18,327 research outputs found
Complex Beauty
Complex systems and their underlying convoluted networks are ubiquitous, all
we need is an eye for them. They pose problems of organized complexity which
cannot be approached with a reductionist method. Complexity science and its
emergent sister network science both come to grips with the inherent complexity
of complex systems with an holistic strategy. The relevance of complexity,
however, transcends the sciences. Complex systems and networks are the focal
point of a philosophical, cultural and artistic turn of our tightly
interrelated and interdependent postmodern society. Here I take a different,
aesthetic perspective on complexity. I argue that complex systems can be
beautiful and can the object of artification - the neologism refers to
processes in which something that is not regarded as art in the traditional
sense of the word is changed into art. Complex systems and networks are
powerful sources of inspiration for the generative designer, for the artful
data visualizer, as well as for the traditional artist. I finally discuss the
benefits of a cross-fertilization between science and art
New communication practices on the radio and in the audiosphere
For the past decade or so, internet radio, podcasts, mobile sound apps, and digital libraries of audio content have enjoyed increasing popularity among researchers and receivers of culture. Radio, similarly to other traditional media, often experiments with the opportunities offered by the new media technologies enabling the emergence of new communicational practices. As a starting point, I consider the contemporary audiosphere, which constitutes the auditory part of the audio-visual culture, and the influence of technological changes on radio communications, artists, and receivers. I attempt to answer the question, what happens at genre fringes? What are the characteristic features of the emerging forms? How, when one is faced with new technology, the multimedia world, and virtual reality, can one reach a reflection on the fiction and non-fiction genres on the radio? The expansive character of new technologies is often the source of inspiration for that which is traditional, thus renewing the object of its study. The inclusion of new phenomena within the widely understood auditoriness has a rescuing nature for traditional forms, and, at the same time, offers new opportunities for creators, and thus an area of research for literary scientists, media scientists and literary critics
Unsupervised Learning of Artistic Styles with Archetypal Style Analysis
In this paper, we introduce an unsupervised learning approach to
automatically discover, summarize, and manipulate artistic styles from large
collections of paintings. Our method is based on archetypal analysis, which is
an unsupervised learning technique akin to sparse coding with a geometric
interpretation. When applied to deep image representations from a collection of
artworks, it learns a dictionary of archetypal styles, which can be easily
visualized. After training the model, the style of a new image, which is
characterized by local statistics of deep visual features, is approximated by a
sparse convex combination of archetypes. This enables us to interpret which
archetypal styles are present in the input image, and in which proportion.
Finally, our approach allows us to manipulate the coefficients of the latent
archetypal decomposition, and achieve various special effects such as style
enhancement, transfer, and interpolation between multiple archetypes.Comment: Accepted at NIPS 2018, Montr\'eal, Canad
Lusciousness - flora and the crafted image in a digital environment
The development of digital imaging within science has been as swift as it is impressive, as the images of outer space developed from data sent back from the Hubble Telescope bear witness. However, in a climate where programmes are constantly being developed to facilitate the production of visual spectacle, the ability to retain the trace of the artist's hand within the field of science imaging is a challenging task. Through my collaborations with botanical scientists at Kew over the past eight years I have been keen to move the artistic nature of depicting microscopic plant imagery to a more sophisticated level. Just as the original plant employs colour coded messages to attract an audience of insect collaborators. Through artistic intervention and interpretation I have sought to create mesmeric images and symbolic objects that carry many messages, markers with which we retain contact with the natural world
Philosophical Toys as Vectors for Diagrammatic Creation: The Case of The Fragmented Orchestra
The central topic of this essay consists into establishing a relation between two dimensions of formation: the conceptual process of creating philo- sophical toys - that is of reelaborating existing philosophical concepts, mainly deriving from the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in terms of their potential as ‘operative constructs' - and their parallel redeployment towards the specific problem of analyz- ing a recent transdisciplinary artwork. By means of this strategical shift, theory looses its character of explanation and illustration. Philosophy as toy becomes rather the matter of evaluating the com- plexity of a specific artistic composition in terms of its aesthetic potential. It contributes towards developing meta- stable conditions of mutual resonance between heterogeneous modalities of creation
Communities, Knowledge Creation, and Information Diffusion
In this paper, we examine how patterns of scientific collaboration contribute
to knowledge creation. Recent studies have shown that scientists can benefit
from their position within collaborative networks by being able to receive more
information of better quality in a timely fashion, and by presiding over
communication between collaborators. Here we focus on the tendency of
scientists to cluster into tightly-knit communities, and discuss the
implications of this tendency for scientific performance. We begin by reviewing
a new method for finding communities, and we then assess its benefits in terms
of computation time and accuracy. While communities often serve as a taxonomic
scheme to map knowledge domains, they also affect how successfully scientists
engage in the creation of new knowledge. By drawing on the longstanding debate
on the relative benefits of social cohesion and brokerage, we discuss the
conditions that facilitate collaborations among scientists within or across
communities. We show that successful scientific production occurs within
communities when scientists have cohesive collaborations with others from the
same knowledge domain, and across communities when scientists intermediate
among otherwise disconnected collaborators from different knowledge domains. We
also discuss the implications of communities for information diffusion, and
show how traditional epidemiological approaches need to be refined to take
knowledge heterogeneity into account and preserve the system's ability to
promote creative processes of novel recombinations of idea
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