This chapter explores the intersection of perception, rhythm and temporality within contemporary performance, focusing particularly on the aporetic experience and its systemic potential for transformation. Drawing from Jonas Rutgeerts’ analysis of asynchronicity in movement as articulated by the choreographers Jérôme Bell and Jonathan Burrows, the work delves into how disrupted temporalities—specifically syncopation and the suspension of rhythm—invite new understandings of time and presence. The chapter investigates how these disruptions in movement, sound and narration open a space for diverse interpretations, fostering a pluralistic sense of meaning-making. The collaborative audio work ET-Her serves as a case study to examine how a monologic discourse, accompanied by sound, can shift attention and facilitate active participation. The piece, which was broadcast during Collisions 2021, engaged the audience in a dialogue that invited movement, drawing and writing, transforming a personal monologue into a collective, immersive experience. The investigation extends to how these experiences of absence, dislocation and corporeal transparency mirror larger questions of empathy, participation and embodied listening, drawing inspiration from Lygia Clark’s somaesthetic practices and George Home-Cook’s exploration of audience dynamics in performance. This chapter explores how engaging the senses, encouraging movement, and using non-traditional notation can help break through the sense of isolation often found in aporia. Instead of seeing it as a dead end, the chapter highlights how aporia can open up possibilities for change within artistic practice. It emphasizes the importance of embodied participation and suggests that a more open, collaborative approach to art can blur the lines between art and everyday life.
Mateus M. Tarozo, Arthur A. B. Pessa, Luciano Zunino
et al.
Quantitative analysis of visual arts has recently expanded to encompass a more extensive array of artworks due to the availability of large-scale digitized art collections. Consistent with formal analyses by art historians, many of these studies highlight the significance of encoding spatial structures within artworks to enhance our understanding of visual arts. However, defining universally applicable, interpretable, and sufficiently simple units that capture the essence of paintings and their artistic styles remains challenging. Here we examine ordering patterns in pixel intensities within two-by-two partitions of images from nearly 140,000 paintings created over the past thousand years. These patterns, categorized into eleven types based on arguments of continuity and symmetry, are both universally applicable and detailed enough to correlate with low-level visual features of paintings. We uncover a universal distribution of these patterns, with consistent prevalence within groups, yet modulated across groups by a nontrivial interplay between pattern smoothness and the likelihood of identical pixel intensities. This finding provides a standardized metric for comparing paintings and styles, further establishing a scale to measure deviations from the average prevalence. Our research also shows that these simple patterns carry valuable information for identifying painting styles, though styles generally exhibit considerable variability in the prevalence of ordinal patterns. Moreover, shifts in the prevalence of these patterns reveal a trend in which artworks increasingly diverge from the average incidence over time; however, this evolution is neither smooth nor uniform, with substantial variability in pattern prevalence, particularly after the 1930s.
The conference Art Beyond the Politics: Africa and the ‘Other’ Europe during the Cold War, planned by the Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2022, was intended to explore the often-overlooked cultural exchanges between Central-Eastern Europe and Africa during the Cold War era. Its goal was to address a significant gap in art historical research by examining both actual and imagined connections between these regions, challenging the prevailing narratives that predominantly focus on Western Europe and the United States. Unfortunately, the outbreak of war in Ukraine rapidly disrupted these plans. Global academic networks were suddenly fractured, and scholars found themselves increasingly divided along national lines. Panels, collaborations, and exchanges that had been in preparation were postponed or cancelled, underscoring how geopolitical crises continue to shape the conditions of intellectual work. This special issue of Acta Academiae Artium Vilnensis seeks to advance the conference’s objectives despite these disruptions, providing a platform for scholarly engagement with the intersections of art, politics, and cultural exchange between Africa and the ‘Other’ Europe during the Cold War.
This issue brings together the work of twelve authors, whose papers engage with a wide range of questions, insights, and perspectives. Each contribution offers a unique approach to understanding the cultural, political and artistic intersections between Africa and the Central-Eastern Europe during the Cold War. Collectively, the papers illuminate both historical connections and conceptual frameworks, providing new analyses, critical reflections, and, in some cases, tentative answers to long-standing questions in art history and cultural studies.
Nicolás Gutiérrez-Pérez, Isabel Artal-Sanz, Tomás Abad
et al.
Once he assumed the Spanish throne after his reign in Naples, Charles III began an ambitious project for the elaboration of a set of models of the most important strongholds in Spain, in order to facilitate the comprehensive understanding of these cities and as a means to make proposals for improvement, mainly in their fortifications. The first project was developed in the city of Cadiz –the main commercial port of the Indies and strategic enclave of the country– between 1777 and 1779, under the direction of Francesco Sabatini, Royal architect, who appointed Alfonso Ximénez, military and model maker, to execute it in the city together with a large multidisciplinary team. As a result, they made a model larger than 100 m² of surface at ±1:250 scale, using noble materials, such as different types of wood, ivory, and silver, constituting an exception among the urban models that had been made so far, both for its size and richness, as well as for its level of abstraction. In this article we will approach this singular and unique exercise by contextualizing it in the European panorama of the time, as well as through its analysis and three-dimensional survey, which will offer new perspectives and will allow us to contrast its accuracy and relationship with historical cartographies, in order to finally value and vindicate the exceptional nature of this graphic contribution in the form of a model.
Gravito-inertial asteroseismology saw its birth thanks to high-precision CoRoT and Kepler space photometric light curves. So far, it gave rise to the internal rotation frequency of a few hundred intermediate-mass stars, yet only several tens of these have been weighed, sized, and age-dated with high precision from asteroseismic modelling. We aim to increase the sample of optimal targets for future gravito-inertial asteroseismology by assessing the properties of 15062 newly found Gaia DR3 gravity-mode pulsators. We also wish to investigate if there is any connection between their fundamental parameters and dominant mode on the one hand, and their spectral line broadening measured by Gaia on the other hand. After re-classifying about 22% of the F-type gravity-mode pulsators as B-type according to their effective temperature, we construct histograms of the fundamental parameters and mode properties of the 15062 new Gaia DR3 pulsators. We compare these histograms with those of 63 Kepler bona fide class members. We fit errors-in-variables regression models to couple the effective temperature, luminosity, gravity, and oscillation properties to the two Gaia DR3 parameters capturing spectral line broadening for a fraction of the pulsators. We find that the selected 15062 gravity-mode pulsators have properties fully in line with those of their well-known Kepler analogues, revealing that Gaia has a role to play in asteroseismology. The dominant g-mode frequency is a significant predictor of the spectral line broadening for the class members having this quantity measured. We show that the Gaia vbroad parameter captures the joint effect of time-independent intrinsic and rotational line broadening and time-dependent tangential pulsational broadening. Gaia was not desiged to detect non-radial oscillations, yet its homogeneous data treatment allow us to identify many new gravity-mode pulsators.
Joni Driessen, Joost de Kruijf, Joachim Arts
et al.
A Line Replaceable Unit (LRU) is a collection of connected parts in a system that is replaced when any part of the LRU fails. Companies use LRUs as a mechanism to reduce downtime of systems following a failure. The design of LRUs determines how fast a replacement is performed, so a smart design reduces replacement and downtime cost. A firm must purchase/repair a LRU upon failure, and large LRUs are more expensive to purchase/repair. Hence, a firm seeks to design LRUs such that the average costs per time unit are minimized. We formalize this problem in a new model that captures how parts in a system are connected, and how they are disassembled from the system. Our model optimizes the design of LRUs such that the replacement (and downtime) costs and LRU purchase/repair costs are minimized. We present a set partitioning formulation for which we prove a rare result: the optimal solution is integer, despite a non--integral feasible polyhedron. Secondly, we formulate our problem as a binary linear program. The paper concludes by numerically comparing the computation times of both formulations and illustrates the effects of various parameters on the model's outcome.
The fourth biennial meeting of the conferences organized by IMG-Network was held at the University of L’Aquila, on July 6th and 7th, 2023, under the direction of Stefano Brusaporci. The theme chosen for this edition of the International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Image and Imagination was dedicated to IMAGIN(G) HERITAGE, a context that combines two very broad fields of research –those of Heritage and Images related to it– in the plurality of variations that this relationship can encompass. [read more]
Machine learning (ML) models are nowadays used in complex applications in various domains, such as medicine, bioinformatics, and other sciences. Due to their black box nature, however, it may sometimes be hard to understand and trust the results they provide. This has increased the demand for reliable visualization tools related to enhancing trust in ML models, which has become a prominent topic of research in the visualization community over the past decades. To provide an overview and present the frontiers of current research on the topic, we present a State-of-the-Art Report (STAR) on enhancing trust in ML models with the use of interactive visualization. We define and describe the background of the topic, introduce a categorization for visualization techniques that aim to accomplish this goal, and discuss insights and opportunities for future research directions. Among our contributions is a categorization of trust against different facets of interactive ML, expanded and improved from previous research. Our results are investigated from different analytical perspectives: (a) providing a statistical overview, (b) summarizing key findings, (c) performing topic analyses, and (d) exploring the data sets used in the individual papers, all with the support of an interactive web-based survey browser. We intend this survey to be beneficial for visualization researchers whose interests involve making ML models more trustworthy, as well as researchers and practitioners from other disciplines in their search for effective visualization techniques suitable for solving their tasks with confidence and conveying meaning to their data.
Built ethnological heritage is acquiring an increasingly participatory and open meaning, in agreement with new conceptualizations of cultural heritage and an understanding of tradition as a dynamic process. However, there is a contradiction between the regulatory documents associated with cultural heritage that advocate these principles, and the types of cultural expression or assets that they recognize and aim to safeguard. This article aims to draw attention to these inconsistencies and proposes the replacement of the traditional comprehensive paradigm of vernacular architecture – excessively formalistic and focussed on constructions – with one that is more inclusive and culturally centred, in which expressions of modern industrial culture are recognized and where the subject community has agency and is effectively engaged. Furthermore it is t is argued that an understanding of this new architectural heritage be integrated without delay into the democratic structures of our societies. To this end, a process of change is required similar to that previously experienced by other cultural sectors, for instance, within the art world
Macarena Gaete Cruz, Aksel Ersoy, Darinka Czischke
et al.
With the urgency to adapt cities to social and ecological pressures, co-design has become essential to legitimise transformations by involving citizens and other stakeholders in their design processes. Public spaces remain at the heart of this transformation due to their accessibility for citizens and capacity to accommodate urban functions. However, urban landscape design is a complex task for people who are not used to it. Visual collaborative methods (VCMs) are often used to facilitate expression and ideation early in design, offering an arts-based language in which actors can communicate. We developed a co-design process framework to analyse how VCMs contribute to collaboration in urban processes throughout the three commonly distinguished design phases: conceptual, embodiment, and detail. We participated in a co-design process in the Atacama Desert in Chile, adopting an Action Research through Design (ARtD) in planning, undertaking and reflecting in practice. We found that VCMs are useful to facilitate collaboration throughout the process in design cycles. The variety of VCMs used were able to foster co-design in a rather non-participatory context and influenced the design outcomes. The framework recognized co-design trajectories such as the early fuzziness and the ascendent co-design trajectory throughout the process. The co-design process framework aims for conceptual clarification and may be helpful in planning and undertaking such processes in practice. We conclude that urban co-design should be planned and analysed as a long-term process of interwoven collaborative trajectories.
In 1974, the exhibition Hungría 74 presented 24 artists from Hungary at the Centro de Arte y Communicación (CAYC) in Buenos Aires, Argentina. By the time, artists from both countries suffered political repressions of the dictatorships ruling their countries. Hungría 74 thus was one of the few occasions to interchange ideas. However, the artists from Hungary and Argentina did not first and foremost agree on their political stance. Rather, they were both preoccupied with the dematerialization of art objects. Among Western artist dematerialization was perceived as a rebellious act against the commodification of art objects on the market; it was also embraced as a positive effect of media societies facilitating participation of marginalized groups. However, Argentinian and Hungarian artists transformed the idea to their own means. Experiencing political oppressions, they understood that the loss of material presence was not merely positive. By contrast, it was connected to disappearance, forced exiles or invisible political surveillance. The works of Dóra Maurer, Tamás Hencze, István Haraszty, György Jovánovics presented at Hungría 74 reflect these different notions of dematerialization and offer a critical perspective on the broader political consequences of dematerializations in media societies developing worldwide since the 1970s.
This article considers the visual poetics of the prominent contemporary Russian poet and poetry translator Andrei Sen-Senkov whose work is examined through the Deleuzian lens as a prime example of rhizomatic poetry. Senkov’s poetics is that of the commonplace: working with cultural cliches, and primarily visual material, it embeds very private concerns within a global matrix, with astounding and often theoretically challenging results.
In previous research, we showed that 'texts that tell a story' exhibit a statistical structure that is not Maxwell-Boltzmann but Bose-Einstein. Our explanation is that this is due to the presence of 'indistinguishability' in human language as a result of the same words in different parts of the story being indistinguishable from one another. In the current article, we set out to provide an explanation for this Bose-Einstein statistics. We show that it is the presence of 'meaning' in 'stories' that gives rise to the lack of independence characteristic of Bose-Einstein, and provides conclusive evidence that 'words can be considered the quanta of human language', structurally similar to how 'photons are the quanta of light'. Using several studies on entanglement from our Brussels research group, we also show that it is also the presence of 'meaning' in texts that makes the von Neumann entropy of a total text smaller relative to the entropy of the words composing it. We explain how the new insights in this article fit in with the research domain called 'quantum cognition', where quantum probability models and quantum vector spaces are used in human cognition, and are also relevant to the use of quantum structures in information retrieval and natural language processing, and how they introduce 'quantization' and 'Bose-Einstein statistics' as relevant quantum effects there. Inspired by the conceptuality interpretation of quantum mechanics, and relying on the new insights, we put forward hypotheses about the nature of physical reality. In doing so, we note how this new type of decrease in entropy, and its explanation, may be important for the development of quantum thermodynamics. We likewise note how it can also give rise to an original explanatory picture of the nature of physical reality on the surface of planet Earth, in which human culture emerges as a reinforcing continuation of life.
En el siguiente artículo nos proponemos indagar sobre el modo en que la práctica artística se apropia del dispositivo afiche y pone en juego su dimensión semiótica y relacional, analizando los procedimientos materiales y retóricos de reelaboración y relocalización implicados en la producción. Asimismo, se profundizará en las transformaciones técnicas, sociales y culturales que favorecieron tal desarrollo. Se considerará, para ello, el caso de la pegatina impulsada por el colectivo Ilusión Gráfica en homenaje al artista Juan Carlos Romero, el 4 de noviembre de 2017 en el marco de la 4.o edición del Festival de Gráfica Contemporánea Presión, celebrado en el centro cultural platense Azul un Ala.
Tourism is changing significantly and many of the changes are also affecting the field of landscape enhancement and cultural heritage education. There is a growing interest in sustainable tourism and projects involving local communities in the promotion of the less-know locations. Contemporarily, the digital transformation is deeply involved in these processes, as it broadens the possibility of accessing information that may interest a particular public focused on cultural, sustainable and community-based tourism offers.
This paper refers to a research project aimed to involve schools in a participatory processes of interpretation and enhancement of the everyday landscape inside an area basically unknown by tourists in an evolving touristic city. The first part focuses on the current links between heritage education and tourism education in consideration of the European policies about the landscape. The second part concisely illustrates the research project, and present an overview of the use of ICTs in the participatory processes of interpretation and enhancement of a suburban landscape. The third part describes a specific activity performed during the project and it focuses on the adopted methodology and the touristic interactive applications created. In the last part, the paper discusses, in the light of the project, the relationship between landscape and heritage education, tourism education and some important transformations that are taking place in the field of tourism. Finally, the authors propose some considerations on the field experience described.
In the words of the twentieth-century British mathematician G. H. Hardy, "the human function is to 'discover or observe' mathematics" (1). For centuries, starting from the ancient Greeks, mankind has hunted for beauty and order in arts and in nature. This quest for mathematical beauty has led to the discovery of recurrent mathematical structures, such as the golden ratio, Fibonacci, and Lucas numbers, whose ubiquitous presences have been tantalizing the minds of artists and scientists alike. The captivation for this quest comes with high stakes. In fact, art is the definitive expression of human creativity, and its mathematical understanding would deliver us the keys for decoding human culture and its evolution (2). However, it was not until fairly recently that the scope and the scale of the human quest for mathematical beauty was radically expanded by the simultaneous confluence of three separate innovations. The mass digitization of large art archives, the surge in computational power, and the development of robust statistical methods to capture hidden patterns in vast amounts of data have made it possible to reveal the---otherwise unnoticeable to the human eye---mathematics concealed in large artistic corpora. Starting from its inception, marked by the foundational work by Birkhoff (3), progress in the broad field of computational aesthetics has reached a scale that would have been unimaginable just a decade ago. The recent expansion is not limited to the visual arts (2) but includes music (4), stories (5), language phonology (6), humor in jokes (7), and even equations (8); for a comprehensive review, see ref. 9.
Ao pensar as possibilidades de atuação do professor de música, a educação básica apresenta-se como um caminho de desafios e de amplos horizontes para a formação docente. Diante das novas políticas públicas e diretrizes curriculares, torna-se urgente promover o debate sobre a formação do educador musical no que se refere à sua própria trajetória educativa com a música que, na maioria dos casos, não ocorreu na educação básica. Assim, o artigo tem o objetivo de problematizar resultados de uma pesquisa apontando as possibilidades da abordagem teórico-metodológica (auto)biográfica para a formação de professores de música conscientes das implicações de suas experiências com a música e seu ensino na prática pedagógica no ensino regular.
Steve Harvey, Tony Yu Zhou, E. Connor Kelly
et al.
This article reviews an arts based project that came to completion in Shanghai during September 2017. During this project, a group of people interested in creative arts therapies from the USA and China used physical storytelling (PS) drawn from both Eastern and Western perspectives to investigate the emotional climate of our contemporary world. In this project, participants introduced stories related to their current life experiences and a small group developed dance improvisations as an initial response to the stories. A larger group then used arts and poetry to express their reflections – leading to the development of metaphors that moved beyond the initial story material to express multiple personal and social aspects not apparent in the initial narrative. As this project was collaborative in nature, several common themes and images emerged. Although initial episodes introduced the theme of individual struggle, this expanded into a metaphorical exploration of general human struggle with larger social and natural forces. The final episode included movement, arts and fairy tale images that suggested a developing creative partnership between the East and West.