No abstract available / Dissertation (MA(Fine Arts))--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Visual Arts / unrestricted

Initiée par la pratique artistique de l’auteur, cette thèse a pour premier objectif de saisir les qualités plastiques et esthétiques de l’aquarium, tant sous sa forme domestique et individuelle qu’à l’échelle des scénographies d’établissements publics. Le second est de déterminer ses rapports avec le monde subaquatique naturel, et son influence potentielle sur notre manière de percevoir ce milieu si particulier. Directement hérité du XIXe siècle, et pour ainsi dire ignoré de la recherche en dehors de l’aquariophilie, ce dispositif d’exposition se distingue par son ambiguïté. Il oscille constamment entre science, décoration et spectacle tout en prenant une infinité de formes, chacune engageant le spectateur de manière différente. Puisant des exemples dans les champs de l’art contemporain, de l’histoire de l’art, de la littérature comme des sciences naturelles, et impliquant constamment le travail plastique de l’auteur, la thèse s’organise en trois parties. À l’issue d’une approche historique, l’aquarium est d’abord défini comme dispositif écranique tenant à la fois du tableau et de la scène de théâtre avant d’apparaître dans un deuxième temps, au vu des éléments qui le composent, comme un jardin miniature. Loin de reproduire avec fidélité un site naturel donné, l’aquarium relève du domaine de l’art et de la création, héritant du maniérisme de la Renaissance, du courant pittoresque du XVIIIe siècle comme des jardins d’Extrême-Orient. Sans évolution marquante depuis son invention, le paysage dans l’aquarium apparaît enfin dans sa dimension nostalgique, grottes, ruines et autres fabriques renvoyant autant aux apocalypses légendaires qu’aux risques écologiques actuels. / Initiated with the author’s own artistic work, the first purpose of this thesis is to point out the plastic and aesthetic properties of the aquarium, in its household and unique form as much as in the scale of the scenographies used by the public aquariums. The second objective is to determine its connections with the natural state of the subaquatic world, and its influence over our way of perceiving this unique environment. Directly inherited from the XIXth century, and essentially ignored by the academic world, this exhibition device is characterized by its ambiguity. It constantly fluctuates between science, decoration and entertainment, while taking an infinite variety of forms, each one involving the spectator in a different way. Using examples in the fields of art, art history, literature, and natural sciences, but constantly linked to the author’s artistic work, this thesis is organized in three parts. After a brief historical approach of the aquarium, it is first defined as a display, a screen generating pictures, based on the model of the painting and the theater stage, and it appears then, considering its components, to be a miniature garden. Far from an accurate reproduction of a natural site, the aquarium falls under the field of art and creation, perpetuating the Mannerism of the Cinquecento, the theory of the picturesque developed in the XVIIIth century, or Chinese and Japanese traditional gardens. Without any major change since its invention, the land- or aquascape inside the aquarium finally projects a nostalgic piece of scenery - the ruins, grottoes and other follies referring to both legendary apocalypses and the current ecological peril.

This dissertation describes the effects of a somatic mindfulness project on the way participants interact with and respond to works of art in a gallery setting. The study begins with a critique of Descartes' philosophy, Cartesianism, which emphasizes the role of the mind over that of the body and senses and argues that this thought continues to affect education even today. By contrast, phenomenology and mindfulness practices attempt to overcome Descartes' legacy by focusing on the importance of the body in lived experience. In particular, this study uses a phenomenological framework to conduct mindfulness on the relationship between the body and the perception of art. To do so, I utilized several phenomenological techniques for gathering data, including observations, video, and interviews, and I also created a unique method to analyze the data using a phenomenological verbal (written) description and visual (through photographic paintings) description. These techniques worked together to express the moment of reversibility between the meditative body and the artworks in the gallery setting. In sum, the findings of this study show that meditation changes the perceptual experience for different people in different ways. Another finding is that different forms of meditation may work better for some people than others. The findings of this study suggest that if art teachers are interested in using meditation, they need to be familiar with multiple forms of meditation. Also, they need to consider the role of the environment, as well as that of the artworks, in creating a wholistic meditative mood.

Syftet med denna studie är att med hjälp av en kvalitativ intervjustudie ta reda påvilka kunskaper som undervisning i bildämnet ger eleverna, vilken betydelseämnet har i skolan och för elevernas framtid. Studiens frågeställningar som blirbesvarade är varför man undervisar i bild och vilka praktiska respektive kognitivafärdigheter eleverna får möjlighet att utveckla inom bildämnet. Den tidigareforskningen fokuseras på synen av bildämnet, dess roll i barns och ungasutbildning, samt de färdigheter bildämnet kan bidra till att utvecklas hos eleven. Imetodavsnittet redogörs för studiens kvalitativa studie som baseras på tresemistrukturerade intervjuer, urvalet och studiens genomförande samt att studiensbearbetning av empiriskt material och analysmetod presenteras. Det empiriskamaterialet analyserades genom en fenomenografisk analysmetod, vilken fokuserarpå de betydelser en företeelse eller objekt ges, samt hur olika perspektiv avhändelser eller av objektet förknippas med varandra. I resultat och analyspresenteras och analyseras studiens empiriska material. Analysen är indelad i dekategorier som användes i den fenomenografiska metoden, som är relevanta tillstudiens syfte och frågeställningar. Resultatet av studien visar att de deltagandelärarna lär ut olika kognitiva förmågor. Studien visar också att lärarna har olikauppfattningar om bildämnets syfte i skolan och ämnets relevans för eleverskommunikativa förmåga. En slutsats jag drar av studien är att alla lärare bör hakunskaper om bildämnets roll för elevers utbildning, identitet och medborgerligarättigheter.

This dissertation stands at the intersection between human rights, contemporary postcolonial literature, and medieval folkloric texts, specifically the One Thousand and One Nights, also known as the Nights, by an unknown author. The Nights was first translated to French by Antoine Galland, when it appeared as a series from 1704 to 1715. This was followed by subsequent English translations and other translations into many other languages. Today, the Nights continues to captivate the world’s literary imagination. The dissertation focuses on selected popular textual and visual human rights narratives published from 1994 to 2014. These narratives are by celebrated human rights artists and authors from different parts of the globe: they are both non-Western and Western, but all have spent a significant portion of their personal lives and careers preoccupied by rights and social justice issues, both locally and universally. I focus on the following texts: Dreams of Trespass: Tales of A Harem Girlhood (1994) by Moroccan author and feminist Fatima Mernissi; Women Without Men (2009) by the exiled Iranian artist and director Shirin Neshat; Women Without Men by exiled and celebrated Iranian novelist called Shahrnush Parispur; Habibi (2011) by novelist Craig Thompson; and The Dream of Shahrazad (2014) by Emmy-Award-winning South African documentary film maker/director François Verster. The varied texts tackle human rights issues such as colonization, wars, human trafficking, rape, violence, torture, women’s subjection, environmental justice; freedom of speech and movement; forms of classism; and racism. I attempt to explore how and why these works are employing the Nights’ narrative model, as well as its formal and aesthetic aspects, to enable modern human rights narratives. While the direct connection to the Nights is obvious, I also trace obscure references to the Nights’ stories, genres, and themes. I focus on how “The Story of King Shahryar and Shahrazad” and its plot about storytelling to heal and save lives interplays with a modern sense of rights issues such as violence, genocide, trauma, healing, and legal appeals for justice. I offer a reading of the Nights’ stories referenced in each work to theorize why human rights artists and authors include them directly or obscurely within their narratives. I conclude that these stories from the Nights were chosen for their themes of social justice, discrimination, trauma, torture, judicial discourse, and feminist empowerment. I also conclude that contemporary human rights artists and authors incorporate elements from the Nights in intertextual ways that enable them to construct currently applicable allegories of human rights advocacy.

No description available.

No description available.

Computational creativity is a new and developing field of artificial intelligence concerned with computational systems that either autonomously produce original and functional products, or that augment the ability of humans to do so. As the role of computers in our daily lives is continuing to expand, the need for such systems is becoming increasingly important. We introduce and document the development of a new “creative” system, called DARCI (Digital ARtist Communicating Intention), that is designed to autonomously create novel artistic images that convey linguistic concepts to the viewer. Within the scope of this work, the system becomes capable of creating non-photorealistic renderings of existing image compositions so that they convey the semantics of given adjectives. Ultimately, we show that DARCI is capable of producing surprising artifacts that are competitive, in some ways, with those produced by human artists. As with the development of any “creative” system, we are faced with the challenges of incorporating the philosophies of creativity into the design of the system, assessing the system's creativity, overcoming technical shortcomings of extant modern algorithms, and justifying the system within its creative domain (in this case, visual art). In meeting these challenges with DARCI, we demonstrate three broad contributions of the system: 1) the contribution to the field of computational creativity in the form of an original system, new approaches to achieving autonomy in creative systems, and new practical assessment methods; 2) the contribution to the field of computer vision in the form of new image features for affective image annotation and a new dataset; and 3) the contribution to the domain of visual art in the form of mutually beneficial collaborations and participation in several art galleries and exhibits.

From African rock paintings created 50-70,000 years ago during African migrations to the art of the Nile Valley and the Benin bronzes, much of African art has been claimed and controlled by European institutions governing the capitalization and exploitation of African art and artists. The Western art world has had a vested interest in African art since the European conquest of Africa when much of it was stolen. Incorporating evidence from books, essays, magazines, reports, interviews, and documentaries, this study shows that an operational Afrocentric approach to African art administration dismantles the exploitative agency of the Western art industry to initiate a liberation process from its artistic confines. It enhances how African artists, the community, and cultural representatives on the continent and throughout the diaspora view African artistry from a cultural perspective and free themselves from the control of an industry profiting from their works by defining them from a Eurocentric racist perspective. Cultivating a creative ecosystem that functions as an organizing method by executing Afrocentric infrastructure to demonstrate creative, economic, and social values establishes a culturally sensitive platform to develop the administration, accumulation, and pedagogies of African art. It will have an educational purpose that requires becoming conscious of African cultural history and the function of art. From this perspective, it is possible to develop a cultural identity and grounded analysis of the creativity of the African world and its value from the past to the future. / Africology and African American Studies

To increase student engagement in their classroom, the author created an art curriculum using gamification methods that incorporates elements of tabletop role-playing games. The Role-playing Art Curriculum is a key element of this thesis. Possible research approaches involving game-based learning and gamification were examined to point toward future research and reflection regarding games and game-like content into an art curriculum. Action research methods were used to create and run the Role-playing Art Curriculum. The author concludes that the gamified curriculum took extra preparation and required more management to run then other traditional art curriculums.