Nietzschean Variations: Politics, Interest, and Education in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People
Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People (1882) has had an unusual reception. Following A Doll’s House (1879) andGhosts (1881), plays that were scandalized upon performance only to be counted, relatively soon, among Ibsen’s most important works, An Enemy of the Peoplewas caught up by history in a different way. While the play has, no doubt, enjoyed bouts of popularity – including the many stagings that followed in thewake of its publication – late twentieth-centurycritics have worried about the political implications of Dr. Stockmann’s elitism and sometimes even compared it to the rhetoric of the later Nationalist Socialistmovement inGermany (Sage 2006, 3–5, 310–311; Ferguson 1996, 280ff ). The kind of elitist sentiments Dr. Stockmann airs inAn Enemy of the People are often associated with the teaching of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s work was much debated and discussed in Scandinavia when Ibsen was working on the play. Thus, critics have emphasized how Ibsen’s play resonates with a kind of aristocratic pathos that is not unlike the onewe find inwork of theGerman philosopher.While such a reading was prefigured in an essay by Anathon Aall at the beginning of the Twentieth Century, we findmore recent versions of the argument in works by Noreng (1969), de Figueiredo (2007) and Kittang (2005). In his reading ofAn Enemy of the People, Kittang speaks Ibsen Studies, 2014 Vol. 14, No. 2, 109–135, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15021866.2014.1000659
Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People: An Inter-sociocultural Perspective
Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People is frequently performed worldwide today. Its popularity must be due to the relevance of the problems depicted therein to the current global context, such as extreme individualism, democracy vs. mobocracy, environmental pollution, manipulation of information, and the conservative education system. An Enemy of the People was the first Ibsen play to be staged in Japan, although it was adapted for the Japanese setting. At the time of its staging, it reflected the then much-debated issue of copper mine pollution in central Japan. Norway and Japan underwent similar processes of modernization in the second half of the nineteenth century, although with a certain time lag. Therefore, in order to properly appreciate An Enemy of the People today, this article examines the play from an inter-sociocultural perspective. Adopting this perspective allows us to demonstrate the continued relevance of Ibsen to our post-modern world.
FlowBrush: optical flow art
The depiction of motion in static representations has a long tradition in art and science alike. Often, motion is depicted by spatio-temporal summarizations that try to preserve as much information of the original dynamic content as possible. In our approach to depicting motion, we remove the spatial constraints and generate new content steered by the temporal changes in motion. Applying particle steering in combination with the dynamic color palette of the video content, we can create a wide range of different image styles. With recorded videos, or by live interaction with a webcam, one can influence the resulting image. We provide a set of intuitive parameters to affect the style of the result, the final image content depends on the video input. Based on a collection of results gathered from test users, we discuss example styles that can be achieved with FlowBrush. In general, our approach provides an open sandbox for creative people to generate aesthetic images from any video content they apply.