Aesthetic Model Research Articles

Shared vs. private aesthetic tastes: The cognitive and neural mechanisms

<p id="p00005">Shared and private aesthetic tastes represent universal and idiosyncratic aesthetic processing, respectively. The new trending that combines both aesthetic tastes are challenging pre-existing “universal” aesthetic principles. Previous research focused mainly on whether aesthetic principles were statistically universal, neglecting the fact that aesthetic attributes can cause different reactions among individuals. This contradictory relationship between generality and particularity concerns one long-standing but essential topic in aesthetics: is beauty universal and objective or idiosyncratic and highly subjective? If an aesthetic principle is only based on the average aesthetic judgment and is able to ignore the differences of aesthetic experience among individuals, can such an aesthetic principle support the proposition that "beauty is universal"? This is a reflection on empirical aesthetics brought by research on aesthetic tastes. Therefore, if private taste does play a role in aesthetic tastes, then there's no doubt that future studies on empirical aesthetics will have to take into consideration both dependent variables: the average aesthetic reactions and the extent to which such aesthetic reactions differ among individuals. Recent studies on aesthetic tastes have revealed many factors that can modulate the relative weights between shared and private tastes, the most typical of which is stimulus domain. Studies have shown that the proportion of shared taste in artificial stimuli (such as architecture and art) is less than that in natural stimuli (such as faces and landscapes). Other studies further demonstrated that high-level object categories (e.g., faces vs landscapes) can override aesthetic principles based on low-level stimulus features (e.g., symmetry). Besides stimulus domain, other factors, including expertise, cultural backgrounds, previous experience and age, can affect the relative weights between shared and private tastes. Recent fMRI and EEG studies have explored the neural mechanisms of shared and private aesthetic tastes, the basis of which includes sensory pathways and the reward system. Similar sensory “impressions” among individuals triggered by the same aesthetic stimuli may be the prerequisite that aesthetic responses share some commonality among individuals. Meanwhile, the reward system, especially medial orbitofrontal cortex(mOFC), shows homologous activation patterns across different stimulus domains. Therefore, both sensory pathways and the reward system might be the neural basis of shared aesthetic taste. What’s more, studies found that default-mode network (DMN) are suppressed in a task requiring external focus, and are engaged in tasks requiring internally directed thought, such as autobiographical memory and autistic thinking. Given that DMN is typically activated in self-directed thinking, it is possible that DMN is more related to individual differences in aesthetic responses, and plays a more important role in private aesthetic tastes. Furthermore, take example for the PIA model and the VIMAP model, contemporary aesthetic processing models still owe an explanation for aesthetic tastes. And it is yet to clear how different aesthetic processing stages lead to changes in relative weights between shared and private tastes. Two completely opposite predictions and explanations can be reached by these models. The first one is that early stages in aesthetic models are driven more by stimuli, thus leading to more homogeneity in aesthetic responses and greater proportion of shared taste due to the objectivity of stimulus characteristics; in contrast, late aesthetic stages are driven more by perceivers, leading to more proportion of private taste. The other one also makes some sense: in stimulus-driven stages, the general “gist” formed by different perceivers can also be heterogeneous because at these stages individuals process the stimuli incompletely and insufficiently. However, in perceiver-driven stages, individuals process stimuli more intactly and sufficiently, thus it is possible that in these stages perceivers have more similar impressions of the targeted stimuli, resulting in higher proportions of shared taste. In the future, more relevant studies are required to expand stimulus domain of aesthetic evaluation and to explore the corresponding relationship between aesthetic tastes and different aesthetic processing stages.

New Aesthetic Characteristics Emerging in the Digital Cinema Era

Digital film technology has constantly transformed and enhanced the fundamental aesthetic elements in the traditional aesthetic categories of film aesthetics during its gradual penetration into the film art system, enabling these fundamental aesthetic elements to take on new forms and appearances that enrich the artistic communication of film and mark This is a sign of artistic advancement. The fusion of old and new technologies in synergy with the original film system has also accelerated the development of digital film technology as an aesthetic model, and in adapting to the original film art system, digital film aesthetics has produced aesthetic implications that transcend the original system, in terms of virtual images, spatial and temporal concepts, narrative modes, sound and picture relationships, and movement characters. They all exhibit new aesthetic characteristics that are distinct from traditional film aesthetics in terms of virtual images, spatial and temporal concepts, narrative modes, sound and image relationships, movement characteristics, and interactive methods. When one examines existing discussions on digital cinema in China and globally, it is easy to see that they primarily focus on expanding the audiovisual expression of images and on the study of the expressive power and image effects of digital special effects, while research on expanding film concepts and expanding film aesthetics is superficial, or even nonexistent. From a film aesthetics standpoint from the standpoint of film aesthetics, as digital technology has gradually displaced traditional modes of film production and concepts, audience viewing styles, and human aesthetic concepts, the aesthetics of digital film under the new digital technology can be a new construction in terms of time and space, reality, narrative techniques, virtual reality, and aesthetic acceptance. Based on established film theories and aesthetic notions, this study will seek to develop film aesthetics in the digital era, highlighting the study's uniqueness and systemic character in light of shifting aesthetic categories and the incorporation of new aspects in digital cinema.

Aesthetics as a Philosophical and Theological Space in the St. Francis of St. Bonaventure’s Major Legend

This paper demonstrates that the figure of St. Francis of Assisi, as expounded by St. Bonaventure in his work Legenda Major (Major Legend), cannot be understood without certain philosophical and theological keys. Following an expository methodology, we point to Saint Francis as a theological aesthetic model. In this sense, we focus on five characterisations found in the Major Legend, introducing their aesthetic meaning, as well as the philosophical and theological significance of St. Bonaventure. We refer to St. Francis as a contemplator of nature, lover of poverty, an imitator of the crucified Christ, a brother of humankind and a Lord’s knight and minstrel, to conclude that the aesthetic model of St. Francis, as found in St. Bonaventure, can only be understood starting from theological (mystical) and philosophical ascension.

MLA 2022—Virtual Panel for Hybrid Convention (Washington DC): Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity

MLA 2022—Virtual Panel for Hybrid Convention (Washington DC)Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity Paul Downes, CHAIR From Bartleby, brooding “among the ruins of Carthage,” to three giant turtles surviving like “Roman Coliseums in magnificent decay,” to Billy Budd, who “showed in face that humane look of reposeful good nature which the Greek sculptor in some instances gave to his heroic strong man, Hercules,” Melville repeatedly turned to Greek and Roman art and history to analogize the people (and other animals) populating his stories and poems. But even before visiting the Levant in 1856, Melville had also demonstrated a fascination with the culture and iconography of ancient Egypt and Palestine, and he regularly drew on a rich bibliography of ancient art, mythology, and history to analogize his protagonists, inform his figurations, and lend gravitas to his poetry and fiction. Scholars have documented these allusions in great detail, but recent debates in the discipline of Classics might prompt us to revisit Melville’s relationship to ancient culture. Princeton Classicist Dan-el Padilla Peralta, for example, has suggested that “the production of whiteness turns on closer examination to reside in the very marrow of classics” (New York Times Magazine, February 2, 2021). For Padilla and others, ancient Greece and Rome have, for too long, and in a disturbingly resurgent way in recent years, fuelled racist fantasies of white European supremacy while concealing—and providing tacit consent for— various forms of exclusionary political and cultural practice. “Melville and the Cultures of Antiquity” will consider how we might read Melville’s attachment to and treatment of the culture of antiquity in the light of such re-evaluations. Reflecting on the full range of Melville’s written work, this panel will ask if Melville’s oeuvre betrays a familiar predilection for Greco-Roman [End Page 121] (white) exemplars or if his wide-ranging allusions reveal a more idiosyncratic relationship to the ancient past. Did Melville contribute to the nineteenth-century European determination to distinguish a “western” tradition of superior civilization reaching back to the Greeks and forward to a contemporary Anglo-American elite? Or did Melville take different lessons from ancient culture, including, among other things, a keen sense of the latent violence and fragility of western political and ethical ideals? Is there anything in Melville’s use of ancient figures and motifs, in other words, that might rub against the grain of hegemonic nineteenth- or twentieth-century European classicism? “The blocks in symmetry congealed”: Melville’s poetic response to American (neo)classicism in Timoleon, Etc. Ronan Ludot-Vlasak Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Classical antiquity was often invoked to provide the citizens of the early United States with a set of stable political, philosophical, and aesthetic models—the foundation upon which the nation might fulfill its destiny. This paper explores the extent to which Melville’s classical imagination in his late poetry disrupts such dominant views and might be investigated in terms that challenge humanist approaches to Greco-Roman cultures. Instead of celebrating a fantasized cradle of Western civilization, the poet’s discovery of the formal perfection of Greek temples—what he styles a “reverence for the Archetype”—manifests itself as an experience of extreme otherness. Not only does the depiction of ancient monuments resist analogies between human subjects, the environment, and mineral artifacts, but these forms “that do [ . . . ] of Plato tell” morph into a “circumambient spell” in which the world of ideas and the shadows of the cave coalesce. The barrenness of Greek isles as well as the silence of ancient stones prompts us to apprehend the links between the American nation and the classical legacy in terms of cultural and historical discontinuity. In this respect, Melville’s poetic dealings with antiquity challenge the teleological narratives in which American citizens could claim their “Manifest Destiny” and picture themselves as the rightful heirs of ancient Greece and Rome. At the same time, the pleasure elicited by ancient artifacts unveils the gendered politics of Melville’s classical imagination. While it unsettles neoclassical representations that evacuated the sexual energies of Greco-Roman antiquity, it paradoxically reterritorializes the experience of pleasure according to androcentric and heteronormative principles. [End Page 122] “Like a sachem petrified”: Clarel in...

Общее доиндивидуальное измерение труда и искусства при постфордизме: постопераистский подход

The study explores the ways of involving the potential dimension of labor into its formation at the current stage. The concept of individualising the “pre-individual” by the Italian philosopher P. Virno is drawn upon to expand the "aesthetic model" onto all productive activities. In the process of the modern labor formation, individualising the pre-individual reality, including the language, human perception, affective sphere, and productive forces of the society, manifests itself through the workforce. All the aforementioned factors constitute the total potential charge of the “pre-individual”. The paper goes on to demonstrate the influence of the artistic critique of industrial labor on this process. The demands for autonomy, creativity, and freedom postulated by art criticism were incorporated into new forms of labor organization. Ways of managing labor began to be directed towards reducing unjustified labor costs as they started to be associated with the unrealized potential of workers. Subsequently, the model of artistic practices spread to the entire world of labor. The problem of involving the potential dimension of labor in its formation is considered through the prism of post-operaism showing that the cultural industry is built around the communicative activity "without the work". An attempt is made to demonstrate that artistic activity in modern society is characterized by the total involvement of the entire life into artistic practices. In addition, such activity is associated with project-based, unstable and intensive forms of human self-actualization. The study emphasizes that such activity is associated with collective practices since it includes the activity of not only the artist, but also the public. Accordingly, the subjectivity of the contemporary worker must be described through the processes of collective creativity and collective subjectivity. The second part of the study focuses on the potential labor dimension and emphasizes that the modern metamorphosis of labor echoes A. Gastev's famous project which emerged as a way to transform labor itself in its potentiality. Gustev's scientific labor organization project demonstrates the possibility of involving pre-individual potentialities into the production practices. In order for this involvement to take place, it is necessary to influence the human body in a certain way and to activate its creative potential suggesting a connection between Gustev's ideas and biopolitics. The investigation paves the way for a new artistic critique that might allow for the commodification of “the pre-individual '' to take place.

AN INTEGRATED SYNTHESIS OF THE ARTS ON THE EXAMPLE OF THE USE OF VICTORIAN GOTHIC MOTIFS IN THE ART OF CREATING CLOTHES AND JEWELRY

The question of the synthesis of arts has always involved the combination of different types of art within a single object, such as, for example, architecture and sculpture, architecture and fresco painting, architecture and mosaic, stained glass, etc. But now the list of art types that can be in an interesting and unusual synthesis has expanded significantly. In a number of articles, we offered an overview of jewelry that in a certain way represents a synthetic combination of monumental architectural and, actually, miniature jewelry art. Various methods of using integral architectural structures, general street and urban ensembles, individual architectural elements, building plans, and characteristic images were presented. This article offers a review of the continuation of this trend, which has ancient roots, but gained particular popularity at the beginning of the 21st century, capturing numerous individual creative workshops and large jewelry houses. The fashion for architectural elements captivates fashion designers and fabric artists who create finished images based on architectural concepts. I especially want to single out a separate trend related to the Gothic subculture, which also gained popularity at the beginning of the 21st century. The article carries out a systematic analysis of the latest meaning of the concept of "Gothic" and its aesthetic model - the culture of Britain at the end of the 19th century, the dark manifestations of which were called "Victorian Gothic". Aspects of the revival of characteristic Gothic elements in Britain, their evolution and eclecticism with ethnic motifs are considered; formation of the concept of "Neo-Gothic" and directly "Victorian Gothic". Characteristic elements of Gothic architecture, such as stained-glass rosettes and gargoyles, become one of the favorite motifs of clothing and jewelry designers who work in this direction. Looking at the works of famous artists, such as the Italian studio Videnoir and Guo Pei, the essence of the concept of "architectural fashion" becomes clear, as their collections directly transfer images of architectural details, and sometimes entire buildings, to clothes. At the same time, they use both realistic and symbolic-metaphorical techniques; involve a wide variety of materials. The same artists are engaged in the creation of jewelry, which is sustained in the general style of the images. A careful review of their works makes it possible to generalize the features of the manifestation of the "Victorian Gothic" style in modern jewelry and clothing design.

Self-esteem, self-image, and school bullying in eating disorders

Body dissatisfaction (BD) is considered one of the most important risk factors for the development of an eating disorder (ED), and low self-esteem a confirmed psychological trait of vulnerability. People with ED or related characteristics suffer more often (two to three times more) from bullying or teasing related to appearance. Special mention should be made of participants in intimidation and harassment behaviors, both as victims or perpetrators, who are at greater risk of developing food symptoms. The results are homogeneous when the control group is made up of the general population and more contradictory with psychiatric control groups. It is also necessary to study cyberbullying because of its relevance. Teasing interventions do not appear to be a priority in ED prevention programs, although EAT-IV results support the importance of targeting weight-related ridicule in education and health initiatives, and of including the family environment as a target in anti-bullying interventions, especially in girls. It will be necessary to consider different models of preventive intervention depending on their gender. In both sexes, personal and socio-family education interventions would be appropriate to expand a more flexible body aesthetic model. Interventions based on health promotion and education to improve self-esteem, where positive body image is promoted with face-to-face interventions, have been successful in reducing BD and ED. Body Project, ZARIMA, DITCA and AMEMC are effective programs.

The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics by Aidan Tynan

Reviewed by: The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics by Aidan Tynan Cory Stockwell Aidan Tynan, The Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy: Wasteland Aesthetics, Edinburgh Edinburgh University Press, 2020. 254 pp. This is a fantastic book, one that challenges and indeed moves the reader on virtually every page. It is worth reading for this alone—the sense one has, while reading it, of being in the presence of a brilliant mind moving from one original, well-crafted idea to the next. Per its title, the book deals with the ways modern literature and philosophy have taken up the theme of the desert; per its subtitle, it configures this engagement as a "wasteland aesthetics." As one might already guess, Tynan is deeply concerned with our current ecological predicament. His gesture, however, is not one of despair: the desert, for him, is a site from which we might begin to think outside of aesthetic models (inherited from Romanticism) that judge nature according to the fullness or totality of the world it creates. Tynan's interest in the desert lies in the fact that, in its seeming impoverishment, it provides a way out of this framework—out of this world. The imperative of overcoming the concept of world is one of the major themes of the book, one that Tynan interrogates mainly through readings of Heidegger and Deleuze. Per Tynan's own admission, this is a provocative pairing, but he argues that these thinkers come together in their criticisms of world. This may seem strange where Heidegger is concerned, given the importance of this concept for his philosophy. Tynan, however, notes that Heidegger, far from positing the world as an embeddedness or surrounding environment, argues that it arises only in those moments at which it ceases to hold together—moments of boredom and anxiety, for example, in which meaningfulness begins to fall apart. Tynan therefore argues that for Heidegger, thinking the world "requires the experience of worldlessness" (29), insofar as our being-in-the-world always "contains some form of awareness, subsequently repressed or forgotten, of a worldlessness without which there would be no being-in-the-world at all" (30). Indeed, Tynan goes so far as to claim that "World is its own loss or impoverishment" (30). Tynan relates this to a certain ungrounding that, he argues, is central to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of "geophilosophy." Taken at face value, the concept might seem to be close to that of world, but in fact it is anything but: Tynan characterizes it as "an attempt to reorient philosophy away from the relationship between subject and object and towards one between territories and the Earth" (63–64). For Deleuze and Guattari, the foundation of territories—which are always territories of meaning—always takes place upon a ground, a prior coherence. This ground, however, is never constituted once and for all: every true foundation creates its own ground and is hence simultaneously an ungrounding. Meaning is therefore always susceptible to being overturned: to do so requires causing the ground "to rise up seismically into the world of representations, [End Page 495] fracturing them along with the putative unity they grant consciousness" (65); an instance of this in Deleuze and Guattari's theory is the body of the catatonic schizophrenic: "The catatonic body, having cast off the organs clinging to its surface, is an embodiment of the unground, the Earth-body that has risen up to shatter the world" (65–66). If Heidegger points toward a productive worldlessness that arises in moments of uncanniness, Deleuze and Guattari push the envelope that much further, allowing us to imagine a deterritorialized Earth that precedes and ceaselessly threatens the world; for Tynan, the desert acts as one of the major figures of this deterritorialization. The desert, in other words, allows for the cancellation of distinctions between surface and depth, such as the Bedeutung and Bedeutsamkeit (meaning and meaningfulness) on which Heidegger's world depends, and this is the task that the desert imposes upon thinking: for Deleuze and Guattari, "philosophy emerges when the ground gives way to an unground beneath it," giving rise to "a desertified expanse" (68) that itself is "a form of depth...

Russian Classics in the USA Transcultural Canon

The issue of the canon (the most studied and taught classics) is one of the most important in the world literature system. The paper briefly outlines the formation of the USA literary canon since the middle of the 19th century and details the formation of the Russian segment in the transcultural canon since the late 20th century. In the history of the USA canon formation, the institutional or sociological model (Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, Paul Lauter), which argues that social institutions respond to ideological demands, and the aesthetic model embodied by Harold Blooms Shakespeare-centered Western Canon stand out. An up-to-date approach to the canon assumes taking both models into account, as well as the perception of the canon as cultural memory. Anthologies are most important sources of documenting the canon. For the 20th century American literature researchers distinguish three phases formed by the leading literary trends: historiographic (1919-1946), new critical (1947-1967) and multicultural (1967- present). Based on the analysis of Norton and Longman anthologies, as well as a popular textbook The Bedford Introduction to Literature since the late 20th century to the present, the paper highlights the Russian core in the USA transcultural canon, which became the source of creative reinterpretation in contemporary literature. The present research is to be continued through the study of the Russian literature canon in specialized editions to outline a comprehensive history of the Russian-American cultural transfer.

‘Making New’ and ‘Attention’ in Poe’s ‘Poetic Principle’ and Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’

This article argues for a neural basis behind Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘Poetic Principle’ and Charles Olson’s ‘Projective Verse’ to create a more robust cross-disciplinary aesthetic model. Brian Boyd and Ellen Dissanayake show that ‘attention’ and ‘making new’ in poetry is a stable but evolving technique. This shows up in constant variation in ‘classic’ and ‘modern’ poetry and it forms a pattern for interpretation. This article will look at Poe’s and Olson’s essays in relation to this technique, steering their conclusions toward a partially naturalized conception of poetics in conjunction with more standard literary models in order to broaden aesthetic understanding.

Genre Hybrids – Between Impossibility, Transitionality and a Search for Fullness

The article offers an overview of the content of the present issue of the „Tekstualia” and problematizes the issue of hybridity in literature and other arts by looking at phenomena such as hybridization as a mechanism of constructing new esthetic and ontological models or as a key to understanding heterogenic origins and features of literature and other arts. More specifi c problems under discussion include: experimentation, para-texts, amorphousness in art, genres in-between, intertextuality, interactivity. Hybridity in art raises a range of ontological, epistemological, and axiological questions that pertain to predominant cultural models across time. Hybrids are artistic phenomena that escape classifi cation, and they play an important role in cultural dynamics because they shape new sensitivities, they also play an important part in culture (especially modern and postmodern), because they require their own description and language.

The Contemporary Art of the Nature Morte in the Age of Artificial Life Forms: The Metafictional Illusion of Life in Installation Art and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein

Observing the artistic response to the illusional nature of artificial life forms in the field of installation art, contemporary writers often allude to conceptual artworks through ekphrastic means to “grasp the texture of the contemporary real” (Virilio 4) in a technologically “transformative moment” (Boxall 4). A “reality hunger” for the contemporary brings together a “burgeoning group of interrelated […] artists in a multitude of forms of media” (Shields 3) to experiment new forms across disciplines through ekphrasis, which “strikes to explode” the “stuffed package” of a culture “containable with its shaped word” (Krieger 233). In her essay “Art Objects” (1995), Jeanette Winterson shows her interest in contemporary conceptual art as she writes that “the true artist is interested in the art object as an art process” and establishing a connection to the future instead of being interested in the final product (12). Her definition of art coincides with that of conceptual art as it seeks to analyse “the ideas underlying the creation and reception of art” (Shanken 433), and thus takes on the framework of the meta-critical process from conceptual art with “the use of scientific concepts and technological media both to question their prescribed applications and to create new aesthetic models” (Shanken 434). Deriving from the artistic landscape of conceptual installation art and its interactions with science, Winterson borrows the subject of the nature morte and the metafictional framework to address the clashes between artificial life forms and the human civilisation by alluding to artworks such as those of Damien Hirst in her novel Frankissstein (2019) when writing about cryonic bodies: “It’s a little like an art installation in here isn’t it? Have you seen Damien Hirst’s pickled shark in a tank?” (106). Based on the interdisciplinary interrelations between installation art and contemporary literature, this paper will read the dialogue between Winterson’s ekphrastic subject of the nature morte in Frankissstein and contemporary installation art, including works of Hirst, Cai Guo-Qiang, and Guillaume Paris, as a response to the rise of artificial life forms with respect to their metafictional and illusional nature as AI will become “fully self-designing” (Winterson 73).

LITERARY REALISM IN THE SHAPING OF SLOVAK CULTURE

Aim. The aim of the study is to clarify the internal complexity of the Slovak literary realist discourse and its diverse relations to the heterogeneous artistic, cultural and ideological discourses of the last third of the 19th century. Attention is focused on the appropriation and adaptation of stimuli from other social systems, as well as on the specific literary operations that modify literary realism as an artistic discourse constructing an intelligible world in a cultural sense. Methods. As a theoretical concept, realism is defined as a type of representation or representation technique associated with a set of textual conventions, complex referential and self-referential figures. As a literary-historical discourse and event situated in a particular moment of history, realism is governed by period-specific principles (operating in the mechanism of culture) of selection, evaluating and connecting the phenomena of reality. Only with this dichotomy the multiplicity of paradoxes, syncretism and heterogeneous character of Slovak literary realism can be captured. The theory of social systems (N. Luhmann) allows for a more complex view of realist literature as an autopoietic system in the context of modern society as a system of communications differentiated into a network of separate social subsystems interrelated by the medium of language. Finally, the theory of fictional worlds proposes selective and formative operations that explicate the construction of realist fictional world and the stratification of its functions (B. Fořt). Results. Among the configurational relations of Slovak literary realism, the concept of ideal realism is highlighted as a model of literary aesthetics that flexibly interacted with the discourse of national revival to provide an adequate expression of contemporary Slovak cultural and national interests. Two literary-aesthetic modifications of ideal realism (creative and voluntarist, originated by Svetozár Hurban Vajanský, and deterministic, represented in the prose works of Martin Kukučín) are analysed in detail in order to show the inner complexity of the literary-realist discourse and to manifest its semantic multidimensionality in the 1880s.

Research on aesthetic models based on neural architecture search

Computational aesthetics, which uses computers to learn human aesthetic habits and ultimately replace humans in scoring images, has become a hot topic in recent years due to its wide application. Most of the initial research is to manually extract features and use classifiers such as support vector machines to score images. With the development of deep learning, traditional manual feature extraction methods are gradually replaced by convolutional neural networks to extract more comprehensive features. However, it is a huge challenge to artificially design an aesthetic neural network. Recently, Neural Architecture Search has upsurged to find suitable neural networks for many tasks in deep learning. In this paper, we first attempt to combine Neural Architecture Search with computational aesthetics. We design and apply a customized progressive differentiable architecture search strategy to obtain a light-weighted and efficient aesthetic baseline model. In addition, we simulate the multi-person rating mechanism by outputting the distribution of the aesthetic value of the image, replacing the previous classification scheme of judging the beauty and unbeauty of the image by the threshold value, and propose a self-weighted Earth Mover’s Distance loss to better fit human subjective scoring. Based on the baseline model, we further introduce several strategies including an attention mechanism, the dilated convolution, and adaptive pooling, to enhance the performance. Finally, we design several groups of comparative experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our baseline aesthetic model and the introduced improvement strategies.

Self-Adaptive Computational Aesthetic Evaluation of Chinese Ink Paintings Based on Deep Learning

<p indent=0mm>Computational aesthetic evaluation of artworks has become an active research direction in recent years. However, current works mainly focus on oil paintings and photographs, there have been few attempts in quantitative aesthetic evaluation of Chinese ink paintings. Chinese ink painting uses ink blended with water and a variation of brushwork to depict picture, which differs significantly from photographs and oil paintings in visual features, semantic features, and aesthetic principles. Aiming at this problem, we propose a framework of self-adaptive computational aesthetic evaluation of Chinese ink paintings based on deep learning technique. Firstly, we build an aesthetic evaluation standard dataset for ink painting images. Secondly, according to aesthetic principles of Chinese ink paintings, we design a multi-view parallel deep neural network by taking global images and local patches as multi-column inputs to extract deep aesthetic features. Finally, we build a self-adaptive deep aesthetic model of Chinese ink paintings based on subject query mechanism. Experimental results show that, compared with the basic VGG16 architecture, our multi-view network that contains six paralleled subject convolution groups has higher aesthetic evaluation performance, the deep aesthetic features outperform the traditional hand-crafted features, and our proposed self-adaptive model can predict human aesthetic decision with highly significant Pearson correlation of 0.823, with mean squared error of 0.161. Moreover, interference experiments show that our network is sensitive to painting factors including composition, ink color, and texture. Our work not only offers a deeply-learned-based reference framework for quantitative aesthetic evaluation of Chinese paintings, but also reveals the relationship between human aesthetic perceptions and deeply-learned features extracted from Chinese ink paintings.

Identification of Predictive Factors for Patient-Reported Outcomes in the Prospective Australian Breast Device Registry.

Patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) are an important tool for evaluating outcomes following breast device procedures and are used by breast device registries. PROMs can assist with device monitoring through benchmarked outcomes but need to account for demographic and clinical factors that may affect PROM responses. This study aimed to develop appropriate risk-adjustment models for the benchmarking of PROM data to accurately track device outcomes and identify outliers in an equitable manner. Data for this study were obtained from the Australian Breast Device Registry, which consists of a large prospective cohort of patients with primary breast implants. The 5-question BREAST-Q implant surveillance module was used to assess PROMs at 1 year following implant insertion. Logistic regression models were used to evaluate associations between demographic and clinical characteristics and PROMs separately by implant indication. Final multivariate risk-adjustment models were built sequentially, assessing the independent significant association of these variables. In total, 2221 reconstructive and 12,045 aesthetic primary breast implants with complete 1-year follow-up PROMs were included in the study. Indication for operation (post-cancer, risk reduction, or developmental deformity) was included in the final model for all reconstructive implant PROMs. Site type (private or public hospital) was included in the final breast reconstruction model for look, rippling, and tightness. Age at operation was included in the reconstruction models for rippling and tightness and in the aesthetic models for look, rippling, pain, and tightness. These multivariate models will be useful for equitable benchmarking of breast devices by PROMs to help track device performance.

How to Overcome the Crisis of Symbolism with the Help of ‘Populist Ideas’? V.F. Chodasevič’s Critical Essays of the Early 1910s and the Article Nadson

This paper analyses V.F. Chodasevič’s early 1910s critical essays and his article Nadson, read in 1912 in the Literary and Artistic Club. Although the article did not play an important role in the critic’s work, because it was only during the exile period that Chodasevič criticized Nadson’s poetry, yet it represents the first example of Chodasevič’s appeal to the aesthetic model proposed by the utilitarian critics and the ideas of patriotism and civic virtues (graždanstvennost’), which were important in his poetry and later critic works. Chodasevič delivered a speech at the Club’s anniversary meeting which conveys his views on how to possibly overcome the crisis of symbolism. According to the poet, literature should restore and fully embody the ideals of the early Aesthetic Movement. The aim of the present research is to analyse the concepts, aesthetic ideas, and quotations used by Chodasevič in Nadson, and ascertain which sources influenced the author and how they relate to the literary context of the time (early 1910s). I argue that Chodasevič’s text echoes, to some extent, symbolist aesthetics while also reflecting elements of radical critique of early Aestheticism. Chodasevič only reproduces politically radical intentions that were present in the texts written by symbolists after 1907. Chodasevič’s article and his social views correspond to the evolution of Blok’s thought during the so-called ‘synthesis’ period; he, in fact, employs Blok’s ideas and introduces indirect quotations from his essays. Chodasevič’s speech at the Literary and Artistic Club was received as advancing principles which were seen too eclectic and old-fashioned, and which, most importantly, did not fit into the established literary context. Notwithstanding Chodasevič’s strategy of turning to Belinskij’s and Pisarev’s literary views was unsuccessful, since his intentions were misunderstood by the audience, he followed a similar pattern in several essays from the early 1910s. Chodasevič used symbolist aesthetic ideas in a number of texts written at the end of the exile period, where it can be seen that his approach and social and political views changed.

Imagen corporal, variables antropométricas y ansiedad en escolares de primaria

Introducción: La imposición de un modelo estético en las sociedades actuales genera insatisfacción con el propio cuerpo. Esta situación puede agravarse durante la pandemia y en edades tempranas. Objetivo: determinar la relación existente entre el grado de satisfacción con la imagen corporal, variables antropométricas e índice de ansiedad en escolares de primaria durante el estado de alarma decretado a causa de la COVID-19. Material y métodos: estudio descriptivo transversal realizado el 23 de marzo de 2020 el cual está compuesto con una mues¬tra de 116 escolares españoles de Educación Primaria con un rango de edad comprendido entre los 8 y 12 años. El índice de ansiedad se valoró mediante el cuestionario Spence Children Anxiety Scale (SCAS). El grado de satisfacción con la imagen corporal se valoró mediante un ítem del cuestionario Health Behavior in School-aged Children (2009). Resultados: el análisis descriptivo mostró que las mujeres presentan un mayor porcentaje de satisfacción con la imagen corporal menor (p &lt; 0.005), una mayor ansiedad (p &lt; 0.005) y un menor peso (p &lt; 0.005) respecto a los varones. La prueba de regresión lineal mostró una asociación entre el grado de satisfacción con la imagen corporal con la edad, el peso, el IMC y el índice de ansiedad con un valor de R2 = 0,293. Conclusión: el grado de satisfacción con la imagen corporal se asocia con variables antropométricas y ansiedad en las mujeres pero no en varones escolares de Primaria.

Eating disorders symptoms prevention program in Mexican children

n recent decades, eating disorders (ED) prevention programs have gained relevance due to the impact they have on people, especially on children. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of an eating disorder prevention program in children. Sixty elementary school children assigned to one of two conditions (control and intervention) participated, who answered three measures that assess: ED symptoms, the influence of body aesthetic model, and self-esteem, before and after an 8-session intervention, aimed at reducing the symptoms associated with eating disorders. En decadas recientes, los programas de prevencion de los trastornos del comportamiento alimentario (TCA) han cobrado relevancia debido al impacto quetien en en las personas, especialmente en los ninos.

Eating disorders symptoms prevention program in Mexican children

In recent decades, eating disorders (ED) prevention programs have gained relevance due to the impact they have on people, especially on children. The objective of this study was to evaluate the impact of an eating disorder prevention program in children. Sixty elementary school children assigned to one of two conditions (control and intervention) participated, who answered three measures that assess: ED symptoms, the influence of body aesthetic model, and self-esteem, before and after an 8-session intervention, aimed at reducing the symptoms associated with eating disorders. En décadas recientes, los programas de prevención de los trastornos del comportamiento alimentario (TCA) han cobrado relevancia debido al impacto quetien en en las personas, especialmente en los niños.