Search

The demand for high-grammage paper, 150 g/m2 or more, is increasing for product protection and aesthetic value. Fold cracking, resulting from high mechanical pressure during folding, considerably decreases the economic feasibility of such products for papermaking companies. Fold cracking can be reduced through creasing, but defects possibly occur as fiber bonds are broken. In this study, the fold cracking of high-grammage paper that was not treated through creasing was explored. The mechanical and folding properties of six types of pulp fibers were evaluated based on their beating degree. The fines content of the fiber differed according to the beating condition. Using pulp with low fines content improved the folding properties. The mechanical properties of hardwood pulp were enhanced with increased beating degree. The mechanical properties of softwood pulp were considerably increased, and fold cracking occurred with increasing beating degree. Therefore, to improve the fold cracking, beating should be applied appropriately, following the type and mixing ratio of pulp fibers. Finally, softwood pulp mixing is proposed as a strategy to control fold cracking while maintaining the unique characteristics of high-grammage paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Combining biologically active compounds with nanocarriers is an emerging and promising strategy for enhancing the activities of molecules while reducing their levels of toxicity. Green nanomaterials have recently gained momentum in developing protocols for treating and preserving artifacts. In this study, we designed a functional biohybrid material by incorporating tributyltin(IV) ferulate (TBT-F) into halloysite nanotubes (HNTs), generating a new formulation called HNT/TBT-F. The primary objective was to develop a formulation with robust antimicrobial properties and reinforcing features for treating paper with artistic and historical value. To characterize HNT/TBT-F, assess the HNT's loading capacity, and investigate the TBT-F release kinetics from the nanotubes, various analytical techniques, including UV-Vis and infrared spectroscopies, thermogravimetry, and microscopy analysis, were employed. Furthermore, we evaluated the antimicrobial potential of TBT-F and HNT/TBT-F against Kocuria rhizophila, a bacterial strain known for its opportunistic behavior and a cause of artifact biodeterioration. HNT/TBT-F exhibited a significantly stronger bactericidal effect than TBT-F alone against K. rhizophila cells growing planktonically or those forming a biofilm. This enhanced performance could relate to the confinement of TBT-F within the nanotubes, which likely improved its physical-chemical stability and increased the local concentration of TBT-F upon contact with the bacterial cells. Additionally, we evaluated the mechanical properties of a paper treated with HNT/TBT-F, assessing any potential alterations in its color. The findings of this study highlight the favorable attributes of the HNT/TBT-F formulation and its potential for developing protocols aimed at consolidating and preserving culturally significant paper objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using the Rushdie papers as a case study, this essay discusses questions of commodification, access, preservation and cultural nationalism related to the acquisition of the literary archives of post-colonial authors. Who should own this archive? What is the archival fate of writers with a tenuous relationship with their place of birth? Finally, how does the well-guarded, commodified, expensively acquired archive privilege aura and secrecy over the treasures in the readily available, published literary corpus? This reading suggests that we need to attend equally to the aesthetic value of the literary imagination as part of the discussion in archival studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late in his artistic and scholarly career, W.G. Sebald decided to eschew then-emergent modes of computational media in favor of analogue production techniques. Sebald himself often remarked on his encounters with media, both new and old, expressing a consistent interest in the materiality of writing. In his own artistic practice, he preferred the process of handwriting to what he called the tyranny of "PC Perfectionism." Scenes of writing, and the technologies of pen, paper, and pencil, appear regularly throughout Sebald's corpus, especially in The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001). These elegiac encounters with residual technologies informed Sebald's literary aesthetic. The novel Austerlitz, in particular, foregrounds media history and the evolution of modes of writerly work. In this novel, written in the shadow of new modes of digital writing that were becoming ubiquitous at the end of the twentieth century, Sebald's poetics of media obsolescence emerges as key preoccupation in his aesthetic project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on ethnographic data from central Serbia, the article uses the concept of "esthetic formations" to consider how divergent expressions of Orthodox Christianity intersect in postsocialist space. The majority of Serbs identify as "Orthodox" and Orthodox imagery pervades the public sphere—but only a minority engage concertedly with liturgical practice. Through their regular fasting and churchgoing such self-identifying "believers" embody an Orthodox esthetic which is at once connected to—and yet distinct from—the overarching Orthodox cultural context. Whilst for churchgoers such embodiment represents sincerity and commitment, for many others it represents fanaticism and excessive piety. Overall, the article makes two claims. First, that "esthetic formations" are not internally rigid and that esthetics can divide as much as they unite. Second, that embodied esthetics allow different actors to articulate different moral claims about what constitutes sincere Orthodox practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In my responses to Kahn and Ceccoli (this issue), I express admiration for the aesthetics of their formulations of the experience of immigration and that of the dance, respectively. I describe the impact of Kahn's understanding of the effect of immigration on my experience of dancing. I also elaborate on Ceccoli's account of implicit, non-verbal dimensions of our analytic encounters, and of the reparative impact of recognition with two clinical vignettes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to introduce a meaning-making process called 'sensuous abstraction' as one approach to aesthetic experience in line with Dewey's philosophy. Dewey highlights aesthetic experience as the best form of experience that integrates emotional and intellectual qualities to foster deep learning and insights. Building on contemporary research on sensation, affect, and human brain, this paper identifies two distinct modes of human understanding: the linguistic/conceptual system and the sensuous-imaginative system. The former, often associated with abstraction and intellectual thinking, is heavily emphasized in traditional schooling, but the latter, integral to human cognition, is sadly neglected and overlooked. While situational meaning offers a way to bridge the two systems, it often falls short of leading to aesthetic experience. In response, sensuous abstraction can promote a process of meaning making that becomes more general than sensation but never as general as linguistic categories while maintaining its sensory wholeness as aesthetic experience demands. Using a classical artwork as an example, this paper concludes sensuous abstraction can be adopted as one approach for educators to create learning experiences by integrating sensory experience and generalizations and abstractions that lead to aesthetic experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The composer, author, and teacher, John Cage, was exercised by our 'inability' to truly listen when approaching sound. In exploring the influences on Cage's avant-garde style, specifically the spiritual discipline found in both Zen Buddhism and Chance operations, this paper attempts to distinguish his philosophy (and use) of silence and chance as an aesthetic pedagogy. In accordance with Dewey's aesthetic theory and Shusterman's Somaesthetics, resolving the inability to listen is aesthetically conceived as somatic 'attuning' to the occurrence of chance sounds in the ambience of the world. By maintaining Cage's spiritually informed approach as a compositional framework, this paper highlights how his philosophy of silence is pedagogically illustrative of the active engagement we can have with the world. This approach is most apparent in Cage's 4'33", where the 'musicalizing' of everyday sounds erodes the boundaries between art and life, creating a continuity with the world. Somewhat problematically, Cage attempted to make this possible by channelling experience into a state of immersion, unifying art and life by 'letting go' of subjectivity. But as is shown by the Fluxus artists who were inspired by Cage's teachings, the possibility for negotiating Cage's terms brings with it an opportunity to theoretically reflect on the educational processes that underpin Cage's approach to sound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the intersection of art history and AI technology. Special attention is paid to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a machine learning technology widely used in AI art. This technology is particularly interesting to art history and the philosophy of art because it raises enduring questions about the creative process of artmaking, especially what constitutes a new and original work of art. While this is a relatively new area, it is possible to discern emerging directions where art and AI intersect. One pressing issue concerns the use (or misuse) of algorithmically enabled technologies and datasets to perpetuate longstanding art-historical biases. The critical position adopted in this paper shares this concern. I examine a notable example of GAN technology that claims to create original art styles. While such experiments in computational creativity are technically interesting, their artistic aims can be questionable. I argue a mechanical model of artistic development based solely on the autonomy of style is problematic for at least two reasons: 1) it uncritically reinstates a formalist view of art history; 2) it recreates a narrow style-centric ‘historical modernism.’ However, despite voicing these reservations, I also discuss the potential of this technology to engage with topics of critical relevance to art history and the philosophy of art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The UEFA Europa League group stage clash on 24 October and 7 November 2019 between Celtic FC of Glasgow and SS Lazio of Rome offers fascinating insight into ultra social movements as forms of leadership. This exploratory research paper conceptualizes this tie as an Event that provides both a pivotal point of cross-cultural reflection on ultra fan groups as emergent social movements, and a means for the examination of forms of social leadership in contemporary society. In such terms, the paper initiates a critical consideration of The Green Brigade, a self-styled ultra fan group of Celtic FC as an emerging social movement, characterizes the group in terms of the differentiated ultra/ultraS binary, begins to qualitatively address the question as to levels of support for the group among the wider constituency of Celtic supporters, and as such, tentatively explores the groups' leadership and organizational characteristics. The research concludes that a creative and action-oriented leadership style can be discerned. While organizational characteristics require further examination, intimations of a logic of development emerge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the history of Chinese embroidery, Gu's Embroidery in the late Ming Dynasty and Ding Pei's Principles of Embroidery can be considered the pinnacle of embroidered painting's practice and texts. Nowadays, there are many studies of the unique position and artistic value of "embroidered painting." It is in this context that this paper offers a particular consideration of the technical aspects of embroidered painting in the Ming and Qing dynasties. With a series of specific questions, this paper is designed to examine embroidered painting from the perspective of stitching technique and gender, as well as its dual status as both an independent art form and a stitching technique. However, due to its nature as a women-exclusive art, embroidery suffered discriminatory treatment and was unable to acquire its privileged status in a male-dominated imperial society. As a result, embroidered painting had to win discourse power by not emphasizing its sophisticated technique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pictorialism emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a global aesthetic movement that argued for photography's artistic status on par with other plastic arts more powerfully than ever. Archives from South Asia demonstrate the movement's thriving life in the subcontinent with Calcutta emerging as a centre and its bilingual amateur photographer-writers as major participants simultaneously engaging in globally circulating specialist discourses on pictorialism and popular discussions of their practice aimed at public pedagogy. By looking into Bangla periodical press this paper investigates how Bengali pictorialists used popular Bangla magazines in the early twentieth century to establish their distinct voice regarding what counted as artistic photography as they engaged with a non-specialist mass readership. Mass-circulated Bangla articles were not vernacular translations of knowledge and practices produced in metropolitan locations and disseminated in transregional languages like English. Vernacular was an extension of Bengali amateur photographers' participation in global photography, as they remained grounded in their historical specificity. These amateur photographers were bilingual intellectuals who wrote in English for a global public and in Bangla for a Bangla-reading publics and refraining from translating culture as they moved across languages. Indeed, articulations in vernacular didn't mean a venularization of practice; they indicate plurality of belonging and affiliation that crafted the pictorialist aesthetic of the Bengali amateurs. By unpacking this intellectual history, this paper decenters the Euro-US-centric history of pictorialism towards writing an interconnected history of the artistic movement, while also complicating the category of modern Indian art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is well-known that digital learning materials influence the classroom curriculum and didactics. At the same time, few studies examine the role of the data visualizations offered by digital learning materials. Data visualizations signpost the emergence of students as data subjects who can be observed and compared on a computer screen. They thus shape teachers’ socio-technical ways of seeing student learning and are likely to influence student assessments. Drawing inspiration from Science and Technology Studies (STS), this paper advances an analytical framework for eliciting the politics of data visualizations, focusing on automation, agencies, and aesthetics. The framework is exemplified through a case study of a popular Danish digital mathematics platform. In a concluding discussion, the paper considers the importance of addressing unsettled and ethical questions about the role of automated digital systems in teachers’ knowledge practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Chemical principles are used to direct the preservation and conservation of paper cultural relics. • The mechanisms of acidic, alkaline and oxidative degradation of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin in paper are summarized. • The intrinsic and extrinsic factors affecting the degradation process of paper are addressed. • The advantages and disadvantages of remedial and preventive conservation methods for paper relics are discussed. Paper cultural relics, with the great historic and artistic value, experience aging and degradation during their long-term preservation. The degradation of paper involves various chemical reactions with complicated mechanisms due to the multiple components of paper itself and the complex factors that promote paper aging process. Therefore, it is of great importance to deeply understand the chemical essence and scientific principle of paper degradation, so as to propose the effective conservation methods for paper relics. This review summarized the chemical mechanisms of acidic, alkaline and oxidative degradation of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin in paper, and discussed the intrinsic and extrinsic factors that affect paper degradation systematically. Moreover, the interaction among the three types of degradation routes was analyzed for the first time, and the evolution of kinetic models for paper degradation was introduced to evaluate the durability and expected lifetime of paper. On this basis, the advantages and disadvantages of remedial and preventive conservation methods for paper relics are summarized, and the fundamental scientific principles was prospected to guide the further development of paper conservation methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author calls for articles or papers to be published in the journal on topics about the Americas like culture, aesthetics, history, and ethics.

The Ming Great Wall Military Defense System is the most complete ancient military cultural heritage in China, which is of great significance to the study of China's ancient military defense mechanism and pattern. Military settlement is an important carrier of this mechanism. The estimation and in-depth understanding of its value can further excavate the profound connotation of the military defense system and the Great Wall spatial pattern in the Ming Dynasty. This paper adopts the AHP-CRITIC weighting approach to determine the weights of the historical value, scientific value, social value, cultural value and artistic value of the settlement heritage, so as to construct the value evaluation model of military settlements, and takes 34 Ming Great Wall military settlements in the Liaoxi Corridor as an example for evaluation. The results of the evaluation identified the priority settlements for conservation and development, and also explored their relationship with historical status, urbanization processes and official policies. The evaluation model constructed in this paper has a certain universality, and can also be followed in the evaluation of other military settlements in the Ming Great Wall Defense System, so as to obtain the overall cognition of the settlement system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractRecently, the concept of mobile labour has garnered increasing attention among mobilities scholars. Yet, the preponderance of research has emphasised workers’ movements that are fairly large-scale and routes-based. This paper proposes another kind of mobility that is of equal significance—that of micro-mobilities by labour, or more accurately by their bodies. Using original research conducted through semi-structured interviews with 40 customer service agents working in an international airport in Asia, the paper examines three kinds of aesthetic labour that these workers perform alongside passengers. Enacted through various bodily motions intended to speed up aeromobile processes and augment productivity, I argue that these performances produce a (tenuous) aesthetics of assuring presence, orderly movement, and passing time. As more and more work tasks are redistributed across the airport between staff and passengers, ‘new’ automation presents an opportunity to reflect on the mobile practices being invented as self-service technologies infiltrate customer service and other work where human relations and decision-making skills are required. More broadly, it also uncovers the gendered politics of bodily comport, gaits, gestures and other micro-movements in labour (re)production in a wider age of technological change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can philosophers incorporate the Digital Humanities into their classrooms? And why should they? In this paper, I explore answers to these questions as I detail what I have dubbed "The Monuments Project" and describe how this project engages with Digital Humanities and teaches students to connect theoretical philosophical concepts with their lives. Briefly, the Monuments Project asks students to apply concepts discussed in our philosophy class (in my case, a Global Aesthetics class) with a monument in their environment. Instead of a traditional paper, students upload MP3s of their observations, pictures and/or drawings of the monument, and text-based responses. The goal of the Monument Project is twofold: to get students to connect what they have learned to a sense of place=the place where they live, and to introduce them to the Digital Humanities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alfredo Panizo was a philosopher who served in various capacities at the University of Santo Tomas (UST) during the twentieth century. In 1954, he gave an address at the university that was also published in book form as Art and Morals. In his address/book, Panizo systematically laid out his aesthetics, which offers a criticism of modern art during a time when Edades and other modernists received institutional support from UST. Unfortunately, scholars have neither provided a comprehensive explication of Panizo's aesthetics nor situated it in the broader history of Philippine modern art. This paper aims to address this problem. By employing Gadamerian hermeneutics, the author of the paper offers an interpretation of Panizo's aesthetics that (1) forms a connection between his ideas and S. P. Lopez's thoughts on proletarian art, (2) explicates Panizo's views on beauty and transcendence, and (3) investigates Panizo's position on modern art. Through this paper, the author hopes to add more nuance to the story of modern art in the Philippines. Although much has been written about the modernists, who made UST a springboard for spreading their ideas, scholars have barely looked at what the Dominicans at the university thought about modern art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When the Conservative Member of Parliament and Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg complained on London's LBC radio that the 72 victims of the 2017 Grenfell fire did not use common sense and simply leave the building, and that he could not understand how it had 'anything to do with race or class', he fell into a trap which is now at least 150 years old. This has seen the art and act of evacuating – especially tall buildings – blamed on the evacuees themselves. It is also revealing of an aesthetics of erasure which silences a classed, raced and gendered politics which has served to render certain subjects and bodies as not only victims, but culpable. The vertical evacuee has been considered too slow, too big, too indecisive, too passionate, too weak, too much, too many – too inadequate. In this paper, and in building on a wider politics of verticality and mobility, I pull on several threads of the gendered and raced geographies of high-rise vertical evacuation focusing particularly on the solidaristic movements and expressions of the workers. The paper explores the history of tall building evacuations, focusing on early high-rise factory fires, their investigation, and subsequent changes to fire regulation, building technologies and working practices in North America which affected predominantly young, female and migrant working labour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a study of the aesthetics of the free-form improvisational dance practice Gaga as an example of contemporary neo-spirituality. The study is based on aesthetic data collected in recreational Gaga classes at the Suzanne Dellal Centre in Tel Aviv. The study shows that the aesthetics of practices are relational and depend on a variety of heterogeneous factors; collective and shared aesthetics persist despite individualization. The paper develops assemblage thinking as a theoretical and practical framework for approaching aesthetics. It combines the specific analytical approach of aesthetic analysis with the theoretical concept of assemblage and applies it to an example of neo-spirituality. It evolves the concept of "aesthetic assemblage" to address the challenges of studying practices that focus on movement, body, and experience. It demonstrates that studying aesthetic assemblages of neo-spiritual practices helps to foster an understanding of social and cultural dynamics in the context of religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Danto's answer - that there is no way to tell the difference without understanding the context of the art world within which the art object is placed - established him as a perceptive and original philosopher of art. On the other hand, one might worry that too wide an opening of artistic practice to include anything anyone recognized as an artist decides to present as art threatens Danto's definition of artworks as "embodied meanings." This short collection of conversations between the renowned American philosopher of art Arthur C. Danto and Italian art critic Demetrio Paparoni will serve as an effective introduction to Danto's work for those unfamiliar with it and a fine coda to his career for the more well-versed reader. [Extracted from the article]

This paper is an aesthetic analysis of the practice of serpent handling by Christians in the Appalachian region of the United States. The purpose of this analysis is to understand serpent handling's aesthetic relationship to the Pentecostal tradition and exposit the implications of this relationship for the practice's legal status. The first section examines the history and defining characteristics of serpent handling and introduces the controversial problem of whether the practice can be categorized within the Pentecostal movement. The second section argues that serpent handling can be understood as belonging within the broader global Pentecostal tradition through engagement with the Pentecostal aesthetics of Nimi Wariboko. The final section concludes that if serpent handling is legible according to the aesthetic norms of Pentecostalism, a now broadly tolerated religious tradition in the United States, then this necessitates a wholesale reconsideration of antiserpent handling legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper raises puzzles concerning our grasp of others' aesthetic selves. I first articulate a conception of an aesthetic self, understood as an autonomously adopted orientation to objects of aesthetic value, encompassing the embrace of aesthetic reasons and the qualitative appreciative states that follow. This articulation is motivated by the commonplace observation that people's aesthetic identities are important to them. Given this importance, we might think it salutary to grasp other people's aesthetic selves, under the general auspices of 'interpersonal understanding'. Given the conception of aesthetic selves, we might think that empathy is an appropriate way to do so. But, second, I argue that you can't find out about another's aesthetic self via empathy. We might instead think that aesthetic conversation is the way to grasp aesthetic selves. However, third, I argue that the aim of finding out about others' aesthetic selves is at odds with the ostensible aims of aesthetic conversation, which are to do with effacing individuality and creating commonality. So aesthetic selves seem hard to grasp. I finally briefly canvass some ways of solving this problem, without settling on a firm answer, and consider how the thoughts might extend to practical identities more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brazilian writer Carolina Maria de Jesus (1914–1977) was born in a rural community and spent most of her life in a slum. Despite this, her literary work achieved remarkable editorial success, having its value recognized by critics and academic circles. This paper analyzes Carolina Maria de Jesus's autobiographical narratives in the light of John Dewey's aesthetic theory, with the purpose of investigating the factors responsible for the development of her aesthetic sensitivity – intellectual and emotional dispositions favorable to involvement with artistic practices. The results suggest that Carolina Maria de Jesus's literary skills, which express not only individual but also collective yearnings, resulted from the incentive she received to think about things that do not exist and from her relationship with people who favored the formation of a personality open to varied experiences. Such results are presented as requirements for a democratic and humanist education that aims at the flowering of aesthetic sensitivity and encourages educators and students to believe in their creative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: According to social-ecological models, the built and natural environment has the potential to facilitate or hinder physical activity (PA). While this potential is well researched in urban areas, a current systematic review of how the built and natural environment is related to PA in rural areas is lacking. Methods: We searched five databases and included studies for adults (18–65 years) living in rural areas. We included quantitative studies investigating the association between any self-reported or objectively measured characteristic of the built or natural environment and any type of self-reported or objectively measured PA, and qualitative studies that reported on features of the built or natural environment perceived as barriers to or facilitators of PA by the participants. Screening for eligibility and quality assessment (using the Standard Quality Assessment Criteria for Evaluating Primary Research Papers from a Variety of Fields) were done in duplicate. We used a narrative approach to synthesize the results. Results: Of 2432 non-duplicate records, 51 quantitative and 19 qualitative studies were included. Convincing positive relationships were found between the availability and accessibility of places for exercise and recreation and leisure-time PA as well as between the overall environment and leisure-time PA. Possible positive associations were found between the overall environment and total and transport-related PA, between greenness/natural environment and total PA, between cycling infrastructure and aesthetics and MVPA, and between pedestrian infrastructure and total walking. A possible negative relationship was found between safety and security and total walking. Qualitative studies complemented several environmental facilitators (facilities for exercise and recreation, sidewalks or streets with low traffic, attractive natural environment) and barriers (lack of facilities and destinations, lack of sidewalks, speeding traffic and high traffic volumes, lack of street lighting). Conclusions: Research investigating the relationship between the built and natural environment and PA behaviors of adults living in rural areas is still limited and there is a need for more high-quality and longitudinal studies. However, our most positive findings indicate that investing in places for exercise and recreation, a safe infrastructure for active transport, and nature-based activities are possible strategies that should be considered to address low levels of PA in rural adults. Trial registration: PROSPERO: CRD42021283508. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper documents the visioning, crafting, and writing of an ethnodrama – a type of embodied writing that takes the form of a research-based play script – about one unusual experience within an aged care organization: what might happen when technology, specifically virtual reality, is implemented into this unique organizational setting? As well as reflecting on the artistic and scientific value of research-based theatre, the script of one of the monologue plays, After Aleppo, is shared. Play scripts are a uniquely creative form of embodied writing, helping people see, imagine, and better understand the experiences of others, with ethnodrama the translation and adaption of research into a written script. As well as generating empathy, this research-based theatre provides a novel form of knowledge translation to engage and educate the public and those working in aged care organizations, a diverse workforce dealing with issues of care relationships, ageing, technology, and death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing scholarship on settler colonialism largely understudies aesthetics. Settler colonial logics work not only through the elimination, dispossession, and criminalization of Indigenous populations but also through the erasure of Indigenous narratives and aesthetics. Aesthetics communicate a particular system of knowledge and power that can either refute or perpetuate settler colonial projects. I use the term "settler aesthetics" to foreground an understanding of aesthetics as dynamic socio-spatial practices through which state and non-state actors assert power, construct particular visions of a city, and shape conditions of belonging. Settler aesthetics demonstrate how the logic of elimination and the work of settler memory reproduces and is reproduced through various visual modalities. I argue that as geographers, we must examine both contemporary settler colonial projects that continue codifying cities as purely settler spaces without Indigenous presence and resistance, and spaces that insist on Black, Latinx, and Indigenous presence and livingness. This paper therefore explores how scholarship on decolonizing and anti-colonial art practice and theory can inform emerging scholarship on settler colonial urbanism that centers perspectives and practices of Black and Indigenous presence and resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A series of recent experimental studies have cast doubt on the existence of a traditional tension that aestheticians have noted in our aesthetic judgements and practices, namely the problem of taste. The existence of the problem has been acknowledged since Hume and Kant, though not enough has been done to analyse it in depth. In this paper, we remedy this by proposing six possible conceptualizations of it. Drawing on our analysis of the problem of taste, we argue that the experimental results in question are not a real challenge to its existence. By contrast, they provide empirical evidence in its support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art and its Objects by Richard Wollheim had a major impact on aesthetics and the philosophy of art when it was first published in 1968. Of the arguments offered in response to Wollheim's essay, Jerrold Levinson's intentional-historical theory of art has been one of the most enduring. Levinson was influenced by three key sections of Wollheim's enquiry: Section 40, which considers the claim that works of art fall under a concept of art, or that we are disposed to regard certain things as works of art; and Sections 60 and 61, which deal with art as a historical phenomenon, and problems arising from its identification and interpretation. To date, these claims have been raised as points of contention in the philosophy of art. This paper takes a different perspective. Wollheim's understanding of art's historicity draws explicitly on the literature of theoretical art history. Via Wollheim, old art-historical problems will reappear as new philosophical questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing literature in philosophy of science focuses on the role of aesthetics in scientific practice, with the experiment recently recognized for its aesthetic value. However, the literature on aesthetics in experimentation grows out of case studies from the history of science, leaving open the question as to how contemporary scientists experience aesthetics in their experimental work. In this paper we offer the first qualitative, empirical analysis of aesthetic experiences regarding experimental practice, drawing from in-depth interviews with 215 scientists in four countries. We identify six categories of aesthetic experience we find in experimentation, their function, and new questions emerging from our study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gond painting, an integral part of the Gond cultural identity of central India, has emerged as highly appreciated and recognised tribal art form worldwide in the recent times. These traditional paintings are believed to have started with the transformation of Gond oral folklores. The Pradhan Gond, a subgroup of the Gonds, who were traditionally assigned to sing songs of the glorification of the gods, goddesses and nature with a Bana, a traditional single-stringed musical instrument, was assumed to initiate the paintings of Gond folktales. They narrated the collective beliefs, values and legends of the Gond tribe on the origin, relationship and divine powers in the form of paintings. The traditions of performing the assigned responsibilities of Pradhan Gond were believed to have lost during the Mughal era and British rule. This research paper focuses on the study of the reflections of three popular Gond folk stories, i.e. Basin Kanya, Mahua tree and Bada Dev, in the contemporary Gond paintings of Madhya Pradesh. The paintings of Jangarh Singh Shyam and Durga Bai have been chosen for the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field of interior home design has witnessed a growing utilization of machine learning. However, the subjective nature of aesthetics poses a significant challenge due to its variability among individuals and cultures. This paper proposes an applied machine learning method to enhance manufactured custom doors in a proper and aesthetic home design environment. Since there are millions of possible custom door models based on door types, wood species, dyeing, paint, and glass types, it is impossible to foresee a home design model fitting every custom door. To generate the classification data, a home design expert has to label thousands of door/home design combinations with the different colors and shades utilized in home designs. These data train a random forest classifier in a supervised learning context. The classifier predicts a home design according to a particular custom door. This method is applied in the following context: A web page displays a choice of doors to a customer. The customer selects the desired door properties, which are sent to a server that returns an aesthetic home design model for this door. This door configuration generates a series of images through the Unity 3D engine module, which are returned to the web client. The customer finally visualizes their door in an aesthetic home design context. The results show the random forest classifier's good performance, with an accuracy level of 86.8%, in predicting suitable home design, marking the way for future developments requiring subjective evaluations. The results are also explained using a feature importance graphic, a decision tree, a confusion matrix, and text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figure of the ethnic minor is a heavily inscribed representational subject in PRC cinema. Coming out of a socialist cinematic tradition as images of thoroughly assimilated, phlegmatic adults-in-waiting, the portrayal of ethnic children in PRC cinema today assumes more nuances as an art-house cinema verité aesthetics demands ethnic children enact their social presence in a complex network of social relations fraught with the tension between modernity and tradition, identity structures and their restructures. This paper examines two 2018 films about ethnic minors in Tibet and the Uyghur region of China—Wangdrak's Rain Boots by Lhapal Gyal and A First Farewell by Wang Lina, respectively. Through the lenses of what Félix Guattari calls "partial subjectivity" and the "social machine," the article demonstrates how the two films portray weather forecast and linguistic ability in Mandarin Chinese as socializing conduit of Chinese state power and produce for the ethnic children an affect of authoritarian certainty. The paper argues that those two films critique the PRC's current ethnopolitical strategies in the said regions, which place a premium on a monoglot and monovocal articulation of a pan-Chinese identity at the cost of impoverishing a polyvocal ethno-social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the novel “Forty Rules of Love” by Elif Shafak, which evokes the historical personality of the great scholar Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, dubbed by the West “the Shakespeare of the Islamic world”. He was known for his moderation and tolerance, for his call to coexistence and fraternity between the members of different religions, and his condemnation of violence and extremism of all kinds. So, the novel strives to change the misconceptions of the West regarding the Asian countries of the East and to challenge the negative attitude towards Islam, known nowadays as Islamophobia. The paper aims to address the evil of fanaticism and violence and introduce the Western reader to the sublime spiritual aesthetics of the East, which starkly contrast to the savage image of Islam as presented by the media. By studying the novel, which has been translated into more than fifty languages, the paper also seeks to emphasise the role of literature, in general, in spreading cultural awareness among fellow human beings so that people can live in peace and safety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a theory of text on-screen as "unvoiceover." It addresses both the case for captioning as social good and the affordances (aesthetic, affective) of writing in or over the moving image. Advancing an argument informed by perspectives from d/Deaf Studies, Critical Disability Studies and Digital Interface Studies, and applying modes of analysis from literary criticism alongside those proper to the study of moving image and sound, it examines the idiosyncrasies of text-in-motion as non-sonorous, fugitive counterpart to the traditional, troublesome "voiceover." To develop a poetics of the unsounding voice on-screen, the paper focalizes its argument through multimedia artist Liza Sylvestre's Captioned series: a body of moving image work that is itself, paradoxically, uncaptioned. Framing Sylvestre's lyrical "unvoiceover" as a reimagining of the lost roles of film explainers and literary intertitles, I argue that the artist's takeover of the caption track intervenes critically in contemporary debates about the ethics of audio-visual translation, situated description and access as public ethos rather than private concern. Posing the artist's personal-and-political writing as suggestive of a lower-case analogue to Deaf Gain, I show how Sylvestre's "unvoiceover" educates its "receivers" in the purpose and functioning of captions. By reading Sylvestre's writing on-screen more closely than its fugitive form seems to invite, I show how the unvoiceover encultures its own demands on its readers and elicits its own habits of reading. By scrutinizing how Sylvestre's series makes the case for captioning, this paper makes the case for a new appraisal of the aesthetic, affective and political affordances of the unvoiceover as writing on the run. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a theoretical contribution to HCI that considers the more-than-human (MTH) as an intrinsic part of human–computer interaction design. In particular, it focuses on MTH as central to responses to the climate crisis as manifested in energy-demand reduction and smart meters. This is explored by expanding on the notion of the ‘design event’, defined aesthetically as the patterns or conformation of unfolding and becoming of heterogenous human and non-human elements. It is with this version of the design event that the MTH can be more directly and effectively engaged. We do this with reference to environmental problems as signaled by Haraway’s speculative future ‘the Chthulucene’ – a worlding for liveable futures. The paper views design briefs in HCI, and design more broadly, as problematics for exploring and determining aesthetic-possible pathways for invention, which necessarily involves MTH elements. Three interrelated design briefs are presented that propose how practitioners might go about addressing energy-demand reduction and metering and provide a set of guidelines on how to devise and write speculative more-than-human briefs. This, the paper argues, involves becoming sensitive to speculative MTH compositions where novel forms of ‘sense making’ orient alternative possibilistic – idiotic – relations to energy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract This paper considers the nature of creativity in Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse, in which she said she had finally 'laid the ghosts' of her parents, after many years of being obsessed with them, her mother in particular. Woolf was very familiar with the psychoanalytic concepts of her day, owing to the social milieu and publishing context of the 'Bloomsbury' intellectual circle. She acknowledged that all her writings were in some sense autobiographical. Despite periods of severe depression, she preferred not to have an analysis but to pursue her own self-analysis through her writings. This paper pursues in detail the evolution of the image of 'internal parents', known in modern psychoanalysis as the 'combined internal object' (Klein, Meltzer) and taken to be the key source of an individual's creativity. The aim is to distinguish the realistic portrayal of external parents from the creative story that is told and indeed discovered by the writer, focussing on its experiential and experimental evolution within the structure of the novel itself. Woolf spoke of the 'androgynous' nature of creative work, and this, it is suggested, refers not simply to the aesthetic interweaving of complementary qualities represented in the story, but to the sense of a governing aegis of parental bisexual objects who work towards and achieve a constructive relationship in the inner world, capable of repairing defects that exist in the external world. Woolf preferred not to interpret her own works symbolically but suggested that readers may do so. The family journey to the Lighthouse is often seen in terms of a spiritual journey, as well as an artistic one, and can also be interpreted in psychoanalytic terms of an internal reconstruction or reparation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese industrial heritage is the materialized carrier and historical witness of the evolution of urban spatial structure and industrial development. As an inseparable part of cultural heritage, it has rich historical, social, economic, scientific, technological, and aesthetic value. However, industrial heritage as a value is not suffi ciently acknowledged in the Chinese society. The factories, their activity, and their historical evolution are often disconnected and isolated from the daily life of the cities, being quite an unknown aspect for most citizens. In addition, due to the acceleration of urbanization, many industrial heritages in cities have disappeared. China has spent two decades promoting sustainable development of its industrial heritage, but there is still a lack of knowledge on how to promote sustainable development of industrial heritage through digital education. Based on these findings the paper discusses our research that promotes sustainable development aspects of industrial heritage, and our subsequent work has particularly focussed on associated landscape recovery. It does so by focussing on the particular highly valued heritage case of the Anshan Steel production site in China, and the environmental consequences of the Dagushan Open mine on the landscape. The paper ends with a critical reflection on how a digital tool can help to shape industrial heritage education, appreciation and involvement, and hence foster sustainable development processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at two memorials built in India to commemorate Sikh victims of the violent events of June 1984 and November 1984. Gurdwara Yaadgaar Shaheedan (Gurdwara Martyrs' Memorial) was built in the Golden Temple complex, Amritsar in 2013, and the Wall of Truth: Sikh Genocide Memorial was inaugurated in Gurdwara Rakabganj, New Delhi in 2017. While both memorials commemorate related events and are built by the same group of people, they differ completely in the choice of nomenclature, design and even the justification given for their creation. This paper discusses the differences between these memorials and their relevance in the memorial politics of contemporary India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critically assesses and argues for the value of first- and second-person phenomenological approaches to researching aesthetic experiences. Against the background of a review of academic debates on the topic of slow cinema, this paper demonstrates the need for more rigorous and grounded research on film experiences. It therefore advocates the implementation of the empirically-informed, second-person research method of micro-phenomenology in the field of film reception studies. It argues for a renewed understanding of phenomenology as experiential translation grounded in a Peircean semiotic framework. From this semiotic angle, it proposes a typology of specific orders, levels, stages, and modes of experiential translation involved in various approaches to phenomenological research. This semiotic perspective also raises awareness of various non-verbal forms of expression, in addition to traditional linguistic forms of description, employed by participants in micro-phenomenological interviews when they intersubjectively transform their film experiences into reflective awareness guided by and through interaction with the interviewer-researcher. This paper promotes expressive phenomenology that includes non-linguistic, gestural, pictorial forms of reporting lived experience as legitimate material as well as non-traditional format of publication of research that meets academic standards of validity and verifiability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nowadays, the ultimate goal of microsurgical breast reconstruction is not merely the effective transfer of vascularized tissue but the achievement of a natural, symmetric appearance. The aim of this present study was to systematically summarize the published evidence on abdominal-based free flap inset for breast reconstruction in order to provide principles and classification that could guide the surgeon in choosing the most appropriate inset technique based on patient and flap characteristics. A comprehensive review was performed following the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines, looking for articles on the insetting technique for free flap breast reconstruction. After screening 306 publications, 24 papers (published from 1994 to 2020) were included in the study. We identified four main breast anatomical features on which the papers reviewed focused when describing their insetting technique: breast width, breast ptosis, breast projection, and upper pole fullness. Patient body type, type of mastectomy, and reported complications are also discussed. Flap shaping and inset during breast reconstruction are fundamental steps in any reconstructive procedure. Despite the low evidence in the current literature, this systematic review provides a framework to guide the surgeon's decision-making and optimize the aesthetic outcomes of abdominal-based free flap breast reconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we distinguish the permissible use of aesthetic features in persuasive communication from their manipulative misuse? The paper reconstructs the basic argument (proposed by Stoics and others in antiquity) that persuasive speech should be aesthetically austere. The argument, it is suggested, is fundamentally sound. But the view it sustains is subject to challenge, on the grounds that it is implausible and impractical in the real world. By making clear the grounds on which the "austere" view is justified, and by making precise the arguments that underlie those challenges, the paper identifies and evaluates three different possible responses to those challenges. The most promising of these accepts the argument for "austerity" but proposes a more moderate interpretation of its conclusion. In doing so, it takes up the challenge of providing a defensible rationale for distinguishing the permissible from the impermissible use of aesthetic features in persuasive communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of this paper is the relocation of a proven learning mechanism in a real-life working situation to a university setting. The aim is to discuss to what degree the types of learning generated in the original setting can survive the re-contextualisation and what might be done to retain as much value as possible. The original learning situation was an aesthetic experience – choral singing and conducting – that allowed nine senior managers to sense various relational phenomena, such as control and empowerment, multi-voice teamwork, the impact of own body, empathy, and vulnerability. The target learning domain is a university setting. The paper draws on various theories of learning. The re-contextualisation is discussed in the form of five hurdles that must be overcome. For each hurdle, a design hypothesis is proposed. The presence of an aesthetic object – the sounding music – illuminates the crucial linkage between discipline knowledge structures and everyday practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human needs, and their fulfillment, are the building blocks of human development, personality, and well-being. However, no published paper in the field of psychology has focused on exploring aesthetic needs. Maslow (1986) gave the topic little more than a paragraph; and Dweck [1], in her elegant Unified Theory of Motivation, Personality, and Development, never mentions aesthetic needs. The aim of this article is to describe developing a scale for measuring the intensity of aesthetic needs. The structure, psychometric properties, and criterion-related validity of the scale were verified with three independent samples (total N = 592). The results of an EFA and two CFAs indicated a three-factor structure: 1) the need to aestheticize everyday life (aesthetic experiences of everyday objects and events unrelated to art, such as the presentation of food or the appearance of a workspace, etc.); 2) the need for contact with aesthetic creations (the arts); 3) the need to aestheticize the built and natural environments (urban spaces, architecture, parks, wild nature, etc.). In addition, our criterion-related convergent validity studies have shown that people with high aesthetic needs are characterized by experiencing more intense experiences in contact with works of art, have higher aesthetic competence in art, are more intensely involved in four forms of beauty, have a higher ability to integrate beauty, a stronger trait gratitude, curiosity about nature, greater sensitivity to disgust, and the need for internal and external stimulation. This scale may prove useful in research on individual differences and the psychology of aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Fung Ming Chip (馮明秋, b. 1951) is a contemporary artist based in Hong Kong who practices shufa (書法, lit. "the way of writing"). Traditionally, shufa is the art of writing Chinese characters with a brush on paper or silk; it is deeply connected to the arts of poetry and painting. However, the theories of making and viewing that undergird traditional shufa, as well as the stakes of its contemporary practice, remain largely unknown to Western audiences. This essay is a response to Fung's latest solo exhibition, entitled NumberS Series. It considers how Fung Ming Chip's latest works have moved beyond traditional shufa practice and language itself to examine the relationship between art and time. Unlike previous critical works that contextualize Fung's art with respect to Euro–North American art and art history, this article uses Fung's writings and early Chinese theories of aesthetics and ontology to establish that his art works in a distinctly non-Western manner that has its own relevance and perspective for a contemporary, global audience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Art appreciation is a remarkable human activity that begins the moment someone first perceives a work of art until they have fully contemplated the art, including purposefully discovering resources to enhance perceptions, reflections, and memorization. In this paper, the author first presents personal conjectures about the origins of the perception of beauty and art. He then explores three ways in which the art appreciation phenomenon has been researched and understood: the traditional art history approach; the opposite scientific neuroaesthetic stream; and a third and often controversial approach, art appreciation assisted by psychoanalytical theory and praxis. Finally, he suggests a method to foster, develop, and refine art appreciation based on personal analysis and his experience with students in immersion courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese calligraphy is an invaluable legacy of Chinese culture, since it bears great artistic and aesthetic value. In this paper, we aim at the problem of Chinese calligraphy style classification, which is an important branch of Chinese calligraphy study. Chinese calligraphy style classification remains a challenging task due to its dramatic intra-class difference and tiny inter-class difference. Therefore, we propose a novel CNN embedded with feature fusion and feature decomposition modules to solve this problem. We first fuse the features of several images from the same category to augment their potential style-related features. Then we feed the fused feature to an attention module to decompose it to two components, viz. style-related feature and style-unrelated feature. We further apply two types of loss function to jointly supervise our network. On the one hand, we feed the style-related feature to a style classifier which is supervised by cross-entropy loss. On the other hand, we construct a correlation loss based on the Pearson correlation coefficient to make the two decomposed features as orthogonal as possible. By optimizing these two types of loss simultaneously, our proposed network has obtained the accuracies of 98.63 % and 94.35 % respectively on two datasets. Besides, substantial experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the feature fusion and decomposition modules. The proposed approach compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the normalisation of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank on the part of their inhabitants. Focusing on the so-called 'non-ideological' settlements that evolved from ideological outposts into middle-class suburbs over the last three decades, this study engages spatial politics in Israel/Palestine in general, and the transformations of the settlement project in particular. Based on ethnographic research in the region, I argue that the acceptance and normalisation of the settlements among Israelis is closely related to their affective and aesthetic experiences. I focus on the co-production of space/territory, affect and aesthetics to show how physical transformations of the settlements since their establishment have turned many of these key nodes of the Israeli occupational apparatus into family-friendly communities, thus erasing the violence of the Israeli control over the Palestinians from settlers' lives. I further demonstrate that these notions are not disrupted even by one of the most prominent symbols and technologies of the occupation, the fence/wall. This study thus contributes to understanding of how the interplay of spatial, territorial, aesthetic and affective practices works to normalise colonial conquest and domination by making their manifestations seemingly natural and even appealing on the part of the privileged segments of the society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]