Built-in Reminder
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Built-in Reminder
''Built-in Reminder'' (russian: «Встроенный напоминатель») is a short story by Victor Pelevin, published in 1991. The story was the title of a collection of stories of the same name published in 2002. Plot The story is a monologue and reflection of a painter of modern art. At an exhibition of modern art, the painter Niksim Skolpovsky talks about a new direction, "vibrationalism". The lecture is attended by several elderly female workers of the Burevestnik factory, who probably got there by accident. As an example of a work of vibrationalism, he demonstrates a simulacrum of a human being Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedality, bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex Human brain, brain. This has enabled the development of ad ..., "a mannequin with a remote eliminator and a built-in death reminder. This mannequin is assembled "from a multitude ...
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Victor Pelevin
Victor Olegovich Pelevin ( rus, Виктор Олегович Пелевин, p=ˈvʲiktər ɐˈlʲɛɡəvʲɪtɕ pʲɪˈlʲevʲɪn; born 22 November 1962) is a Russian fiction writer. His novels include '' Omon Ra'' (1992), '' The Life of Insects'' (1993), '' Chapayev and Void'' (1996), and ''Generation P'' (1999). He is a laureate of multiple literary awards including the Russian Little Booker Prize (1993) and the Russian National Bestseller (2004), the former for the short story collection ''The Blue Lantern'' (1991). His books are multi-layered postmodernist texts fusing elements of pop culture and esoteric philosophies while carrying conventions of the science fiction genre. Some critics relate his prose to the New Sincerity literary movement. Biography Victor Olegovich Pelevin was born in Moscow on 22 November 1962 to Zinaida Semenovna Efremova, an English teacher, and Oleg Anatolyevich Pelevin, a teacher at the military department of Bauman University. He lived on ...
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Painting
Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and airbrushes, can be used. In art, the term ''painting ''describes both the act and the result of the action (the final work is called "a painting"). The support for paintings includes such surfaces as walls, paper, canvas, wood, glass, lacquer, pottery, leaf, copper and concrete, and the painting may incorporate multiple other materials, including sand, clay, paper, plaster, gold leaf, and even whole objects. Painting is an important form in the visual arts, bringing in elements such as drawing, Composition (visual arts), composition, gesture (as in gestural painting), narrative, narration (as in narrative art), and abstraction (as in abstract art). Paintings can be naturalistic and representational (as in still life and landscape art, lands ...
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Modern Art
Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the traditions of the past have been thrown aside in a spirit of experimentation. Modern artists experimented with new ways of seeing and with fresh ideas about the nature of materials and functions of art. A tendency away from the narrative, which was characteristic for the traditional arts, toward abstraction is characteristic of much modern art. More recent artistic production is often called contemporary art or postmodern art. Modern art begins with the heritage of painters like Vincent van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, Georges Seurat and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec all of whom were essential for the development of modern art. At the beginning of the 20th century Henri Matisse and several other young artists including the Proto-Cubism, pre-c ...
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Exhibition
An exhibition, in the most general sense, is an organized presentation and display of a selection of items. In practice, exhibitions usually occur within a cultural or educational setting such as a museum, art gallery, park, library, exhibition hall, or World's fairs. Exhibitions can include many things such as art in both major museums and smaller galleries, interpretive exhibitions, natural history museums and history museums, and also varieties such as more commercially focused exhibitions and trade fairs. In British English the word "exhibition" is used for a collection of items placed on display and the event as a whole, which in American English is usually an "exhibit". In both varieties of English each object being shown within an exhibition is an "exhibit". In common usage, "exhibitions" are considered temporary and usually scheduled to open and close on specific dates. While many exhibitions are shown in just one venue, some exhibitions are shown in multiple location ...
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Simulacrum
A simulacrum ( plural: simulacra or simulacrums, from Latin '' simulacrum'', which means "likeness, semblance") is a representation or imitation of a person or thing. The word was first recorded in the English language in the late 16th century, used to describe a representation, such as a statue or a painting, especially of a god. By the late 19th century, it had gathered a secondary association of inferiority: an image without the substance or qualities of the original. Literary critic Fredric Jameson offers photorealism as an example of artistic simulacrum, in which a painting is created by copying a photograph that is itself a copy of the real thing.Massumi, Brian"Realer than Real: The Simulacrum According to Deleuze and Guattari." retrieved 2 May 2007 Other art forms that play with simulacra include trompe-l'œil, pop art, Italian neorealism, and French New Wave. Philosophy Simulacra have long been of interest to philosophers. In his '' Sophist'', Plato speaks of two ...
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Human
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, and language. Humans are highly social and tend to live in complex social structures composed of many cooperating and competing groups, from families and kinship networks to political states. Social interactions between humans have established a wide variety of values, social norms, and rituals, which bolster human society. Its intelligence and its desire to understand and influence the environment and to explain and manipulate phenomena have motivated humanity's development of science, philosophy, mythology, religion, and other fields of study. Although some scientists equate the term ''humans'' with all members of the genus ''Homo'', in common usage, it generally refers to ''Homo sapiens'', the only Extant taxon, extant member. A ...
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Mannequin
A mannequin (also called a dummy, lay figure, or dress form) is a doll, often articulated, used by artists, tailors, dressmakers, window dressers and others, especially to display or fit clothing and show off different fabrics and textiles. Previously, the English term referred to human models and muses (a meaning which it still retains in French and other European languages); the meaning as a dummy dating from the start of World War II. Life-sized mannequins with simulated airways are used in the teaching of first aid, CPR, and advanced airway management skills such as tracheal intubation. During the 1950s, mannequins were used in nuclear tests to help show the effects of nuclear weapons on humans. Also referred to as mannequins are the human figures used in computer simulation to model the behavior of the human body. ''Mannequin'' comes from the French word ', which had acquired the meaning "an artist's jointed model", which in turn came from the Flemish word ', me ...
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Contemporary Art
Contemporary art is the art of today, produced in the second half of the 20th century or in the 21st century. Contemporary artists work in a globally influenced, culturally diverse, and technologically advancing world. Their art is a dynamic combination of materials, methods, concepts, and subjects that continue the challenging of boundaries that was already well underway in the 20th century. Diverse and eclectic, contemporary art as a whole is distinguished by the very lack of a uniform, organising principle, ideology, or "-ism". Contemporary art is part of a cultural dialogue that concerns larger contextual frameworks such as personal and cultural identity, family, community, and nationality. In vernacular English, ''modern'' and ''contemporary'' are synonyms, resulting in some conflation and confusion of the terms ''modern art'' and ''contemporary art'' by non-specialists. Scope Some define contemporary art as art produced within "our lifetime," recognising that lifetimes a ...
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Realism (arts)
Realism in the arts is generally the attempt to represent subject matter truthfully, without artificiality and avoiding speculative fiction, speculative and fantasy literature, supernatural elements. The term is often used interchangeably with naturalism, although these terms are not synonymous. Naturalism, as an idea relating to visual representation in Western art, seeks to depict objects with the least possible amount of distortion and is tied to the development of linear perspective and illusionism in Renaissance Europe. Realism, while predicated upon naturalistic representation and a departure from the idealization of earlier academic art, often refers to a Realism (art movement), specific art historical movement that originated in France in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1848. With artists like Gustave Courbet capitalizing on the mundane, ugly or sordid, realism was motivated by the renewed interest in the common man and the rise of leftist politics. The Realist ...
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Theurgy
Theurgy (; ) describes the practice of rituals, sometimes seen as magical in nature, performed with the intention of invoking the action or evoking the presence of one or more deities, especially with the goal of achieving henosis (uniting with the divine) and perfecting oneself. Definitions *Proclus (c. 480): theurgy is "a power higher than all human wisdom embracing the blessings of divination, the purifying powers of initiation and in a word all the operations of divine possession" * Keith Thomas: "Spiritual magic or theurgy was based on the idea that one could reach God in an ascent up the scale of creation made possible by a rigorous course of prayer, fasting and devotional preparation." *Pierre A. Riffard: "Theurgy is a type of magic. It consists of a set of magical practices performed to evoke beneficent spirits in order to see them or know them or in order to influence them, for instance by forcing them to animate a statue, to inhabit a human being (such as a medi ...
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Theosophical Coke
Theosophy is a religion established in the United States during the late 19th century. It was founded primarily by the Russian Helena Blavatsky and draws its teachings predominantly from Blavatsky's writings. Categorized by scholars of religion as both a new religious movement and as part of the occultist stream of Western esotericism, it draws upon both older European philosophies such as Neoplatonism and Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. As presented by Blavatsky, Theosophy teaches that there is an ancient and secretive brotherhood of spiritual adepts known as the Masters, who—although found around the world—are centered in Tibet. These Masters are alleged by Blavatsky to have cultivated great wisdom and supernatural powers, and Theosophists believe that it was they who initiated the modern Theosophical movement through disseminating their teachings via Blavatsky. They believe that these Masters are attempting to revive knowledge of an ancient religion ...
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Vasily Chapayev
Vasily Ivanovich Chapayev or Chapaev (russian: link=no, Василий Иванович Чапаев; 5 September 1919) was a Russian soldier and Red Army commander during the Russian Civil War. Biography Chapayev was born into a poor peasant family in a village called Budayka, now part of Cheboksary. During World War I, he fought as a non-commissioned officer and was awarded the Cross of St. George three times. In September 1917, he joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks). In December he was elected commander of the 138 Infantry Regiment by a vote of the regiment's soldiers. He later commanded the 2nd Nikolaev Division and the 25th Rifle Division. On 5 September 1919, the divisional headquarters near Lbishchensk (now renamed Chapayev in his honour) were ambushed by White Army forces. According to official sources, Chapayev tried to escape by swimming across the Ural River, but was never again seen alive. "In 1919, a wounded Chapayev was shot and dro ...
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