Attention theory-based agent system: using shopping street design simulation as an example

[[abstract]]"Pedestrians’ movements and spatial cognition in urban environments are main issues for urban designers in urban spatial planning and analysis. Past studies related to pedestrians mostly focused on crowd aggregation, and only described regular movements. However, the varied outcomes of crowds due to interactions between individuals and environments require further exploration. Therefore, this article aims to study interactions between a behavioral model of pedestrians and urban spaces, and regards micro-scale urban spaces as its target. This article suggests constructing and analyzing a pedestrian behavioral model using the ‘Attention Theory’, and introducing the rules and attributes of agent behavior oriented simulation. Based on the validation of actual street cases, the findings show that (1) the platform constructed by this study is proper for simulating a model of a window-shopping pedestrian, with accurate behaviors and movements; (2) stopping, and walking movements of pedestrians on urban streets can be interpreted as actual behavior induced by internal demands and the stimulation of external environments. The pedestrians can be represented by an agent program, and behavioral reactions of walking agents under different stimuli can be further simulated. Thus, this study suggests that a correlation study on pedestrian behaviors and spatial environments should become the criterion for urban street designers in order to help them create better flows.

Ubiquity

From its invention to the internet age, photography has been considered universal, pervasive, and omnipresent. This anthology of essays posits how the question of when photography came to be everywhere shapes our understanding of all manner of photographic media. Whether looking at a portrait image on the polished silver surface of the daguerreotype, or a viral image on the reflective glass of the smartphone, the experience of looking at photographs and thinking with photography is inseparable from the idea of ubiquity—that is, the apparent ability to be everywhere at once. While photography’s distribution across cultures today is undeniable, the insidious logics and pervasive myths that have governed its spread demand our critical attention, now more than ever

Securing the Everyday City: The Emerging Geographies of Counter-Terrorism

This thesis investigates the presence of counter-terrorist security within the everyday life of cities. It emerges from, and contributes to, ongoing debates concerning the place of security in contemporary urbanism, and discussions regarding the increased saturation of urban spaces with a diverse range of security interventions. Drawing on this work, this thesis argues that in order to better understand the urban geographies of security, instead of exclusively conceiving security as only imposed on urban spaces, we must ask how processes of securing cities are ʻlivedʼ. In doing so this study responds to the lack of attention to the complex relations between processes of security and lived everyday urban life. This thesis explores the neglected everyday life of security through a case study of an emerging form of counter-terrorist security apparatus within cities in the UK, examining the broadening of the National Security Strategy of the United Kingdom and the continuing development of CONTEST, the United Kingdomʼs counter-terrorist strategy. Taking London as a named example, the study concentrates on the security interventions of two research sites, the Southbank and Bankside area of the South Bank, and the Victoria Line of the London Underground, to examine how security addresses the everyday life of the city and how such practices are experienced as part of lived everyday urban life. In sum, this thesis focuses, first, on the processes through which the everyday city is secured and, second, it draws attention to and describes how those processes of securing are encountered and enacted, as they become part of the everyday life of cities

More than a Spasm, Less than a Sign: Queer Masculinity in American Visual Culture, 1915-1955

This research considers the contribution of visual culture to queer masculinity among white American men during a profound reorientation both in popular understandings and the practical conditions of eroticism between men. From about 1915 to 1955 a pragmatic libidinal economy centered on the theatrical effeminacy of “fairies” was displaced by one founded on the presumption of strongly delineated and relatively fixed hetero- and homo-sexual identities. Although medical discourses about queerness had been developing since the middle of the Nineteenth Century in Europe, what Americans of the opening decades of the twentieth century knew about queerness they learned unsystematically from hearsay, the observation of local people and practices, and visual culture. Photography and film built on existing representational conventions, such as those developed in painting, illustration, theatre and nightlife, but the voyeuristic position of the spectators of films and photographs provided a special liberty to look at men, fetishistically or critically, and imagine recreating their gestures in the medium of one’s own body. Gesture is understood here as the aestheticization of self-presence by means of the movement or disposition of the body and its props. Gestures articulate a selfhood that enjoys a conditional freedom in its relation to the social world while being subject to the structures of meaning it inherits and the operation of discipline. Through fine-grained analyses of queer gags in Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick comedy and nude figure studies by George Platt Lynes, this research argues that visual culture provided an apprenticeship in and theory of queer masculinity as a set of gestures. This study supplements the scholarly literature on Charlie Chaplin by foregrounding aspects of his star text that key audiences to recognize the masculinity of his signature Tramp as queer and cataloguing his use of dance, drag, and accident to provide a figure for homoeroticism in slapstick. It also significantly extends the existing critical literature on the photography of George Platt Lynes by considering camp, surrealism, and glamour as aspects of a decades-long engagement with the phenomenal texture of life as a middle-class queer American man

Out-of-Bounds: re-imagining the border through contemporary art narratives

The materiality of national borders is changing from structures of stone and steel to networks of ideas and understandings. Containment and exclusion, while still evident, are being understood more broadly in terms of their social and cultural impacts. Nationhood and citizenship are beginning to be diluted as economic opportunity gains primacy, such as in the European Union. Globalization spreads with little regard to locality. The Internet transcends place. Artists have explored the significance of borders in many ways, including their role as political entities, during war and its aftermath and the effect on refugees, after colonization, in their cartographic form and as barriers to individual crossers. In this research, I consider how, as a visual artist, I can gain insights into borders as a contemporary phenomenon through personal experiences of a range of borders. This research was carried out in the United States of America, Indonesia and Australia, at several sites, using contemporary inter-disciplinary art methodologies to re-contextualise and re-imagine borders. Drawing on my personal experience, news-media reports, and observational field trips, I have constructed narratives, using video and still photography, text, prints, drawings and artist books, performance and sound, to formulate my own multi-dimensional experiences of borders, as a visual method of understanding border dynamics. Working at the intersect of artists such as Guillermo Gomez-Pena on one side and the notions of social theorists such as Eiki Berg on the other, I consider the impact of the flux of borders through memory, stories and reminiscence. I propose that contemporary national borders can be perceived as transcending history and geography, nurturing the ascendancy of the non-citizen, and existing experientially so that each person, everywhere, into the future, could be the new border

Photography and Social Life: An Ethnography of Chinese Amateur Photography Online

This dissertation explores the ‘middle-brow’ (Bourdieu, 1990) photography practices of contemporary Chinese people in the digital era and how they produce, circulate, and consume photographic images on and off the Internet. Through participant observation and interviews with Chinese photo hobbyists and professionals working in the visual-Internet industry based in London, Beijing, or in the virtual world, it asks how the marriage between photography and the Internet in China has been similar to, or distinct from, its counterparts in the rest of the world, consolidating a vernacular photo-scape that has emerged alongside China’s booming Internet economy and socio-economic transformation over the past forty years. The research further addresses the agencies of both individuals and images, which determine what people want from photography in today’s China and what photography wants from this new networked, mediated society. The dissertation moves across persons, communities, organisations, and real and virtual sites, making it a multi-sited ethnography that traces social relations and ‘the circulation of cultural meanings, objects, and identities in diffuse time-space’ (Marcus, 1995: 96). The thesis presents a panoramic picture of the everyday practices carried out by Chinese amateur photographers, who are often imagined and categorised as the country’s middle class. The study focuses on two main aspects. The first is the activity of amateur photography, including the conspicuous consumption of photographic equipment and participation in relevant events, as well as social behaviours on and off of Internet photography platforms. The second involves the judgement and appreciation of photographic images on sites such as Tuchong, focusing on various kinds of aesthetic strategies around and within photographic images. The combination of the two has helped photo hobbyists in China to shape their values, career paths, and new identities in the context of digitalisation and the rise of social media

Do you see what I see?: photovoice, community-based research, and conservation education in Samburu, Kenya

2011 Spring.Includes bibliographical references.In the remote region of Samburu East District in north-central Kenya, community-based conservation (CBC) may arguably provide the best way forward for realizing conservation goals. Education is often identified as an integral part in realizing CBC goals in rural African contexts. Moreover, CBC efforts on the African continent have revealed mixed results regarding success, and there no agreed upon method for evaluating the effectiveness of community-based research on specific conservation education issues, particularly with those disempowered human populations living in and adjacent to conservation areas. Photovoice, a community-based participatory action research (CBPAR) strategy, is evaluated as an effective tool for realizing community-based research goals by its ability to address three core criteria: community-centered control, knowledge production and outcome-oriented results. The Samburu photovoice project employed park rangers and scouts, local teachers and community members in this creative CBPAR strategy to identify local conservation education concerns, and propose opportunities for community involvement in addressing these concerns. Over the course of 8 months, during one of the most severe droughts in recent memory, members of the Samburu community photographed their landscape and collectively addressed the current state of conservation knowledge. Through photo and narrative analysis and participant observation, the Samburu photovoice project is evaluated as effectively supported by the local community; has proven to produce conservation knowledge and allow for disempowered members of the community to have a voice on current issues that affect them; and has ultimately empowered some Samburu community members to act on their newly acquired knowledge. Implications for use as a methodology in Kenya and in other conservation education contexts are discussed. Additionally, narrative inquiry and holistic-content analysis strategies were used to uncover the culturally appropriate learning environment that may best allow for effective conservation education in the Samburu communities. Five of the original 26 photovoice participants were involved in semi-structured interviews to explore this learning phenomenon. The approach provided a rich description of three major themes regarding effective and culturally appropriate learning environments for conservation instruction in Samburu. This includes: exposure to new landscapes coupled with guided discussion, place-based and project-oriented instruction, and cultural drivers. Implications for the development of future conservation instruction in Samburu are given

Intuition, expertise and judgement in the capture and assessment of photographic images

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to our theoretical and experiential understanding of the exercise of multivariate, short time-slice photographic judgement. This research is grounded in both the ontology and the psychology of nonconscious (intuitive) cognition and its orthogonal interaction with conscious thought at the moment of capture or assessment of a photographic image. My principal mode of empirical investigation uses a cross-sectional, correlational design employing a testing instrument, the Intuitive Mastery Photography Test (the IMP Test) originally developed to support Ryan (2017). The tests were conducted upon a mixed sample of 106 amateur and professional photographers, twenty of whom also participated in an unstructured intraspective interview. The testing and interviews establish: (i) that ten constructs satisfactorily enclose the concept of expertise for this sample of photographers in this domain, (ii) that partitioning on the basis of inter alia gender, photographic qualification and genre produce significant differences in the engagement and conjugation of the ten constructs in the intuitive moment of capture or assessment, and (iii) that ‘style’ or ‘voice’ can be explained as an emergent property derived from the complexities of the exercise of expert, intuitive, photographic judgement. I conclude that, notwithstanding the sample size, there are grounds for strong confidence that the testing is of high external validity as a tool for individual analysis and modest confidence that it is also valid for the partitioned sub-groups