<p>本文自跨媒介方法出發，探討楊德昌《恐怖份子》（1986）如何展現並解構媒介特殊性，彰顯多重媒介間既分明又匯融之關係。本文首先聚焦於電影最後二十分鐘，透過蒙太奇結構與音畫部署，闡述其如何體現電影媒介的特殊性。其次，則討論電影與攝影於其中的媒介混融，以思考電影中的「攝影性」與攝影中的「電影性」。本文接著分析《恐怖份子》中電視與多螢幕（類）錄像裝置的運用，探討楊德昌如何挑戰傳統電影定義，拓展新電影的影像實驗與媒介思辨。最後，本文指出，《恐怖份子》一方面體現電影性與攝影性之特質，另一方面則打破媒介邊界。在1980年代媒介科技發展脈絡下，楊德昌透過攝影、電視與（類）影像裝置等多重媒介的融合，不僅關注電影與攝影媒介特質，亦嘗試探索電視與錄像美學。《恐怖份子》中對於媒介特殊性的強調與拆解，預示了其後楊德昌晚期作品於數位網路時代呈現的媒介匯流景觀。</p><p>This article adopts an intermedial approach to examine how Edward Yang’s Terrorizers (1986) both articulates and deconstructs the notion of medium specificity, highlighting the interplay between distinct yet interconnected media forms. The analysis begins by focusing on the final twenty minutes of the film, exploring its intricate montage structure and the deployment of sound and image to interrogate the ways in which Terrorizers foregrounds the specificity of the cinematic medium. The second section investigates the intermedial fusion of film and photography, considering how Terrorizers presents “the photographic” in cinema and “the cinematic” in photography. This article subsequently examines the presence of television and multi-screen (quasi-)video installations in the film, analyzing Edward Yang’s challenge to traditional concept of cinema and his expansion of Taiwan New Cinema’s experimental aesthetics and media discourse. In the end, this article argues that Terrorizers simultaneously embodies and disrupts the conventional distinctions between film and photography, destabilizing the boundaries that define medium specificity. Within the broader technological landscape of the 1980s, Edward Yang’s engagement with photography, television, and (quasi-)video installations not only reflects his sustained interest in the formal properties of different media but also signals an attempt to explore television and video art aesthetics. Ultimately, the film’s simultaneous assertion and deconstruction of medium specificity anticipate the emergent media convergence in Edward Yang’s later works, particularly in the context of the digital network era.</p>

The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942) is an incomplete film. It is not one of the many unfinished films in Welles’s career that never reached their audiences, but it was not completed – and evidently not appreciated – by the director. “RKO destroyed Ambersons, and the picture itself destroyed me”, he explains in an interview, as a big portion of the film was removed from the original cut, and additional scenes were shot by the studio, leaving a mutilated version of what the director intended in the first place. The film’s complicated production process occurred at a time when RKO, one of The Big Five studios, already had lost money on Citizen Kane (1941), and it is exemplary in terms of illustrating the unstable power relationships between producers and filmmakers of the studio era. Ambersons is the only picture of mine I’ve seen after it was finished and released.Orson Welles (quoted in Rosenbaum 1992: 9)

Jean Rhys's Modernist Bearings and Experimental Aesthetics by Sue Thomas (review)

This paper explores the (non)representational aesthetics and politics of Serpent Rain, a 2016 Black feminist film inspired by the recovery of a Danish-Norwegian slave ship. Despite ample historical evidence, Scandinavia’s involvement in the transatlantic slave trade remains an underdiscussed topic; when the history is broached at all, it tends to be relegated to a distant ‘dark chapter’ already overcome. I argue that Serpent Rain rejects this binary of erasure vs. contained representation in its treatment of slavery, enacting instead another type of (non)representation that moves beyond “the limits of most available narratives to explain the position of the enslaved” (Hartman and Wilderson 2023, 184). Taking its meandering and associative form from Serpent Rain’s experimental aesthetics, this article draws on Black feminist theory—particularly Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake—to argue that the film unsettles visual and ontological certainty to dramatize the repetitive structure of racial capitalism and its ongoing reiterative violence, from the sunken slave ship to the ongoing extraction of oil on indigenous land. Ultimately, the film makes us question not only the hegemonic mediation of the enslaved, but also the orthography of the (white) Human and the seeming serenity of Norwegian oceanic landscapes.

This is a research paper in experimental aesthetics, examining the effect of expectedness on the aesthetic perception of linguistic stimuli as a means of artistic expression. Within the framework of New Experimental Aesthetics, complexity, novelty, expectedness, and conflict are considered key determinants of the aesthetic experience of a given content, as they influ- ence the observer’s level of arousal. Research on visual and musical content shows that the newer and less expected the content is, the more interesting it will be perceived as. On the other hand, moderately expected content is judged as most pleasant, while entirely unexpected content is experienced as unpleasant. However, regarding the relationship between expected- ness and pleasantness, later studies—particularly under the paradigm of the mere exposure effect—have yielded inconsistent findings, revealing a tendency to perceive highly familiar and expected content, to which we have been repeatedly exposed, as the most pleasant. This study aimed to examine the effect of expectedness on the interestingness and pleasantness of verbal stimuli, given that words serve as a medium of literary artistic expression. A total of 47 partic- ipants took part in the research, rating the expectancy, pleasantness, and interestingness of verbal stimuli—phrases used in the poetry of Serbian authors—on a seven-point scale. The results indicate that, similar to other art forms (visual or musical), the less expected a verbal stimulus is, the more interesting it appears to the observer. However, unlike other art forms, unexpected content in literature is not perceived as pleasant; instead, expected and familiar verbal stimuli are preferred. The discussion offers an overview of the specific features of the aesthetic experience of verbal content.

Abstract: The late African American author William Demby's writings in postwar Rome for the Italian cinema and for periodicals suffuse the experimental aesthetics of his semi-autobiographical 1965 novel The Catacombs ( Le catacombe , 1967) at the level of content, style, and form. This essay analyzes filmic and televisual elements that animate The Catacombs ' striking revision of protest art through its Black female protagonist Doris's relation to the image. Demby's own life narrative enters into a playful, metafictional relationship with that of his novel's narrator, "Bill Demby," an African American expatriate author writing a novel in Rome in the early Sixties and living with his Italian wife, who is also a writer. Again, this novel within The Catacombs revolves around an African American actress, Doris, who is working in Rome's film industry. Though The Catacombs is highly elliptical and does not provide detailed descriptors of Demby's Italian postwar cohorts, it notably alludes to several groundbreaking artists, including Demby's wife, writer Lucia Drudi, as well as Lorenza Mazzetti, Mimmo Rotella, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Alberto Moravia, among others. Demby's experimental approach to engaging transnational networks of affiliation figures 1960s Rome as a vital hub of daring cultural work and collaboration.

Over the past two decades, researchers in the field of visual aesthetics have studied numerous quantitative (objective) image properties and how they relate to visual aesthetic appreciation. However, results are difficult to compare between research groups. One reason is that researchers use different sets of image properties in their studies. However, even if the same properties are used, the image pre-processing techniques may differ, and researchers often use their own customized scripts to calculate the image properties. To provide better accessibility and comparability of research results in visual experimental aesthetics, we developed an open-access and easy-to-use toolbox called Aesthetics Toolbox. The Toolbox allows users to calculate a well-defined set of quantitative image properties popular in contemporary research. The properties include image dimensions, lightness and color statistics, complexity, symmetry, balance, Fourier spectrum properties, fractal dimension, self-similarity, as well as entropy measures and CNN-based variances. Compatible with most devices, the Toolbox provides an intuitive click-and-drop web interface. In the Toolbox, we integrated the original scripts of four different research groups and translated them into Python 3. To ensure that results were consistent across analyses, we took care that results from the Python versions of the scripts were the same as those from the original scripts. The toolbox, detailed documentation, and a link to the cloud version are available via GitHub: https://github.com/RBartho/Aesthetics-Toolbox. In summary, we developed a toolbox that helps to standardize and simplify the calculation of quantitative image properties for visual aesthetics research.

In The Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy popularized the ship as a salient chronotope for examining the Black diasporic transnational alliances across the Middle Passage because ships sailing across the Atlantic metonymically represented Pan-Africanism and transcultural relations in the writings of intellectual activists like W. E. B. Du Bois. Jettisoning the clichéd chronotope of the ship and portraying the alternative chronotope of the airport as a space that restricts mobility for Black diasporic subjects, this article argues that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Americanah represents the unique chronotope of the hair salon as a spatiotemporal organizer of the narrative depicting the diverse lived experiences of the new Black diaspora. Close reading to demonstrate how Adichie’s experimental aesthetics augments extant theoretical models of the Black diaspora (e.g., Brent Edwards’s Décalage), the article concludes by proffering that Ifemelu’s blog posts challenge the claims of The Black Atlantic, which are supported by a framework that Michelle Wright describes as the “Middle Passage Epistemology.”

This paper delves into the innovative integration of arts in science education, as exemplified by the book Einstein, Eddington, and the Eclipse: Travel Impressions. The book uniquely combines a history of science essay and a graphic novel, collaboratively created by Ana Simões, a historian of science, and Ana Matilde Sousa, an artist. Diverging from conventional science communication comics, the graphic novel section adopts an “art comics” style, with experimental aesthetics and complex storytelling, challenging the notion that comics oversimplify scientific concepts and events. This paper primarily focuses on the creative processes, themes, and decisions involved in the making of the graphic novel, showcasing how it synergizes with the essay to present a rich tapestry of the global context, societal impact, and diverse individuals involved in the 1919 British astronomical expeditions which proved Einstein’s light bending prediction. Additionally, this paper also serves as a practical resource/tool for educators, offering a “skeleton key” that engages students, particularly science undergraduates, in critical thinking about scientific and historical content. It underscores the significant role of visual arts in enriching science education and highlights the book’s contribution to the evolving landscape of STEAM education.

Abstract The haptic sense is an essential component of aesthetic evaluation that is often overlooked in today's mobile internet age. Unlike hearing and vision, the sense of touch is less widely transmitted. Unfortunately, most aesthetic theories and explanations have focused solely on the visual and auditory senses, with minimal attention given to tactile evaluation. To address this gap in knowledge, we have collected studies on tactile aesthetics within the framework of experimental aesthetics from 2000 to 2022. After statistical generalization, our findings suggest the following: The criteria for evaluating tactile aesthetics were mostly dichotomous, that is, positive (like/appreciation/pleasure) and negative (dislike/disgust/unpleasant). Tactile aesthetics predominantly involved the toucher dimension (synesthesia/need for touch/touch pattern) and the touch sample dimension (shape/type/texture), with the commonly overlooked factors of “need for touch” and “touch pattern.” Some studies did not restrict the shape and material of the touch samples. Based on our findings, we have systematically summarized and concluded what tactile factors influence aesthetic evaluation and have analyzed future research trends.

You can touch this! Brain correlates of aesthetic processing of active fingertip exploration of material surfaces

Narrative Materiality and The Contemporary Book David Wylot (bio) 1. HAPPY READING In 2019, the publishing house Penguin Books ran an advertising campaign across the UK for its imprint Penguin Classics entitled "Happy Reading." The campaign comprised of photographs of individually owned books from the Penguin Classics range that have been handled, used, and thoroughly read. One campaign poster, for instance, displayed a copy of CHARLOTTE BRONTË'S Jane Eyre (1847) complete with bent cover, annotation labels, and the marks of a book worn with use.1 More than just a celebration of their stories and worlds, the campaign sought to vividly display (and sell) readers' physical encounters with the printed book. As its promotional material stated, each book photographed "tells a story of its own, through its cracked spine, dog-eared pages, scribbled margins or its missing cover."2 The story contained by the book is only half of the book's story. Penguin's attention to readers' tactile handling of the book is clearly attentive to what Leah Price terms "the manual dimension of reading," and in this respect, the campaign is strikingly contemporary.3 "Happy Reading," after [End Page 71] all, notably appears at a time when the sociology, media history, and literary study of the book and of reading have captured the attention of the academy. This coincidence need not be limited to criticism either. Twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction, as many remark, has increasingly turned to a thematic and formal emphasis on the materiality of its printed inscription in response to a changing digital media landscape.4 An archive of this material might include the textual experimentation of Mark Z. Danielewski's The House of Leaves (2000), Ali Smith's printing of two versions of How to Be Both (2014), Chris Ware's book-in-a-box graphic novel Building Stories (2012), or Nicola Barker's typographic play in H(A)PPY (2017), but also less explicitly experimental texts that explore the permutations of their bookish form, such as James Smythe's No Harm Can Come to a Good Man (2014), discussed shortly. As Jessica Pressman suggests, these literary engagements with the "bookishness" of the codex book "describe an aesthetic practice and cultural phenomenon that figures the book as artifact rather than as just a medium for information transmission and, in so doing, presents the book as a fetish for our digital age."5 In this scholarship's expansion, however, less has been made of the impact of the book on readers' comprehension of narrative. In cases where it has been, the textual archive has remained largely pre-twentieth century; likewise, media-conscious narrative theory has often turned to nonprint media due to verbal narrative structure's dominance in narratology.6 Yet the rise of "bookish" books, coupled with renewed focus on the material dimension of reading, clearly invites reconsideration of narrative comprehension attentive to this form. This essay therefore asks two related questions. First, what kinds of narrative dynamics should we look to when incorporating the printed book into a consideration of narrative? And second, what can bookish form make perceptible of twenty-first-century digital culture amid the proliferation of new forms of reading, writing, and consuming narrative? I consider both by way of an analysis of James Smythe's British science fiction novel No Harm Can Come to a Good Man.7 Despite lacking the experimental aesthetics normally associated with "bookish" books, No Harm thematically reckons [End Page 72] with the bounded nature of its printed form to offer vivid reflection on the book's narrative temporalities. The novel follows the story of Laurence Walker, a U.S. senator running for nomination in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries, whose political campaign runs aground once a ubiquitous data service called ClearVista, italicized throughout, predicts that he has 0% chance of success. ClearVista, which offers users forecasts of the likelihood of seemingly any event in a digitally quantified world, provides the novel's speculative vision for the methods of capture, "datafication," and statistical forecasting that underpin the technological and ideological regime of "big data" in the twenty-first century.8 It is a technology that, as Laurence is told, "finds out everything about...

This scholarly essay is about research-creation in interactive, immersive and digital non-fiction storytelling. It seeks to shed light and update this research approach and to identify ways in which it can be rendered more accessible to both practitioners and researchers. The essay revisits two recent factual narratives—the web-documentary Field Trip (2019) and VR experience Myriad (2021), projects in which the authors were directly involved as practitioners. Then, it positions these two digital practices in the body of literature on media innovations before qualifying them as interactive and immersive documentaries (i-docs). Field Trip is a browser-based 92-minute documentary taking a deep dive into the history and social struggles around the Tempelhof Field, Berlin’s former airport turned public park. Myriad is a 32-minute immersive VR experience narrated from the perspective of globally migrating animals, sensitizing the audience to the interplay and interrelationship of all life forms. The authors explain how these projects have, in their separate and singular ways, opened spaces for iterative loops between creative practice and theory. Field Trip exemplifies how triangulation can be applied to creative media practice. This method, albeit a relatively classic in research, continues to be a challenge for practitioners. The case of Myriad, in turn, discusses two additional methods: core to audience and interdisciplinary iteration in experimental aesthetics. While these two methods in format development and artistic enquiry might sound familiar to practitioners, they are promising for closing some gaps in academic research design. The two case studies speak to the diversity of research-creation approaches, methods and formats while illustrating how research-creation, as a research mindset, can facilitate the output of two things at once: a more ‘educated’ artistic expression and more grounded academic knowledge. The essay further identifies the need to systematize and offer continuous support to researchers-creators. It argues that this fits the mandate of higher education art and design schools, which should be understood as research-creation competence centers. The paper ends with five learnings meant to encourage digital media practitioners to develop an enquiry reflex and media scholars to “get their hands dirty” in partaking in innovative, creative media projects.

This study examined the effects of psychotic tendencies on aesthetic preferences for paintings. Although psychotic tendencies and related phenomena are often associated with creative achievements, little research in the field of experimental aesthetics has investigated their effects on the aesthetic experience. This study (N = 153) examined how the positive, negative and disorganized aspects of psychotic tendencies, defined through a comprehensive model of the Disintegration trait, are related to the aesthetic preferences of paintings. Results indicated a general trend whereby Disintegration and its modalities had a positive effect on the aesthetic preferences of non-canonical (Ugly and Incomprehensible) paintings, and a negative effect on canonical, traditional (Beautiful and Comprehensible) paintings. Examination of the Disintegration trait provides us with additional information regarding aesthetic preferences, compared to use of the Big Five model alone. Two processes – conservation and progression – are proposed as explanations for the findings.

Increasing the aesthetic quality of a shape is an important objective for enhancing the attractiveness of a product. Many studies on shape generation systems are based on the user’s emotion as a means of supporting the ideas of product designers. However, most of the proposed systems are unsuitable for extrapolation of shapes because they rely on the subjective evaluation of the user to determine the shape of an object. Experimental aesthetics theory suggests that a moderate level of novelty and complexity yields pleasant feelings. Furthermore, a mathematical model has been proposed for this theory that focuses on the sum of the information content induced by the novelty and complexity of an object. In this study, we formulated the novelty and complexity of contoured shapes and developed a system that generates a variety of shapes with the given novelty and complexity parameters. We conducted experiments using the generated butterfly and automobile shapes. The results indicate that the system can independently manipulate the novelty and complexity of a shape and affect its interestingness. The system may support the evaluation and further investigation of the most acceptable level of novelty and complexity with respect to the product shape.

Daniel Berlyne's "new experimental aesthetics" offers a deliberately mole- cular and non-normative view of aesthetic processes. This paper suggests that Berlyne's theoretical structure may derive greater social applicability by regarding aesthetic stimuli as aspects of leisure and the entertainment industry: that the concept of optimal level of stimulation is useful in predicting individual leisure preferences; that a formal link between percep- tion and intrinsic motivation may be found in perceptually-mediated arousal; and that the hedonic value of this arousal is determined by the socially formed values attached to aesthetic stimuli.

The subreddit r/FutureCompasses is an online community where users play with the notion of a computationality engineered futurity. Future compasses are intricate 4 × 4 grids that imagine different futures. Each grid offers sixteen different futuristic scenarios thematically structured around concepts such as ecology or technology. These compasses combine computationality with experimental aesthetics through play. As per Roger Callois, play here crucially involves the creation of a new universal reality The authors of these compasses participate in the making of new social reality by applying a computational lens to the future and offering speculative scenarios about what the future could be. However, these scenarios do not reflect a realistic future for humanity. Instead, they subvert the idea of being able to calculate the future. Through creative play and experimental aesthetics, users who produce future compasses contrast computationality with human creativity. In this way, future compasses take their place in the artistic tradition of the New Aesthetic as defined by James Bridle. This article argues that future compasses contrast what can be technologically calculated and what should be creatively imagined.

The topic of the human face is addressed from a biocultural perspective, focusing on the empirical investigation of how the face is represented, perceived, and evaluated in artistic portraits and self-portraits from the XVth to the XVIIth century. To do so, the crucial role played by the human face in social cognition is introduced, starting from development, showing that neonatal facial imitation and face-to-face dyadic interactions provide the grounding elements for the construction of intersubjective bonds. The neuroscience of face perception is concisely presented and discussed, together with the psychophysics of face perception and gaze exploration, introducing the notions of the left visual field advantage (LVFA) and the left gaze bias (LGB). The results of experiments on the perception and the emotional and aesthetic rating of artistic portraits and self-portraits are reported, showing that despite participants’ inability to tell self-portraits and portraits apart, greater emotional, communicative-social, and aesthetic ratings were attributed to self-portraits. It is concluded that neuroscience and experimental aesthetics can contribute to better understand the human face, hence to better understand ourselves.

This scholarly essay is about research-creation in the field of interactive, immersive and digital non-fiction storytelling. It seeks to shed light and update this approach to research, and to identify ways in which it can be rendered more accessible to both practitioners and researchers. The essay revisits two recent factual narratives—web-documentary Field Trip (2019) and VR experience Myriad (2021), projects in which the authors were directly involved as practitioners. It positions these two digital practices in the body of literature on media innovations, before qualifying them as interactive and immersive documentaries (i-docs). Field Trip is a browser-based 92-minutes documentary taking a deep dive into the history and social struggles around the Tempelhof Field, Berlin’s former airport turned public park. Myriad is a 32-minutes immersive VR experience narrated from the perspective of globally migrating animals, sensitizing the audience to the interplay and interrelationship of all life forms. The authors explain how these projects have, in their respective and singular ways, opened spaces for iterative loops between creative practice and theory. Field Trip serves to exemplify how triangulation can be applied to creative media practice. This method, albeit a relatively classic one in research, continues to be a challenge for practitioners. The case of Myriad, in turn, is used to discuss two additional methods: core to audience and interdisciplinary iteration in experimental aesthetics. While these two methods in format development and artistic enquiry might sound familiar to practitioners, they are promising for closing some gaps in the design of academic research. The two case studies speak to the diversity of research-creation approaches, methods and formats, while at the same illustrating how research-creation, as a research mindset, can facilitate the output of two things at once: a more ‘educated’ artistic expression and more grounded academic knowledge. The essay further identifies the need to systematize and offer continuous support to researchers-creators. It argues that this fits the mandate of higher education art and design schools, which should be understood as research-creation competence centers. The paper ends on five learnings meant to encourage digital media practitioners to develop an enquiry reflex and media scholars to “get their hands dirty” in partaking in innovative creative media projects.

Experimental Philosophy (X-Phi) is now a fully-fledged methodological project with applications in almost all areas of analytic philosophy, including, as of recently, aesthetics. Another methodological project which has been attracting attention in the last few years is conceptual engineering (CE). Its areas of implementation are now diverse, but as was the case initially with experimental philosophy, aesthetics has unfortunately been left out (or perhaps aestheticians have failed to pay attention to CE) until now. In this paper, I argue that if conceptual engineers are interested in expanding their project to the field of aesthetics, which would greatly benefit the field, then they should rely on the existing experimental work of aestheticians. Experimental philosophers have only recently started to join forces with conceptual engineers in various fields, as well as to explore the methodological implications of such an alliance. This paper goes a step further by not only arguing that CE has potential in aesthetics, but that the way to realize this potential is to piggyback, so to speak, on the work of experimental aestheticians. In other words, instead of building a CE project in aesthetics from the ground up, this paper describes the support that CE can and should derive from current experimental aesthetics, thereby making the former’s development more efficiently realizable. Furthermore, I argue that doing so would also be beneficial to experimental aesthetics. Currently, the integration of X-Phi to the wider field of aesthetics is losing ground because certain objections—notably, the objection that X-Phi cannot be of relevance to normative questions—have not been properly refuted. By pairing up with a normative programme like CE, though, experimental aestheticians should finally be able to put these objections to rest.