This dissertation investigates the relationships between Buddhism and culture as exemplified at Mindroling Monastery. Focusing on the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, this work argues that Mindroling was a seminal religio-cultural institution that played a key role in cultivating the ruling elite class during a critical moment of Tibet's history. This analysis demonstrates that the connections between Buddhism and high culture have been salient throughout the history of Buddhism, rendering the project relevant to a broad range of fields within Asian Studies and the Study of Religion. As the first extensive Western-language study of Mindroling, the project employs an interdisciplinary methodology combining historical, sociological, cultural and religious studies, and makes use of diverse Tibetan sources. Mindroling was founded in 1676 with ties to Tibet's nobility and the Fifth Dalai Lama's newly centralized government. It was a center for elite education until the twentieth century, and in this regard it was comparable to a Western university where young members of the nobility spent two to four years training in the arts and sciences and being shaped for positions of authority. This comparison serves to highlight commonalities between distant and familiar educational models and undercuts the tendency to diminish Tibetan culture to an exoticized imagining of Buddhism as a purely ascetic, world renouncing tradition. Although Mindroling was in many regards an exemplary model of monasticism, rather than focusing solely on renunciation Mindroling's founders aimed to integrate a Buddhist doctrinal perspective with being in the world. The cultivation of aesthetics and practical ethics were as central to a Mindroling education as composition, rhetoric and Buddhist doctrine. During the dissertation's period of focus, Mindroling alumni consistently went on to successful careers in a highly complex sociopolitical milieu that comprised Tibetan, Mongol and Qing elements. In addition to its role as a school, the monastery was a center for literature and rituals that helped unify the Tibetan polity, a unification that was still underway and frequently contested. Buddhist rituals are inextricably tied to Buddhist aesthetics and material culture, making Mindroling a center for the arts as well. Mindroling was also known for esoteric meditative techniques, martial rituals, a marriage of classical Indic and innovative Tibetan styles, and the relative prominence of women teachers. In all aspects Mindroling crystallized an early modern zeitgeist that was both uniquely Tibetan and highly cosmopolitan. The monastery received the favor of Tibet's most influential patrons, but as a result of sectarian conflicts Mindroling was razed to the ground by Dzungar Mongols in 1717. A female Buddhist expert joined forces with a former Mindroling student who had gone on to become the highest ranking Tibetan leader to reestablish the monastery. Mindroling thrived and became known as the "mother monastery" to an extensive network of institutions across the vast Tibetan cultural region that based their ritual liturgies, art practices and curricula on the Mindroling model. Official institutional documents including the monastic history, constitution and curriculum are analyzed in conjunction with biographies and letters to construct a history of Mindroling's role in shaping the high culture and cosmopolitan aesthetic of early modern Tibet.

This thesis explores the roles of the composer, listener and performer in the construction of aesthetic experience and develops new theories in order to elucidate these roles. It uses a series of six diverse case studies to show how these relationships can shape the experience created in the reception of music. In so doing, it sees the creation of musical experience as an intersubjective phenomenon. The theories explored within this work suggest new and different foci on the relationships between the roles within musical production and reception and greatly expand existing understanding of how music is communicated meaningfully and how cultural value is attributed to certain musical works. These theories are all constructed using the concept of the chain of communication which includes the relationships between composers, listeners and performers. The first chapter uses two case studies to investigate musical listening through an empirical investigation into Johann Sebastian Bach's Double Violin Concerto and a reception-based examination of Gustav Mahler's Fourth Symphony. In the second chapter, musical composition is studied through examinations of a variety of works by Joseph Haydn and Franz Schubert. Finally, Chapter Three looks at musical performance through case studies on the work of the Early Music ensemble Red Priest and Procol Harum's song ‘A Salty Dog'. The approaches used to examine the case studies are taken from a variety of fields and areas, ranging from music psychology to myth-studies. In this way, this work fills a gap in musicological understanding of aesthetic experience, as it combines research from a variety of fields to further elucidate musical experience: an approach which has not previously been used within musicology. In so doing, this work examines how experience can be shaped and how it is subject to historical and cultural conditioning.

Lai, Yuen Shan Elise. / "September 2011." / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 50-52). / Abstracts in English and Chinese. / Everyday life aesthetics / Chapter ´Ø --- Aesthetics experience in everyday life / Chapter ´Ø --- Limitation ´ؤ few and far between / Chapter ´Ø --- Autonomous aesthetics experience in everyday / Chapter - --- "our opinion, decision or engage in an action." / Chapter ´Ø --- The neglected in everyday life / Chapter : --- Luc Tuymans / Chapter : --- Chu Yun / Critique of everyday life / Chapter ´Ø --- "The central concept of le quotidien, the everyday." / Chapter ´Ø --- Everydayness ´ؤ The concept of alienation and mystification. / Chapter ´Ø --- Distant intimacy of everyday life / Chapter : --- Moments / Chapter : --- Chu Yun - Who Has Stolen Our Bodies (2002) / Chapter : --- Jiri Kovanda - actions / Chapter : --- Stephen Shore - Uncommon Places (1973-1981) / Chapter ´Ø --- The 'individual' and 'public change' / About Space and Lived Space / Chapter ´Ø --- Space as a medium / Chapter ´Ø --- The system of space / Chapter : --- Martha Rosier - The Bowery in two inadequate descriptive system (1974-1975) / Chapter ´Ø --- The Lived Space and the hotel / Chapter : --- Sophie Calle - L'Hotel (1981) / The domain of ( ) / Chapter ´Ø --- Strategies / Chapter ´Ø --- Tactics / Chapter ´Ø --- The practice of everyday life / Chapter : --- Reading / Chapter : --- Re-appropriation and end of procedure of creativity / Chapter : --- Jiri Kovanda-I hide (1977) / Chapter : --- "Francis Aly ´ؤ Zocalo, (May 20, 1999)" / Leisure in everyday life / Chapter ´Ø --- Leisure (and work) / Chapter ´Ø --- Leisure - a break / Chapter ´Ø --- The paradox of leisure time / Chapter ´Ø --- Oeuvres / Chapter ´Ø --- Painter as a day-to-day worker / Chapter : --- David Hockney - paintings of the trivia / Chapter : --- Martin Kippenberger - hotel paper drawing as an artistic biography / Conclusion: Travelling: the alternation of everyday life due to the change of time and space / Chapter ´Ø --- Change of the mode of living / Chapter ´Ø --- The journey of the change of time and space / Chapter : --- The airport / Chapter : --- The airplane - as if time has frozen / Chapter ´Ø --- The travelling time / Chapter : --- "Special experience, strangeness, distancing" / Chapter : --- Hotel as a lived space / Chapter : --- "Space: use of space, special owned experience." / Chapter : --- Time: Timeless time / Chapter ´Ø --- "Some leisure, treasures and pleasures" / Bibliography

For Fyodor Dostoevsky, ways of seeing reflect ways of thinking about the world. This dissertation complements Mikhail Bakhtin’s analyses of Dostoevsky’s poetics by taking a visual-aesthetic approach and exploring “visual polyphony,” a concept that Bakhtin used but did not develop at length. When Dostoevsky returned from nearly ten years in exile (1849-1858), his interest in aesthetics was acute. He had intended to write a treatise on art and Christianity, but that project never materialized. Dostoevsky did, however, explore visual matters in essays of the 1860s. And vision figures prominently in his post-Siberian fiction. Each of the three chapters in this dissertation focuses on vision in Dostoevsky’s writing. The first chapter analyzes two important aesthetic statements of Dostoevsky’s journal Vremia. The first is “Petersburg Visions: In Prose and Verse” wherein Dostoevsky’s narrator declares that he is a “dreamer,” a claim that also reveals the role of imagination in Dostoevsky’s special brand of realism. In “Exhibition at the Academy of the Arts: 1860-1861,” Dostoevsky takes issue with the realism of the Academy’s prized painting, Valery Yakobi’s Prisoners’ Halt, for being too photographic in its servility to visual objectivity and outward appearance. These writings display Dostoevsky’s fascination with vision not as a passive observation, but as an active, subjective and complex process in which empirical data blends with existing narratives that dictate what the seer sees. In the second chapter, I show how Dostoevsky renders prison convicts empirically, yet empathetically in Notes from the house of the Dead (1861). The narrator Gorianchikov describes the eponymous notes as “scenes.” Through Gorianchikov, Dostoevsky maintains an exterior perspective relative to the peasant convicts’ thoughts. In this sense, Gorianchikov assumes the perspective of a realist painter, yet he manages to humanize the prisoners where Yakobi’s painting fails. This is especially evident in my analysis of what Gorianchikov calls a “strange picture,” which is his description of the prisoners gathered in anticipation of their annual Christmas theater performance. The characters of this novel number among the least psychologically penetrated in his fiction, yet Dostoevsky manages to indicate their interiority from without. In the third and final chapter, I examine Dostoevsky’s use of Holbein’s Dead Christ (1521) in The Idiot (1868). Drawing from Pavel Florensky’s explanations of Realism in visual art and reverse perspective in iconography from his article “Reverse Perspective,” I show how the Dead Christ combines Realist and reverse perspectival qualities. I use Bakhtin’s term “visual polyphony” to explain the special capacity of this painting to convey conflicting messages about Christ’s death and to elicit conflicting worldviews from Ippolit, Rogozhin and Myshkkin. The visually polyphonic painting plays a critical role in The Idiot, the most polyphonic of Dostoevsky’s novels. It reveals the visual dimensions to Dostoevsky’s polyphony: things look differently from different perspectives.

No description available.

This thesis addresses the escalation of interest in the senses, across a range of media technological contexts, dating from the mid 1990s. Much of this discourse has focussed on the experiential, particularly intense, multisensory experience of the present. As there are numerous discourses on the senses, technology and affect individually, my concern is to examine some of the intersections between these, in order to reconsider the contemporary significance of aesthetics in media contexts. I develop a ‘hyper/aesthetic’ approach to try to think about aesthetic relations with technology in a nuanced way, opening up a space from which to investigate a variety of relations with technology. Walter Benjamin’s work on the senses and modern technology is useful in this, as is that of two of his commentators, Susan BuckMorss and Miriam Hansen. In providing the outlines of a hyper/aesthetic approach in this thesis, I am, in particular, seeking to complexify understandings of audience reception and meaningmaking, to return some ambivalence to conceptions of the sensory encounter with technology. Hyper/aesthetics is a term that draws together ambivalence, doubling, virtuality, unfamiliarity, innervation, and moving beyond, all concepts that are relevant to the senses and subjectivity. In close readings of case studies drawn from the areas of advertising, computer gaming practices, and new media art, I argue that as well as critiquing their claims to newness, it is also important to attend to the ways in which particular relations with technology exceed or refuse the logic of instrumentality. In particular, these cases consider the emerging aesthetic experiences that technologies of computer gaming and new media art facilitate, and the new subjective possibilities that follow from each. Approaching these studies hyper/aesthetically enables me to go beyond other accounts in appreciating the more experimental character of some of these relations with technology. I particularly focus on the effects and affects generated by encounters with the unfamiliar, including that which is considered strange, ‘unnatural’ or ‘inhuman’, and critically appraise the significance of encounters such as these for the manner in which subjectivity is conceived.

Through the lens of a realist conception of artworks as artefacts, this research investigates the underlying ontological constraints governing children’s aesthetic understanding in art. Challenging structural conventions of research into aesthetic development in art, a realist philosophical framework provides a neutral space within which the ontological basis for children's aesthetic concepts of pictorial meaning and value can be analysed, and developmental differences mapped. The study employs an analytical schema which brings together analytical tools borrowed from Feldman's ‘ontic dumping’ and Wollheim's twofolded ‘seeing-in.’ This schema is used to classify qualitative changes in concepts of pictorial value and meaning in three groups of children aged 6, 9, and 12, and two teachers, as employed in the experimental curation of an exhibition of portrait paintings. The curatorial policy developed by children from each group, in justification of their choice of eight pictures and accompanying exhibitions, are interpreted using quantitative and qualitative methods. Characteristic-to-defining shifts from na??ve accounts to more autonomous aesthetic judgements of value are identified relative to the ontological stance children adopted in their critical reasoning about the portraits they chose. Findings include differences in the level of conceptual integration in justification of portraits chosen, differences in the breadth and autonomy of identity brought to bear in choices of portraits, but few differences in the representational abstraction of the images chosen by different age groups. The authenticity of the experimental tasks, as well as the rich characterisation of the developmental differences described in the study have significance for pedagogical explanations of critical practice in art education.

PhD / The influential theorist, David Bordwell, talks about various modes of watching film: the intellectual, the casual, or the obsessive interaction with cinema practiced by the film-buff. This thesis is an attempt to come to terms with film and film culture in a number of ways. It is first an attempt at reinscribing a notion of aesthetics into film studies. This is not an easy task. I argue that film theory is not adequately equipped to discuss film in affective terms, and that instead, it emphasises ways of thinking about film and culture quite removed from the act of film ‘spectating’ – individually, or perhaps even more crucially, collectively. To my mind, film theory increasingly needs to ask: are theorists and the various subjectivities about whom they theorise watching the same films, and in the same way? My experience of film is, as Tara Brabazon writes about her own experience of film, a profoundly emotional one. Film is a stream of quotation in my own life. It is inextricably wrapped up inside memory (and what Hutcheon calls postmodern nostalgia). Film is experience. I would not know how to communicate what Sergio Leone ‘means’ or The Godfather ‘represents’ without engaging what Barbara Kennedy calls the ‘aesthetic impulse.’ In this thesis, I extrapolate from what film means to me to what it might mean to an abstract notion of culture. For this reason, Chapters Three and Four are necessarily abstract and tentatively bring together an analysis of The Matrix franchise and Quentin Tarantino’s brand of metacinema. I focus on an aesthetics of cinema rather than its politics or ideological fabric. This is not to marginalise such studies (which, in any case, this thesis could not do) but to make space for another perspective, another way of considering film, a new way of recuperating affect.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The overall aim of this research was to examine aesthetic response to façade colour. Drawing on a range of theories and studies from environment-behaviour studies (EBS), Nasar’s (1994) probabilistic model of aesthetic response to building attributes provided a theoretical framework within which to examine patterns of response. Prompted by the Development Control Plan for Sydney Regional Environmental Plan: Sydney Harbour Catchment (NSWDOP, 2005), this research also linked its aims and methods to planning policy in Sydney. The main research questions focussed on whether changes in aesthetic response are associated with variations in façade colour; and whether changes in judgements about building size, congruity and preference are associated with differences in façade colour. A quasi-experimental research design was used to examine patterns of aesthetic response. The independent variable was represented by four façade colours in two classifications. An existing process, environmental colour mapping, was augmented with digital technology and used to isolate, identify and manipulate the independent variable and for preparation of visual stimuli (Foote, 1983; Iijima, 1995; Lenclos, 1977; Porter, 1997). Façade colour classifications were created from extant colour theories (including those of Albers, 1963; Hard & Sivik, 2001 and Itten, 1961). The façade colour classifications were further developed using F-sort and Q-sort methodology (Amin, 2000; Miller, Wiley & Wolfe, 1986; Stephenson, 1953). Ten dependent variables, linked to overall aesthetic response, were drawn from studies relating to environmental evaluation, building congruity and preference (Groat, 1992; Janssens, 2001; Russell, 1988; Russell, 2003; Russell, Ward & Pratt, 1981; Wohlwill & Harris, 1980). The dependent variables were presented in the form of a semantic differential rating scale and a sample group of 288 evaluated the visual stimuli. The Latin-square technique was used for the controlled presentation of visual stimuli. Factor analysis, correlation analysis and analysis of variance were applied to the data. The findings indicate that variations in aesthetic response are associated with differences in façade colour. Judgements about building size varied by up to 5% and buildings featuring contrasting façade colours were judged to be larger and more dominant. Judgements about a building’s congruity varied by up to 13% and buildings that featured harmonious colours were considered to be more congruous. Preference varied and harmonious façade colours were not necessarily preferred over contrasting façade colours. The outcomes from this research suggest that a new approach to façade colour within the context of planning policy may be appropriate. A model of façade colour evaluation is presented and, unlike current planning guidelines, the model allows for a participatory approach to façade colour evaluation and specification. The model allows for factors that may influence aesthetic response to façade colour (such as contextual, perceptual and idiographic factors) as well as variation in architectural expression with respect to façade colour.

<p> </p><p>This is a study of pedagogue’s perspective on children's opportunities for relaxation and contact in preschool. Relaxation and contact are important for all, especially in today's society when stress goes farther and farther down the ages. The stress is what has been in the centre, both in research, discussion and media. The children need to rest and the preschool curriculum says that children should be offered a balanced daily rhythm and environment. The CRC says that States Parties recognize the right of children to rest and leisure.</p><p>A qualitative method was used and the data material was collected through four open interviews. The interview persons were selected randomly and the interviews were recorded on tape and transcribed. The question asked was how the pedagogue see the children's opportunities for relaxation and contact in preschool and in which situations the opportunity is given.</p><p>The pedagogues that I spoke to beliefs relaxation is important for the children, they have long days at preschool and it's a different tempo there than at home. Relaxation can be very individual for each individual. The pedagogues in the study mention the environment as an important factor for relaxation, that the environment is welcoming and that the children are allowed to go away and sit down for themselves.</p><p>Massage in combination with rest is a popular method to use in preschools. It is appreciated by the children and the pedagogues. The result of the massage is that the kids accept that someone comes close and can speak up when they do not want something. Furthermore, it becomes calmer in children groups.</p><p> </p><p><strong>Keywords</strong>: Relaxation, Contact</p>