The gift and the threat: an artistic exploration into the machine's threat against the flesh body

This paper acts as a support for the two projects I have submitted: Industrial Strength and The Gift The Threat. The projects and the paper examine ideas of the threat of the metallized body on the flesh body. Aesthetics and texts vitalized ideas that were explored through the videos, and the videos themselves represent an artistic discovery and a contribution to aesthetics, history and philosophy - as well as a springboard for a larger body of work. My research involved analysis of the fascists and the Futurists and their use of the machine and machine-body ideals, the cult of the engineer, rhetorical applications of the Mechtech machine as determined by Barry Brummett as well as examination into texts and imagery involving the body, dance, military aesthetics and finally, much personal discovery. The process of making the two videos revealed my own position on the topic of the body - filming my own body in relation to texts and imagery analyzed, I was forced to answer questions of how I felt about the body, technology, spirituality and art making, all within an academic and artistic context. The footage and soundtrack in both videos are original (save for one still image) and were composed using a process that I explore at length in the paper: spiritual and highly personal, the process divulges much about the artist, and likewise, I hope that the reading of the projects offers discovery for the viewer in the form of personal questions of the body and the machine. The possibility for further artistic and academic work on the ideas examined in these projects is exciting: my focus was solely on the Mechtech machine (gears and pistons, and what we would know as factory machinery), fascism and the body, but there are many ideas one could expand upon, including a study in gender and machine aesthetics; contemporary machines and the body; and the body and mechanical/flesh motion. My hope is that these projects inspire questions, ideas and further pursuits based on the topics explored within the works and paper.

The gift and the threat: an artistic exploration into the machine's threat against the flesh body

This paper acts as a support for the two projects I have submitted: Industrial Strength and The Gift The Threat. The projects and the paper examine ideas of the threat of the metallized body on the flesh body. Aesthetics and texts vitalized ideas that were explored through the videos, and the videos themselves represent an artistic discovery and a contribution to aesthetics, history and philosophy - as well as a springboard for a larger body of work. My research involved analysis of the fascists and the Futurists and their use of the machine and machine-body ideals, the cult of the engineer, rhetorical applications of the Mechtech machine as determined by Barry Brummett as well as examination into texts and imagery involving the body, dance, military aesthetics and finally, much personal discovery. The process of making the two videos revealed my own position on the topic of the body - filming my own body in relation to texts and imagery analyzed, I was forced to answer questions of how I felt about the body, technology, spirituality and art making, all within an academic and artistic context. The footage and soundtrack in both videos are original (save for one still image) and were composed using a process that I explore at length in the paper: spiritual and highly personal, the process divulges much about the artist, and likewise, I hope that the reading of the projects offers discovery for the viewer in the form of personal questions of the body and the machine. The possibility for further artistic and academic work on the ideas examined in these projects is exciting: my focus was solely on the Mechtech machine (gears and pistons, and what we would know as factory machinery), fascism and the body, but there are many ideas one could expand upon, including a study in gender and machine aesthetics; contemporary machines and the body; and the body and mechanical/flesh motion. My hope is that these projects inspire questions, ideas and further pursuits based on the topics explored within the works and paper.

FACTURE, TEXTURE AND TEHNO-ORNAMENT IN MODERN DESIGN: FUNCTION AND ARTISTIC MEANING

The article is devoted to defining the place and role of textured formations and techno-ornament in modern design, setting out the features of their use and methods of obtaining. The sources of the artistic attitude to the texture and texture of the material in the creation of works of decorative and applied art, interiors are briefly outlined, the importance of increased attention to them in the modern period is revealed. A special role is assigned to techno-ornamentation, which has arisen in high-tech culture and has become an exponent of new rhythmic-plastic images that are in tune with modernity. Images with machine aesthetics with alternating elements that do not have open semantic content. The authors came to the conclusion that in the late 20 th to the early 21 st centuries there was an unprecedented increase in interest in textured and textural ornamental formations. Their images are very vague and associated with an environment largely distanced from humans. Ornament in such an environment is extremely contextual.

Multiple Visual Feature Integration Based Automatic Aesthetics Evaluation of Robotic Dance Motions

Imitation of human behaviors is one of the effective ways to develop artificial intelligence. Human dancers, standing in front of a mirror, always achieve autonomous aesthetics evaluation on their own dance motions, which are observed from the mirror. Meanwhile, in the visual aesthetics cognition of human brains, space and shape are two important visual elements perceived from motions. Inspired by the above facts, this paper proposes a novel mechanism of automatic aesthetics evaluation of robotic dance motions based on multiple visual feature integration. In the mechanism, a video of robotic dance motion is firstly converted into several kinds of motion history images, and then a spatial feature (ripple space coding) and shape features (Zernike moment and curvature-based Fourier descriptors) are extracted from the optimized motion history images. Based on feature integration, a homogeneous ensemble classifier, which uses three different random forests, is deployed to build a machine aesthetics model, aiming to make the machine possess human aesthetic ability. The feasibility of the proposed mechanism has been verified by simulation experiments, and the experimental results show that our ensemble classifier can achieve a high correct ratio of aesthetics evaluation of 75%. The performance of our mechanism is superior to those of the existing approaches.

Creating a Computable Cognitive Model of Visual Aesthetics for Automatic Aesthetics Evaluation of Robotic Dance Poses

Inspired by human dancers who can evaluate the aesthetics of their own dance poses through mirror observation, this paper presents a corresponding mechanism for robots to improve their cognitive and autonomous abilities. Essentially, the proposed mechanism is a brain-like intelligent system that is symmetrical to the visual cognitive nervous system of the human brain. Specifically, a computable cognitive model of visual aesthetics is developed using the two important aesthetic cognitive neural models of the human brain, which is then applied in the automatic aesthetics evaluation of robotic dance poses. Three kinds of features (color, shape and orientation) are extracted in a manner similar to the visual feature elements extracted by human brains. After applying machine learning methods in different feature combinations, machine aesthetics models are built for automatic evaluation of robotic dance poses. The simulation results show that our approach can process visual information effectively by cognitive computation, and achieved a very good evaluation performance of automatic aesthetics.

Żarnower [Żarnowerówna], Teresa (1895–1950)

Teresa Żarnower was a Polish painter, graphic artist, sculptor, and stage/architectural designer. One of the most prominent representatives of Polish Constructivism, Żarnower was also linked to the Yiddish avant-garde and belonged to the pioneers of functional typography and photomontage. As co-founder and the main representative of the Polish group Blok, she edited the group’s magazine Blok (1924–1926). Together with her closest collaborator, Mieczysław Szczuka, she made this publication a forum of International Constructivism, promoting machine aesthetics and a utilitarian approach to art. Beginning in 1915, Żarnower studied sculpture at the School of Fine Arts in Warsaw; in 1919 she was awarded the prize for the best student of the year. She also received a prize by the Ministry of Art and Culture for her diploma work, Masculine Nude (1920). Żarnower held her first exhibition in the Spring Salon of the Society for Fine Arts Promotion in 1921, and co-organized the Exhibition of New Art in Vilnius in 1923, as well as Blok group shows in Warsaw in 1924–1925. She exhibited her works in the Berlin gallery Der Sturm (1923), at the International Exhibition of Modern Art in Bucharest (1926), at the first International Modern Architecture Exhibition in Warsaw (1926), and at the Modern Architecture Exhibition in Moscow (1927).

Machine Art in the Twentieth Century

This book deals with the ways in which visual artists have reflected on the cultural meaning of technology, and the particular aesthetic of machines, throughout the twentieth century. It is the first comprehensive treatment of Machine Art and covers the most important historical developments as well as the key concepts of machine aesthetics. The book examines a variety of twentieth- and early twenty-first-century artworks that articulate people’s changing relationship with technical devices and infrastructures. It traces historical lineages that connect art of different periods, looking for continuities that link works from the end of the twentieth century to developments in the 1950s and 1960s and to works from the avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s. The investigation focuses on four specific domains of artistic engagement with technology: algorithms and machine autonomy; image, vision, and the advent of technical imaging; the human body in its relation to machines; and ecology. The book argues that systems thinking and ecological theories have brought about a fundamental shift in the cultural meaning of technology, which has also caused a change in the way technology impacts the formation of human subjectivity. This changing relationship between technology and subjectivity has been articulated by the different types of "machine art" throughout the twentieth century.

Nanoaesthetics: From the Molecular to the Machine

Rooted in the history of the representation of benzene, this paper examines the evolution of nanoaesthetics from the 1985 discovery of buckminsterfullerene forward, including the aesthetics of molecular machines and scanning probe microscopy (SPM). It highlights buckminsterfullerene's Platonic aesthetics, the aesthetic relationship of nanocars and molecular switches to Boyle's seventeenth-century mechanistic philosophy and twentieth-century machine aesthetics, and the photographic aesthetics of SPM.