Bridges Among Visualization, Aesthetics, and Technology

Author(s):  
Jing Zhou

This chapter presents the motivation, background, implementation, and comparison of two interactive projects created by the same artist—Living Mandala: The Cosmic of Being1 and Through the Aleph: A Glimpse of the World in Real Time2. Living Mandala is an interactive graphics installation that combines real-time data, multi-cultural mandalas, scientific imagery, and cosmological and mythological symbols; this living graphical system is an exploration into uncharted territories of the human soul sculpted by our present time. Through the Aleph is a net art project offering an unprecedented visual and interactive experience where many places on Earth and in space can be seen simultaneously in an instant; with an unexpected approach to surveillance cameras and global networks, this meditative web project draws the connections between individuals and the global environment, Earth and outer space, eternity and time, and art and science. Built in an open source environment using live data and complex graphics, both projects visualize microcosm (the diversity of human civilizations and perceptions of life) and macrocosm (the unity of humanity and the ever-changing universe). Although one work is responsive to the physical environment while another to the virtual space, each project merges multiple layers of dynamic imagery and symbols related to cultural heritage, cosmology, science, technology, and nature in a globalized society through time and space in the present moment. 3 In spite of the differences in visual expressions and media platforms between the two projects, the quintessential force bridging visualization, aesthetics, and technology emerges from the artist's journey of being a humble student of Life.

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Stuart M. Marshall ◽  
Cole Mathis ◽  
Emma Carrick ◽  
Graham Keenan ◽  
Geoffrey J. T. Cooper ◽  
...  

AbstractThe search for alien life is hard because we do not know what signatures are unique to life. We show why complex molecules found in high abundance are universal biosignatures and demonstrate the first intrinsic experimentally tractable measure of molecular complexity, called the molecular assembly index (MA). To do this we calculate the complexity of several million molecules and validate that their complexity can be experimentally determined by mass spectrometry. This approach allows us to identify molecular biosignatures from a set of diverse samples from around the world, outer space, and the laboratory, demonstrating it is possible to build a life detection experiment based on MA that could be deployed to extraterrestrial locations, and used as a complexity scale to quantify constraints needed to direct prebiotically plausible processes in the laboratory. Such an approach is vital for finding life elsewhere in the universe or creating de-novo life in the lab.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002216782110180
Author(s):  
Luke Hockley

This article explores what it means to feel film. It does so through an exploration of the interconnections between Bergson, Deleuze, and Jung. Central to the argument is the ontological status of the image in these different philosophical and psychological traditions. In particular, image is seen as an encapsulation of coming into being, or what Bergson terms durée. To feel film is to engage with its therapeutic capacity to bring us into being. In the consulting room and in the cinema, this process is embodied and in some way created either between client and therapist or viewer and screen. The elusive present moment is the site at which the past permeates the present, creating as it does feeling toned entry into the process of becoming. Jung thought of this as central to individuation and Bergson as central to being. Feeling film from this perspective becomes a way of finding ourselves in both the world of the film and in our individual psyche.


2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 415-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
ARIA LASKIN

In the age of decolonization, Indian psychology engaged with and nationalized itself within global networks of ideas. While psychology was eventually applied by public intellectuals in explicitly political arenas, this essay focuses on the initial mobilization of the discipline's early Indian experts, led by the founder of the Indian Psychological Association, Narendranath Sengupta. Although modern critics have harshly judged early Indian psychologists for blind appropriation of European concepts, an analysis of the networks through which the science of psychology was developed challenges this oversimplification. Early Indian psychologists developed their discipline within a simultaneously transnational and nationalistic context, in which European ideas overlapped with ancient texts, creating a deliberately “Indian” brand of psychology. As the discipline of psychology exploded across the world, Indian psychologists developed a science ofswaraj, enabling synergies between modern psychological doctrine, philosophy and ancient texts. This paper explores the networks of ideas within which modern Indian psychology was developed, the institutional and civil environment in which it matured, and the framework through which it engaged with and attempted to claim credence within transnational scientific networks.


Author(s):  
A. A. Orlov

Specifics of present moment of historical development is cardinal change of a geopolitical picture of the world. The period of partnership between Russia and the West came to an end. Partnership is succeeded by new structure of the international relations which will be constructed on much more pragmatic basis. At the same time it is obvious that the unipolar world was absolutely not effective. This world finally disbalanced all system of the international relations that was expressed in the number of the regional and local conflicts unprecedented before, and in return in the last two years of direct confrontation between Russia and the West.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 22-32
Author(s):  
Anita Shukla ◽  
◽  
Ankit Jain ◽  

Present work focuses on need of automation in farming by using IOT technology. Automation of farming envisages monitoring and controlling of various parameters which could be helpful in increasing productivity. The proposed system provides a technological solution to the various problems like, maintenance of water requirements, humidity level, maintenance of proper temperature, and proper availability of light for sophisticated plants, fire alert and to keep a check on unwanted entry in the farming lands including timely and sufficient supply of electricity. This hardware provides an effective and efficient solution to the defined problems in Indian farming system by using node MCU Wi-Fi module. Different sensors like humidity sensor, soil moisture sensor, PIR sensor, fire sensor, light sensor and temperature sensor have been used for monitoring and controlling of various problems technologically. In proposed system a Wi-Fi module has been used which automatically informs the farmer about the water requirement, site temperature, humidity and moisture, light, fire alert and about the unwanted occupancy or encroachment by displaying real time data which can be seen and accessed over internet using IOT technology from anywhere in the world. System is equipped with solar panel which provides power backup to the system even in the absence of power supply. We have used five different sensors on three different plants with different environmental conditions and the performances of different sensors are found to be upto the desired expectations.


2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 107-110 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nikki Usher ◽  
Matt Carlson

The network society is moving into some sort of middle age, or has at least normalized into the daily set of expectations people have for how they live their lives, not to mention consume news and information. In their adolescence, the technological and temporal affordances that have come with these new digital technologies were supposed to make the world better, or least they could have. There was much we did not foresee, such as the way that this brave new world would turn journalism into distributed content, not only taking away news organizations’ gatekeeping power but also their business model. This is indeed a midlife crisis. The present moment provides a vantage point for stocktaking and the mix of awe, nostalgia, and ruefulness that comes with maturity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-127
Author(s):  
Tiffany Rhoades Isselhardt

Where are the girls who made history? What evidence have they left behind? Are there places and spaces that bear witness to their memory? Girl Museum was founded in 2009 to address these questions, among many others. Established by art historian Ashley E. Remer, whose work revealed that most, if not all, museums never explicitly discuss or center girls and girlhood, Girl Museum was envisioned as a virtual space dedicated to researching, analyzing, and interpreting girl culture across time and space. Over its first ten years, we produced a wide range of art in historical and cultural exhibitions that explored conceptions of girlhood and the direct experiences of girls in the past and present. Led by an Advisory Board of scholars and entirely reliant on volunteers and donations, we grew from a small website into a complex virtual museum of exhibitions, projects, and programs that welcomes an average 50,000 visitors per year from around the world.


Author(s):  
Anke Walter

The aetiological story of Ate, told by Agamemnon in Book 19 of the Iliad, establishes a connection between the crucial moment when the main conflict of the epic is resolved and an important moment of transition on Olympus. While tying the time of men and the time of gods together in a shared ‘ever since then’, the aetion also marks a growing divide between the two, providing a vivid stratigraphy of Iliadic time. In Hesiod’s Theogony, three aetia that explicitly invoke the poet’s present revolve around the central event of the work, the birth of Zeus: the origin of Hecate’s powers, Zeus’ marking the start of his reign by planting the stone that his father Cronus had swallowed instead of himself in the earth of Delphi, and Prometheus’ theft of fire. These aetia create a particularly meaningful present moment: one that testifies to the different types of divine time and its interaction with human time—including the complex model of time embodied by Hecate and the linearity of time introduced by Zeus—and implicates the audience in the stability of this new order of the world. Finally, in the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, the aetion of how the lyre becomes a token of Hermes’ and Apollo’s friendship imbues the present with a strong sense of the connection with the divine sphere, even while the lyre itself as the instrument accompanying the performance of the hymn vividly enacts its own continuity.


Author(s):  
Kitty Hauser

Photography, as is well known, is the image-making technology which specializes in the freezing of time.1 What kind of historiography, then, might photography be said to embody? How can photography, with its ineluctable connection to the present moment, hope to say anything at all about the past—about either the broad processes of history or even the events of the hours and minutes immediately preceding the second in which the photograph is taken? What kinds of knowledge of the past does photography allow, and what does it disallow? How can photography, that most superficial of media, hope to become a vehicle for the archaeological imagination, with its love of immanent depths? If photographic technology is uniquely equipped to record (visually) the present moment, it is also characterized—famously—by its thorough and indiscriminate recording of surface detail. What it lacks in temporal depth it makes up for in this meticulous rendering of appearances; any surface marked by the effects of action or time can be faithfully recorded by this technology which itself produces the marked surfaces of photographic plate, film, or print. History and the passing of time is available to photography only in the form of its traces, the more-or-less legible marks and remnants it has left behind at any one moment in the world. And it is precisely photography’s own nature as a chemical trace (until digitization, at least) that enables it accurately to reproduce these marks and signs of history. As discussed in Chapter 1, since the nineteenth century (at least) historical sciences such as palaeontology, geology, and archaeology have based themselves upon the reading of such signs of the past in the present, and this broad epistemological model could be extended to include military reconnaissance, forensic science, and art connoisseurship. Photography, fixing these signs in an image, has had—unsurprisingly, perhaps—an important part to play in the historical development of these disciplines. Photography meets the archaeological imagination as soon as photographic images are scanned for historical information in these disciplines and practices. In a sense, however, photography cannot help but represent the world archaeologically, since it cannot help but record its objects and landscapes in a temporal context, the traces of the past scattered across their surfaces. Ruskin enthused over this quality of the new medium.


2018 ◽  
Vol 186 ◽  
pp. 07002
Author(s):  
Mauro Gargano ◽  
Antonella Gasperini ◽  
Luisa Schiavone ◽  
Francesca Brunetti

Polvere di stelle (Stardust) is the web portal of the National Institute for Astrophysics(INAF) dedicated to the Italian astronomical libraries, archives and museums. It offers different tools and databases created to support astronomical research and increase the value of one of the richest astronomical heritages in the world. In a single virtual space one can find useful tools for sharing digital resources and other services for current research. Besides the OPAC, consisting of bibliographic data of ancientand modern books and serials, the portal offers to astronomers, scholars, students, amateur astronomers and historians of science the possibility to search at the same time other databases: manuscripts, instruments, archival documents and biographies of astronomers. Furthermore, a digital showcase of rare books plays a relevant role in the portal. This paper illustrates the ongoing developments and perspectives of Polvere di stelle.


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