Characters Look Research Articles

Penciptaan Produk Eksklusif Melalui Aplikasi Material dan Tekstur Pada Karya Fotograf

This research is an effort to synthesize, explore and experiment to formulate photographic products of applied art by combining aspects of photographic art and aspects of painting. Concretely, through this research, digital photo printing will be carried out on paper and canvas media which in the next stage will be applied with painting materials and techniques to get an exclusive impression. The physical consumption of photography is now increasingly focused on meeting domestic and artistic needs. The results of observations show that the texture in the painting has its own visual strength, which is not found in photographic works. The main question of this research is how to select, digitally print photos on certain media, and apply materials and painting techniques to produce unique, exclusive, and characteristic photo works through the application of materials and painting techniques. The innovation resulting from this research is a working model to increase the value of photo prints in society by adding textural elements resulting from the touch of a hand. The creative method for creating works refers to Graham Wallas in The Art of Thoughts which consists of stages: preparation, incubation, illumination and verification. The product will be analyzed by using Otto Ocvirk’s theory in Art Fundamentals Theory and Practice. He discusses that texture gives the illusion of a touch effect so that the surface character looks real. It is found that applying resin to photos printed on paper has a positive impact and corresponds to the illusory effect to be achieved. Keywords: texture, photograph, exclusive product

УДВОЕНИЕ РЕАЛЬНОСТИ В ТВОРЧЕСТВЕ З. Е. СЕРЕБРЯКОВОЙ

The article shows that in Serebryakova’s work there is a phenomenon when the world depicted in the painting loses its unambiguity and closedness. Three types of examples of this kind are analyzed. 1) Self-portraits in which a two- or threefold image of the author is present, which makes it impossible to clearly differentiate between the author and the character. 2) Depiction of an interior space (a house or a room) in which a pair of directly opposite directions is emphasized. The character looks at the viewer, but behind his back there is a boundary (realized by a door or a window), beyond which is the outside world, and where the viewer’s gaze is directed. 3) Behind the reality depicted in the painting there is a second plan, connected with the presence of a classical sample (subtext). And this pattern is itself connected with the presence of a second reality or a doubling of the existing one. The result is a doubling of the doubling. The situation may become more complicated if a mirror, an object that itself doubles reality, is present in the painting in one form or another. In general, the phenomenon under discussion can be seen as characteristic of twentieth-century painting (and similarly, literature), when classical notions of a fixed and unambiguous object prove to be insufficient. However, this phenomenon, inherent in the 1st (until the mid-20s) period of Serebryakova’s works, was not further developed after her emigration.

‘Mirror, Mirror on the Wall’: Female Subjective Dialectics in the Work of Paul Howard, Louise O’Neill and Naoise Dolan

This essay will examine how the three authors Paul Howard, Louise O’Neill and Naoise Dolan see the gaze, and the male gaze, as constitutive of subjectivity and identity in a twenty-first-century Irish context. It uses a theoretical matrix that combines the work of Jacques Lacan, Laura Mulvey and a range of contemporary feminist perspectives to critique the hermeneutics of identity and the concept of the image. In Howard’s work, Ross, the central character, reifies and commodifies women according to how they look, as being with a woman who is beautiful is how he validates his own quite insecure masculinity; his is the gaze of commodification and power. In Asking for It, Louise O’Neill offers a binary image of the power and the allure of visual beauty as her central character looks for the gaze of the other and manipulates it, but is then subject to the rape and the aftermath wherein she has no control over her images on social media and the subjective dehiscence that ensues. In Exciting Times, Naoise Dolan’s central character is the object of a male and female gaze, as a bisexual character who oscillates between two lovers; Ava, therefore, problematizes and complicates the theory of reflection and the gaze.

Seeing Pink

Seeing Pink

마리보의 ‘섬’ 3부작에 관한 연구

This article is in the interest of the representation of the ‘island’, the stage of the 18th century French comedy writer Marivaux’s <The Island of Slaves>, <The Island of Reason>, and <The Colony>, contemplating what the writer ultimately intends to realize through the role and function of the island in the development of the plot. The writer reduces various aspects of the real society and human groups into the imaginary space of ‘island’: its’ ‘spatial representation’ would seem to embody a utopia reversing the established order. However it functions as a ‘space of recognition’ where characters look into their own illusionary image in society, and as a space of healing and recovery, revealing the human truth behind the false mask. Therefore, Marivaux’s island is a ‘symbolic space’, which embodies a ‘world of truth’ leading to human understanding.

Malaysian Non-native Chinese Students' Challenges and Learning Strategies in Chinese Characters Learning

This study investigates the challenges faced by non-native Chinese learners in learning Chinese characters and their learning strategies. This research applied quantitative research, where the questionnaire was delivered at the end of the semester to 370 students of Mandarin level two, selected through convenience sampling. The descriptive analysis showed that most of the students stated that being literate in Chinese characters and learning many Chinese characters was the most challenging act while corresponding between characters and their pronunciations was the least challenging. Next, the students listed repetitively memorising Chinese characters as the preferred learning strategy, followed by imitating each stroke of a Chinese character and picturing what Chinese characters look like in their minds. The finding of this study contradicts other research studies since the students in this study did not perceive the "lack of correspondence between characters and their pronunciation in Chinese character learning" as the main challenge since they only learned 105 Chinese characters for two semesters. Nonetheless, this study also supports similar research on learning strategies in that students have difficulty learning Chinese characters as there are too many characters, too many pronunciations, and too many strokes. Hence, they repeatedly imitate and memorise the characters as learning strategies. Thus, memory strategies and graphic strategies are the main learning strategies to help learners cope with learning Chinese characters. For future study, it is recommended to find out whether there is any correlation between the challenges for non-native Chinese learners and the learning strategies they apply, which will give teachers an idea of how to improve their teaching to support learners’ learning strategies to boost their Chinese character learning.

Little Tin Openers: Ann Quin's Aesthetic of Touch

Although critics have often noted Ann Quin's ‘literary geometry’ (Jordan 2020: 151) and ‘visual composition’ (Stevick 1989: 238), little has been made of the way her use of shapes and surfaces relates to contemporaneous developments in 1960s visual arts. Taking as its starting point Quin's specific art-world context, this essay reads Three (1966) in the light of post-war artists’ anxieties surrounding figuration and their turn towards the potentially generative effects and affects of disfiguration. I go on to consider how Niklaus Largier's account of aesthetic experience as ‘touch and being touched’ is fitting for the way Three makes of literature a plane of perception where figures move tenuously in and out of reach. But while Quin's characters look vainly to figures – human, inanimate, whole, fractured – in pursuit of aesthetic experiences, such ‘touch’ is usually withheld, deferred, or even made violent. What emerges is a view of Quin's particular mode as setting forth an aesthetic of touch where objects trigger not exalted experience so much as marking post-war conditions to be reckoned with, however elusive, equivocal, and resistant to resolution they may be. With this, Three seems to endorse the idea that an artwork at best can be an ‘emotive form’, as Donald Judd put it in 1967, with its characters typifying late-modernist concerns surrounding representation, what makes ‘good’ art, and performance more generally.

Character Recognition Techniques and approaches: a literature review

Researchers have carried out many approaches to recognizing the OCR through software-based and FPGA-based and its relationship with the ANNs and training these NNs by using the BP algorithm. The FPGA supports high speed to recognize the character because it works in parallel. It involves many logic circuits and can process at the same time (clock cycle). There have been problems with the established system because the size, shape, and style of supposedly identical characters might differ from person to person and even within the same person on rare occasions. The photograph is vulnerable to noise and can lose some or all of its visual clarity as a result. There are strict guidelines that govern the way a character looks that the character must adhere to. The NN and its learning process could only be defined by heuristically deducing its rules from samples and the enormous dataset.

The importance of visual effects in fights in tv and film

This project is a research into the importance of Visual Effects, especially Digital Visual Effects in Fights in Film and TV shows. It will discuss the role of these effects in enhancing fighting sequences to make them look more amazing than they would normally look because audiences expect more out of them nowadays that they are exposed to incredible fighting sequences in films and TV shows. It will also discuss how these effects make weaker-looking characters look stronger and more powerful by giving extraordinary abilities to the characters. A media work created to show this importance will be discussed too. The media work is a fight between two actors with no experience in any kind of fighting enhanced by digital visual effects. The project’s main aim is to motivate researchers of the area to write a book or academic text devoted exclusively to the importance of VFX in Film and TV shows. The effectiveness of the final piece was evaluated through online screenings, a multiple-choice questionnaire and self-critique.

African-American Identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987)

This paper aims to examine the African-American identity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987). The novel emphasizes the painful aspects of slavery such as sexual abuse and violence and explores the effects of the institution of slavery on the African-American character’s identity. The paper also addresses what it means to have a name and be free. The slavery institution does not believe in individuality. Naming is significant since it identifies the character. An analysis of the character’s identity and name will be studied since the characters have written their own stories and they are historically deprived of their humanity and language, a major constituent of the character’s personal and fellow slaves’ history. Therefore, the African-American character looks at the past as he/she longs for the sense of self. Moreover, the African slave is prohibited from being himself/herself or from belonging to a family. In this kind of institution, the African-American doubts the essential aspects of his identity, such as his value as an individual and the source of his manhood. Even after emancipation, the character feels that he has no identity, alienated and has no sense of self. After being freed, the characters try to reclaim their identities. The characters rename themselves in a way that they can now become ‘definer’ not ‘defined’: specific examples and references will be drawn from the narrative. The white founders of the institution of slavery commit acts of raping, an attack on one’s freedom, stealing and stripping the slave’s belongings and possessions, including his name.

Performance Analysis of State of the Art Convolutional Neural Network Architectures in Bangla Handwritten Character Recognition

Bangla handwritten character recognition is a popular research topic as its difficulty is higher than the recognition of other languages because of multiple formats of compound characters. State of the art Convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures are very much useful in computer vision applications. Some works have been carried out in Bangla handwritten character recognition but most of them either not very efficient or they can not classify a lot of characters. In this work, state of art pre-trained CNN architectures is used to classify 231 different Bangla handwritten characters using CMATERdb dataset. The images were first converted to B&W form with white as the foreground color. The size of the images is reduced to 28 × 28 form. These images are used as input to the CNN architectures. The weights of the state-of-the-art CNN models are kept as it was. The training learning rate was set to 0.001 and categorical cross-entropy as the error function. After 50 epochs, InceptionResNetV2 achieved the best accuracy (96.99%). DenseNet121 and InceptionNetV3 also provided remarkable recognition accuracy (96.55 and 96.20%, respectively). We also considered combination of trained InceptionResNetV2, InceptionNetV3 and DenseNet121 architectures which provided better recognition accuracy (97.69%) than other single CNN architectures but it is not feasible for using as it requires a lot of computation power and memory. The models were tested in the cases where characters look confusing to humans, but all the architectures showed equal capability in recognizing these images. Considering computational complexity, memory and capability of recognizing confused characters, InceptionResNetV2 can be said as the best performing model.

A Research on the value of Chinese ink painting in Ink animation character design

Ink Animation is an important branch of the Chinese School of Animation, and its fresh, ethereal and rhythmic artistic style is impressive. The character design of Ink Animation incorporates the characteristics of Chinese Wash Painting, making the characters look lifelike. This paper discusses the work and value of Chinese ink painting in character design based on a case study of Ink Animation characters, and provides a useful reference for the application and development of Chinese ink painting in animation characters.

Anna Marongiu ed. by Luigi Fassi

Reviewed by: Anna Marongiued. by Luigi Fassi Francesca Orestano (bio) Anna Marongiu. Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museo MAN, Nuoro, Italy, 811. 2019–1 03. 2020. Bilingual edition. Edited by Luigi Fassi. Marsilio Editori, 2019. Pp. 168, with 163 color illustrations. €25.00. ISBN 978-88-297-0486-6. Images sometimes need examining without preconceived ideas as to the race, class, gender, cultural or religious beliefs of the artist who created them. The horses, lions, bison in the Chauvet Cave, discovered in 1994 in the Ardèche region of France, inspired a fascinating documentary by Werner Herzog, Cave of Forgotten Dreams(2010), in which he confronts us with images from the Upper Paleolithic without posing the customary questions as to their antiquity, or the identity of the artists who made them. Actually those questions can be bypassed, or delayed, inasmuch as images have a force of their own, that dwarfs all attempts at attribution, or interpretation. "Marongiu" does not tell us much; nor does "Anna," apart from gender: when opening the book entitled Anna Marongiu, resulting from the exhibition of her art held at the MAN museum in Nuoro, Sardinia (8 Nov. 2019–1 Mar. 2020), and containing essays by Luigi Fassi, Michael Hollington, and Paola Pallottino, one is directly drawn to the art work. Luigi Fassi uses the word "rediscovered," and this draws our attention to the 163 images the book contains. Other questions can be delayed: the age and place she lived in, between 1907 and 1941, the school and teachers who guided her, in Cagliari and in Rome, the Fascist regime then in its full sway and the role of women in it. Marongiu's short life was terminated by an air crash, as she was flying back to Rome, from Sardinia. But what demands to be examined are the 163 images, the vivid colors chosen by the artist, the lines and strokes of her pencil, without pentimento, the animation that characters acquire in her drawings, gouaches, watercolors, etchings, and burin engravings. A first series of 38 images in pencil and gouache, dated 1926, illustrates I promessi sposi( The Betrothed) by Alessandro Manzoni. This text has been, and still is today, mandatory school reading in Italy: students are familiar with its characters, a staple of the Italian literature syllabus that requires discussion in the classroom, analyses and written compositions. Students often make fun of them, as Manzoni's characters look like the stuffy literary heroes of a past age. The first character portrayed by Marongiu is Don Abbondio, famously frightened by the Bravi – the thugs – at the very beginning of the novel. In black clerical dress, but with red socks, breviary in hand, fat and round, he moves with long strides. A vertical frame in deco style decorates the margins of the ochre cardboard background: but Don Abbondio has nothing of the static fixity of deco. He comes towards us, in lively buoyant manner; from his feet the artist has traced an oblique shadow that marks the [End Page 215]ground and gives depth to the image. The gouache forms a thick layer, almost a glazing. In addition to the portrait, and the caption below, Marongiu adds her own touch of irony: in the right upper corner there is a small emblem with a rabbit that suggests the inner quality of the apparently courageous but easily frightened Don Abbondio. And so for other images belonging to the same series: the characters of Gertrude, Don Rodrigo, Lucia, Renzo, stand out in bold relief against the uniform background – grey, sepia, black or pale blue cardboard. Could these portraits match Manzoni's invention? Yes, because we recognize them even before reading their names. One may add that Marongiu's irony is something we Italians are familiar with, since our school years and long hours spent on the book. But the second series, on Charles Dickens's Pickwick Papers, dated 1928–29, shows ulterior skills in the delineation of character and situation that have nothing to do with our national culture. 1The work on Pickwick Papersis of specific interest for us Dickensians, as there is a substantial corpus of 262 illustrations for the first half...

A Review of Mary South's You Will Never Be Forgotten

A Review of Mary South's You Will Never Be Forgotten Vince Granata (bio) A Review of Mary South's You Will Never Be Forgotten Vince Granata New York, NY: FSG Originals, 2020. 256 pages. $15.00 When a mother loses her nine-year-old daughter, she discovers a way to circumvent grief. She plans a "rebirth," a subsequent child, a duplicate for the daughter she'd lost. "If our baby was returning to us, there was nothing to grieve," she explains. The mother painstakingly reenacts her first daughter's life with her genetic copy. A first kiss, the death of a pet, and birthday parties are all scripted and choreographed to occur as they had before. Through control of this duplicate daughter, the mother tries to resurrect the child she lost. Grief is a feral thing in Mary South's stunning debut story collection You Will Never Be Forgotten. The wounded mother in South's "Not Setsuko," is one of many characters who look for a balm for uncontrollable feelings—grief, rage, desperation. Across ten stories, South inhabits people grasping to stay tethered to their ghosts. Loss and trauma are not easily bandaged. Wounds stay open, leave caverns to fill and fill. Trauma infantilizes a group of men, leaves them groveling for taboo maternal intimacy while they bicker and fight, propping up each other's sadness at a hostel on the Turkish coast. A celebrated architect from a fractured family superimposes her daughter's birth defects onto designs for buildings, plans that twist and distort the human form. Loss compounds as a relator for the houses of the recently deceased mourns his wife. "A memory is altered each time it is recollected," South's protagonist claims. "Whenever I long for my wife I lose her more and more." In his grief he recognizes the totality of his haunting. "What can be more ghostly than missing someone so intensely that you can no longer remember her as she was?" _______ I've read a lot about grief. I look for characters like South's characters, people who struggle to bend their worlds into shape after trauma and loss, who clutch totems of memory for people who are gone. I used to read about grief to try to recognize myself, make sense of the ways I'd tried to hold onto my mother after I lost her suddenly. Then, I read books written like manuals, ways to measure progress in Kübler-Ross stages, daily meditations that trained focus forward to the next day, then the next, then the next. But nothing about my life felt linear. I clung to a voicemail from my mother, thirty-three seconds of her voice I'd saved on my phone. I almost lost it once. Months after she died, I fell into a river. My phone was in my pocket. I remember standing in a Verizon store—still soaking wet—while a man in a polo shirt told me to enter my name into a tablet. "Someone will take care of you," he said, looking away from where I dripped on the gray carpet. When an employee called my name, I thrust my phone forward, clutched its dark husk. "My phone died," I said. Then, near tears, "is my voicemail gone?" I looked at my thumb, still pressing the round power button, red flaring beneath my nail. I did a lot that surprised me after I lost my mother, acts more irrational than standing in a puddle in a Verizon Store. I still wonder about this person, who I'd become after trauma and loss. _______ "If you're reading this page, chances are you've recently heard that you need to have a craniotomy. Try not to worry." Through a hospital website's frequently [End Page 280] asked questions page, South inhabits the voice of a neurosurgeon addressing patient concerns. Though the document, ostensibly, aims to placate fears, South's surgeon offers direct—often lyrical, often wryly funny—descriptions of what appears within our skulls. "The blush of living brain has been described as resembling the inside of a conch shell or a crumbling marble quarry. To me, it's like the revelation...

In-Air Continuous Writing Using UWB Impulse Radar Sensors

We developed an impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar-based system that can recognize alphanumeric characters in midair without the need for any handheld device. The hardware consists of four IR-UWB radar sensors set up with a rectangular geometry. Writing a single character in midair results in artifacts that make some characters look similar on a position trajectory-based (x, y) plane, which makes them difficult to classify. Thus, we developed an algorithm that transforms 2D coordinate image data into trigonometric ratios (i.e., tangents) and plots them against the time axis to obtain unique images for training a convolutional neural network. An extended Kalman filter is used to obtain the 2D trajectories of hand motions. To evaluate our proposed method, we first applied it to characters that may be written in midair very simply without creating artifacts and compared its performance with that of a state-of-the-art digit classification algorithm. Then, we considered combining characters written midair with and without artifacts. After the individual character recognition, we combined the characters into words. We defined a specific marker based on an energy threshold to detect the start and end of a character for midair writing. The energy level was found to change drastically when the hand is pulled in and out of the radar plane. The proposed method was found to outperform the current state of the art at character classification when artifacts are present in the images.

Machado de Assis, Houses, and the Gaze: Between the Universal and the Local

A central theme throughout Machado de Assis’s works is the way characters look at each other inside and outside houses. This article argues that vision, race, and houses define his narrative strategies in the short stories “Pai contra Mãe” and “O Caso da Vara,” and the novels Dom Casmurro, Memórias póstumas de Brás Cubas, and Esaú e Jacó. In doing so, it shows how eyes are key to understanding racism, houses, and, more broadly, Machado de Assis’s position as a writer who engaged in universal topics as well as those specific to Brazilian society.

The Bird Motif in Hasan Ali Toptaş's Novels in the Context of Hope-Hopelessness Dialectics

Hasan Ali Toptas, one of the leading novelists of our time, has been extensively studied on academic levels. The most prominent ones among these studies are thematic studies. As the author's novels are open to different interpretations, these works allow us to look at the novels from different perspectives. In addition, the author's texts are open to reader response criticism because they have modernist and postmodernist qualities. The concepts of hope and despair are often included in the novels of the author and shape the way in which the characters look at life. With this feature, hope is one of the key words of Toptas literature. Likewise, one of the prominent and recurring elements in the novels of the author is the word bird. Repeating elements in a literary work can be considered as motifs, but also common elements from different works of the same author can come together to form a motif. The motifs identified in the works are usually interpreted on their own and based on a single work. However, it is possible that the common motifs in different works of the author serve the same purpose. Intertextual research studies support this possibility. The aim of this study is to interpret the bird motif as a commonality in the seven published novels of Hasan Ali Toptas, and to reveal the function of this motif. Accordingly, the qualities of the bird as an entity will be associated with the hopeful and hopeless condition of man.

3D Character Generation from Images using Convolutional Neural Networks and 3D-Character Factory

Face recognition using convolutional neural networks can be utilised for constructing 3D characters from a photograph or from a live person. By using convolutional neural networks human attributes like the color of the eyes, skin tone, hair color, presence or absence of facial hair, body type and so on can be identified and provided as a response to a 3D-Character in a game engine like Unity3D using factory pattern approach to make the 3D Character look like the subject.

A Study of Facial Features of American and Japanese Cartoon Characters

Many researchers think that the characters in animated cartoons and comics are designed according to the exaggeration or reduction of some features based on the human face. However, the feature distribution of the human face is relatively symmetrical and uniform. Thus, to ensure the characters look exaggerated, but without breaking the principle of symmetry, some questions remain: Which facial features should be exaggerated during the design process? How exaggerated are the faces of cartoon characters compared to real faces? To answer these questions, we selected 100 cartoon characters from American and Japanese animation, collected data from their facial features and the facial features of real people, and then described the features using angles, lengths, and areas. Finally, we compared cartoon characters’ facial features values with real facial features and determined the key parts and degree of facial exaggeration of animated characters. The research results show that American and Japanese cartoon characters both exaggerate the eyes, nose, ears, forehead, and chin. Compared with human faces, taking the eye area as an example, American animation characters are twice as large compared with human faces, whereas Japanese animation characters are 3.4 times larger than human faces. The study results can be used for reference by animation character designers and researchers.

Old Trees as Memory-Keepers in Taiwanese Children’s Books: Nostalgia as a Search for the Meanings of Change

This article explores a narrative approach adopted by three Taiwanese children’s books that feature old trees as storytellers and memory-keepers to address aspects of emotional and psychological adaptation when facing drastic life changes. Although these stories are told from the perspective of old trees, the nostalgic tone serves a specific purpose: to present a private and intimate connection between trees and humans, which sets them apart from sapient trees in mythology or talking trees in fantasy stories. The nostalgic form of storytelling addresses aspects of pain and transformation when handling uncontrollable changes. Drawing on research from the psychology of nostalgia and the social–cultural relationship between trees and people, the three books are analysed for their underlying meanings of intimate and nostalgic connection. It is proposed that the connection is a medium for the characters to seek meanings from life changes; the memories of the past are materialized in these old trees, and through them the characters look back to retrieve memories and make sense of changes. These stories to a certain extent also reflect political and social changes in Taiwan. Young readers are given an ‘old’ perspective to see the comfort and strength embodied in old trees that stand steadfastly throughout time and change.