scholarly journals Symmetry in Engineering Sciences

Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (6) ◽  
pp. 797 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco G. Montoya ◽  
Raúl Baños ◽  
Alfredo Alcayde ◽  
Francisco Manzano-Agugliaro

The symmetry concept is mainly used in two senses. The first from the aesthetic point of view of proportionality or harmony, since human beings seek symmetry in nature. Or the second, from an engineering point of view to attend to geometric regularities or to explain a repetition process or pattern in a given phenomenon. This special issue dedicated to geometry in engineering deals with this last concept, which aims to collect both the aspects of geometric solutions in engineering, which may even have a certain aesthetic character, and the aspect of the use of patterns that explain observed phenomena.

2017 ◽  
Vol 10 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Anne Koch

This special issue enquires into aesthetic ways of newly creating or re-shaping and re-presenting civil religion and its central characters, symbols, or figures. Normally, civil religion addresses value-orientation and social integration. In addition to these features, the papers make the aesthetic performance of civil religion the subject of discussion. The reason for taking this path is the altered aesthetic circumstances of highly mediatised and consumerist societies. Before this backdrop, images, literary figurations, movie sequences, and brands in media, public and national discourse are examined in various case studies from Italy, Finland, the uk, France, the former gdr, and Switzerland. At the same time, the negotiation and aesthetic plausibility of aesthetic styles, pragmatic power, and particular media logics are evaluated. The concept of civil religion deserves this closer re-definition also with respect to past and recent (post-)secularisation and non-religion discourses. Hopefully, this multi-layered analysis of aesthetics and aesthetic pragmatics of civil religion will shed some light on the persistent appropriateness of the ‘civil religion’ concept and its capacity to be introduced into various methodological contexts in combination with the aesthetic perspective.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 135-157
Author(s):  
Dhanesh M.

This paper aims to look at one of the fundamental factors of human beings—the appreciation of things. Calling it ‘the aesthetic faculty’ this paper tries to see how it is inevitable to the way human beings as a species function. This paper aims to propose this idea of an ‘aesthetic faculty’ as a potential basis for our community life in its diverse operations in terms of cultural spaces and their semantics. Viewing the socio-systemic life from the point of view from the aesthetic faculty reveals how appreciation and evaluation are inevitable to human life and how an ideological ground cannot actually affect life without addressing this basic human faculty. This paper tries to take the term ‘aesthetic’ vis-a-vis ‘appreciation’ to a different semantic world altogether so that it is no longer a matter of artistic engagements alone, but something more fundamental and formative than that.


2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (78) ◽  

The concept of fear includes more than humanity’s physiological responses to sudden stimuli. Although it is known that fear is constituted as a result of a certain biological reaction, cultural and socio-psychological experiences not only play a sensational role in its formation but also they are the causation of fear transferring itself from one generation to another. The types of fear varies depending on its geography, culture, and time; however, many sources of fear, such as darkness, loneliness, natural events, war, hunger, disease have survived unchanged since the moment of human existence. The only change regarding this terminology then takes place according to the way humanity has been dealing with its consequences. Likewise, humanity undergoes fear through the experiences within culture, the reflection of the feeling of fear on art also has been directly related to the cultural level and has been represented by the point of view in the age it has taken a part. Hence, while the themes of fear idealized itself with a more symbolic language in the classical era, it has reconstructed itself with a new and unprecedented reality thanks to the suggestion by the Modern Age. The prominent product of this reconstruction predicated by the modern era becomes, therefore, nothing but the fear associated with the fractured industrialization and the technology offered by the modern era. In this study, thus, the concept of fear is theoretically handled in a way that the sources of fear among human beings are defined in general terms, and the theme of fear in the history of art is examined in a chronological order. In the later chapter, the concept of fear is examined through the works of art, made by modern artists; Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and Ludwig Meinder. Here, then the readers briefly witness an analytical and interpretive comparison between the artistic expressions from the listed artists above and the aesthetic representations formed within the classical period. The aim of this study, in conclusion, is to reveal the way the terminology of fear has been aesthetically depicted from the period of the Renaissance to the Modern era, and emphasize the comparisons between the artistic methods of both periods which have respectively expressed the concept of fear according to their way of understanding the world.


Author(s):  
Liubov Vetoshkina ◽  
Yrjö Engeström ◽  
Annalisa Sannino

By skillfully shaping and producing objects human beings externalize and make real their future-oriented imaginaries and visions. Material objects created by skilled performance make human lifeworlds durable. From the point of view of history making, wooden boat building is a particularly rich domain of skilled performance. This chapter is based on two research sites, one in Finland and the other in Russia. The analysis is divided into four layers or threads of history making, namely personal history, the history of the wooden boat community, the political history of the nations and their relations, and the history of the boats themselves as objects of boat-building activity. The chapter ends by discussing our findings and their implications for the understanding of skilled performance and history making in work activities and organizations.


2016 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 447-463 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dagmar Divjak ◽  
Natalia Levshina ◽  
Jane Klavan

AbstractSince its conception, Cognitive Linguistics as a theory of language has been enjoying ever increasing success worldwide. With quantitative growth has come qualitative diversification, and within a now heterogeneous field, different – and at times opposing – views on theoretical and methodological matters have emerged. The historical “prototype” of Cognitive Linguistics may be described as predominantly of mentalist persuasion, based on introspection, specialized in analysing language from a synchronic point of view, focused on West-European data (English in particular), and showing limited interest in the social and multimodal aspects of communication. Over the past years, many promising extensions from this prototype have emerged. The contributions selected for the Special Issue take stock of these extensions along the cognitive, social and methodological axes that expand the cognitive linguistic object of inquiry across time, space and modality.


Author(s):  
Abby S. Waysdorf

What is remix today? No longer a controversy, no longer a buzzword, remix is both everywhere and nowhere in contemporary media. This article examines this situation, looking at what remix now means when it is, for the most part, just an accepted part of the media landscape. I argue that remix should be looked at from an ethnographic point of view, focused on how and why remixes are used. To that end, this article identifies three ways of conceptualizing remix, based on intention rather than content: the aesthetic, communicative, and conceptual forms. It explores the history of (talking about) remix, looking at the tension between seeing remix as a form of art and remix as a mode of ‘talking back’ to the media, and how those tensions can be resolved in looking at the different ways remix originated. Finally, it addresses what ubiquitous remix might mean for the way we think about archival material, and the challenges this brings for archives themselves. In this way, this article updates the study of remix for a time when remix is everywhere.


2021 ◽  
pp. xx-xx

Several scholars have focused on the different approaches in designing convivial urban spaces, but literary evidence shows that the essence of aesthetic design in public urban spaces, by referring to the main dimensions involved in the shaping of urban vitality, has not been adequately researched. In this regard, this study, by hypothesizing that the quality of urban design leads to a vital urban environment, focuses on urban vitality from the aesthetic point of view. Thus, in using qualitative grounded theory as a main methodological tool and using a systematic review of the related literature as the main induction approach for collecting qualitative data, five main dimensions of urban vitality, which are necessary to attain a correlation with the aesthetic quality of urban design, were conceptualized. The study concludes that the aesthetic design of an urban setting has a direct effect on the active involvement of its users and that this, therefore, has a direct consequence on the level of public urban vitality, manifested. Integrating the complexity theory with the five main dimensions used for assessing urban vitality was suggested as a viable area for further research.


2010 ◽  
pp. 52-72
Author(s):  
Serena Zacchigna ◽  
Mauro Giacca

Since the early days of gene therapy, both the scientific community and the public have perceived the ethical challenges intrinsic to this discipline. First, the technology exploited by gene therapy is still experimental and burdened by important safety issues. Second, in several instances gene therapy aims at stably modifying the genetic characteristics of individuals. Third, the same modifications could in principle be applied also to embryos, foetuses or germ cells. Finally, while gene therapy applications are generally accepted for therapeutic purposes, the same gene transfer technologies could also be exploited to improve the aesthetic appearance, or the physical and intellectual performance of people. The definition of suitable guidelines for a controlled, ethically accepted translation of gene therapy to the clinics remains a major challenge for the near future.


2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marwan Alqaryouti ◽  
Ala Sadeq

The concept of evil has been researched since the Medieval era, leading to the conclusion that human beings have the freedom to choose good from bad, or evil from good. The origin of evil based on the religious teachings is Satan, who is described as the Rebel Angel, as explained by Dante in The Divine Comedy (Alighieri, 1957). Satan tempts human beings into sinning, as revenge against God for placing him in Hell. Based on the psychological point of view developed by Sigmund Freud, the source of evil is id which is distinctive (Freud, 1966). Villain motivations are driven by the tendency of the ego to make realistic decisions about meeting the unrealistic and unreasonable desires by the id. The other aspect that motivates villain actions include jealousy, anger and revenge, as indicated in the play. Shakespeare presents the villain character perfectly in his play Othello (1604) through Iago, whose main focus in life is to destroy others “So will I turn her virtue into pitch And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all” (Shakespeare, 1993, p. 99). Through his manipulative skills, he makes the other characters trust him “Iago most honest” (Shakespeare, 1993, p. 75) and then fuel conflicts among them. Iago is motivated by anger, revenge and jealousy to commit the evil acts.


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