Enlightened Romanticism: Mary Gartside’s colour theory in the age of Moses Harris, Goethe and George Field

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the work of Mary Gartside, a British female colour theorist, active in London between 1781 and 1808. She published three books between 1805 and 1808. In chronological and intellectual terms Gartside can cautiously be regarded an exemplary link between Moses Harris, who published a short but important theory of colour in the second half of the eighteenth century, and J.W. von Goethe’s highly influential Zur Farbenlehre, published in Germany in 1810. Gartside’s colour theory was published privately under the disguise of a traditional water colouring manual, illustrated with stunning abstract colour blots (see example above). Until well into the twentieth century, she remained the only woman known to have published a theory of colour. In contrast to Goethe and other colour theorists in the late 18th and early 19th century Gartside was less inclined to follow the anti-Newtonian attitudes of the Romantic movement

Feature selection and novelty in computational aesthetics

[Abstract] An approach for exploring novelty in expression-based evolutionary art systems is presented. The framework is composed of a feature extractor, a classifier, an evolutionary engine and a supervisor. The evolutionary engine exploits shortcomings of the classifier, generating misclassified instances. These instances update the training set and the classifier is re-trained. This iterative process forces the evolutionary algorithm to explore new paths leading to the creation of novel imagery. The experiments presented and analyzed herein explore different feature selection methods and indicate the validity of the approach.Portugal. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia; PTDC/EIA–EIA/115667/2009Galicia.Consellería de Innovación, Industria e Comercio ; PGIDIT10TIC105008P

"I like how it looks but it is not beautiful" -- Sensory appeal beyond beauty

Statements such as “X is beautiful but I don’t like how it looks” or “I like how X looks but it is not beautiful” sound contradictory. How contradictory they sound might however depend on the object X and on the aesthetic adjective being used (“beautiful”, “elegant”, “dynamic”, etc.). In our study, the first sentence was estimated to be more contradictory than the latter: If we describe something as beautiful, we often intend to evaluate its appearance, whereas it is less counterintuitive to appreciate an appearance without finding it beautiful. Furthermore, statements including “beautiful” appeared more contradictory than those including “elegant” and “dynamic”, pointing to its greater evaluative component. When related to artworks, sentences could appear less contradictory due to readers’ consideration of the divergence between conventional beauty and art-related sensory pleasures that can even include negative valence. Such ambivalence might be more frequent in art-objects than in other artefacts. Indeed, in our study, sentences referring to artworks were estimated to be less contradictory compared to sentences referring to other artefacts. Meanwhile, an additional small group of graphic design students showed a less clear difference between art-related and non-art-related sentences. We discuss the potential influence of art experience and interest as well as theoretical and methodological challenges like the conceptualization of beauty

Neuroaesthetics: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience

This research was supported by Grant AAEE124/09 from the Govern de les Illes Balears, Spain

Non-functional biomimicry : utilising natural patterns to provoke attention responses

Natural reoccurring patterns arise from chaos and are prevalent throughout nature. The formation of these patterns is controlled by, or produces, underlying geometrical structures. Biomimicry is the study of nature’s structure, processes and systems, as models and solutions for design challenges and is being widely utilized in order to address many issues of contemporary engineering. Many academics now believe that aesthetics stem from pattern recognition, consequently, aesthetic preference may be a result of individuals recognising, and interacting with, natural patterns. The goal of this research was to investigate the impact of specific naturally occurring pattern types (spiral, branching, and fractal patterns) on user behaviour; investigating the potential of such patterns to control and influence how individuals interact with their surrounding environment. The results showed that the underlying geometry of natural patterns has the potential to induce attention responses to a statistically significant level

A Gaze-Driven Evolutionary Algorithm to Study Aesthetic Evaluation of Visual Symmetry

Empirical work has shown that people like visual symmetry. We used a gaze-driven evolutionary algorithm technique to answer three questions about symmetry preference. First, do people automatically evaluate symmetry without explicit instruction? Second, is perfect symmetry the best stimulus, or do people prefer a degree of imperfection? Third, does initial preference for symmetry diminish after familiarity sets in? Stimuli were generated as phenotypes from an algorithmic genotype, with genes for symmetry (coded as deviation from a symmetrical template, deviation–symmetry, DS gene) and orientation (0° to 90°, orientation, ORI gene). An eye tracker identified phenotypes that were good at attracting and retaining the gaze of the observer. Resulting fitness scores determined the genotypes that passed to the next generation. We recorded changes to the distribution of DS and ORI genes over 20 generations. When participants looked for symmetry, there was an increase in high-symmetry genes. When participants looked for the patterns they preferred, there was a smaller increase in symmetry, indicating that people tolerated some imperfection. Conversely, there was no increase in symmetry during free viewing, and no effect of familiarity or orientation. This work demonstrates the viability of the evolutionary algorithm approach as a quantitative measure of aesthetic preference

Non-functional biomimicry : utilising natural patterns to provoke attention responses

Natural reoccurring patterns arise from chaos and are prevalent throughout nature. The formation of these patterns is controlled by, or produces, underlying geometrical structures. Biomimicry is the study of nature’s structure, processes and systems, as models and solutions for design challenges and is being widely utilized in order to address many issues of contemporary engineering. Many academics now believe that aesthetics stem from pattern recognition, consequently, aesthetic preference may be a result of individuals recognising, and interacting with, natural patterns. The goal of this research was to investigate the impact of specific naturally occurring pattern types (spiral, branching, and fractal patterns) on user behaviour; investigating the potential of such patterns to control and influence how individuals interact with their surrounding environment. The results showed that the underlying geometry of natural patterns has the potential to induce attention responses to a statistically significant level

Visual Attention Bias for Self-Made Artworks

Action Contro