Search Results (472)

With the continuous deepening of green building concepts and the sustained advancement of research on health-oriented design, increasing attention has been paid to the impact of architectural space on users’ psychological perception and behavioral outcomes. In China, the rapid development of urban cultural facilities and the growing emphasis on high-quality public cultural spaces have made concert halls an important context for examining how architectural environments shape user experience. In recent years, relevant studies have gradually expanded from energy conservation, function, and technical performance evaluation to discussion of the subjective experience of the architectural environment and its psychological effects. As a typical type of cultural building, the concert hall is an important place for music communication and artistic experience, and its spatial environment may also influence users’ state of immersion and emotional resonance. However, existing studies mostly focus on the acoustic quality, visual characteristics, and functional organization of concert halls, and still lack a systematic empirical explanation of how restorative design influences user satisfaction through psychological mechanisms. Using survey data from 972 users of six representative concert halls in six Chinese cities, this study constructs a theoretical model with perceived restorative design as the independent variable, flow experience and musical resonance as mediating variables, and user satisfaction as the dependent variable, aiming to broaden the understanding of the internal mechanism through which restorative design affects user satisfaction. The results show that: (1) perceived restorative design is positively associated with user satisfaction; (2) flow experience and musical resonance respectively play mediating roles between perceived restorative design and user satisfaction; and (3) flow experience and musical resonance respectively play a chain mediating role between perceived restorative design and user satisfaction. This study enriches the applied research on restorative design in the field of cultural architecture, reveals the psychological path through which restorative design in concert halls affects user satisfaction, and expands the theoretical boundaries of research on architectural environment experience. The conclusions provide a theoretical basis for optimizing the design of concert hall buildings and improving user experience, and also offer practical insights for the human-centered and high-quality development of cultural buildings in the context of green building. Full article

This contribution engages with perspectives, concerns and experiences of artists who staged either their own life stories or the life stories of others. At its core, it challenges the idea that staging a life story is solely an empowering, self-enabling and emancipatory aesthetic practice. By analysing two choreographies and their respective working conditions, as well as an interview with one of the choreographers, this article reflects on the commercialisation and neoliberal extraction of personal life stories. Further, this contribution revisits the concept of ‘cultural mobility’ with two case studies. The first one, mi vida en tránsito (2022), draws on the precariousness and vulnerability experienced in times of professional mobility in the Central European dance scene. Overseas (2022), the second case study, criticises the Eurocentric assumption that mobility is equally distributed across the globe. To analyse both case studies, this article establishes ‘cultural immobility’ as a scholarly perspective on how immobility relates to the production, performance, practice and circulation of cultural artefacts and artistic works. Full article

To address the limitations of the original Secretary Bird Optimization Algorithm (SBOA), such as insufficient population diversity, weak local exploitation ability, and a tendency to become trapped in local optima when solving complex optimization problems, this paper proposes a Multi-Strategy Improved Secretary Bird Optimization Algorithm (MISBOA). First, a chaotic elite initialization strategy is introduced to improve the quality and diversity of the initial population. Second, an adaptive spiral Lévy flight strategy is designed to enhance the balance between global exploration and local exploitation during the iterative process. Third, a dynamic neighborhood-guided mutation strategy is incorporated to maintain population diversity and improve convergence accuracy in the later search stage. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, MISBOA is comprehensively evaluated on the IEEE CEC2014, CEC2017, and CEC2020 benchmark suites. Experimental results demonstrate that MISBOA achieves superior convergence speed, optimization accuracy, and robustness compared with several representative metaheuristic algorithms. Furthermore, MISBOA is applied to Otsu-based multilevel threshold image segmentation. The segmentation performance is assessed using PSNR, FSIM, SSIM, and visual quality comparisons. The results indicate that MISBOA can generate more accurate and stable segmentation outcomes, demonstrating its strong potential for solving complex numerical optimization and artistic image segmentation problems. Full article

African migrants arriving in South Africa are finding themselves fighting a war on two fronts: the one they fled from and the one they are arriving to. As a collection of five individual narratives, this research goes behind the paintings, performances, and poetry to understand how not only migration and xenophobia, but also lives are embodied and negotiated through creative mediums, and how these creative mediums should also be emphasised as important epistemologies. Here, a journey will be taken through understanding xenophobia and otherness through the lens of language, and will look at how the arts, as a form of language, offer an alternative space and way of communicating in a space that discriminates based on communication (or lack thereof). Accordingly, the research further investigates (self-)representation from the individual and community, how public displays of pain are really felt by the artists sharing their vulnerability, and also how creative practices create a space to negotiate between the complexities of ‘home’ and the violent state of xenophobia arrived to in and beyond South Africa. Consequently, the study explores how trauma and experiences are not always visible on the body, but are carried through the mind, spirit, and generations that come later. Full article

Facial expression recognition (FER) is a well-established task in computer vision, yet its application to non-photorealistic domains, such as anime and manga, remains largely underexplored. The stylized, exaggerated, and often non-proportional facial features of illustrated characters present unique challenges for deep learning models trained predominantly on realistic imagery. In this work, we construct a balanced dataset of 3000 manga and anime face images spanning six emotion categories (Angry, Embarrassed, Happy, Manic–Euphoric, Sad, Scared) and conduct a systematic comparison of two major deep learning paradigms: Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and Vision Transformers (ViTs). Specifically, we evaluate ResNet-18, ResNet-50, ViT-B/16, and ViT-S/16 under four fine-tuning strategies: linear probing, partial fine-tuning, full fine-tuning, and progressive unfreezing, enabling a controlled comparison of both architectural families and transfer learning depth. Our results show that fine-tuning strategy significantly impacts performance: the best configuration (ViT-B/16 with progressive unfreezing) achieves 81.33% test accuracy (single run, seed 42), compared to 61.33% for the weakest linear probe baseline (ViT-S/16), a gap of 20.00 percentage points. To isolate architectural differences from strategy effects, we note that under full fine-tuning, the only strategy applied identically to all four models, ViT-S/16 (76.00%) outperforms ResNet-18 (74.44%) by 1.56 percentage points and ViT-B/16 (74.22%) by 1.78 percentage points, confirming a modest but consistent architectural advantage for Transformers once backbone adaptation is permitted. Vision Transformers benefit disproportionately from fine-tuning, and the relative ranking of architectures changes across fine-tuning regimes. Confusion matrix analysis reveals persistent cross-class confusion between visually similar emotions (e.g., Happy vs. Embarrassed), while the highly distinctive Manic–Euphoric category is consistently well recognized across all architectures. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to conduct a controlled multi-architecture, multi-strategy transfer learning benchmark specifically for FER in anime and manga, revealing findings that are not predictable from photographic FER literature and that carry direct practical implications for model selection in non-photorealistic visual recognition tasks. The anime and manga domain provides a uniquely controlled testbed for studying transfer learning under deliberate stylization, where the domain gap from realistic imagery is not an artifact of image degradation or environmental noise but a principled artistic choice with codified visual conventions; observing that fine-tuning depth dominates architectural choice in this domain suggests the same conclusion likely holds in other non-photorealistic transfer scenarios such as medical illustrations, architectural drawings, and synthetic training data. Full article

This study applies Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory as an analytical framework to examine the development of Peking opera along the Beijing Central Axis during the Qing Dynasty. It explores how the interaction between the court and folk fields contributed to the formation of its artistic form. From this perspective, social space is understood as a structured network of objective relations, shaped by the distribution of different forms of capital and the habitus of social actors. In the Qing Dynasty, as the core of political and cultural activities, the Peking opera field along the Beijing Central Axis was divided into two major sub-fields: the court field, centered around imperial power and subject to political discipline, and the folk field, market-oriented and following secular logic. By analyzing the differences between the two fields in terms of core power, spatial characteristics, capital distribution, and the habits of actors, this study reveals their two-way interaction achieved through the movement of artists, adaptation of repertoires, and capital conversion. The interaction between the two fields was not symmetrical: while the folk field contributed performative vitality and responsiveness to audience demand, the court provided institutional authority and symbolic legitimacy. Ultimately, in the dynamic balance between power and the market, the unique form of Peking opera, characterized by the integration of elegance and vulgarity, is refined. This study deepens our understanding of the interaction between spatial organization and artistic form, while further elucidating how power, culture, and art were structurally interconnected in the Qing Dynasty through the framework of field, capital, and habitus. In doing so, it offers both theoretical insights and empirical evidence for interdisciplinary research on the social and cultural functions of traditional art. Full article

The assessment of art learning outcomes has long relied on teachers’ subjective judgment, facing challenges such as inconsistent evaluation criteria and difficulty in multi-dimensional quantitative analysis. To address these issues, this study proposes a framework for the automatic assessment of art learning outcomes based on symmetry analysis of multi-dimensional aesthetic features. The model quantifies the symmetry between student works and instructional exemplars across three aesthetic dimensions: color distribution features (HSV color space histograms and dominant color composition), compositional features (visual center distribution and structural symmetry), and art movement style features (multi-layer Gram matrices from VGG-19 with PCA dimensionality reduction). Using publicly available artwork datasets, this study constructed Temporal Evolution Pairs (early and late works by the same artist) and Stylistic Inheritance Pairs (works by different artists within the same movement) to validate the model’s effectiveness. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed multi-dimensional feature fusion strategy achieves 87.6% accuracy in artist style evolution trajectory recognition and 82.3% accuracy in art movement style inheritance quantification, significantly outperforming baseline methods including SSIM (52.3%), VGG-fc features (68.9%), and single style loss (76.4%). Two in-depth case studies further validate the model’s quantitative capability: in analyzing Picasso’s stylistic evolution, the Mastery Index and the Creativity Divergence Index successfully captured the stylistic continuity of adjacent periods (Blue Period to Rose Period: the Mastery Index = 73.6) and the breakthrough innovation of cross-period transformations (Rose Period to Cubism: the Creativity Divergence Index = 82.7). t-SNE visualization of the feature space further revealed that deep style features can clearly distinguish different art movements and individual artists, with spatial distances between artists closely corresponding to stylistic affinities. This research provides new perspectives and tools for a computational framework with the potential for art education assessment practice. It is important to emphasize that the reported performance demonstrates the model’s ability to quantify stylistic relationships between artworks but does not yet demonstrate its validity for assessing student learning outcomes in real classroom settings. As noted, the current validation is based on art-historical consensus, and direct application to educational contexts will require further validation with actual student works and expert evaluation, which we plan to address in future work. Full article

Gayatri Spivak suggests that we turn our attention to the planet rather than to the globe. While she recognizes the planet in the species of alterity, she considers the globe to be an abstract quantity linked with the desire for control through digital quantification methods. This article discusses Claudia Bosse’s choreographic approach of re-imagining the human being as a planetary subject by investigating her dance performance WASTEland (2025), which took place on a piece of fallow land near Vienna Central Station. The choreographer turned this wasteland into her artistic laboratory and workplace for seven months. Using a mixed-method approach—combining performance analysis and discourse analysis—and drawing from planetary thinking and new materialism, I analyze Bosse’s artistic research, which raises the question of the relationship of precarious landscapes and the precarity of the bodies that perform (on) them, exposed to their climatic and ecological conditions as well as to their uncontrollable inhabitants, both human and other-than-human. How can wasteland and building sites be artistically activated? Does working and dancing on/with wasteland signify a withdrawal from urgent political issues or does this physical exposure enable a shift of perspective in regard to political miseries? Full article

This paper examines DisAbitanti, a participatory cultural initiative developed in Corigliano d’Otranto (Grecìa Salentina, Southern Italy) to explore how performative and community-based practices may contribute to sustainable and proximity tourism in small heritage towns. The study adopts an exploratory qualitative case study design, combining participatory action research and artistic research, drawing on participant observation, reflective field diaries, semi-structured interviews with local actors and participants, and analysis of project materials and relevant local planning documents. The analysis identifies a set of emerging patterns suggesting that the reactivation of abandoned or underused spaces through site-specific performances and collective storytelling is associated with forms of resident participation, reconfiguration of resident–visitor roles, and off-season cultural activation. These dynamics contribute to strengthening local identity and social cohesion, while highlighting the role of cultural practice in place-based governance processes. The analysis indicates that performative interventions can act as catalysts for the emergence of informal governance dynamics within the case study, connecting local associations, artists, residents, and cultural organizers. This claim is supported by empirically observed indications, including the number and diversity of actors involved and the emergence of new collaborative interactions. While the findings are not intended to be generalizable, they provide analytical insight into how performative practices may enable forms of place-based coordination around heritage use and spatial activation, linking heritage experience to habitability and spatial equity. The paper concludes that DisAbitanti offers a context-sensitive approach for translating sustainability principles—consistent with the UN 2030 Agenda—into situated tourism governance practices, with potential relevance for other small inner peripheral towns facing seasonality and spatial marginalization. Full article

While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) excel at image classification, their generalization across domains and robustness to nonlinear degradation remain challenges in art media classification (AMC). To address these challenges, this article presents a dual-stage analytical framework: first, an evaluation of seven discrete CNN architectures—ranging from VGG16 to ConvNeXt—subjected to domain shift using the New Spain (Mexico) Art Media Dataset; and second, a formal robustness analysis using an artistic corruption benchmark (Art-C). This benchmark simulates nonlinear degradations, including cracking, oxidized varnish, and pictorial abstraction. Our results demonstrate that while deep convolutional representations maintain acceptable transferability (accuracy $>70\%$), significant variability exists in architectural stability (mean 0.0607) under progressive stochastic degradation. Notably, Xception exhibited the highest robustness (Art-mCE = 0.8039), whereas VGG16 showed the greatest relative performance decay. Severity analysis further indicates that structural perturbations induce higher error rates than chromatic shifts, suggesting that CNNs are more sensitive to topological features (depth and residual connections) than color-space distributions. We provide quantitative evidence characterizing the relationship between architectural topology and empirical stability in non-natural image domains. Full article

Multi-threshold image segmentation is an important research topic in the fields of computer vision and image processing. Its core objective is to efficiently determine the optimal threshold combination within a high-dimensional and complex search space. However, as the number of thresholds and image complexity increase, the computational cost of traditional exhaustive search methods grows exponentially. Meanwhile, conventional swarm intelligence algorithms often suffer from unstable convergence, premature stagnation, and parameter sensitivity when dealing with high-dimensional composite functions. To address these issues, this paper proposes an enhanced optimization algorithm termed the Parrot Optimizer with Artistic Design Strategy (PO-ADS). The proposed method constructs a multi-strategy cooperative optimization framework that integrates an Evolution Feedback–Based Adaptive Control Strategy (EFACS), a Multi-Operator Cooperative Evolution Strategy (MOCES), and an Artistic Design Strategy (ADS). These strategies enable dynamic parameter adjustment, adaptive balance between global exploration and local exploitation, and structured perturbation enhancement mechanisms. Experimental results on the CEC2020 and CEC2022 benchmark suites demonstrate that PO-ADS significantly outperforms seven state-of-the-art optimization algorithms across different dimensional settings in terms of optimization accuracy, convergence speed, and stability. The Friedman test results show that, on the CEC2020 benchmark suite, PO-ADS achieves average ranks of 1.72 (30-dimensional) and 1.85 (50-dimensional), both statistically superior to the comparative algorithms. Furthermore, PO-ADS is applied to multi-threshold image segmentation based on the Otsu criterion. The results indicate that the proposed method achieves optimal or near-optimal performance in terms of SSIM, PSNR, FSIM, and objective function values. Overall, the experimental findings confirm that PO-ADS not only possesses strong numerical optimization capability but also demonstrates robust and practical applicability in real-world image segmentation tasks. Full article

Analyzing music similarity in large catalogs is challenging because people perceive music differently and important details are found in audio, text, and metadata. This article introduces a multimodal framework that uses an ontology to make music similarity and recommendation more explainable. The framework brings together learned features from audio, lyrics, and other text with structured metadata in a shared similarity space, and then improves ranking with a music ontology that captures relationships between songs, artists, genres, and moods. The design works with any encoder that creates fixed-size features. This study uses strong neural audio and text encoders, mainly based on transformers. This approach allows the system to handle different input types while staying reliable across datasets. This study tests the framework on several open music and audio datasets using content-based retrieval tasks and standard ranking measures. In addition to Configurations C1–C4, this study includes an external content-based reference baseline based on conventional MIR audio descriptors. This baseline represents a signal-level retrieval approach that models complementary aspects of the audio signal, such as timbre, harmony, and spectral characteristics, and is evaluated under the same retrieval protocol as the main framework. It is included to provide an external comparison point outside the proposed C1–C4 design. Compared to audio-only and non-ontological variants within the same framework, the proposed multimodal and ontology-guided configurations achieve better precision, recall, and mean average precision, and also cover more rare content. Visualizations and case studies show that combining different data types and using ontology-based reranking can improve performance and make results easier to interpret. This work lays the groundwork for explainable, cognitively informed music recommendation systems and points to future work in modeling user behavior over time and adapting to different cultures. Full article

The paper examines the poetics of graphomania as a productive aesthetic device within the Russian literary tradition, focusing primarily on Velimir Khlebnikov and extending the analysis to figures such as Fedor Dostoevsky’s Captain Lebyadkin and real authors such as Eduard Limonov, Dmitrii Prigov, and Sasha Sokolov. Building on the article’s central insight that Khlebnikov’s “bad writing,” stylistic shifts, and violations of canonical norms constitute not a defect but a sui generis artistic strategy, the study situates these techniques within broader historical and theoretical frameworks, including the Formalist concepts of parody, junior branch, and heteroglossic subcodes of poetic culture. The article traces the way Khlebnikov’s dynamic alternation of heterogeneous linguistic, prosodic, and generic registers produces a complex, unstable but grandstanding authorial “I” aligned with the traditional figure of the poet-as-character and the culturally embedded myth of the Poet–Tsar. Furthermore, it maps a genealogy of “graphomaniac” writing from the avant-garde to postmodernism, demonstrating how later authors transform Khlebnikov’s innovations—alternately amplifying, parodying, or ironizing them. Through close readings and extensive intertextual contextualization, the article argues that graphomania functions as a critical mechanism for destabilizing aesthetic orthodoxies, exposing, performing and producing literary authority, and redefining the boundaries between norm and deviation, author and character, poetic freedom and canonical constraint. Full article

This review provides a comprehensive overview of the most adopted 3D surveying techniques in Cultural Heritage, offering practical guidance for the selection of appropriate methods when three-dimensional documentation of artworks is required. The analysis focuses on the most effective technologies for the 3D documentation of sites and objects of artistic value, with selection criteria primarily centred on non-invasiveness, given the uniqueness and cultural significance of the case studies, and the instrument flexibility, a crucial requirement for non-transportable items. A broad spectrum of 3D techniques is currently available for the multiscale diagnostic investigation of artworks, providing information at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. This review reports on the state of the art of such systems and evaluates the main characteristics of each technology in relation to its applicability in the heritage field. Particular attention is given to highlighting advantages and limitations, and to assessing performance in terms of resolution, gauge volume/area, acquisition time, and cost. In addition, the review discusses exemplary cases in which 3D methods are integrated with other analytical techniques to enable a more comprehensive understanding of the object under investigation. Finally, recent studies are examined to identify the most suitable approaches and the specific requirements for the digitization of real-world heritage assets. Full article

Out-of-school tutoring, as a form of privatized compensatory education beyond formal schooling, has become increasingly prevalent, yet its role in fostering students’ holistic competencies remains insufficiently examined. Drawing on a student engagement perspective, this study investigates how different types of out-of-school tutoring, including academic, arts, and sports tutoring, are associated with the development of students’ holistic competencies. Data were drawn from a survey of 704 Grade 10 students in central China. Tutoring engagement during junior secondary school was measured using a self-developed Likert-scale instrument, while holistic competencies were obtained from official Comprehensive Quality Assessment records. The findings reveal differentiated effects across tutoring types. Academic tutoring shows no significant association with academic performance or other dimensions of holistic competence. In contrast, sports tutoring is positively associated with physical and mental health, and arts tutoring demonstrates a significant positive relationship with artistic literacy. Regarding engagement characteristics, simply increasing the number of programs or financial investment yields limited benefits. Instead, time investment and cognitive involvement in sports tutoring, as well as affective involvement in arts tutoring, are positively related to specific dimensions of holistic competence. These results suggest that the effectiveness of out-of-school tutoring depends less on participation amount and more on the nature of students’ engagement. The study highlights the uneven developmental returns of compensatory education and calls for a more balanced and development-oriented approach to tutoring participation. Full article