The Michelangelo effect. Art improves the performance in a virtual reality task developed for upper limb neurorehabilitation

The vision of an art masterpiece is associated with brain arousal by neural processes occurring quite spontaneously in the viewer. This aesthetic experience may even elicit a response in the motor areas of the observers. In the neurorehabilitation of patients with stroke, art observation has been used for reducing psychological disorders, and creative art therapy for enhancing physical functions and cognitive abilities. Here, we developed a virtual reality task which allows patients, by moving their hand on a virtual canvas, to have the illusion of painting some art masterpieces, such as The Creation of Adam of Michelangelo or The birth of Venus of Botticelli. Twenty healthy subjects (experiment 1) and four patients with stroke (experiment 2) performed this task and a control one in which they simply colored the virtual canvas. Results from User Satisfaction Evaluation Questionnaire and the NASA Task Load Index highlighted an appropriate level of usability. Moreover, despite the motor task was the same for art and control stimuli, the art condition was performed by healthy subjects with shorter trajectories (p = 0.001) and with a lower perception of physical demand (p = 0.049). In experiment 2, only the patients treated with artistic stimuli showed a reduction in the erroneous movements performed orthogonally to the canvas (p < 0.05). This finding reminds the so-called Mozart effect that improves the performance of subjects when they listen to classic music. Thus, we called this improvement in the performance when interacting with an artistic stimulus as Michelangelo effect

A framework study on the use of immersive XR technologies in the cultural heritage domain

Most cultural promotion and dissemination are nowadays performed through the digitization of heritage sites and museums, a necessary requirement to meet the new needs of the public. Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Virtual Reality (VR) have the potential to improve the experience quality and educational effect of these sites by stimulating users’ senses in a more natural and vivid way. In this respect, head-mounted display (HMD) devices allow visitors to enhance the experience of cultural sites by digitizing information and integrating additional virtual cues about cultural artifacts, resulting in a more immersive experience that engages the visitor both physically and emotionally. This study contributes to the development and incorporation of AR, MR, and VR applications in the cultural heritage domain by providing an overview of relevant studies utilizing fully immersive systems, such as headsets and CAVE systems, emphasizing the advantages that they bring when compared to handheld devices. We propose a framework study to identify the key features of headset-based Extended Reality (XR) technologies used in the cultural heritage domain that boost immersion, sense of presence, and agency. Furthermore, we highlight core characteristics that favor the adoption of these systems over more traditional solutions (e.g., handheld devices), as well as unsolved issues that must be addressed to improve the guests’ experience and the appreciation of the cultural heritage. An extensive search of Google Scholar, Scopus, IEEE Xplore, ACM Digital Library, and Wiley Online Library databases was conducted, including papers published from January 2018 to September 2022. To improve review reporting, the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines were used. Sixty-five papers met the inclusion criteria and were classified depending on the study’s purpose: education, entertainment, edutainment, touristic guidance systems, accessibility, visitor profiling, and management. Immersive cultural heritage systems allow visitors to feel completely immersed and present in the virtual environment, providing a stimulating and educational cultural experience that can improve the quality and learning purposes of cultural visits. Nonetheless, the analyzed studies revealed some limitations that must be faced to give a further impulse to the adoption of these technologies in the cultural heritage domain

'Let it Grow'- Immersive installation in relation to culture expression and audiences' perceptual experience

Currently, immersive art installation has become one of the most rapidly growing segments of the immersive design industry. As a hybrid of art and technology to collectively disrupt the zone of single material expression, full-body, sensory immersion installations have emerged and given people more opportunities to experience different realities. As various immersive exhibitions emerged in the year 2019, it was evident to see that more pop-up exhibitions start to be generated by instant interaction and astonishing digital illusions. The lucrative market space and audiences' pursuits of novelty underlined by the overall development of this industry provoked the critical question that this thesis takes into consideration, that is, 'What is the intrinsic value behind immersive art?' In order to enhance the cultural perception of this project, it is significant to understand the relationship between audiences' cultural experiences and a range of design methods. Based on audiences' linear experience of this project, this study divides audiences' experience into three stages - 'before exploring', 'exploring', and 'after exploring'. In the first stage, this study investigates the realm of psychology to gain an understanding of how the inherent value of artworks promotes people's intrinsic motivation for spontaneous immersion. In the second stage, this study conducts two representative case studies adopting several design factors to understand how the aesthetic distance between the artwork and audiences' knowledge affects audiences' perception of an unknown culture. The goal is to retrieve the optimal aesthetic balance as well as further develop the reflective design approaches. In the third stage, this study strategically carries out through practical design using design approaches to better understand participants' perceptual experience. To investigate how the perceptual process evolves, a practical design is conducted by creating a physically immersive installation based on a Finnish myth story called 'Revontulet'. Besides, a questionnaire is designed to further understand audiences' interests and willingness to participate in the installation, and the questionnaire aims at gathering audiences’ feelings, including different factors, to evaluate the design approaches and the design work

The Color Revolution: Printed Books In Eighteenth-Century Japan

Beginning in the mid-1760s, images printed in more than five colors in early modern Japan were known as nishiki-e 錦絵, or “brocade pictures,” an appellation that signaled their visual richness in distinction to prints in monochrome or limited color. Most accounts of full-color printing locate the development of this technology and its visual impact in the medium of the single-sheet print, as part of the genre of ukiyo-e 浮世絵 (the “pictures of the floating world”). This project revises that view by considering the illustrated books produced in the full-color technique, which predate or appear contemporaneously with the so-called “nishiki-e revolution.” Closely analyzing the materiality and visual programs of these books reveals how their use of printed color not only constitutes an important shift in technical practices of printing, but also signals a wider engagement with the artistic, social, and scientific discourses of mid-eighteenth century Japan. Ranging from interest in the natural world to painting, from poetry to scientific classification, from elite milieux to commercial publishers, these illustrated books demonstrate the convergence of a diverse set of concerns upon the particular medium of the color-printed, thread-bound book. The three case studies analyzed in this dissertation take up books differentiated by subject matter, style, and artistic genres. The first two chapters examine a book of fishes and its sequel, on the theme of plants and insects; both books are genre-bending works that combine concerns of poetry, natural studies, and painting. The third chapter considers two picture books of the floating world (ukiyo-ehon 浮世絵本), which feature actors and prostitutes of the pleasure quarter, respectively. Tracing the movement of printed “full color” from its emergence in the context of coterie poetry groups to its later status as a commercial imperative, this study reframes the earliest full-color illustrated books as critical artifacts of technological and epistemological change for picture-making and print in early modern Japan, centered around the materiality and conceptual power of color

Wish You Were Here, Hiroshige (2014)

As if responding to the call of the exhibition title ...(someone in the class sensed the artist’s personal invitation), a group of RISD students undertook a virtual journey through space and time to Edo period Japan. For a duration of a semester the entire class plunged directly into the midst of the Tokaido world, mixing with all kinds of travelers and local residents, learning their customs and manners, trying out various travel modes and road-side services, exploring every bend of the road, in winter and summer, at dawn and dusk, in sunshine and violent storm. ... “Wish you were here,” is an exclamation of a traveler overwhelmed by the new sights and desiring to share the excitement with those of kindred spirit. The class that authored this project enthusiastically addresses these words to the exhibition’s visitors and catalog readers. -- Foreword, Wish You Were Here, Hiroshige Contributing Authors Annie Bai, Hanjie Bao, Shannon N. Crawford, Yue Meredith Du, Emily G. Fang, Jordan Hu, Haesoo Ji, Alexandra Ju, Chae Hyun Kim, Yi Bin Liang, Jacqueline Lin, Tiara F. Little, Hanyu Liu, Alexander Mattaway, Devyn Park, Jimin Park, Mina Park, Jacob Reeves, Jonathan Rinker, Joseph Sands, Karnth Sombatsiri, Rachel Whitely, Chaoqun Wang, Therese Tachee Whang, Xiaowei Vica Zhao.https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/thad_studentwork_ukiyo-e_prints_exhibitioncatalogs/1001/thumbnail.jp

Endurant Bodies/Atmospheric Borders: Race, Indigeneity, and Transmedia Art in Contemporary Canada

Interrogating post-9/11 shifts in the institutional and discursive organization of policing and incarceration capacities, state surveillance practices, and citizenship and immigration policy, this work argues that the contemporary Canadian state manages the boundary between the (normatively white) social body it names and its Indigenous and racialized Others by way of an atmospheric bordering regime. An ambient system of disciplinary pressures that overreaches the state’s territorial limits, this regime functions as a technology, simultaneously representational and irreducibly material, for moving bodies through and removing bodies from the state by consolidating and ascribing, to some bodies more than others, particular forms of racial and Indigenous difference – interrelated and co-constitutive, yet never strictly equivalent. Through this process, racialized and Indigenous bodies are variously configured as strange, backward, and contaminating; as ‘points of tension’ that, for threatening to rend a “shared atmosphere” (Ahmed, 2014, para. 15) of national belonging, are targeted for exclusion, expulsion, and elimination. While tracing how these dynamics weave through specific discursive artefacts (policy documents, press releases, news reports, legal proceedings, and governmental pronouncements), I also emphasize how critical representational practices might hold open the possibility of contestation. To this end, I turn to the work of four contemporary Indigenous and racialized artists working in Canada, exploring how their transmedial practices recast our embodied encounters with difference, and help us to grasp at ways of being in touch with o/Others across and against the racial and (settler) colonial logics embedded in the labour of atmospheric bordering

Bodies and labour: industrialisation, dance and performance

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Master of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel UniversityThis thesis presents an interdisciplinary analysis of ideas regarding the introduction of technologies in the field of dance and performance since the industrial era. The first two chapters analyse different historical periods, thus creating a parallel between the establishment of work-science, and emerging methods and styles within performing arts that utilise technology as a core element for its creation. The historical examination of the field of work-science studies allows the sketching of a variety of relationships between labour and technical developments, focusing especially on the systematisation of productive processes, the integration of new technical developments and the measurements of body’s rhythms and capacities. Therefore, rather than presenting a full historical study of industrialisation and technological performance, this research proposes a segmented analysis of two different periods: firstly, a parallel between Taylorism and Electric Dance since the late nineteenth century; and secondly, some relevant notions of Fordism, Mass Ornament and film studies from the 1920s. In the last part of this thesis, I present some general ideas on post-Fordism and digital performance that will serve as a base for future research development. This investigation is rooted in the field of performing arts, introducing ideas and concepts from labour studies and generating a critical approach to the integration of technologies within performing arts and its aesthetical, methodological and creative outcomes. The research encompasses a wide range of perspectives, from early photographic experiments, film studies, entertainment culture, video games, and digital technologies, formulating a general approach to technological transformations since the late nineteenth century. The key question throughout this research is precisely a double-sided adaptation between movement style and technical development: a process of intermedial configurations based on technological progress, analysed from a labour-science perspective, and then applied to performance art and entertainment culture

Spatialising Illustration

As an illustrator I reflect on human behaviour and the psychological effects of space through drawing. I use people I have met and whose lives intrigue me. Taking a woman I know, I observe and draw. ‘She sat at the table in the sparse kitchen. It had belonged to her grandmother, and her mother before her.’ (Regan, 2012) This quote is taken from the illustrated book I have created ‘The Set,' it is significant in introducing what I discovered about space. Space is not physical and universal. It is personal and formed in the mind. ‘The Set’ explores a woman and the spaces she inhabits. I visualise and try to make sense of this by drawing