Disparate Images Research Articles

Myth and the Cinematic Apparatus Deconstructed in The Phantom of Liberty (1974)

Roland Barthes defines myth as a semiological system with “the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal.” I link his ideas to Jean-Louis Baudry’s apparatus theory, which argues that the mechanisms of filmmaking and exhibition forge “an ‘organic’ unity” between a film’s essentially disparate images. Finally, I examine the ways in which films can deconstruct myth by increasing in Barthes’s terms “the abstractness of the concept and the arbitrariness of the sign,” a goal toward which Luis Buñuel’s 1974 film The Phantom of Liberty admirably strives.

Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia

Imagining Anglo-Saxon England: Utopia, Heterotopia, Dystopia

The Eve of St. Agnes ve dvou novějších českých překladech

The contrastive analysis of two modern Czech translations of John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes by Jiřina Hauková (1961) and Hana Žantovská (1977) shows differences on three levels: the translators’ refashioning of the Spenserian stanza, different preferences in rendering Keats’s imagery, and different levels of deliberate archaizing in lexical choices and syntax, especially in direct speeches. Žantovská’s version is more euphonious with a higher percentage of full rhymes and, with a rhyming scheme of ababcdcdd and a final alexandrine line, keeps closer to the original rhythmical and rhyming pattern. It also keeps closer to the original in preserving the highly stylized nature of most direct speeches in the poem. Hauková’s earlier version relies more on imperfect rhyming or assonance and departs more radically from the Spenserian scheme, with a rhyming pattern of ababcdcdc, and a frequent lack of a clear caesura in the last line. It also tends to make the direct speeches less ornate and, even outside direct a dress, resorts less frequently to highly formal, poeticized or archaic lexical choices or syntax. Žantovská’s rendering of Keats’s imagery shows preference for precision and logical consistency while the poetic effects in Hauková’s version depend more often on combining seemingly disparate images and notions.

Who Is Palomides? Closer Look at the Character in Charles Williams’s Taliessin Cycle

This articles examines the character arc of Palomides in Charles Williams’s Taliessin poems to see how it brings together several key themes in Williams’s work: Romantic Theology, the relationship of spirit and matter, and the problem of evil. It examines Palomides’s struggle to overcome his own internal antagonisms and allow himself to accept his own limitations, as a model that is salutary to readers of the poems. The article uncovers some of the abstract symbolism that appears in ‘The Death of Palomides’ and demonstrates the coherence of Williams’s use of disparate images in that poem. Lastly, the article asks what the progression of Palomides’s character reveals about Williams’s philosophical and theological attitudes, especially how Williams understood the nature of conversion.

Combining Science and Humanities to Assess and Promote the Development of Visual‐Spatial Skills in Medical Learners

Skillful observation and interpretation of visual information is key to practicing medicine, not only in specialties that emphasize anatomy but also for effective physical examination and recognizing patients’ emotional states and needs. Since visual analysis appears to depend heavily on tacit knowledge, often it is difficult for learners to develop and educators to teach appropriate skills. Recently, efforts to integrate the humanities into medical training have generated interest in using pedagogical methods adapted from visual art practices to teach medical learners how to analyze and interpret visual information. Such efforts are predicated on the idea that cognitive processes involved in analyzing visual information are to some extent independent of the specific nature of the visual information. As part of our ongoing efforts to develop novel approaches to promote the development of visual analysis skills in medical students, one current goal is to test whether facility in analyzing medically relevant images covaries with facility in analyzing art images and whether pedagogical approaches that are used to teach art students can increase the ability of medical learners to analyze medically relevant images. We developed a custom assessment of visual spatial ability that is based on a simple task in which subjects must identify the two similar images in groups that include two similar images and one dissimilar image. Half of the questions use histological images, while the other half of the questions use images representing fine art or furniture design (Figure 1). Sixteen experienced (3rd and 4th year) medical students completed the assessment in an initial study. The results from this cohort revealed significant, positive correlations between the subjects’: 1) past performance in 1st- and 2nd-year biomedical science courses or anatomy practical examinations and their scores on histology-based questions, 2) self-reported level of previous art instruction and time spent taking the assessment, and 3) time spent taking the assessment and overall score. Thus, as expected, in this group of experienced medical learners, those who previously demonstrated stronger performance in biomedical science courses and specifically on anatomy examinations performed better when analyzing medically relevant images. Previous experience with art instruction increased the time subjects spent taking the study assessment, and taking more time increased overall performance on the assessment. In ongoing studies, the performance of early and advanced medical learners and art students will be compared to test the effects of experience in art- and medical curricula on the ability to analyze similar and disparate images. The early medical learners will be retested after completing the histology discipline in the medical curriculum, and half of those learners also will receive explicit training in evaluation of visual images using methods drawn from art education. This will test directly the effects of 1) experience with the histology curriculum and 2) adding explicit, art-based training on visual analysis skills.

Subjective assessment of display stream compression for stereoscopic imagery

AbstractHigh‐resolution display bandwidth requirements often now exceed the capacity of display link channels necessitating compression. The goal of visually lossless compression codecs such as VESA DSC 1.2 is that viewers perceive no difference between the compressed and uncompressed images, maintaining long‐standing expectations of a lossless display link. Such low impairment performance is difficult to validate as artifacts are at or below sensory threshold. We have developed a 3D version of the ISO/IEC 29170‐2 flicker paradigm and used it to compare the effects of image compression in flat images presented in the plane of the screen (2D) to compression in flat images with a disparity offset from the screen (3D). We hypothesized that differences in the location and size of the compression errors between the disparate images in the 3D case would affect their visibility. The results showed that artifacts were often less visible in 3D compared to 2D viewing. These findings have practical applications with respect to codec performance targets and algorithm development for 3D movie, animation, and virtual reality content. In particular, higher compression should be attainable in stereoscopic compared to equivalent 2D images because of increased tolerance to artifacts that are binocularly unmatched or have disparity relative to the screen.

Marine conservation may not deliver ecosystem services and benefits to all: Insights from Chilean Patagonia

Gains in biodiversity from marine conservation might not correlate with a fair distribution of benefits, situation that has been narrowly documented. We analyzed how different social actors perceived changes in ecosystem services (ESs) and benefits from marine conservation and explored barriers preventing access to benefits, based on the Marine Protected Area of Multiple Uses (MUMPA) Almirantazgo Sound located in the Chilean Patagonia. We applied a semi-structured interview to artisanal fishers, tourism operators, State representatives and researchers (n = 86) and analyzed the data through frequency analysis and Covariance Analysis. Interviewees identified various ESs but prioritized food provision, maintenance of genetic diversity, and information for cognitive development, and among several benefits, they prioritized basic materials for a good life. Fishers were the most dependent on ESs and benefits, (i.e., food provision and employment/nutrition, respectively). Social actors’ general perception was that the MUMPA will not change wellbeing homogeneously, which can be explained by specific access barriers, such as reduced fishing entree. Most interviewees, despite personal attributes, recognized tour operators as the main ‘winners’ of the MUMPA creation and fishers as the main ‘losers’. For an inclusive governance, managers face the challenge of ‘reshaping’ the disparate images actors have on what the MUMPA is and does.

Mash-Up: The Enduring Fusion of High Art & Mass Culture

Mash-UpThe Enduring Fusion of High Art & Mass Culture Kristine Somerville Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov [End Page 121] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Adam, Eve & Medor, Rennes, France, 2009 In 1912 at his Boulevard Raspail studio in Montparnasse, Picasso hung a changing installation of collages on a beige wall over a cot scattered with pillows and papers. He displayed six or seven pieces of new work selected from the nearly hundred collages he had created that year. Most notably, he shared variations on a study of a guitar, a paste-up of wallpaper and cardboard on newsprint. When artists heard about Picasso's new work, they flocked to his small studio to get a look. Intrigued by the method, futurists such as Gino Severini, Umberto Boccioni, and Giacomo Balla began using collage as a method of enriching the surfaces of their works. Picasso's displays of simple cutting and pasting of the detritus of daily life were declared "a pasted-paper revolution." The idea moved quickly; collage became a favorite medium among international modernists for [End Page 122] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Mickey Mouse Is Dead, Paris, 2009 [End Page 123] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Clair-obscur, Saint-Malo, France, 2010 its playful, ephemeral style and quick, spontaneous process—what Picasso called "one mad rush." ________ Picasso's work on collage had really begun five years before, when he forged an artistic friendship with Georges Braque. The French artist often compared their closeness to "two mountain climbers tethered together," and for years, in the evenings, they visited each other's studios to critique the day's work. They challenged each other to discover new techniques. When Braque began to add sand, cinder, sawdust, and coffee grounds to his works to increase the texture of his images, it launched in Picasso a flurry of activity. "I am using your latest papery and powdery methods," he wrote to Braque in a letter. He was referring to the scraps of wallpaper, sheet music, and oilcloth that he was pasting to his canvases. For Braque and Picasso, the medley of scraps salvaged from [End Page 124] Click for larger view View full resolution Žilda, Escaping Criticism, Paris, 2011 ordinary existence and employed in their work replicated the chaotic spirit of the times. By coupling unlikely images and materials, they were commenting on the frenetic world of modern Europe, with its escalating technologies, proliferation of handbills and posters, and blaring newspaper headlines of mounting political unrest. While the explicit definition of collage refers to the pasting-on of scraps that originate beyond the artist's studio, the definition loosened as different artistic traditions engaged the practice and made it their own, and the technique evolved. The futurists embraced the fundamentals of collage, but the Dadaists found the method too dainty and precious for a crumbling civilization on the brink of disaster. Artists such as John Heartfield and Hannah Höch explored Picasso's and Braque's innovations in photomontage, releasing them from standard artistic [End Page 125] Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov limitations in favor of foraging for and then reassembling fragments of photographic material. Through the process of cutting and pasting ready-made images from cast-off periodicals, they became, as Heartfield describes, "engineers" who sought to express the absurd nature of the times. While the basic technique of cutting and pasting offered the Dadaists a way to dissolve barriers between fine art and wider culture, the surrealists reveled in collage's tendency to synthesize contradictory pictorial elements, which perfectly suited their recurring themes of the unreliability of logic, the value of dream, and the embrace of the absurd. Selecting, arranging, and making connections between disparate images gave their compositions a higher level of expressiveness and emotional impact. In their associative leaps and juxtaposed imagery, the pieces became [End Page 126] Click for larger view View full resolution Alexey Kondakov came picture-poems of a world that existed somewhere between imagination and reality. In the 1940s, when artists and intellectuals escaping World War II made New York City the new hub of modern...

캐살 블랙의 영화 󰡔코리아󰡕(Korea)에 나타난 해방 후 아일랜드 가족의 시적 재구성

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the poetic techniques in Cathal Black’s Korea, a film in which he reconstructs the trajectory of the postliberation Irish family in the 1950s. In focusing on poetic aspects of repetition, defamiliarization, and irony in relation to the filmic techniques of symbol, montage, and voiceover, I will demonstrate how Black’s poetic reconstruction of the era goes against the grain of the forward movement of the narrative. First, Black adopts the repetition of symbolic objects like eels and electricity to represent the state of an era in which hope and despair coexist. Second, Black’s montage technique produces a defamiliarization effect. Juxtaposing disparate images and sounds, Black delivers a sense of shock and confusion, a key to understanding the spirit of the age. Finally, the ironic voiceover that unsuceessfully drives the narrative of the film works as a device for the reconstruction of recent Irish history. The narrator who lacks the capacity to overview his circumstance holds ambivalent attitudes toward the past, neither indiscriminately critical nor blindly nostalgic. With the repetition of symbolic objects, the radical montage, and the ironic voiceover, Black shows the anomalous state of postliberation Ireland in the 1950s, in which the trauma and nostalgia of the old generation and the hope and apprehension of the young generation are commingled like an oxymoron.

Disrupting the Cartographic View from Nowhere: “Hating Empire Properly” in Layla Curtis’s Cartographic Collage The Thames

This article gives a close reading of a contemporary artwork, The Thames by Layla Curtis (2013), as an opportunity to think through how it disrupts the “cartographic view from nowhere.” This characteristic viewpoint of cartography is understood as a form of cartographic abstraction, the material mode of thought and experience that can be produced through cartographic ways of depicting the world. The Thames uses collage to bring together disparate cartographic images and place names, creating an altered and disrupted image of the River Thames at London, UK. In reading the artwork, I aim to acknowledge authorial positionality (within the “imperial centre,” in this case London) in order to show that The Thames both uses and disrupts the cartographic view from nowhere, showing it to be conceptually “collaged.” This disruption can usefully be read in a postcolonial context as a “productive fiction,” showing the co-constitution and “mutual imbrication” of “centre” and “periphery.”

Poe: Stories and Poems

Poe: Stories and Poems

Transformations in Teachers’ Views in One-to-One Classes—Longitudinal Case Studies

This qualitative study aimed to examine how teachers in one-to-one (1:1) classrooms changed their views regarding the integration of students’ personal laptops over three academic years. Given the relative lack of longitudinal studies in the field of technology in education, this study is unique in tracing transformations in teachers’ views. The study tracked seven teachers in two junior high schools. The seven case studies comprised three interviews with each teacher, at three different points in time, in order to reveal whether the 1:1 program met their general and pedagogical expectations as well as their attitudes towards integrating the laptops into their teaching. Data revealed a diversity of transformations, disappointments, and surprises as evidenced through teachers’ testimonies and the disparate images the participants chose to illustrate their views. The findings lead to understanding the kind of support teachers may need to better integrate 1:1 laptops into their teaching practices.

Volume Completion Between Contour Fragments at Discrete Depths.

Building on the modal and amodal completion work of Kanizsa, Carman and Welch showed that binocular stereo viewing of two disparate images can give rise to a percept of 3D curved, nonclosed illusory contours and surfaces. Here, it is shown that binocular presentation can also give rise to the percept of closed curved surfaces or volumes that appear to vary smoothly across discrete depths in binocularly fused images, although in fact only two binocular disparities are discretely defined between corresponding contour elements of the inducing elements. Surfaces are filled in from one depth layer’s visible contours to another layer’s visible contours within virtual contours that are interpolated on the basis of good contour continuation between the visible portions of contour. These single depth contour segments are taken not to arise from surface edges, as in Kanizsa’s or Carman and Welch’s examples, but from segments of “rim” where the line of sight just grazes a surface that continues behind and beyond the rim smoothly. When there are two or more surface-propagating contour segments, the propagated surfaces can continue away from the inferred rim, merge, and then close behind the self-occluding visible surface into an everywhere differentiable closed surface or volume. Illusory surfaces can possess a depth and perceived surface curvature that is consistent with all visible contour segments, despite the absence of local disparity cues at interpolated 3D surface locations far from any visible contour. These demonstrations cannot be easily explained by existing models of visual processing. They place constraints on the surface and volume generation processes that construct our 3D world under normal viewing conditions.

“You, Again?”

“You, Again?”

Comparative postcolonial ruralities and English heritage: Julian Barnes’s England, England and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss

This article argues for the vastly different ways in which English heritage is celebrated as a legacy of the British Empire in rural spaces located both in England and in India. Comparing Julian Barnes’s satirical novel England, England (1998) with Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss (2006) affords disparate images of English heritage in postimperial Britain and in postcolonial India. Barnes parodies efforts by the English heritage industry, in an age of decline, to revivify English nationalism and to recollect erstwhile imperial glory. In a globalized world, he underscores the desire for nostalgia preoccupied with a mythic English agrarian past, its historical icons, and its social order as anachronistic instead of inspirational. At best, it appears historically ignorant; at worst, he suggests, it serves as a perversion of reality. For Barnes, the English heritage industry is self-indulgent and largely motivated by profit. In contrast, Desai’s novel represents the damage caused by a class structure forged from India’s colonial inheritance and a persistent privileging of English culture and heritage. Desai suggests economic power and social prestige, even in an obscure hill village in India, are articulated through material displays and personal knowledge of English heritage, reflecting the different classes’ uneven access to capital and knowledge. Her novel simultaneously depicts those at the bottom end of India’s class hierarchy who are compelled to acts of desperation in pursuit of better lives.

Perceptual content analysis for city image: a case study of Hong Kong

ABSTRACTThis paper presents a case study investigating the most salient impressions and unique attractions of Hong Kong, perceived by government officials, inbound visitors and local residents. The study utilizes neural network analytical content analysis as a tool to understand the shared and disparate images and perceptions of the uniqueness of Hong Kong by quantifying the occurrence of open-ended self-reported textual answers by the respondents. The clustering of the answers and perceptual mapping confirms that the stakeholder groups think of Hong Kong as a conventional tourist destination and as a cosmopolitan metropolis. This strong stereotype, which displays an obvious knowledge gap between visitors and residents, as well as inter-group discrepancies, has created obstacles to innovating Hong Kong's image and branding.

The Beautiful Unseen: Variations on Fog and Forgetting. A Memoir by Kyle Boelte

Reviewed by: The Beautiful Unseen: Variations on Fog and Forgetting. A Memoir by Kyle Boelte Kathleen Boardman Kyle Boelte, The Beautiful Unseen: Variations on Fog and Forgetting. A Memoir. Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2015. 156 pp. Paper, $14.95. When Kyle Boelte was thirteen, his older brother, Kris, hanged himself in the basement of the family home in Denver. At age thirty Boelte, having moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, perceives parallels between the coastal fog and his obscured memories of Kris. Fog makes it difficult to see clearly; it can be beautiful, softening hard edges; it can be dangerous, causing falls and shipwrecks. Memory, too, plays ambiguous roles, especially for one who has experienced tragedy. Worried about forgetting the past, Boelte is also troubled by it, wondering, “What did I know? What could I have done?” (33). An experienced researcher—with publications on environmental issues in Orion, Sierra, Earth Island Journal, and High Country News—he decides to find out more about fog, memory, and his brother. “I’ve been living with the fog for some time now, surrounded, without knowing much about it,” he says. “It’s time I took a look around” (9). The result is a haunting memoir that collects, and attempts to connect, knowledge about the “unseen.” [End Page 271] As its subtitle suggests, The Beautiful Unseen is a series of “variations” on a theme; these are fairly brief chapters that can be read as fragments, puzzle pieces, of research and remembering. Taken together, though, they recreate a process of learning, and Boelte, using the present tense, takes his reader along on his journey. The first half of the book portrays Boelte walking, running, and cycling through the coastal fog, narrating the tragedy of the past, and observing his inner and outer environment. In the second half, although the tone of his reflections remains consistent, the narrative’s pacing and method change. On a visit to his mother and father in Colorado, Boelte collects family anecdotes and videos and asks for the box of “Kris’s things” that his parents keep in their garage. Several documents from the box are included in the book: the police and newspaper reports of his brother’s death, Kris’s adoption papers and his death certificate, song lyrics, a speech, a girl’s letters to Kris, a disciplinary form from Kris’s high school, the eulogy read at Kris’s funeral. Intensifying his search “for a story, a way to connect the disparate images” (78), Boelte researches and writes chapters on lsd, asphyxia, coastal redwoods, the Atacama Desert, San Francisco history, and the Golden Gate Bridge as a suicide site. A six-page “Field Guide to San Francisco’s Fog” is written in a different voice and a different font from the rest of the book. Eventually, although he understands more about perception and accepts that “living requires some forgetting” (48), Boelte cannot fully answer his earlier questions. “What else did I know?” he now asks. “What else have I forgotten?” (154). It’s common for memoirists to reflect on the nature of memory and on their experience of its quirks and limitations. After a few pages of these reflections, most go on with their stories, bridging memory’s gaps as best they can. In contrast, Boelte returns repeatedly to the problem of memory, not content to fill gaps in his narrative with guesses. Despite his many walks around San Francisco’s foggy Eureka Peak, he generates no spurious “aha” moments when sadness dissipates and memory transfigures. Near the end of his exploration, when “so much still remains out of sight” (104), he admits that “there is no field guide to these matters” (143). Five blank pages near the end of the book show that “the unseen” can be appalling as well as beautiful. [End Page 272] Boelte quotes from Douwe Draaisma’s Metaphors of Memory: “With each new metaphor we place a different filter in front of our perception of memory” (63). Fog is Boelte’s metaphor, and as a metaphor it finally does offer some perspective, self-knowledge, and relief—although uncovering scientific facts about weather patterns, the jet stream, and geography cannot alleviate sadness or...

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic

Threnody with a Wren and a Skipping Rope, and: Sudden Stain

The image of a figure in a forest called Claudia who is jumping a rope turned by a wren foregrounds a meditation on immortality, mortality, and death. Seemingly disparate images are placed side-by-side to blur the lines between binaries such as innocence and guilt and violence and non-violence.

Montage

The Problem Adaptive leadership calls for leaders to open up conflicts and differences and to help others engage with them. However, this sets up some tension with organizational priorities such as order and productivityWorking with difference and conflict is built on assumptions other than those that privilege efficiencies and smooth functioning. Taken-for-granted habits and assumptions about what is “good” and productive are at issue. Engaging with differences and conflict is not just a matter of learning new skills, it involves engaging with questions of mind-set and assumptions. The prospect of making space for differences may be threatening or seem to be out of bounds, particularly in traditional organizations. The Solution In this article, we argue that new practices privileging conflict and difference call for methods that disrupt habitual ways of working and that support people as they learn to respond to familiar situations in new ways. We offer montage, a technique adopted from the movie industry that sets disparate images side-by-side, as promising in this regard, providing temporary “new rules” that enable people to experience new ways of working. The Stakeholders This article will be of interest to human resource (HR) professionals who select and sponsor leadership development interventions It will be particularly relevant for those in the area of learning and development who support new learning beyond workshops, in the context of day-to-day organizational life. It will also be of interest to researchers who seek to understand felt experiences in organizations and managers who are interested in reshaping their practice.