Shared seminar: Embroidered messages and stories: craftivism, social media and public space & Reimagining Neo-Confucian Diagrams: Insights from 3D Animation

About the seminar:

This week we will have two presentations.

Embroidered messages and stories: craftivism, social media and public space

In the last two decades, embroidery has earned a significant position among the media of artistic representation, creative activism (craftivism), and has also become one of the revived means of community building. As a result, the phenomena suggests a variety of implications as well as a variety of research approaches. Taking the prevalence of gender studies and sociological research in account, I should like to suggest a shift of perspective by enquiring into intermedial and multimodal aspects of the issue. The intermedial focus will be on transmediations of narrative structures into embroidered representations and application of narrative tools of other media such as comics, the concurrence of iconicity and symbolism of the traditionally embroidered and newly introduced signs and their interplay with embroidered texts. The multimodal approach proves necessary due to  the rather contradictory relation between the materiality of the original media product, and the immateriality of its media of display and distribution, typically social media. Nevertheless, the presentation of the artefacts (or rather “craftifacts”) in the public space and other modes of sharing the products as well as the “craft” itself such as public workshops should not be omitted.

Reimagining Neo-Confucian Diagrams: Insights from 3D Animation

This paper aims to explore whether we can gain new insights and understandings of the Neo-Confucian diagrams of the Chinese Song scholar Zhou Dunyi (1017-1073) and Korean Joseon scholar Yi Hwang Toegye (1501-1570) through digital 3D animation. The Neo-Confucian tradition in China and especially Korea had a strong focus on the human being and our connection to heaven and earth, as well as creation. This led scholars to not only write down their theories but also visualize them through diagrammatic drawings. Such scholar was Zhou Dunyi, who created The Diagram of the Supreme Ultimate (太極圖, taiji tu), and Toegye, who created The Diagram of the Mandate of Heaven (天命圖, cheonmyeong do) based on Zhou’s diagram. These two diagrams are drawn in 2D. However, in recent years scholars have begun to wonder whether these diagrams, despite being in 2D, were intended to be imagined in 3D when observed based on certain statements found in the diagram’s corresponding textual explanations. The corresponding textual explanations of the diagrams have been studied before in the context of the diagrams being in 2D. Hence, if the diagrams have to be viewed differently, do we then have to analyze the textual explanation differently? As mentioned above, Toegye based his diagram on Zhou Dunyi’s, and therefore they have been compared in former research. Thus, would the comparison prove different if we viewed the diagrams in 3D instead of 2D? Lastly, we might ask whether employing digital methods, such as 3D animation, can aid us in the study of Neo-Confucian diagrammatic literature as well as provide us with new perspectives on how to study pre-modern Chinese Korean literature.