We are currently experiencing a revolution associated with the rapid development and widespread introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. This process provides great opportunities and is associated with great risks. It has become an important factor in geoeconomics and geopolitics, an arena for superpower rivalry.

Human being exists in rational, emotional and intuitive spaces. The last three centuries have been associated with the development of rational space. We know little about the emotional space and know almost nothing about the intuitive one. These areas of cognition of the world are associated with art, artistic and social creativity, with philosophy. In the 21st century, the role of these areas will grow. There is a transition now happening from the industrial phase of the civilization development to the post-industrial one, from the world of machines to the world of people. Therefore, attempts to reduce human activity to the rational solving of problems, to replace human in many areas with artificial intelligence, will be a step backward, into the past, and not forward, into the future.

The response to the challenge associated with the AI development, with the rapid spread of computer technologies, should be given, first of all, in the cultural space, in the area of meanings and values. It is necessary to rethink the essence and limitations of people, the nature of the tools that they can create, and those that should be abandoned. This is about redefining the capabilities of human beings and their place in the world, as well as about fundamental changes in the organization of society. The article shows that the strategy of “irresponsible gods” and entrusting AI with the “last issues” can bring us to a global catastrophe. However, conscious using of the opening opportunities can help humanity reach a new, higher level. And the choice between these alternatives is now being made in the cultural space.

In some European countries, strategic development documents have alredy been included in the official standard of museum work, and this is gradually becoming a mandatory element of the museum management in the Russian Federation as well. In this regard, there is an urgent need for at least a general description of the scenario for preparing and structuring such documents. As evidenced in practice, the issue of creating strategic planning documents is still relevant for the museum sphere in Russia. One of the ways to solve this problem is use modern international experience. The article analyzes the formats of strategic plans created by individual museums and museum associations in the museum sphere of the United Kingdom and the United States. There are reviewed nine such documents. The article focuses on their structure, i.e. the main semantic elements and presentation format. In the preparation of strategic documents of museums, the following points can be noted: there is an obvious tendency to reduce the documents and present the most important elements in their final text. The elements usually include the following sections: mission (and/or values), main goals/activities and tasks, image of the future. Much less often, they include principles and analysis of the major challenges. The analytical part is usually not allocated to a separate section, being either included in an appendix, or designed as insets to the corresponding parts of the text. There is paid much attention to the visual appearance of strategic documents and their impact on actual and potential stakeholders: both texts and design are primarily aimed at the external audience. As evidenced in practice, the modern museum strategy is becoming not just a tool for museum management, but also an extremely important tool for public relations.

The article analyzes characteristic features and development logic of the library project by Google, which started from the famous Google Book Search project (also known as Google Books and Google Print), and later as Google Play Books within the multi-platform multimedia service Google Play. For decades, a constant trend of the corporation’s activity has been the development and testing of new social and communication models in working with users, combining the complexity and global reach of the audience with the use of its interactive potential. In the early 2000s, the company initiated mass scanning of library collections, thus starting the development of a new institutional paradigm for electronic libraries. Later, having developed new business models for the distribution of electronic copies of printed products in the course of numerous legal proceedings on charges of copyright infringement, it also pioneered the new information market development.

From the very beginning, Google Book Search was aimed at the mass user, which was facilitated by its constantly expanding set of options and increasing level of comfort of access to the resource. In 2006—2010, the service presented an opportunity for users to download, in pdf format, books free of copyright law; a new viewing interface “About this book” was added; an opportunity to operate texts using “My library” option was provided; a mobile version of the service was launched; access to statistical information on diachronic frequency dynamics of word usage based on the collected database was provided.

The article analyzes the further development of the library project within the Google Play Books service, which allows users to read, buy and sell e-books, use bookmarks, download their own books in pdf and EPUB formats, and synchronize data on all user’s devices. There is assessed the social significance of the project in the context of the global electronic civilization development.

This paper attempts to uncover the semantic message of “The River”, an unreleased film that was supposed to be a new program product in the filmwork of Aleksei Oktyabrinovich Balabanov. At the beginning of the article, the author reveals the director’s method of conceptualizing his films that appeal to the mythological conceptualization of the narrative structure in addition to the plot and genre of the film. The latter is clarified in the process of comparing the films with the structure of a fairy tale, which has also already been noted by some researchers of Balabanov’s movies. The novelty of the article is connected with a philosophical analysis of the indicated conceptualization of “The River” film-project (2002) and an attempt to identify aesthetic effects and symbolic meanings encoded in the film production.

The author believes that the close attention of “The River” project’s director to the cultures of traditional society, and especially the culture of northerners — the Tofalars (Tofa), the Yakuts (Sakha), is due to the proximity of the traditional cultures of the North and the Arctic to the mythological method of conception in culture. In this sense, “The River” project was, in all likelihood, to become the director’s experiment in building an archaic topos with a crystalline mythological concept of the abundance of the natural over the cultural and the corresponding mentality and psychology of the actions of the “old era”. The main thing in this cinematic experiment was to take the culture “off the table” and analyze the natural spontaneity in human nature, with the subsequent “splitting” of mythological consciousness, breaking the epic circle of tradition with a symbolic outcome, through the concept of “boat” and “river”, to a universal human principle, metaphysical topos of thought. The prophetic gift of the director, embodied in a number of his films, is interpreted on the example of “The River” and reflects the message for the path of self-development of the cultures of Russian peoples.

The article is devoted to the satirical agitation ABCs that appeared during the Civil War, which have never previously been identified by researchers as a separate type of agitation art. The ABCs, which used to have the narrow purpose of teaching children to read and write before, became a form of agitation art in the hands of artists and writers. This was facilitated by the fact that ABCs, in contrast to primers, are less loaded with educational material and, accordingly, they have more space for illustrations. The article presents the development history of the agitation ABCs, focusing in detail on four of them: V.V. Mayakovsky’s “Soviet ABC”, D.S. Moor’s “Red Army Soldier’s ABC”, A.I. Strakhov’s “ABC of the Revolution”, and M.M. Cheremnykh’s “Anti-Religious ABC”. There is also briefly considered “Our ABC”: the “TASS Posters” created by various artists during the Second World War. The article highlights the special significance of V.V. Mayakovsky’s first agitation ABC, which later became a reference point for many artists. The authors of the first satirical ABCs of the Civil War period consciously used the traditional form of popular prints, as well as ditties and sayings, in order to create images close to the people. The article focuses on the iconographic connections between the ABCs and posters in the works of D.S. Moor and M.M. Cheremnykh, who transferred their solutions from the posters to the ABCs.

The purpose of this article is to prove that world culture, whether it is a picture of the world in its generalized quality or specific artistic practices in different types of art, still remains under the unabated influence of A.P. Chekhov’s personality and creativity. This applies not only to his characters, life conflicts, or individual artistic and aesthetic techniques, but also to the meaning-setting, qualitatively changed by A.P. Chekhov, which we define as “Chekhov’s discourse”. It is understood as a frame of reference in which intercultural communication takes place, and designated by a cultural matrix with its inherent codes and sometimes unexpected meanings, born of decades of Chekhov’s attention and understanding.

The author believes that the main features of Chekhov’s discourse of world culture are: the creator’s penetration, unique by its depth and paradoxical nature, into the social and moral world of man (a kind of “diagnosis”); the conceptual integration of the intertext and context of individual creativity and world cultural experience; and the formation of aesthetic foundations for the art of absurdity as a characteristic cultural phenomenon of the Chekhov and post-Chekhov eras.

The “diagnosis” was a product of Chekhov’s unique intellectual insight and intuitive talent. The property of Chekhov’s diagnosis, and the explanation that there were no recipes, is the presence of Chekhov’s figure and his picture of the world in the cultural continuum. The continuation of Chekhov’s thoughts and imaginative systems, with all their details and models, are several layers of creative “products” created in different types of art and in different periods that have passed in the life of mankind after Chekhov.

Chekhov’s intertext is a dialogue between a Russian person and other epochs and authors; this dialogue is not without irony in relation to the “interlocutors”, to the subject of discussion, to life itself, a source of unexpected associations and ideas about the paradoxical connections of life and being. The author believes that Chekhov’s context as a semantic facet of Chekhov’s discourse has been manifested primarily in those connections and influences that were and continue to be of a personalistic nature: researchers from different countries, followers in his creativity.

In the space of eternity, against the background of paradoxical cultural trends, a phenomenon has been formed that we previously designated as the concept of “Russian absurdity” first introduced into scientific circulation. On the one hand, Chekhov’s discourse of world culture, had unobtrusively introduced into artistic practice the principles of alogism, mutual misunderstanding, alienation, ironic discrepancies of everyday manifestations and details, on the other hand, it had marked the existence of ordinary people in the space of eternity, in an empty and dangerous, alien and incomprehensible world.

If white authors speak on behalf of dark-skinned characters in their texts, African-American critics and writers often accuse them of attempting cultural appropriation. In this case, according to African-Americans, white people describe them only stereotypically and thus deprive them of a voice. Despite this, such attempts continue. In 2009, K. Stockett released her novel “The Help”, which is narrated by three women, including two dark-skinned maids (Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson). These characters tell about their experiences working for white masters in the early 1960s, in the city of Jackson, Mississippi, during a time of severe racial segregation. Newly arising after every release of such literary or film texts (just remember the recent film “Green book”), the ongoing controversy over cultural appropriation determines the relevance of addressing this topic. K. Stockett presents these characters as anti-racism fighters, with the word as their main weapon. Minny bluntly tells her employers what she thinks of them, which is in line with how African-American authors describe in their texts a way of speaking boldly to those you obey, called “to sass”. On the other hand, Aibileen tries not to show her attitude to white people and, in conversations with them, encodes the true content of her statements as much as possible, in fact using the practice of “signifying”, also characteristic of African-American culture: persuading other maids to tell a white girl about the relationship between masters and servants in their city, in order for it to be published. She deems the written preservation of an ethnic group history as a way to fight against racism. The author comes to the conclusion that K. Stockett follows, consciously or not, the traditions of African-American literature, in which many dark-skinned characters appear as tricksters.

The article deals with the history of development of the antique theatrical architecture in the context of the environment that forms the territory acquiring the status of a cultural landscape. The material of antiquity is interpreted in the aspect of the formation evolution of theater buildings, ranging from ancient Greek to ancient Roman, which, despite being in ruins, amaze us with their large-scale and unspoiled architecture. The article attempts to systematize the valuable evidence of the past, material (theater architecture) and non-material (theater art), since the repertoire is alive as long as it is performed, and the theater architecture remains to posterity. There is considered their relationship in space and time. The study’s methods (descriptions of the phenomena under study, field observation, problem-historical analysis) made it possible to focus on the construction specifics of the theater buildings located in open spaces representing cultural landscapes — vast areas of co-creation of man and nature. Over the epochs, the theater architecture, designed for spectacular performances and connected with the environmental factor and acting art, was transforming, just as the theater itself was changing, sometimes within a single performance on a single stage. Fragments of the lost cultural experience are today open systems in associative, semantic, historical aspects, as well as in terms of objects reconstruction. They form an attractive and popular place that goes beyond the limits of urban planning conditions and has the property of an important public space. The composition of theater construction and the principles of shaping that formed in the ancient period had a great influence on their subsequent development and have been preserved in modern design solutions. In this context, the experience of interpreting the architectural monuments belonging to the theatrical art has a great cultural and educational value, not only in terms of reconstructing the lost stratum of cultural heritage, but also, to a greater extent, in modeling a new vision of the emerging architectural culture of the world.

Publication Ethics.

Requirements to Information and Articles.