Computer Graphics Reflection in African Digital Age Visual Designs

African concept of visual design was derived from the concept of creation which has been noted to be the exclusive preserved of the gods. Design and art as it were, are created with intrinsic value such as inventions, innovations technical prowess and deep imagination. To create design in Africa content is unique therefore; design forms which keep on occurring in African arts obviously have significance in the life of those who created them for the purpose of aesthetics and beauty in African digital designs This paper is not mere description or just an historical narration of African digital design and visuals but centers on the deviation of African people from their original system of design and imbibing computer graphic digital application as an alternative to pen and paint box creative designs The paper concluded that the conventional African visual designs should be guided against because African design is center on values and experience which is concern with the essence of African personality and existence of transmission of design legacy from parents to children which leads to physical or merit pattern, which later becomes the object of perception, admiration, and utilization. Computer graphics and visual design reflection in African design is therefore cognitive reaction scientifically which implies conceptualization and, inspiration in 21st century.

Making Design Review Interactive

As a synthesis, this paper offers the opportunity to rethink the status of current technologies within the design review process. It suggests the potential for transforming the complex participatory, communicative, and technical nuances of the design review process to coexist with the affordances of the new genre of digital media. Thus, this paper presents the final stage of an ongoing study that focuses on the design and evaluation of an interactive communication medium, called SketchBoard, for the design review process. Findings reveal that SketchBoard that embodies intelligent and intelligible behavior could potentially remedy the vagueness of visualization. This could further provide an insight into improving participatory communication and visualization around technical activities within the design review process using mobile interactive surfaces.

A Model for a Collective Aesthetic Consciousness

During the 20th century, the modern media was born and viewed as an industrial factory-model machine. These powerful media such as film, radio, and television transmitted culture to the passive masses (Enzensberger; 1974). These art forms were divorced of ritual and authenticity and were reproduced to reinforce their prowess (Benjamin, 1936). In the 21st century post-media condition, a process of convergence and evolution toward a social consciousness, facilitated by a many-to-many social network strategy, is underway. Web 2.0 technologies are a catalyst toward an emergence of a collectivist aesthetic consciousness. As the prophecy of a post-industrial society (Bell, 1973) becomes fulfilled, a post-media society emerges whose quest is for knowledge dependent upon economy that barters information. This paper identifies a conceptual model of this recent paradigmatic shift and to identify some of the possibilities that are emerging.

Exploring the Use of a 3D Virtual Environment in Cultural Transmission to Show Chinese Cultural Project “Confucius' Journey” as an Example

The use of 3D virtual technology in cultural transmission has been more and more innovative and popular in the recent years. Meanwhile, with the high interactivity, experience of virtual technology deeply rooted in the people's hearts, the use of 3D virtual world in cultural transmission shows an evident advantage. Through scene construction and intelligent interaction in a 3D virtual world environment, we developed the project “Confucius' Journey”. And considering the problems in such applications, such as the lack of interaction and reduced effectiveness in representing the application purpose, we explored interactive objects and virtual human technology. In addition, we can verify the advantage of using the 3D platform via the experimental results.

The MetaPlastic Technè

This chapter describes the theory of the Metaplastic metadiscipline (Ars MetaPlastica), a science-art-design research field that studies the most recent technological influences into the contemporary culture. It discusses the realization of the metaplastic virtual media through interdisciplinary methodologies between reality and virtual realities. The virtual media acquire form and meaning through its process of conceptual interpretation. The metaphor of the artistic machine finds its new realization where the metaplastic machine itself becomes aesthetic expression of the virtuality. The Open Metaplastic framework's art approach applied to software and hardware modeling design are also discussed and some examples of applications are introduced.

Formatization Unleashed

We propose the thesis that the evolution of information technology, which promises nearly unlimited possibilities, is actually not leading to an increase of individual freedom, but to the very opposite. Since a seemingly increase in individual user-freedom is accompanied by a de facto-increase in preformatted devices for achieving it, and hence, does lead to the actual decrease of this very freedom. All in all, the evolutionary process of information technology described in the following has led to an increasing number of abstraction layers the hierarchy of which can be interpreted as a pyramid of formats. The top of this pyramid is a format in itself that builds upon formats of lower layers. As the final consequence we as the users of these technologies are losing our actual degrees of freedom, with every layer introduced.

Preparing Students to Engage the Arts in the 21st Century

The Department of Performance Studies at Texas A&M University is building a culture of innovation through strategic facility development, a focus on students sharing work through public performance, and interdisciplinary collaboration. The department has embraced the celebrated strengths of our university in STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) by developing interdisciplinary experiences and inspiring facilities (through technology and curriculum grants). These experiences contribute to the university at large by demonstrating how technology can connect with the human element and how technology impacts human expression. Students benefit by joining faculty in exploring the new and also rediscovering the traditional.

“Smooth Space” for Avatars

During the years of Suprematism, between 1919 and 1923 in Russia, one of the movement's most significant contributors, architect, artist and designer El Lissitzky developed a series of works which he entitled “Prouns,” a name the exact meaning of which El Lissitzky never fully revealed, although he later described the purpose of his creations as interchange stations from painting to architecture, i.e., from two dimensional to three dimensional visuality. The author has re-created El Lissitzky's “Proun #5A” from 1919 in the metaverse, as an architecture for avatars. The process in which the translation from analogue drawing to three dimensional digital artifact was undertaken, the challenges encountered during its re-building; framed within a literature review that examines both El Lissitzky's influence on contemporary cyber-architecture, as well as the significance of his spatial investigations and his sources of inspiration during the early decades of the twentieth century will form the contents of this text.

Subjectivity and Inadvertence in Computational Art

Creativity is stochastic and assumptive in nature. The importance of randomness in the creative process must not be ignored, underestimated or intentionally disregarded in a condescending way. Notions of chance, randomness, or unpredictability are much important, especially when it comes to artistic creation. In addition to above notions, serendipity can be seen as the expected contribution for making expedient discoveries by coincidence, by chance. To put serendipity into work, there is need to accumulate a list of questions that need solving, acquaintance with already existing answers, and their use in daily life. Only when this knowledge is present, ‘chance' can take its part in establishing the perfect milieu for the ‘problem' and the ‘solution' to find each other. If there is already a great deal of knowledge accrued in our minds about the problem and the requisites for the solution, chance adds the final piece to the puzzle. It is when we can start to talk about a traditional ‘prescriptive, authoritarian and rather conventional' aesthetics vs. a new ‘generative, irregular, unprescribed' aesthetics.

Power to Share

Online social media tools have made it increasingly easy to communicate, cooperate and collaborate with others online, and as such offer new frameworks for making creative work. Facebook claims that it helps members connect and share, but what if the people you want to connect and share with are your artistic collaborators? Can Facebook be used creatively, as a collaborative artistic environment? This article draws on the practical research projects ‘Feedback', carried out by the author, exploring new methodologies for collaborative creation supported by online social media. The project focused on the creative use of Facebook as a tool for creative collaboration, establishing a possible working model of artistic collaboration using the social media tool.