The review section of this issue of ArteActa academic journal is made up of three pieces. In the study The Worldbuilding of Television Series from the Perspectives of Fandom and Utopian Studies: Twin Peaks and other Fictive Maps, David Havas mulls over the motivation for dwelling in the fictional worlds of television series not only from the point of view of works stemming from fandom studies, but also through investigating the utopian motifs and narrative fissures of these audiovisual worlds. In the second study, The Body as a Tool of Political Resistance, Marcela Magdová focuses on four actions of the Russian actionist Pytor Pavlensky. Magdová centers her attention mainly on the performer’s work with his own body, which the author explicates in light of the social and political context of contemporary Russia. In the last study, The Experience of Flow and the Distortion of the Time Perception While Playing Rez Infinite and Resident Evil: The Influence of Specific Games, Gaming Platforms, and Sound on Flow and the Accuracy of Time Perception, the authorial duo of Tomáš Oramus and Kateřina Lukavská present their findings from an empirical study focused on the level of flow while playing computer games of various genres in diverse testing environments.
The second issue of ArteActa journal continues in the search for answers regarding the question of what artistic research is and what it is for. In the essay section we present the reader two texts by the German artist and academic Julius Klein – the first a carefully argued manifesto for the support of the idea of artistic research, while the second presents the author’s ontological groping of a theory of aesthetic relativity.
Concerning review studies, we offer an intricate reflection on two books which recently caught our attention. The esthete Tereza Hadravová reflects on Jiří Anger’s book Afekt, výraz, Performance (Affect, Expression, Performance) which was published last year by the Publishing House of the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University in Prague. Meanwhile, the literary historian and theorist Roman Kanda looks at the Czech translation of Fredric Jameson’s now cannonical work of the theory of postmodernism.
News from the life of AMU closes out the issue. Michaela Raisová looks back on her research fellowship in London in two texts dedicated to the voice pedagogue Nadine George. Vít Havlíček reflects on the distinguished Czech composer and pedagogue, the late Otomar Kvěch.
