Axial Generation: Mixing Colour and Shapes to Automatically Form Diverse Digital Sculptures

Abstract: Automated computer generation of aesthetically pleasing artwork has been the subject of research for several decades. The unsolved problem of interest is how to please any audience without requiring too much of their involvement in the process of creation. Two-dimensional pictures have received a lot of attention; however, 3D artwork has remained relatively unexplored. This paper showcases an extended version of the Axial Generation Process (AGP), a versatile generation algorithm that can create both 2D and 3D items within the Concretism art style. The extensions presented here include calculating colour values for the artwork, increasing the range of forms that can be created through dynamic sizing of shapes and including more primitive shape types, finally, 2D items can be created from multiple viewpoints. Both 2D and 3D items generated through the AGP were evaluated against a set of formal aesthetic measures and compared against two established generation systems, one based on manipulating pixels/voxels and another tracking the path of particles through 2D and 3D space. This initial evaluation shows that the process is capable of generating visually varied items which exhibit a generally diverse range of values across the measures used, in both two and three dimensions. Comparatively, against the established generation processes, the AGP shows a good balance of performance and ability to create complex and visually varied items

'Towards retreat' : modernism, craftsmanship and spirituality in the work of Geoffrey Clarke

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Art and the artist in the literary works of Elsa Triolet

This thesis takes a representative selection of Triolet's works to study the themes of writing and creativity as they are presented in the novels. These are all portraits of artists and the accounts of the search for a synthesis of aesthetic freedom and ethical responsibility. It considers Triolet's importance as a foreign writer, adopting a new creative language to be adopted by a different cultural environment, to be essential in understanding her importance to the French literary tradition. By emphasising her formative years in the avant-garde circles of prerevolutionary Russia, my study demonstrates her considerable contribution to the meeting of Russian and French aesthetic theories. I extend this with close textual readings of certain works to demonstrate her techniques in novelistic construction which reveal many Formalist practices before Formalist works in translation made their official influence on creative methods. The introduction considers the reasons for Triolet's neglect as a writer. It then considers various contemporary and recent critical appraisals which indicate the interest she has received until present and which allow me to define my own critical approach. Part One traces Triolet's literary evolution from her formative years in Russia, through exile to her first publications in Russian. It then considers her insertion into French literary activity, and her association with the schools of socialist realism and the "nouveau roman". Part Two examines two traditional novels which portray the creative and metaphorical roles of the artist and his work, showing the constant conflict between private and public lives. In Part Three, I show how aspects of novelistic traditionalism are gradually foregrounded so that the work develops a dual-sided character where it both narrates and examines the processes of its own narration. In Part Four, this move to highly self-conscious aesthetics demonstrates an idiosyncratic exploration of new paths for the novel that bring visual, auditive and cinematographic media into the traditional domain of written art. Accompanying the very post-modernist experimentation, I show how this research within the novel into the novel's own future has an ethical and redemptive purpose whose final conclusion is that creativity and human freedom are inexorably interwoven

Art and Remembrance: Gima Hiroshi, the Marukis, and Representations of the Battle of Okinawa

The battle of Okinawa in 1945 was one of the bloodiest battles of the Asia Pacific War: nearly a quarter of the Okinawan civil population perished. Yet whilst the battle itself has been exhaustively researched, the relatively few artistic representations of the subject have been largely passed over in silence. Okinawan artists themselves, keen to avoid conflict with the U.S. authorities once the region had fallen under the control of the U.S. administration in 1945, were reluctant to address the subject head–on. Their reticence was only compounded by Japan’s own failure to acknowledge its complicity in the 1945 massacre of Okinawan citizens. Thus, through the insidious mechanisms of self–censorship, an event that had decimated the region’s population and left an indelible scar on its landscape, remained almost invisible in contemporary cultural production. It was only in the decades following the battle that artists began to develop idioms that allowed them to express, through the brutalized landscape or female anguish, the suffering of the Okinawan people. These works served as powerful expressions of communal trauma. They also contested the gradual objectification of Okinawa in the mainland imaginary. Within two decades of the war, the region had been newly identified as a tourist destination, marketed in visual media as an exotic paradise. For Okinawans themselves, the conscious branding of their land carried the painful consequence of erasing the memory of loss and destruction that fundamentally informed their experience of it. Art, that is, became a means of rectification: of countering the power of silence and the myth of the exotic with the trauma of history. This paper focuses on visual descriptions of the Battle of Okinawa both as (semi–covert) expressions of communal trauma and as a means of communicating to mainland Japanese audiences the pain, the suffering, and the struggle of its recent history. A key figure in this discussion is the artist Gima Hiroshi (1923–2017), an Okinawan born on Tinian Island who subsequently moved to Osaka, who over a period of three decades used a combination of media – oil painting, woodblock prints, albums, children’s books and collaborations with Okinawan poets – to bring into the open an event that defined the lives of the Okinawan people. These works played a crucial role in recasting Okinawa in the mainland imaginary, of retrieving its pain from the margins of nation and history