Search Results (428)

Traumatic experiences can disrupt one’s sense of safety, self-efficacy, and relationships. Prolonged stress may lead to anxiety, depression, and diminished agency. The embodied, subjective manifestations of trauma call for personalized therapeutic approaches that address symptoms and foster resilience. Group Creative Arts Therapies (CATs) offer relational aesthetic interventions that promote resilience and trauma recovery. Incorporating body-based methods, movement, materials and visual expression, CATs support interoceptive awareness, multisensory integration, embodiment, and emotional–cognitive processing. This article presents a review and conceptual framework of group CAT interventions during wartime, focusing on challenges related to body awareness, self-efficacy, and autobiographical memory. It examines how creative aesthetic approaches help process trauma and strengthen resilience. Drawing on predictive processing accounts of brain function, the article explores the neuropsychological impact of trauma and how creative group work may modulate related brain mechanisms. Creative techniques can foster bodily anchored self-awareness, self-efficacy and processes of traumatic memory reconsolidation. Aesthetic experiences are associated with changes in brain activation and connectivity through processes of embodiment, externalization, and meaning making. On an intrapersonal level, converging evidence highlights the role of sensory and sensorimotor processing, along with the dynamic interplay between Default Mode, Executive Control, and Salience networks, as conceptualized in the Triple Network Model. On an interpersonal level, the literature points to the dynamics of brain and body synchronization, as emerging phenomena during shared creative engagement. These neurodynamics provide a coherent framework for understanding how creative arts-based psychotherapeutic group work can support trauma processing and the cultivation of resilience. Full article

Our Fairytales: The Cost of Migration, National Myth, and Creative Labor in Unser Deutschlandmärchen is a performance analysis that examines lived cultural narratives through the lens of the Maxim Gorki Theatre’s production of Dinçer Güçyeter’s autobiographical novel Unser Deutschlandmärchen. The impact on Turkish migrants in Germany and their descendants is explored through an investigation of primary production texts, migration and diaspora literature, and Turkish–German cultural commentary. A discussion of fairy tales and national mythos reveals the material contributions migrant communities often make to host nations through systemic endurance and cultural enrichment, frequently at the cost of forgoing “happily ever after.” The reformation of the traditional fairy tale recasts Turkish–German migrants as modern fairy-tale heroes who generate counter-cultural narratives through collective, intergenerational, and ethnographically inherited memory. Full article

In her excellent volume Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life, Agnes Callard juxtaposes Socrates’s conclusion that the meaningfulness of life is a function of consistent critical inquiry into existence with Leo Tolstoy’s contrary insistence that existential meaning ensues from living life without constant interruptions of self-reflection. These two perspectives functionally identify the tension between whether individuals may linguistically express opinions on truth and meaning or must negotiate in some manner with an inescapable silence regarding how best to comprehend and communicate discrete interpretations of the significance and veracity of lived experience. This present article investigates that tension and how it depends on the poetic and apophatic characteristics of language to both Say and Unsay how meaning and truth may be conceived. Salient positions from Ludwig Wittgenstein and William Franke provide introductory material to set the context for a closer examination of the complementary hermeneutics of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur and the American poet Wallace Stevens. Both thinkers concur that properly analyzing meaning and truth requires a reliance on the creative imagination with its privileging of poetic language and its dependence on the humility of an incredulous faith in approximating an operative asymptotic approach to existential meaning. Full article

Bamboo, renowned for its rapid growth, high carbon sequestration capacity, and superior mechanical properties, has become a strategic sustainable material in product design. Through bibliometric and content analysis, this study systematically examines its current applications across multiple sectors, including furniture, consumer electronics, transportation interiors, fashion, and cultural and creative products. It further proposes four core innovation strategies: material-driven optimization, digital manufacturing process innovation, cultural narrative design, and circular economy system transformation. Despite its potential, bamboo faces several challenges, such as inconsistent material properties, precision processing limitations, and biased market perceptions. To address these issues, future research should prioritize the development of standardized material databases, functional bamboo-based composites, integration of digital technologies, and enhanced interdisciplinary collaboration. By framing bamboo not merely as an alternative but as a preferred material, this study provides theoretical foundations and strategic directions for sustainable design and green industrial advancement. Full article

Awaken, aware, arise, perform, pause, and repeat. The actions of the everyday. Without it, we fall into dysregulation. This paper seeks to examine creative research developed as an experiment during COVID-19, an audiovisualscape in virtual reality (VR). Rhythmanalysis+ is a social, ecological, and sensorial enquiry into materiality, grounded in archipelagic thinking, through the lens of Rhythmanalysis, a form of analysis focusing on the everyday, through the lens of cyclical and linear rhythms. (Lefebvre). The research will also draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory, a botanical and philosophical investigation into networks. Networks form the backbone of the research. Lars Bang Larsen also argues that networks offer a distinctive view on how factual, speculative, historical, and non-human elements envelop and intertwine. Glissant’s archipelagic thought promotes transformation, multiplicity, and a sense of unpredictability. For this work, four inhabitants from Sherkin, a small island off the southwest coast of Ireland with a population of 100, became the research focus. Across four weeks, islanders gathered data from their daily sensory rhythms. Flight patterns of birds and bats were recorded, daily tasks noted, pathways cycled. Relational impacts of animal-odour on farming, weather, and tides were processed remotely, and an immersive cartographic score was created as a direct response in a three-dimensional virtual space. Rhythmanalysis+ analyses our newly altered perceptions of time and space as a material within a virtual world. VR, created as a gaming platform, is being pushed by art itself, forcing us to relook at the natural world, which is not static, but relational. Fluid but equally extractive, it is important to look at technology’s impact on all that is human and how it is perceived within the body as it is reframed digitally. Full article

Antonopoulou and Dare’s ongoing collaborative projects (Phi Books 2008: ongoing; Digital Dreamhacker 2013: ongoing) enact an open-ended, experimental set of slow ‘Fictioning’ practices and actions that involve performing, diagramming, or assembling to create or anticipate new modes of existence. In this paper, the authors use the visual essay form to evidence how their daily practices of drawing, writing, and exchanging, position art and the artist. These practices unfold without, in this case, the utilitarian, economic, and epistemic priorities and systems of reductive representation which underpin the extractive models of Generative AI and other ‘innovative’ intermediaries, systems which expedite content and regulate consumption in the cultural and creative industries and in ‘arts and humanities’ education. Focusing on their creative practices, Antonopoulou and Dare reposition commodified notions of productivity, creativity, and innovation, seeking what Haraway describes as a way ‘of making, thinking and worlding’ beyond the neoliberal imperatives of extracting profit from labour. Positioned within an era of escalating precarity combined with ecological and political instability driven by extractive colonialism, the temporality of collaboration and drawing over decades is proposed as an act of material resistance to art’s subsumption into the venture capitalist hype cycles. Such cycles are associated with an accelerating array of crises, discussed here. Full article

Biomimetics, the field of learning from Nature for applications in science, engineering and the arts, offers pathways toward sustainable innovation and integrative education. This contribution presents a conceptual framework that explores plant galls as an inspiration for biomimetic thinking, speculative design, and STEAM-based education. Plant galls are complex structures induced by insects, bacteria, fungi, or other organisms through biochemical signaling that reprograms local plant development. While gall formation is widely understood as a parasitic process that primarily benefits the inducing organism, galls nonetheless represent extreme and highly localized instances of developmental plasticity, information transfer, and morphological novelty. Building on these observations, this paper introduces the speculative Gall-Accelerated Innovation (GAI) framework, which asks whether gall induction can be interpreted, at a conceptual level, as a form of developmental probing that exposes plants to atypical structural and biochemical configurations. Rather than proposing a demonstrated evolutionary mechanism, the framework serves as a thought experiment that bridges gall biology, biomimetics, and artistic research. Through observational examples, interdisciplinary dialogue, and educational visualization, the work invites reflection on how interactions across species and disciplines can stimulate new ways of thinking about programmable living materials, creativity, and learning from Nature. Full article

Owing to the substantial polarity difference and weak interfacial interaction, the large-scale application of fly ash (FA) in rubber materials still faces substantial challenges. To solve this issue, this study prepared a modified hybrid SSBR@FA filler through a solution mechanochemical reaction between solution-polymerized styrene-butadiene rubber (SSBR) and FA in a lab planetary ball mill. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) and energy-dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) analyses demonstrated the in situ grafting-neutralization between the carboxyl in the SSBR chains and metal oxides in FA. Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) showed that surface-grafted SSBR formed a rubber-constrained layer on FA particle surfaces, which can reduce their surface energy and improve the wettability between FA and SBR matrix. Compared with the SBR vulcanizate, the mechanical properties, thermal conductivity, and flame-retardant properties of the SBR/SSBR@FA vulcanizates were obviously improved. This was because of the uniform distribution of FA and the improved interfacial interaction between FA and the rubber matrix. For example, the tensile strength, tear strength, and elongation at break increased by 66.3%, 52.9%, and 17.7%, respectively. This easy, efficient, and environmentally modified method for FA was expected offer a practical and creative solution for its application in rubber manufacturing. Full article

Plastic pollution poses severe threats to ecosystems, human health, and economies as plastics fragment into macro- and microplastics that accumulate across marine and terrestrial environments. Conventional monitoring is constrained by scale, cost, and resources, particularly in under-resourced regions, whereas citizen science provides an inclusive, community-driven alternative for data collection, analysis, and remediation to support evidence-based policy. This systematic review advances the field through three novel contributions: a refined participatory typology that explicitly prioritizes co-creative models for equitable engagement in the Global South; the first comprehensive synthesis of direct citizen involvement in plastic bioremediation, including community microbial isolation, household biodegradation trials, and real-world testing of biodegradable materials; and a new conceptual framework positioning citizen science as the central nexus linking upstream prevention, technological innovation, bioremediation, and global governance. Findings highlight large-scale geotagged datasets, behavioral change, and policy influence, while persistent challenges include data standardization, digital exclusion, and Global North bias. We therefore advocate institutional mainstreaming through dedicated policy offices, decolonial integration of indigenous knowledge, and hybrid citizen–lab validation pipelines, especially in underrepresented regions such as Africa, establishing citizen science as a transformative mechanism for participatory and equitable responses to escalating plastic pollution. Full article

This study focuses on the site-specific improvisatory dance performance Deconstruction and Reconstruction of the Path of Life, a self-directed and self-performed work in Lhasa’ s sacred space dominated by a huge Buddha statue. It aims to explore how site-specific context and altitude sickness shape performance, and how freedom and meaning are created within limitations. Using auto-ethnography including video documentation, creative journals and reflective observation, this research examines interactions with spatial elements (Xuan paper, Buddha feet, stairs, flowers) and physiological responses to low oxygen. Main findings include that altitude-induced breath difficulty, chest oppression, and movement imbalance became generative forces: breathing rhythm changes (steady-rapid-steady) symbolized life’s struggles, while a “pain-movement-meaning” chain fostered new bodily senses, framing pain as a gateway to spirituality. Rather than treating the space as a static backdrop, this study explores how the material and cultural characteristics of the location actively lead to dance movement choices and choreographic logic under extreme physiological condition. Full article

Automata and artificial intelligence (AI) have long occupied a central place in cultural and artistic imagination, and the recent proliferation of AI-generated artworks has intensified debates about authorship, creativity, and human agency. Empirical studies show that audiences often perceive AI-generated works as less authentic or emotionally resonant than human creations, with authorship attribution strongly shaping esthetic judgments. Yet little attention has been paid to how AI systems themselves evaluate creative authorship. This study investigates how large language models (LLMs) evaluate literary quality under different framings of authorship—Human, AI, or Human+AI collaboration. Using a questionnaire-based experimental design, we prompted four instruction-tuned LLMs (ChatGPT 4, Gemini 2, Gemma 3, and LLaMA 3) to read and assess three short stories in Italian, originally generated by ChatGPT 4 in the narrative style of Roald Dahl. For each story × authorship condition × model combination, we collected 100 questionnaire completions, yielding 3600 responses in total. Across esthetic, literary, and inclusiveness dimensions, the stated authorship systematically conditioned model judgments: identical stories were consistently rated more favorably when framed as human-authored or human–AI co-authored than when labeled as AI-authored, revealing a robust negative bias toward AI authorship. Model-specific analyses further indicate distinctive evaluative profiles and inclusiveness thresholds across proprietary and open-source systems. Our findings extend research on attribution bias into the computational realm, showing that LLM-based evaluations reproduce human-like assumptions about creative agency and literary value. We publicly release all materials to facilitate transparency and future comparative work on AI-mediated literary evaluation. Full article

Today, literacy is defined much more broadly, i.e., as the enabling ability to recognize, understand, interpret, create, and use various written materials in different contexts. Creative writing skills are developed in primary school, but it is difficult for students to express their thoughts in writing. This article presents how personalized creative writing prompts can help primary school students with different abilities improve their Lithuanian & General P narrative writing skills. Third-grade students (N = 14) from a private school in a large city participated in the study. An action research approach was applied, preceded by a diagnostic assessment of students’ creative writing skills, during which the essays were written without the aid of prompts. The experiences of each student were also described, as the children composed written narratives using prompts. After analysing the students’ work, progress was noted in all areas of text creation: from the use of vivid language elements in writing, the use of connecting words in sentences, to corrected spelling and punctuation errors. Full article

The construction industry remains one of the main contributors to environmental degradation due to its high material consumption and massive waste generation. This study introduces Granizzo, a hybrid methodological framework that integrates artificial intelligence (AI), parametric design, and digital fabrication to transform construction and demolition waste (CDW) into sustainable architectural mosaics. The workflow involves material selection, AI-driven classification of fragments, generative design algorithms for pattern optimization, and CNC-based experimental prototyping. A dataset comprising brick, cement, marble, glass, and stone fragments was analyzed using a Random Forest classifier, achieving an average accuracy above 90%. Parametric design algorithms based on circle packing and tessellation achieved up to 92% surface coverage, reducing voids and optimizing formal diversity compared to manually assembled mosaics. Prototypes fabricated with CNC molds exhibited 35% shorter assembly times and 20% fewer voids, confirming the technical feasibility of the proposed process. A preliminary Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) revealed measurable environmental benefits in energy savings and CO₂ reduction. The findings suggest that Granizzo constitutes a replicable methodological platform that merges digital precision and sustainable materiality, enabling a circular approach to architectural production and aligning with contemporary challenges of design innovation, material reuse, and computational creativity. Full article

This paper explores the potential of interdisciplinary teaching that combines science and fine art to foster students’ responsible engagement with environmental and social challenges, positioned as an important contribution to sustainability. Within a participatory action research project conducted over five cycles in a Slovenian primary school, the Model of Interdisciplinary Teaching in Science and Fine Art (MITSFA) was developed. It integrates problem-based science tasks, experimental work, reflective discussions, and art assignments with a strong communicative and esthetic dimension. The paper analyses activities that encouraged scientific inquiry, critical thinking, and visual interpretation of complex phenomena, ranging from material properties to sustainable spatial planning. Empirical data include students’ artworks, interviews, written reflections, and the teacher’s research diary. Findings suggest that combining scientific exploration with visual expression deepens understanding, fosters emotional engagement, and promotes environmental and social awareness. Students showed greater sensitivity to complexity, ability to recognize layered meanings, and readiness to express their worldview through art. It can be concluded that meaningful learning emerges where scientific and artistic processes are interconnected, highlighting the teacher’s role as a creative facilitator bridging investigation and interpretation. The study demonstrates how integrating science and fine art in primary education directly supports education for sustainable development by cultivating environmental awareness and responsibility. Full article

This paper aims to re-examine the roles of engravers and printers in the producing process of Nishiki-e, multicolored woodblock prints made in 18th–19th century Japan. Previous research has privileged the creative ideas of artists while regarding the craftsmen’s work as mere reproduction. In contrast, this paper re-evaluates the Nishiki-e production process, comprising publishers, painters, engravers, and printers, as a “meshwork,” a concept proposed by anthropologist Tim Ingold. By examining documents and specific works from three perspectives of imagery, coloring, and texture, this paper argues that the engravers and printers were also deeply involved in selecting lines and colors in the finished work. It reveals that Nishiki-e were products woven through the correspondence between humans and materials, reflecting economic factors and spectators’ pleasure. Full article