Lights, camera, algae: how making algae films inspires curiosity, creativity and deeper understanding

The article examines the relevance of the scientific legacy of the prominent philologist, Doctor of Philological Sciences, Professor at Ternopil National Volodymyr Hnatiuk University, Academician of the National Academy of Sciences of Higher Education of Ukraine, Member of the Union of Writers of Ukraine (since 1983), and Chief Editor of the scientific journal Studia Methodologica, Professor Roman Teodorovych Hromyak (1937–2014). The study analyzes the main works of the scholar that represent his scientific contributions, particularly his literary studies, which are based on a deep understanding of the philosophical and aesthetic foundations of literary and artistic creativity. Professor Hromyak's scientific ideas are characterized as significant for contemporary theoretical-methodological, literary-critical, and historical-literary studies, as well as in the context of the development of comparative literary studies. It is noted that the scholar's legacy, his activities, and his personal qualities continue to influence the scientific life of Ukraine: materials dedicated to his scientific ideas or based on them are still being published; conferences are held in memory of the professor; and the Ternopil theoretical-literary school, founded by Professor Hromyak, continues to thrive. This school is represented by several generations of researchers, among whom Doctors of Philology and Professors Z. and M. Lanovyks have made significant contributions to honoring the memory of their mentor. The magnitude of the scholar's personality is highlighted through comparisons with figures such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, one of the founders of 20th-century philosophical hermeneutics, and Roman Ingarden, a developer of literary phenomenology. In the context of Professor Hromyak's historical-literary interests, particular attention is given to issues related to the creative legacy of Ivan Franko. The moral and ethical intensity of the scholar’s works, their axiological potential, and their connection to the political and social life of Ukraine are emphasized. It is asserted that Professor Hromyak’s scientific activities were marked by a profound sense of responsibility for everything occurring within the cultural space of the country.

Despite a history of different attitudes and approaches, art and science are engaging more often in collaborations of mutual benefit

Milford Care Centre's Compassionate Communities Project uses a seed grant scheme to engage with communities around illness, dying, death and bereavement. The scheme, now in it's 3(rd) cycle strives to inspire and support the work of local groups, organisations and individuals who wish to mark in some tangible way their response to the universal realities of death, dying, loss and care as lived and experienced by those living within their communities. A key requirement for the receipt of a grant is that the level of funding must be matched either in cash or in kind. This presentation will report on the projects supported, describing the short and medium term impact they have had on the local community. A short film will showcase the projects. Qualitative interviews were conducted with all grant recipients to determine the impact of the seed grant at a community level. Seed grants were used in a variety of ways, for example: Supporting a community group to develop a reflection space Supporting a youth project to explore what death, dying, loss and care means to service users through the creative arts. Supporting a library to develop a bereavement information 'resource'. Supporting local groups to run a community event aimed at increasing awareness and knowledge about 'healthy' ways of coping with loss and grief. Supporting those seeking practical ways of providing support to other living with illness and loss. The seed grant scheme offers a low cost, high impact approach to working with communities.

Mary Delany (1700-1788) is most famous for her “paper mosaicks”, a collection of botanically accurate flower collages that are now held by the British Museum. These collages lie at the intersection of art and science, feminine accomplishment and Enlightenment and were the culmination of a life spent engaging with these topics. Yet often the importance of Delany’s earlier creative and intellectual output goes ignored. With much of this work now lost, this article utilises the extensive collection of Delany’s correspondence to recover her earlier activities and seeks to situate them within her lifelong interest in the Enlightenment. Focusing on the period that Delany lived in Ireland, 1744-1767, it examines the importance of this time in the development of her creative practices. It was at Delville, her home in Glasnevin, County Dublin, that her creative and intellectual activities flourished with her new situation nurturing her interests. Concentrating on Delany’s shellwork and collections, this article explores how she utilised the creative arts to engage with natural history, and how her creative practices became an important part of the construction of an Enlightenment identity. Ultimately, her creative arts served as a means of practicing scientific Enlightenment ideas through an engagement with creative media.

The author discusses his view that while art and science are very different activities, scientific creation and artistic creation are both inspired by the unconscious and so have much in common. Creativity is manifested in new artistic ideas formed in new visions of the world and in scientific ideas about certain aspects of nature or the universe. Considering the works of philosophers, both ancient and contemporary, he comes to the conclusion that the disciplines are unified by the spirit that originates in human being and that is communicated to human being.

Synergistic art

No Free Tickets

New ways to produce creative content based on open technologies, co-productions and global networking of experts and non-experts with different skills have affected the animation industry in recent years. Many productions have been possible thanks to the involvement of open source software and online communities sharing suggestions about narratives, technologies and technical issues. This article examines and deconstructs the production phases of the short film in CGI Arturo e il gabbiano, directed by the Italian animator Luca Di Cecca in 2019 and made entirely in Blender, an open source software that experienced a strong development in recent years and focuses on the fundamental contribution provided by the online community to its production. By going through the criticisms, suggestions, feedback and the constant and motivating participation of the Blender community, the article outlines a new production process based on an asynchronous and virtual collaboration of experts and non-experts interested in the project and graphically visualizes it as a multi-circular and inter-connected model. This collaborative approach, furthermore, can have social and educational consequences since it opens to a more democratic and mutual share of technological skills, knowledge and experience.

With the arrival of the digital age and technology, creation of art and its replication reached a whole new pinnacle. Increasingly, conservators find themselves dealing with editions, copies, and replicas as part of their job. Indeed, the replication of a work of art, be it paper or a 3D printed sculpture, is becoming one of many conservation measures that may serve as a preventive conservation technique, protecting the art from excess levels of light, travel, or handling, or as a tool to better understand the art. Replication of a digitally existing master for each new display may be the artist’s intent, or enable simultaneous multiple displays of the same work as per the artist’s directive. This article describes the making of an Exhibition Copy of the American artist Mike Kelley’s The Wages of Sin, a pile of partly melted wax candles atop a readymade, commercially sourced table. Owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the highly complex three-dimensionality and materiality of this iconic work of art posed significant challenges to replicate. The following description illuminates the conceptual aspects considered, why and how the replica was made, and decision-making processes throughout its fabrication, exploring materiality and technical issues. The role of the Whitney’s Replication Committee in this project is discussed, including participation of its curators, archivists, and other museum professionals, along with an explanation of the Committee’s choice of the term ‘Exhibition Copy’ to describe the replica. The account of the collaboration and coordination of the project with the Mike Kelley Foundation and external fabricators is central to this comprehensive project. Ramifications for future use of the Exhibition Copy within the museum management, documentation, loans, and wall labels, and its legal and publication consequences conclude this paper.

Short films are regarded as an alternative form of artistic creation, and they express, in a few minutes, a whole gamma of different emotions oriented to impact the audience and communicate a story. In this paper, we exploit a multi-modal sentiment analysis approach to extract emotions in short films, based on the film criticism expressed through social comments from the video-sharing platform YouTube. We go beyond the traditional polarity detection (i.e., positive/negative), and extract, for each analyzed film, four opposing pairs of primary emotions: joy-sadness, anger-fear, trust-disgust, and anticipation-surprise. We found that YouTube comments are a valuable source of information for automatic emotion detection when compared to human analysis elicited via crowdsourcing.

This paper examines the relationship between “creators” (gods and poets) and their creations in the poem “Once at mid-day in late spring” (“Num meio-dia de fim de primavera”) by the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935)—but ostensibly authored by Alberto Caeiro, one of the numerous fictional heteronyms through which Pessoa published entire works in verse and prose—and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s short film, La ricotta (1963). I focus in particular on Pessoa and Pasolini’s displacement of a divine subject onto a human object and of creative authority onto secondary authors. Secondly, I consider the playfulness inherent in the irreverent rejection of the institutionalization of artistic and religious creation in the poem and the film, as well as the use of bucolic settings that revive a kind of pre-historical, pre-Christian religiosity in a landscape that is nonetheless distinct from traditional “pastoral” modes due to the constant interruption of modern systems of production and representation. Finally, I explore the reversal of the hierarchical relationship between ignorance and intellect, pathos and logos, which is employed in both works in order to access a more authentic representation of natural existence. “Once at mid-day in late spring” (“Num meio-dia de fim de primavera”) is the eighth of the forty-nine poems that comprise the collection entitled The Keeper of Sheep (“O Guardador de Rebanhos”). In the seventeen stanzas of the poem, the poet adopts a playful tone to describe a dream in which God descends from the cross, taking residence in the poet’s house in the form of an “Eternal Child” who finally finds the freedom to criticize God and create mischief in the poet’s village. The emphasis on the child’s ignorance of worldly affairs, the pleasure he finds in observing nature and his inability to compre hend the poet’s “stories about the doings of mankind” (“historias das cousas so dos homens”) 1 provide an example of why Edwin Honig and Susan Brown, authors of the English translation, define The Keeper of Sheep as a “poetic manifesto, proclaiming the unknowable and manifold nature of reality as something

The Poetry and Music of Science: Comparing Creativity in Science and Art

While analysing creative experiments in architecture, one finds a number of different phenomena and examples, not so easy to discuss in a more or less systematic way. These phenomena and results, in one or another way related to experimental architecture, can hardly be defined by a single category and, as shown by the history of architecture, have become one of its driving forces contributing to the development of architecture in the course of time. The issue of the concepts of architectural experimentation on the whole is important and urgent in two aspects. First of all, such concepts are used in attempting to formulate basic architectural and cultural declarations, consequentially applied in forming and proclaiming different political creeds (usual practice of international architectural biennales and expo exhibitions). Secondly, their cultural value is of key importance too, as the ideas and thoughts expressed through the experimental creation often convey social aspects and states, also the idea, how architecture is understood during a specific period of time and the role given to it by society. Finally, as architecture is a language used by society to convey its socio-cultural status and values, the experimental architectural creation can be significant, although often ignored, in architectural practice. The most outstanding examples of architectural experiments confirm that architecture as artistic creation has long ago gained certain features of a cultural phenomenon, which eventually has become closely connected to society. Thus the area of culture and forms of its expression has becoming more and more relevant and significant to architectural experimentation. Although artistic and scientific experiments have certain similarities within contemporary discourse of architectural practices, they still differ a lot in the aspects of their backgrounds, processes and even results. But still, the interdisciplinary aspect, common to contemporary artistic experimentation, draws art and science closer together. Fairly often, peculiar new forms of art borrow scientific data or ideas interpreting, expressing and using them effectively to make pure art. The concept of architectural experimentation still does not exist as an integral concept. Only a few general features and attributes can be named as helping to define the architectural phenomenon as an experimental one. These are: (a) the idealistic trend and (b) very active element of motivation. It is also noteworthy that looking retrospectively, within different epochs the architectural experimentation had different relationship with other arts. The discussed in the article experimental practices of architecture in the 1950-ies – 1970-ies accumulated and effectively operated the languages of other visual – and not only – arts. Although, at the same time it should be admitted that they did not have the same close relationship to traditional, fundamental arts, such as sculpture and painting. So does the contemporary, the 21st century, architectural experimentation – it no longer has closer connection to traditional arts. Although it has to be admitted that the most recent, media-related arts influence experimental architecture on the levels of its forms as well as concepts. In general, the architectural creation at the beginning of the 21st century (both building architecture and urban planning) is getting more and more social. The experiment in such creation is less artistic or valuable as pure art in the traditional sense. Fewer experiments are made on the form only, but rather on the process itself and then – the form. Although the most innovative architectural images being developed and declared are getting more abstract and universal, they are easier to implement than before (due to the most advanced technologies). So, it is not so simple to draw a dividing line between purely idealistic and realistic experimental architecture, because what was just a vision not so long ago, today can be easily realized. Does it mean that experiments have become more social and less creative? Probably, not. Most likely, it’s because creativity has become transformable and gained new ways of expression. Santrauka Straipsnyje analizuojamos esminės kūrybinio eksperimento sampratos architektūroje. Apžvelgiami pagrindiniai mokslinio ir meninio eksperimento principai, konceptai juos charakterizuojant bei lyginant tarpinternatvyje, detalizuojant tiek esminius skirtumus, tiek ir logines sąsajas tarp vienų ir kitų. Taip pat tekste plačiai analizuojamas kūrybinio eksperimento reiškinys architektūroje, aptariant ir mokslinės, ir meninės sričių įtakas jam, jo specifikas ir ypatumus.

Reviewed by: The Color Revolution by Regina Blaszczyk Laura Kalba (bio) The Color Revolution. By Regina Blaszczyk. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. Pp. 368. $34.95. Historians of technology are not especially known for their great sense of style. Regina Blaszczyk’s The Color Revolution may change that, not through fashion advice for the twenty-first-century scholar, but by providing an original and well-researched account of how color came to play a central role in twentieth-century American consumer culture. Contrary to intellectual histories tracing the evolution of scientific and philosophical ideas about color, or more anthropologically inspired studies of color symbolism, Blaszczyk focuses on the everyday business of color, more specifically, the wide-ranging if underappreciated role of color experts in American manufacturing, retailing, and advertising from the 1890s to the 1960s. The color revolution, she demonstrates, was not the result of chemical innovations alone. Obviously, synthetic dyes and car paints, not to mention awe-inspiring light displays, contributed to making everyday life more colorful than ever before. Yet, according to Blaszczyk, what was most revolutionary was less color per se than the new technologies—color wheels and cards—and [End Page 261] new forms of knowledge—color streamlining, forecasting, and psychology—developed by a coterie of innovative individuals to manage this chromatic cornucopia. Contrary to the notion that all things pertaining to fashion, color trends in particular, are wholly irrational and therefore unsuited for the detailed historical analysis afforded other aspects of industry, “the color revolution,” Blaszczyk insists, “grew out of American industry’s drive for efficiency in design, production, and distribution” (5). Moreover, she argues, it was American businesses’ commitment to scientific management that anchored the color revolution in the United States, as opposed to Europe, where several of the new color technologies and related commercial practices originated. The book begins with two chapters tracing the beginnings of the color revolution, focusing on the dramatic development of synthetic dyes starting in the late 1850s and the cross-Atlantic efforts of Michel-Eugène Chevreul and Albert Munsell to develop a universal system for identifying colors and, through the promotion of certain colors or color combinations, improve public taste. However, as Blaszczyk convincingly demonstrates, it was only after the First World War that American businesses began paying serious attention to the market value of color. Indeed, the book’s central arguments are primarily developed in the subsequent five chapters, wherein the author describes in fascinating detail the expanding reach of color and color experts during the interwar period. By the mid-1920s, for example, the Textile Color Card Association of the United States, building off the success of the color card system it developed during the war, firmly established itself as a leader of color standardization and forecasting. Around the same time, producers of durable goods also embraced the rainbow as a lucrative sales strategy. H. Ledyard Towle, originally at DuPont, became one of America’s top automotive colorists by transferring the camouflage techniques he had learned during the war to the design of cars. Towle, together with successor Howard Ketcham, increased the connection between the automotive and fashion industries through the strategic application of visual streamlining techniques and the perfection of color forecasting tools. Around the Second World War, experts began shifting their attention to color’s ability to influence people’s moods and behaviors. Faber Birren, the leading color expert of the time, specialized in advising companies on how best to use color to reduce accidents and keep up workers’ morale, highlighting how ties between color and scientific management remained strong well into the 1960s. The Color Revolution makes an original and important contribution to the history of American business and design. Yet, scholars of American commercial culture likely have most to gain from Blaszczyk’s work. The breadth and depth of the author’s research illuminates surprising connections between Europe and the United States, fashion trends and the automotive [End Page 262] industry, and artistic creativity and scientific management, providing readers with a more nuanced picture of how aesthetics, commerce, and culture intersect than that generally provided in studies relying on “cultural representations” alone. However, this same historical richness occasionally detracts from the...

The article attempts to trace the connection between the worldview positions and attitudes of Konstantin Dmitrievich Ushinsky and modern scientific ideas in the field of practical psychology. It is noted that a new round of interest in the ideas of the great Russian teacher is due to conceptual changes in domestic education, understanding the problems and priorities of its development, and the search for new models and strategies for pedagogical interaction. The object of the study is the problems of man, dialogue and artistic creativity in the legacy of Ushinsky and in modern psychological practice. The influence of the ideas of Ushinsky is noted both in the course of accumulation and systematization of knowledge about a person, and in the process of building psychological anthropology. It is considered how the problem of the influence of one personality on another in the legacy of Ushinsky develops in the dialogical approach of T.A.Florenskaya, based on the spiritual and moral guidelines that have been established over the centuries and are inextricably linked with the traditions of Russian philosophical thought. Particular attention is paid to dialogue, which is understood as a creative, spiritually transformative communication. The constitutive principles and basic concepts of a spiritually oriented dialogue are considered. The vector of personal development of a person in the conditions of internal dialogue is indicated and the consequences in the situation of its deformation are named. The influence of Ushinsky's idea about the role of artistic creativity on modern art therapy practice, which combines various types of art with therapeutic, correctional and developmental goals, is shown. The reasons why artistic creativity is necessary for the full personal development of the child are listed. It is concluded that the problems of a person, dialogue, artistic creativity, which worried the great Russian teacher, remain the epicenter in the field of modern scientific and practical research. The ideas of the great thinker are not copied, but continue to live, develop, be rethought and creatively transformed.