Visual Artworks Research Articles

Mind ascribed to AI and the appreciation of AI-generated art

Creative artificial intelligence (AI) has received a lot of attention in recent years. Artworks that are introduced to be generated by AI (rather than a human artist) are, however, often evaluated negatively. Integrating extant research, we suggest that AI is ascribed less mind (i.e. agency and experience) which is responsible for this effect. In two experiments ( N = 176 and N = 381) we observed negative indirect effects of artist information (AI vs human artist) on the appreciation of visual artworks. The AI is consistently ascribed less agency and less experience than a human artist. Higher levels of experience and agency ascribed to an artist are, in turn, associated with higher appreciation of a piece of art. In both experiments the total effect of artist information on appreciation was not significant. Artist information did not predict whether the artwork deviated positively from viewers’ expectations developed before the actual artwork was encountered.

Borrowing in Visual Art Works: Aspects of Attitude Formation in the Educational Environment

The aim of the article is to highlight certain aspects of attitude formation in the educational environment to the issue of borrowing in visual art works and in project and design activities. Results. Borrowing, considered as the transformation of something into one’s own property, can take different forms, with appropriation as borrowing someone else’s work (part of it) to express new content and visual plagiarism as an ethical violation, presenting someone else’s visual work (part of it) under one’s own name, including. The analysis of research related to borrowing in visual art works gave grounds to single out the socio-cultural, pedagogical, psychological, moral and ethical, legal, and technological aspects of attitude formation to the issue of borrowing in visual art works and in project and design activities. The range of attitudes towards borrowings in works of art is determined, ranging from acceptance to denial of the existence of original works, and can be perceived under different conditions as a neutral, positive, and negative phenomenon. The article proposes recommendations for preventing visual plagiarism in creative student projects, which can be applied by teachers in educational and methodological activities. The scientific novelty lies in identifying and analysing the socio-cultural, pedagogical, psychological, moral and ethical, legal, and technological aspects of attitude formation in the educational environment to the issue of borrowing in visual art works. Conclusions. Considering the identified aspects of attitude formation in the educational environment to the issue of borrowing in visual art works is crucial for developing a well-balanced strategy of behaviour by teachers and improving the methodology of teaching the educational components of artistic and design educational programmes regarding the formation of a culture of academic integrity and prevention of visual plagiarism in the development of visual works. The issue of responding to manifestations of visual plagiarism in the educational environment, the development of a set of methodological measures to promote a zero-tolerance stance towards plagiarism, and the conscious and constant adherence to professional ethics in the field of visual art require additional study and detailed analysis taking into account existing practices.

Hell and Heaven: Film Interpretations of Images in the Context of Mental Representations

The idea of applying the experience of cognitive analysis to visual works of art served as a prerequisite for studying the mental representations of hell and heaven on the basis of the most vivid cinematic images. Two films — “What Dreams May Come” (V. Ward, USA, 1998) and “Heavenly Judgement” (A. Zvantsova, Russia, 2011—2014) — were chosen as the research material. The center of scientific interest is the cognition of the “inner man” through art. The article outlines the trajectory of the development of individual and collective artistic interpretations of the afterlife within Christian culture. It is argued that the concept of hell has spread directly through objects of verbal and non-verbal creativity. This has significantly distorted the original doctrine of life as a path of spiritual transformation. By the will of man, the “infernal picture of the world” embraced the sphere of the Earth and was embodied in reality. At the turn of the 20—21 centuries, in the conditions of rapid technical evolution, there is a reassessment of metaphysical experience. A cognitive analysis of two directorial concepts — heaven and hell as a state of consciousness (V. Ward) and as a fictitious form of life (A. Zvantsova) — reveals an important qualitative change. It consists in the transformation of the concepts of the inner world in relation to the traditional vertical structure “heaven — earth — hell”. In the modern cognitive model, “hell” is located between “heaven” and “earth”. In the boundaries of the inner world (soul) hell directly intersects with or absorbs paradise, and heavenly paradise is practically absent. As a result of comprehending the screen images of heaven and hell in the context of the established mental representations, an updated picture of ideas about postmortem existence and the nature of the soul is formed.

DisOrientations: Thinking through Lines of Desire in the Visual Artwork of Jordache A. Ellapen

This article examines the artwork series Queering the Archive: Brown Bodies in Ecstasy (2011–2016) by South African Indian film studies scholar Jordache A. Ellapen. Ellapen’s work stages intimate photographic portrayals of queer bodies-of-colour, overlaid on family album photographs and Indenture and apartheid documents categorising bodies, along with images of objects and landscapes. This visual cartography speaks of bodies at the intersection of race-gender-sexuality-class-nationalism-(religio-)ethnicities and the complicated subjectivities it renders. The work looks at Sara Ahmed’s notion of orientation and José Estaban Muñoz’s concept of “disidentification” to follow the lines of Ellapen’s work and the ways its stagings make one aware of one’s own disOrientations, as well as how it disidentifies with the naturalised performativities of dominant identity constructions. The article proposes that allowing oneself to follow such lines of desire permits one to find proximity to identities that are positioned as Othered and rather reflect the complex formations of the everyday.

New Research

Abstract The refugee experience is exacerbated by hostile receiving environments, out of which have developed an essentialized refugee imaginary. Media reporting has evidently been rife with documentation of anti-immigration political rhetoric and prejudice toward refugees. In this article we employ a framework of migrant-directed artistic programming to examine the experiences of refugees hosted in Malawi, United Kingdom, and India as curated in their visual, literary, and performance artworks. We interrogate context, meaning, and practice for the annual Tumaini Festival at Dzaleka Refugee Camp, Malawi; Refugee Week Festival, United Kingdom; and the recently published collection of artistic works from India Why did I become an illegal migrant? Tamil refugee students and youth on citizenship. Our examination pays particular attention to the dynamics and interplay of refugees’ individual and collective agency and the paternalistic oversight of their host communities. The distinct and overlapping experiences of refugees in the three countries echo the salience of the resulting power relations in society. This article highlights the agency and tactful resistance of refugees across communities in three different countries. Using thoughtfully curated artwork and related experiences, the refugee communities highlighted in this article begin to remold the layperson's understanding of the refugee experience. Our article contributes to the growing body of literature on refugee experiences and underscores the importance of elevating the voices and perspectives of marginalized migrant communities. Following the author's experience of the performance SÅLE at the 2022 Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival in Norway, this article argues that the concept of curating as deployed in contemporary music must be expanded beyond an understanding of the authorial individual carried over from the figure of the composer. Using Aneta Szyłak's (2013) concept of curating context, the text argues that a more open-ended understanding of the term will allow practitioners organizing musical events to think beyond this narrowly delimited role and engage in new ways with the organization and constitution of musical events. The text then addresses organizers of contemporary music events directly to detail what this wider view of the curation of musical context could entail for their practices, while speaking to the specificities and challenges of musical curating specifically. The article concludes by suggesting that an expanded notion of working with musical context facilitates the inclusion of new people and perspectives into contemporary music and serves to better frame and value the work of many people already working in this musical genre whose labor does not fit into established notions of musical work. This article questions the potential of pre-enactment to embody prototypical counter- strategic forms in artistic and curatorial practices, within the European context, in light of a resurgence of authoritarianism, political populism, and the presence of various conflicts, migratory phenomena, and environmental crises. Pre-enactment has been characterized, for example, in certain works of the duo Hofmann & Lindholm, the Public Movement and Interrobang collectives, and the director Milo Rau. According to Friederike Oberkrome and Verena Straub in the introduction to their book (2019), pre-enactment is the invention of hypothetical scenarios, speculations on possible futures, and the experimentation of fictitious times and spaces order in to act on the present. This article approaches pre-enactment from the perspective of performative action-exercises based on three examples: Training for the Future (2019–) by Jonas Staal and Florian Malzacher, la facultad (2021–) by Myriam Lefkowitz and Catalina Insignares, and The Truth Commission (2013–) by Chokri Ben Chikha and his company Action Zoo Humain. Festivals and their arrangements illuminate aspirational, economic, and aesthetic questions of societies and their citizens. However, to what extent do festivals reflect or represent the crucial concerns of the community they are a part of? This article addresses negotiations in the curatorial process of various festivals, while unraveling the layers of identity formation maneuvered through historical dance narratives. It addresses concerns about how festivals or cultural events become “sites” of curation that can speak to power. The attempt is to define the politics of curation and the need for “curation as a strategy of critique” for the existing presentation of “national” culture and its performance (display) in India. Considering the massive expansion of festivals in artistic arenas, national marketplaces, the international cultural industries, and scholarly programs in festival studies, this article tries to map out the historical context of the dance (performance) festival culture that exists in India.

Culture Malay Community Value Profane On Modern Malaysian Islamic Art Exhibition

Art and culture are two entities that are closely related and are suspended from each other. The arts have become an identity and practice essential to Malaysia’s cultural society, which is a multiracial nation. With the diversity of the art practices of multi-ethnic societies in the country, the identity of multicultural Malaysia has become more highlighted and recognizable. The objective of this paper is to gather visual artwork on Culture values found in the Islamic exhibition from 1957 to 1999. The artworks have been put into consideration and recorded accordingly, such as the artwork’s title, dimension or size of the artwork, media, and techniques used in producing the artwork. The researcher followed the integrative approach and applied the technique of the descriptive quantitative approach. The information gathered through data collection inclusive of three major issues, the concept, the national policies, and the events or exhibitions gathered from various sources, including academic books, journals, proceedings as well as exhibition catalogues cum books of painting, retrospectives, biographies, competition booklets, and website. The important events on Islamic art were also gathered through the articles presented at seminars and symposiums as well as newspaper cuttings and magazines. It is hoped that through visual arts, generations of Malaysians will be literate in culture, have high aesthetic values, critical, creative, imaginative, innovative, and inventive, as well as explore thought explorations, and design in a wide range of visual arts to allow the development of ideas and self-expression.

What Got You through Lockdown?

What Got You through Lockdown?

Self-Relevance Predicts the Aesthetic Appeal of Real and Synthetic Artworks Generated via Neural Style Transfer

What determines the aesthetic appeal of artworks? Recent work suggests that aesthetic appeal can, to some extent, be predicted from a visual artwork’s image features. Yet a large fraction of variance in aesthetic ratings remains unexplained and may relate to individual preferences. We hypothesized that an artwork’s aesthetic appeal depends strongly on self-relevance. In a first study (N = 33 adults, online replication N = 208), rated aesthetic appeal for real artworks was positively predicted by rated self-relevance. In a second experiment (N = 45 online), we created synthetic, self-relevant artworks using deep neural networks that transferred the style of existing artworks to photographs. Style transfer was applied to self-relevant photographs selected to reflect participant-specific attributes such as autobiographical memories. Self-relevant, synthetic artworks were rated as more aesthetically appealing than matched control images, at a level similar to human-made artworks. Thus, self-relevance is a key determinant of aesthetic appeal, independent of artistic skill and image features.

Exploring the experiences of high-risk groups during the first UK Covid-19 lockdown through creative methods

ABSTRACT Background: Groups at high risk of severe illness/death from COVID-19 (older people and those identified as clinically extremely vulnerable: CEV) experienced increased restrictions, poor mental health and loneliness during the first UK lockdown. Methods: Seventeen older adults, eight CEV adults, one parent of a CEV child, and two family carers of CEV adults, shared their experiences of the first UK lockdown through various media: written reflections, interviews, poetry, videos, photographs, and visual artwork. Results: Through a positive psychology lens, five themes were identified: experiencing loss; community and connection; finding joy, hope and optimism; adapting to change; and sense- and meaning-making. Conclusion: High-risk groups fostered wellbeing and flourishing and formed a sense of coherence in a time of great loss. Engagement with artistic, creative, and cultural activities facilitated this. The arts not only provided a creative means of collecting data but was also identified as a central thread in the findings.

Cutting and pasting in adults’ descriptions of experiences of secrets in childhood

ABSTRACT Background In light of recent research and a growing understanding of the destructive repercussions of secrecy and concealment, unique interventions are required. Aims This article, part of an art-based qualitative-phenomenological study, explores the subjective experiences of adults who grew up under secrecy. Methods The research utilised art therapy, readymade art, the creation of stories and interviews. These allowed access to primal, non-verbal and unconscious aspects of the experience and to implicit and explicit memories and their impact. Results The study revealed themes of connection, disconnection and integration, reflecting recurring aspects of participants’ artworks, and prominent narratives in their stories and interviews. The intermodal transfer between art forms valuable while enriching and expanding the content of the art-based session. Conclusions Participants’ experiences revealed an inability to connect between information kept secret during childhood and information that was not. They experienced ambiguity and a sense of something missing in relation to information that was sensed but could not be conceived. Implications for practice This article offers clinical implications relating to art-based psychotherapeutic work with clients who grew up under secrecy. The process uses metaphors emerged from visual and narrative expressions. A possible application is related to the intermodal transfer between art forms enriching core themes in a way that enables clinical work using metaphors produced by the participants. A possible implication is the clinical use of arts-based intervention inviting clients to create a variety of metaphors from the ready-made artwork and from their stories, which in turn expand the outlook upon the experience, enabling access to its implicit components. Plain-language summary Research has shown that growing up in an environment of secrecy and concealment can be harmful. New knowledge in this field can contribute to the development of unique interventions designed to assist clients who are coping with psychological damage of this kind. This study explored the experiences of 11 adults who grew up in the shadow of a secret. During an individual, 90-minute session with the researcher, each participant was invited to engage in readymade art, i.e. create a visual artwork from everyday objects provided to them. Following this task, each participant observed his or her work together with the researcher and was then asked to compose a story or dramatic monologue based on the artwork. In the last phase of this 90-minute session, the participants were interviewed. Findings of the study reveal that themes of connection, disconnection and integration repeatedly appear across the artworks, narratives and interviews. The transition between the various modes – artwork, dramatic monologue and interview – enabled the emergence of rich content and images. The discussion explores the experience of participants who grew up in the shadow of a secret, and especially their feelings of ambiguity and sense of something missing, as well as their inability to connect the fragments of information they encountered and build an integrative narrative of their lives.

КРЕСТОВЫЕ ПОХОДЫ В АРАБСКОМ ТЕАТРЕ И КИНО (1914–1948)

The article is devoted to the study of the image of the Crusades in the works of Arabic visual art of 1914–1948, in which the action takes place during the Third (1189–1192) and Seventh (1248–1254) Crusades. Analysis of the plays «Abṭāl al-manṣūra» («Heroes of Mansura», 1915) and «Ṣalāḥ al-dīn al-ayyūbī munqiḏ falisṭīn» («Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi, Savior of Palestine», 1948), as well as the films «Šajarat al-durr» («Shajarat ad-Durr», 1935) and «Ṣalāḥ al-dīn al-ayyūbī» («Salah ad-Din al-Ayyubi», 1941) showed that if in plays created before the First World War, Arab authors only praised the commanders of the past who defeated the Crusaders, then starting from this global military conflict, the theme of the Crusades began to be used also in order to liken modern Europeans to the Crusaders and draw analogies between the Crusades and the colonial presence in the Middle East. At the same time, the film industry continued to reproduce the romanticized image of the Crusades that emerged in the 19th century. In the analyzed works, the trend towards the Arabization of the past, which developed within the framework of the Arab Revival, also continued: non-Arab heroes, primarily Salah ad-Din, are most often referred to in the works as «Arab leaders».

When Melancholia Turns Black

The term Black melancholia - when melancholia turns black - speaks to a profound collective gloom born of insistent socio-historical violence. With it, Dr Nana Adusei-Poku takes the concept of melancholy and extracts it from a highly racialized discourse in which notions of loss are pathologized and reserved for white cis (fe-)male subjects. Adusei-Poku subverts the idea of melancholy to describe a particularly Black experience of sadness, one borne of fatigue and the certainty of loss in the future. Her reading of sadness takes into consideration colonial legacies of pain and grief, as well as the aesthetic practices that utilize this emotional space as a creative force. Curated by Adusei-Poku, the exhibition ‘Black Melancholia', which took place at the Hessel Museum of Art and Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, 25 June 2022-16 October 2022, brought together works by twenty-eight artists of African descent that expand and complicate the notion of melancholy in art historical discourse. While the show included powerful visual artworks, this interview with Alhena Katsof focuses on the performative aspects of the exhibition to explore the ways Adusei-Poku activated the space. Katsof, a scholar of performance studies and exhibition histories, is also a friend and interlocutor of Adusei-Poku. In ‘When Melancholia Turns Black’, they pick up their ongoing conversations about exhibitions and performance, transforming their long-distance phone calls into words on a page.

Image/text/cliché/insight: analogical practices in the global art world

The special issue Analogical Practices in the Global Art World systematically examines for the first time the widespread practice of constructing global art and architectural histories through analogy. In addition to summarizing the essays presented and the pertinent literature on analogy across several fields, this Introduction marshals primary research alongside scholarship and observations from diverse disciplines to advance two overarching arguments. First, we claim that art world analogies both disclose and influence the axes along which art-historical and museological thinking is habitually oriented: national groupings or “schools” above all, but also chronology, gender, race, cultural identification, art media, and style. Second, we argue that the art world analogy paradigmatically involves collaborations of textual iteration with works of visual art. Proposing, ultimately, that visual analogy is never just visual, we build a theory of analogy-as-discourse for the visual arts.

Contribution of Affect and Cognition in Shaping Aesthetic Responses

The human experience of art is unique, being associated with exceptional and transcendent states of consciousness. These experiences are formed based on the interaction between the work of art itself, the observer, and the context. Using the multilevel modelling with crossed random effects analysis, we explored the connection between the affective and cognitive appraisals of a visual work of art and the aesthetic judgment. Two experiments were performed. In the first, lay persons appraised figural paintings with pleasant and unpleasant content. In the second experiment, abstract and realistic paintings were appraised. The results indicate a strong connection between affective appraisal and the aesthetic judgment, especially with the assessment of beauty. Cognitive appraisals are less closely connected to aesthetic appraisals. These results suggest that naive observers use everyday, practical perception when evaluating works of art, and that paintings which evoke "sweet", pleasant, hedonic emotions will be assessed as more aesthetically pleasing. The deviation of a painting from traditional art canons further strengthens the reliance on everyday perception in lay persons. The implications of these results are discussed.

REPRESENTATION OF EDUCATIONAL FACILITIES AND THEIR RELATION TO ELEMENTS OF ECONOMIC CULTURE IN THE FILM LASKAR PELANGI

Currently, film is no longer interpreted as a work of visual art, but as a social representation and mass communication. In which there is a lot of social interaction to build a good film. While film can also be interpreted as a means to convey messages conveyed to the community. Film is a new facility for all humans to work both in writing and orally which can provide visualization into a film. So film as a means of mass communication also functions as a cultural transmission in society. Laskar Pelangi film with educational and social themes is understood as a representation of cultural reality that shows how a culture works and lives in a society. So that film can be said to be an effective medium in cultural learning by the community. This research is a cultural studies research with a subjective research approach. Through the unit of analysis in the form of the Laskar Pelangi film, this concept reflects a number of educational cultural findings such as the still weak education sector due to the uneven distribution of the education budget that is not optimal, the pretentiousness of education because it is more concerned with prestige than skills, lack of respect for the process, education is still measured from statistical figures. and the commercialization of education. Keywords: film, education, culture, economy

A Review of The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture

A Review of <i>The Microgenre: A Quick Look at Small Culture</i>

Stopping the Boats, Changing the Narrative: How the Migrant Refugee Bildungsroman Became a Ghost Story

What literary conventions best help us understand the migrant refugee’s claim for protection, and the terms on which law claims to offer it? One contender to have attracted attention recently is “bildungsroman” (“formation novel”), since the narrative of the refugee escaping danger and oppression to find safety and stability within a host state arguably maps onto bilgungsroman’s themes of a protagonist’s difficult personal journey from margins to social acceptance and flourishing. However, this view is now seriously undermined by legislative initiatives in the UK aimed at ensuring migrant refugees who cross the English Channel in small boats should have no cause to hope for such a happy ending. By way of a close reading of the narrative implications of these initiatives, this article proposes a thorough rethink of our approach to figuring the irregular migrant refugee. Rejecting bildungsroman as now implausibly optimistic, the article suggests we look instead to the ghost, whose “presence” is typically the chief problem for those to whom it appears, whose “shape” is uncertain, and whose complaints and demands inspire dread and strenuous efforts to make it disappear. The article employs these conventions to draw a new relationship between refugee migration law and the arts, and argues that if the UK’s policies for “stopping the boats” may be characterized as an attempt to effect such a disappearance, then the migrant refugee’s reappearance in visual art offers a ghostly figuration of resistance and of admonishment at injustice unredressed and obligations unfulfilled. The article traces these qualities and explores their critical potential through two recent works of visual art, namely “The Walk” (2021–22) and Gideon Mendel’s “Dzhangal” [“Jungle”] (2016–17). Both of these works admit of multiple readings, but both also crucially resist the punitive and reductive framing of migrants in law in some surprising ways.

The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract: Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography can best be described as a literary portrait. Woolf draws a portrait of the titular character—a composite of literary and visual artworks—as perpetually youthful. Through this portrait, the novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity—from Orlando's memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. The face of Orlando, which Woolf forcefully inserts into the history of the portrait, is sketched in a formal relation to absent faces in the history of portraiture—women's faces and racialized faces. An engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya's recent photographic reflections on Orlando reveals the version of modernist queerness dramatized by the novel to be mediated by racial difference.

The Biography of a Face: Virginia Woolf's Orlando

Abstract: Virginia Woolf's novel Orlando: A Biography can best be described as a literary portrait. Woolf draws a portrait of the titular character—a composite of literary and visual artworks—as perpetually youthful. Through this portrait, the novel traces a change in the history of the physiognomic face in modernity—from Orlando's memorable face-to-face with Queen Elizabeth to her search for meaning in the faces around her in London in 1928. The face of Orlando, which Woolf forcefully inserts into the history of the portrait, is sketched in a formal relation to absent faces in the history of portraiture—women's faces and racialized faces. An engagement with Paul Mpagi Sepuya's recent photographic reflections on Orlando reveals the version of modernist queerness dramatized by the novel to be mediated by racial difference.

Ekphrasis in Disneyland: The Alice in Wonderland Ride (1958)

Abstract The Alice in Wonderland ride in Disneyland, which opened in 1958, was designed to place visitors inside the action, as if seeing things through Alice’s eyes. It drew on the film and on concept artwork, as well as the Lewis Carroll book; and can be seen as a transmedial work, which utilised a complex set of media elements. It can also be considered ekphrastic, in the way it referred to source media texts, but elaborated on them, and repurposed them. The concept of ekphrasis has traditionally been applied to verbal representations of visual art works. Modern theoretical approaches, however, have challenged the idea that language is the only acceptable target medium; the concept has been applied to different media products, including films, music videos, video games, etc. Cecilia Lindhé (2016) has emphasized the ancient Greco-Roman understanding of ekphrasis, which highlighted the question of enargeia: the imaginative and physical response in the reader or viewer. The Alice ride was like a journey through a strange dream, a series of random, even surreal encounters; it exemplified the concept of enargeia, in making visitors feel, not only as if they were present at events, but that it was happening to them.