Images

An understanding of religion as a practice of mediation has great potential to open up new methods and theories for a critical study of religion. Leading beyond the privileged medium of the text, this understanding approaches religion as a multi-media phenomenon that mobilizes the full sensorium. The central point of this article is that forms of visual culture are a prime medium of religion, and studying them offers deep insights into the genesis of worlds of lived experience. Pictorial media streamline and sustain religious notions of the visible and the invisible and involve embodied practices of seeing that shape what and how people see. Discussing the implications of the “pictorial turn” for the study of religion, I argue that a more synthesized approach is needed that draws these fields together. The methodological and theoretical implications of this approach are exemplified by turning to my research on video and representations of the “spiritual” in Southern Ghana.

Everyone plays and that, of course, includes children. In an ideal world, there would be literary traditions, archaeological remains and artistic renditions, which would enable the reconstruction of toys. Unfortunately, the situation does not exist for ancient Jewish society. For the most part, there are depictions in rabbinic literature and it is those toy traditions which I examine. The study begins with those toys explicitly connected to halakhic issues, firstly with those traditions in which the toy is essential to the law and afterwards to those in which the toy is tangential to the law. The study then deals with those toys mentioned in a nonlegal rabbinic framework. Finally, I discuss toys that were popular in the Greco-Roman world but not mentioned in rabbinic literature. I seek to determine whether descriptions of toys in rabbinic literature and set within the broader Greco-Roman world are sufficient for visualization.

This study was designed to identify African American early adolescents’ subjective meanings of African American women’s sexuality through an examination of Stephens and Phillips’ (2003) sexual images—the Diva, Gold Digger, Freak, Dyke, Gangster Bitch, Sister Savior, Earth Mother, and Baby Mama. These eight sexual images both inform and reflect beliefs about African American women’s physical attractiveness. Interpersonal relationship decision making processes also were influenced by these conceptual frameworks of African American women’s sexuality. Findings from this study are important given the tendency of previous researchers to ignore race and intraethnic variations in studies of beliefs about attitudes toward sexuality.

Images in advertisements have power to shape our perception on the way we look at the world. Women in ads are often portrayed as sexual objects. Conventional beauty is women’s attribute. Unfortunately, the images of women most ads portray are usually the creation of artificiality that establishes an impossible standard of physical perfection for women This article presents some different ads from some famous women’s magazines and discusses some possible meanings the viewers may perceive from the images.

“Illustrators embody their experiences. The personification of experience is a fundamental device in the way
illustrative imagery and visual communication perpetuates ideologies, metaphors, mythologies, and in particular the
anthropomorphisation of the human condition. Illustrators translate experiences, and the perceptual synthesis (Merleau-
Ponty 2013) of those experiences into the illustration and design of fictitious narratives, worlds, characters, and
environments. Drawing becomes a crucial part of articulating the world and capturing perception of experience and
reality. Audiences can relate to the experiences of designed characters through observed similarities with their own
experience. If we take the understanding that individuals tacitly negotiate the world, and their interactions with other
people, through interpretation of aesthetics, physiology, psychology, socio-economic class and culture- then the design of
characters that exhibit a range of these factors can help define a reflexive relationship between the illustrator, the
character, and the audience. This paper will examine the implicit role an illustrator’s habitus (Bourdieu 1977) has in the
development of their characters, and provide conceptual tools that outline this unique relationship. Habitus is a unifying
concept that generates tastes and dispositions based on an individual’s physiology, psychology and sociology.”

This article discusses Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto from the perspective of the notion and the activity of looking or being looked at. It is argued that the power of the gaze and the particular semiotics of " ocular economy " , while to some extent linked to biographical contexts, can also be noticed in Walpole's text itself. What is studied is not only the way in which images are used in the text, i.e. what function they perform, but also how they structure the importance of an appeal to vision and images within hauntological perspective and the Gothic genre of literature. R

One simple method of recognizing paper currencies
has been introduced. It considers different
dimensions, areas, Euler numbers, correlations
between images as features. It uses Weighted
Euclidean Distance for classification. The method
uses the case of Saudi Arabian paper currency as a
model currency under consideration. It uses fifth
series of currency, issued by Saudi Arabian
Monetary Agency (SAMA), as a model currency
under consideration. It produces quite satisfactory
results in terms of recognition and efficiency.

Dieses Buch wendet sich nicht nur, aber auch an Lesende, die im Bereich der Gestaltung tätig sind. Gegenwärtigen Erscheinungen in Kunst, Design, Medien und Architektur liegen oftmals Konzepte zugrunde, die aus der traditionellen philosophischen Ästhetik stammen. Man muss sie kennen, wenn man jene Erscheinungen angemessen begreifen möchte. Eines der Ziele dieses Buches ist daher, zu demonstrieren, dass bestimmte Begriffe und Kategorien des überlieferten Ästhetik-Diskurses nach wie vor geeignet sind, um aktuelle Phänomene zu  verstehen.

Thinking about and with images has long been central to the practice of geographical fieldwork. This paper considers how the participation of images in urban-based fieldwork might be understood in the wake of non-representational theories. Drawing upon our experience of co-teaching an urban-based field course in Berlin, we discuss three ways in which such theories allow us to make more of the participation of images in the thinking-spaces of urban fieldwork. Specifically, we consider how images afford opportunities for attending to everyday ecologies of materials and things; for thinking through the rhythms of urban environments; and for producing affective archives. In concluding we suggest that thinking with images in urban fieldwork can be understood as part of the elaboration of ecologies of non-representational ethico-aesthetic practices.

"Room with a View: the Surrealist Library in Hebdomeros, by Giorgio De Chirico
De Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros (1929) is deeply influenced by contemporary Surrealist theories. Imitating the metaphoric space of a library, the narration combines the two dimensions of interiors and exteriors. The hero himself, Hebdomeros, is a room with a window – a window which is the direct link with the external world. Inside, the erudition deriving from experience and memory; outside the contemporary life, with its solicitations and spontaneity. Life is, in De Chirico’s and his alter ego Hebdomeros’s mind, an intricate skein of enigmas, waiting to be interpreted.
In order to accomplish the difficult task of interpretation, one has to compare Hebdomeros with other coeval surrealist novels: René Crevel’s Babylone (1927); Robert Desnos’s La Liberté ou l’amour! (1927); Georges Limbour’s L’Acteur du Lancashire (1923); Michel Leiris’s Le Point cardinal (1927); Breton’s Nadja (1928). De Chirico absorbed the deep sense of Surrealism: a man has to walk along an initiating path, guided by his thoughts and memories, with no other end than self-understanding.

Keywords : De Chirico, Hebdomeros, Surrealism, novel, metaphorical space, initiation


Chambres avec vue: la bibliothèque surréaliste dans Hebdomeros de Giorgio De Chirico
Le roman de Chirico Hebdomeros (1929) est très influencé par le surréalisme. En imitant l’espace métaphorique d’une bibliothèque, la narration combine les deux dimensions de l’intérieur et de l’extérieur. Le héros lui-même est une sorte de chambre avec des fenêtres qui donnent sur le monde extérieur : à l’intérieur l’érudition qui vient de l’expérience et de la mémoire ; à l’extérieur la vie contemporaine. La vie est pour l’alter ego de Chirico, un noyau intriqué d’énigmes qui cherchent à être interprétés. Mais pour arriver à une véritable interprétation de l’œuvre elle-même, il faut comparer Hebdomeros avec les récits surréalistes contemporains : Babylone de Crevel ; La Liberté ou l’amour ! de Desnos ; L’Acteur du Lancashire de Limbour ; Le Point cardinal de Leiris ; Nadja de Breton. Chirico a absorbé le sens profond du surréalisme : l’homme doit marcher sur un chemin initiatique, guidé seulement par ses pensées et ses souvenirs, avec le seul but de se connaître. Parmi les auteurs cités : Riese Hubert, Antle, Fagiolo dell’Arco, Vitrac.

Mots-clé : De Chirico, Hebdomeros, surréalisme, roman, espace métaphorique, initiation"

In 2017, Mexican transfeminist artist and activist Lia García (La Novia Sirena) made weekly visits to dorm 10Bis of the prison Reclusorio Norte, engaging in performative actions with a group of cis-male prisoners. Sprouting from images of Proyecto 10Bis (2017), this article argues that, within conditions of increasing violence and impunity, Lia transgenders touch in ways that, by (re)pro-ducing hypertenderness, serve as a balm for a hyperviolent state. Unpacking the haptics in the mechanics of production, and considering the Derridian impossibility of tact and of the law, the author argues that by placing herself - cuerpo y corazón - between the state and the body, Lia engenders a haptic tactic that, through a transgendered hypertender touch, activates transaffective resistances that contend with the law and the state.

Recent developments in image-making techniques have resulted in a drastic blurring of the threshold between the world of the image and the real world. Immersive and interactive virtual environments have enabled the production of pictures that elicit in the perceiver a strong feeling of being incorporated in a new and autonomous world. In doing so, they negate themselves as " images-of-something " , as icons: they are veritable " an-icons ". This kind of picture undermines the mainstream representationalist paradigm of Western image theories: " presentification " rather than representation is at stake here. My paper will address this challenging iconoscape, arguing for the necessity of a specific methodological approach—namely, an-iconology.

The Museum of Natural History located in Concepción, Chile, holds a body of eleven small-scale images (seven figures of Saints, one of the Virgin and Child, plus three sculptures of Christ), whose height ranges from 18 to 36 cm. This paper will discuss their iconographies, formal types, material constitution, and possible origins. As the article proceeds, it will prove that the main bulk of this collection can be tracked back to a handicraft center of religious imagery which was active between the cities of Linares and Concepción, during the 18th and 19th centuries.

Yaoi/BL Fandom Survey (only takes 10 mins to complete): https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

http://sainsbury-institute.org/news-events/legislating-manga-workshop/

This talk will explore the implications of the Prohibited Images of Children section of the Coroners and Justice Act 2009 for Boys' Love and Yaoi in the UK. The British legislation will be set in context briefly with regard to the legal situation in North America, Australia, Japan and China. Anna is Chair of Qualitative Inquiry in the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds and is author of 'Boys’ Love manga for girls: Paedophilic, satirical, queer readings and English law' in Children, Sexuality and Sexualisation (2015). Her online BL fandom survey can be found at https://leeds.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/blfandomsurvey

Despite the growing number of publications on the Russo-Japanese War, an abundance of questions and issues related to this topic remain unsolved, or call for a reexamination. This 30-chapter volume, the first in the two-volume project Rethinking the Russo-Japanese War, provides a comprehensive reexamination of the origins of the conflict, the various dimensions of the nineteen-month conflagration, the legacy of the war, and its place in the history of the twentieth century. Such an enterprise is not only timely but unique. It has benefited from a multinational team of thirty-two scholars from twelve nations representing a broad disciplinary background. The majority of them focus on topics never researched before and without exception provide a novel and critical view of the war. This reexamination is, of course, facilitated by a century-long perspective as well as an impressive assortment of primary and secondary sources, many of them unexplored and, in a number of cases, unavailable earlier.


TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements; List of Contributors; List of Maps, Tables, Figures; List of Illustrations; Conventions; Introduction; 1 The Memory and Significance of the Russo-Japanese War from a Centennial Perspective; PART I: ORIGINS; I. Geopolitical, Economic, and Intellectual Background; 2 Guarding the Gates of Our East Asia: Japanese Reactions to the Far Eastern Crisis (1897–98) as a Prelude to the War; 3 An Invitation to the Aquarium: Sergei Witte and the Origins of Russia’s War with Japan; 4 “The Unknown Enemy”: The Siberian Frontier and the Russo-Japanese Rivalry, 1890s–1920s; PART II: THE WAR; II. The Military Dimension; 5 The Clash of Two Continental Empires: The Land War Reconsidered; 6. The Secret Factor: Japanese Network of Intelligence gathering on Russia during the War; 7 Chaos versus Cruelty: Sakhalin as a Secondary Theater of Operations; III. The Economic Dimension; 8 The War and the Perception of Japan by British Investors; 9 Realpolitik or Jewish Solidarity? Jacob Schiff’s Financial Support for Japan Revisited; 10 The War, Military Expenditures and Postbellum Fiscal and Monetary Policy in Japan; IV. The Cultural Dimension; 11 The Widow’s Tears and the Soldier’s Dream: Gender and Japanese Wartime Visual Culture; 12 School Songs, the War and Nationalist Indoctrination in Japan; 13 Forgotten Heroes: Russian Women in the War; 14 The Dress Rehearsal? Russian Realism and Modernism through War and Revolution; 15 The Scepter of the Far East and the Crown of the Third Rome: The War in the Mirror of Russian Poetry; ; PART III: REACTIONS AND POSTWAR REPERCUSSIONS; V. The Belligerents: Consequences in Japan and Russia; 16 The Impact of the War on the Constitutional Government in Japan; 17 The Legacy of the War and the World of Islam in Japanese Pan-Asian Discourse: Wakabayashi Han’s Kaikyo Sekai to Nihon ; 18 Soldiers’ Unrest Behind the Front after the End of the War; 19 Imperial Russian War Planning for the Eurasian Space and the Impact of the War; VI. Divided Onlookers: Europe and the War; 20 The War and British Strategic Foreign Policy; 21 British War Correspondents and the War; 22 Participant Observation: Germany, the War, and the Road to a European Clash; 23 Perceptions of Russia in German Military Leadership during the War; 24 A Different View: The War in Austro-Hungarian Political Cartoons; 25 A Reinterpretation of the Ottoman Neutrality during the War; 26 The Jewish Response to the War; VII. Rude Awakening? Asia and the Colonial World; 27 Russo-Japanese Negotiations and the Japanese Annexation of Korea; 28 Japan’s Victory in Philippine, Vietnamese, and Burmese Perspectives; 29 The War and the British Invasion of Tibet, 1904; 30 Distant Echoes: The Reflection of the War in the Middle East; Bibliography; Index

Está concebido como un manual universitario de carácter absolutamente pedagógico que se articula en diez apartados que pueden ser leídos de forma continuada o aleatoria. Se pretende cubrir así las parcelas principales que constituyen la imagen audiovisual: definición de la imagen, articulación narrativa, tipos de planos, elementos compositivos, campo y fuera de campo, el punto de vista, los movimientos de cámara, la iluminación, el sonido y el montaje. Cada capítulo desarrollará brevemente los conceptos de sus enunciados en base a definiciones, clasificaciones y funciones de dichos conceptos para pasar a la parte más rica de este manual: el análisis de secuencias completas de filmes.
La aplicación práctica de la teoría se abordará a partir de una propuesta de metodología de trabajo para el análisis de la imagen secuencial basada en la aplicación de los principales conceptos relacionados con la imagen audiovisual expuestos en la parte teórica.

Las imágenes entrañan relatos que remiten a universos simbólicos constitutivos del imaginario y que se convierten en marcos de comprensión del mundo. Este trabajo propone un marco de pensamiento para la imagen en prensa que permita contemplar otras posibilidades de representación que no se ajusten a la retórica del objetivismo pero que, sin embargo, sean modos de representación que permitan hablar de lo real y de lo que acontece con justicia. Proponemos la posibilidad de la imagen pensamiento.

Predicting the compressive strength of cement-stabilized rammed earth (CSRE) using current testing machines is time-consuming and costly and may harm the environment due to the samples’ waste. This paper presents an automatic method using computer vision and deep learning to solve the problem. For this purpose, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) model is proposed, which was evaluated on a new in-house scanning electron microscope (SEM) image database containing 4284 images of materials with different compressive strengths. The experimental results show reasonable prediction results compared to other traditional methods, achieving 84% prediction accuracy and a small (1.5) oot Mean Square Error (RMSE). This indicates that the proposed method (with some enhancements) can be used in practice for predicting the compressive strength of CSRE samples.

While symbolic colour use has always played a salient role in science research and education, the use of colour in historic diagrams remains a lacuna within the history of science. Investigating the colour use in diagrams often means uncovering a whole cosmology otherwise not explicit in the diagram itself. The periodic table is a salient and iconic example of non-mimetic colour use in science. Famous is Andreas von Antropoff’s rectangular table of recurrent rainbow colours (1924); Alcindo Flores Cabral’s (1949) application of colour in his round snail form using the rgb scheme, Mazurs’ pine tree system (1967), speaking of warm and cold colours that he attributed to specific groups of elements – an attribution that we can relate back to humoralism and alchemy. From the first periodic tables in the 19th century on, individual researchers have used different colour regimes. While standardization may play an obvious role in chemistry and its diagrams, all the more impressive is the anarchistic use of colour in the respective diagrams up to today. This article focuses on periodical tables in chemical journals and text books and explores and compares the development of colour codes found in the few existing polychrome diagrams from the 1920s to the 1970s.

Umberto Eco (1975; 1985) has invariantly maintained that specular images have no semiosic status, basically because they stand in front rather than instead of an object. In his Kant and the Platypus (1997), Eco returns offering reasons to exclude specular images from signs, and definitely classifies mirrors as visual prosthetic devices. In this paper I argue that Eco is partly right and partly wrong. He is right inasmuch as he claims that seeing an object in a mirror must count as a case of seeing that object rather than as a case of seeing a sign of that object (or, a sign standing for a propositional content about that object). The only reason why we should agree with Eco on this point, however, is that otherwise we would be forced to admit that also when we see the object in normal visual perception, with no mirror involved, what we really see is a sign. But then Eco is wrong because he does not acknowledge that, although mirror phenomena do have no semiosic status per se, they may acquire it by taking advantage of independent sign-functions – thus coming to be part of what I call parasiticly semiosic phenomena. Specifically, since an object that is visually perceived in a mirror may appear to have some spatial or topological properties that the real object does not possess, it is sufficient for the mirror phenomenon to exploit an independent sign-function whose expressions admit spatial or topological properties among their distinctive traits in order for it to become fully (though parasiticly) semiosic.

Advancement in the arts and sciences is a primary driver of economic production and social policy in post-industrial societies. Imagination steps back and asks what advances the arts and sciences? This book explores the collective, social and global dimension of human imagining and the ambivalent relationship of social institutions, including universities, schools, economies, media and culture industries, to the collective imagination. Basic discovery requires high levels of creative thinking: Imagination looks at the social conditions that make path-breaking thought possible on a large scale. It examines the role of aesthetic, pictorial, digital, paradoxical and other imaginative styles of thinking, and the times and places in which such styles become socially prominent and a significant force in economic and cultural production. It looks at successful societies as they are approaching their peak, when new ideas are driving them forward.

The prevailing opininion considers that Islam is against images. Going back to the Koran and the hadiths, and reviewing the art production in Islamic lands from the beginning to our time, the book tries to give another perspective on this question. The modern period, where a multiplication of images can be observed, is analyzed in details, through fatwas and other positions taken by Islamic scholars.

This book draws from art history, photography and visual studies to develop an interdisciplinary, image-based approach to understanding consumer behavior. Focusing on four themes: representation, photography, images and identity, it presents a theoretical perspective on visual consumption, providing wide-ranging examples from advertising, the internet, photography, design, theatre and tourism, and discusses the importance of the internet in bringing visual issues into the mainstream of strategic thinking; spurring research into perception of visual displays.

Despite massive interest in visual culture and an abundance of theories on images, basic questions still animate researchers: What is an image? How does it work? Why is it powerful? This article reviews the growth of Visual Culture studies and provides an overview of key questions of visuality, how they have influenced research and offers a glimpse into future directions occupying the field.