La imaginación desmadrada de Juan José Millás: humor y melancolía en La soledad era esto
This essay explores Juan José Millás's novel La soledad era esto (1990) as means of interrogating current appropriations of disenchantment and melancholy in discussions of contemporary Spanish culture and society. Through a detailed analysis of this novel as well as theoretical studies of affect, this essay aims to achieve three goals. First, to analyze how psychological and ideological processes of melancholy are transformed in Millás's text into a sort of autobiographical simulacrum that deliberately blends fiction and autobiography, thus laying the groundwork for a possible challenge to the tendency to reduce literary works to mere historical documents, and the creativity of writers to psychological diagnoses. Second, to reformulate the medical and political conception of melancholy in an aesthetic conception that locates a strange form of knowledge in black humor—understood both as melancholia in the Hippocratic tradition and as a comedy of despair. Finally, to examine how this reformulation of melancholy in humorous terms interrogates cultural critiques of "desencanto," insofar as such interpretations may themselves be self-referential and disenchanted—while melancholy may work as a model for hope.
Máscaras y simulacros : nuevas políticas del sujeto y la narración
El trabajo se enfoca en la produccion de tres autores, el uruguayo Mario Levrero (La novela luminosa, 2005), el puertorriqueno Eduardo Lalo (Paises invisibles, 2008) y el cubano Leonardo Padura (El hombre que amaba los perros, 2009). Estos textos no solo comparten la cercania temporal sino que coinciden en parecer “inclasificables” por su imprecisa condicion generica y por un uso de la voz narrativa igualmente complejo y ambiguo. Se analizan las estrategias de “autoficcion”, es decir las formas que adquieren las representaciones del yo (que tambien han sido llamadas “ficciones de autor” o “simulacros autobiograficos”) y de las emociones en tres relatos bien distintos. Los dos primeros, centrados en el registro minucioso de lo trivial e insignificante del mundo cotidiano, no se plantean abiertamente como una narrativa politica, por el contrario, en ellos parecen primar las preocupaciones esteticas. A su vez, la novela de Padura se presenta como un claro texto politico, incluso biografico-historico. Sin embargo, todos parecen dejar constancia de la desilusion y desencanto que ha producido la perdida de las utopias sociales y politicas del siglo XX.
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.