Analysis Of Expressive Gesture Research Articles

The Study of Image by Aby Warburg

Warburg is one of the most inspiring figures in the German tradition of art historiography. Although one of the well-known aspects of Warburg’s intellectual work is its relation to iconology, this article seeks to go beyond the conventional understanding of Warburg to mapping a picture of his “special” view of the image as a whole. To this end, by re-reading the classic Warburg texts and new interpretations of those texts, an attempt has been made to examine the place of his approach to the “image” in the tradition of German art historiography and the key concepts of his intellectual system in this field. The findings of the article show that in this system of thought, we can see the traces of the ideas of thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche, Jakob Burckhardt and Robert Vischer. In this context, Nietzsche’s “Apollonian-Dionysian” dichotomy, Fisher’s concept of “empathy” and Hegelian Burckhardt’s totalitarianism were influential in formulating Warburg’s particular conception of the Renaissance art. In this regard, Warburg devotes himself to the study of a concept called the “afterlife” of antiquity and other concepts such as pathos formula, dialectic, and empathy in Renaissance art and thought. It seems that most of these concepts revolve around the idea of “survival.” According to Warburg, since art has a history, images also had remnants, remnants that reveal themselves in connection with the concept of memory and in connection with a concept called pathos-formula. In this sense, Warburg focuses on gestures and their transmission through art. The result of such an effort is a silent language design free from argument. Expressive gesture analysis offers an unusual way of looking at past shapes and allows the audience to find images of the past in the present. This is the meaning of the afterlife and the survival of the images.

Real-time motion attention and expressive gesture interfaces

This paper aims at investigating the relationship between gestures’ expressivity and the amount of attention they attract. We present a technique for quantifying behavior saliency, here understood as the capacity to capture one’s attention, by the rarity of selected motion and gestural expressive features. This rarity index is based on the real-time computation of the occurrence probability of expressive motion features numerical values. Hence, the time instants that correspond to rare unusual dynamic patterns of an expressive feature are singled out. In a multi-user scenario, the rarity index highlights the person in a group which shows the most different behavior with respect to the others. In a mono-user scenario, the rarity index highlights when the expressive content of a gesture changes. Those methods can be considered as preliminary steps toward context-aware expressive gesture analysis. This work has been partly carried out in the framework of the eNTERFACE 2008 workshop (Paris, France, August 2008) and is partially supported by the EU ICT SAME Project (www.sameproject.eu) and by the NUMEDIART Project (www.numediart.org).

The MEGA Project: Analysis and Synthesis of Multisensory Expressive Gesture in Performing Art Applications

This article presents a survey of the research work carried out within the framework of the European Union-IST project MEGA (Multisensory Expressive Gesture Applications, November 2000 – October 2003; www.megaproject.org). First, the article introduces a layered conceptual framework for analysis and synthesis of expressive gesture. Such a framework represents the main methodological foundation upon which the MEGA project built its own research. A brief overview of the achievements of research in expressive gesture analysis and synthesis is then provided: these are the outcomes of some experiments that were carried out in order to investigate specific aspects of expressive gestural communication. The work resulted in the design and development of a collection of software libraries integrated in the MEGA System Environment (MEGASE) based on the EyesWeb open platform (www.eyesweb.org).