Looking behaviour and preference for artworks: The role of emotional valence and location

The position of an item influences its evaluation, with research consistently finding that items occupying central locations are preferred and have a higher subjective value. The current study investigated whether this centre-stage effect (CSE) is a result of bottom-up gaze allocation to the central item, and whether it is affected by item valence. Participants (n=50) were presented with three images of artistic paintings in a row and asked to choose the image they preferred. Eye movements were recorded for a subset of participants (n=22). On each trial the three artworks were either similar but different, or were identical and with positive valence, or were identical and with negative valence. The results showed a centre-stage effect, with artworks in the centre of the row preferred, but only when they were identical and of positive valence. Significantly greater gaze allocation to the central and left artwork was not mirrored by equivalent increases in preference choices. Regression analyses showed that when the artworks were positive and identical the participants’ last fixation predicted preference for the central art-work, whereas the fixation duration predicted preference if the images were different. Overall the result showed that item valence, rather than level of gaze allocation, influences the CSE, which is incompatible with the bottom-up gaze explanation. We propose that the centre stage heuristic, which specifies that the best items are in the middle, is able to explain these findings and the centre-stage effect.

(Un)covering ground: dance, space and mobility

Ballet and modern dance teachers often exhort students to ‘travel across the floor’ and ‘cover ground’. These instructions invoke metaphors of travel and mobility that capture an array of common assumptions about dance, space and movement. This essay examines the spatial and mobility discourses that these instructions simultaneously build upon and produce while exploring the seductiveness of technique’s promise of mastering space through the moving body. Threading auto-ethnography with critical theory and moving across different disciplinary fields and writing styles, I explore the ways in which these instructions leak outside the perimeter of the dance studio to feed into the narrative of a dancer’s extended physical, geographical and social mobility. Analysing the mobility and travel discourses of my dance training vis-à-vis poststructuralist theorizations of the subaltern power of the nomad and theories of space and place, I argue that this narrative becomes complicit in the construction of an idealized notion of artistic nomadism, which, in turn, aligns with current neoliberal logics organised around the production of mobile subjects.

The Creative Unconscious and the Pictorial Sign

Within The Creative Unconscious and Pictorial Sign I explore the dialogue that exists between social language and personal expression to understand how creativity is mediated. I consider how the involuntary inventiveness of artistic creativity and the structuring function of language come to negotiate what artists can experience and represent. My Doctoral practice attempts to question the influence of orthodox postmodernist views and allow sensual and direct experiences to be located within improvisation and spontaneous approaches to image making. I ask if it is possible for a humanistic and psychological interpretation of creativity to move beyond the copy and quotation that some postmodern theories of simulation and the hyperreal advance; but to retain the communicative function of visual expression and the model of a social form of signification instead of naïvely promoting unintelligible and personal languages.

A Framework for Security Transparency in Cloud Computing

Individuals and corporate users are persistently considering cloud adoption due to its significant benefits compared to traditional computing environments. The data and applications in the cloud are stored in an environment that is separated, managed and maintained externally to the organisation. Therefore, it is essential for cloud providers to demonstrate and implement adequate security practices to protect the data and processes put under their stewardship. Security transparency in the cloud is likely to become the core theme that underpins the systematic disclosure of security designs and practices that enhance customer confidence in using cloud service and deployment models. In this paper, we present a framework that enables a detailed analysis of security transparency for cloud based systems. In particular, we consider security transparency from three different levels of abstraction, i.e., conceptual, organisation and technical levels, and identify the relevant concepts within these levels. This allows us to provide an elaboration of the essential concepts at the core of transparency and analyse the means for implementing them from a technical perspective. Finally, an example from a real world migration context is given to provide a solid discussion on the applicability of the proposed framework.