Throwback fascism: Accelerationist fascination with the faux 50s

Data-driven innovation to capture user-experience product design: An empirical study for notebook visual aesthetics design

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Water supply and waste-water disposal: by Gordon Maskew Fair and John Charles Geyer. 973 pages, plate, diagrams, 16 × 24 cm. New York, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1954. Price, $15.00

The aesthetic is a need, the humanistic psychologist Maslow made his famous "Theory of Demand. In his view, physiological, safety, respect, aesthetic, self-actualization level from junior to senior development needs. Form of beauty, art and design epitomizes the spirit of this advanced form of aesthetic needs. Pottery as a traditional media people becoming more concerned about environmental consciousness and spiritual level, but also both involved in the environmental space in the case of modern consciousness, showing it is a form of the emerging field of environmental art, pottery design consistent with human on the environmental aesthetic needs of the development of results, its aesthetic value cannot be ignored. An art form as a visual language, environment pottery body language has a unique aesthetic value and characteristics, and continue to join in today's visual culture under the influence of cultural concerns, its aesthetic characteristics in terms of interpretation of the visual language also has the image era semantic features. An area designed as a public environmental art, Environmental Ceramic aesthetic environment and the environment of people closely related to the artistic life, the concept of the art of living also make work pay more attention to the reality of the workplace awareness and survival, the manifestation of the spiritual needs Therefore aesthetic inject a greater angle. The visual aesthetic activity comes from the sensory response, but limited to the spiritual feeling, which mobilized human emotion, imagination, understanding mental function. These aesthetic mental activities are affected by different environment, different populations, different era with different cultural backgrounds and Cultural Complex of the impact and role.

Visual aesthetic quality is the visual pleasure level that attracts people and makes them prefer certain areas. Visual aesthetic quality is valued and considered for urban forests but remains challenging. This could be due to a lack of understanding of visual aesthetic quality assessment variables based on visual aesthetic theories. This study supports an integrated conceptual framework based on the result of a systematic literature review study to describe and measure aesthetics that incorporates objective and subjective factors through urban forest visual character and urban forest visual quality. The results include defining and understanding a description of visual aesthetic factors and variables as well as a thorough explanation of visual aesthetic theories to comprehend how to assess the visual aesthetic quality of urban forests. This study agrees with and supports the visual aesthetic theoretical framework, and we believe that due to our shared evolutionary history, humans have a standard set of urban forest visual aesthetic features with preferences that change according to cultural and personal variances. Furthermore, this research provides a foundation of visual aesthetic variables of urban forests that will assist urban forest researchers, urban forest managers, and decision-makers in managing and protecting the visual aesthetics of urban forests.

The selection of border elements between pedestrian walkways and vehicular roads is a critical aspect of urban landscape design that supports safety, comfort, and visual aesthetics. One widely adopted approach is the use of vegetation as a natural separator. This study aims to visually analyze the effectiveness of plant selection in separating these two functional zones, focusing on safety, visual legibility, and aesthetic value. This research seeks to strengthen through landscape enhancement while providing a pleasant pedestrian experience. The study employed one original site photograph and four digitally altered (montaged) images, which were evaluated by 30 respondents using structured questionnaires. Scenic Beauty Estimation (SBE) and Semantic Differential (SD) methods were applied to assess visual aesthetic quality. The results indicate that plant type significantly influences perceived aesthetic quality and is closely associated with user perception. The study concludes that medium-height shrubs are the most suitable choice for pedestrian borders, as they enhance visual aesthetics while maintaining a functional and environmentally responsive road landscape.

Permanent urban forest reserves are aesthetic assets within cities. Consequently, their aesthetic quality must be continuously preserved and visually assessed. Even though numerous studies have utilized multiple variables to characterize visual aesthetics, they have lacked information on the importance and weightage of each variable, making it very challenging to assess this. Therefore, this study aimed to determine the relative weightage of the visual aesthetic variables for permanent urban forest reserves in Malaysia. We used a converging approach assessment method to determine the ranked preferences for the visual aesthetic variables of permanent urban forest reserves by selecting multiple variables based on public preferences and expert survey assessments of these. In addition, we utilized the converging approach results as a guide for the analytic hierarchy process in order to determine the weights of the visual aesthetic variables. We identified 14 variables, derived from six main variables, as multiple visual aesthetic variables for permanent urban forest reserves based on the content of photos taken by 12 public participants. The expert survey confirmed the validity of the classification of the variables and the importance of their linear sequencing. It was revealed that the greatest weight normalization (W = 10) was achieved from the variables “openness with city view”, “uniqueness of water with natural elements”, and “openness with water view”, while the least weight normalization (W = 1) was obtained from the variables “legibility with natural path”, “uniqueness with man-made elements”, and “uniqueness with natural elements”. Our findings provide a foundation for assessing the visual aesthetic quality of permanent urban forest reserves.

The study focuses on the analysis of new visual aesthetics shaped by digital technologies. Special attention is given to glitch art, pixel art, and generative art as key movements that reflect transformative processes in contemporary visual culture, as well as to the identification of their artistic features and sociocultural impact. The research reveals that digital technologies fundamentally alter the principles of creating and perceiving visual imagery. Glitch art interprets the aesthetics of error, highlighting the fragility of the digital environment. Pixel art, grounded in nostalgia, has evolved into an independent artistic form with its own expressive means. Generative art, emerging at the intersection of human creativity and algorithmic processes, expands the notion of authorship. These forms are integrated into internet culture and digital design, interacting with traditional artistic practices and provoking discussions about the nature of art in the digital age. The scientific novelty of the study lies in the systematization of knowledge about contemporary digital visual aesthetics and in substantiating their status as autonomous artistic phenomena. It is demonstrated that glitch art, pixel art, and generative art are fully developed artistic directions. The new visual aesthetics generated by digital technologies represent a natural stage in the evolution of visual culture, revealing significant potential for further development and integration into various spheres of human activity while transforming the perception of both art and reality.

May 03 2021 A Quiet Revolution in Arts Education: The Rise of blaxTARLINES Kumasi Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu, Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu kwaku boafo kissiedu (castro) is a cofounder and the administrative director of blaxTARLINES, Kumasi. He is a senior lecturer at the famed Fine Art Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana where, together with other colleagues, he has pioneered revolutionary changes in fine art pedagogy, turning out emerging artists who are making waves worldwide. kwakukiss@yahoo.com Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Ruth Simbao Ruth Simbao ruth simbao is the DSI/NRF Research Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa and a professor in Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University. She founded the Arts of Africa and Global Souths postgraduate research program at Rhodes, and is a researcher with the international Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence (Rhodes University, Moi University, University of Lagos, Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo and Bayreuth University). r.simbao@ru.ac.za Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Scholar Author and Article Information Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu kwaku boafo kissiedu (castro) is a cofounder and the administrative director of blaxTARLINES, Kumasi. He is a senior lecturer at the famed Fine Art Department of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana where, together with other colleagues, he has pioneered revolutionary changes in fine art pedagogy, turning out emerging artists who are making waves worldwide. kwakukiss@yahoo.com Ruth Simbao ruth simbao is the DSI/NRF Research Chair in Geopolitics and the Arts of Africa and a professor in Art History and Visual Culture at Rhodes University. She founded the Arts of Africa and Global Souths postgraduate research program at Rhodes, and is a researcher with the international Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence (Rhodes University, Moi University, University of Lagos, Université Joseph Ki-Zerbo and Bayreuth University). r.simbao@ru.ac.za Online Issn: 1937-2108 Print Issn: 0001-9933 © 2021 by the Regents of the University of California2021Regents of the University of California African Arts (2021) 54 (2): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00575 Cite Icon Cite Permissions Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Search Site Citation Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu, Ruth Simbao; A Quiet Revolution in Arts Education: The Rise of blaxTARLINES Kumasi. African Arts 2021; 54 (2): 1–5. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00575 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter All ContentAll JournalsAfrican Arts Search Advanced Search A quiet revolution has steadily been rising in Kumasi, Ghana. The fluid, experimental network known as blaxTARLINES is a mutable and transgenerational community of artists, curators and writers that is based in, but extends beyond, the Department of Painting and Sculpture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST).1 This special issue on blaxTARLINES, edited by Ruth Simbao and Kwaku Boafo Kissiedu (Castro), brings together five articles authored by twenty blaxTARLINES affiliates who, in their own words, trace the rise of the creative and intellectual network that was sparked by the work of kąrî’kạchä seid'ou, affectionately known as the godfather of this revolution. Kissiedu and Simbao first met at the African Tertiary Arts Education (ATAE) meeting organized by the African Arts Institute (AFAI) and the Goethe-Institut South Africa in 2015.2... © 2021 by the Regents of the University of California2021Regents of the University of California You do not currently have access to this content.

The influence of high art on theatrical productions at the prestigious top end of the Victorian theatrical scene has been well documented, in studies of Henry Irving and Herbert Beerbohm Tree in particular.1 The interaction between the minor, or non-West End, popular theatres and other forms of visual culture has received less attention. The Britannia Theatre in Hoxton makes a useful case study to explore the dynamics of this relationship. The Britannia (popularly nicknamed the Brit) was a large East End theatre whose audience was predominantly drawn from the working- and lower-middle classes living in the neighbourhood.2 It began life as a saloon theatre in 1840 and had established itself as a popular community amenity by 1850. Under the management first of Samuel Lane and then his actress widow, Sara Lane, the Britannia consistently drew large audiences until the end of the nineteenth century. It also attracted favourable attention, especially during the run of its pantomimes, from prominent visitors from outside the vicinity, such as Charles Dickens and George Bernard Shaw. This essay reveals how visual culture influenced the form of the theatre’s mid-century productions and contrasts this with its output at the fin de siècle. It also highlights two aspects of the Britannia’s entertainments where its visual aesthetics were very different from its West End counterparts — its incidentals and its pantomimes.KeywordsRoyal AcademyPopular TheatreBritish LibrarySeptember 1866Visual CultureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Assessing visual aesthetics has important applications in several domains, from image retrieval and recommendation to enhancement. Modern aesthetic quality predictors are data driven, and leverage the availability of large annotated datasets to train accurate models. However, labels in existing datasets are often noisy, incomplete or they do not allow more sophisticated tasks such as understanding why an image looks beautiful or not to a human observer. In this paper, we propose an Explainable Visual Aesthetics (EVA) dataset, which contains 4070 images with at least 30 votes per image. Compared to previous datasets, EVA has been crowdsourced using a more disciplined approach inspired by quality assessment best practices. It also offers additional features, such as the degree of difficulty in assessing the aesthetic score, rating for 4 complementary aesthetic attributes, as well as the relative importance of each attribute to form aesthetic opinions. A statistical analysis on EVA demonstrates that the collected attributes and relative importance can be linearly combined to explain effectively the overall aesthetic mean opinion scores. The dataset, made publicly available, is expected to contribute to future research on understanding and predicting visual quality aesthetics.

Permanent forest reserves (PFR) in urban areas are an integral aspect of the urban forest concept and the basis of a city’s green infrastructure. The preservation of natural forests in urban areas has become a widely researched topic due to the environmental, social, and economic benefits provided by it. Although several studies have shown that visual aesthetics play a role in preserving natural forests in urban areas, visual aesthetic value is typically not prioritized in preservation plans since it varies based on the physical characteristics of natural forests in urban areas, making it difficult to measure universally. Therefore, this research aims to identify the suitable variables for assessing the visual aesthetic quality of permanent forest reserves within urban areas in Malaysia. This study selected two permanent forest reserves based on four criteria. Data were collected via participant-generated images taken along selected forest trails based on participant visual aesthetic preferences. Researchers and experts analyzed and classified the data according to content to identify suitable visual aesthetic quality variables. This research identified 14 suitable variables for assessing the visual aesthetics of PFRs in urban areas, with a dominant preference for information-processing theory variables. Mystery was the most present variable for the visual aesthetic quality assessment of PFRs. Furthermore, participants’ educational and emotional backgrounds, categorized as design, environmental, social, and technical, impacted their visual aesthetic preferences. Our findings serve as a foundation for assessing the visual aesthetic quality of natural forests within urban areas in Malaysia.

Visual aesthetics had always referred to the beauty or pleasant appearance of a thing. Being a visual gadget that has some visual properties in its operation, the smartphone has caught the interest of visual research to probe into the attractive tendencies of its Graphical User Interface, and design layout. The study therefore examined the perception judgement of the visual aesthetic features of smartphones among the students of Moshood Abiola Polytechnic, Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, paying attention to demographic differences in visual aesthetic judgement among students in the study domain. Sample size of 380 was taken as sample from 27,000 students. Systematic random sampling was used, Likert Scale was used to rate users’ perception of the visual aesthetics of their smartphones and the result was analyzed using descriptive statistics. The result showed greater percentages of the demographic variables showing a significant relationship with visual aesthetics perception among the respondents; while twelve (12) cases show large effect, only six (6) cases show exceptions with no significant effect relationship. This creates an inference that smartphone visual aesthetics presents an inspirational platform for its desired and continued use among students of higher institutions.

In order to study the relationship between the characteristics of visual aesthetics in China today and sociology, the importance of cultural symbols is discussed. The appearance of aesthetics is not entirely theoretical isolation. It is the result of “confrontation” with political ideology in the field of artistic self-discipline and aesthetic independence. Therefore, aesthetics are not only a framework system that is limited to aesthetic and experiential subjects, but also lies in the history of the exploration of modern Chinese aesthetics. From an external point of view, sociological vision and political ideological confrontation constitute the formation mechanism of visual aesthetics. From an inner point of view, the pedigree of aesthetics from the classical Chinese to the western modern constitutes the two major fulcrums of discipline construction. From sociological appeals to knowledge resources, visual aesthetics build a brand new Chinese aesthetics. In addition, it gained the legitimacy of its own existence and the value of history-oriented motivation.

This article explores the pathological aesthetics of design by examining the repression and perverse representations in contemporary visual culture through the lens of psychoanalytic theory. It traces the origins of repression and perversion in visual culture to the context of modernity, characterized by visual centrism, consumer society, and technological innovations. The article then interprets visual culture using key concepts from psychoanalytic theorists such as Freud, Lacan, and Deleuze, revealing the pathological manifestations of repressed desires and perverse imaginaries in various design practices, including advertising, movie posters, and social media. Finally, it proposes a transformative vision for design aesthetics, one that confronts repression, challenges perversion, and embraces a more diverse, inclusive, and humanistic approach to design ethics and aesthetics. The article concludes by reflecting on the critical mission of visual culture criticism and design aesthetics in guiding healthy and responsible design practices.