Aesthetic Shaping Research Articles

In PLACE OF SHOUTING

Fides Krucker is a singer of contemporary opera who specializes in extended vocal sound. For three decades, her passion has been interdisciplinary co-creation. Extended, or ‘expanded,’ voice is an effective mode of expression and communication. It can marry with theatrical forms in multiple ways. This article dips into (1) the work of the music-driven feminist collective URGE, (2) Krucker’s history in electroacoustic opera, (3) ‘vocalography’ for choreographer Jessica Runge, and (4) devised theatre at Humber College Theatre Performance. There is practicality, purpose, and economy to non-verbals—from groan, growl, and sigh through to scream, squeal, and shriek. This palette becomes the rough material for aesthetic shaping, and the sounds—often taboo and definitely stimulating—are emotion turned inside out. They affect the listener in biologically direct ways that are surprisingly spiritual. It requires training to develop a body of performers willing and able to go to these ‘improper’ vocal places. It takes an imagination that loves and understands these sounds to create compositions based on their loamy soil. This terrain is a fertile meeting ground for theatrical impulse to marry with the structural values of musical composition: dynamics, timbre, layering, motifs, range. Physical and devised theatre are a part of the Canadian performance landscape. Could vocally driven theatre create a robust avant-garde aesthetic capable of going beyond shouting to express the urgency of our times?

Color Doppler Sonography Assisted Subcutaneous Mastectomy with Inferior Pedicled Nipple-Areola Complex in Female-to-Male Transsexuals: A Retrospective Cohort Analysis.

The surgical goals of gender reassignment surgery of the breast in female-to male transsexuals (FMT) is the aesthetic shaping of a male thoracic wall with minimal scarring, while preserving the sensitivity of the nipple-areola complex (NAC). For large and ptotic breasts, we perform a mastectomy over an inframammary access with inferior pedicled NAC under color Doppler visualization of the perforators. This paper presents the technique, including complications and assessment of quality of life, as part of a unicentric analysis. This was a retrospective analysis of 23 patients (46 mastectomies) performed between September 2014 and September 2020. The complication rate and the number of corrective surgeries were recorded for quality assessment. A semiquantitative score was used to evaluate aesthetic outcome, nipple sensitivity, quality of life, and sexuality. A total of 46 mastectomies were performed in 23 patients. The patient survey showed high patient satisfaction. Loss of nipple sensitivity was observed after one mastectomy (2.17%). In 91.67% of cases, patients reported that their appearance reflected how they feel on the inside. In 75% of cases, patients reported feeling equal to other men. The overall complication rate was 10.87%. Shape correction due to persistent excess of volume was rare (2.17%, equivalent to one mastectomy). Subcutaneous mastectomy with inferior nipple pedicle can be performed with a high degree of safety and satisfaction in FMT. Color Doppler-guided visualization of the perforator vessels is helpful in allowing a thin pedicle preparation, thus reducing the need for secondary surgeries to optimize the shape. This journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each article. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266 .

Интеграционные процессы в современной проектно-художественной культуре

The paper is to comprehend the experience of design and artistic shaping in environmental design as an integral phenomenon. Artistic and synthetic foundations of design practices, where figurative-content and spatial-plastic connections are given a central place, determine the vector of design research in a holistic relationship with spatial and plastic arts. The authors consider the integration processes in project culture using the example of environmental design. The paper outlines modern approaches to art and design organization of space, where axiologically-oriented design thinking of a designer and understanding of the continuity of artistic traditions in shaping the spatial environment are of critical value. In this context, a new quality is given to the natural conformity and the place of conformity of design solutions, taking into account architectural asset of the area and architectural environmental scenario. The study demonstrates that design and artistic integration processes represent a new and complex design synthesis, determining integrity of the environment and aesthetic shaping. The design and artistic synthesis allows expressing the concepts, values, creative intentions and perceptual actions of the designer and establishing connections with historical and cultural reality which enables us to consider the definition of “project-artistic synthesis” as a holistically structured system in the existence of project culture.

Defining the Inframammary Fold by Liposuction: An Essential Tool in Aesthetic Shaping of the Reconstructed Breast. Technique and Long-term Results in a Series of Patients

BackgroundA good inframammary fold (IMF) definition and position is essential to achieve a satisfactory and natural result in breast surgery. This structure can be damaged, especially during mastectomies. Multiple methods are reported in the literature to restore IMF or improve its definition. In this study, we present the results achieved in a series of patients treated with subdermal liposuction.MethodsWe report on all our patients who underwent IMF liposuction between January 2016 and June 2020. Subdermal liposuction was performed with a blunt 3 mm cannula along the new IMF to promote skin retraction and adherence between skin and fascia. Results were evaluated subjectively by the patients and objectively by 8 individuals not involved with the treatment.ResultsWe performed IMF liposuction in 88 breasts (69 patients), aged 21–74 (mean 52) years for 82 implant-based reconstructions, 2 tuberous breasts, and 4 contralateral breast augmentations. Mean follow-up was 28 months (6–64). Subjective results: the overall result evaluated with the VAS scale reached 86.6/100. All the 22 patients interviewed judged as well defined the new inframammary fold. Objective results: in 83% of cases the definition of the inframammary fold was judged as good or excellent, while symmetry with contralateral IMF, natural appearance, and overall aesthetic outcome were judged as good.ConclusionBased on our long-term satisfactory results, we recommend the technique of subdermal liposuction to improve the definition of IMF in breast reconstruction after mastectomy and other breast procedures. It is effective, easy to perform, minimally invasive, and durable.Level of Evidence IVThis journal requires that authors assign a level of evidence to each submission to which Evidence-Based Medicine rankings are applicable. This excludes Review Articles, Book Reviews, and manuscripts that concern Basic Science, Animal Studies, Cadaver Studies, and Experimental Studies. For a full description of these Evidence-Based Medicine ratings, please refer to the Table of Contents or the online Instructions to Authors www.springer.com/00266.

La periferia en la ciudad alemana: de la ciudad-jardín a la Siedlung moderna

<p class="VLCResumen">This article examines how the most recognisable urban forms of the Siedlung in the first postwar period in Germany were influenced by previous experiences in the construction of the urban periphery involving the company town and the garden city. The adaptation of these peripheral settlements – in which the desired balance between the country house and the urban dwelling was achieved by introducing terraced housing – to meet certain requirements of sufficient density to satisfy the growing demand for small dwellings was to determine the final configuration of the “modern Siedlung,” the settlement characteristic of the expansion of the large German city in the 1920s. An urban form that was to combat the housing shortage problem by providing systematic, medium-density housing groups consisting mainly of linear buildings several storeys high integrated with the open space in a remarkable balance between building and nature. On the basis of original sources from that period, this text addresses noteworthy aspects of this evolution towards a spatial, functional and aesthetic shaping of the collective accommodation characteristic of a Modernist German urbanism which still deserves to be taken into consideration in the current discussion about urban density.</p>

Correction and Prevention of the Pixie Ear Deformity: A Combined Technique.

Ear and earlobe deformities after surgical rhytidectomy are common and can significantly diminish the aesthetic outcome. The main causes of ear/earlobe distortion are skin overresection, an imbalance between vertical/horizontal skin-lift vectors, and tractional distortions through superficial muscularaponeurotic system (SMAS) tension. To demonstrate a new method for earlobe suturing and ear fixation that would prevent aesthetics-related complications after facelift surgery. A total of 105 primary SMAS facelift surgeries were performed between 2015 and 2016 by the first author. A combination technique consisting of a posterior earlobe rotation flap (PERF) and a concha-mastoid suspension suture (CMSS) was executed bilaterally within each facelift procedure (n = 210). A retrospective data analysis was conducted (preoperatively and one year postoperatively) using our hospital information system and a photometric data analysis to assess auricular displacement, earlobe distortion, and hypertrophic scarring. Pseudoptosis of the earlobe was noted in two cases, and auricular displacement was observed in four cases. Bilateral mild hypertrophic scarring was seen in one patient. The postoperative photometric analysis showed a natural ptosis grade I/II in all the patients, with a statistically significantly reduced postoperative earlobe size (P < 0.05). The total rate of aesthetics-related complications was 4% in our cohort (earlobe distortion with pseudoptosis: 1%; auricular displacement: 2%; hypertrophic scarring: 1%). Our modification of the facial flap anchoring at the ear base in combination with a CMSS stabilizes the natural position of the ear and prevents distortion while allowing better control over the earlobe's aesthetic shaping. This novel method reduces the incidence of ear/earlobe deformities and hypertrophic scarring at the ear base after rhytidectomy and, therefore, promises to be a valuable advancement.

Acts of Perception: Samuel Becket, Time, Space and the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949

Situated in the wake of the first and second waves of the Digital Humanities, the Digital Literary Atlas of Ireland, 1922–1949 website provides interactive mapping and timeline features for academics and members of the public who are interested in the intersection of Irish literary culture, history, and environment. The site hosts Google Earth software produced interfaces with the EXHIBIT Timeline functions made available by the Semantic Interoperability of Metadata and Information in unLike Environments (SIMILE) project, developed and hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and Library. This paper's case study maps the biographical lifepath of the writer Samuel Beckett using digital humanities techniques such as ergodicity, and deformance. The geo-digital-timeline mapping of his biography allows us to visualize the shift in Beckett's literary perspective from a latent Cartesian verisimilitude to more phenomenological and fragmented, existential impressions of time and place. The atlas's visualizations of his Wanderjahre years in various European metropoles chart the intellectual and aesthetic influences shaping the Beckettian literary landscapes of his later and better-known works, such as En Attendant Godot (1953). Beckett's thought, works, and shifts in perception provide insight into how digital cultural mapping practices and third wave digital humanities methodologies and tools can be conceptualized and operationalized.

Aesthetic theory formation industrial products

This article investigates the theoretical aspects of aesthetic shaping of industrial products. P ozkryto ties shape of a product from its design, materials, manufacturing technology and function revealed principles of optimal and harmonious shaping.

The Shaman's Song and Divination in the Epic Tradition

ABSTRACTEvidence of the intimate linkage of the shaman's song and divinatory procedures may be viewed in the ancient epics. These narrative poems contain structural and thematic elements recognizable from theshaman's song—in particular his or her voyage to the Otherworld and the guidance of oracular powers. In this paper,The Epic of Gilgamesh, Euripedes'Ion, andThe Ozidi Saga(a living epic from West Africa) are examined as recuperations of the orally composed and transmitted song of the shaman. I argue that the epics—the origins of which predate their composition in literary form—bear witness to these most ancient and mysterious forms of linguistic expression. As depictions of Otherwordly journeys, they can be viewed through a metaphysic outside of time, rendering divination not only possible but inevitable, and necessitating a language of abstraction, allusion, and ambiguity. Today's experimental poetries may not all partake of a conscious recuperation of shamanic themes and forms, but they share an imaginary (yet not imagined) repositioning of reality, an open questioning of consensus forms of awareness, and an aesthetic shaping of what Jean Gebser calls “Integral Consciousness” (15), the simultaneous integration‐disintegration of archaic, mythic, magic, and mental paradigms in an intensification of awareness which sees time as diaphanous, and Mind as a doorway between possibilities.

Psychoanalysis as a creative shaping process

The author first explains the concepts of creativity, play and aesthetic experience. He then outlines the psychoanalytic process as a creative one that shapes reality. Making a link between psychoanalysis and the humanities, he demonstrates that creative play is a fundamental aspect of the human experience of reality. Aesthetic experiences during the psychoanalytic process are comparable to the play by which children structure their world and artists' activity in following their urge to shape. Furthermore it is shown that creative actualisation testifies to a quasi‐biological need for coherence and structure. Through modern hermeneutics, the truth claims of aesthetic shaping can be established in epistemological terms. The basic principles of hermeneutics‐historicity, linguisticity and communicative experience‐find their psychoanalytic counterparts in memory, representational shaping and transference‐countertransference. Psychoanalysis is demonstrated to be simultaneously a science and an art. On the basis of a case history, aesthetic experience is shown to constitute a specific and unique form of access to psychic reality. Aesthetic experience and creativity do not only aid recovery from ‘bad psychological states’, they are also indispensable for the entire understanding of internal and external reality. It is possible to develop this understanding through a creative psychoanalytic attitude.

Psychoanalysis as a creative shaping process

The author first explains the concepts of creativity, play and aesthetic experience. He then outlines the psychoanalytic process as a creative one that shapes reality. Making a link between psychoanalysis and the humanities, he demonstrates that creative play is a fundamental aspect of the human experience of reality. Aesthetic experiences during the psychoanalytic process are comparable to the play by which children structure their world and artists' activity in following their urge to shape. Furthermore it is shown that creative actualisation testifies to a quasi-biological need for coherence and structure. Through modern hermeneutics, the truth claims of aesthetic shaping can be established in epistemological terms. The basic principles of hermeneutics--historicity, linguisticity and communicative experience--find their psychoanalytic counterparts in memory, representational shaping and transference-countertransference. Psychoanalysis is demonstrated to be simultaneously a science and an art. On the basis of a case history, aesthetic experience is shown to constitute a specific and unique form of access to psychic reality. Aesthetic experience and creativity do not only aid recovery from 'bad psychological states', they are also indispensable for the entire understanding of internal and external reality. It is possible to develop this understanding through a creative psychoanalytic attitude.

Modernist Aesthetics in Joseph Roth's "Radetzkymarsch": The Crisis of Meaning and the Role of the Reader

Joseph Roth's narrative of fin-de-siecle Austro-Hungary depicts an aesthetic transition from realism to a modernist subversion of realist conventions.1 Although the novel contains such realistic devices as a fictional world anchored in a specific time and place, a plot with a credible ending, plausible characters, and an omniscient narrator, Roth subverts the thematics of destiny and the strategies of illusion-hallmark traits of late realism.2 In particular, Roth punctures the realist illusion of the wholeness of the text with a self-reflexiveness ubiquitous in German Romantic works which not only exposes the machinations that produce mimesis, but also subverts the basis of realism, the tacit assumption that fictional reality contains an intrinsic order. This use of Romantic irony addressed to the reader challenges the presupposition that an irreversible cause-and-effect sequence of events shapes the protagonists' inevitable destinies and draws attention to the process of narration. This self-reflexiveness creates a self-consciousness of the text as artistic artifact in which the author's aesthetic shaping of the narrative through linguistic devices, not an intrinsic cosmic or historical force, creates order among disparate events and alerts readers to their own role in the aesthetic enterprise of producing meaning. This self-conscious depiction of the text's order and meaning as products of increasingly obsolete linguistic stratagems of the nineteenth-century novel exposes the precarious role of language in transforming a chaotic reality into a meaningful narrative and demands the readers' participation in discovering/constructing the text's meaning. Although the fictional works of Roth's contemporary, Carl Einstein, an anti-realist novelist and art critic, differ from Roth's, his aesthetic theories reveal the debates concerning the novel of Roth's generation and shed light on modernist aspects of Roth's work. Einstein distinguishes between a self-conscious, artistic order imposed upon fictional reality and one that appears inherent in the world of mimetic novels. In an essay Uber den Roman (1914) Einstein notes that the plot of a psychological novel is based upon the logical development of cause and effect, a psychologically motivated chain of events.3 He proposes an alternative novelistic form ruled not by psychological motivation, but by the randomness of auctorial caprice: Also das Kunstwerk ist Sache der Willkur (Einstein 127). As Neil Donahue notes: notion of arbitrariness undermines the logical connectedness required for naturalistic depiction in visual or verbal art [...].4 In this alternative art form, laws of formal composition as an aesthetic order replace the order of logical causality in mimetic art. Einstein perceived causality and artistic form as opposites and believed that a chronological ordering of events as a linear sequence of causes and effects destroyed the autonomous, closed form of the total work of art.5 Roth's work is transitional because it consists of a balancing act between Einstein's two paradigms for the novel. At first reading, the decline of the empire appears to be the result of an inevitable historical destiny, the teleological design of a realist novel that consists of a linear cause-and-effect sequence of events. The narrator's intrusive commentary, however, calls attention to authorial manipulation of the narrative that is so pervasive in German Romantic, modernist, and postmodernist prose. The narrator subverts the illusion of an inherent order, often depicted as fate in nineteenth-century fiction, through self-reflexive commentary on the storytelling process that fictionalizes events through the techniques of mimesis and verisimilitude, which create meaning. Both this questioning of an intrinsic order and the allusions to an arbitrary aesthetic one in Roth's novel underscore art's dubious role in imposing order onto a chaotic world. Specifically, cyclical, repetitive aesthetic patterns and the leitmotif, a prevalent technique in music, subvert the novel's linear plot and mimetic function. …

Remedial Action for Radioactive Waste Rock Piles in China

ABSTRACTThe Chinese government has conducted remedial action for radioactive waste rock piles since 1990. The radioactive waste rocks produced in the course of geological exploration of uranium deposits are widely distributed over several hundreds of locations in more than 20 provinces in China.The following remedial actions for radioactive waste rock piles have been undertaken in China:1. Protecting dams for stabilizing the piles have been built. A total length of about 50,000 m of these dams has been completed.2. Soil layers have been emplaced on the radioactive waste rock piles. The focus of the action is to eliminate the radiation harmful to public health. A total area of 750,000 square meters of soil ahs been placed on the piles in China.3. Radioactive waste rock piles have been vegetated. Aesthetic shaping of the landscape in the exploratory district of the uranium deposits is our expectant goal. A total area of about 560,000 square meters of vegetation has been placed on the soil covering the piles.Through these remedial actions, the environmental situation has been extensively improved in the remedial districts. The individual annual effective dose equivalent is less than 1 Sv/a. The radon emission rate is less than 20 pCi/m2.s. The gamma ray external exposure rate has been greatly reduced.

Aesthetic Considerations for Urban Pedestrian Bridge Design

Many urban pedestrian bridges have been built in the world. However, their aesthetic aspect has often been neglected. As the loadings of an urban pedestrian bridge is comparatively small and its width is relatively narrow, the modeling of the bridge is more flexible than other types of bridges. In this paper, the factors affecting the formation of urban pedestrian bridges are analyzed. These factors include the surroundings, positions of viewers, and types of bridge structures. Additionally, some basic considerations and regulations concerning the aesthetic shaping of urban pedestrian bridges and plane and space compositions are developed. These regulations can help engineers better understand the aesthetic aspect of urban pedestrian bridge design. Finally, the aesthetic analysis of several existing bridges based on the presented regulations is given.