Bishara Atiyeh, MD, Paul Beaineh, MD, Edwin Chrabieh, MD
et al.
Background:. Neuroaesthetics has made meaningful progress in unraveling the neurological mechanisms involved in the perception of various arts, landscapes, and architecture. Only recently, neural processes of artistic valuation and judgments have been investigated regarding the aesthetics of the human body. The current narrative review intended to summarize the recent advances made in this field.
Methods:. A literature review of PubMed, MEDLINE, Embase, PsycInfo, and Web of Science databases was conducted. Cerebral areas involved in aesthetic experience and judgment are reviewed, and the biological neural basis of judgment processes are analyzed in the multidimensional preference space with specific attention to visual perception and beauty appraisal of the human body.
Results:. Twenty-nine experimental studies specifically related to the neurobiological basis of aesthetic appraisal and judgments regarding the human face and body were identified.
Conclusions:. Aesthetic judgment emerges from the interaction among emotion–valuation, sensory–motor, and meaning–knowledge processes. There is objective evidence that human body beauty perception is shaped by natural selection and activates brain regions distinct from those activated by visual arts. It may still be early to grasp all the implications of neuroaesthetics, and much research is still needed. However, progress in the field holds promise for generating a more holistic understanding that will most probably have an impact on aesthetic interventions, which must aim to reproduce the characteristics of ideal mates. It also holds promise for possibly quantifying the outcomes of aesthetic interventions objectively.
O artigo analisa textos e obras de arte de Nuno Ramos, com o objetivo de apontar uma inflexão no modo de pensar o Brasil e de relacionar estética e política. Para Nuno Ramos, o Brasil teria passado de um gerúndio esperançoso em que estaria se fazendo para uma repetição do mesmo na violência reiterada de sua história, frustrando uma ideia de formação. De ensaio geral aberto, como na imagem da fita de Moebius, teríamos passado ao enclausuramento fechado, como na imagem de um poço. No entanto, o artigo aponta que, se essa passagem depende da constatação de que a formação do Brasil já se completou, há um precedente disso na crítica literária de Antonio Candido, que pensa os impasses do país cifrados em sua formação, mais do que resolvidos por ela no futuro. Nuno Ramos responde com o que chamei de “gerúndio corajoso” ao fim do “gerúndio esperançoso”, através de uma politização de sua poética, evidente na Pandemia de Covid-19.
Introduction: The visual elements and the writing system in the stamps of the Pahlavi dynasty reflect cultural-ideological symbols and signal the political, economic, and social relations of that era. This study aims to analyze the writing system (language-structure) in the stamps of the Pahlavi period and to evaluate the factors that influence it. In line with this aim, the study seeks to answer the following questions: «Into how many categories can the writing system of the stamps of Pahlavi I and Pahlavi II be divided? What structural features of the writing system (script and typography) appear in Pahlavi stamps?»Research Method: This study employs a descriptive–analytical approach, focusing on the structural system of writing in Pahlavi-era stamps. The sample is purposefully and selectively chosen, consisting of 5 stamps from Pahlavi I and 21 stamps from Pahlavi II. Data were collected from library resources and a targeted selection of stamps from this period.Findings: In these stamps, Nastaʿlīq, Shikasta Nastaʿlīq, Iranian Naskh, Thuluth, and Kufic scripts were used for Persian phrases, while Times and Helvetica fonts were applied for Latin inscriptions. In some cases, Latin letters and phrases were placed before Persian text, particularly in international contexts, where the main structural diversity is expressed through the use of Latin fonts. In the Pahlavi II period, asymmetrical composition in the structure of writing dominated over symmetrical layouts; consequently, in some stamps, the imbalance between visual and textual elements disrupted the relationship of positive and negative space, equilibrium, and smooth eye movement.Conclusion: Stamps of the Pahlavi I period were designed based on simple aesthetic principles and showed little structural variety in writing design. By contrast, in the Pahlavi II period, the design of writing received particular attention, and the visual qualities of script were enhanced. The full utilization of the stamp space by writing signaled the recognition of writing as a visual element, a feature observable in part of the corpus of this period. Furthermore, the use of Iranian scripts such as Shikasta Nastaʿlīq was a distinctive feature of stamp design in this era. These developments produced diverse and prominent writing styles in terms of structure, letter usage, and grid-based layout in stamp design.
Herliyana Rosalinda, Nurulfatmi Amzy, Edo Galasro Limbong
This study examines the diverse visualizations of the Kalpataru motif in ancient Mataram temples. As significant religious symbols, these temples embodied societal values and were constructed with meticulous attention to materials, architecture, and aesthetics. By chronologically comparing the Kalpataru motif in Hindu and Buddhist temples, this research explores its evolving meaning and form. The Kalpataru, representing purity and sacredness in Hindu-Buddhist thought, appears prominently in temples such as Borobudur, Mendut, Pawon, Prambanan, and Sojiwan. While its origins lie in Buddhist symbolism, associated with Siddhartha Gautama's enlightenment, the motif underwent significant transformation in Hindu temples, particularly Prambanan, where it became more decorative and incorporated animal figures. This study employs a historical methodology, encompassing heuristic, critical, interpretive, and historiographical stages, to analyze these changes and their implications for understanding ancient Mataram culture.
History (General) and history of Europe, History of Asia
Paola Mattioli's work in fashion photography is characterized by keywords such as "portrait," "canon," and "representation of women." Through collaborations with prominent magazines like "Amica" and the feminist publication "Grattacielo: Women's Eyes on the World," Mattioli establishes herself as a key figure in feminist photographic practices. Transitioning from socio-cultural reflections of the late '60s, she began publishing fashion spreads in Italian magazines in the '80s, continuing into the 2000s, culminating in collaborations with Christian Dior. Mattioli's fashion photography during the 1981-1991 period encompasses two types of projects: collaborations with magazines and direct partnerships with brands like Enrica Massei and Nanni Strada. She delineates two approaches to her fashion photography: one focused on portraiture and the other on scene creation, both aimed at redefining cultural models, particularly those of femininity. A critical exploration of fashion photography requires moving beyond viewing fashion as mere clothing, as it embodies attitudes, linguistic forms, and lifestyle choices. Fashion serves as an identity vehicle, contributing to identity formation, as discussed by Lars Svendsen and Roland Barthes. Mattioli engages in sociological and aesthetic perspectives, particularly addressing the concept of identity in relation to subjectivity. Operating in a predominantly male-dominated context in fashion photography, Mattioli challenges the male gaze and redefines female representation through her lens. Her work intersects with feminist discourse, in line with Eugenia Paulicelli's view that fashion provides a vital space for identity construction and resistance against stereotypical images. She consciously subverts traditional fashion poses, offering new perspectives rooted in feminist concepts.
Alex Gomez-Villa, Kai Wang, Alejandro C. Parraga
et al.
Visual illusions in humans arise when interpreting out-of-distribution stimuli: if the observer is adapted to certain statistics, perception of outliers deviates from reality. Recent studies have shown that artificial neural networks (ANNs) can also be deceived by visual illusions. This revelation raises profound questions about the nature of visual information. Why are two independent systems, both human brains and ANNs, susceptible to the same illusions? Should any ANN be capable of perceiving visual illusions? Are these perceptions a feature or a flaw? In this work, we study how visual illusions are encoded in diffusion models. Remarkably, we show that they present human-like brightness/color shifts in their latent space. We use this fact to demonstrate that diffusion models can predict visual illusions. Furthermore, we also show how to generate new unseen visual illusions in realistic images using text-to-image diffusion models. We validate this ability through psychophysical experiments that show how our model-generated illusions also fool humans.
After the recent ground-breaking advances in protein structure prediction, one of the remaining challenges in protein machine learning is to reliably predict distributions of structural states. Parametric models of fluctuations are difficult to fit due to complex covariance structures between degrees of freedom in the protein chain, often causing models to either violate local or global structural constraints. In this paper, we present a new strategy for modelling protein densities in internal coordinates, which uses constraints in 3D space to induce covariance structure between the internal degrees of freedom. We illustrate the potential of the procedure by constructing a variational autoencoder with full covariance output induced by the constraints implied by the conditional mean in 3D, and demonstrate that our approach makes it possible to scale density models of internal coordinates to full protein backbones in two settings: 1) a unimodal setting for proteins exhibiting small fluctuations and limited amounts of available data, and 2) a multimodal setting for larger conformational changes in a high data regime.
Mingchen Zhuge, Haozhe Liu, Francesco Faccio
et al.
Both Minsky's "society of mind" and Schmidhuber's "learning to think" inspire diverse societies of large multimodal neural networks (NNs) that solve problems by interviewing each other in a "mindstorm." Recent implementations of NN-based societies of minds consist of large language models (LLMs) and other NN-based experts communicating through a natural language interface. In doing so, they overcome the limitations of single LLMs, improving multimodal zero-shot reasoning. In these natural language-based societies of mind (NLSOMs), new agents -- all communicating through the same universal symbolic language -- are easily added in a modular fashion. To demonstrate the power of NLSOMs, we assemble and experiment with several of them (having up to 129 members), leveraging mindstorms in them to solve some practical AI tasks: visual question answering, image captioning, text-to-image synthesis, 3D generation, egocentric retrieval, embodied AI, and general language-based task solving. We view this as a starting point towards much larger NLSOMs with billions of agents-some of which may be humans. And with this emergence of great societies of heterogeneous minds, many new research questions have suddenly become paramount to the future of artificial intelligence. What should be the social structure of an NLSOM? What would be the (dis)advantages of having a monarchical rather than a democratic structure? How can principles of NN economies be used to maximize the total reward of a reinforcement learning NLSOM? In this work, we identify, discuss, and try to answer some of these questions.
Book review: Daniel Ion Sofron, Perspectivă artistică. O abordare practică / Perspective in Art. A Practical Approach, PIM Publishing House, Iași, 2022, 2 volumes, 240 pages.
Hora de Aventura, Twin Peaks: The Return y un detector de neutrinos en Japón, el Super-Kamiokande, funcionan como sostén para la hipótesis poética que moviliza este texto: donde hay nada, hay fantasmas. Los argumentos se hacen más tangibles al sospechar que no existe la nada por sí misma, prestando atención y desentramando aquellas condiciones, mecanismos, estrategias y sistemas que generan un efecto de nada. Por último, pone en acción un ejercicio historiográfico que mira hacia los silencios de los relatos históricos canónicos y los documentos para habilitar, allí, la invocación de fantasmas queer.
Idealists believe that understanding the filmic world and the world around it depends on the perception and the ways in which the mind of the audience work. Realists, in contrast, see re-creation and representation as a reflection of an external, undistorted reality. The views of Andre Bazin, the leader of the realist movement, have always been met with skepticism and opposition, and the idealists have taken advantage of this movement to explain different views on cinematic representations. In phenomenological theory in which Husserl plays a pivotal role, understanding representation is an intuitive and direct process. Phenomenologists emphasize subjectivity, the power of imagination in the representational experience, and the role that consciousness and awareness play in the independent existence of objects, whether imaginary or real. Their main emphasis is on analyzing the performance of the imaginative force, the emotional response, and the mental representation of the spectator's presence in the film's cosmos. Vivian Sobchack the phenomenologist of the present age, goes beyond this view and believes that films, like humans, can comprehend mental processes such as perception and have agential activity; therefore, they should be analyzed with these characteristics in mind. The present study adopts a phenomenological approach with the aim of revealing the viewer's perception of the cinematic representational experience. Hence, the research problem is to analyze and understand how the spectator communicates with the phenomenon of film and cinema. The research method is qualitative-interpretive.
Michelle Bogre: Documentary Photography Reconsidered: History, Theory and Practice, London and New York: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing, Plc, 2019, 264 pages.
Journalism. The periodical press, etc., Communication. Mass media
O artigo aproxima duas produções de campos diferentes, o livro O pequeno príncipe, de Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, e a obra de Marcel Duchamp, em especial Com a minha língua na minha bochecha, para tratá-las como pontas do mesmo iceberg, a saber a mudança do regime sígnico paradigmático histórico referenciado no símbolo para o pós-histórico, que tem como referência o índice, segundo as definições da semiótica de C.S. Peirce; assim como a influência das imagens técnicas neste processo, com base na análise de Vilém Flusser que incide sobre a dinâmica cultural do Ocidente e a retomada da hegemonia da imaginação inerente ao domínio da lógica produtora de sentido por aparelhos.
We propose to interpret machine learning functions as physical observables, opening up the possibility to apply "standard" statistical-mechanical methods to outputs from neural networks. This includes histogram reweighting and finite-size scaling, to analyse phase transitions quantitatively. In addition we incorporate predictive functions as conjugate variables coupled to an external field within the Hamiltonian of a system, allowing to induce order-disorder phase transitions in a novel manner. A noteworthy feature of this approach is that no knowledge of the symmetries in the Hamiltonian is required.
Peer assessment is a popular technique for a more fine-grained evaluation of individual students in group projects. Its effect on the evaluation is well studied. However, its effects on the learning abilities of students are often overlooked. In this paper, we explore self-evaluation, motivation, and study time of students in relation to peer assessment, as part of an ongoing project at our local Faculty of Engineering Technology. The aggregated measurements of two years so far show that: (1) students get much better at evaluating their own project on some, but not all, of the evaluation criteria after a peer assessment session, (2) students report in a follow-up survey that they are more motivated to work on their project, and (3) the relation between motivation and time spent on the project increases. These results suggest that peer grading could have positive long-term effects on the reflective, and therefore lifelong learning, skills of students. A better understanding of the evaluation criteria results in more accurate self and peer grades, emphasizing the importance of properly defining and communicating these criteria throughout the semester.
Shortly after the bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, the American government impressed upon the media industry and corporate advertising the cooperative need to boost morale and enlist nationalist support for the war effort. Public opinion was shaped through an active campaign of visual propaganda and media censorship in which the social trauma of war, in particular, representations of death and destructive disorder, was erased from official news reports. However, avant-garde art and writing in View magazine during the early 1940s can be analyzed as a radical form of counter-discourse that challenged the media’s representation of the war. View had been founded in 1940 by the poet Charles Henri Ford, who vowed to create a magazine devoted to what he called the “new journalism”, a form of international reporting by poets and visual artists that would provide visionary critical insight on the forthcoming political catastrophe in Europe. Lacking their own publishing forum, a number of Surrealist émigrés and American adherents of Surrealism gravitated towards View. As this article will examine, Surrealist imagery and prose in View evoked a profound sense of the bodily trauma and physical destruction omitted from mass media, subverting the government’s highly sanitized and ideologically manipulated representations of World War II.
o objetivo deste trabalho é estabelecer algumas premissas para o entendimento do documentário e sua relação com a História e a memória, elegendo o documentário histórico como objeto de análise, por esse apresentar aproximações com o discurso histórico. Ter o documentário como lugar e mídia “de memória” nos leva a problematizá-lo como objeto de instrumentalizações (ou articulações) de memórias e identidades destinadas a colocar em prática um discurso sobre o passado, convincente e comovente.
This notebook paper presents an overview and comparative analysis of our systems designed for the following two tasks in Visual Domain Adaptation Challenge (VisDA-2019): multi-source domain adaptation and semi-supervised domain adaptation. Multi-Source Domain Adaptation: We investigate both pixel-level and feature-level adaptation for multi-source domain adaptation task, i.e., directly hallucinating labeled target sample via CycleGAN and learning domain-invariant feature representations through self-learning. Moreover, the mechanism of fusing features from different backbones is further studied to facilitate the learning of domain-invariant classifiers. Source code and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/Panda-Peter/visda2019-multisource}. Semi-Supervised Domain Adaptation: For this task, we adopt a standard self-learning framework to construct a classifier based on the labeled source and target data, and generate the pseudo labels for unlabeled target data. These target data with pseudo labels are then exploited to re-training the classifier in a following iteration. Furthermore, a prototype-based classification module is additionally utilized to strengthen the predictions. Source code and pre-trained models are available at \url{https://github.com/Panda-Peter/visda2019-semisupervised}.