Environmental features of Chinese architectural heritage: the standardization of form in the pursuit of equilibrium with nature

We present a scientific discussion about Chinese historical architecture and cultural paradigms in order to analyze the formation of building patterns objectively connected to environmental features. In this regard, we will demonstrate the process of standardization from architectural modules related in different levels of composition around “voids”, onto cosmological urban tissues in harmony with nature. The conclusions show that we can only understand Chinese architectural patterns in relation to Dào or nature, and in turn, they possess profound social and environmental values from which we receive useful lessons to advance towards sustainability in architecture and urban planning. The authors believe that it is critical for China and the world to find a new approach to the building construction industry with an ecological and philosophical background recognizable as “Chinese” and based in its own past. In order to support the information provided in the first part of the article, the authors have conducted an environmental analysis of the traditional Chinese urban layout whose results greatly confirm the initial hypotheses, i.e. the historical fashion of constructing neighborhoods improves conditions of the town in terms of comfort and is able to save energy, thus reducing pernicious change effects

On a landscape approach to design and eco-poetic approach to Landscape

For Landscape Architecture to become an academic discipline it must present its own coherent theory and methodology for the planning, designing and management of (built) landscapes. This also requires not only an articulated if difficult differentiation of planning, design and management and the interrelationship between them, but also clarification of the term landscape itself

Wearable performance

This is the post-print version of the article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2009 Taylor & FrancisWearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. 'Wearable performance' briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with 'design in motion' and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab which involves transdisciplinary convergences between fashion and dance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies and digital animation. The concept of an 'evolving' garment design that is materialised (mobilised) in live performance between partners originates from DAP Lab's work with telepresence and distributed media addressing the 'connective tissues' and 'wearabilities' of projected bodies through a study of shared embodiment and perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing). Such notions of wearability are applied both to the immediate sensory processing on the performer's body and to the processing of the responsive, animate environment. Wearable computing devices worn on the body provide the potential for digital interaction in the world. A new stage of computing technology at the beginning of the 21st Century links the personal and the pervasive through mobile wearables. The convergence between the miniaturisation of microchips (nanotechnology), intelligent textile or interfacial materials production, advances in biotechnology and the growth of wireless, ubiquitous computing emphasises not only mobility but integration into clothing or the human body. In artistic contexts one expects such integrated wearable devices to have the two-way function of interface instruments (e.g. sensor data acquisition and exchange) worn for particular purposes, either for communication with the environment or various aesthetic and compositional expressions. 'Wearable performance' briefly surveys the context for wearables in the performance arts and distinguishes display and performative/interfacial garments. It then focuses on the authors' experiments with 'design in motion' and digital performance, examining prototyping at the DAP-Lab which involves transdisciplinary convergences between fashion and dance, interactive system architecture, electronic textiles, wearable technologies and digital animation. The concept of an 'evolving' garment design that is materialised (mobilised) in live performance between partners originates from DAP Lab's work with telepresence and distributed media addressing the 'connective tissues' and 'wearabilities' of projected bodies through a study of shared embodiment and perception/proprioception in the wearer (tactile sensory processing). Such notions of wearability are applied both to the immediate sensory processing on the performer's body and to the processing of the responsive, animate environment

Architectural Typology of the Malay Chinatown Facade: Case: Perniagaan Street of Malay Chinese Village Bagansiapiapi, Rokan Hilir, Riau.

Chinatown architecture in Bagansiapiapi is a major component of the Chinatown area as an identity with various facades influenced by local Malay culture. The growth and development of cities with economic orientation is often not in line with the understanding to maintain the image of the building, which has an impact on district transformation which can eliminate the existence of Chinatown architecture that currently exists or intersects with the city Commercial center. This can be seen in the changes in facade formation that took place on the Bagansiapiapi Perniagaan street. The typology of facade architecture of the Chinatown building was carried out with the aim of (i)Knowing the character of the facade shape of Chinatown facade, (ii)Getting the dominant formation in each of the facade forming element , so that Chinatown buildings can still be found. The method used is a qualitative method with a descriptive approach, which is directed at describing and interpreting existing conditions. The analysis used by classifying facades on elements of Malay Chinatown architecture includes types of building dimensions, ownership and function modules, which are formed by facade components (roofs, vents, doors, windows, walls, and stilt construction). The findings of this study are the facade of the Chinatown building in Bagansiapiapi on the facade of formation elements that have dominance: 1) Module composition of the core dimensions (a) 1 function of the house floor with wood 2) The shape of the gable, the formation of plain rectangular windows and two long ornaments downward, the formation of the window extends downward by placing a balanced composition right and left, setting a horizontal wall, using a stilt construction. Keyword: Architecture of Chinatown, Facade Elements, Malay Architecture, Typolog

TextFormer: A Query-based End-to-End Text Spotter with Mixed Supervision

End-to-end text spotting is a vital computer vision task that aims to integrate scene text detection and recognition into a unified framework. Typical methods heavily rely on Region-of-Interest (RoI) operations to extract local features and complex post-processing steps to produce final predictions. To address these limitations, we propose TextFormer, a query-based end-to-end text spotter with Transformer architecture. Specifically, using query embedding per text instance, TextFormer builds upon an image encoder and a text decoder to learn a joint semantic understanding for multi-task modeling. It allows for mutual training and optimization of classification, segmentation, and recognition branches, resulting in deeper feature sharing without sacrificing flexibility or simplicity. Additionally, we design an Adaptive Global aGgregation (AGG) module to transfer global features into sequential features for reading arbitrarily-shaped texts, which overcomes the sub-optimization problem of RoI operations. Furthermore, potential corpus information is utilized from weak annotations to full labels through mixed supervision, further improving text detection and end-to-end text spotting results. Extensive experiments on various bilingual (i.e., English and Chinese) benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of our method. Especially on TDA-ReCTS dataset, TextFormer surpasses the state-of-the-art method in terms of 1-NED by 13.2%.Comment: MIR 2023, 15 page

'Chineseness': The work of Lo Yuen-yi in memory of the women of Nushu

ABSTRACT One of the difficulties facing art historians and curators when approaching recently produced artworks is how to interpret such works within the dominant narrative of art history and its traditional axis of historical time and geographical place. Often such works are interpreted as ‘global’ and effectively reduced to a western interpreta- tion of the artworks. While this is a helpful approach for many artists and artworks, it can be less helpful to the interpretation of works that seek to address local issues that the ‘global’ approach might miss. Moreover, the criteria of the ‘global’ might exclude such works from being perceived as ‘contemporary art’. The problem today is acute when dealing with artworks in East Asia, especially China, because so many works have been accepted as ‘global’ only occasionally mentioning that they are ‘Chinese’. Hence the uneasy term ‘Contemporary Chinese art’ and the debate between its inter- pretation as ‘global’ and/or ‘Chinese’. If the latter perspective is applied, some form of ‘Chineseness’ will explicitly or implicitly be applied. This article takes the ‘local’ perspective in order to interpret a group of works by the Hong Kong/Macau artist Lo Yuen-yi in memory of the rural women who practised nüshu (women’s writ- ing) through chants, embroidery and writing in Hunan province, China. In so doing, Lo can position herself within an alternative narrative of female literate and artistic ancestral narrative from which she is not excluded as a Chinese female artist. The article argues that the work cannot be fully understood from the ‘global’ perspective and thus requires a perspective that would necessarily adopt a strategic concept of ‘Chineseness’