Nelson Goodman's distinction between autographic and allographic arts is appealing, we suggest, because it promises to resolve several prima facie puzzles. We consider and rebut a recent argument that alleges that digital images explode the autographic/allographic distinction. Regardless, there is another familiar problem with the distinction, especially as Goodman formulates it: it seems to entirely ignore an important sense in which all artworks are historical. We note in reply that some artworks can be considered both as historical products and (...) as formal structures. Talk about such works is ambiguous between the two conceptions. This allows us to recover Goodman's distinction: art forms that are ambiguous in this way are allographic. With that formulation settled, we argue that digital images are allographic. We conclude by considering the objection that digital photographs, unlike other digital images, would count as autographic by our criterion; we reply that this points to the vexed nature of photography rather than any problem with the distinction. (shrink)

Modern technology plays an important role in our daily lives. Many people use technology for their works, interactions, and special interests such as art. Art as a discipline, which expresses human emotion and creative side, takes a new form for its contextualization with the help of information technology. A neologism for this discipline is “digital art.” Some experts who employ a traditional value in their aesthetical perspective consider this new approach unlikely. Walter Benjamin, an eminent figure from this group, (...) stated that art must have an aura in its production as is the case in paintings. With this aura, the work of art and not artwork has uniqueness of value. However, the problem arises when information technology becomes a predominant tool for the work of art. Digital art does not consider the aura as the core value in defining something as a work of art. Furthermore, digital artists think that art can exist within a digital object and maintain its uniqueness. Parallel with the latter, this article will describe the dispute and make a clear statement that a work of art in the digital age does not require aura. (shrink)

Abstract: The purpose of this article is to highlight the aesthetic layout created by the digital device in the ontological autonomy of the digital representation. As a result, in the digital screen, as a simulated immersive area, the object is alienated through the hyper-representation of a hyper-reproduction: a hyper-reproduction which causes the data and its image to be the monadic support that multiplies it in always livable creases by interactivity. A digitally-represented world would become the ultimate alienation (...) of the modern representational area in terms of excess of closeness. Thus, this question would cause the simulacral strategy of post-modernity through its digitization. -/- Resumen: Este artículo se propone evidenciar, en la autonomía ontológica de la representación digital, la disposición estética abierta por el dispositivo digital. Como consecuencia, en la pantalla digital, en cuanto super cie inmersiva simu- lacral, se logra enajenar el objeto por medio de la hiper-representación de una hiper-reproductibilidad. Una hiper-reproductibilidad que hace del data y su «ima- gen» el sustento monádico que lo multiplica en pliegues siempre habitables por la interactividad. El mundo representado digitalmente se haría «espectáculo» de la enajenación de nitiva de la super cie representacional moderna en cuanto exceso de cercanía. Cuestión que provocaría la estrategia simulacral de la modernidad en lo postmoderno por medio de su digitalización. (shrink)

Objective: Changing contour lines of the external nose following traumatic, aesthetic and tumour surgeries have become very trendy. The goal of this research is to study the several soft tissue landmarks, measurements (linear distances, ratios, angles) of the external nose and its nasal indicis using a computer program. Methods: Face region were taken a photographs of the two hundred adults. Analyses of linear (the lengths of nares, nasal bridge, and columella and nose height, nares width) and angular analyses (angles of (...) nasofrontal, nasolabial and nasal tip) were computed and averaged for gender with age. As for the shape of the nose, it was categorized as subunits: nasal tip (sharp, normal, wide, protrusive and asymmetric), nasal base (normal, wide, asymmetric) nasal alae (normal, thick, thin, asymmetric), nares (normal, horizontal and asymmetric) and columella (normal, wide, short and bifid) nasal base, nares, nasal alae, columella and classified subunit as normal, protrusive, sharp, asymmetric, and wide. Results: The nose height have to 49.05 ± 3.48 mm in young male adults, 50.37 ± 2.33 mm in young female adults. Distance lengthwise the nasal bridge have to 48.60 ± 3.24 in males, 37.09 ± 5.49 females. The two mean measured nasal lengths were significantly greater in men. At the same time, angular measurements for nasolabial and interalar were higher in males. Nasal tip angle was 127.47 ± 82.9° in males, 75.8° in females. On average, young male adults had larger nasal linear distances such as nasal bridge length, nares lengths and nares widths relation of height than young female adults (p;<0.01); No gender differences were observed for columella widths and to nose height ratio (p;<0.01). The nasofrontal, nasal tip, nasolabial and interalar angles showed statistically significant differences among young male adults and young female adults (p;<0.05). The nasolabial angle exhibited considerable variability. The shape details of nares was showed large variability. Nasal base, nasal tip and nasal alae shapes were similar, nares asymmetry was more frequently compared with other features. Conclusions: The Anatolian people’s nose exhibits wide nasal tip, has a wider nasal base, and is more thicker at the alae, with wider definition of the columella. The significant gender differences of nasal shapes were found. The wide and sharp features of nasal tip were related to an important features in men, whereas asymmetric nares were dominant in young female adults. Using digitized reference details, this study helped define the best cosmetic surgery recreate the nose and increase the success of customized therapy. Also, our findings facial alteratios, facial reconstruction, personal identification, Trauma assessments may also have data banks based on age and gender. (shrink)

As artefacts, the worlds of digital games are designed and developed to fulfil certain expressive, functional, and experiential objectives. During play, players infer these purposes and aspirations from various aspects of their engagement with the gameworld. Influenced by their sociocultural backgrounds, sensitivities, gameplay preferences, and familiarity with game conventions, players construct a subjective interpretation of the intentions with which they believe the digital game in question was created. By analogy with the narratological notion of the implied author, we (...) call the figure to which players ascribe these intentions ‘the implied designer’. In this article, we introduce the notion of the implied designer and present an initial account of how appreciators ascribe meaning to interactive, fictional gameworlds and act within them based on what they perceive to be the designer’s intentions. (shrink)

The article analyzes the concept of serendipity as a property and state of personality. The approach chosen by the author is aesthetic; the problem is covered from the perspectives of pedagogy and didactics. The object of the study is the phenomenon of "intuitive serendipity", the subject is the methods of creativity development. Comparison of different types of thinking (inductive, deductive, paradoxical) allowed us to make a number of generalizing judgments. In particular, the superiority of "paradox logic" over formal logic and (...) the role of intuition and "sense of truth" in the process of cognition. On the basis of the conclusions it is proposed to discuss the author's hypothesis of the trigger principle of learning based on cultivating a craving for knowledge, ideological immunity and the ability to independently search for and analyze information, as well as to implement it in the creative process. В статье приводится анализ понятия серендипности как свойства и состояния личности. Выбранный автором подход — эстетический; освещение проблемы в ракурсах педагогики и дидактики. Объект исследования — феномен "интуитивной прозорливости", предмет — методики развития творческого потенциала. Сравнение различных типов мышления (индуктивное, дедуктивное, парадоксальное) позволило выйти на ряд суждений обобщающего характера. В частности — о превосходстве "логики парадокса" над логикой формальной и о роли интуиции и "чувства истины" в процессе познания. На основании выводов предлагается обсудить авторскую гипотезу триггерного принципа обучения, основанного на культивировании тяги к знаниям, идеологического иммунитета и способности самостоятельно искать и анализировать информацию, а также реализовывать ее в творческом процессе. (shrink)

The first chapter of The Sympathy of Things published in Research & Design: Textile Tectonics (2011). It develops the notion of a “gothic ontology” which inverts Deleuze’s baroque ontology of the fold. Where in the universe of the fold continuity precedes singularity, in the gothic singularity precedes continuity. The reversal is based on the Ruskinian notion of the rib, which is the source of “changefulness”, expressed through “millions of variations” of figures. Figures move and change only to interact with or (...) connect to other figures, i.e. to build configurations. Ruskin’s notion of savageness, which is always categorized as an ethics-over-aesthetics, now becomes a notion of craft that is inherent to matter, not to humans. (shrink)

This richly illustrated book offers new perspectives and research on how digital culture is transforming museums in the 21st century, as they strive to keep pace with emerging technologies driving cultural and social change, played out not only in today’s pervasive networked environment of the Internet and Web, but in everyday life, from home to work and on city streets. In a world where digital culture has redefined human information behavior as life in code and digits, increasingly it (...) dominates human activity and communication. These developments have radically changed the expectations of the museum visitor, real and virtual, the work of museum professionals and, most prominently, the nature of museum exhibitions, while digital art and life in a digitally saturated world is changing our ways of seeing, doing, our senses and aesthetics. -/- Overall, this book creates a new picture of the 21st-century museum field. As museums become shared spaces with their communities, local, national and global and move from collection-centered to user-/visitor-centered institutions, they are assuming new roles and responsibilities tied to new goals for engaging their audience, conveying meaning through collections, creating learning experiences and importantly, connecting to daily digital life and culture integral to the museum ecosystem. Our studies of recent exhibitions at museums leading change are used to exemplify new directions, while they point to a reimagined vision for museums of the future at the heart of which is the integration of digital culture and visitor experience and participation in real and virtual space. (shrink)

In this paper I suggest that, over and above the need to explore and understand the technological newness of computer art works, there is a need to address the aesthetic significance of the changes and effects that such technological newness brings about, considering the whole environmental transaction pertaining to new media, including what they can or do offer and what users do or can do with such offerings, and how this whole package is integrated into our living spaces and activities. (...) I argue that, given the primacy of computer-based interaction in the new-media, the notion of ‘ornamentality’ indicates the ground-floor aesthetics of new-media environments. I locate ornamentality not only in the logically constitutive principles of the new-media (hypertextuality and interactivity) but also in their multiform cultural embodiments (decoration as cultural interface). I utilize Kendall Walton’s theory of ornamentality in order to construe a puzzle pertaining to the ornamental erosion of information in new-media environments. I argue that insofar as we consider new-media to be conduits of ‘real-life’, the excessive density of ornamental devices prevalent in certain new-media environments forces us to conduct our inquiries under conditions of neustic uncertainty, that is, uncertainty concerning the kind of relationship that we, the users, have to the propositional content mediated. I conclude that this puzzle calls our attention to a peculiar interrogatory complexity inherent in any game of knowledge-seeking conducted across the infosphere, which is not restricted to the simplest form of data retrieval, especially in mixed-reality environments and when the knowledge sought is embodied mimetically. (shrink)

Ask most any cognitive scientist working today if a digital computational system could develop aesthetic sensibility and you will likely receive the optimistic reply that this remains an open empirical question. However, I attempt to show, while drawing upon the later Wittgenstein, that the correct answer is in fact available. And it is a negative a priori. It would seem, for example, that recent computational successes in generative AI and textual attribution, most notably those of Donald Foster (famed finder (...) of Ted Kazinski a.k.a. “the Unibomber”) speak favorably of the connectionist model's capacity to overcome the “aspect blindness” handicap in this domain. I argue however that such results are only achievable when rigid input‐to‐output parameters are given, and that this element is precisely what is absent in standard examples of aesthetic judgment. I thus conclude that while the connectionist model anticipated by Turing may provide the best approach for the AI project, its capacity for meeting its own sufficiency requirements is necessarily crippled by its inability to share in what can be generally referred to as the collective engagements of human solidarity. (shrink)

This essay provides an interpretation of the potential and limits of Michael Fried's difficult claims in his essay "Art and Objecthood" (1967) that cinema by its nature escapes the problems of modernism and also escapes the problems of theater. By focusing on Stanley Cavell's account of how cinema as an automatic medium escapes problems associated with variability across performances, I try to render a version of Fried's claim about cinema and theater that can ground a figurative version of his claim (...) about cinema and modernism, where film at least provides us a symbol of relief from concerns about medium specificity. In the second part of the essay I argue that something close to Cavell's and Fried's thoughts (about using the figure of theater to remind us of cinema's specificity, but also of cinema in its character as a symbol of relief from medium-specific concerns) takes on a certain urgency in questions about what cinema is in the digital age, manifested in representations of theater in the digitally photographed "Shakespeariadas" series by the contemporary Argentine filmmaker Matías Piñeiro. (shrink)

Ornamentality is pervasive in the new media and it is related to their essential characteristics: dispersal, hypertextuality, interactivity, digitality and virtuality. I utilize Kendall Walton's theory of ornamentality in order to construe a puzzle pertaining to the new media. the ornamental erosion of information. I argue that insofar as we use the new media as conduits of real life, the excessive density of ornamental devices which is prevalent in certain new media environments, forces us to conduct our inquiries under conditions (...) of neustic uncertainty, that is, uncertainty concerning the kind of relationship we, the users, have to the propositional content mediated. I suggest that this puzzle calls upon us to consider what would be a viable logic of virtual discovery. (shrink)

Nietzsche talks about style [Stil and cognates] in all of his published and authorized works, from The Birth of Tragedy to Ecce Homo. He refers to style in over one hundred passages. Yet the scholarly literature on Nietzsche and style includes only a handful of publications, among them Derrida’s notorious Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles (1978), which barely even engages with Nietzsche’s writings (see also Magnus 1991 and Babich 2011, 2012). Much of the rest of the literature is about Nietzsche’s style, rather (...) than about what he has to say about style. And none of it is comprehensive. In this paper, I aim to fill the gap in the secondary literature by using digital humanities methods to systematically investigate the functions of style in Nietzsche’s writings. I argue that, for Nietzsche style emerges in the context of a tradition in a community. It can then become personalized and individualized, though there are dangers with such innovations. One’s personal style is expressive of one’s psychology and physiology, and can go wrong by mis-expressing. Correlative with style, in Nietzsche’s conception, is the taste of the audience. Only those who share important psychological characteristics with the stylist will be able to fully comprehend their expressions. Finally, moving beyond aesthetics, Nietzsche connects style with moral and intellectual character, contending that the good stylist seeks recognition as such from those with good taste. (shrink)

Chapter 3 of the ongoing publication "Artificial Aesthetics" Book information: Assume you're a designer, an architect, a photographer, a videographer, a curator, an art historian, a musician, a writer, an artist, or any other creative professional or student. Perhaps you're a digital content creator who works across multiple platforms. Alternatively, you could be an art historian, curator, or museum professional. -/- You may be wondering how AI will affect your professional area in general and your work and career. (...) Our book offers intellectual tools to help us better see the future of creative fields. These tools come from philosophy of art, experimental psychology, media theory, digital culture studies and data science. The book is the first to combine these different perspectives together. -/- We started the work on the book in summer 2019, exchanging numerous messages, commenting on each other ideas, and sharing drafts of sections. The final book is a result of this process. Although each chapter is written by one author, it reflects the discussions we had over 27 months. (shrink)

Chapter 1 of the ongoing online publication "Artificial Aesthetics: A Critical Guide to AI, Media and Design", Lev Manovich and Emanuele Arielli -/- Book information: Assume you're a designer, an architect, a photographer, a videographer, a curator, an art historian, a musician, a writer, an artist, or any other creative professional or student. Perhaps you're a digital content creator who works across multiple platforms. Alternatively, you could be an art historian, curator, or museum professional. -/- You may be (...) wondering how AI will affect your professional area in general and your work and career. Our book offers intellectual tools to help us better see the future of creative fields. These tools come from philosophy of art, experimental psychology, media theory, digital culture studies and data science. The book is the first to combine these different perspectives together. -/- We started the work on the book in summer 2019, exchanging numerous messages, commenting on each other ideas, and sharing drafts of sections. The final book is a result of this process. Although each chapter is written by one author, it reflects the discussions we had over 27 months. (shrink)

Today, a consistent part of our everyday interaction with art and aesthetic artefacts occurs through digital media, and our preferences and choices are systematically tracked and analyzed by algorithms in ways that are far from transparent. Our consumption is constantly documented, and then, we are fed back through tailored information. We are therefore witnessing the emergence of a complex interrelation between our aesthetic choices, their digital elaboration, and also the production of content and the dynamics of creative processes. (...) All are involved in a process of mutual influences, and are partially determined by the invisible guiding hand of algorithms. -/- With regard to this topic, this paper will introduce some key issues concerning the role of algorithms in aesthetic domains, such as taste detection and formation, cultural consumption and production, and showing how aesthetics can contribute to the ongoing debate about the impact of today’s “algorithmic culture”. (shrink)

Touch is the first sense to develop in the womb, yet often it is overlooked. The Senses of Touch examines the role of touching and feeling as part of the fabric of everyday, embodied experience. -/- How can we think about touch? Problems of touch and tactility run as a continuous thread in philosophy, psychology, medical writing and representations in art, from Ancient Greece to the present day. Picking through some of these threads, the book ‘feels’ its way towards writing (...) and thinking about touch as both sensory and affective experience. -/- Taking a broadly phenomenological framework that traces the tactility from Aristotle through the Enlightenment to the present day, it examines the role of touch across a range of experiences including aesthetics, digital design, visual impairment and touch therapies. The Senses of Touch thereby demonstrates the varieties of sensory experience, and explores the diverse range of our ‘senses’ of touch. (shrink)

Andreas Gursky is the darling of philosophers and art theorists of all kinds of traditions and denominations. He has been used as a prime example of the return of the sublime in contemporary art, as a trailblazer in the use of the digital manipulation of images in order to represent something abstract and even as a philosopher of perception who makes some subtle point about the nature of visual experience. All of these arguments are based on some or another (...) technological innovation Gursky uses: the size of his photos, their postproduction (often digital) manipulation and their unusually high resolution. The aim of this paper is to shift the emphasis from these arguments on the significance of the new technology in Gursky’s oeuvre to a much more important role technology plays in his works, namely, in their aesthetics. (shrink)

It’s interesting and a bit surprising how little attention philosophy has given to the status of emoji, those funny little symbols that punctuate text messages, Twitter, and other digital spaces. They have become ubiquitous, but maybe because they’re seen as frivolous or a “lower” form of communication, philosophy hasn’t paid them much mind. But they are an interesting aesthetic phenomenon. They are part language, part representational image. They are phenomenologically interesting in their effect on how we experience the written (...) word. They punctuate, accentuate, emphasize, and add flavor to our communication in ways that are difficult to achieve otherwise. It would not be ridiculous to say that they represent a genuine linguistic development—a change in conventional orthography, and of an almost unbelievably sudden and dramatic, even revolutionary, kind. (shrink)

periphery looks at you with hate. This phrase in red neon struck the visitors of Landscapes, an exhibition by Domenico Antonio Mancini in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples, in 2019. It was not addressed to the public but to the nineteenth-century pictorial views relocated in the last room of the exhibition, as if repainted by the immaterial vandalism of the colored light. The exhibition’s theme was the visibility of contemporary suburban environments, now accessible through Google street view visualizations. Mancini’s (...) non-representational Landscapes are Google addresses, not aesthetically appreciable but pragmatically challenging: the visitor must type on a touch screen to access to the outskirts of Naples, Palermo, Catania, Rome and Milan. The words at the end of the exhibition almost literally replicated a black graffiti drawn on Palazzo Missori in Milan. Are these relocation and remediation just about artification? What happens when, browsing Google street view, I take a close look at that graffiti recalling the political protests during the streets the 1960s? The deictic transitability in space and time of the hypermediated image can activate a fortuitous narrative and an open interpretation by looking back on the present as if it were past. Even a digital landscape is a moral landscape like that of public art for Danto, with a «internal beauty» whose meaning is not already embodied in architectural and artistic media but accessible and shareable through our portable devices. (shrink)

Martin E. Rosenberg -/- The Gift of Silence: Towards an Anthropology of Jazz Improvisation as Neuro-Resistance. -/- ABSTRACT: -/- This essay addresses how the complex processes that occur during jazz improvisation enact behaviors that resemble the logic of gift exchange first described by Marcel Mauss. It is possible to bring to bear structural, sociological, political economical, deconstructive or even ethical approaches to what constitutes gift exchange during the performance of jazz. Yet, I would like to shift from focusing this analysis (...) of jazz improvisation with reference to the language of music as symbolic action (which all of these approaches require), to grounding improvisation in embodied and distributed cognition, the performance of which begins with a ritual gift of silence. By silence, I refer to the embodied, yet shared pure duration as felt synchrony within an individual performer, that extends to the members of an ensemble. Thus, I refer to both aesthetic and micro-political implications of embodied, yet also distributed musical cognition in real time. -/- For jazz musicians, embodied silence becomes the initial condition for processes of cognitive bifurcation. For it is bifurcation that attracts us to jazz in the first place. Here I expand my previous work establishing similarities in the behavior of bifurcating systems in physical and cognitive sciences to the unfolding of ambiguity in real time during improvisation with respect to polyphony, polytonality and polyrhythms in the history of jazz from Charlie Parker to Ornette Coleman. We can therefore re-conceptualize jazz improvisation as a subversive antidote for processes of determination identified in a sub-discipline of cultural studies called “cognitive capitalism.” By examining silence from this anthropological perspective, we can conceive of jazz performance as a ritualized resistance to top-down cognitive control immanent with social and digital networks. The ritual enactment that is jazz improvisation points towards an aesthetics of bifurcation that is simultaneously a micro-politics of neuro-resistance. In other words, I argue that freedom of thought requires freedom from thought as an initial condition. -/- Yet, I emphasize the empirical rather than mystical grounds to this gift of silence. The valorization of silence by jazz musicians is not simply etiquette, an ethics of reciprocity for performers exchanging “riffs,” but an initial condition that jazz performers (and, I would argue, listeners) experience in their bodies, thus linking embodied cognition to a collective field of cultural production that emerges from each embodied individual, and yet also pervades the ensemble in ways reminiscent of feedback loops in complex systems. The recent and remarkable research on music and the brain has demonstrated that it is now possible to describe jazz improvisation as possessing both embodied and distributed cognitive properties. The emergent neuronal ensemble behavior within the individual that is visible in jazz improvisors, discovered by the neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins led by Charles Limb, bears striking resemblance to the interactive behaviors of the jazz ensemble itself. Thus, it is by recourse to recent research by myself and others into the cognitive neuroscience of music generally, and jazz improvisation specifically, that the empirical grounds for an anthropology of neuro-resistance become visible. (shrink)

periphery looks at you with hate. This phrase in red neon struck the visitors of Landscapes, an exhibition by Domenico Antonio Mancini in the Lia Rumma Gallery in Naples, in 2019. It was not addressed to the public but to the nineteenth-century pictorial views relocated in the last room of the exhibition, as if repainted by the immaterial vandalism of the colored light. The exhibition’s theme was the visibility of contemporary suburban environments, now accessible through Google street view visualizations. Mancini’s (...) non-representational Landscapes are Google addresses, not aesthetically appreciable but pragmatically challenging: the visitor must type on a touch screen to access to the outskirts of Naples, Palermo, Catania, Rome and Milan. The words at the end of the exhibition almost literally replicated a black graffiti drawn on Palazzo Missori in Milan. Are these relocation and remediation just about artification? What happens when, browsing Google street view, I take a close look at that graffiti recalling the political protests during the streets the 1960s? The deictic transitability in space and time of the hypermediated image can activate a fortuitous narrative and an open interpretation by looking back on the present as if it were past. Even a digital landscape is a moral landscape like that of public art for Danto, with a «internal beauty» whose meaning is not already embodied in architectural and artistic media but accessible and shareable through our portable devices. (shrink)

The article investigates how the use of extended reality technologies and interactive digital interfaces have affected the design of exhibition spaces. Its main objective is to shed light on how these technologies have influenced the ways in which immersive art installations are conceived and experienced. Particular emphasis is placed on the impact of interactive technologies on how visitors experience exhibition spaces. The article examines an ensemble of immersive art cases, paying special attention to the distinction between immersion and interactivity. (...) Two concepts that are pivotal for understanding the transformations concerning the subjectivity of the exhibition visitor those of the “imagineer” and the “ultra-technologist”, which are analysed in the article. The intention is to render explicit how extended reality technologies have contributed to the design of immersive experiences, significantly influencing the interrelations between the technical, aesthetic and institutional aspects concerning exhibition design and the methods of dissemination of art. (shrink)

Among the many forms of artistic expression that characterize the digital era, remix occupies a rather central position. At the same time, however, the success of remix as an artistic practice raises several hard questions. What is original and what is derived? How can we sort out and make sense of questions concerning origination and derivation in situations where one thing is appropriated, reused, and repurposed for something else? What theory of moral and aesthetic value can accommodate and explain (...) these situations where authorship, authority, and origination are already distributed across a network of derivations, borrowings, and re-appropriated found objects? This paper develops a response to these questions, and it does so in three steps or movements. The first briefly introduces the concept of remix and the opportunities and challenges that this now wide-spread, content creation practice presents to existing models and theories of moral and aesthetic value. The second outlines the three elements of what I call “remixology”—a new axiology (or theory of moral and aesthetic value) that is designed to scale to these new opportunities and challenges. The third and final movement investigates the consequences of this proposal, demonstrating how remixology can be read backwards through time, providing us with some new perspectives on artistry and creativity in all human endeavors, and read forwards into the emerging challenges that have been made available by innovations in algorithmic content generation and computational creativity. (shrink)

In recent decades, the internet has become our predominant public space and yet the role of art in this space remains largely unthought. This paper argues that graphic art, and in particular digital graphic art, has great power to shape and transform our thinking and experience. But with that power comes an enormous political and ethical responsibility, a responsibility too often ignored by programmers and computer scientists. This paper uses the work of Denis Schmidt and Jacques Taminiaux as important (...) resources for developing a Heideggerian response to this lack. (shrink)

This book is an anthology about transformation processes. It brings together contributions that were made during the 16th International Congress of the German Society for Semiotics 2021. Due to the Corona pandemic, it was finally not held in attendance at the TU Chemnitz, in Germany, but took place online. 11 sections with different focuses from archaeology, architecture, design, digital humanities, on the body, from the field of literature & youth and subcultures, media, fashion, environment, and carto/atlas semiotics and sign (...) philosophy had each published their own call for papers. -/- The focus of the IMAGE & Cultural study sections' call, published with the volume, was to understand images as agents - according to art and cultural studies scholar Aby M. Warburg - and to recognize and understand not only their potential for cognition, but also their potential for action. As an active part of culture, they not only convey it, but at the same time stimulate action. In this respect, images can be understood not only as documents and testimonies of collective history, but also as active carriers and repositories of affectively effective elements of communication. As agents of cultural transformation processes, images take on a status of their own within the human capacity for expression and action. The essays in this volume bear eloquent witness to this. (shrink)

The need for technical input, particularly set design in the overall theatrical process cannot be overemphasised in the pursuit of an aesthetically pleasing stage performance. This is because set design (flats and platforms) is the first place of contact irrespective of the medium of production. This work, therefore, examines postmodern trends in set designs within the backdrop of emerging set design concepts and interpretations via the use of sophisticated technology (such as light emitting diode screen, green-hippo software, 3D digital (...) model among others), in our contemporary society, using selected productions in Ultima Studios and Zmirage, Lagos. The study employs the descriptive and participantobservation methods while the interview instrument complements the two methods. The two methods enable us to study the trends, dimensions and techniques of set designs in Ultima Studios and Zmirage, Lagos. This study also relies on relevant journals, articles, textbooks and appropriate internet materials. More so, Sunnie Enessi Ododo’s (2002) Representational and Presentational Performance Styles, is adopted as our theoretical framework. Our findings show that set design for the stage or screen production goes beyond physical set design method to include the virtual set design. Postmodern trends in set design such as media mapping projection set design are also recognised. We also discover that, set design is a make-believe world that requires expertise, experience and professionalism in the process of its artistic utilisation within the postmodern age. The work concludes that, technical experts in the theatre should advance with the new trends of set design for both stage and screen production by studying and learning various trends and dimensions of postmodern set design. The study recommends that postmodern set design should not be downplayed in any production either screen or stage in the Nigerian theatre. (shrink)

This paper responds to recent developments in the field of sensory augmentation by analysing several technological devices that augment the sensory apparatus using the tactile sense. First, I will define the term sensory augmentation, as the use of technological modification to enhance the sensory apparatus, and elaborate on the preconditions for successful tactile sensory augmentation. These are the adaptability of the brain to unfamiliar sensory input and the specific qualities of the skin lending themselves to be used for the perception (...) of additional sensory information. Two devices, Moon Ribas’ Seismic Sense and David Eagleman’s vest, will then be discussed as potential facilitators of aesthetic experiences in virtue of the tactile sensory augmentation that these devices allow. I will connect the experiences afforded by these devices to the Kantian categories of the mathematical and the dynamical sublime, and to existing accounts of tactile sublimity. Essentially, the objects these devices make sensible, earthquakes for the Seismic Sense and digital information for the vest, produce pleasurable feelings of potential danger, awe, and respect. The subsequent acclimation to this new way of sensing and the aim to comprehend its sensed object are then discussed as possible objections to the interpretation of these experiences as sublime, and as aesthetic in general. To exemplify these issues and concretise my thesis of tactile sensory augmentation as a trigger of the sublime, I will outline an experiment to use the vest as an aid for faster decision making on the stock market. (shrink)

Today, the binary understanding of reality is increasingly significant. It is also the starting point for many theoretical considerations (mainly in the area of digital physics) describing the structure of the universe. What is lacking is an experimental confirmation of the binary nature of reality. This article proposes an idea for an experiment that possibly would confirm the following hypothesis: Electromagnetic waves in the form of binary signals of appropriate complexity and other parameters are capable of creating observable, material (...) objects. Also suggested is the use of an Abstract Complexity Definition (derived from aesthetic field), presented in the Supplementary Material section. (shrink)

DOI:10.20850/9781716645440 -/- An amazing exploration of the mind is now possible for everyone. With the Colors of The Sunrise, the first volume of the series The Psychotherapy of Whole: Aesthetics, Philosophy, Humanism, and Cognitive Science the reader has the opportunity to engage with a book that utilizes the methods and structure of self-help, popular science, and expressive therapies books. -/- Science, psychotherapy, philosophy, music, art and digital reality for the first time come together in a book phenomenon and (...) a series designed during 16 years to provide the first A.I Psychotherapy model internationally, focused on a profound study that has been evaluated by leading names from many of the areas analyzed around the world. -/- The book has been based on the background of advanced academic research, lending from the recent and updated investigations in an extraordinary number of areas. These include but are not limited to the disciplines of social sciences, psychiatry, philosophy, expressive art therapies, exact sciences, history, politics, artificial intelligence, and humanities that are presented from a global perspective. -/- Linguistics, neuroscience, anthropology, robotics, physics, and mathematics reconsidered as positive parts of the universal structures. It is explained the manner of uniting the cognition staying in perfect harmony with the today’s knowledge acquired by cognitive science, and the knowledge that traditionally contributes to the flourishing of the human mind through the philosophical approaches. -/- This manner discovered through the cutting-edge clinical and scientific study of the author. As a Licensed Social Worker and Cognitive Scientist, Anthony N. Skarvelakis devoted many years of professional investigation to reach a cognitive metaprogram as a model that expands human thought, giving the solution searched for years regarding the design of the first complete model of A.I Psychotherapy. (shrink)

In the popular and academic literature on the problems of the so-called attention economy, the cost of attention grabbing, sustaining, and immersing digital medias has been addressed as if it touched all people equally. In this paper I ask whether everyone has the same resources to respond to the recent changes in their stimulus environments caused by the attention economy. I argue that there are not only differences but disparities between people in their responses to the recent, significant increase (...) in the degree and persuasiveness of digital distraction. I point toward individual variance in an agent’s top-down and bottom-up attention regulation, and to further inequality-exacerbating variance in active participation on the internet and in regulating reward-seeking behaviors on the internet. Individual differences in these areas amount to disparities because they have been found to be connected to socioeconomic background factors. I argue that disparities in responding to digital distraction threaten fair equality of opportunity when it comes to digital distraction in the classroom and that they may lead to an unequal contribution of achievements that require complex cognition by people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. (shrink)

The primary concern of our 2014 paper was not notation but the autographic/allographic distinction, not representations as such but works of art. As we see it, Zeimbekis's considerations do not ultimately undermine the position we advanced in 2014— but they do challenge an element of Goodman's own theory of notation that derives from his requirement of recoverability. That requirement can be abandoned without losing the explanatory power of the autographic/allographic distinction as we have refined it.

The technological revolution and appropriation of internet tools began to reshape the material basis of society and the urban space in collaborative, grassroots, leaderless, and participatory actions. The protest squares’ representation on Television screens and mainstream media has been broad. Various health, governmental, societal, and urban challenges have marked the advent of the Covid-19 virus. Inequalities have become more salient as poor people and minorities are more affected by the virus. Social distancing makes the typical forms of protest impossible to (...) carry out. Under social distancing, some state-led policies took advantage of social media to focus on the Covid-19 pandemic to silence social and political activities, censor criticism, and control the press. However, during the pandemic era, the movements for social justice have been particularly active, focusing on defending workers’ rights, mutual aid and solidarity, monitoring policymakers, and popular education. These progressive movements combined concrete practices and experiences to confront the reactionary, capitalist, and governmental actors that sought to shape and envision the world. Through different case studies of protest movements during the pandemic in Europe, the UK, and Asia, this paper argues that at the time of rising racial, social, and economic inequalities, the social activities adapted to the circumstances determined by the social distancing and the impossibility of people gathering in physical spaces. Subsequently, the people in different countries had various individual and collective responses to the support of health workers, systemic inequalities, loss of jobs, and other societal and financial challenges imposed by the governments. It means that, rather than disappearing, the social movements have adapted to the unexpected situations during the pandemic outbreak. The pandemic broke the new digital global wave of protests in this sense. (shrink)

Throughout Iran and various countries, the recent calls of the “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (in Persian), “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” (in Kurdish), or “Woman, Life, Freedom” (in English) movement call for change to acknowledge the importance of women. While these feminist protests and demonstrations have been met with brutality, systematic oppression, and internet blackouts within Iran, they have captured significant social media attention and coverage outside the country, especially among the Iranian diaspora and various international organizations. This article, grounded in feminist urban (...) theories of the Global South, analyzes the digital feminist placemaking movement in Iran. As the first counter‐revolution led by women, the movement utilizes digital art, graffiti, and protest movements to embody women’s solidarity groups and sympathy rallies. Our analysis employs various digital research methods, including social media scrutiny and the study of protest illustrations. Analyzing the digital feminist placemaking in Iran will enable us to compare the commonalities, differences, challenges, and opportunities between the minorities and majorities in the world’s countries. The outcomes of this research can help international organizations such as Amnesty International and the United Nations Agency for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (UN Women), as well as policymakers, institutions, academics, and NGOs, to highlight the various ways in which broader public participation could be encouraged in the process of digital feminist insurgent placemaking. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to reveal the scientific approach that substantiates the impact of the creation of strategic alliances (SA) on the digital transformation of business and the development of their innovative power based on identified success factors. The aim was achieved using the following methods: abstract logic and typification (for classification of SA's success factors), generalization (to determine the peculiarities of SA's influence on their innovation development), analytical and ranking method (to determine the relationship between the (...) dynamics creating of SA and the degree of acceleration of digital transformation), expert evaluation (to determine the degree of influence of SA success factors by business areas). Implementing a business-integrated approach to understanding digital transformation will accelerate implementation of innovation and organizational change, identifies future prospects for market, customer and business relationships, highlighting the importance of researching the factors that ensure their success. An alternative vision of SA’s success factors is suggested, which are determined by the possibilities the organization of partnerships and organizational culture, integration of business sectors, compatibility of management goals, external relevance, obtaining synergies. Innovation is considered by the authors as an integration factor that reconciles all groups of SA success factors, giving them the necessary focus to solve business problems. The results of the study show that the creation of SA has a significant impact on accelerating and changes priority of digital transformation of business areas involved in strategic partnerships, and the impact of SA on the development of their innovation power is crucial. (shrink)

As ever more advanced digital systems are created, it becomes increasingly likely that some of these systems will be digital minds, i.e. digital subjects of experience. With digital minds comes the risk of digital suffering. The problem of digital suffering is that of mitigating this risk. We argue that the problem of digital suffering is a high stakes moral problem and that formidable epistemic obstacles stand in the way of solving it. We then (...) propose a strategy for solving it: Access Monitor Prevent (AMP). AMP uses a ‘dancing qualia’ argument to link the functional states of certain digital systems to their experiences—this yields epistemic access to digital minds. With that access, we can prevent digital suffering by only creating advanced digital systems that we have such access to, monitoring their functional profiles, and preventing them from entering states with functional markers of suffering. After introducing and motivating AMP, we confront limitations it faces and identify some options for overcoming them. We argue that AMP fits especially well with—and so provides a moral reason to prioritize—one approach to creating such systems: whole brain emulation. We also contend that taking other paths to digital minds would be morally risky. (shrink)

The paper argues that digital ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is digital, and the universe is a computational system equivalent to a Turing Machine) should be carefully distinguished from informational ontology (the ultimate nature of reality is structural), in order to abandon the former and retain only the latter as a promising line of research. Digital vs. analogue is a Boolean dichotomy typical of our computational paradigm, but digital and analogue are only “modes of presentation” (...) of Being (to paraphrase Kant), that is, ways in which reality is experienced or conceptualised by an epistemic agent at a given level of abstraction. A preferable alternative is provided by an informational approach to structural realism, according to which knowledge of the world is knowledge of its structures. The most reasonable ontological commitment turns out to be in favour of an interpretation of reality as the totality of structures dynamically interacting with each other. The paper is the first part (the pars destruens) of a two-part piece of research. The pars construens, entitled “A Defence of Informational Structural Realism”, is developed in a separate article, also published in this journal. (shrink)

Common mental health disorders are rising globally, creating a strain on public healthcare systems. This has led to a renewed interest in the role that digital technologies may have for improving mental health outcomes. One result of this interest is the development and use of artificial intelligence for assessing, diagnosing, and treating mental health issues, which we refer to as ‘digital psychiatry’. This article focuses on the increasing use of digital psychiatry outside of clinical settings, in the (...) following sectors: education, employment, financial services, social media, and the digital well-being industry. We analyse the ethical risks of deploying digital psychiatry in these sectors, emphasising key problems and opportunities for public health, and offer recommendations for protecting and promoting public health and well-being in information societies. (shrink)

This study examines the role of digital technologies in building resilient communities, focusing on data collected during the pandemic. This research aims to explore the impact of digital technologies on community development, assess their effectiveness in enhancing community resilience, and identify key success factors. The study adopts a mixed-methods approach, including qualitative data collected through interviews and focus groups, a review of existing literature and case studies. Preliminary findings indicate that digital technologies have been crucial in supporting (...) community resilience, enabling virtual communication, remote access to resources, and community engagement. However, disparities in digital access and literacy have influenced their effectiveness. Addressing the digital divide and ensuring equitable access is crucial while providing ongoing support, capacity building, and community engagement. Digital technologies have demonstrated their potential to build resilient communities, particularly in times of crisis. (shrink)

As a generation of ‘digital natives,’ secondary students who were born from 2002 to 2010 have various approaches to acquiring digital knowledge. Digital literacy and resilience are crucial for them to navigate the digital world as much as the real world; however, these remain under-researched subjects, especially in developing countries. In Vietnam, the education system has put considerable effort into teaching students these skills to promote quality education as part of the United Nations-defined Sustainable Development Goal (...) 4 (SDG4). This issue has proven especially salient amid the COVID−19 pandemic lockdowns, which had obliged most schools to switch to online forms of teaching. This study, which utilizes a dataset of 1061 Vietnamese students taken from the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO)’s “Digital Kids Asia Pacific (DKAP)” project, employs Bayesian statistics to explore the relationship between the students’ background and their digital abilities. Results show that economic status and parents’ level of education are positively correlated with digital literacy. Students from urban schools have only a slightly higher level of digital literacy than their rural counterparts, suggesting that school location may not be a defining explanatory element in the variation of digital literacy and resilience among Vietnamese students. Students’ digital literacy and, especially resilience, also have associations with their gender. Moreover, as students are digitally literate, they are more likely to be digitally resilient. Following SDG4, i.e., Quality Education, it is advisable for schools, and especially parents, to seriously invest in creating a safe, educational environment to enhance digital literacy among students. (shrink)

Nietzsche promises to “translate man back into nature,” but it remains unclear what he meant by this and to what extent he succeeded at it. To help come to grips with Nietzsche’s conceptions of drive (Trieb), instinct (Instinkt) and virtue (Tugend and/or Keuschheit), I develop novel digital humanities methods to systematically track his use of these terms, constructing a near-comprehensive catalogue of what he takes these dispositions to be and how he thinks they are related. Nietzsche individuate drives and (...) instincts by the type of actions they motivate. One way in which the “translation” of man back into nature might succeed is through naturalistic explanation and reduction of moral notions such as virtue in terms of amoral, naturalistic notions, such as drives and instincts. I go on to show that this is indeed Nietzsche’s project: for him, a virtue is a well-calibrated drive. Such calibration relates both to the rest of the agent’s psychic economy (her other drives) and to her social context (what’s considered praiseworthy and blameworthy in her community). (shrink)

Analytic aesthetics has been obsessed with mature, art historically well-informed aesthetic judgment. But the vast majority of our engagement with art fails to take the form of this kind of judgment. Crucially, there seems to be a disconnect between taking pleasure in art and forming mature, well-informed judgments about it. My aim is to shift the emphasis away from aesthetic judgments to ways of engaging with works of art that are more enjoyable, more rewarding and happen to us more (...) often. (shrink)

Digital COVID certificates are a novel public health policy to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic. These immunity certificates aim to incentivize vaccination and to deny international travel or access to essential spaces to those who are unable to prove that they are not infectious. In this article, we start by describing immunity certificates and highlighting their differences from vaccination certificates. Then, we focus on the ethical, legal, and social issues involved in their use, namely autonomy and consent, data protection, equity, (...) and international mobility from a global fairness perspective. The main conclusion of our analysis is that digital COVID certificates are only acceptable if they meet certain conditions: that they should not process personal data beyond what is strictly necessary for the aimed goals, that equal access to them should be guaranteed, and that they should not restrict people’s autonomy to access places where contagion is unlikely. We conclude that, if such conditions are guaranteed, digital COVID certificates could contribute to mitigating some of the most severe socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic. (shrink)

This paper argues that social media companies’ power to regulate communication in the public sphere illustrates a novel type of domination. The idea is that, since social media companies can partially dictate the terms of citizens’ political participation in the public sphere, they can arbitrarily interfere with the choices individuals make qua citizens. I contend that social media companies dominate citizens in two different ways. First, I focus on the cases in which social media companies exercise direct control over political (...) speech. They exercise quasi-public power over citizens because their regulation of speech on social media platforms implies the capacity to arbitrarily interfere with citizens’ democratic contestation in the political system. Second, companies’ algorithmic governance entails the capacity to interfere with citizens’ choices about what mode of discursive engagement they endorse in their relationships with fellow citizens. By raising the cost of deliberative engagement, companies narrow citizens’ choice menu. (shrink)

Objective: The study seeks to provide a thorough description of the teachers' digital literacy (DL) and digital competence (DC) and shine a light on the variables that influence the development of their digital literacies and competence. Method: Comprehensive data collection and analysis from 274 participants were completed. Descriptive and inferential statistics were conducted to accomplish the objectives of this study. Results: It came to light that teachers with less than ten years of experience have higher levels of (...) digital literacy. Pre-service education, having access to ICT resources, and a favorable attitude about using ICT were all strongly associated with DL and DC. The research's essential contribution is its findings affirming the value of DL and DC, which can be utilized to approach new technologies critically and use them as a part of digital pedagogy. Novelty: The critical contribution of the research is the result claiming the positive status of DL and DC, which can be used to approach new tools from a critical pedagogical perspective and apply them as part of digital pedagogy. -/- . (shrink)

The digital is deeply transforming reality. Through discussion of concepts such as identity, location, presence, law and territoriality, this article explores why and how these transformations are occurring, and highlights the importance of having a design and a plan for our new digital world.

Christiaens argues that digital technologies are fundamentally undermining workers’ autonomy by enacting systems of surveillance that lead to exploitation, alienation, and exhaustion. For a more sustainable future of work, digital technologies should support human development instead of subordinating it to algorithmic control.

The development of personal technologies has recently shifted from devices that seek to capture user attention to those that aim to improve user well-being. Digital wellness technologies use the same attractive qualities of other persuasive apps to motivate users towards behaviors that are personally and socially valuable, such as exercise, wealth-management, and meaningful communication. While these aims are certainly an improvement over the market-driven motivations of earlier technologies, they retain their predecessors’ focus on influencing user behavior as a primary (...) metric of success. Digital wellness technologies are still persuasive technologies, and they do not evade concerns over whether their influence on users is ethically justified. In this paper, we describe several ethical frameworks with which to assess the justification of digital wellness technologies’ influence on users. We propose that while some technologies help users to complete tasks and satisfy immediate preferences, other technologies encourage users to reflect on the values underlying their habits and teach them to evaluate their lives’ competing demands. While the former approach to digital wellness technology is not unethical, we propose that the latter approach is more likely to lead to skillful user engagement with technology. (shrink)