Chinese Ornaments of the Imperial Robe: A modern motif design interpretation

“Twelve Ornaments” are a group of ancient Chinese symbols and designs that are considered highly auspicious. In ancient China, because they signified authority and power, they were employed in the decoration of textile fabrics, and were embroidered on vestments of state, such as the Imperial Robe. They are the patterns that could represent the essence of Chinese traditional national dress. This thesis project is based on the analysis, research and summarization of this design history as well as the establishment of effective visual design solutions intended to transform the twelve ornaments into modern motif designs. The design will retain the traditional cultural elements of the motifs and help people to learn the meaning represented by such ancient traditional patterns intuitively. More importantly, it also shows the possibility of using traditional patterns in the modern design fields, by providing inspirations to designers who are interested in Chinese traditional culture and patterns. This furthers and promotes the communication of Chinese and Western culture in the design field. In this thesis, through research and conceptual experiment, an effective visual design study will be conducted to interpret and develop Chinese ornaments from a traditional Imperial Robe into modern designs. This will also help people to better understand and thus will increase interest in traditional Chinese culture. This project integrates research, informational poster design, a design set of 12 motifs and design of a poster series

‘The Catholic Florist’: flowers and deviance in the mid-nineteenth century Church of England

The middle decades of the nineteenth century saw a dramatic change in the appearance of many ecclesiastical interiors due to the growing popularity of Catholic revivalism in the Church of England. One aspect of this process was the increasing abundance of flowers in churches in defiance of opinions which regarded such practices as incompatible with Protestantism. Such opposition also drew strength from cultural associations between flowers and dangerously alluring femininity and sexuality. It was popularly feared that priests were using flowers to lure women into their clutches. The medievalising work of Pugin and the members of the Ecclesiological Society played a major role in the moral legitimisation of both flowers and floral motifs in the decoration of churches. At the same time, rising living standards were bringing cut-flowers, including those forced in hot houses, within the budgets of middle-class households. The enhanced respectability of flowers as suitable for sacred contexts fuelled the development of an emergent craze for floral decoration in the home. Practices of the use of flowers as ornaments increasingly crossed back and forth between domestic and ecclesiastical contexts. The continued association of blossoms with the realm of the feminine did not, however, lead to sustained moral panic because flower-arranging Anglo-Catholic priests were increasingly seen as effeminates rather than as sexual predators. This analysis of developments in the early to mid-Victorian periods is seen as forming the basis for further work into the subsequent floral interconnections between sacred contexts, aestheticism and the Arts and Crafts Movement

Media Parergon, Media Ergon: An Analytical Overview of the Grammar and Pragmatics of the Media Language

The present work has a central question: how a certain media distinguishes itself from the other communicational and linguistic apparatuses of the world. And with that, he turns on the big question of what each media practice would be. The hypothesis defended here is that each type of media, in its definition, is a language and not an apparatus. Using the concepts of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and John R. Searle, the concepts of parergon and ergon are discussed. Thus, there is the consideration that if the study of the parergon is a logical study, close to the philosophical debates of the Analytical Philosophy and of authors of Continental Philosophy that quoted Wittgenstein, the study of ergon is a pragmatic study, focused on the speech acts. Logic and Pragmatics do not enter here as competitors, but rather as analytical partners in the definition and study of a language. While the first one analyzes the clipping modes, the second analyzes the action made possible by its clipping

The fiddle in a tune : John Doherty and the Donegal fiddle tradition

Publisher PD

Extreme offspring ornamentation in American coots is favored by selection within families, not benefits to conspecific brood parasites

Offspring ornamentation typically occurs in taxa with parental care, suggesting that selection arising from social interactions between parents and offspring may underlie signal evolution. American coot babies are among the most ornamented offspring found in nature, sporting vividly orange-red natal plumage, a bright red beak, and other red parts around the face and pate. Previous plumage manipulation experiments showed that ornamented plumage is favored by strong parental choice for chicks with more extreme ornamentation but left unresolved the question as to why parents show the preference. Here we explore natural patterns of variation in coot chick plumage color, both within and between families, to understand the context of parental preference and to determine whose fitness interests are served by the ornamentation. Conspecific brood parasitism is common in coots and brood parasitic chicks could manipulate hosts by tapping into parental choice for ornamented chicks. However, counter to expectation, parasitic chicks were duller (less red) than nonparasitic chicks. This pattern is explained by color variation within families: Chick coloration increases with position in the egg-laying order, but parasitic eggs are usually the first eggs a female lays. Maternal effects influence chick coloration, but coot females do not use this mechanism to benefit the chicks they lay as parasites. However, within families, chick coloration predicts whether chicks become “favorites” when parents begin control over food distribution, implicating a role for the chick ornamentation in the parental life-history strategy, perhaps as a reliable signal of a chick’s size or age. (Includes Supporting information.

Why can’t you dance to the piper?

Publisher PD

A novel approach to symbolic algebra

A prototype for an extensible interactive graphical term manipulation system is presented that combines pattern matching and nondeterministic evaluation to provide a convenient framework for doing tedious algebraic manipulations that so far had to be done manually in a semi-automatic fashion.Comment: 15 page

Extreme offspring ornamentation in American coots is favored by selection within families, not benefits to conspecific brood parasites

Offspring ornamentation typically occurs in taxa with parental care, suggesting that selection arising from social interactions between parents and offspring may underlie signal evolution. American coot babies are among the most ornamented offspring found in nature, sporting vividly orange-red natal plumage, a bright red beak, and other red parts around the face and pate. Previous plumage manipulation experiments showed that ornamented plumage is favored by strong parental choice for chicks with more extreme ornamentation but left unresolved the question as to why parents show the preference. Here we explore natural patterns of variation in coot chick plumage color, both within and between families, to understand the context of parental preference and to determine whose fitness interests are served by the ornamentation. Conspecific brood parasitism is common in coots and brood parasitic chicks could manipulate hosts by tapping into parental choice for ornamented chicks. However, counter to expectation, parasitic chicks were duller (less red) than nonparasitic chicks. This pattern is explained by color variation within families: Chick coloration increases with position in the egg-laying order, but parasitic eggs are usually the first eggs a female lays. Maternal effects influence chick coloration, but coot females do not use this mechanism to benefit the chicks they lay as parasites. However, within families, chick coloration predicts whether chicks become “favorites” when parents begin control over food distribution, implicating a role for the chick ornamentation in the parental life-history strategy, perhaps as a reliable signal of a chick’s size or age. (Includes Supporting information.