Aesthetic Judgment Research Articles

Femboys in the Factory

This article aims to explore the political economy of trans life through an examination of the category of the “femboy” as a means for understanding the concrete processes of sexuality and social activity responsible for the internally differentiated valuation of kinds of trans labor and the wider regime of accumulation of which these valuations form a part. Following Kevin Floyd's historical materialist account of gendered performativity, it details the femboy's historical emergence within hierarchies of racialized sexuality. Using the case of online streaming, the article argues that femboys’ disavowal of transness, and intelligibility to dominant regimes of sexuality, subtends their higher valuation than trans women in comparable lines of work. Making use of the case study, the article argues that identification itself appears to affect the judgment and valuation of individuals within the labor process and that such aesthetic judgements—the contours of how capital “sees” its subjects—are both ineliminable and constitutive of the concrete differences that emerge in the process of production. Aesthetic judgment and the process of abstraction therefore offer an entry point into both the analysis of the labor process more generally, and the relations of desire, abjection, and identification that enforce the present subordination of trans people.

Influence of architectural interior design on human perception and emotion with the consideration of neural aesthetics

Interior contour, an essential component of the built environment, has drawn wide attention from home and abroad. From the perspective of neuroaesthetics, preference for architectural interior contour is closely tied to brain activity. Therefore, revealing the underlying neural basis of aesthetic preferences for architectural interior contour in terms of neuroimaging is of great importance. We recruited 30 healthy participants for behavioural assessment and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Using percent amplitude of fluctuation (PerAF), the current study measured participants’ neuroaesthetic responses to curvilinear and rectilinear architectural interior contours in the three frequency bands. When participants viewed architectural images with curvilinear contours, the PerAF was significantly reduced in multiple brain regions, in comparison to rectilinear architectural interior contours. Moreover, significant negative correlations were observed between ratings of aesthetic judgments of curvilinear space and increased PerAF values in specific regions including the left Rolandic operculum. Aesthetic judgments were significantly correlated with PerAF values in specific brain regions, including the left middle frontal gyrus. Our study reveals that participants have a higher preference for curvilinear contours over rectilinear contours. Neural response varied across different architectural contours, highlighting the complex interplay of neural mechanisms underlying aesthetic perception.

Coding Beauty and Decoding Ugliness: The Role of Aesthetic Concerns in Programming Practices

In this article, we analyze the productive role of aesthetics in organizing technoscientific work. Specifically, we investigate how aesthetic judgments form and inform code-writing practices at a large web services company in Russia. We focus on how programmers express aesthetic judgments about code and software design in everyday practice and explore how language with positive and negative valences is deployed. We find that programmers label code as “beautiful” without defining or establishing agreement about the term and are thereby able to maintain different ideals of beauty within the same organization. However, by learning how to avoid what senior developers deem to be “ugly” code, developers become socialized into producing code with a similar style and logic that we describe as “not ugly.” The fieldwork suggests that aesthetic language can function simultaneously as a mechanism that supports professional diversity within an organization and as a tool for producing consistencies in software design. Studying manifestations of both positive and negative aesthetic language in technoscientific work provides insight into professional practices and the various roles aesthetic language can play in organizational life.

Kant’s Fantasy

Abstract Throughout his lectures and published writings on anthropology, Kant describes a form of unintentional, unstructured, obscure, and pleasurable imaginative mental activity, which he calls fantasy (Phantasie), where we ‘take pleasure in letting our mind wander about in obscurity’ (LA 25:480). In the context of his pragmatic anthropology, Kant is concerned not only to describe this form of mental activity as a fact of human psychology, but more importantly, to criticize and discourage it. But must we share Kant’s negative evaluation? Could fantasy play a positive role in some kinds of experience? In this paper I first reconstruct Kant’s conception of fantasy, and then consider what role fantasy might play in aesthetic experience. Precisely because of his anxieties about fantasy, Kant is careful to distinguish between the lawless freedom of the imagination in fantasy and the ‘free lawfulness’ of the imagination in aesthetic judgment. Departing from Kant, and with help from Susan Sontag, I argue that certain aesthetic objects, especially certain works of modernist art, positively invite fantasy, making fantasy part of proper aesthetic appreciation. I conclude by suggesting that while fantasy can indeed play a positive role in aesthetic appreciation, there is still reason to regard fantasy as ‘normatively ambiguous’.

Capturing differences in perception and aesthetic judgment of live or medially presented music: development of a self-report instrument.

Nowadays there are multiple ways to perceive music, from attending concerts (live) to listening to recorded music through headphones (medial). In between there are many mixed modes, such as playback performances. In empirical music research, this plurality of performance forms has so far found little recognition. Until now no measuring instrument has existed that could adequately capture the differences in perception and aesthetic judgment. The purpose of our empirical investigation was to capture all dimensions relevant to such an assessment. Using 3D-simulations and dynamic binaural synthesis, various live and medial situations were simulated. A qualitative survey was conducted at the Department of Audio Communication of the Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin). With the help of the repertory grid technique, a data pool of approximately 400 attribute pairs was created and individual rating data were collected. Our first study served to create a semantic differential. In a second study, this semantic differential was evaluated. The development of the semantic differential was carried out by first using a mixed-method approach to qualitative analysis according to grounded theory. Thereafter, a principal component analysis reduced the attribute pairs to 67 items in four components. The semantic differential consists of items concerning acoustic, visual and audio-visual interaction as well as items with an overarching assessment of the stimuli. The evaluation study, comprising 45 participants (23 male and 22 female, M = 42.56 years, SD = 17.16) who rated 12 stimuli each, reduced the items to 61 and resulted in 18 subscales and nine single items. Because the survey used simulations, the social component may be underrepresented. Nevertheless, the questionnaire we created enables the evaluation of music performances (especially for classical concerts) in a new scope, thus opening many opportunities for further research. For example, in a live concert context, we observed not only that seating position influences the judgment of sound quality but also that visual elements influence immersion and felt affect. In the future, the differential could be reviewed for a larger stimulus pool, extended or used modularly for different research questions.

Early Discourse About Video Game Music in Japan

Japanese video game music has received considerable attention in ludomusicological research, but the broader culture and public perception of game music in Japan has received relatively little scholarly scrutiny. The article addresses this gap by examining how video game music has been conceived as a distinct genre in early Japanese media discourse, namely writings in Japanese gaming magazines and mainstream media from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Drawing upon a constructivist perspective on mediated discourses, the article considers discussions in media as active agents that contribute to the formation of perceptions of the surrounding world. Through this process, media discourse can potentially influence how audiences experience and evaluate video game music as well as how practitioners create music or identify themselves as composers. The data reveals three particularly prominent interconnected categories: (1) game music as children’s music; (2) the conception of game music as transitioning from “background music” to “real music”; and (3) using authorship as a legitimacy marker. Especially the Dragon Quest (1986–) series and its composer, Kōichi Sugiyama (1931–2021), played a prominent role in shaping these categories. While generally presenting game music in a positive light and contributing to a conceptualization of video game music as a distinct genre, all three categories effectively distance game music from its original context within the game. Instead, they incorporate aesthetic judgments, wherein the value of the music is assessed in relation to preexisting musical styles and genres outside the gaming context. Early Japanese discourse thus exhibits a limited comprehension of the audiences and functions of this genre. These observations nevertheless broaden an understanding of the history of game music as well as its public position in Japan and elsewhere.

Что бы ни случилось с киноопытом: от чувственных данных к опытности в истории эстетики

<p>The aesthetics of sensuality is rightfully considered an interdisciplinary field. One of the principles of such reasoning is the shift from the particular to the general, since sensuality is able to resist the 'majors' of rationality among topics (aesthetic judgment, art expertise). Even the most non-reductive approaches, standing apart from the Theories, emphasize the absence of common features that many aesthetic experiences would inherit. Whereas experience, along with observation, has a base that acts as an aid to academic texts. In the language of film criticism, there are seemingly intuitive, but productive notions: intonation, voice and atmosphere. Experienceness as a concept at the intersection of practical aesthetics and film theory makes it possible to find prerequisites for interest in sensuality in a cumulative sense in the history of aesthetics. Being an expression of a particle 'already', referring to both time and space, experienceness in the narrow sense (watchfullness) means a qualitative gap between the value judgment of the film and the depth of experience. While in a broad sense (namely experienceness ) It can be a reason to reconcile the axiology and phenomenology of the sensual side of cinematic experience.</p>

О трудной проблеме в эстетике

<p>Aesthetics, like other branches of philosophy, has its fundamental problems. At different points in the history of aesthetics, such problems have been taste as a form of aesthetic judgment, the limits of art, the possibilities of aesthetic method, and others. Today we can distinguish at least three fundamental problems that are solved in aesthetics with varying degrees of success. The first is a set of problems of aesthetic experience, including the problem of its existence and the problem of its analysis. The second is the problem of art as a special object of aesthetic experience. The third has not yet been clearly defined, but today it is labeled as the problem of the everyday aesthetics, the aesthetics of the environment, or the aesthetics of atmosphere. Within a problem field there may be a problem that is the essence of the field but has not been solved yet. Within the set of problems of aesthetic experience there is a hard problem. It is based on the distinction between sensory and aesthetic experiences. The essence of this problem: what is the necessity of the existence of aesthetic experience on a par with sensory xperience? This problem seems to be unsolved. But if we do not solve this problem, we will have to admit that aesthetic experience is accidental, that there is no need for its existence, that it is reducible to other forms of experience, and that it has no characteristic of its own.</p>

Gait pattern can alter aesthetic visual impression from a third-person perspective

Beauty is related to our lives in various ways and examining it from an interdisciplinary approach is essential. People are very concerned with their appearance. A widely accepted beauty ideal is that the thinner an individual is, the more beautiful they are. However, the effect of continuous motion on body form aesthetics is unclear. Additionally, an upright pelvic posture in the sagittal plane during walking seems to affect the aesthetic judgments of female appearance. We directly analyzed the influence of body form and walking pattern on aesthetic visual impressions from a third-person perspective with a two-way analysis of variance. Captured motion data for three conditions—upright pelvis, normal pelvis, and posteriorly tilted pelvic posture—were applied to each of three mannequins, representing thin, standard, and obese body forms. When participants watched stimulus videos of the mannequins walking with various postures, a significantly higher score for aesthetic visual impression was noted for an upright pelvic posture than for a posteriorly tilted pelvic posture, irrespective of body form (F(2, 119) = 79.89, p < 0.001, η2 = 0.54). These findings show that the third-person perspective of beauty can be improved even without being thin by walking with an upright pelvic posture.

AESTHETICS OF JACKAL’S JUDGEMENTS IN THE FOLKTALES OF TRIBAL COMMUNITIES OF JHARKHAND

Aesthetics, the philosophical perspective that guides the interpretation of an art or its elements for beauty and taste, is not as a simple tool as it appears to be, and its complexity rests on its association with multiple principles and concerns. As located by Immanuel Kant in his The Critique of Judgement Kant (1790/1928), the presence of faculty of judgement consists two parts: ‘critique of aesthetic judgement and critique of teleological judgement,’ and there is a discussion on the ‘aesthetic purposiveness’ in judgement which is presented immediately after the discussion on the ‘logical purposiveness’ in the introduction. In handling the aesthetics of art, it is not merely an expression of the feeling or the sense of taste; rather it is a judgement ascribed to it. Teleology, on the other hand, moves on the regulative or heuristic path in achieving a goal or purpose of the object Bird (2023). However, this article moves away from the core philosophical dialogue on the nature of aesthetics to evolve a framework for contemplating the aesthetics associated with the presence of animal characters in the folktales of judicial/judgement belonging to the tribal communities of Jharkhand. A few judgement tales are taken for this study, not with any specific reason, but these tales have been identified as a matter of convenience in addressing a strong message that is constructed using the popular animal motifs that are quite common and particular to tribal communities in the state. By employing literary tools in delineating and portraying the animal characters as folk motifs and their aesthetic representations to effectively construct and convey the notion of moral judgement on the narrative events that are conditioned with the narrative requirements as per the narrative programme, this article attempts contemporize the dialogue on the moral and ethical attributes as well as to signify the existence of oral tradition with greater responsibility for human beings with amusement as a mere camouflage technique.

THE ROLE OF SPIRITUAL AND FORMAL EFFECTS IN THE PERCEPTION OF EMOTIONAL STATES CONSTITUTING A WORK OF ART

: The emotional states that constitute a work of art are formed through the effects of a series of rules and regularities that explain the organization of various systems and also form the foundation of a field of study. Emotions, formal pleasures, and spiritual approaches are among the phenomena that develop a theory defining the general definition of art, delineating its boundaries, and identifying the qualities that allow us to label something as a "work of art." Additionally, art is related with the aesthetics of nature and human subjective realities. The emotional sentiments, characterized as reality for the artist and manifested through seeing and understanding, are dependent on the subjects to be addressed in art. Art, an inherent human capability, is essentially a representation of existence. The tangible qualities of natural objects, considered reality for the artist, assist in perceiving and grasping these emotional feelings in art. Furthermore, individually arising emotional states give rise to aesthetic judgment based on both objective and subjective evaluations. The essential qualities inherent in the essence of the artwork are the foundation of artistic existence. The form that aids in the emergence of artistic presence appears as the perceptible reality of any object through our senses. For the artist, the material characteristics in nature bring forth perceptions. Artistic works produced for aesthetic purposes help bring forth the existing emotional states.&#x0D; The artist reflects their artistic expression through a perspective developed from their perception of the dynamics of art, attempting to create artistic forms based on the interaction between everyday objects and the senses. Objects that transport perceived forms into reality and everyday items, in interaction with the senses, aid in creating artworks as a synthesis of spiritual approaches. Cultural, sociopolitical, and economic factors influencing society are among the primary factors affecting the creation of artworks. Additionally, variables related to the artist's psychological state and societal structure play a role in this transformative process in the production of artworks. Thus, objects that inherently lack artistic meaning interact with each other in the journey of being transformed into artworks by artists.&#x0D; Our research is conducted by examining qualitative data related to the emotional states that constitute a work of art and their perceptual, spiritual, and formal effects. It is believed that this study will contribute to the field of art.

How to make a bridal bouquet: sensory knowing in action

This study explored the planning and making of a bridal bouquet in classroom interaction between a teacher and a student in a Swedish upper-secondary adult floristry education school. The purpose was to empirically reveal floristry disciplinary aesthetics. Aesthetics can be said to involve the exploration of sensory perception in general, entailing a focus on tacit sensory knowing. Methodologically, this study drew on the principles of ethnomethodology and (multimodal) conversation analysis to investigate video-recorded empirical data. The analysis included three separate sequences of interaction after the student requested the teacher’s attention. In the sequences, the student repeatedly provided answers to her own known-answer questions, and it remained her privilege to define what should be done and why as a consequence of the teacher’s authoritative guiding and gentle support. The results include examples of floristry disciplinary aesthetics in action when making a bridal bouquet, such as airiness and the role of outer shape. Moreover, in situ aesthetic judgement as part of sensory knowing is shown to be ample in the form of embodied actions, such as showing with the hands and communicating with facial expressions.

The beauty and the self: A common mnemonic advantage between aesthetic judgment and self-reference.

The beauty and the self: A common mnemonic advantage between aesthetic judgment and self-reference.

Bombast Circumstance: Linguistic Creativity and Aesthetic Judgment in Early Modern Tragedy

Bombast Circumstance: Linguistic Creativity and Aesthetic Judgment in Early Modern Tragedy

Gazing at monsters: aesthetics, politics, and the national distribution of the sensible

ABSTRACT The Humanity Monument, a gigantic monument in Kars, a northeastern border city of Turkey, was intended to be visible from the Armenian side of the border and supposed to send messages of peace, apology, and reconciliation, implicitly alluding to the Armenian genocide of 1915. It depicted two halves of a human, or two humans, looking at each other in the eye. However, the then prime minister Erdoğan called it a “monster” in a public speech, leading to the monument’s demolition. He then suggested that his comments were just aesthetic judgments free of political convictions, echoing the familiar paradigm of “aestheticizing politics”: covering over or obscuring a political motive (“the ideological”) through the aesthetic. Although a useful understanding, this reduces both aesthetics and politics to ideology and establishes a binary between the sober critic and the a(n)esthetized masses. Instead, drawing upon Rancière’s notion of the aesthetic as what disturbs “the distribution of the sensible,” that is, the partition of roles, territories, parts, and visibilities, this essay reads the story of the monument as a disturbance of the national distribution of the sensible, pointing to the ways it embodies and reveals the monstrosity of the modern state founded upon the event of genocide and further complicates the distinctions between critic and masses, self and other, and gaze and object that the aesthetic ordering of the nation-state relies on.

Aesthetic experience in technology education – the role of aesthetics for learning in lower secondary school robotic programming

IntroductionWithin the technology education research field, aesthetics has primarily been treated as either related to artifacts, design processes and innovation, or as related to students’ enjoyment, appreciation, and participation in technology and technology education. This study focuses on the role of aesthetics in technology learning more specifically the learning of programming. Previous research has pointed to aesthetics as important for the learning of programming, e.g., that programming activities in higher education typically involve experiences of frustration. While previous research is primarily based on student reports, there is a need for further exploration of processes of learning to program. The aim of this study is to explore the role of aesthetics for student learning to program in and what these processes may mean in relation to a disciplinary aesthetics of the technology subject.MethodsThe study was part of a design-based study with the overall purpose to develop the teaching of programming in lower secondary school. Data was collected from a programming task designed and implemented in school-year 9 (the students were aged 15–16) in Technology in two lower secondary classes. In total, three teachers participated in the implementation. The students pair-programmed Lego robots that should perform specific movements, such as following a curved line. Each group recorded their coding process along with audio, resulting in videos that documented the gradual evolution of their programs. These videos, capturing the real-time programming and associated student and teacher conversations, serve as the data for this study. In order to analyze the role of aesthetics in classroom conversations a Practical Epistemology Analysis was applied.ResultsThe results show that aesthetic judgments were important for orienting learning toward (1) the movement of the robot and (2) the ways to be in the programming activity. During the programming activity, the students expressed feelings of frustration but also joy and humor.DiscussionThe findings concur with previous research and contribute to further understanding the role of negative and positive aesthetic experiences in the teaching and learning of programming. The importance of the objects of aesthetic experience found in this study are discussed as part of a disciplinary aesthetic of programming.

The influence of sensory modality on aesthetic judgments of poetry.

The influence of sensory modality on aesthetic judgments of poetry.

Selective interference of liking and beauty judgements on affective working memory and visual working memory.

Aesthetic processing has profound implications for everyday life. Although liking and beauty judgements are outcomes of aesthetic processing and derive from a common hedonic value, there may be some differences in how they engage working memory. This study used maintenance and aesthetic judgement tasks to examine whether liking and beauty judgements make different demands on domain-specific working memory resources. Sixty participants (30 males) were instructed to rate picture for liking or beauty while maintaining the subjective affect or brightness of the presented pictures. Results indicated that liking judgements selectively impaired participants' performance in the affect maintenance task, and beauty judgements selectively impaired their performance in the brightness maintenance task. In addition, maintaining affect and brightness feelings in the mind increased image ratings on beauty but not on liking. Our findings provide evidence that liking judgements draw more on affective working memory resources than beauty judgements, and beauty judgements draw more on visual working memory resources than liking judgements.

"Encumbered with useless graces": Ornamentation and Aesthetics in Eighteenth-century Scottish Music

Throughout the eighteenth century, a steady stream of Italian musicians travelled to Scotland, in search of artistic and commercial success. Inspired by the enterprise of their Scottish counterparts, many published collections of “Scots Tunes,” such that by the end of the century a rich body of repertoire had emerged. Italians and Scots alike valued this repertoire for various reasons: for some, these tunes represented an idealised vision of pastoral simplicity; for others, a fossilised record of the music of past generations; for others still, these tunes were a vehicle for the expression of nationalistic sentiment. This repertoire presents a challenge to Early Music practitioners today, who must contend with the fact that this music has been transmitted through textual sources and oral tradition. To this end, many musicians engage with elements of Scottish Traditional performance practice – a practice that often diverges from, and is at times incompatible with, dominant understandings of eighteenth-century performance practice. In this thesis, I summarise some of the ornamentation techniques employed by Scottish Traditional musicians, investigating their possible influence on Italian Scots Tunes sources. I contend that comparative analysis of these sources can inform performances of this repertoire, by revealing implicit relationships between notation, performance practice and aesthetic judgements. Further, I survey current trends in the historical performance practice of Scots Tunes, interrogating the ways in which this repertoire is framed by modern conceptions of “folk” music. I observe that this repertoire continues to be valued within a variety of aesthetic frameworks, which are themselves revealed, upheld, and reproduced through performance practice.

The relationship between Satisfaction and Interest related to the Aesthetic Judgment in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

This article aims to present a reading of the first paragraphs of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Aesthetic Judgment and the conceptualization about the beauty, pleasurable and good, and the relation there is between satisfaction and interest in the judgment of taste. Its motivation is due to the philosophical relevance that both the author and the topic represent in the framework of the philosophical renewal of his time and nowadays. With this central intention, this work seeks to disclose, in an explanatory way, all logical chains of the proposed Kantian thinking, to facilitate its understanding. The content was exposed based on a hermeneutic analysis of the book Critique of the Power of Judgment. As a result of the research, an excellent logical link was observed in the author's argument, defending the thinking about the judgment of taste and an expert work of conceptualization regarding beauty, pleasant and good. This research concludes by revealing that many of the aesthetic relations presented can be associated to both the faculty of thinking and the feeling developed between object and subject; thus, making it possible the advance of the research to a more comprehensive topic.