The Narrative Value of Dance Communication: "habitus", musicality and emotion

The richness of dance comes from the need to work with an individual body. Still, the body of the dancer belongs to plural context, crossed by artistic and social traditions, which locate the artists in a given field. We claim that role conflict is an essential component of the structure of collective artistic creativity. We address the production of discourse in a British dance company, with data that spawns from the ethnography ‘Dance and Cognition’, directed by David Kirsh at the University of California, together with WayneMcGregor-Random Dance. Our Critical Discourse Analysis is based on multiple interviews to the dancers and choreographer. Our findings show how creativity in dance seems to be empirically observable, and thus embodied and distributed shaped by the dance habitus of the particular social context.

Sweat Lodges in Iron Age Iberian Peninsula: New Data, Typologies and Interpretations

Three questions on the study of NO Iberian Peninsula sweat lodges are posed. First, the new sauna of Monte Ornedo (Cantabria), the review of the one of Armea (Ourense), and the Cantabrian pedra formosa type are discussed. Second, the known types of sweat lodges are reconsidered underlining the differences between the Cantabrian and the Douro - Minho groups as these differences contribute to a better assessment of the saunas located out of those territories, such as those of Monte Ornedo or Ulaca. Third, a richer record demands a more specific terminology, a larger use of archaeometric analysis and the application of landscape archaeology or art history methodologies. In this way the range of interpretation of the sweat lodges is opened, as an example an essay is proposed that digs on some already known proposals and suggests that the saunas are material metaphors of wombs whose rationale derives from ideologies and ritual practices of Indo-European tradition.

Of Marx and Makers: an Historical Perspective on Generative Justice

In Marxist frameworks “distributive justice” depends on extracting value through a centralized state. Many new social movements—peer to peer economy, maker activism, community agriculture, queer ecology, etc.—take the opposite approach, keeping value in its unalienated form and allowing it to freely circulate from the bottom up. Unlike Marxism, there is no general theory for bottom-up, unalienated value circulation. This paper examines the concept of “generative justice” through an historical contrast between Marx’s writings and the indigenous cultures that he drew upon. Marx erroneously concluded that while indigenous cultures had unalienated forms of production, only centralized value extraction could allow the productivity needed for a high quality of life. To the contrary, indigenous cultures now provide a robust model for the “gift economy” that underpins open source technological production, agroecology, and restorative approaches to civil rights. Expanding Marx’s concept of unalienated labor value to include unalienated ecological (nonhuman) value, as well as the domain of freedom in speech, sexual orientation, spirituality and other forms of “expressive” value, we arrive at an historically informed perspective for generative justice. 

Evaluating historic graffiti based on cultural significance and definitions of art.

Many examples of historic graffiti have been shown to be worthy of attention and conservation. The examples discussed in this article have been selected for their previous academic study, enabling rational assessment. This work does not suggest that only those examples of historic graffiti that have been subject to academic investigation can be evaluated and classified. This article, the result of a collaboration between two individuals with complementary interests in building conservation and contextual studies in art and design, brings together formal techniques used in the assessment of cultural significance in traditional architectural conservation and established theories in the evaluation of art. It is the purpose of this work to help those who are attempting to evaluate the merit of graffiti to do so. The current Scottish system that assesses cultural significance may be incomplete in its evaluation of graffiti. This necessitates a supplementary investigation of the artistic characteristics and merit of graffiti. Almost all graffiti could be said to be 'art', using established definitions, but not 'good' art. This evaluation may only be undertaken by experts, as with other aspects of identification of cultural significance within the built environment.

KE & Science Europe briefing paper: Funding Research Data Management and related infrastructures

Responsible Research Data Management (RDM) is a pillar of quality research. In practice good RDM requires the support of a well-functioning Research Data Infrastructure (RDI). One of the challenges the research community is facing is how to fund the management of research data and the required infrastructure. Knowledge Exchange and Science Europe have both defined activities to explore how RDM/RDI are, or can be, funded. Independently they each planned to survey users and providers of data services and on becoming aware of the similar objectives and approaches, the Science Europe Working Group on Research Data and the Knowledge Exchange Research Data expert group joined forces and devised a joint activity to to inform the discussion on the funding of RDM/RDI in Europe.

Sorghum Crop Modeling and Its Utility in Agronomy and Breeding

Crop models are simplified mathematical representations of the interacting biological and environmental components of the dynamic soil–plant–environment system. Sorghum crop modeling has evolved in parallel with crop modeling capability in general, since its origins in the 1960s and 1970s. Here we briefly review the trajectory in sorghum crop modeling leading to the development of advanced models. We then (i) overview the structure and function of the sorghum model in the Agricultural Production System sIMulator (APSIM) to exemplify advanced modeling concepts that suit both agronomic and breeding applications, (ii) review an example of use of sorghum modeling in supporting agronomic management decisions, (iii) review an example of the use of sorghum modeling in plant breeding, and (iv) consider implications for future roles of sorghum crop modeling. Modeling and simulation provide an avenue to explore consequences of crop management decision options in situations confronted with risks associated with seasonal climate uncertainties. Here we consider the possibility of manipulating planting configuration and density in sorghum as a means to manipulate the productivity–risk trade-off. A simulation analysis of decision options is presented and avenues for its use with decision-makers discussed. Modeling and simulation also provide opportunities to improve breeding efficiency by either dissecting complex traits to more amenable targets for genetics and breeding, or by trait evaluation via phenotypic prediction in target production regions to help prioritize effort and assess breeding strategies. Here we consider studies on the stay-green trait in sorghum, which confers yield advantage in water-limited situations, to exemplify both aspects. The possible future roles of sorghum modeling in agronomy and breeding are discussed as are opportunities related to their synergistic interaction. The potential to add significant value to the revolution in plant breeding associated with genomic technologies is identified as the new modeling frontier.

Efficient Image and Video Representations for Retrieval

Image (Video) retrieval is an interesting problem of retrieving images (videos) similar to the query. Images (Videos) are represented in an input (feature) space and similar images (videos) are obtained by finding nearest neighbors in the input representation space. Numerous input representations both in real valued and binary space have been proposed for conducting faster retrieval. In this thesis, we present techniques that obtain improved input representations for retrieval in both supervised and unsupervised settings for images and videos. Supervised retrieval is a well known problem of retrieving same class images of the query. We address the practical aspects of achieving faster retrieval with binary codes as input representations for the supervised setting in the first part, where binary codes are used as addresses into hash tables. In practice, using binary codes as addresses does not guarantee fast retrieval, as similar images are not mapped to the same binary code (address). We address this problem by presenting an efficient supervised hashing (binary encoding) method that aims to explicitly map all the images of the same class ideally to a unique binary code. We refer to the binary codes of the images as `Semantic Binary Codes' and the unique code for all same class images as `Class Binary Code'. We also propose a new class­ based Hamming metric that dramatically reduces the retrieval times for larger databases, where only hamming distance is computed to the class binary codes. We also propose a Deep semantic binary code model, by replacing the output layer of a popular convolutional Neural Network (AlexNet) with the class binary codes and show that the hashing functions learned in this way outperforms the state­ of ­the art, and at the same time provide fast retrieval times. In the second part, we also address the problem of supervised retrieval by taking into account the relationship between classes. For a given query image, we want to retrieve images that preserve the relative order i.e. we want to retrieve all same class images first and then, the related classes images before different class images. We learn such relationship aware binary codes by minimizing the similarity between inner product of the binary codes and the similarity between the classes. We calculate the similarity between classes using output embedding vectors, which are vector representations of classes. Our method deviates from the other supervised binary encoding schemes as it is the first to use output embeddings for learning hashing functions. We also introduce new performance metrics that take into account the related class retrieval results and show significant gains over the state­ of­ the art. High Dimensional descriptors like Fisher Vectors or Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptors have shown to improve the performance of many computer vision applications including retrieval. In the third part, we will discuss an unsupervised technique for compressing high dimensional vectors into high dimensional binary codes, to reduce storage complexity. In this approach, we deviate from adopting traditional hyperplane hashing functions and instead learn hyperspherical hashing functions. The proposed method overcomes the computational challenges of directly applying the spherical hashing algorithm that is intractable for compressing high dimensional vectors. A practical hierarchical model that utilizes divide and conquer techniques using the Random Select and Adjust (RSA) procedure to compress such high dimensional vectors is presented. We show that our proposed high dimensional binary codes outperform the binary codes obtained using traditional hyperplane methods for higher compression ratios. In the last part of the thesis, we propose a retrieval based solution to the Zero shot event classification problem - a setting where no training videos are available for the event. To do this, we learn a generic set of concept detectors and represent both videos and query events in the concept space. We then compute similarity between the query event and the video in the concept space and videos similar to the query event are classified as the videos belonging to the event. We show that we significantly boost the performance using concept features from other modalities.

Strzygowski and his theory of early Christian art ...

From the Harvard theological review, v. III, July, 1910.

Phronèsis et prudence : esquisse de la science pratique dans les textes de la tradition classique

Ce mémoire porte sur les transformations du concept de prudence, de l’Antiquité grecque au XVIIe siècle. Il souligne notamment le lien qui unit les manières d’être et l’art, tant chez les Grecs qu’au début de la modernité. La phronèsis se définissait tout d’abord en relation aux autres manières de faire, dont la technè fait partie. Si Platon et Aristote les distinguent, les auteurs de la modernité assimileront ces deux manières de faire. De plus, on peut voir dans la forme du langage employé pour écrire sur la prudence un reflet de la vertu antique. Il s’agit de donner, tant par le style que par le propos, un exemple de prudence. Cette vertu, qui est d’ailleurs la première des vertus cardinales, est donc fondamentale pour comprendre le rapport entre l’éthique et l’art, de l’Antiquité au début de la modernité. Elle annonce aussi les débuts de l’esthétique moderne, en ce qu’elle donne des règles à suivre pour arriver à ses fins, qu’il s’agisse de n’importe quelle manière de faire.

Phronèsis et prudence : esquisse de la science pratique dans les textes de la tradition classique

Ce mémoire porte sur les transformations du concept de prudence, de l’Antiquité grecque au XVIIe siècle. Il souligne notamment le lien qui unit les manières d’être et l’art, tant chez les Grecs qu’au début de la modernité. La phronèsis se définissait tout d’abord en relation aux autres manières de faire, dont la technè fait partie. Si Platon et Aristote les distinguent, les auteurs de la modernité assimileront ces deux manières de faire. De plus, on peut voir dans la forme du langage employé pour écrire sur la prudence un reflet de la vertu antique. Il s’agit de donner, tant par le style que par le propos, un exemple de prudence. Cette vertu, qui est d’ailleurs la première des vertus cardinales, est donc fondamentale pour comprendre le rapport entre l’éthique et l’art, de l’Antiquité au début de la modernité. Elle annonce aussi les débuts de l’esthétique moderne, en ce qu’elle donne des règles à suivre pour arriver à ses fins, qu’il s’agisse de n’importe quelle manière de faire.

Tensions, transisitions and triumphs : examining the transitional experience of fashion students between school and university

Joining any new community involves transition and adaptation. Just as we learn to adapt to different cultures when we choose to live abroad, so students learn the language and culture of an academic community in order to succeed within that environment. At the same time however, students bring with them individual learning styles and expectations, influenced by their prior experiences of learning and of life more generally. Some have excelled at school; others have come to fashion seeking something in which to excel for the first time. Commencing a degree in fashion design brings students into contact with peers and lecturers who share their passion, providing them with a community of practice which can be both supportive and at the same time intimidating.----- In Queensland where university level study in fashion is such a new phenomenon, few applicants have any depth of training in design when they apply to study fashion. Unlike disciplines such as Dance or Visual Art, where lecturers can expect a good level of skill upon entry to a degree program, we have to look for the potential evidenced in an applicant’s portfolio, much of which is untutored work that they have generated themselves in preparation for application. This means that many first year fashion students at QUT whilst very passionate about the idea of fashion design are often very naïve about the practice of fashion design, with limited knowledge of the history or cultural context of fashion and few of the technical skills needed to translate their ideas into three dimensional products.----- For teachers engaging with first year students in the design studios, it is critical to be cognizant of this mix of different experiences, expectations and emotions in order to design curricula and assessment that stretch and engage students without unduly increasing their sense of frustration and anxiety. This paper examines a first year project designed to provide an introduction to design process and to learning within a creative discipline. The lessons learnt provide a valuable and transferable resource for lecturers in a variety of art and design disciplines.

Concerning the house museum and the picturesque landscape in the work of Sir John Soane : with raw hints for post-heritage museum space

The picturesque aesthetic in the work of Sir John Soane, architect and collector, resonates in the major work of his very personal practice – the development of his house museum, now the Soane Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. Soane was actively involved with the debates, practices and proponents of picturesque and classical practices in architecture and landscape and his lectures reveal these influences in the making of The Soane, which was built to contain and present diverse collections of classical and contemporary art and architecture alongside scavenged curiosities. The Soane Museum has been described as a picturesque landscape, where a pictorial style, together with a carefully defined itinerary, has resulted in the ‘apotheosis of the Picturesque interior’. Soane also experimented with making mock ruinscapes within gardens, which led him to construct faux architectures alluding to archaeological practices based upon the ruin and the fragment. These ideas framed the making of interior landscapes expressed through spatial juxtapositions of room and corridor furnished with the collected object that characterise The Soane Museum. This paper is a personal journey through the Museum which describes and then reviews aspects of Soane’s work in the context of contemporary theories on ‘new’ museology. It describes the underpinning picturesque practices that Soane employed to exceed the boundaries between interior and exterior landscapes and the collection. It then applies particular picturesque principles drawn from visiting The Soane to a speculative project for a house/landscape museum for the Oratunga historic property in outback South Australia, where the often, normalising effects of conservation practices are reviewed using minimal architectural intervention through a celebration of ruinous states.

Artists, audience and participations

We spent a fare amount of time thinking and debating where to draw the line between what is and what is not single-screen-based interactive media. This really is a tricky category. I would like to use this opportunity to raise certain issues about this very new category introduced this year to ifva. First of all, what do we mean by "interactive" media? If we conceptually or philosophically try to describe it, almost every artifact (not only those who are intended as a piece of art) can be perceived as "interactive" media as soon as one sees/ recognises it and begins interacting with it physically and/or mentally. What about when we limit this to computer related media? This certainly limits the scope, but well, it is becoming increasinly difficult to find art and design that are considered innovative without the use of computer. the term "single-screen" certainly makes it more specific, but as we saw from a range of works submitted to this category, people do come up with various interpretations to it. Some simply submitted work that can be viewed with computer screen, which didn't allow much user participation, while others provided various degrees of user/audience participation. What does "singel-screen-based interactive media" mean?