Mobilizing The Collective: Helhesten And The Danish Avant-Garde, 1934-1946

This dissertation examines the avant-garde Danish artists\u27 collective Helhesten (The Hell-Horse), which was active from 1941 to 1944 in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen and undertook cultural resistance during the war. The main claim of this study is that Helhesten was an original and fully established avant-garde before the artists formed the more internationally focused Cobra group, and that the collective\u27s development of sophisticated socio-political engagement and new kinds of countercultural strategies prefigured those of postwar art groups such as Fluxus and the Situationist International. The group and its eponymous journal involved the Danish modernists Asger Jorn, Ejler Bille, Henry Heerup, Egill Jacobsen, and Carl-Henning Pedersen, as well as anthropologists, archeologists, psychologists, and scientists. Helhesten\u27s twelve issues from April 1941 to November 1944 featured essays on art theory, non-Western artifacts, literature, poetry, film, architecture, and photography, together with exhibition reviews and profiles of contemporary Danish artists. The group appropriated certain stylistic traits from German Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism. Yet rather than partaking in a retrograde modernist nostalgia, the Helhesten artists radically reformulated the tactics of these movements into what they called a living art, or new realism, which emphasized subjectivity, indeterminacy, and a fundamental anti-essentialism that rejected the Nazi obsession with purity as much as it did the prescriptive manifestos of the historical avant-gardes. What emerged was purposefully unskilled, brightly colored painterly abstraction and naïve styles that were humorous and disarmingly child-like on the surface but trenchant and sophisticated underneath. Helhesten consciously challenged Nazi racist propaganda and its conception of Volk, caricatured the idealized Aryan body, defied Hitler\u27s attempts to assert a common Nordic heritage, and critiqued the National Socialist obsession with historical continuity and order. Moreover, as a fundamental link between pre- and postwar vanguard art movements, Helhesten\u27s living aesthetic celebrated quotidian existence through play, disruption, and heightened awareness in a manner that presaged the postwar avant-garde\u27s engagement with everyday life

Perception and recognition of computer-enhanced facial attributes and abstracted prototypes

The influence of the human facial image was surveyed and the nature of its many interpretations were examined. The role of distinctiveness was considered particularly relevant as it accounted for many of the impressions of character and identity ascribed to individuals. The notion of structural differences with respect to some selective essence of normality is especially important as it allows a wide range of complex facial types to be considered and understood in an objective manner. A software tool was developed which permitted the manipulation of facial images. Quantitative distortions of digital images were examined using perceptual and recognition memory paradigms. Seven experiments investigated the role of distinctiveness in memory for faces using synthesised caricatures. The results showed that caricatures, both photographic and line-drawing, improved recognition speed and accuracy, indicating that both veridical and distinctiveness information are coded for familiar faces in long-term memory. The impact of feature metrics on perceptual estimates of facial age was examined using 'age-caricatured' images and were found to be in relative accordance with the 'intended' computed age. Further modifying the semantics permitted the differences between individual faces to be visualised in terms of facial structure and skin texture patterns. Transformations of identity between two, or more, faces established the necessary matrices which can offer an understanding of facial expression in a categorical manner and the inherent interactions. A procedural extension allowed generation of composite images in which all features are perfectly aligned. Prototypical facial types specified in this manner enabled high-level manipulations to be made of gender and attractiveness; two experiments corroborated previously speculative material and thus gave credence to the prototype model. In summary, psychological assessment of computer-manipulated facial images demonstrated the validity of the objective techniques and highlighted particular parameters which contribute to our perception and recognition of the individual and of underlying facial types

The Primitivist Imaginary in Iberian and Transatlantic Modernisms

UIDB/00417/2020 UIDP/00417/2020Taking into account politics, history, and aesthetics, this edited volume explores the main expressions of primitivism in Iberian and Transatlantic modernisms. Ten case studies are thoroughly analyzed concerning both the circulations and exchanges connecting the Iberian and Latin American artistic and literary milieus with each other and with the Parisian circles. Chapters also examine the patterns and paradoxes associated with the manifestations of primitivism, including their local implications and cosmopolitan drive. This book opens up and deepens the discussion of the ties that Spain and Portugal maintained with their imperial pasts, which extended into European twentieth-century colonialism, as well as the nationalist and folk aesthetics promoted by the cultural industry of Iberian dictatorships. The book significantly rethinks long-established ideas about modern art and the production of primitivist imagery.publishersversionpublishe

Development of the huggable social robot Probo: on the conceptual design and software architecture

This dissertation presents the development of a huggable social robot named Probo. Probo embodies a stuffed imaginary animal, providing a soft touch and a huggable appearance. Probo's purpose is to serve as a multidisciplinary research platform for human-robot interaction focused on children. In terms of a social robot, Probo is classified as a social interface supporting non-verbal communication. Probo's social skills are thereby limited to a reactive level. To close the gap with higher levels of interaction, an innovative system for shared control with a human operator is introduced. The software architecture de nes a modular structure to incorporate all systems into a single control center. This control center is accompanied with a 3D virtual model of Probo, simulating all motions of the robot and providing a visual feedback to the operator. Additionally, the model allows us to advance on user-testing and evaluation of newly designed systems. The robot reacts on basic input stimuli that it perceives during interaction. The input stimuli, that can be referred to as low-level perceptions, are derived from vision analysis, audio analysis, touch analysis and object identification. The stimuli will influence the attention and homeostatic system, used to de ne the robot's point of attention, current emotional state and corresponding facial expression. The recognition of these facial expressions has been evaluated in various user-studies. To evaluate the collaboration of the software components, a social interactive game for children, Probogotchi, has been developed. To facilitate interaction with children, Probo has an identity and corresponding history. Safety is ensured through Probo's soft embodiment and intrinsic safe actuation systems. To convey the illusion of life in a robotic creature, tools for the creation and management of motion sequences are put into the hands of the operator. All motions generated from operator triggered systems are combined with the motions originating from the autonomous reactive systems. The resulting motion is subsequently smoothened and transmitted to the actuation systems. With future applications to come, Probo is an ideal platform to create a friendly companion for hospitalised children

The construction of identity amongst young people of north African origin in France : discourses and experiences

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Struggle for a modern American art, 1890-1925

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (p. 347-369).American modernism was formulated at the turn of the twentieth century, when artists and intellectuals became newly self-conscious of their aesthetic strategies in a rapidly urbanizing United States. During that same period, new immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe poured into the U.S., native-born black and white Americans undertook internal migrations to northern cities, and advances in the technology of image making - photography, film, and even improvements in the graphic reproduction of caricature in newspapers - provoked uncertainty in the art world. This dissertation explores the intersections of these two trajectories in period artworks and debates about artistic medium, examining how notions of America as a diverse nation operated at an aesthetic and a cultural level.The immigrant critics and practitioners at the center of my study - Japanese-German critic Sadakichi Hartmann, Mexican-born artist Marius De Zayas, and English-Sri Lankan curator Ananda K. Coomaraswamy - each formed conflicted partnerships with the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz. These allies attacked America's homogeneous arts, positioning themselves as critical hybrid outsiders, and identifying marginal media as means by which to devise and theorize a new art in the U.S. This dissertation examines three episodes in their formulation of American modernism, arguing that each aesthetic breakthrough informed and was informed by a double debate: one occurring in the political and cultural sphere, and a parallel discourse about artistic media themselves.(cont.) Part one traces the origins of "straight" photography in relation to the nascent philosophy of cultural pluralism (1895-1907); part two explores caricature's role as a hybrid medium for negotiating between African and modern European art (1907-1917); and part three examines how the motion picture served to engage both popular white nativism and avant-garde celebration of ethnic spiritualism (1917-1925). With independent expressive properties, each art form could restructure the artistic canon and enable the formulation of what I term a "composite" American modernism.Formalist criticism has used medium specificity to isolate the study of art from other modes of history writing, but this dissertation restores a crucial historical context for modernist media theory to reveal that the ongoing American dilemma of integrating difference lies at the heart of American modernism.by Lauren Kroiz.Ph.D

Medical discourse and avant-garde art in France, 1905-1925

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‘The Grin upon the Deathshead’: A Study of Satire in 1920s British Art.

This study of satire in British art in the 1920s questions what prompted the reappearance of satire in painting, what characterised the new form of ‘modernist’ satire, if and how it relates to the English satirical tradition, and how this new mode evolved over the course of the decade. In attempting to answer these questions, consideration of the post-­‐war context with its rapid, unsettling modernisation and profound social change is crucial. I begin with Wyndham Lewis, whose ‘Tyros and Portraits’ exhibition in 1921 seems to mark the emergence of a new, more bitter and cynical, brand of satire. Lewis’s return to figuration can be analysed in the context of the post-­‐ war ‘rappel à l’ordre’, and his Tyros (A Reading of Ovid) can therefore be interpreted as a complex dialogue with neo-­‐classicism, used here in the service of satire as a harsh critique of post-­‐war society. Towards the end of the decade, Edward Burra exemplifies a move away from Lewis’s antagonism in favour of a more detached and amused satirical approach that echoes the writing of contemporaries such as Evelyn Waugh. His early work raises interesting questions regarding changing attitudes to gender and identity, and the influence of modern technology, cinema and jazz. The Sitwells form an important link between these two artists in their role as sitters, patrons and self-­‐acclaimed leaders of the modernist movement in the arts in Britain. They also play a key part in reintroducing the popular, traditional humour of the commedia dell’arte into a modernist context. The Sitwell trio are at once the butt of the satire these works contain, while also meting out satirical ripostes in their turn, engendering a momentum in this neglected genre that appears to me significant. I end my study with Cecil Beaton, a protégé of the Sitwells and part of a younger generation who adopted the satirical mode as expedient. Following the trajectory of Beaton’s career into the 1930s illustrates the decline in power of satire, as political developments claimed attention across Europe