Modelling the Functionality of the Multimedia Digital Library for Fashion Objects

This paper describes a project of a multimedia digital library for fashion objects. The presented work aims to provide an environment for the National Art Academy students works, showing in front a professional and nonprofessional public the significant values of the fashion domain.

The Measure of All Things: Rethinking Humanism through Art (Group Show)

University of Buffalo New York Department of Art Gallery. The ancient philosopher Protagoras is most famous for his claim: “Of all things the measure is Man” and today, Western societies continue to promote anthropocentrism, an approach to the world that assumes humans are the principal species of the planet. We naturalize a scale of worth, in which beings that most resemble our own forms or benefit us are valued over those that do not. The philosophy of humanism has been trumpeted as the hallmark of a civilized society, founded on the unquestioned value of humankind defining not only our economic, political, religious, and social systems, but also our ethical code. However, artists recently have questioned whether humanism has actually lived up to its promises and made the world a better place for humankind. Are we better off privileging humans above all else or could there be other, preferable, ways to value life? With the continued prevalence of violent crimes, even genocide, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we see the ways in which the discourse of humanism falters, as groups are targeted through rhetoric reducing them to the subhuman, and therefore disposable. But what if the subhuman, nonhuman, and even the non-animal and material, were reconsidered as objects of worth even if far removed from us?

Simplified Chinese lacquer techniques and Nanban style decoration on Luso-Asian objects from the late sixteenth or early seventeenth centuries

The meeting of multiple cultures and their mutual influence during the Portuguese expansion in Asia led to the emergence of different types of fusion styles in objects commissioned by the settlers, merchants, and religious orders present in Portuguese India. The east-Asian lacquer coatings of modestly sized wooden objects of various types dating from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries have been analyzed as part of the research for a doctoral thesis that aims to establish their cultural and geographical attribution within the context of the Getty Conservation Institute’s lacquer research project. Among the objects were three seventeenthcentury lacquered trays from Portuguese museums and private collections that had previously been classified as Japanese Nanban, Chinese or Ryukyuan lacquers or even as Indo-Portuguese artifacts. The materials and techniques that were identified show close similarities with Chinese techniques mentioned in historic accounts — the only existing Ming Chinese Treatise on lacquering Xiushi lu and the eighteenth-century memoirs of the Jesuit priest d’Incarville. These nearly 400-year-old artifacts are among the first lacquered objects commissioned by Europeans and probably the first of Chinese origin. Their detailed technical study contributes to international lacquer research and complements existing knowledge and perceptions of the lacquering processes that were applied in response to an early European demand for exotic items.

Autoethnography : critical appreciation of an emerging art

In this article, the author discusses how she applied autoethnography in a study of the design of hypermedia educational resources and shows how she addressed problematic issues related to autoethnographic legitimacy and representation. The study covered a 6-year period during which the practitioner’s perspective on the internal and external factors influencing the creation of three hypermedia CD-ROMs contributed to an emerging theory of design. The author highlights the interrelationship between perception and reality as vital to qualitative approaches and encourages researchers to investigate their reality more fully by practicing the art of autoethnography.