Aesthetic Process Research Articles

Technologies of Drawing (On) a Desert: Reading Land Art and Colonial Politics in the Naqab/Negev Diffractively

ABSTRACT Experimenting with a new materialist diffractive approach, this article offers an insight into the agential capacities of lines by juxtaposing two apparently unrelated cases of large-scale drawing practices: the aesthetic process involved in an event of artistic creation and the scientific process of visual representation of data-supported meteorological measurements. The article makes use of the analysis of Jim Denevan’s land art as a tool with which to approach cartography-based colonial politics in the Naqab/Negev Desert (Israel). Such an unusual methodological strategy assists in exposing how political decisions based on the system of scientific classification of land have contributed to the substantial reconfiguration of settlement patterns in the region, negatively affecting the life of a significant number of Bedouin Arabs, indigenous to this land. By investigating the possibly harmful, highly politicised potentials of cartographic endeavours while uncovering their material-semiotic contingency, the article reveals how the enterprise of mapping space can benefit colonialism and discriminatory politics. The aim is to offer a cultural studies understanding of the problematic political and environmental developments taking place in the Naqab/Negev, explaining how the science-based politics of drawing has been mobilised for the purpose of colonial policy, translating into the discriminatory treatment of the indigenous population while extrapolating spatial injustices in the region.

ИСТОКИ КИТАЙСКОЙ ВОКАЛЬНОЙ КУЛЬТУРЫ ДАО

The relevance of the article is determined by the significance of Taoism, a phenomenon little studied in Chinese and Russian musicology, and the influence of its ideas on Chinese culture and musical art. Filling this gap seems important, since the comprehension of general Chinese musical and vocal-performing culture cannot be complete without a proper understanding of the specifics of Taoist music and its influence on the subsequent development of Chinese art. Over the centuries and historical conflicts, when opposing priorities clashed, most of the recorded Taoist melodies were lost and perished. The study of the partially preserved musical heritage of Taoist culture allows a deeper understanding of the cultural and artistic values of Taoism, as well as tracing their influence on modern Chinese musical culture. The purpose of the study is to substantiate the basis of the vocal culture of China as a musical implementation of the concept of Taoism. The object of the research is the musicological and performing specifics of Tao art. The subject of the research is the vocal culture of China perceived through the prism of Taoist musical traditions. To achieve these goals, the dissemination of the ideas of Taoism in the field of philosophical and aesthetic processes was investigated; the sources of the emergence of Taoism were identified, the texts of myths were studied in order to find facts confirming the origin and significance of music in the life of ancient Chinese society; some musical monuments of Taoists were analysed.

"His Eyes Disappear": (Re)framing the Racial Imagination through Anti-Portraiture in Teju Cole's Blind Spot

"His Eyes Disappear":(Re)framing the Racial Imagination through Anti-Portraiture in Teju Cole's Blind Spot Benjamin Williams (bio) TEJU COLE uses film photographs and oblique prose divagations to take us on a voyage across the globe with a peripatetic philosopher in his 2017 photobook, Blind Spot. With COLE snapping photos, processing the film, and composing corresponding texts, we travel from the United States to Lagos (where COLE grew up), next to a lake in Switzerland; then, in a "flickering series of scenes," we are transported from the sites of a Balinese massacre in Ubud, Indonesia, to New Zealand, and from there to makeshift memorials for migrants scoring the earth near the Arizona border, and back again to Africa.1 The travel photographs paired with lyrical prose make us consider how exposure within the photographic and textual frame creates epistemic and ontological disjunctions, or what COLE calls "blind spots." Rather than an "attempt at comprehensiveness and totality," COLE'S collection maintains "faith in the fragment and the montage," which can "evoke the truth about a situation."2 We are asked to look more toward an intermingling visual constellation [End Page 93] of the photobook as a whole and to discover a through-line connecting disparate places and people. COLE creates an aesthetic assemblage or montage of photography, testimony, poetry, and ethnography to illuminate a kind of missing truth about the connections between historical displacement, attenuated pasts, mobility, and racial representation. While Cole's fiction and its relationship to photography and racialization have been widely discussed, his own photographic practices, as exemplified in Blind Spot, the "fourth in a quartet of books about the limits of vision," have received only limited critical attention.3 Most criticism, like Robert Pinsky's, examines Cole's terse and oblique commentary in the photobook to argue that Cole reveals "mysteries of the ordinary," which are "attained in patiently awaited, brief flashes."4 Similarly, Colin Dickey illuminates how Cole's fragmentary images are used to explore the "absences that define documentation and nonfiction," as exemplified through the slow and deliberate practices of film development that Cole uses.5 More recently, Monika Gehlawat argues that Cole uses intermedial aesthetic practices to "foster an atmosphere of thoughtful discretion," reticence, and inwardness for both photographed subjects and the audience.6 Yet, these accounts are limited in their engagement with questions concerning the historical and transnational trajectory of photography that has been calibrated in accordance with hierarchical conceptions of race. Alexandra Kingston-Reese, however, provides an incisive corrective as she reflects not only on intermediality but also on the racialized politics of vision and aesthetics of blackness in Cole's photobook. Kingston-Reese finds that through the emphasis on aurality, visuality, and digital presence, the volume creates slant rhymes and "networked contemporary artistic practices" to foster "empathetic forms," illuminate "perceptual weaknesses," and afford "new modes of reading."7 I follow Kingston-Reese's attendance to Cole's ethically insightful and "ethnically observant" intermedial aesthetics, but I turn my attention to the coeval processes of photographic portraiture and race-making exhibited in the work.8 More specifically, I examine Cole's aesthetic process, which reveals how portraiture's methods are co-constitutive of a reductive imaginary of race that we face, or fail to face, in the photograph.9 As I argue, Blind Spot explores ethically fraught issues within the sensorially confused space of the photo collection by [End Page 94] playing with exposure, light, and composition to confront what Paul Gilroy calls "epidermal thinking."10 To challenge such framing ontologies of race, Cole practices anti-portraiture, which allows the audience to (re)search, (re)envision, and (re)frame the racial imagination that uses photographic documents, especially those emphasizing physiognomy and bodies, as a locus for classification and racial categorization. By (re)framing an alternative way of seeing according to the limitations of vision, Cole's compendium of photographs and text engages with our ethical obligation as he activates cultural memory and uses film photographs to move us to forget the familiar and instead see unfamiliar faces and places on their own terms, where darkness signifies wisdom or potentiality. Cole's process of anti-portraiture thus responds to the...

Einbildungskraft (Imagination)

Einbildungskraft (imagination) is a multifaceted mental faculty in Goethe’s theoretical writings and poetic works that is non-systematic and rich in aporias. At work in both cognitive processes and artistic production, it becomes a defining concept in Goethe’s creative understanding of natural and aesthetic processes. Einbildungskraft serves as a faculty that presides over nature, the human mind, and the arts as a source of interdisciplinary knowledge. As a pre-noetic power, moreover, it also manifests the poietic force of language. By creatively expanding the Kantian distinction between the productive and reproductive imagination, Goethe theorizes a third kind of Einbildungskraft at work in poetic language with an internal law (Gesetzlichkeit) that “circumspectively surveys” the inner and outer worlds. As a kind of analogical thinking, this “umsichtige Einbildungskraft” (surveying imagination) participates in cognitive processes by actively elaborating thought, affect, vision, and memory. And as an artistic power, it mirrors in metaphorical language the organic forces of nature, which share the same principles of human life: synthesis, expansion, and transformation. According to Goethe, Einbildungskraft is the faculty responsible for shaping perceptual inputs, affects, memories, and mental images into artistic and verbal forms, thereby reconfiguring all the fragmented pieces of existence into an organic system that represents reality in its ontological essence.

Structure of aesthetic judgements

Daniel Berlyne's "new experimental aesthetics" offers a deliberately mole- cular and non-normative view of aesthetic processes. This paper suggests that Berlyne's theoretical structure may derive greater social applicability by regarding aesthetic stimuli as aspects of leisure and the entertainment industry: that the concept of optimal level of stimulation is useful in predicting individual leisure preferences; that a formal link between percep- tion and intrinsic motivation may be found in perceptually-mediated arousal; and that the hedonic value of this arousal is determined by the socially formed values attached to aesthetic stimuli.

Affectivity of New Media Art Based on the Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience

With the development of both media and technology, new media technology has cast a significant influence on art creation, creating an aesthetic paradigm different from that of traditional art. Meanwhile, owing to the different aesthetic appeals of the new era, basic components of art, such as content and form, are constantly changing. The ultimate goal of art is to express the artist’s emotions and communicate with the spectator in the same aesthetic flow. Additionally, new media art attempts to convey emotions to the appreciators and provide them a multidimensional aesthetic approach by subverting traditions and innovating in artistic expressions and aesthetic experience. This study aims to explore the aesthetic perception and perception-based emotions in new media art from the perspective of aesthetic experience. Specifically, it applies Dufrenne’s phenomenological aesthetic theory to analyze the aesthetic process. Through the analysis of affectivity in aesethics, the creator’s aprroaches of constructing the emotional aesthetic space, as well as the role of emotions in art creation, is reflected upon to inspire the future affective creation of new media art.

Novel Reading as Aesthetic: The Nesting of Aesthetic Experiences and Reproduction of Aesthetic Perception

Abstract This article discusses the nesting of the individual aesthetic experience and the reproduction process of aesthetic perception when an individual reads a novel. The essence of the “boundary” of the novelistic space is discussed first. This aesthetic process examines the relationship with the boundary of novelistic space. Next, I discuss two cognitive and dynamic outcomes that arise from the stimulation of “intervention” during the nesting of aesthetic experiences inside and outside the boundary. Finally, I argue that the reproduction process of aesthetic perception usually comes in the form of the “co-construction of opposites” due to the nesting of aesthetic experiences. This structure will make each individual's aesthetic experience distinctive and unique. In this research, a new viewpoint for reference will also be provided to research the arts’ aesthetic process in other forms.

Uma câmera-flecha; mobilizações, cosmopolítica e modos de aldear o cinema

The Brazilian context of the last few years has reinforced Rudyard Kipling’s maxim: “The first casualty of war is the truth”. Later, Paul Virilio would correct the sentence by saying that war victimizes the “reality”. In these recent battles, in which the Brazilian State strives to suppress a series of rights conquered by native peoples, cinema and indigenous communication have revealed themselves as important tools (weapons) against the “machine for grinding worlds”, which is like the writer Ailton Krenak names this “entity” called Capitalism.We saw the emergence of a series of productions carried out and starring by indigenous people, which bring us an enormous renewal of narrative and aesthetic processes. It is as if it were a counter-anthropology or the reverse of the ethnographic film. When we occupy the artefacts of cinema, it is understood that indigenous films represent cameras-arrow that launch themselves into the world, helping to displace traditional notions about science, politics and philosophy, in the quest to expand the concept of Cosmopolitics, engendered by Isabelle Stengers and defended by authors such as Bruno Latour.

The State of the Sublime: Aesthetic Protocols and Global Security

Security politics is everywhere, its tendrils entangled with every aspect of life. Nonetheless, this hyper-securitised status quo has not interrupted the flow of everyday life, nor the circulation of people, goods, or ideas. For the privileged of the world, a paradox has emerged: war, terrorism, ecological disaster, pandemics, and many other ‘monstrous’ forms of insecurity are now experienced as mundane and manageable phenomena in spite of the exceptional political measures, and more generalised affective states of fear and anxiety, that they have proliferated. How has this occurred? This article argues that aesthetic processes and politics are fundamental to the maintenance of this paradox. To do so, we draw on Bruno Latour’s concept of ‘transfrayeurs’ (trans-fears) to understand how modes of aesthetic design are deployed to simultaneously locate sublime imaginaries of insecurity in our midst while also allowing us to live with, accept, and forget their presence. More specifically, we suggest that trans-fearing is achieved through ‘aesthetic protocols’ that specify principles for designing material, affective, and discursive forms into our lives in ways that allow for the careful ‘calibration’ of how we (unequally) experience a hierarchised, depoliticised, and militarised ‘state of the sublime’ within global security politics. L’État du sublime : protocoles esthétiques et sécurité mondiale

Single incision-plus approach for gasless endoscopic parotidectomy: a seven-step procedure.

Endoscopic parotidectomy has the potential to become a reliable procedure for benign and low-grade malignant parotid gland tumors. Based on the previous literature review and our own clinical experience, we introduced in detail the surgical procedure of single incision-plus approach for gasless endoscopic parotidectomy. This method contributes a logical approach to achieving endoscopic resection of parotid gland tumor and preservation of facial nerve, which can be summarized into the following seven-step method: preoperative preparation; design of retroauricular-hairline incision and plus-incision; surgical cavities creation and coalescence; separation of surgical boundaries; separation and protection of the facial nerve trunk; processing of the branches of facial nerve; en bloc resection of the superficial parotid gland and tumor. Endoscopic parotidectomy is a more difficult procedure than conventional parotid surgery, requiring more precision as well as more experience and equipment. The learning curve of time and frequency is influenced by many factors, like anatomy, instruments, procedures and patience. We contribute our clinical exploration of anatomical precautions, feasible instruments, and surgical procedures and summarize precautions under single incision-plus in gasless endoscopic parotidectomy. Given the growing interest in the aesthetic process of the parotid region, the seven-step method may have the potential to be a method for teaching gasless endoscopic parotidectomy.

Showing progress. Defining self-tracking as an aesthetic audio-visual genre

Abstract This article analyses videos of men talking about and documenting their lack and growth of hair via Finasteride and Minoxidil. We explore these male self-representational videos on YouTube as a specific form of self-tracking enabled by the camera within a specific platformed environment. We argue that the camera is not solely a tool, but rather an aesthetic practice with performative effects. In other words, self-tracking must be understood as always already entangled in and inseparable from mediating and aesthetic processes. The article then outlines the main characteristics of self-tracking videos as a self-representational audio-visual genre, defining them as momental videos and longitudinal videos. It is our claim that these defining characteristics constitute the central aesthetic principles of Finasteride and Minoxidil self-tracking videos, but that they are also applicable to other forms of videos preoccupied with representing and tracking transformation.

Clothes make the man: butch fashion in digital visual cultures

There are few sartorial ensembles as heavily signified as masculine as a suit. This article focuses on the suit within queer fashion digital cultures and spaces to explore how butch of colour digital fashion suits up to offer us different ways to think about masculinity. Intervening in the erasure of women of colour in histories of fashion – including menswear – and histories of sexuality – butch, dapper, tomboy, dandy – I argue that butch digital fashion works as a site and composition of flesh, fabric and feeling that reworks masculinity as a project of embodiment. I look at three interwoven dimensions of butch digital fashion – aesthetic process, texture as feeling and spatial imaginations – attending to the themes of fantasy, desire and pleasure. I situate butch within and between fashion studies and media studies to offer butch as a relation, practice, orientation and site of embodiment to think about being and becoming, about the body politics of space and feeling, as matters of race, sexuality, class and gender – and the materialities of race, sexuality, class and gender, mediated by the global, and as the global by the digital. Digital butch fashion is, at once, a visual culture, a creative visual space, a resource of queer fantasy and an aesthetic process. It is messy, tense and fraught with the politics of race, colonialism and class, yet at the same time, dense with possibility, pleasure and eroticism. Butch of colour fashion offers frames and forms for rethinking and remaking masculinity as a sign of a body, as a category of personhood, as a set of practices and feelings made coherent by processes of embodiment.

A Multitask Convolutional Neural Network for Artwork Appreciation

The computational aesthetics of pictorial art is an important part of human artistic creation, and the computational aesthetics of pictorial art images is a computationally computable human aesthetic process using machines, which has important applications and scientific significance in the automated analysis of large-scale paintings and the computational modeling of perception by machines. To this end, this paper proposes a multitask convolutional neural network model for emotion and rating of artworks. (1) An artwork appreciation dataset consisting of fifty Chinese paintings and fifty Western oil paintings was created, and twenty subjects were recruited to score the art appreciation of one hundred artworks in the dataset, covering both painting aesthetic evaluation and painting emotion evaluation. (2) Based on the artwork art appreciation dataset, an AlexNet-based convolutional neural network model is proposed to utilize the powerful feature extraction and classification capabilities of neural networks to complete artwork art appreciation, and an oversampling method and multitask learning method are used to improve the overall recognition accuracy. (3) Compared with the combination of traditional manual features + machine learning algorithms, the end-to-end multitask convolutional neural network proposed in this paper has the highest accuracy rate of 74.57%/71.43%/74.12%.

Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage: A feminist film in a postmodern frame

Chinese-language film studies have paid scant attention to the intersection of feminism and postmodernism. This article argues that Stanley Kwan’s Center Stage (1991), a film with a female protagonist and a postmodern narrative format, is demonstrably a feminist film. The parodic representation of protagonist Ruan Lingyu and the film’s scripted re-enactments of scenes from Hong Kong cinema are revealed as postmodern aesthetic processes, through which traditional gender norms can be explored and questioned. Finally, the article examines Kwan’s unique, self-reflexive narrative practice, which constructs an alternative female celebrity biopic and situates the film firmly as feminist historiographic metafiction.

Moral Instruction by Bad Example: The First Latin Translations of Theophrastus’ Characters☆

<i>Moral Instruction by Bad Example: The First Latin Translations of Theophrastus’</i> Characters☆

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

Beyond Imperial Aesthetics: Theories of Art and Politics in East Asia

Stress-CARE: A Chinese music therapeutic model to treat stress and burnout syndromes

Psychological stress, stress disorders and burnout syndromes are considered a global burden ‒ and they are challenging public health systems. They cover a broad spectrum of health conditions, some of which are diagnosable, others not. Although particularly burnout is commonly associated with working conditions, we identified stress disorders and burnout risks also in children and adolescents, hence the need for specific health education. Based on meta-synthetic construction, the present article suggests the Stress-CARE model for classroom education. It involves four crucial perspectives ‒ creativity, anxiety, recovery and energy ‒ hence the model’s name CARE: (i) given that chronic stress and burnout tend to freeze cognition and emotion, creative interactions and models such as ‘sound scene improvisation’ can restore personality dynamics, (ii) there is an inner connection between stress and anxiety, which advocates psychoeducation alongside music-guided self-exploration, (iii) stress disorders and burnout syndromes have a tendency to inhibit self-healing capacities, while specific forms of sound meditation can bring relief and help to stimulate self-regeneration, (iv) chronic stress and burnout are likely to unbalance psychosomatic energy systems ‒ and specific body-voice-techniques are used for rebalancing. Although the Stress-CARE model was designed for health education, it may also be applied in clinical settings as add-on therapy, complementary therapy or main therapeutic intervention, depending on the patients’ attitude towards creative and aesthetic processes, as well as therapeutic responses.

Music, dance and painting to treat eating disorders; The Chinese TIBET-Model

Eating disorders are considered an increasing public health problem, also in China. They comprise a broad spectrum of medical conditions such as anorexia nervosa, avoidant/restrictive food intake disorder, bulimia and binge eating, which often go hand in hand with considerable mental and physiological issues such as obesity and metabolic syndrome. Scientific research and clinical experience suggest distinct therapeutic interventions; many of them are related to cognitive behavioural therapy and psychoeducation. The present article introduces artistic approaches comprising music, dance and painting, the so called TIBET-Model, which is based on five principles, namely trance, identity, beauty, exploration and transition, hence the term. This model can be applied as add-on therapy, complementary therapy or main therapeutic intervention, depending on the patient’s attitude toward creative and aesthetic processes, as well as therapeutic responses.

От труда – к искусству и обратно: К.Маркс, М. Дюшан, Б. Арватов, А. Гастев

The paper addresses the post-capitalist state of art and its main actors. An important role in the article is assigned to a return to the anthropological issues of post-anthropocentric art. In today's post-capitalist society, the role of art is being fundamentally transformed. There is now a different understanding of the very essence of what is commonly regarded as art, the work of the artist, and seen as an act of art. The aim of this article is to reactualise the impact of national research in the context of current trends in the aesthetic theory and to substantiate the perspective of this impact. In a situation where art is already thought of beyond the production of "creations" and beyond the professional work of the artist as a person who has specific craft skills. This article intends to clarify the relationship between perception and labor in the context of the artist's work and to substantiate the relationship between non-productive art and perceptive labor. In contemporary art theory, following the affective turn, the work of aesthetics is seen as being external to the original anthropologisation and psychologisation of aesthetic processes. It is important to demonstrate the specific impact of the representatives of the "productivist art" in overcoming the fetishisation of art. An important point of the article is that art is seen as a resource for overcoming alienated labor and the decapitalization of sensuality. The researchers return to the connection between art and labor on a new level. We show that, within the capitalist matrix, art only partially overcomes labor's alienation, while creative labor itself becomes alienated. The authors suggest that the next step is to turn attention to the Soviet tradition of the sociology of art, in particular, the productivist art and the Soviet organizational ideas of the 1920s. In the works of Boris Arvatov and Alexei Gastev, we see ways of making sense of the decapitalization of sensuality through the conscious construction and framing of the social, where the artist becomes the engineer of life, where labor becomes life, and the individual remains human.

Поетизація буденного у творчості Вільгельма Ґенацино

Increased interest in everyday life and routine explains a new and relevant perception of the creative agenda of contemporary German writer Wilhelm Genazino (1943-2018), known as “poetizing everyday life”. The article, thus, aims to offer a comprehensive view into the poetics of the German novelist to identify ways in which everyday life is poetized, which is an example of linguistic mastery, narrative skill, and philosophical generalization. A close reading method is used to analyze specific scenes from the novels (An Umbrella for One Day, Happiness in Unhappy Times, The Foolishness of Love, If We Were Animals), in which the characters actively practice the “extended gaze”, theoretically validated in W. Genazino’s essay, to reveal a system of special ties important to their inner world behind the routine situations and worn clothes. The writer believes that in such a way, characters experience an epiphany, which provokes further musing about art and the mystery of everyday life. In this connection, it is established that Genazino’s characters manage to avoid the negative influences of society by distancing from it via self-invented aesthetic processes. They are constantly searching for individual vision. It is also noted that the writer focuses on prolonged disappearance scenes, works with time accumulated in objects, and projects distancing from one’s own self to clothes. The extended gaze which the protagonists use to watch their own portrayals helps them overcome identity crisis and generate art, which promises salvation, through simple observance. It is concluded that W. Genazino talks about the aesthetic link between the subject and object perceived as individual “cultural significance”. It enables the protagonists to discard the routine and enter a space outside the limits they have themselves created. Everyday objects and familiar situations have the capacity to stimulate memories and boost creative perception. Their fleeting nature provides for compensatory narration, which means dropping the inessential and petty and is, consequently, perceived as a productive narration. Everyday reality emerges as something that may be perceived as visible existence, which upon some consideration may reveal unique dimensions and gain particular significance based on intermediary space between what is perceived by the eye and the invisible, actualized by the inner vision. Such reflexive vision transcends the limits of things, transforming them and constituting new reality. Such is the underlying principle that the writer used to recreate everyday life in his works.