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

iPulse: September 2013

Issues: September 19, 2013 September 20, 2013 September 23, 2013 September 24, 2013 September 25, 2013 September 26, 2013 September 27, 2013 September 30, 2013https://spiral.lynn.edu/studentnews/1190/thumbnail.jp

A Cultural Tourism Strategy: Enriching Culture and Building Tourism in Buffalo Niagara

Their continued dedication to the region\u27s cultural, arts and heritage organizations and the development of cultural tourism has been, and will continue to be, essential to attaining the vision of “A Cultural Tourism Strategy”. The cultural tourism mission is to strengthen cultural, artistic and heritage organizations; expand individual opportunities for creativity and interpretation; help our regional economy grow; enhance the quality of life in our communities; advance the image and identity of the region; and build the region\u27s reputation as a world-class tourism destination. These benefits reinforce one another and can be achieved together

'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

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

Art can empower children and lead them to think seriously about significant critical issues

This thesis is an investigation of how students can benefit through art and how visual arts educators can engage students in thinking about critical issues that are happening within contemporary society. Raising people’s awareness of the value of art, and especially urging to practice art better in schools’ curriculums are the starting point. This thesis includes looking at selective literature from Elliot Eisner, Charles Fowler, Mika Munakata and other educators and authors. The author also examines select contemporary practices in art education that occur in different settings, for example, in school, in gallery, in museum, and in community. The author argues that art is integral to the school curriculum and has the power to make impact and bring about change. This thesis identifies children as the next generation and society’s future. And through this thesis the author declares the importance within education of all subjects in children’s education and these importantly must include Art

Santa Clara Magazine, Volume 55 Number 4, Summer 2014

20 - A DAY WITH THE DALAI LAMA photos by Charles Barry, Noah Berger, and Michael Collopy . Close-ups and long views from the spiritual leader’s Feb. 24 visit. 24 - THE CATHOLIC WRITER TODAY by Dana Gioia. The poet, critic, and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts argues that Catholic writers must renovate and reoccupy their own tradition. At stake: the diversity and vitality of the American arts. 38 - OUR STORIES AND THE THEATRE OF AWE an interview with Marilynne Robinson. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer speaks with Editor Steven Boyd Saum about grace, discernment, and being a modern believer.https://scholarcommons.scu.edu/sc_mag/1029/thumbnail.jp

Southeast Ohio Winter/Spring 2017

Table of contents: Lyrical Legacy Charlie’s Red Star Blues Barn is one fun house of cool for area music lovers ... 4 Prawn Appetit Don’s Prawns & More brings sustainable seafood to Ohio ... 6 Tavern Tenacity Two bar managers overcome tragedy and revive Ohio\u27s longest operating bar in Nelsonville ... 10 Home Brewed One woman’s dream to open a coffee house in Peebles becomes reality and provides a needed community space ... 12 Grill Seeker Winding backroads lead to the region’s best barbecue joints ... 14 Lore City Salt Fork State Park features beauty in every acre ... 16 Athens Bodhi Tree Guesthouse and Studio offers guests an out-of-body experience ... 17 Portsmouth Sudzy’s Pin-Up Palace features clothes with moxie ... 18 Equity in Education After 20 years, how is the public support? ... 19 Building a Foundation Jackson County residents continue a commitment to helping the local homeless ... 20 An Upward Bound Bond For the Dunn family women, mutual support and a strong mindset is what matters most ... 22 Building Brilliance New federal dollars will link “makerspaces” and Innovation Centers to create jobs and encourage investment ... 26 ART HAPPENS ... 28 Finding New Threads A St. Clairsville mother-daughter duo bring new material to the regional quilting scene ... 30 Old School Cool A blacksmith artisan in McConnelsville helps revitalize the 19th century metal practice ... 31 Crafted Culture Local art teachers go beyond classroom instruction to offer art lessons to the Lancaster community ... 32 Let the Light In One man’s career change brings a resurgence of stained glass making to Chillicothe ... 33 Tales from the Farm Discover the rich history of three local family farms celebrating centennial and bicentennial birthdays this year ... 34 Civil Society Take an upclose and personal journey with the reenactment of the American Civil War\u27s Battle of Buffington Island ... 38 A Grounded Gentleman Sixty years in the making, Dorsell Bibbee continues diggin’ dirt ... 46https://ohioopen.library.ohio.edu/southeast-ohio/1007/thumbnail.jp

(Dis)enchantments and perambulations: 'walking-with' intangible cultural heritage, coerced walking and reluctant heritage

This submission presents findings and makings drawn from an emergent hybrid participatory walking and multi-media arts practice, contextualised within and around specific heritage narratives. The thesis features two walking arts case studies: "Honouring Esther" (2015-17), a project based on walking the route of a Nazi Death March, and "Sweet Waters" (2017), a cycle of walks exploring the legacies of slaveownership in Bath. In both case studies, registers of walking are juxtaposed in a creative exploration motivated by a social justice desire to realise agency in heritage as process. Honouring Esther represents an early iteration of walking-with exploring dissonant interventions to stimulate empathic dialogues. "Sweet Waters" develops a further iteration of the approach as a critical creative unsettling of an authorised heritage narrative. In the Humanities, an interest in affect, sensation and the corporeal, described broadly as the ‘affective’ turn, has unfolded a space valuing contributions from artistic practice. This Creative Practice as Research undertaken in that intradisciplinary space contributes to the ‘creative’ turn thus afforded; this is a walking arts engagement with the practices of heritage. The submission brings together activist concerns underpinned by a focus on the walking itself. Through developing an understanding of the somatic, embracing an alertness to the more-than-representational, a co-creative walking and multi-media approach has emerged. Attending to matter and the power of things, drawing on embodied experience and curated content, a critically questioning and retelling of heritage narratives begins. Grounded in the body and bodies in motion, walking and questioning, new knowledge and understandings are produced as part of an intangible cultural heritage process. Walkers become critical story carriers. The submission presents iterations of 'walking-with' as an emergent walking arts practice exploring particular heritage contexts. In these contexts 'walking-with' generates empathic dialogues and builds solidarity in attending to difficult, reluctant, heritages. In addition to indicating new directions for this creative practice and observations of possible interest to research in related fields, I propose 'walking-with' as a non-confrontational approach of potential value for working creatively with other dissonant and complex heritage narratives