Non-western rendition of ambient rhetoric of Khajuraho monuments.

This dissertation develops an ambient rhetoric: a living practice that is more disclosive than communicative, more entangled than intersectional, and more subtle than explicit and evidential. Rather than exploring the symbology, iconography, texture, and artistic integrity of Khajuraho monuments, I claim that Khajuraho monuments aim at convincing visitors with their persuadability and affectability inherent in their material bases, architectural panels, fractal design, allegorical cast, aura of attunement, and the environment in which the monument complex is nestled. Khajuraho groups of monuments in Central India, matchless in their monumentality, dynamic in their adjustment to the shifting socio-politico-cultural landscape in the world, fantastic in their amenability to entanglement, and susceptible to their intra-action with cutting-edge digital tools and technology, have proved to be a vibrant hub for those who—constrained by the deficit model of rhetoric as a logic of supplementation and also by the exploitative and extractive model of rhetoric that valorises human-centric rhetorical approach to persuasive assemblage—venture into exploring the holistic version of the rhetoric predicated on the principle of a third term. The monument complex’s persuadability rests not just on its symbology but on its enduring sandstone that lays the material basis for the construction of its majestic architecture, splendid sculpture, stunning superstructure, gorgeous ground plan, fractal design, strategic placement of the artifacts, the upward projection of the superstructure exposed to the four elements, the lapidary locale of the monuments nestled in an environment that escapes any intelligent guess as to when, how, and why it participates in revealing the monument complex’s rhetoricity

Protest Beyond Representation: The Vitalism of Digital Protest Art\u27s Political Aesthetics

The complexities of post-modernity tend to dissolve any facile model of direct cause-and-effect in politics, and yet as a democratic polity, we look for the comfort in knowing that political expression can enact change. Protest art, or acts of creative expression intended to resist dominant powers, forces, and structures, models the potential for political expression to create change that is not immediate, direct, or obvious, but rather moves the social through expressivity and aesthetics. While these features lend themselves to an analysis guided by affect theory, this sub-discipline within communication studies has tended to lack the methodological specificity to reproduce or expand applications. Daniel Stern\u27s vitality pentad acts as a heuristic by which to study rhetorical objects; these objects are studied due to their expressivity, rather than their appeal to reason. Stern excludes still media forms such as photographs and illustrations; however, by looking at the way in which digital artifacts are imbued with movement in its networked path, we can understand that all digital media are time-based. The objects of study speak to the temporal, vital dimensions of digital protest art: Turkey\u27s Vandalina art collective, which places protest stickers on transit cars, demonstrates how force and scale engender feeling of intimacy in public spaces. Iran\u27s Zahra\u27s Paradise, a webcomic-turned-graphic novel, offers differing temporal environments for the reader and weaves its aesthetics into the narrative to create a sense of space and place. Finally, the images of #HandsUpDontShoot, through their directional pull across digital networks, illustrates social media\u27s tendency to remix aesthetic features of older media forms. Major insights drawn from this research speak to the political importance of subject formation--or interventions therein--and vitality forms as a method for rhetorical criticism, which allows the rhetorical critic to be more specific and methodical in applying affect theory to rhetoric. It also challenges the positivist notion that political expression must result in measurable change in order to be validated. Finally, this project addresses the virtual potentiality of digital data and offers a perspective that sees all digital media as time-based

The Body Politics of Data

The PhD project The Body Politics of Data is an artistic, practice-based study exploring how feminist methodologies can create new ways to conceptualise digital embodiment within the field of art and technology. As a field of practice highly influenced by scientific and technical methodologies, the discursive and artistic tools for examining data as a social concern are limited. The research draws on performance art from the 60s, cyberfeminist practice, Object Oriented Feminism and intersectional perspectives on data to conceive of new models of practice that can account for the body political operations of extractive big data technologies and Artificial Intelligence. The research is created through a body of individual and collective experimental artistic projects featured in the solo exhibition The Body Politics of Data at London Gallery West (2020). It includes work on maternity data and predictive products in relation to reproductive health in the UK, created in collaboration with Loes Bogers (2016-2017), workshops on “bodily bureaucracies” with Autonomous Tech Fetish (2013-2016) and Accumulative Care, a feminist model of care for labouring in the age of extractive digital technologies. This research offers an embodied feminist methodology for artistic practice to become investigative of how processes of digitalisation have adverse individual and collective effects in order to identify and resist the forms of personal and collective risk emerging with data driven technologies

Fine Art Pattern Extraction and Recognition

This is a reprint of articles from the Special Issue published online in the open access journal Journal of Imaging (ISSN 2313-433X) (available at: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/jimaging/special issues/faper2020)

Religion and Art: Rethinking Aesthetic and Auratic Experiences in 'Post-Secular' Times

How can we think of the “aura” of (sacred) contexts and (sacred) works? How to think of individual and collective (esthetic/religious) experiences? What to make of the manipulative dimension of (religious and esthetic) “auratic” experiences? Is the work of art still capable of mediating the experience of the “sacred,” and under what conditions? What is the significance of the “eschatological” dimension of both art and religion (the sense of “ending”)? Can theology offer a way to reaffirm the creative capacities of the human being as something that characterizes the very condition of being human? This Special Issue aspires to contribute to the growing literature on contemporary art and religion, and to explore the new ways of thinking of art and the sacred (in their esthetic, ideological, and institutional dimensions) in the context of contemporary culture

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts. EVA 2012 Florence

The key aim of this Event is to provide a forum for the user, supplier and scientific research communities to meet and exchange experiences, ideas and plans in the wide area of Culture & Technology. Participants receive up to date news on new EC and international arts computing & telecommunications initiatives as well as on Projects in the visual arts field, in archaeology and history. Working Groups and new Projects are promoted. Scientific and technical demonstrations are presented

Virtual Heritage: new technologies for edutainment

Cultural heritage represents an enormous amount of information and knowledge. Accessing this treasure chest allows not only to discover the legacy of physical and intangible attributes of the past but also to provide a better understanding of the present. Museums and cultural institutions have to face the problem of providing access to and communicating these cultural contents to a wide and assorted audience, meeting the expectations and interests of the reference end-users and relying on the most appropriate tools available. Given the large amount of existing tangible and intangible heritage, artistic, historical and cultural contents, what can be done to preserve and properly disseminate their heritage significance? How can these items be disseminated in the proper way to the public, taking into account their enormous heterogeneity? Answering this question requires to deal as well with another aspect of the problem: the evolution of culture, literacy and society during the last decades of 20th century. To reflect such transformations, this period witnessed a shift in the museum’s focus from the aesthetic value of museum artifacts to the historical and artistic information they encompass, and a change into the museums’ role from a mere "container" of cultural objects to a "narrative space" able to explain, describe, and revive the historical material in order to attract and entertain visitors. These developments require creating novel exhibits, able to tell stories about the objects and enabling visitors to construct semantic meanings around them. The objective that museums presently pursue is reflected by the concept of Edutainment, Education + Entertainment. Nowadays, visitors are not satisfied with ‘learning something’, but would rather engage in an ‘experience of learning’, or ‘learning for fun’, being active actors and players in their own cultural experience. As a result, institutions are faced with several new problems, like the need to communicate with people from different age groups and different cultural backgrounds, the change in people attitude due to the massive and unexpected diffusion of technology into everyday life, the need to design the visit by a personal point of view, leading to a high level of customization that allows visitors to shape their path according to their characteristics and interests. In order to cope with these issues, I investigated several approaches. In particular, I focused on Virtual Learning Environments (VLE): real-time interactive virtual environments where visitors can experience a journey through time and space, being immersed into the original historical, cultural and artistic context of the work of arts on display. VLE can strongly help archivists and exhibit designers, allowing to create new interesting and captivating ways to present cultural materials. In this dissertation I will tackle many of the different dimensions related to the creation of a cultural virtual experience. During my research project, the entire pipeline involved into the development and deployment of VLE has been investigated. The approach followed was to analyze in details the main sub-problems to face, in order to better focus on specific issues. Therefore, I first analyzed different approaches to an effective recreation of the historical and cultural context of heritage contents, which is ultimately aimed at an effective transfer of knowledge to the end-users. In particular, I identified the enhancement of the users’ sense of presence in VLE as one of the main tools to reach this objective. Presence is generally expressed as the perception of 'being there', i.e. the subjective belief of users that they are in a certain place, even if they know that the experience is mediated by the computer. Presence is related to the number of senses involved by the VLE and to the quality of the sensorial stimuli. But in a cultural scenario, this is not sufficient as the cultural presence plays a relevant role. Cultural presence is not just a feeling of 'being there' but of being - not only physically, but also socially, culturally - 'there and then'. In other words, the VLE must be able to transfer not only the appearance, but also all the significance and characteristics of the context that makes it a place and both the environment and the context become tools capable of transferring the cultural significance of a historic place. The attention that users pay to the mediated environment is another aspect that contributes to presence. Attention is related to users’ focalization and concentration and to their interests. Thus, in order to improve the involvement and capture the attention of users, I investigated in my work the adoption of narratives and storytelling experiences, which can help people making sense of history and culture, and of gamification approaches, which explore the use of game thinking and game mechanics in cultural contexts, thus engaging users while disseminating cultural contents and, why not?, letting them have fun during this process. Another dimension related to the effectiveness of any VLE is also the quality of the user experience (UX). User interaction, with both the virtual environment and its digital contents, is one of the main elements affecting UX. With respect to this I focused on one of the most recent and promising approaches: the natural interaction, which is based on the idea that persons need to interact with technology in the same way they are used to interact with the real world in everyday life. Then, I focused on the problem of presenting, displaying and communicating contents. VLE represent an ideal presentation layer, being multiplatform hypermedia applications where users are free to interact with the virtual reconstructions by choosing their own visiting path. Cultural items, embedded into the environment, can be accessed by users according to their own curiosity and interests, with the support of narrative structures, which can guide them through the exploration of the virtual spaces, and conceptual maps, which help building meaningful connections between cultural items. Thus, VLE environments can even be seen as visual interfaces to DBs of cultural contents. Users can navigate the VE as if they were browsing the DB contents, exploiting both text-based queries and visual-based queries, provided by the re-contextualization of the objects into their original spaces, whose virtual exploration can provide new insights on specific elements and improve the awareness of relationships between objects in the database. Finally, I have explored the mobile dimension, which became absolutely relevant in the last period. Nowadays, off-the-shelf consumer devices as smartphones and tablets guarantees amazing computing capabilities, support for rich multimedia contents, geo-localization and high network bandwidth. Thus, mobile devices can support users in mobility and detect the user context, thus allowing to develop a plethora of location-based services, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits and cultural or tourist sites according to visitors’ personal interest and curiosity

What do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About Human-Robot Interaction?

This is a collection of papers presented at the workshop What Do Collaborations with the Arts Have to Say About HRI , held at the 2010 Human-Robot Interaction Conference, in Osaka, Japan