Visualising Surfaces, Surfacing Vision: Introduction

In this Introduction to a special section on Visualising Surfaces, Surfacing Vision, we argue that to conceive vision in the contemporary world it is necessary to examine its embedding within, expression via and organisation on the surface. First, we review recent social and cultural theories to demonstrate how and why an attention to surfaces is salient today. Second, we consider how vision may be understood in terms of surfaces, discussing the emergence of the term ‘surface’, and its transhistorical relationship with vision. Third, we introduce the contributions to the special section, which cover written articles and artworks. We make connections between them, including their exploration of reflexivity and recursion, observation, objectivity and agency, ontology and epistemology, relationality, process, and two- and three-dimensionality. Fourth, we consider some implications of an understanding of visualising surfaces/surfacing vision

Enhancing preschoolers' executive functions through embedding cognitive activities in shared book reading

Given evidence that early executive functioning sets the stage for a broad range of subsequent outcomes, researchers have sought to identify ways to foster these cognitive capacities. An increasingly common approach involves computerized ‘brain training’ programs, yet there are questions about whether these are well suited for fostering the early development of executive functions (EFs). The current series of studies sought to design, develop, and provide evidence for the efficacy of embedding cognitive activities in a commonplace activity – shared reading of a children’s book. The book, Quincey Quokka’s Quest, required children to control their thinking and behaviour to help the story’s main character through a series of obstacles. The first study investigated effects of reading with embedded cognitive activities in individual and group contexts on young children’s executive functions (EFs). The second study compared reading with embedded cognitive activities against a more-active control condition (dialogic reading) that similarly engaged children in the reading process yet lacked clear engagement of EFs. The third study sought to investigate whether the effect of reading the story with embedded EF activities changed across differing doses of the intervention and whether effects persisted 2 months post-intervention. Findings provide converging evidence of intervention effects on working memory and shifting in as little as 3 weeks (compared to more traditional reading) and maintenance of these gains 2 months later. This suggests the efficacy of embedding cognitive activities in the context of everyday activities, thereby extending the range of users and contexts in which this approach can be used

Simulated Translucency

Including accounts by prominent artists and professionals, the collection emphasises the centrality of use and experimentation in the shaping of technological platforms

Touch, Digital Communication and the Ticklish

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Becoming Animated

To become animated is to exhibit a capacity for spontaneous movement that is associated with living beings. This association is open to question in technically gl"neraled animation. Modern incarnations of animated states had an unsettling autonomy - an uncanny liveliness associated with the artificially vivified automaton. Factory workers were seen as such by audiences in films like Modem Times; assembly-lines of mechanically-possessed, somnambulant bodies whose actions and gestures were dictated by their machines. Understood as the substitution of robotic machinery for the animus of a governing consciousness, spectacles of mechanical animation called humanist notions of selfdetermination into question. Feminist film theorists have argued that the way audiences viewed these figures was partly prefigured in the form of the doll _ woman-automaton. I Feminist cultural and literary critics have dwelt at length on gendered forms of mechanical animation. The following study begins by comparing the way Rey Chow and Helene Cixous analyse Freud's Interpretation of the woman-automaton In Hoffman'S tale, 'The Sand-Man'

The Svankmajer Touch

Czech Surrealist and animator Jan vankmajer has experimented with tactility as a sensory modality that can kindle affect by analogy. His approach to tactile experience is also as far removed from the aims and applications of computational theories of haptic perception as one could imagine. This article elaborates on the difference between objects that feel life-like through the incorporation of touch in multimodal tele-interaction, and the way Svankmajer conveys the vitality of objects through touch