Red Aesthetics,Intermediality and the Use of Posters in Chinese Cinema after 1949

Abstract

This article focuses on the aesthetic and affective techniques of saturation through which posters legitimated the Party-State in Mao’s China by closing the gap between everyday experience and political ideology. Propaganda posters were designed to put into practice the principle of unity, as conceptualised by Mao Zedong. The argument posits that while the “poster” is normally a printed edition of a painting or design intended for mass distribution in this way, the term may fairly be deployed to capture other cultural objects that function as “posters”, in that they provide public, political information that expresses or constructs a political self in aesthetic form. This approach requires a metonymic understanding of a visual field in which cultural objects are interrelated and mutually reinforcing. The essay draws on recent in-depth interviews with poster artists of the 1960s and 1970s.     

The Lashley Award

The Karl Spencer Lashley Award for Distinguished Achievement in the Neurosciences has been bestowed upon 50 of the world's leading neuroscientists of the last half century but is not well known. It originated in 1953 when Lashley accumulated excess stock holdings and established a Fund for Neurobiology with 52,000 dollars to provide small grants for neurobiological research. Several years later the assets were transferred to the American Philosophical Society to administer and convert to an award for achievement in neurobiology The nature, amount, and format of the award have evolved ever since. These changes in the award and the characteristics of its recipients are described.     

A Minimum-Impact Method for Measuring Corrosion Rate of Steel-Hulled Shipwrecks in Seawater

Current research on USS Arizona is focused on a minimum-impact technique for calculating corrosion rate of the battleship's steel hull by analysing physical and chemical properties of marine encrustation covering the exposed hull. An equation is derived that allows concretion thickness, density, and total iron content to be used to calculate corrosion rate of steel hull plate.
© 2006 The Authors