Artistic Image Research Articles

GAN and art: Facilitation of artistic production and expression based on artificial intelligence

The advancement of Artificial Intelligence has resulted in the investigation of its applications in a variety of sectors. The creation and depiction of artistic images as a tool for demonstrating human creativity and intellect has been a significant focus of Artificial Intelligence (AI) content generation. This study discusses picture generation approaches and highlights image creation principles as well as numerous varieties of Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). GAN models for image creation can inspire designers and artists, generate images that assist people grasp historical elements by imitating old artistic styles and cultural forms, and generate images of humans. GAN models for image generation can help designers and artists inspire their creativity, produce images that help people understand historical features by mimicking classic artistic styles and cultural forms, and produce images of people that provide intuitive access to information for communication and learning purposes. The application of GAN models in the field of art production is becoming increasingly sophisticated, and many novel applications are yet to be described and popularised. The article summarises the applications of artworks generated by GAN models, for one it can be applied as a thinking aid in art design and the creation of stylised artworks, while GAN-generated images can also help people GAN-generated images can also help people understand history, culture and other related knowledge, making profound art forms more common and popular. The article also analyses the potential hazards of GAN model-generated art images that are related to the passion and creative rights of the creators.

CARMEL: Capturing spatio-temporal correlations via time-series sub-window imaging for home appliance classification

Energy management systems (EMS), as enablers of more efficient energy consumption, monitor and manage appliances to help residents be more energy efficient and thus more frugal. Recent appliance detection and identification techniques for such systems rely on machine learning. However, machine learning solutions for appliance classification on existing low-frequency household metering have not yet been thoroughly investigated. In this paper, we propose CARMEL, a new approach for identifying home appliances from load monitoring in building EMS based on a new data representation technique and a new model that leverages spatio-temporal correlations in the new representation. The proposed data representation technique performs dimensionality expansion of time series that scales linearly, rather than quadratically and, together with the proposed model, outperform the state of the art image transformation models by 5 percentage points. Evaluation on 5 different low-frequency household metering datasets, considering 29 appliances in total, shows that the proposed representation and the corresponding resource-aware deep learning architecture (1) achieve an average weighted F1 score of 0.92 and (2) require only 230 labeled samples and 3x fewer epochs to transfer to new households.

Պարսկական ճարտարապետության գոհարներից մեկը՝ Երևանում

The Blue Mosque plays an important role in understanding the history of Yerevan, the artistic image of the city in that period, as well as in the comparative study with other monuments of Iranian architecture have the best and most complete picture of this architecture. It is also important to recognize the role of the Blue Mosque complex in the cultural life of Yerevan, both past and present. Today it is actively included in the cultural life of Yerevan, making it an important place for the manifestation and establishment of Armenian-Iranian cultural ties. In addition, the example of the restoration project of the Blue Mosque of Yerevan played a very important role in the cultural cooperation of the two countries and contributed to the appreciation, study, preservation, restoration, use and other issues of solving and implementing many architectural monuments within their borders.

Images as a Resource for Catholic Theology

The aim of this article is to demonstrate why Catholic theology should actively engage with artistic images and elucidate how they could serve as a valuable resource for theological knowledge and content. The discussion is articulated in three distinct steps. Firstly, drawing from theological-historical perspectives within Christian tradition, it is shown that certain images possess significant theological potential. There have been various forms of interaction between theology and the visual representation of faith. The second step discusses the gradual reduction of theological reflection towards rational and conceptual cognition. The author relies predominantly on inner-theological arguments to advocate for the necessity of expanding the intellectual and conceptual horizons of contemporary Catholic theology so as to include the aesthetic dimension. In the final, third part, these insights are substantiated through the examination of two examples from contemporary Catholic theology: the works of Alex Stock and Peter Hofmann, exploring how artistic images can enrich systematic theology by serving as a “locus theologicus”. In conclusion, the author asserts that images have the potential to expand and concretize abstracted topics within dogmatic theology. They can also facilitate the reintegration of fragmented theological disciplines and forge a more direct link between theology and the lived experience of faith.

Improving the quality of image generation in art with top-k training and cyclic generative methods

The creation of artistic images through the use of Artificial Intelligence is an area that has been gaining interest in recent years. In particular, the ability of Neural Networks to separate and subsequently recombine the style of different images, generating a new artistic image with the desired style, has been a source of study and attraction for the academic and industrial community. This work addresses the challenge of generating artistic images that are framed in the style of pictorial Impressionism and, specifically, that imitate the style of one of its greatest exponents, the painter Claude Monet. After having analysed several theoretical approaches, the Cycle Generative Adversarial Networks are chosen as base model. From this point, a new training methodology which has not been applied to cyclical systems so far, the top-k approach, is implemented. The proposed system is characterised by using in each iteration of the training those k images that, in the previous iteration, have been able to better imitate the artist’s style. To evaluate the performance of the proposed methods, the results obtained with both methodologies, basic and top-k, have been analysed from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Both evaluation methods demonstrate that the proposed top-k approach recreates the author’s style in a more successful manner and, at the same time, also demonstrate the ability of Artificial Intelligence to generate something as creative as impressionist paintings.

The Legacy of Soviet Monumental and Decorative Art (on the Example of Tselinograd, Republic of Kazakhstan)

The development of virgin lands (also known as tselina – previously uncultivated or unexplored areas of land, which have not been affected by humans and are typically located in rural or remote regions) has not only boosted the economy but influenced the development of art in Kazakhstan, particularly in Akmolinsk (in 1961 it was renamed Tselinograd, the current name of the city is Astana). Muralists M. Antonyuk and V. Tovtin made a significant contribution to the artistic and aesthetic image of Tselinograd. The purpose of the study is to identify the role of Soviet monumental and decorative art in designing the aesthetics of urban space and to substantiate its historical and cultural value. In this study, the features of stained-glass windows, marquetry, and monumental mosaics of Tselinograd were analysed. Their value as works of art was analysed, the specificities of incorporating national character are described, and their influence on the cultural development of the city is explained. The level of skill of the artists, including the ability to “embed” the artwork in the architectural image of the building is emphasised. The uniqueness of the monumental mosaics of the Soviet period is proved. Conclusions are drawn about their role as agitation. The need to preserve the works of monumental art for future generations is emphasised. This is an important part of the historical period – thoughtless “modernisation” of residential buildings, indifference to and devaluation of the artistic and cultural heritage of the Soviet past are not acceptable.

PLACE AND ROLE OF DANCE IN THE BEIJING OPERA

Dance in the Beijing Opera is distinguished by its unique aesthetic system, ex-cellent performing mastery, symbolism, submission to certain canons allowing to create a bright artistic image of the character of the performance. The article describes the characteristic features of opera dance, reveals its functions and forms. Special attention is paid to the specifics of the actor’s performing art in opera dance.

Образ Великобритании в оригинале и автопереводе очерка Г. Д. Гребенщикова «Вестминстерские колокола»

The aim of the research is to identify the peculiarities of the artistic image of Great Britain based on the original and self-translation of G. D. Grebenshchikov’s essay “Westminster Bells”. The paper discusses the creation of the country’s image through the use of a complex chronotope, imitation of documentary style and references to classical British literature. Additionally, the images of the ruler and the people are interconnected through the portrayal of Westminster Abbey bells and radio. The scientific novelty of the research lies in introducing into scientific use the study material, as the self-translation has not been published by the author and the Russian version of the essay has not been reprinted since its publication in the newspaper “Novaya Zarya” and is not included in the “Collected Works”. As a result, it has been found that the components of the empire’s image for G. D. Grebenshchikov consist of the classical “orthodoxy – autocracy – nationality” imperial triad, which is realised both in the original and the self-translation of the work.

Patterns of Artistic Image in the Poetry of Salah Abdus-Sabour

The artistic image in its multiple varied patterns is considered one of the most prominent elements of the poem in all ages. The poem cannot be composed without an artistic image that expresses its poetic essence because it will lose a pillar of its aesthetic composition. Every academic critical study that tackles a specific poet or a specific poem looks at the artistic image as an aesthetic dimension that is indispensable. The artistic image is usually of multiple shapes, formulas and signs regarding its relationship to poetic structure, language, and rhythm . Salah Abdus-Sabour is one of the pioneering Arab poets, as he is the most prominent poet of modernity in Egypt since the early fifties with Ahmed Abdul-Mu’ti Hujazi, Mohammad Afifi Matar, and others. However, Abdus-Sabour is distinguished by his transparent poetic pictorial language that depends on a new language in Expression and composition. That is why the researchers find it appropriate that the poems of Abdus-Sabour are a fertile topic for this research in the field of artistic image patterns in modern Arab poetry.

Research on the Underlying Principles and Deep Learning Algorithms based on Image Style Conversion Techniques

Image style transformation techniques are an important research area in the field of computer vision, aiming to combine the content of one image with the artistic style of another image to create new images with the content of the input image and the style of the artistic style image. The development of this field has benefited from the rapid development of deep learning algorithms, especially the application of techniques such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN). At the heart of image style transformation is how to capture both the content and artistic style of the input image. This is typically achieved by using different levels of activation of the convolutional neural network as content and style representations. The content representation captures the object and structural information in the image, while the style representation captures the texture and colour information of the image. To capture the style of an image, a Gram matrix is typically used to measure the correlation between features at a particular level. This matrix representation allows us to capture texture information and colour distribution, thus enabling style migration. The goal of the image style transformation model is to minimise both content loss and style loss to produce synthetic images. Content loss typically uses Euclidean distance to measure the difference between content representations, while style loss involves the distance between Gram matrices. GANs have become an important tool in image style transformation. The generator network is responsible for generating synthetic images and the discriminator network evaluates the realism of the generated images. Through adversarial training, the generator and discriminator networks constantly compete to improve the quality of the generated images. Finally, this study highlights the potential applications of image style conversion techniques in the fields of art creation, image editing and virtual reality, and proposes directions for future research on deep learning algorithms and underlying principles to further improve the efficiency and quality of image style conversion techniques. The continuous development of this field will bring new opportunities for image processing and creative applications.

Research on virtual color restoration algorithm for printmaking art images based on semantic segmentation and convolutional neural network

Abstract In this paper, semantic segmentation based on a convolutional neural network is used to guide the image color restoration process. In order to avoid the problem of content mismatch, higher-order features are first extracted from the basic dimensions of the input image, and the convolutional operation is done on the feature map by the excitation function. Then the network parameters are optimized and updated by the backpropagation algorithm to minimize the error between the prediction result and the real result. Finally, in image processing, the dilated convolution technique is introduced to perform noise reduction on the semantic segmented image pixels to optimize the restoration quality. In order to prove the effectiveness of the method in this paper, an experimental analysis of the method is conducted. The experimental results show that the peak signal-to-noise ratio of the model proposed in this paper is higher than 42.986db on average, the structural similarity reaches 0.8%, and the fit is around 0.75. And its color difference can reach at least 11.2% with the increase of iterations. It indicates that the reduction algorithm of semantic segmentation and convolutional neural network greatly improves the accuracy of color reduction results and can obtain printmaking images with higher color quality.

“Foreigners in a foreign land”: a historical context of “Strangers” from E. Chirikov’s “Essays on provincial life”

Written at the turn of the 19th– 20th centuries, Evgeny Chirikov’s novel “Strangers”, reflecting the realities of provincial life, received an impressive number of critical reviews from the author’s contemporaries. However, decades later, critics took a different look at the work of E. Chirikov. The article examines the historical context of the novel created by the writer, searches for real prototypes of the characters depicted by the author, authentic events that served as a source of inspiration for Chirikov; as a result, the position of the writer’s contemporary critics is questioned. We have established that several episodes of the Samara “newspaper battles” of the 1880s – 1890s were taken as the basis for the plot development in the story “Strangers” by E. Chirikov, the main episode was the short “Marxist” period of “The Samara Vestnik”. We suggest that, while depicting Samara and Samara Messenger on the pages of the story, the author of “Strangers” did not copy the reality, recreating it in the way required by the laws of creating an artistic image. Finally, we prove that when creating the images of individual characters in “Strangers”, the writer acted in at least three different ways: “copying” the characters from real prototypes, “splitting” the prototypes into different characters, and finally, combining several real figures into one character.

Tatar appellatives in G. Yakhina’s novel “Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes”: polylinguality and transculturality

The article is devoted to the linguocultural meanings of nationally specific forms of vocatives used by G. Yakhina in her novel “Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes”. The research object is the corpus of language units, used in G. Yakhina’s novel “Zuleikha Opens Her Eyes”, which are selected by continuous sampling from the first part of the novel. To analyze the studied units (appellatives), we use the descriptive and comparative methods, the method of word-formation, component and contextual analyses, as well as the method of quantitative calculation. To reconstruct the world of the Tatar village, the Russian-speaking writer uses a variety of appellative words (exoticisms, diminutives, evaluative forms, etc.), which do not always adequately appeal to the content of the Tatar linguocultural discourse. In the present article, we examine appellatives, in the unity of their form and content, as units of a particular literary text in order to identify their semantic specificity, stylistic and linguocultural affiliation, while taking into account the context of their use. The transformation and substitution of linguistic units, associated with the national specificity of the linguistic picture of the world, prevents adequate and accurate perception of Tatar linguistic culture when the author creates artistic images in her novel, or subsequently conveys the meaning in translation. Thus, the article shows how the words of a foreign culture are introduced into the text and what consequently happens to the meanings they convey.

Традиции русской и советской культуры в повести Лу Яо «Судьба»

The study aims to shed light on the peculiarities of interpretations of Russian and Soviet culture traditions in Lu Yao’s story “Life” (1982), which became a classic of the Chinese literature of the xúngēn movement in the last third of the XX century. It is the first time that this work by the Chinese prose writer has become the subject of a separate study, in addition, the paper defines the range of works by Russian writers and artists whose traditions are reflected in the story, reveals the role of images and motifs of Russian art in its ideological and artistic singularity, which accounts for the scientific originality of the study. The artistic images of Russian and Soviet art direct references to which are contained in Lu Yao’s work served as the subject of comparative analysis. As a result of the study, it was determined that Lu Yao uses a very wide context of Russian and Soviet culture, including novels by I. A. Goncharov, N. A. Ostrovsky, stories by Ch. T. Aitmatov, V. G. Rasputin, Soviet paintings, and demonstrates adherence to the principles of realistic aesthetics in the story “Life”. The images created by the Chinese author significantly complement the gallery of typological heroes of the Russian literature of the XIX-XX centuries (the hero of the time, the ideal female image, the wise old person), bringing new artistic interpretations in keeping with the Chinese national cultural and historical tradition.

Tekhnicheskie i hudozhestvennye osobennosti bronzovyh izdelij epohi dinastii Shan-In'

The Yin and Shang period was an important stage in the development of Chinese civilization, the heyday of the Bronze Age. As an important symbol of social hierarchy in the Yin Shang Dynasty, bronze ritual vessels are a basis for studying the etiquette system and the social life history of the Shang Dynasty, and also studying the casting techniques of bronze vessels. The article studies the shape and modeling characteristics of bronze ware in the Yin Shang Dynasty, as well as its cultural and artistic images.

Formation of a New Identity of Road Service Objects Using Lighting Design Techniques: Pre-Project Analysis

The article examines the mechanisms of influence of techniques and principles of lighting design on the formation of the identity of road service objects in Russia. The analysis of the artistic and aesthetic potential of the lighting design in the formation of the artistic image of road infrastructure objects on the example of an old-style gas station is given. From the point of view of the functional approach, the structure of the multifunctional road service zone has been developed, within the framework of the environmental approach, the features of the infrastructure of the multifunctional road service zone have been identified. Socio-cultural factors allowed to form the main scenarios of users on the gas station territory. They formed the basis of design models. The results of the analysis of the implemented and conceptual design developments of the multifunctional road service zone are presented: domestic and foreign experience. The pre-project study was carried out according to the methodology developed at the sub-department of Environmental Design of Stroganov Academy within the framework of the Master’s Degree Program “Environment Design”.

Artistic image adversarial attack via style perturbation

Artistic image adversarial attack via style perturbation

Seeing in the Dark: A View into Dissociation and Healing.

In this paper, I will explore the role of art-making, the experience of trauma and dissociation, and the process of working with self-states from an analytic and creative frame. Relevant literature on dissociation, trauma, and the use of art will be discussed. A case involving my work with an adolescent girl who had experienced sexual abuse from a family member will be shared, with an emphasis on the meaningful role images played during the therapeutic process. Both Jungian and psychoanalytic models of conceptualizing and working with dissociation are included, following Donald Kalsched's (2013) recommendation for a "binocular stance" to treatment, including both a focus on the inner, intrapsychic world and the interpersonal, relational realm, and how art images both illuminated and expressed these realms. Within the therapeutic process, art images allowed the therapist a view into the client's unconscious process, and created a meeting ground for dissociative barriers to be gradually seen, felt and known, by both therapist and client. The experience of dissociation, in images and in session, provided a reference point for myself and my client, Taylor, to develop a shared understanding and a framework for growth.

Опосредствование переживаний как фактор саморегуляции подростков с задержкой психического развития

<p>The problem of the development of emotional self-regulation as a process of becoming an independent experiencing in its cultural sign-symbolic mediation is discussed. The results of the study are presented: the process of becoming an independent experience in adolescents with developmental delay. The sample consisted of 42 normotypic adolescents and 25 adolescents with developmental delay. Methods: psychodiagnostic – drawing “My emotional state”, author's questionnaire, composition “The meaning of music in my life”; methods of qualitative data analysis: methods of grounded theory, content analysis. Methods of mathematical statistics: frequency analysis, criterion – Fisher angular transformation. A generalizing conclusion is made that the mediation of the experience of a teenager with developmental delay is largely difficult. Music plays the role of “activation” – strengthening the actual state of a teenager, but the experiencing remains incomplete, since there is only saturation of the immediate bodily-perceived level of it. Low cognitive and reflexive abilities of adolescents with developmental delay do not allow using an artistic image as a means-incentive for “mastering oneself”.</p>

Research of the Phenomenon of Animalistic Art in the Works of Foreign and Russian Authors

The article considers animalistic art as a significant historical and artistic phenomenon, which has become a field of research of foreign and Russian authors. The article analyses important questions concerning the specificity of animalistics and related reflections of world outlook. The author discusses moral issues, asks the question about the role of animals in human history, notes the negative results of the consumerist attitude of man to wildlife and, in this regard, the need for a positive and careful attitude to it. The reader’s attention is drawn to animalistic art as a fertile sphere of influence on human feelings and thoughts, especially in the era of global change. The position of the artist, researcher, looking at and studying the world of living nature is revealed. In this aspect the historical stratum of separate epochs is emphasized, in which the figurative nature of animals and in it the qualities of iconicity, symbol as identifying, concentrated meanings are vividly revealed. The first group of questions considers animalistic art from an educational point of view, allowing us to look at the images of animals and birds from the position of a scholar, study. The second group is related to the method of work of the animalist artist, revealing the peculiarities of the genre. The worldview aspect, determined by the artists’ views on the animal world, is inseparable from the pictorial aspect, i.e. the embodiment of animals and birds in the artistic image. This aspect also implies a conversation about the specificity of animalistics, which in the works of Russian researchers found a clear and precise expression. The relevance of the topic is denoted by the importance of talking about the problems of ecology, which have acquired a pronounced character in the modern world. This universal concept of preservation of the natural world, which has become universal, has opened a new layer of significance of animalistic art. At the present stage, when the main principle — the relationship between man and nature — is being reassessed, the reference to the world of animals, including in the historical and artistic aspect, acquires high significance.