Morphological Bias of Ancient Artifacts: A Case Study of Incense Burners in Ming and Qing Dynasties

This study verifies the relevance of the combination of traditional Chinese artifacts and perceptual semantic research. It provides new research ideas to study the Chinese artifact culture. Moreover, it helps people to understand the cultural spirit better and design crystallization of traditional artifacts. This study considered Chinese traditional incense burners in Ming and Qing dynasties to adopt morphological analysis and affinity diagram to select representative experimental samples. Furthermore, this research applied the perceptual engineering theory to explore the relation between design group’s description of perceptual semantics and the shape of incense burners. The focuses were the design group on the shape and style of ancient artifacts in aesthetic consideration. According to the results of semantic principal component analysis, the perceptual semantic bias of the design group towards incense burners was concentrated, which is related to the style acceptance of incense burners. Among these related incense burner styles, the design group paid more attention to the proportional design of “incense burner foot” in the perceptual bias of incense burner shape and preferred the proportional incense burner shape of “long foot.”

Play with Consequences?

Andreas Englhart examines the aesthetics of evil, particularly extreme evil, in the work of director Milo Rau, focusing on Five Easy Pieces. Englhart considers the ways in which postmodern aesthetics are beginning to turn once again toward the ethical and how this turn is both reflected and problematized in Rau’s “theater of the real.” The analysis includes aesthetic consideration, an examination of Rau’s rehearsal and creation techniques, and the ways in which audiences and critics have responded to these provocations in different performances.

Perceptions and attitudes of visitors at the Jardín Zoológico Payo Obispo and their influence on the conservation of native wildlife

This study focused on the relationship between the perceptions and attitudes of visitors at the Jardín Zoológico Payo Obispo and their support for the conservation of nine animal species, native of southeastern Mexico. Results from 198 surveys applied from November 2018 to February 2019, show that fear is the most important factor for visitors to decide if they support the protection of opossums and boas, while for ferruginous pygmy-owl and Morelet’s crocodile it was the aesthetic consideration (“ugly”). For the remainder species, with the exception of the jicotea turtle, both, the fear, and the aesthetic perceptions directly influence conservation support.

Eco-ontological Systems of Human Interaction: Rethinking Ecology through Aesthetics

The object of this paper is to connect ecology with ontology as a complex field of architectural system-based design, and more specifically, as a field worthy of aesthetic consideration. In the post-digital age, globalization seems to be one of the most important consequences for the loss of experience and meaning of space. The modern field of progress ishampered by various ideological stakes relating to the environmental and ecological awareness of place. These preclude the consideration of both the eco-systemic environmental approach, and the potential for cultural and technological evolution that is independent of new material conditions and new design tools that may be perceived as new forms of humanperception. The purpose of this paper is to connect ecology and aesthetics, with ontology as an intermediary. The human metabolic mechanism, as well as the perceptual and musculoskeletal systems, is related to a broad network of ecosystemic references. These references comprise the totality of the ecological approach, both of the environment and of the human individual and collective organization. Thus an ecological approach to aesthetics carries new methods of contemplating territories as background of human interaction. Territory is perceived as an energy threshold which corresponds to human interactions forming the principles of the Eco-ontological concept. To this end, comprehension of the territory as an Ecoontological system refers to the potential positive effect of this research based on systemic concepts with the purpose of improving living experience, especially in densely populated urban centers.

A Husserlian Approach to Aesthetic Experience: Existential Disinterest and Axiological Interest

As early as 1905, Husserl made clear that, when it comes to aesthetic consideration, our “interest” is not directed toward the existence of the object as such, but rather toward the object’s way of appearance. Husserl’s famous letter to Hofmannsthal (1907) goes as far as to suggest that any existential concerns are potentially even a menace to the purity of aesthetic experience. This position clearly echoes Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment presented in the third Critique, notably as regards the notion of disinterestedness. However, this is not tantamount to claiming that aesthetic attitude implies the suspension of all interest: this paper aims to show that it would be more appropriate to discuss it in terms of a change of interest: from an existential interest to an axiological one.

Rampant Arch and Its Optimum Geometrical Generation

Gothic art was developed in western Europe from the second half of the 12th century to the end of the 15th century. The most characteristic Gothic building is the cathedral. Gothic architecture uses well-carved stone ashlars, and its essential elements include the arch. The thrust is transferred by means of external arches (flying buttresses) to external buttresses that end in pinnacles, which accentuates the verticality. The evolution of the flying buttresses should not only be considered as an aesthetic consideration, but also from a constructive point of view as an element of transmission of forces or loads. Thus, one evolves from a beam-type buttress to a simple arch, and finally to a rampant arch. In this work, we study the geometry of the rampant arch to determine which is the optimum from the constructive point of view. The optimum rampant arch obtained is the one with the common tangent to the two arches parallel to the slope line. A computer program was created to determine this optimal rampant arch by means of a numerical or graphical input. It was applied to several well-known and representative cases of Gothic art in France (church of Saint Urbain de Troyes) and Spain (Cathedral of Palma de Mallorca), establishing if they were designs of optimal rampant arches or not.

Classical architecture in the scope of Kantian aesthetics: Between Lyotard and Rancière

Classical architecture's inherent potentiality to constitute the principal architectural expression of western culture since Greek antiquity is due to its dual character: although it comes out from the primordial unity of things expressed by myth and religion in archaic times, it acquires its form of completion in the fifth c. BC, as a symbol of democracy and a harmonic articulation of the world on the ground of philosophical thinking. By placing the avant-guard art in the sphere of the Kantian sublime, Jean-Francois Lyotard focuses on the impossibility of an absolute relation between reason and perception or between thinking and image, in modernity. He considers that in cases where this happens, it gives birth to political monsters. He connects postmodern expressions of classicism in architecture with Freud's "Interpretation of Dreams" and the Kantian beautiful. Jacques Ranciere's approach to a Kantian in basis aesthetic consideration of modernity is opposite to that proposed by Lyotard. Instead of the sublime, Ranciere relates the beautiful with the rupture between thinking and perception . In this respect, fragments of the past can stimulate a creative procedure in the present. This investigation aims to contribute to the dialogue for a renovated approach to the role of classicism in architecture today.