Artistic Gesture Research Articles

Precision Drift

In 1956 Murakami Saburō (1925–1996) placed a wall clock in an 80 cm cubic wooden box. This simple gesture, like many of Murakami’s simple artistic gestures, provoked a complex rethinking of the position of the audience in contemporary art and sound’s particular role in that shift. The author takes the process of art handlers unpacking and setting up Work (Box) as a pathway to exploring the acoustic and material encounter with the piece, and the intricacies and implications of its relationship to duration and bodily presence.

Teraźniejszość manifestów. Strategie i obszary działania

The article is an attempt to trace and comment on the recent turn toward the manifesto as a genre that continues to be effective for emancipatory and artistic gestures. The author, drawing on Julian Hanna’s „The Manifesto Handbook” (2019), briefly reconstructs the origins of the manifesto: first, as a political form of authoritarian speech that was subversively abandoned during the 19th-century rise of democratic ideas in France; second, as an artistic tool, pioneered by Filippo Marinetti, for proclaiming art’s contemporary desires for social transformation. Inspired by Hanna’s periodization of the three waves of manifesto existence, the author of the article considers 2008 as the moment of renewed interest in the meaning of manifestos. The essential analysis develops around selected examples of manifestos of the 21st century, both artistic and scholarly (from the field of humanities). Key-words: artistic manifesto, performative statements, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Artur Żmijewski, Rita Felski

Construction of environmental knowledge by applying project-based learning with students from the El Corazón educational institution

Currently it is possible to affirm that the work of a professor is not easy, a reason that should lead us to value our work, but being a professor is not just a job, it is a vocation, a profession and an art, a vocation that has no meaning in it. that one must be aware that the work of a teacher contributes to the training of two students on a physical, mental, intellectual, social and cultural level; A profession that has its own knowledge of a specific area of knowledge, strategies, teaching methods and art, once one must be very creative to teach, motivate different people who have different expectations, with different styles and rhythms of learning, Therefore, we must "think not as an artistic gesture" opening spaces for the cultural, linguistic, cognitive, social, artistic dimension in the development and training of students, reinforcing their knowledge, emancipating their motivations and supporting their dreams. For all the reasons mentioned above, this research aims to build environmental knowledge through the application of project-based learning (PBL) with students of the El Corazón Educational Institute, in which it was verified that this type of learning provides strategies for the identification and solution of problems , creates competencies of knowledge of discipline, development of critical thinking, autonomous learning, integration between student-teacher and, above all, the ability to integrate acquired knowledge into everyday life.

Artistic Play and Laughter as a Way of Living in Art

The article deals with the duality of a rational, sane worldview and an oppositional-irrational, namely a laughable and theatrical way of reinterpreting reality and life in this "other reality". It is emphasized that the instinct of play, theatricality, and a sense of humor from the earliest times (prehistoric eras) was and still is a manifestation of individual freedom. The instinct of play as a manifestation of cultural self-awareness is represented as a sign of psychological and mental health. Options for rethinking rational life within the framework of the "laughing instinct" are considered in the review of creative approaches to reality by Serhiy Parajanov (his collages), in the stage techniques of Bohdan Stupka. For the first time in Ukrainian art history, the "laughter" of Lucien Dulfan — an artist from Odesa, and since the 1980s — a New Yorker, has been considered. The Odessa "laughter space" was also traced in the works of Serhiy Bozhek and Igor Gusev (their anti-war work of 2022). The painting of Vladyslav Shereshevsky is visualized from the point of view of the "carnival double". Negativist, cynical manifestations of laughter and play in the works of individual representatives of Ukrainian contemporary art were also noted. The article analyzes the positive role of laughter in the works of Ukrainian artists of 2022–2023 in their protest against Putinism. The prognostic value of artistic gestures is illustrated on the example of Serhiy Parajanov's work, which, breaking the law of continuity and normality in art, in creative outbursts (moments of bifurcation), shake the old system of artistic thinking, offering novelty. Laughter in this situation is a guide to prognostication. The article shows how the creative theatricalization of the worldview, the transformation of the tragic into the comic with a joke, in a game and a laugh, is able to save a person not only from lame pragmatism in everyday life, but also from a tragic sense of well-being during periods of severe trials, in particular, when confronting the barbarism of war.

The post-memory of the Armenian genocide and the myth of origins in Antonia Arslan’s works

This contribution aims to analyse the postmemory of the origins through the work of an Italian author of Armenian descent, Antonia Arslan, and stems from an ongoing research project about “Narrating the Trauma in European Literatures and Cultures” based at La Sapienza University of Rome. I will therefore focus on the link between this research project, which serves as a theoretical framework, and the specific case study concerning Antonia Arslan. The project originates from two concerns: the first one being the awareness of the loss of poets and writers’ long-lived faith in the creative power of the artistic gesture, a widespread belief before the two world wars, and the second one consisting in a reflection on a general change of the theoretic framework of literature, especially in the case of the narration of traumatic experiences such as wars, genocides, migrations and displacements of people, which have taken place in Europe during the 20th Century [Neohelicon, 2004(1), Migratio et litterae].

Virtual Mouse Using Artificial Intelligence

Abstract: The "AI Virtual Mouse" project represents a pioneering exploration at the intersection of computer vision, machine learning, and digital artistry. This endeavor seeks to revolutionize the conventional modes of digital art creation by introducing an immersive, hands-free painting experience through the interpretation of hand gestures. Motivated by a vision to make digital art more intuitive and interactive, the project employs sophisticated hand tracking facilitated by the MediaPipe library and robust image processing via the OpenCV framework. By discerning the nuanced movements of the hand in real- time, the system translates these gestures into dynamic strokes on a virtual canvas, eliminating the physical barriers that often accompany traditional input devices. This abstract encapsulates the project's core objectives, highlighting its architectural foundations, implementation strategies, and future trajectories. The convergence of technology and artistic expression in the AI Virtual Mouse project presents a paradigm shift in how individuals engage with digital canvases. It not only democratizes the creative process by mirroring natural artistic gestures but also lays the groundwork for a more personalized and collaborative approach to digital art creation. As technological landscapes continue to evolve, this project stands as a testament to the potential of artificial intelligence in fostering innovative and accessible avenues for artistic exploration. The paper delves into the details of the AI Virtual Mouse, offering insights into its current capabilities and paving the way for an exciting future where the realms of technology and creativity seamlessly intertwine.

PLASTIC SURGERY, AN ARTISTIC PRACTICE FOR WOMENS PSYCHOLOGICAL AESTHETICS

Beauty and aesthetics are currently relevant issues. In the aesthetic act, the pursuit of beauty is a quest for the tranquility that rests between the plastic surgeon s hands.Yet, women are driven by the desire to devote themselves to the beauty of their bodies in order to preserve their psychological integrity.The idea that beauty is a remedy and a consolation motivates plastic surgeons to avoid error and catastrophe.So, what place does psychology have in aesthetic demand and, conversely, what place does plastic surgery have in the psychology of women?An eight-month(8)exploratory study was carried out in various clinics. Seventeen women were included in the study, with a mean age of 34.76 years old. The psychological evaluation took place eight days after the first medical consultation and four months after the cosmetic operation. It included a semi-directive interview and two questionnaires (PQVS, GHQ12) to quantify the dimension of subjective psychological suffering. After the operation, the study showed an improvement in subjective quality of life, satisfaction with physical appearance, social investment, and better sleep. Finally, the study endorses the fact that the success of surgical treatment is associated with the artistic gesture adopted by the doctor in surgery and the favorable relationship maintained with the patient. Cosmetic surgery seems to contribute to a complete state of physical, mental, and social well-being. Ultimately, beauty is a therapeutic issue, where the aesthetic surgeon artfully performs, an operation on a woman in pain, with the aim of providing her more psychic than bodily aesthetics.

The Symbol of "Snake" in Chinese Culture and Its Significance of Ecosemiotics

This paper starts with the snake symbol in Chinese culture, and explains its significance of ecosemiotics. The snake symbol in the image of "human head and snake body" in Chinese Nvwa and Fuxi's myths is a kind of body index, which shows the integration of symbolic activities between ancient people and non-human animals, and is a combination of natural signs and cultural symbols.The symbol of the snake has a close relationship with local culture and national memory. The symbolic relationship between the snake symbol and the local entity nature constitutes a “nature-text” and has an impact on the natural environment,which reflects the contextual characteristics of ecosemiotics.The thesis also reflects on the artistic creation of the snake symbol in a postmodern context. Although the creation of snake symbols in China embodies postmodern artistic gestures of breaking dualism and pluralism, the artistic modeling of snake symbols gradually distances itself from the real experience of human beings on the natural environment, and does not reflect the side of ecological ethics.

Wounded Beauty: Aesthetic-Theological Motifs in the Work of Alberto Burri and Anselm Kiefer

In their different languages, codes of expression, practices and worldviews, art and religion share a reflexive intention to symbolize the chaos, suffering and ambivalence of the real. In particular, the aesthetic programme of Christianity has sought to combine the opposites of divine revelation attested in Scripture: chaos and cosmos, earth and heaven, betrayal and reconciliation, wounding and transfiguration, cross and resurrection, sin and forgiveness. This paper aims to explore this compositional dialectic, which over the centuries has oscillated between idealization and realism, despair and aestheticization, the ideology of pain and the mythology of redemption. In order to better understand this aesthetic religious programme in all its ambivalences and polarizations, reference will be made to two emblematic contemporary artists, Alberto Burri and Anselm Kiefer. Their aesthetic programme revolves around the memory of the suffering and wounds of history and in seeking to understand these develops a compassionate perspective on them. In their works, the artistic gesture is what saves reality from its horror and reveals a ‘wounded beauty’ that does not remove the signs of its struggle and contingency.

Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts

Urban Taxi Slogans: The People's Arts

Song Dong’s Performative Futility: Action, Impact, and Efficacy in Contemporary Chinese Performance Art

In a number of photographed performance works from the mid-1990s the artist Song Dong 宋冬 (b. 1966) dramatized futile actions that appeared to lack any lasting impact. This article examines these works as part of a larger group of contemporary performances in 1990s China that features futile acts and ephemeral effects. It explores the stakes of such artistic gestures during a period characterized by a contradictory sense of both socio-economic agency and political impotence. Informed by recent scholarship on performativity and mediation, the article develops the term “performative futility” to assess the ways in which Song’s works stage an expanded temporal relationship between the futile performance and its performance photograph. Reconceptualizing notions of action, impact, and efficacy, Song’s works rethink performance art’s longstanding emphasis on the immediacy of action and offer an alternative to the popular trope of the Chinese artist-as-dissident. Ultimately, the article sheds light on the highly nuanced ways in which Song and other Chinese performance artists of the period articulated new forms of agency and visibility within a postsocialist context. Challenging assumptions about the politics of contemporary art practice, it lays the groundwork for a more rigorous understanding of the politics of aesthetics in China.

Holding on

What resources do people facing great difficulties linked to the increase in social inequalities between territories use daily? Why do some people in precarious situations move from one region to another and not others? How do these relocations, endured or chosen, contribute to locking them in or giving them back control over their lives? A loss of income or the hope of an easier life may lead to residential relocation to areas where the cost of living is lower (rent, food), where relatives are available to share domestic tasks in the broadest sense. Staying put when neighbors leave, having to leave a neighborhood where the cost of living has risen sharply, seeing one's neighborhood become impoverished, empty, collapsed, seeing adjacent neighborhoods get richer: all these factors obfuscate attitudes towards the future and lead to emotions such as anger, shame, or sadness. These questions are raised by a collaborative social science study that examines the role of economic dynamics and public authorities in the selective collapse of portions of the French territory. The photographic investigation conducted in Tonnerre between 2017 and 2022 is the first unit implemented by this collective research. It focuses on the conditions necessary for photography to be an effective heuristic tool in the service of scientific knowledge. Formally, the work is part of a lineage partially interrupted during the second half of the twentieth century, that of alliances between photography and social sciences forged a century earlier in Europe (Thomson and Smith), in Australia (Gillen and Spencer), and in the United States (Boas and Hastings). The project advocates the notion of photographic and ethnographic practice closer to a craft rather than an art form, a profession rather than an artistic gesture, for production of knowledge at the service of accretion of understanding and interdisciplinary cooperation rather than the competitive search for innovation. On the zoom.able platform, the visual essay unfolds on three levels. The first layer presents a map of the city of Tonnerre that highlights the important structures for the survey: pictograms indicate the entry points to the territory, the caring institutions that allow people to survive, the vacant places that play a key role in the arrival of precarious populations, and the shelters that provide protection from the cold and rain. The second layer shows a selection of portraits, with captions providing information on the different ways in which people have settled in Tonnerre over the past ten years. The framework engages the people photographed at several stages of the production. They have chosen the places where the pictures were taken. They have also chosen the places to which their portraits are linked on the map, either because they spend time there, or because they have in those locations an emotional connection, related to their hopes and doubts. And they have also coauthored the captions accompanying the photographs, to explain their singular relationship to the area. The third layer follows two rationales: the places identified on the map refer to photographic documentation of the territory, while each portrait refers to the resources mobilized to deal with daily life as well as photographic situations. From an epistemological perspective, this is about restoring the gap between the observed world and its photographic representation, a reminder that photographic materials, in order to be usable, must be related to the singular context of their production: the distance between photographer and subject; monochromatic effects; and things that are out-of-frame, such as the photographer's body language during the shoot.

Alchemy of color

Alchemy of Color: Enlightening Nanoworlds is a research/creation project designed to challenge the certitudes of our perception, by presenting gold and silver objects sculpted at a nanoscale, invisible to all optical processes. The result is two complementary installations: A Thousand Shades of Green, an Attempt – nanolithographies, a nanoengraving on a glass disk, and Alchimie de la lumière – nanosculptures. Coloring is an artistic gesture, a sensitive use of light associated with human visual perception. But coloring is also a physicochemical process associated with the interaction between photons and the molecular matter of pigments and inks. The colors of nanoparticles are a consequence of another light and matter interaction. Smaller than the photons that strike them, the metal nanosculptures are electrified and deflect the rainbow’s path. Here, color is no longer a molecular property of light absorption by pigments or dyes but a resonance that makes form tangible. This photonic resonance of light with nanoscale textures belongs to the family of structural coloration. It differs from the latter through interferences that occurs when the object is larger, a fraction of a micron in size, about half the photon’s wavelength. Classical pigments absorb light, as do plants: they appear green since the chlorophyl absorbs the blue and the red of the visible spectrum. One of alchemy’s ancient goals was to transmute matter, lead into gold, copper into silver. In the present project, the nanoscale sculptures that interfere with light are made of gold and silver and the alchemy refers here to the transmutation of the photons into plasmon. In an inversion of roles, invisible gold and silver objects are performing, in front of the spectator, the alchemical transformation of light, producing new colors, as if light and colors were matter. A Thousand Shades of Green, an Attempt, is a nano engraving test using electronic lithography employing millions of gold cylinders, whose diameters increase from 50 to 100 nanometers, on a 2-square-centimeter glass disk. During the process, some parts of the metal layer deposited through the lithographic mask—too large for current technologies (limited to 1 square millimeter)—are torn away when the mask is peeled off. The damaged areas then reveal a world of iridescence, in green, orange, and blue. The two installations, Alchimie de la lumière – nanosculptures, resemble cabinets of curiosity cabinet; they were created for the exhibition OU\/ERT in Bourges (2019) and Bourges contemporain in 2021. The glass forms, isolated or creating a landscape, change color according to the transformations of the light scene. The blown forms contain metallic nanoparticles, produced by chemical assembly, which emit a thousand new shades of green, depending on the angle that we look at it from. The aqueous nanoparticle solution thus appears green when seen in direct light and orange or blue in transparency. Thus, the two installations constitute a modern form of vanities. In classical painting, earthly goods, money, scientific instruments, or symbols of knowledge were represented scattered or broken on the ground, alluding to their all being in vain with respect to a higher, inaccessible reality, a transcendence. Here, the nano engraving on the disk is broken and the perfect silver and gold nano spheres are invisible and only reveal their presence in the transformation of light into the multiple shades produced, the sensible dimension taking over the sensitive control.

Theater of Ancestral Mediation

Theater of Ancestral Mediation

Decolonial gesture and the screening of the botanical artist in Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (Bo Wang and Pan Lu, 2017)

Bo Wang and Pan Lu’s split-screen video essay Miasma, Plants, Export Paintings (2017) charts the relationship between its titular categories and British imperialism in China, especially the colonial possession of Hong Kong as a result of the Opium Wars in the nineteenth century. It centres on the collecting of plants from China for the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, along with their documentation through botanical drawings by local Chinese artists. The video essay shows fleeting glimpses of several anonymous Chinese paintings, revealing in the process the dual sense of screening at the heart of the colonialist enterprise that involved showcasing the art while obscuring the artist. Wang and Lu, in contrast, return attention to the skills of the Chinese artists. Through their own dual vision, they challenge myriad hierarchical colonial images of human-plant relations. Drawing on Vilém Flusser’s work on the gesture of video and combining this with Walter D. Mignolo’s discussion of decolonial gesture, I show how Wang and Lu question through their own artistic gestures the distortions of the colonial gaze evident within dominant western image regimes. In this, their work speaks indirectly to recent writings in the environmental humanities and critical plant studies that valorise more lateral relations between humans and plants.

From archive to dataset. Visualizing the latency of big data

The objective of the proposal is to analyze what latent space is within a Deep-Learning system and how its visualization is capable of triggering a meaning-effect concerning the epistemology of big data. The latent space is the mathematical space that maps what a Neural Network has learned from the training dataset. It is the result of the compression of the input data and the step before the Neural Network’s output, a step that usually remains invisible to the human eye, rendering effective the promise of a transparent effect of reality generally promoted by Artificial Intelligence technologies. Precisely in contrast with this promise, the visualization of this complex spatiality makes accessible, and therefore intelligible, the epistemic and rhetorical relations inscribed within datasets, intended as archives that gather information. To achieve my objective, I will consider an artistic project realized by multimedia artist and coder Jake Elwes, Zizi-Queering the Dataset (2019), a multi-channel video where different facial portraits are shown in a morphing loop that visualizes what a Generative Adversarial Network has learned from the re-training of a dataset containing portraits with another one containing facial images of drag and non-binary individuals. This artistic gesture has led to a series of epistemic issues concerning big data and their situated and ideological meaning.

Akson, an Audio-Visual Environment for Networked Interaction and Performance

In this article, we present Akson, a web-based audio-visual (AV) environment for networked interaction and performance. It is demonstrated as an emerging artefact of an investigation in computer music and media art from collaborative interfaces exploring the cloud. Akson allows both the generation of content in a customized network and the structuring of agents connected in different interaction models. There are detailed experiments carried out during the development process, their existence taking advantage of the Internet and the way in which the software works technically is detailed extensively. As an interface that extends the artistic gesture, it is presented as a result of research in the context of Braga Media Arts, a creative city of UNESCO (UCCN).

Playing between concealment and presence


 This article is based on the methodology of art-practice-as-research, which departs from my artistic productionWhere is Diana?, a series of photoperformances and videos made between Beijing, Tijuana and City Mexico during 2013-2015. Aware of the obsession with identity, with this proposal I raise the question of whether it is possible to transcend physical and intellectual borders. In my work I include the dynamics of recognition in a paradoxical way, as I present myself hooded, unrecognizable, without identity, placing myself on the border, on the margins, on the limit and in precariousness, through a body that transgresses its place and moves from the private to the public. This theoretical-practical perspective considers the gender perspective, as well as the conceptual tools that feminisms have created to rethink the female subject and de-center it, through a displacement towards what is non-hegemonic or predetermined by biology. The characteristics that are defined as masculine and feminine must be questioned because their meaning is the result of a historical and social practice that has artificially naturalized them.
 
 So I propose axes of resistance to subvert gender and national identities, which I argue are fluid and modifiable. Creating this de-centre may lead to the construction of new subjectivities, a framework that expands the possibilities of action and recognition. To achieve this, I relate my artistic process to politics through the reconstruction of the sensible in social space, in the way bodies and their meanings act in that space. The relationship between art, politics, and representation that I propose here does not have to do with a discursive level but focuses on the artistic gesture and how to communicate the affects that are imprinted in the bodies, which have a sensorial and political implication.
 

Tempus/Modus

This article explores Candida Hofer’s photographic slide-show Turken in Deutschland (1979) and its 2011 digital version with the new title Turken in Deutschland 1979. It analyzes temporality, changes in media installation and their effects on the artwork’s meanings. Attention focuses on the historic and medial differences – between the 1970s and the 2010s as well as between analogue and digital projection – that are the results of processes of translation. It is argued that by reworking the piece, Hofer undertakes an actualization as well as a historicization of her work, first realized as a series of slides, then of digital copies. The artistic gesture of changing media and title are mutually dependent on and constitutive of each other. They productively disrupt the coherence of the work and emphasize the time passed between the two versions as well as the artwork’s mode of expression.

Inferring Performer Skill from Aesthetic Quality Features in a Dance Game Gesture Corpus

In this paper, we describe experiments for inferring the artistic skill of performers by analyzing pose features in a gesture corpus. Poses were generated by having participants play a popular Kinect dance game in a markerless motion capture studio. Skeletal data was analyzed for features derived from both statistical analysis as well as arts and animation theory, and aesthetic metrics were designed to score pose features along three dimensions: balance,asymmetry, and readability. We applied our metrics to poses in a corpus of 10,080 annotated frames generated from 20 dance performances ranked according to the performing arts background of each participant. This work is the foundation of a computational performatology approach to quantifying artistic gesture in media by identifying aesthetic features that indicate figurative quality to viewers. The potential application of gesture analysis and feedback will be to inform the design of performative logics for virtual controlof avatars and non-player characters in videogames.