No 1 (2024)

The article deals with the problems of historical memory visualization in Internet memes. In the digital age, the construction of historical memory is no longer a matter for professional historians and political actors only. Internet users actively create historical media content, interpret historical events, and make representations about the past. This practice destroys the line between historical knowledge and memory. Visualization has become a key form of representation of the past in the media environment. Digital technologies for creating visual images transform historical memory. Internet users perceive polysemantic images of the past on an emotional level. The main emotions are nostalgia for a bygone era and the desire to recreate historical reality. At the same time, visualization of the past strengthens the simulation of historical reality. For people, the authenticity of historical events ceases to be a value, since they have equated history and myth. In visual historical images, the masses do not resurrect the past, but create the present. This gives rise to fakes. The emergence of historical fakes is due to both the general concept of the post-truth, in which the authenticity of the fact ceases to matter, and the visualization of distributed polysemantic images, which leads to the simulation and semiotization of the media sphere. The Internet meme is characterized by its emotional impact, changeable structure and viral spreadability, so it introduces historical images into the mass consciousness with high efficiency. It is the perfect embodiment of a historical fake. Historical memes combine mythological representations of the past with current agendas, popular culture stereotypes, and modern media images. By compiling various elements, Internet memes distort historical reality and create new images of historical memory while visualizing them. Internet memes about Peter I illustrate these processes. The Russian Emperor is a highly mythological historical figure in Russia, with his reign, life, and actions being presented as a collection of myths in popular consciousness. These myths include an order to shave beards, the "opening of a window" to Europe, construction of a fleet, and establishment of a Northern capital on marshy lands. These stories are reflected in Internet memes, connecting with the visual characteristics of current events. The practice of combining ideas about the past and the realities of the present allows users to actualize the memory of Peter I in the mass consciousness and fit modernity into the historical context. The case “Peter I and Shrek” shows how the visual image of a historical person becomes a part of digital culture, and the image of mass media acquires the status of historical reality.

Ornament is one of the oldest methods of decoration, with the help of which people often tried to express their emotions, knowledge, beliefs, hopes, desires, and requests. Ornamental art can undoubtedly be considered as a completely independent type of applied arts, visualizing the conceptual thinking of its creator at a given moment in time. Therefore, the development of ornament is closely related to the history of the formation and development of the nations of the world. This article considers such a formation on the basis of traditional Kazakh felt carpets of different types, regardless of their manufacture method and purpose. The traditional shape of the carpet is most often a rectangle with a central symmetrical pattern edged with an ornamental curb. In the study of ornaments of traditional Kazakh felt carpets, attention is focused on the symbolism and conceptual meaning of Kazakh ornaments, borders and rosettes in particular. The work is based on a study of the national Kazakh ornament due to its dominant position in the visual arts of this country until the end of the 18th – early 19th centuries, as a result of the semi-nomadic way of life with its inherent unity with the outside world, as well as due to the gradual penetration of Islam with its ban on images of humans and animals. The study is also based on the laws of symmetry, on Curie’s principle in particular. As it was established, the most common methods of constructing curbs of Kazakh felt carpets are: the use of the sliding reflection operation and various combinations of the transfer axis. Also, when creating an ornament, attention is paid to the structure of the substrate - an invisible flat grid (lattice). The ornaments were explored as a single unit rather than its individual elements. Special attention was also paid to the fact that, in the Kazakh folk ornament, along with the shape, its color scheme plays a huge role. Although the value of color is noted in many works, a comprehensive analysis of motifs, background, and substrate has not been carried out. Physical symmetry (that of color) in the Kazakh ornament is no less important than the motif. In this work, the value of color in the life of Turkic peoples, which had been formed in the conditions of nomadic life in the endless steppes, was invested in the consideration of color design. Color for the nomad became not only a hallmark, it could also mean the directions of the world or characterized the quality of the object. As a result, the location of the types of elements of the ornament was determined with special points on the grid that have specific properties compared to the entire ornamental field. The role of an invisible substrate (grid, lattice) for building ornaments was confirmed. Such a mathematical analysis opens up great opportunities in the applied use of the results of this study.

The aim of the article is to investigate the modern phenomenon of poetry in social networks in terms of its artistic and social value, legitimacy and role in the cultural context. First of all, its main features, which are influenced by the nature of the social media platform itself, are established. The following aspects are identified: interactivity, the perception of the poem as content, a hybrid audiovisual form, the transformation of the criteria of what is considered literature under the influence of the rules of social networks and the desire for popularity and commercial success, a tool for building digital identity, performativity. All of them influence the transformation of habits of consumption of poetic content, as well as its assessment. Secondly, poets attempt to balance the roles of an influencer and a traditional poet, which contributes to the creation of a mythologized image through the way they maintain their account, certain linguistic and visual markers within the posts. In addition, poems have therapeutic properties because they come in the form of daily emotional and visual experiences. They also not only have personal value for the individual, but also spread important social messages relevant to the Western mass culture currently. Thirdly, the article establishes how poets develop their virtual identity and how this affects the content they create, which has the characteristics of being authentic and fake at the same time. Poets’ work, like the image they create on social media, oscillates between these two poles, conveying an ambivalent emotional message. A person’s subjective experience is put at the center. The movement of Western culture beyond postmodernism towards the currently developing metamodernism is analyzed. Sincerity versus irony is the main opposition here, relevant for the media text subgenre in question. Metamodernism combines only emerging different states of culture that have replaced the postmodern ones, so the term does not have the necessary stability and accuracy for it to be widespread. Several interpretations of the term are analyzed in the article, and common elements are pointed out. For instance, in poetry we can note its characteristic use of modernist techniques in a new context and with different goals. Another example is that at the forefront is a conscious attempt to connect the unconnected, namely, the opposite poles of binary oppositions, which postmodernism tried to deconstruct. The identification of a tendency for the recuperative qualities of literature and art to become important in contemporary society and culture speaks to the scholarly significance of the paper, as does the overall interdisciplinary nature of the article. The article also reflects new aspects of the characterization of the contemporary state of poetry, which is moving from elitism to utilitarianism and dehierarchy.

The relevance of the study of ornament in a semiotic way is confirmed by the active research in the world semiotic science enriching its methodological reserve more and more. The results of studies on problems of ornament as a semiotic structure and ethnographic code since the mid-twentieth century are illustrated by dozens of works on the material of different cultures: Slavic, Balkan, and many others. However, it should be acknowledged that at the moment all the diversity, beauty, intelligence, plasticity, aesthetics and semantics of Kazakh (and wider Turkic) ornament are little known outside Kazakhstan. Many aspects of Kazakh ornament remain insufficiently studied from the standpoint of semiotic research, which will expand the horizons of understanding not only ornamental art itself as a “chronicle of culture”, but also its symbolic nature and code system. Ornament in such a reading appears as a special kind of language, a sign system that exists in structural unity with other structures of the cultural whole. On the one hand, ornamental design functions in the field of various types of traditional art and crafts: textile art and costume, wood and stone processing, jewelry, pottery, architecture, rock art, tamgas, and others; thus, considering ornament as a special kind of a sign system, we should also remember the polysemantic nature of ethno-sign codes. On the other hand, the internal structure of ornament correlates with other languages of culture: music, poetry (oral culture), writing, dance, etc., as well as with the phenomenon of Tengrian calendar, which is seemingly incommensurable in its functionality. The article presents the results of a study of the structural model of ornament in its correlation with the languages of other phenomena of Kazakh culture.

An explanation of two circumstances precedes the presentation of the main content of this article. The first relates to the fact that, with this article, the journal opens a new “Open Lecture” section. The second reveals both the meaning of the words in the section title and the primary purpose of the research, the first results of which are presented in this article. The phrase “open lecture” is the name of one of the procedures (established in the practice of domestic higher education), which is part of the preliminary selection of educators participating in the competition for a lecturer role. This procedure’s name defines the lecture as open to professional criticism: discussion of the content and its structure, the manner of communication between the lecturer and the audience and the likelihood of students achieving educational goals. The originality of the presented research lies in the fact that, firstly, all these components of the discussion are understood from the standpoint of semiotics, respectively, as semantic, syntactic and pragmatic translations. Secondly, these translations are understood as the interconnection of specific stages of the information process. It opens up the possibility of modelling the structure of the lecture content based on the characteristics of information (value, quantity, effectiveness). Thirdly, the stages of the information process are understood as mechanisms of self-organization, which makes it possible to interpret learning results from the standpoint of stimulating a transition (or lack thereof) of the students from simple reception to acceptance. Fourthly, the very formulation of the research problem is the problem of discovering the semiotic optimum in organizing the learning space. One can emphasize that, in this formulation, the problem within the pedagogical theory and practice framework is posed for the first time since the semiotic essence of education remains unnoticed in pedagogical science. The circumstance for implementing the semiotic optimum, assuming that this optimum is discovered, is the educator’s clear understanding of the student’s goals (spectrum and hierarchy of goals) in the classroom rather than the goals of the educator’s activity. Therefore, the subject of the study was chosen to be the first lecture on a subject that is extremely rarely taught at school in domestic education. Thereby, it is a lecture for which the audience may have minimal prejudice. More precisely, there can only be a premonition of the complexity of the subject, the isolation of its content from real life, which reduces the initial goals of students only to mastering ways to overcome this ‘disaster’ in their curriculum. It states the following need for the educator: (a) to have empathy; (b) maintain a balance between complexity of content and simplicity of explanation. Both necessities boil down to finding a measure, an optimal measure. The article justifies that illustrative material for a lecture should (1) serve not as proof but only as an explanation of the lecture statements. The choice of material should (2) be made from various visualizations that are events in intellectual history and also visually express the multi-layered context of known metaphors. In the case of our research, these are illustrations of works by artists from the Bruegel family; this intends (in addition to the mentioned) to demonstrate the metamorphoses of ideas within one philosophical school or tradition. Illustrations must (3) meet the requirement of end-to-end examples throughout the entire course of lectures. The material we have chosen illustrates the following. The contemplation of the world by a genius leads to the extraction of an essential detail unnoticed by others; expressing this detail in abstract form initiates a dialogue; expressing this detail in a relevant form creates grounds for interpretation among many people, which ultimately shapes the worldview of those people. The fact that there is a known case of erasing details from a painting and that the demonstrated artworks received different titles over time illustrates the change in topical emphases. The number of illustrations should (4) meet the condition: no more than one visual demonstration in a fifteen-minute lecture time interval. The article presents results obtained as of now only empirically. Experience shows that compliance with the above conditions ensures the stability of impressions among students and contributes to their understanding (and not just memorization) of the main messages of the lecture.