Way Of Representation Research Articles

Touching the Shield of Achilles: Ekphrasis and/as Re-Mediation

Abstract Homer’s treatment of the Matter of Troy illuminates the foundational impossibility of representation in ways that sponsor examination of the semiotic choices, the costs and benefits and tradeoffs, of different practices. Homer’s ekphrastic description of the shield of Achilles highlights a variety of available semiotic systems focused on different media of representation. This article explores Homeric ekphrasis in relation to later theories of media intersection, interaction, and transformation. Not only word, image, music, and dance, but also human perception as such, are subject to mediation.

‘Detached Desires’ - Resituating Pornographic and Celebrity Persona Online

Celebrity and pornography are dominant features of late-capitalist consumption, and both serve to influence and bolster the performance, curation and construction of a sexualised and/or sexually explicit persona online. More so, a range of social and networked spaces such as Twitter XXX, Instagram, JustFor.Fans and onlyfans.com have enabled ‘ordinary’ subjects to assimilate and adapt elements of celebrity and pornographic representation in ways that have permitted them to explicitly and publicly present (and profit from) their private sexual persona. Individuals create and sustain their individual profiles through boundless processes of self-branding, self-promoting, self-objectifying, and the self-management of their sexual personas as “an ideal typification of the neoliberal self, emphasising how demotic neoliberalism, with the aid of celebrity role models instructs” not only their own, but also their viewers desires (McGuigan 2014, p. 224). This enigmatic discourse of sexual self-presentation as a form of empowerment, entrepreneurialism, and an aesthetic mode of influence may well function as an apex of neo-liberal and late capitalist ideology. It is here that the meticulous construction of sexual authenticity and tropes we connect to the banal and everyday are refined and embodied to tactically produce amateurish porn content that followers and fans identify with, algorithmically rate, consistently follow, prolifically share, and (of course) economically subscribe.

Trust Me, I’m Trolling: Irony and the Alt-Right’s Political Aesthetic

Trust Me, I’m Trolling: Irony and the Alt-Right’s Political Aesthetic

Recognition of emotions conveyed by facial expression and body postures in myotonic dystrophy (DM)

IntroductionNeuromuscular diseases may be of neuropsychological interest insofar as they may affect representations based on embodied cognition theories. Previous studies have shown impaired ability to recognize facial emotions and an association between facial emotion recognition and visuospatial abilities in myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1) patients. Here we examined the ability of both DM1 and DM2 patients to recognize emotions expressed by body postures and its relation, and their association with cognitive performance. MethodsParticipants included 34 DM1 patients, 8 DM2 patients, and 24 healthy control subjects. Emotional recognition ability was assessed through two computerized matching tasks (face and bodies). A neuropsychological battery was used to measure cognition in three domains and global cognition. We used univariate and adjusted linear regression models to investigate the association between cognition and emotion recognition performance. ResultsDM patients (combined DM1 and DM2) performed worse on emotional facial expression (p = .006) and body posture (p = .004) accuracy measures than healthy controls. In linear regression models, DM patients’ facial expression accuracy was associated with executive function (p = .013) and visuospatial (p < .001) z-scores. Body posture accuracy was associated with visuospatial (p = .001) and memory (p = .012) z-scores. There were no associations among controls or between cognition and reaction time. DiscussionThese findings suggest that impaired emotional recognition among DM patients is also extended to emotions conveyed by body postures. Consistent with embodied cognition theories, people affected in their body and its movement may have impaired sensorimotor representation in ways that have yet to be fully understood.

Revisiting the medial axis for planar shape decomposition

We present a simple computational model for planar shape decomposition that naturally captures most of the rules and salience measures suggested by psychophysical studies, including the minima and short-cut rules, convexity, and symmetry. It is based on a medial axis representation in ways that have not been explored before and sheds more light into the connection between existing rules like minima and convexity. In particular, vertices of the exterior medial axis directly provide the position and extent of negative minima of curvature, while a traversal of the interior medial axis directly provides a small set of candidate endpoints for part-cuts. The final selection follows a prioritized processing of candidate part-cuts according to a local convexity rule that can incorporate arbitrary salience measures. Neither global optimization nor differentiation is involved. We provide qualitative and quantitative evaluation and comparisons on ground-truth data from psychophysical experiments. With our single computational model, we outperform even an ensemble method on several other competing models.

Retching on Rome

The Apocalypse of John is an affect-intensive text. What Revelation reveals above all is an immense loathing for Rome, and it aims to infect its audiences in turn with disgust for that intimate Other. Impelled by Sara Ahmed’s work on the cultural politics of emotion, this article reconceives Revelation’s “great whore” as a circulating (sex) object that is supremely “sticky” or saturated with affect. It explores how Revelation’s affective economy works by sticking “figures of hate” together like Jezebel, the whore, and the beast. It argues that Revelation’s impossible project is the vomitous ejection of a loathsome alien entity (Rome as Jezebel) that has somehow gotten inside, but in whose monstrous body (Rome as Babylon) one is also somehow contained. It explains why the expulsion or annihilation of the intolerable Other is contradictorily combined with its incorporation or ingestion: the devouring of the whore; the ghastly “great supper of God.” It also ponders why nauseous food (“sacrificed to idols”) taken into the (social) body figures the fear of contamination in this book, and why the intimately encroaching empire is figured in intensely sexualized terms: the intolerable cultural closeness of Rome requires representation in ways that evoke intimate contact felt on the surface of the skin.

Pragmática da experiência cinematográfica

We present a research about the relations between mimesis and the cinema that point out the insufficiency of notions such as “imitation” and “narrative” to describe the cinematographic experience and also make use of a non-representational ontology of the image that can be found in the deleuzian re-reading of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, to demonstrate how, under any and all kinds of hermeneutics and/or iconologies, there is a latent kinematics of the mimesis that does not let itself be caught entirely by representational codes. The notion of simulacrum is articulated to Charles S. Peirce’s a-significant semiotics in order to think the cinematographic apparatus as a crucial factor in the understanding of the irreducibility of mimesis to its own self-generated forms of codified representation. The cinematographic mimesis is thus elaborated through a pragmatics of the cinematographic experience, as a kind of device that simultaneously and reciprocally modulates the objects of experience and the signs of representation in ways that are nor exclusively visual or even photographical, for all means of sensorial and conceptual expression are “mimetizable” by such a device. The cinematographic experience can be conceived of, at last, as a general mimetology of any and all experience, although organized according to its four noetic components: the generative, transformational, diagrammatical, and machinical components.

"Rapidized" cognitive task analysis

Cognitive task analysis is the study of macrocognitive work and the modeling of the knowledge and reasoning of domain experts, which inform the creation of intelligent systems. Over the past quarter-century, most research on decision-making and other aspects of macrocognition has been conducted using some form of cognitive task analysis. In this essay, we focus on the cost of cognitive task analysis. Cognitive task analysis can be resource-intensive and requires skilled practitioners of the craft to make the investment of time and resources worthwhile. Providing valid, useful, actionable findings from cognitive task analysis requires thoughtful analysis and representation in ways that communicate meaning. Yet, many system development efforts have not relied enough on cognitive task analysis, and have instead fallen into the trap of designer-centered design. Not only does this preclude the development of a human-centered system, it obviously avoids the actual challenge. But does cognitive task analysis have to take as long as it seems to? We explore how we might "rapidize" cognitive task analysis, by looking in detail at factors that affect the time and effort involved.

Judicial Interference with Effective Assistance of Counsel

Probably the most damaging external impediment to a lawyer’s ability to render effective assistance to a client may come from the interference by the trial judge in counsel’s advocacy. A judge supervises the conduct of a trial but he is more than a mere umpire or moderator. A trial judge, by his rulings, questions, and comments, has an enormous capacity to affect the merits of a party’s case and thereby influence the verdict of the jury. To be sure, the basic requirement of a trial judge, both legally and ethically, is to be impartial in demeanor as well as in actions. However, some judges deviate from this precept of neutrality, and through inadvertence or willfulness, engage in conduct that subverts a lawyer’s ability to effectively defend his client. A judge has broad discretion to administer a trial and supervise the flow of the evidence and the conduct of the attorneys. However, this broad discretion does not authorize a judge to improperly impede defense counsel’s representation in ways that destroy a defendant’s right to a fair trial and the effective assistance of his attorney. When a trial judge improperly interferes with counsel’s representation, to the extent that the defendant suffers substantial prejudice, an appellate court may conclude that a defendant’s right to effective assistance of counsel has been violated and the conviction will be reversed.

The Complexity of Self–Complexity: An Associated Systems Theory Approach

The current work proposed a new measurement of self–complexity based on Carlston's (1994) Associated Systems Theory (AST). AST is a systematic approach to classifying the cognitive representations of social entities and, as such, it provides a rich and theoretically based framework for examining self–concept representation in ways that existent approaches cannot. In the current study, an AST–based measure of self–complexity showed evidence of the buffering effect (i.e., when facing greater stress in their lives, those greater in self–complexity reported greater well–being in terms of fewer physical illnesses and less depression). However, this buffering effect was achieved only when an AST process–based scoring method (i.e., distance in AST space) was used and not when the traditional scoring method (i.e., H) was used. Implications of these results for understanding self–concept representation, AST, and their consequences are discussed.