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<p> The impact of building features which promote wellness is of increasing interest to the building owners, designers, and occupants. This study performed a post-occupancy evaluation of two user groups at a medical facility with specific wellness features. 76 staff and 62 patients of a cancer center were polled separately to determine their preferences in 11 categories. Results showed that all wellness features were viewed favorably by the two groups, with natural lighting, views of nature, and thermal comfort as top categories for both. T-test comparisons were performed, and significant differences (p &lt; 0.05) between the two groups were found for three of the features (views of nature, art and murals, and indoor plants). Discussion of these differences and the interaction of competing design goals (thermal comfort, views of nature, natural light and desire for privacy) are included. Size limitations of the study and areas for further study are discussed.</p>

<p> This dissertation attempts to examine Chinese realist novels (novellas) flourishing in the transitional period between Mao&rsquo;s era and post-Mao era (1976-1984). This period, rarely explored in English-speaking academia, constitutes a critical site to understand the social and cultural transformation from socialist to post-socialist China and to study the &ldquo;individual&rdquo; newly formed in that period whose influence continues to shape today&rsquo;s China. By looking into realist novels, my research attempts to understand this social change and the historical construction of an individual subject distinct from both the human subject conceptualized in the socialist realism in Mao&rsquo;s era and the bourgeois individual in the 19th century European Realism. Realist novels, which opened a textual space for social imagination in a liminal period, undertook the role of creating a life-world of post-socialist China with its mimetic and critical function, thus launching another &ldquo;cultural revolution&rdquo; immediately following the ending of Mao&rsquo;s &ldquo;Cultural Revolution.&rdquo; The main body of my research consists of the analysis of three sub-genres&mdash;Enlightenment fiction (Chapter One), humanist fiction (Chapter Two) and peasant&rsquo;s fiction (Chapter Three), each corresponding respectively to political subject, aesthetic subject and economic subject. The dissertation will show how the enlightenment subject, Kantian subjectivity and &ldquo;persona economicus&rdquo; reinvigorated in these fictional imaginations. However, it was also a period in which all these newly constructed &ldquo;myths&rdquo; of subject were pressed to meet their internal limits which led to their ineluctable dissolution. This was due to the emergence of the &ldquo;wild individual,&rdquo; for example, we can detect the terrifying unrestrained desire of lower class that participated in the discursive formation of the autonomous subject and we can detect the anxiety caused by the accumulation of capital even in the overall optimistic narrative of peasant&rsquo;s literature.</p><p>

This paper argues that George Orwell was a myth maker in the twentieth century, an age of existential perplexities. Orwell recognized that man is innately "patriotic," that the will-to-believe is part of his nature, but that the excesses of scientific analysis have disrupted the absolutes of belief. Through the Organic Metaphor, Orwell attempted to reconstruct man's faith into an aesthetic, and consequently moral, sensibility. Proposing to balance, and not replace, the Mechanistic Metaphor of industrial society, Orwell sought human progress along aesthetic lines. "Socialism" was his political expression of the Organic Metaphor: both advocated universal integrity in time and space.

This document, in conjunction with the body of work within the exhibition The Apparatus, challenges the dichotomy of practical and theoretical definitions of utility. Presented in two opposing formats, the work within this thesis attempts to re-examine the concept of utility as a spectrum, rather than in the binary structure of the practical (functional) and theoretical (aesthetical) methods of encounter. / October 2016

In this research, we study image composition in the context of computer rendering, investigate why composition is difficult with conventional rendering methods, and propose our solutions. Image composition is a process in which an artist improves a visual image to achieve certain aesthetic goals, and it is a central topic in studies of visual arts. Approaching the compositional quality of hand-made art work with computer rendering is a challenging task; but there is scarcely any in-depth research on this task from an interdisciplinary viewpoint between computer graphics and visual arts. Although recent developments of computer rendering have enabled the synthesis of high quality photographic images, most rendering methods only simulate a photographic process and do not permit straightforward compositional editing in the image space. In order to improve the visual quality of the digitally synthesized images, the knowledge of visual composition needs to be incorporated. This objective not only asks for novel algorithmic inventions, but also involves research in visual perception, painting, photography and other disciplines of visual arts. With examples from historical painting and contemporary photography, we inquire why and how a well-composed image elicits an aesthetic visual response from its viewer. Our analysis based on visual perception shows that the composition of an image serves as a guideline for the viewing process of that image; the composition of an image conveys an artist's intention of how the depicted scene should be viewed, and directs a viewer's eyes. A key observation is that for a composition to take effect, a viewer must be allowed to attentively look at the image for a period of time. From this analysis, we outline a few rules for composing light and shade in computer rendering, which serve as guidelines for designing rendering methods that create imagery beyond photorealistic depictions. Our original analysis elucidates the mechanism and function of image composition in the context of rendering, and offers clearly defined directions for algorithmic design. Theories about composition mostly remain in the literature of art critique and art history, while there are hardly any investigations on this topic in a technical context. Our novel analysis is an instructive contribution for enhancing the aesthetic quality of digitally synthesized images. We present two research projects that develop our analysis into rendering programs. We first show an interpolative material model, in which the surface shading is interpolated from input textures with a brightness value. The resultant rendering depicts surface brightness instead of light energy in the depicted scene. We also show a painting interface with this material model, with which an artist can directly compose surface brightness with a digital pen. In the second project, we ask an artist to provide a sketch of lighting design with coarse paint strokes on top of a rendering, while details of the light and shade in the depicted scene are automatically filled in by our program. This project is staged in the context of creating the visual effects of foliage shadows under sunshine. Our software tool also includes a novel method for generating coherent animations that resemble the movements of tree foliage in a gentle breeze. These programming projects validate the rendering methodology proposed by our theoretical analysis, and demonstrate the feasibility of incorporating compositional techniques in computer rendering. In addition to programming projects, this interdisciplinary research also consists of practices in visual arts. We present two art projects of digital photography and projection installation, which we built based on our theoretical analysis of composition and our software tools from the programming projects. Through these art projects, we evaluate our methodology by both making art ourselves and critiquing the resultant pieces with peer artists. From our point of view, it is important to be involved in art practices for rendering researchers, especially those who deal with aesthetic issues. The valuable first-hand experiences and the communications with artists in a visual arts context are rarely reported in the rendering literature. These experiences serve as effective guides for the future development of our research on computer rendering. The long term goal of our research is find a balance between artistic expression and realistic believability, based on the interdisciplinary knowledge of composition and perception, and implemented as either automated or user-assisted rendering tools. This goal may be termed as to achieve a staged realism, to synthesize images that are recognizable as depictions of realistic scenes, and at the same time enabling the freedom of composing the rendering results in an artistic manner. / Graduate / 0357 / 0984

Magister Artium - MA / Bab’aba - Ugly Short Stories is a collection of vignettes whose function is to colour and collage three portraits of Black women characters; namely, a rural woman (Nozikhali), a township teenager (Zola), and a child/baby (Loli). Each of these stories serve as details in each other’s portraits whilst remaining stories on their own. My intention with this collection was to restore some form of abstract equality and right to mystery by functioning within a lexicon of opacity. In the scholarship of decoloniality this is my argument for the legitimacy of vernacular/customised definitions for problems that preoccupy communities/individuals rather than having to always pin ourselves to already existing theory in order to be legible. In the scholarship of opacity, this is a contribution to the argument against the necessity for legibility/transparency (in the first place) in exchange for dignity. I chose ugliness as my thematic district of departure because of its connoted potential to provide richer explorations into notions of marginality and an emancipatory praxis that cannot afford to have in its makeup the potential to seek to eliminate. And though such a liberatory ambition is hard to fantasize about against the backdrop of popular chauvinism in the contemporary landscape of - particularly - South Africa, and the visceral effects thereof and the swift justice needed to attend thereto, I do think that there is merit in hallucinating some sort of doctrine of humanity that ends in dignity for all.

University of Macau / Faculty of Arts and Humanities. / Department of English

高慧玲. / 手稿本(複印本) / Thesis (M.A.)--香港中文大學, 1991. / Shou gao ben (fu yin ben) / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 87-99). / Gao Huiling. / Thesis (M.A.)--Xianggang Zhong wen da xue, 1991. / Chapter ´第¡章 --- 音樂的意義 / Chapter （一） --- Hospers的觀點 --- p.3-6 / Chapter （二） --- 對Hospers的駁斥 --- p.7-11 / Chapter （三） --- 音樂與符號 --- p.Dec-18 / Chapter （四） --- 表徵與表現 --- p.19-22 / Chapter ´第Ł章 --- 表徵論 / Chapter （一） --- 三種符號 --- p.23-26 / Chapter （二） --- 歌曲與表徵作用 --- p.27-31 / Chapter （三） --- 樂曲與表徵作用 --- p.32-51 / Chapter ´第Ø章 --- 表現論 / Chapter （一） --- 「表情」的三個向度 --- p.52-57 / Chapter （二） --- 音樂與情感的抒發 --- p.58-60 / Chapter （三） --- 音樂與情感的喚起 --- p.61-66 / Chapter （四） --- 音樂與情感的顯露 --- p.67-76 / 總結 --- p.77-79 / 註釋 --- p.80-86 / 書目 --- p.87-99

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