Shangles: A Stream of Consciousness

The purpose of this thesis is to explore the Shangle. Shangle is a term devised by my grandfather during the course of a practical joke. Years after his death, I look to define and explore the ramifications and possibilities of a shangle. I describe how the pursuit of a shangle has allowed for an evolution of my art-making methodologies and concerns. My artwork draws from my interests in humor, culture, materiality, personal anecdotes, and a pervasive need to find the edge of my artwork. My artwork toes the line between fictional narrative and the violent reality of everyday life. I believe artwork has the power to shift how people see the world, but in order to do so, the experience and process of making an artwork needs to first change the artist

FELIX GONZALEZ-TORRES and KEN OKIISHI: The Evolution and Representation of Experience

The two artists Ken Okiishi and Felix Gonzalez-Torres--though separated by a generation--both use physical objects to signify the loss of human presence, connection or connections. Both instill meaning into familiar physical objects such as candy, clocks, or television screens, and both are able to provoke feelings associated with the kinds of presence objects can represent – without that actual presence. Gonzalez-Torres worked during a time when digital technology was not yet an existent medium, while Okiishi worked during a time in which the technological world and its social effects are central to his work and message. In fact, a central point of his work gesture/data is to replicate our dependent relationship with technology and how people interact with the virtual world. This world is only available by viewing through a screen; it is unreachable, unlike the tangible objects, that we can physically feel, via which Gonzalez-Torres’ works often confronted viewers. These two artists demonstrate stark, pivotal generational differences: a world and society before technology, art before digital technology (Gonzalez-Torres), and the effects and experiences of art in a world engulfed by such technology entirely (Okiishi). One relies on physical interaction, and the other responds and relays the effects of infinite, intangible spectacles. Both speak to the importance and meaning of presence, or being, and what part that presence or absence plays in art experience during these juxtaposing time periods: before and after the Internet. In his 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle, French theorist Guy Debord wrote, “in societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation”.[1] Gonzalez-Torres’ and Okiishi’s artworks both could be said to exemplify this idea of evolution and generational transformation, but in Okiishi’s work, there is an increased disconnection, to the point that everything may be mere representation. This raises the question: has art changed with technology? Have we lost actual experience to mere representation? [1]Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Buchet-Chastel, 196

Street Art, Graffiti and the Moral Right of Integrity: Can Artists Oppose the Destruction and Removal of their Works?

The relatively recent boom of street art and graffiti in many cities around the world animates and brings attention to the debate around their conservation. Can artists within these communities use the legal tools offered by moral rights laws to preserve their art? This note addresses this issue and, in particular, expands on whether street artists and graffiti writers can rely on moral rights regimes to prevent the destruction or removal of their works. It does so by looking at recent cases, especially in the US, where artists have started lawsuits aimed at preserving their street pieces or anyhow objecting to their erasure. The note also partially draws on semi-structured interviews I have conducted with several street artists and graffiti writers, whom I asked questions about whether they nurture interest in taking legal action for the above purposes

Optimisation using Natural Language Processing: Personalized Tour Recommendation for Museums

This paper proposes a new method to provide personalized tour recommendation for museum visits. It combines an optimization of preference criteria of visitors with an automatic extraction of artwork importance from museum information based on Natural Language Processing using textual energy. This project includes researchers from computer and social sciences. Some results are obtained with numerical experiments. They show that our model clearly improves the satisfaction of the visitor who follows the proposed tour. This work foreshadows some interesting outcomes and applications about on-demand personalized visit of museums in a very near future.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures; Proceedings of the 2014 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems pp. 439-44

Pigment analysis by Raman microscopy and portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) of thirteenth to fourteenth century illuminations and cuttings from Bologna

Non-destructive pigment analysis by Raman microscopy (RM) and portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) has been carried out on some Bolognese illuminations and cuttings chosen to represent the beginnings, evolution and height of Bolognese illuminated manuscript production. Dating to the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and held in a private collection, the study provides evidence for the pigments generally used in this period. The results, which are compared with those obtained for other north Italian artwork, show the developments in usage of artistic materials and technique. Also addressed in this study is an examination of the respective roles of RM and pXRF analysis in this area of technical art history

The initiation to architectural analysis viewed by a group of architect teachers

Ponencia presentada a Session 4: Investigar los procesos de diseño: etnografías y análisis de dialogías sociales / Research through the design processes: etnographic and social dialogical perspectivesThis article is about a pedagogical experience in architecture workshop teaching first-year student? at the National School of architecture of Tunis (ENAU). It focuses, in particular, on the initiation of the student to the architectural analysis process which is a major step in his course. The present work is based on a comparative study between the statements of the exercises related to the topics studied in the workshop. This comparison covers a period of eight years of teaching for the same group of teachers, and deals with their conception of architectural analysis and their way to approaching this initiation to their students. For this purpose, the Group of teachers has implemented an analysis grid that serves, to guide students in their work, and provides a good understanding of the architectural analysis as a process and brain action summoning both the senses and the mind. For this, the Group of teachers made the choice that the parameters to be analyzed concern only the geometry and topology of architectural form levels. They built their grid of architectural analysis on the basis of a postulate stating that “an architectural project is a complex act”. Thus, they consider the architectural project as a whole composed of a multitude of elements; a unit that draws its essence from the plurality. They formulate this complexity by the following equation: [An architectural project = A = 1 unit = 1+1+1+1+1...] Where the (1) represents the components of the project and the (+), the relationships that binds them to each other

Hermeneutic resonance in animats and art

One major criticism of direct or active perception (and other forms of embodied action) from the perspective of cognitive psycology is that, according to common sense, there are some actions that require strictly symbolic information - for example, to stop a car in response to a red traffic light - which fall outside the realm of a perception-action cycle. Although such cognitive responses are not necessarily a goal of artificial life, they must necessarily be included within the embodied paradigm if it is to encompass the cognisant individual, the self-aware individual, or, potentially, the conscious individual. This paper will address the question, 'can an animat appreciate art?' Although this may seem very different to the example of a prosaic response to a traffic light, it will be argued that a common framework for establishing the meaning of an object is needed. It will also be argued that clarification to previous philosophical models of artistic engagement is required: in particular that the process of understanding is not a dialogue between an autopoietic artwork and animat, but that there is either a unity of object (artwork-animat) which becomes self-maintaining, or a more classical Gibsonian interpretation as a fixed set of affordances offered by an object to the subject, both of which lead to the conclusion that the process of understanding becomes a resonance in the unity or animat

Truth in the Experience

This document focuses on the development of my artwork during my three year studio practice at the University of Maryland, College Park. It discusses the evolution of the various types of work and how they function artistically and conceptually. It culminates in an explanation of my work in the thesis exhibition, with which I have discovered the importance of the experience of an artwork as a crucial functional element of the work

History of art paintings through the lens of entropy and complexity

Art is the ultimate expression of human creativity that is deeply influenced by the philosophy and culture of the corresponding historical epoch. The quantitative analysis of art is therefore essential for better understanding human cultural evolution. Here we present a large-scale quantitative analysis of almost 140 thousand paintings, spanning nearly a millennium of art history. Based on the local spatial patterns in the images of these paintings, we estimate the permutation entropy and the statistical complexity of each painting. These measures map the degree of visual order of artworks into a scale of order-disorder and simplicity-complexity that locally reflects qualitative categories proposed by art historians. The dynamical behavior of these measures reveals a clear temporal evolution of art, marked by transitions that agree with the main historical periods of art. Our research shows that different artistic styles have a distinct average degree of entropy and complexity, thus allowing a hierarchical organization and clustering of styles according to these metrics. We have further verified that the identified groups correspond well with the textual content used to qualitatively describe the styles, and that the employed complexity-entropy measures can be used for an effective classification of artworks.Comment: 10 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in PNAS [supplementary information available at http://www.pnas.org/highwire/filestream/824089/field_highwire_adjunct_files/0/pnas.1800083115.sapp.pdf