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Collaborations between artists and brands have become common place. We investigate their cooperation through two emblematic cases. First, the Masters Collection project, a collaboration between Louis Vuitton, Jeff Koons, and the Louvre, and second, the Air Force 1 project, a collaboration between Louis Vuitton, Virgil Abloh, and Nike. To analyze the shared interests and inherent limits of these projects, we analyzed online data collected between May and August 2022. After presenting the historical context of the alliance between art and brand design, we indicate the field of tensions between artistic practices and contemporary industrial issues. Based on this analysis, we highlight the trivialization of the convergence between art and marketing-communication practices via our research questions: What are the links between artists’ and brands’ strategies? What are the characteristics and socio-economic logics of their collaboration? What value is created (or not) by their collaboration and for whom? We analyze the role of the artist who, through a work that ressembles design practices, operates a punctual mediation between the symbolic universes of the different stakeholders. This dialogue integrates not only aesthetic characteristics, but also project constraints (temporal, budgetary, and material constraints). We indicate, that by collaborating with brands, the artist takes on the function of a designer. A detailed analysis of these collaborations allows us to identify five key trends: 1. A diversification of collaboration strategies between artistic and branding practices. 2. A difficulty of dissociating their positioning. 3. An increase in the frequency of collaboration. 4. Experimentations with more extravagant collaborations. 5. An orientation towards political collaborations.

Design as a profession differs from other communication practices in its sociopsychological and epistemological features. These features need to be considered to understand recent public relations strategies (Taylor & Botan, 2004). We analyze design practices and identify the five essential features which should be taken into account in the management of public relations: 1) the aspect of (necessarily) tolerated randomness; 2) the rejection of explicit methods and theory; 3) emotions as a constant, but implicit, background disposition of practices, and as a finality via the desirability paradigm; 4) a tendency towards auto-centered working perspectives; and 5) a large share of determined logics contrasting with creative sparks. We demonstrate that these features are implicit in the discourses and practices of designers, and we confront these features with our assumption that design practices are grounded in the Dasein (referring to Heidegger, 1963/1927) of designers. These features raise management challenges. The rationalization of design practices and the democratization of design tools make design more easily realizable by non-designers like communication professionals; consequently, other communication professionals are also pushed to consider these features of design practices. In the future, design and communication professionals will collaborate even further. The results of this research represent an ongoing challenge for socioeconomic actors to ensure the effective management of public relations.

Abstract We further exploit the relation between tropical Grassmannians and Gr(4, n) cluster algebras in order to make and refine predictions for the singularities of scattering amplitudes in planar N $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 4 super Yang-Mills theory at higher multiplicity n ≥ 8. As a mathematical foundation that provides access to square-root symbol letters in principle for any n, we analyse infinite mutation sequences in cluster algebras with general coefficients. First specialising our analysis to the eight-particle amplitude, and comparing it with a recent, closely related approach based on scattering diagrams, we find that the only additional letters the latter provides are the two square roots associated to the four-mass box. In combination with a tropical rule for selecting a finite subset of variables of the infinite Gr(4, 9) cluster algebra, we then apply our results to obtain a collection of 3, 078 rational and 2, 349 square-root letters expected to appear in the nine-particle amplitude. In particular these contain the alphabet found in an explicit 2-loop NMHV symbol calculation at this multiplicity.

Abstract We study tropical Grassmanians Tr(k, n) in relation to cluster algebras, and assess their applicability to n-particle amplitudes for n = 7, 8. In N $$ \mathcal{N} $$ = 4 super Yang-Mills theory, we first show that while the totally positive part of Tr(4, 7) may encompass the iterated discontinuity structure of the seven-point Maximally Helicity Violating (MHV) amplitude, it is too small for the Next-to-MHV helicity configuration. Then, using Tr(4, 8) we propose a finite set of 356 cluster A $$ \mathcal{A} $$ -coordinates expected to contain the rational symbol letters of the eight-particle MHV amplitude, and discuss how the remaining square-root letters may be obtained from limits of infinite mutation sequences. Finally, we use a triangulation of the totally positive part of Tr(3, 8) to obtain the associated generalised biadjoint scalar amplitude in a form containing a near-minimal amount of spurious poles.