In this master thesis I examinate the experience of space, place and genius loci in the application Acute Art X and the virtual reality art works at the platform, using a phenomenological method. Six artworks were on display while the thesis was authored. All the displayed artworks were analysed because of their variation of theme, topic, and experience. The applied method uses the body and the perception as tools to reach the phenomenon of the space, place and genius loci in the virtual reality artworks presented in the application. The applied theories are theory of space, theory of place and genius loci – the spirit of place. Space being the surrounding area where life takes place, it is produces by man or by nature. Space is there for more of an architectural character, while place is defined by particularity of its inherent meaning. The production of space in the virtual reality art works be a representation of physical space, produced to mediate an artistic content.  The virtual reality spaces of art are based on the model of all-encompassing frescoes dated 2000 years back, where entire spaces and rooms were covered by illusional art works. The immersive experience of being inside of the artwork has reached its next development with the technique of virtual reality. The enclosed experience of being inside of an artwork is examined in this thesis, along with the outcomes of the artworks forming of an artistic virtual reality world. Main questions: What is the experience of the application Acute Art X, as a space and place for art, as an exhibition space? What is the experience of space, place, and the function of the place in the virtual reality artworks displayed in the application? What is the experience of the physical body´s functions in the virtual reality worlds of the art works? How are the conditions between the intentions of the virtual reality artworks and the genius loci of the virtual place? The conclusions are made from the discussion about the phenomenology method, which puts the position of the physical body in a new experience based on the perception’s location inside the virtual reality artworks, and of the experience of space, place, and the spirit of the places – genius loci – in the virtual reality artworks. The artworks are the places, not made at an already existing place, and the artworks inherited meaning are the same as the genius loci of the virtual reality worlds of art.

I denna vetenskapliga essä undersöker jag vad trädgårdsmästarens praktiska kunskap är och vad den innebär det när aspekter som plats, natur och kultur är del av formandet av den. Jag visar också på det dilemma kring kommunikation om den praktiska kunskapen som uppstår i relation till medarbetare och uppdragsgivare. Dilemmat blir synligt i kritiska lägen och jag visar att det i min arbetssituation finns ett behov av en gemensam utgångspunkt och samsyn för att ha möjlighet att diskutera konstruktiva lösningar. Jag använder essän som metod för ett undersökande som går ut på att hitta en fördjupad kännedom om den praktiska kunskapen. I essän använder jag fenomenologi formulerad av Martin Heidegger som redskap. Min slutsats är att praktisk kunskap för trädgårdsmästaren har en betydelsefull sammankoppling med platsbyggande. En djup förståelse för platsens identitet, väsen eller genius loci är central för att gestalta platser och närmare bestämt parker.

My installations are propositions for an imaginary world that relies on its own internal logic, a world of believability without recognition. While the work references landscape it also emphasizes its contrivance, as it is automatically estranged in an "unnatural" gallery setting. I subvert or de-familiarize the materials and processes that I use in the service of creating a fictitious environment. My places are impossible places. They are irregular, illogical, and unstable. Our imagination can be one of most dangerous things to psychological stability as it is an inventory of all things possible, no matter how irrational or improbable. The irrational is always an option, a lingering threat. The imagination seems to hate permissions and limitations, but is nevertheless lodged within them. I want to create a sense of nonsensical logic. If all things that can be imagined are logical possibilities, I want to find the place where fantasy seems to be just barely reality. If I can't have an inherent contradiction, I'll take an apparent one.

(in English): Diploma thesis Genius loci as an aesthetic problem is addressed by defining the concept of genius loci and exploring its aesthetic implications and parallels. After clarification of the ontological nature of this phenomenon its commonalities will be monitored with selected concepts of environmental philosophy and aesthetics, especially the aesthetic dimension of the environmental experience. Publications of Christian Norberg-Schulz and David E. Cooper are used as a starting material.

Contemporary studies demonstrate that non-marital sex (heterosexual penetrative sex) is on the rise and opinions about it have become more liberal, as shown by The Pew Research Center and a study published in 2014 by ChristianMingle and JDate. Pew research also revealed that there are 5.3 million Jews in the United States and one out of five ethnic and cultural Jews report having no religion (Lugo 23). The combination of these two societal trends has caused new issues to emerge in the age-old debate within educational, civic and religious communities about non-marital sex. The conflict over non-marital sex can be traced through the writing of contemporary cultural and feminist critics and parallel trends in rabbinic thought. Socio-sexual change (here explored through the rise in non-marital sex) does directly affect Jewish religiosity and identity. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.S.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2015. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

The thema of my thesis is Nature versus City. The terms nature and the city are presented as separate and connected terms in the theoretical part, which is the focus of the thesis. The relationship between nature and cities is presented like inconsistent and also like consistent. The aim of the theoretical part is to answer questions about whether nature in towns is important to their inhabitants and why. The thema nature versus the city is connected with fine arts, concrete examples of artists and their works. Among other things, I deal with the concepts of ecology and the environment across the work. I deal also with questions about the current social and environmental situation of the planet, which are complemented by examples of artists who incorporate this theme into their works, emerge from the text. My own art work is based on the theoretical part, its center is performance in the public space. I have come up with gradual development to the final performance, which simultaneously had site-specific features. The theoretical part is followed by art education etudes, in which the relationship of nature and the city is transformed, in parallel with the integration of environmental education. In realizing the artistic tasks, the aim was to encourage pupils to interconnect nature and the city. And...

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To increase fitness for survival, organisms not only passively react to environmental changes but also actively predict future events to prepare for potential hazards within their environment. Accumulating evidence indicates that the human brain is a remarkable predictive machine which constantly models causal relationships and predicts future events. This ‘predictive processing' framework, a prediction-based form of Bayesian inference, states that the brain continuously generates and updates predictions about incoming sensory signals. This framework has been showing notable explanatory power in understanding the mechanisms behind both human behaviour and neurophysiological data and elegantly specifies the underlying computational principles of the neural system. However, even though predictive processing has the potential to provide a unified theory of the brain (Karl Friston, 2010), we still have a limited understanding about fundamental aspects of this model, such as how it deals with different types of information, learns statistical regularities and perhaps most fundamentally of all what its relationship to conscious experience is. This thesis aims to investigate the major gaps in our current understanding of the predictive processing framework via a series of studies. Study 1 investigated the fundamental relationship between unconscious statistical inference reflected by predictive processing and conscious access. It demonstrated that predictions that are in line with sensory evidence accelerate conscious access. Study 2 investigated how low level information within the sensory hierarchy is dealt with by predictive processing and regularity learning mechanisms through “perceptual echo” in which the cross-correlation between a sequence of randomly fluctuating luminance values and occipital electrophysiological (EEG) signals exhibits a long-lasting periodic (~100ms cycle) reverberation of the input stimulus. This study identified a new form of regularity learning and the results demonstrate that the perceptual echo may reflect an iterative learning process, governed by predictive processing. Study 3 investigated how supra-modal predictive processing is capable of learning regularities of temporal duration and also temporal predictions about future events. This study revealed a supramodal temporal prediction mechanism which processes auditory and visual temporal information and integrates information from the duration and rhythmic structures of events. Together these studies provide a global picture of predictive processing and regularity learning across differing types of predictive information.

The sense of agency is the experience of being the initiator of our intentional actions and their outcomes. According to higher order thought theory, a representation becomes conscious when there is a higher order state about it. Thus conscious experience, including that of intentions, is metacognitive. The experience of involuntariness characteristic of hypnotic responding may be attributable to the formation and maintenance of inaccurate metacognitive higher order states of intending. Conversely, the practice of Buddhist mindfulness meditation may develop accurate metacognition, including higher order states of intending. Highly hypnotisable people and mindfulness meditators may therefore occupy two ends of a spectrum of metacognitive ability with regard to unconscious intentions. The presented research investigated predicted trait differences in cognitive tasks which directly or indirectly reflect metacognition of intentions: the timing of an experience of an intention to move and the compressed time interval between a voluntary action and its outcome, known as intentional binding. As an implicit measure of sense of agency, intentional binding was also employed to investigate the veridicality of reports of the experience of involuntariness in hypnotic responding. Additionally, while hypnosis presents a unique opportunity to investigate reliable changes in agentic experience, existing hypnosis screening instruments are time consuming and present a barrier to wider adoption of hypnosis as an instrument for studying consciousness. Here a revised, time-efficient hypnosis screening procedure (the SWASH) is presented. Consistent with predictions, highly hypnotisable groups reported later awareness of motor intentions than less hypnotisable groups and meditators earlier awareness than non-meditators. In an intentional binding task, high hypnotisables showed less binding of an action-outcome toward an action (outcome binding) than low hypnotisables and meditators more outcome binding than non-meditators. Outcome binding was reduced in post-hypnotic involuntary action compared to voluntary action. It is proposed that intentional binding is driven by a cue combination mechanism and that these differences reflect varying precision of motor intention related information in reported timing judgements. The SWASH was found to be a reliable hypnosis screening instrument.