Search Results (835)

Cellulose has been integral to a range of essential applications throughout history and remains relevant today. This research highlights an important topic: the study of cellulose-based and wood-derived supports in works by Portuguese artists from the twentieth century. Such an investigation is valuable for conservation and heritage science, as materials such as cardboard, plywood, hardboard, and particleboard are common in modern and contemporary artworks but are often not thoroughly characterized or discussed. Micro-infrared spectroscopy, when combined with reference materials, offers a promising means of identifying and analyzing these supports. The study focuses on works by Portuguese artists from 1915 to 1986. Applying principal component analysis to infrared data in the 1000–1200 cm⁻¹ range enabled us to distinguish among the artists. For Pomar, Rodrigo, Vespeira, Calvet, and Hatherly, using hardboard in this range appears most suitable. For Salazar, Teles, and Pinheiro, particleboard is the optimal choice. Beech and eucalyptus plywood are preferable for Pires Vieira and Carlos Botelho. The effort to connect material knowledge with sustainable conservation practices is commendable. The research also aims to relate cellulose-based supports adhering to the European Union’s Sustainable Development Goals, fostering more sustainable and meaningful approaches to cultural preservation. Full article

In an era where artificial intelligence is rapidly expanding into creative domains, the challenge of modeling human-like cognition and emotion in generative processes becomes increasingly central. The present study was made in connection with the exhibition of Munch’s works held in Rome from February to June 2025. Indeed, the paper introduces the concept of a Cognitive Digital Twin grounded in the Super Time-Cognitive Neural Network (STCNN) framework and applies it to the case of Edvard Munch, the iconic Norwegian expressionist. The proposed system—Munch Digital Twin—goes beyond static generative models by integrating temporal, emotional, and cognitive dimensions through a complex-valued time representation t = a + i·b, where a denotes chronological time and b encodes imagination, memory, and creativity. We define Edge Knowledge as an output-stage re-ranking criterion that admits a generated response only where corpus evidence, knowledge-graph constraints and the LLM surface jointly agree (the boundary, or ‘edge’, between documented identity and machine inference). STCNN allows this twin to process real inputs (text, visual prompts, emotional cues) and generate outputs that reflect both the rational and expressive styles of Munch. The imaginary components of the network enable speculative and affective expansions of known artworks—such as reinterpreting The Scream under new emotional or social contexts. This paper presents the theoretical underpinnings of cognitive digital twins, the architecture of the STCNN-based model, and a prototype implementation trained on Munch’s paintings, letters, and critical essays. The system—comprising a GPT-4-Turbo cloud profile and a 4-bit LLaMA-2-13B edge profile for language, Stable Diffusion 1.5 + LoRA for image generation, a Neo4j knowledge graph, and FAISS retrieval—is trained on approximately 600 letters, 100 artworks, and Munch’s diaries and criticism, and evaluated across 100 interactive sessions with 14 students and expert raters. Headline results against an unconditioned baseline include CLIPScore +13.8%, FID −25.5% (small-sample, indicative), and emotion-cosine similarity +44.9%. Ethical implications surrounding posthumous digital emulation, authorship, and emotional manipulation are also discussed. The Munch Digital Twin represents a new paradigm in AI-driven art, where machines do not merely replicate, but collaborate across time with human legacies, enabling an anticipatory and emotionally intelligent form of computational creativity. This work is primarily a conceptual and architectural contribution, supported by a proof-of-concept prototype and a preliminary, non-controlled user study; the quantitative results are indicative and not yet confirmatory. Full article

This article examines the Buddhist artworks commissioned by Yŏm Sŭngik (廉承益, ?–1302), a powerful court official and ritual specialist active during the reign of King Ch’ungnyŏl in late Koryŏ. Focusing on three surviving works—a copied Lotus Sutra manuscript (1283), an Amitābha Tathāgata painting (1286), and a woodblock-printed Baoqieyin jing dhāraṇī (1292)—the study explores how Buddhist art functioned as a material expression of repentance, ritual healing, karmic eradication, and aspirations for Pure Land rebirth. Through analysis of votive inscriptions, painting inscriptions, and dhāraṇī texts, the article argues that the repeated four-line gāthā appearing in both the sutra manuscript and Amitābha painting is most plausibly understood within the devotional and ritual framework of the Yenyŏm mit’a toryang ch’ambŏp, rather than primarily through Huayan doctrinal interpretation, as previous scholarship has suggested. The article further situates Yŏm Sŭngik’s patronage within broader political and familial networks linking elite officials, Buddhist monks, and the religious culture of the Koryŏ and Yuan courts. Ultimately, it argues that Buddhist art in late Koryŏ operated not merely as devotional imagery, but as an active medium of ritual practice through which repentance, healing, and hopes for Pure Land rebirth were materially enacted. Full article

Background/Objectives: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is increasingly recognized as a multisystem disorder affecting perceptual, emotional, and reward-related processes. While arts-based interventions in PD have primarily focused on active creative arts engagement, it remains unclear whether receptive arts engagement with visual art—how artworks are perceived and evaluated—is altered. Our objective is to determine whether aesthetic evaluation of visual artworks differs in individuals with PD compared to age-matched healthy controls. We further examine whether emotional interpretation, color-emotion associations, and experiential responses to art viewing are altered. Methods: In a cross-sectional case–control study, individuals with PD (n = 87) and age-matched healthy controls (n = 49) completed two online assessments. Participants evaluated 36 artworks from the Vienna Art Picture System in terms of liking, beauty, and subjective art attributes. Objective image-derived features were computed for each artwork. Interpretable machine learning models were used to test whether evaluation patterns predicted diagnostic group and to identify determinants of aesthetic judgments. Participants further completed a color-emotion association task using ambiguous expressive portraits and reported perceived changes in cognitive, emotional, motivational, and physical states following art viewing. Results: Aesthetic evaluation patterns did not support reliable classification of PD status, indicating no systematic group differences in liking, beauty, or attribute-based judgments between PD and controls. Instead, aesthetic judgments were robustly predicted by individual differences and objective artwork properties, including art-historical style, symmetry, complexity, and color-related features, whereas diagnostic group, gender, and age did not contribute to predictions. Emotional interpretation and color-emotion associations were largely comparable between groups, with a single specific deviation in color-emotion mapping. Positive emotions were less frequently associated with pink in people with PD. Self-reported experiential responses to art viewing did not differ significantly between groups. Conclusions: Aesthetic evaluation of visual artworks appears largely preserved in people with PD. These findings suggest that, in digital viewing contexts, substantial adaptation of visual content to make it accessible for people with PD may not be necessary, although subtle perceptual and emotional differences may still be relevant. Efforts may instead be better directed toward addressing practical barriers to visual art engagement. Full article

The Porous Line is a drawing inquiry that uses materials and processes to engage in a dialogue with a suburban ecosystem. I follow the physicist David Bohm’s proposal to use dialogue as a mode of engagement where habitual modes of thought are suspended, a form of non-judgmental curiosity. I reflect on how immersing a large roll of French imported paper in my everyday environs reveals the porousness between nature and culture. The binary separation of nature and culture has undergone significant criticism as we deal with the climate crisis. As a foundational medium within western art and thought, how can drawing communicate this growing ontological shift? The essay engages in dialogue with Yolngu art from Yirrkala as a guide on what an ecological art practice entails. Their commitment to work with what ‘country’ provides has resulted in innovative and thoughtful new works. In response to propositions seen in Yolngu artworks, this essay engages with place, materiality, and relationality through the process of merging line and ground, the fundamentals of drawing, physically and conceptually. I reflect on the challenges that need to be addressed within western ontologies to develop an ecological approach in drawing. Full article

This study proposes a combination of optical and thermal methods to investigate the structural integrity of two 16th–17th centuries wooden panel paintings at the early stages of restoration. Well-established techniques, such as 3D scanning, technical photography, and active thermography, are combined with the less conventional shearography, which has recently gained increasing relevance in the diagnostics of cultural heritage materials. The proposed methodology enables the identification and spatial localization of different forms of degradation within the multilayered structure of the artworks, including physical-structural alterations, insect damage, localized hygroscopic degradation, nails, interlayer deterioration, and craquelure. This approach provides a comprehensive insight into the state of the panel painting structure and highlights potentially critical areas which were undetectable by visual inspection alone, demonstrating the ability to guide restoration interventions. Full article

The Singaporean government’s Green Plan 2030 aims to “galvanize a whole-of-nation movement and advance [its] national agenda on sustainable development,” transforming the Garden City into a City in Nature. The state’s #OneMillionTrees campaign, which intends to plant a million trees over a decade, seems less focused on climate adaptation, given Singapore’s unresolved environmental issues such as oil refinement, terraforming, and hyperconsumption. Instead, it appears to superficially address deeper socioenvironmental wounds inflicted on the postcolonial people and land. In this article, I explore the visual culture of Singapore’s ableist-nationalist greening campaigns alongside artworks such as Marvin Tang’s A Guide to Tree Planting and History of 39 Cuttings—Hybrids, and Woong Soak Teng’s Ways to Tie Trees and Rules for Photographing a Scoliotic Patient. I argue that Tang and Woong highlight adaptation issues in the face of eco-ableist sustainability in Singapore, challenging simplistic notions of climate adaptation by attending to vulnerable, sexed and gendered more-than-human bodies. The field of art history has an opportunity to probe ableist visions of ecological sustainability—within an emerging discourse between environmental justice and disability studies—by historicizing and interpreting such art, as it speaks to enduring, more-than-human impairment and climate adaptation. Full article

The rapid development of AI Technology has significantly influenced digital art and triggered widespread discussion on social media platforms, particularly X. The use of AI in generating visual artworks and digital content has elicited diverse public responses, ranging from support for technological innovation to concerns regarding originality and the role of human artists. In this study, a total of 1737 tweets were collected through a data crawling process using relevant keywords and processed using RapidMiner through preprocessing stages to analyze user sentiment on the X platform toward the application of AI in digital art. The data include data cleaning, text normalization, and tokenization, before being classified into positive and negative sentiments. Three classification algorithms, Naïve Bayes, support vector machine (SVM), and decision tree, were applied to compare sentiment distributions. The results show that the Naïve Bayes model classified 30.5% of tweets as positive and 69.5% as negative, while the SVM and Decision Tree models showed a stronger bias toward negative sentiment, with 93.3% and 88.8% negative classifications, respectively. These findings indicate that negative sentiment toward AI in digital art is more dominant among users. Full article

This study examines the implementation of an educational workshop on AI-mediated generative art, entitled Programmed Emotions, developed with primary school students. The research aims to explore the potential of generative technologies as tools for emotional expression and creativity, as well as to analyse their implications for students’ reflective processes. A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining quantitative data from self-assessment scales with qualitative data from open-ended responses and image analysis. The study investigated how the use of generative tools influenced engagement, emotional expression, creativity, and reflection. The results revealed high levels of active participation and creative production, together with a clear predominance of positive emotions, particularly joy, and a strong sense of identification between students and their artworks. However, the findings also highlighted significant limitations in reflective depth, characterized by brief responses and limited conceptual elaboration. These results suggest that, although generative art can effectively promote emotional expression and creativity, it does not by itself ensure deeper processes of understanding. Overall, the study underscores the educational potential of generative art in early educational stages while emphasizing the need for explicit pedagogical mediation to foster critical thinking, emotional diversity, and meaningful reflection. Full article

This article reconsiders the methodological primacy of representation in early modern art history by shifting attention from image to material. Taking Rembrandt’s Polish Nobleman (1637) as its point of departure, it argues that narrative interpretation—long central to the discipline—has obscured the material conditions that make images possible. Rather than assembling meaning from pictorial elements, the essay follows the painting’s support: a Baltic oak panel sourced from the woodlands of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. From this perspective, the artwork emerges not simply as an autonomous image but as the endpoint of an extractive chain linking forestry, peasant labour, river transport, and long-distance trade. Drawing on agronomic manuals, estate records, and economic histories, the article reconstructs these dispersed threads as “story matter”: fragments that, brought into relation, begin to cohere into an alternative mode of narration. In doing so, it advances “material literacy” as a methodological reorientation—an attunement to substances, processes, and infrastructures that precede and exceed representation. Recovering these histories does not replace interpretation but expands its scope, opening art history to ecological and infrastructural forms of storytelling. Full article

The FAIR principles have become a central framework for research data management and digital infrastructures, yet their implementation remains challenging within the long-tail of research. This paper examines how FAIR principles can be operationalized in practice through a case study on the FAIRification of the INFRA-ART Spectral Library, a specialized heritage science data service hosting multi-analytical spectral datasets related to art and archaeological materials. The FAIRification process was approached as an iterative and incremental workflow structured around three interconnected dimensions: technical interoperability, semantic alignment, and governance-oriented stewardship practices. Implementation activities included machine-actionable metadata exposure, semantic enrichment through ontology mappings and controlled vocabularies, interoperability-oriented infrastructure development, and the adoption of TRUST-aligned governance mechanisms. The results demonstrate substantial improvements in metadata quality, discoverability, interoperability, and repository transparency. At the same time, the FAIRification process highlighted persistent challenges related to fragmented semantic resources, evolving interoperability requirements, limited stewardship capacity, and dependence on project-based funding and institutional support. The study argues that effective FAIRification in long-tail data services depends on context-sensitive and incremental implementation approaches rather than rigid compliance models. Full article

The present work introduces the Bulgarian Spectral Database for Painting Materials, a freely accessible web-based resource containing FTIR and Raman spectra, together with complementary analytical information, for materials commonly found in Bulgarian artworks. The database encompasses a collection of over 200 reference materials and more than 100 entries derived from authentic samples obtained from wall paintings, dating from the 5th century BC to the 20th century. The largest section of the database consists of inorganic reference materials, including natural and synthetic mineral pigments, fillers, and additives commonly identified in historical mural paintings, complemented by organic binders and natural dyes. Reference model mixtures simulating historical painting techniques are also included. The database provides interactive visualization and downloadable spectra in plain text formats (.txt) compatible with all spectroscopic software. The integration of spectral data obtained from artworks represents a distinctive feature of the resource. The database is a practical tool for material identification, comparative studies, and conservation research in the field of cultural heritage science. It also provides a robust foundation for comparative studies and facilitates interdisciplinary research across the Balkan region and beyond. Full article

This article examines dialogic presence as articulated by Martin Buber and explores its continued relevance within contemporary technoetic and AI-mediated new media art. Drawing on Buber’s early writings on art, theatre, and dance—particularly Daniel (1913)—the article first analyses the dialogic relations between artist, art form, and viewer, with attention to the aesthetic principles of distance, unity, and presence that structure the I–Thou encounter. The second part explores the correlation between Buber’s dialogic philosophy and the principles of technoetic art as theorised by Roy Ascott, focusing on the telematic installation Aspects of Gaia: Digital Pathways across the Whole Earth (1989) as a paradigmatic example of dialogic encounter within technologically mediated environments. The third part examines seven artworks from the Infinite Self Pavilion, curated for The Wrong Biennale (2025–2026), as illustrative examples. These works engage AI-mediated aesthetics to interrogate the relation between Self and Other through modes of dialogic encounter and presence induced by orbital apparatus, installation, and screen practices, positioning the viewer at the centre of the encounter while challenging the limits of human consciousness. The article concludes by foregrounding Buber’s ethical stance toward advanced technologies, emphasising relational responsibility and humility in dialogue with Ascott’s technoetic ethics. Full article

The concept of awareness in the visual arts has become an ethical, professional, and social imperative. Adopting a sustainable approach to creative practice is no longer a trend but an established and necessary field of inquiry. Within this context, awareness has been expressed not only through eco-branding and design campaigns but also through artworks and contemporary artistic practices that embody sustainable values both aesthetically and philosophically. Visual arts thus function as a reflective and critical tool, capable of reassessing past and present paradigms, encouraging more responsible uses of resources, promoting environmental sustainability, and shaping public attitudes through conscious and critical forms of expression. This study adopts a qualitative approach to examine transformations in contemporary art practices within the Saudi Arabian art scene. Selected artworks are analysed to explore historical and conceptual narratives shaping artistic production. The research is based on a bibliographic and documentary review that includes academic literature, exhibition catalogues and press sources related to the Saudi cultural context. Data are gathered through observing artworks and, where possible, through interviews with artists. A comparative analysis was developed, with the study framed by art practices, their concepts, and their ecological contributions, leading to a sustainable awareness and their potential role in encouraging social change. The comparative study among artists provides an innovative research framework and initiates a broader dialogue on sustainable creative practices rooted in Saudi cultural contexts. The findings highlight how visual arts contribute to ecological awareness and climate activism through art installations, recycled materials, and digital practices, reinforcing sustainability as a core value within contemporary Saudi society. Full article

Modern oil paintings are characterized by the extensive use of industrial pigments, synthetic binders, and chemical additives introduced during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. While these innovations enabled significant artistic experimentation, they also introduced new conservation challenges due to the chemical instability of many modern paint formulations. As a consequence, modern oil paintings frequently exhibit degradation phenomena such as efflorescence, yellowing, blistering, peeling and cracking, and high sensitivity to water and organic solvents. A comprehensive understanding of the materials used in modern oil paintings—including pigments, binders, and additives—is therefore essential for developing effective conservation strategies. In this context, electromagnetic (EM) diagnostic techniques represent powerful tools for the noninvasive or minimally invasive investigation of artworks. These techniques allow researchers to characterize the chemical composition, morphology, and degradation processes affecting paint layers and substrates. This paper provides an overview of the EM techniques most commonly used in the conservation of modern oil paintings. Particular attention is devoted to spectroscopic and imaging methods such as scanning electron microscopy with energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (SEM-EDX), Fourier-transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy, Raman spectroscopy, UV-Vis spectroscopy, and X-ray-based techniques, as well as to the laser technique for the delicate cleaning process. Through selected case studies reported in the literature, this review highlights the role of these techniques in pigment identification, degradation analysis, and the development of more effective conservation strategies for modern oil paintings. Full article