Search Results (29)

This article traces the historical evolution of mural painting as a medium of cultural expression from prehistoric cave art to contemporary street interventions. Adopting a diachronic and interdisciplinary approach, it investigates how muralism has developed across civilizations in relation to techniques, symbolic systems, social function, and its embeddedness in architectural and urban contexts. The analysis is structured around key historical periods using emblematic case studies to examine the interplay between materiality, iconography, and socio-political meaning. From sacred enclosures and civic monuments to post-industrial walls and digital projections, murals reflect shifting cultural paradigms and spatial dynamics. This study emphasizes how mural painting, once integrated into sacred and imperial architecture, has become a tool for public participation, protests, and urban storytelling. Particular attention is paid to the evolving relationship between wall painting and the spaces it inhabits, highlighting the transition from permanence to ephemerality and from monumentality to immediacy. This article contributes to mural studies by offering a comprehensive framework for understanding the technical and symbolic transformations of the medium while proposing new directions for research in the context of digital urbanism and cultural memory. Full article

This article analyzes the significance of the ruins and remnants of the Soviet Army in Borne Sulinowo, a former secret Soviet military base in Western Pomerania (Poland), as a source of inspiration for performance artists. This study draws from a variety of theoretical frameworks, including performance art theory, new materialism, and the thing theory. Additionally, it draws from the ideas of Carl Lavery, Richard Gough, Ann Laura Stoler, and Georg Simmel. This text delves into the notion that the transient character of performance art mirrors the fleeting nature of power, particularly in the context of the dissolution of the Soviet regime. Following the Polish reacquisition of the site in the early 1990s, artists such as Władysław Kaźmierczak and Brian Connolly transformed found objects and the decaying environment into performance art. This article analyzes performances such as Kaźmierczak’s кoнец фильма (The End of the Movie) and Connolly’s Frieze Frame. It discusses how these works captured the emotional and intellectual responses to the remnants of military occupation. The performances demonstrate the interplay between decay, memory, and historical consciousness, employing the ruins as a medium for reflecting on the collapse of Soviet influence in Poland and the shifting geopolitical landscape. Full article

This article looks at the ways in which satirical postcards provided political commentary at a pivotal moment in the Franco-Russian alliance. Often overlooked as a medium of communication, turn-of-the-20th-century postcards reflected contemporary cultural values and were an important art form. Here, the focus is on postcards created by Orens and Mille, two of the best caricaturists of the day, as their work offered scathing critiques of Russia’s constant need for financial assistance from its ally and point to the ways in which the public was growing weary of these demands. Closely examining some of their postcards shows how such sentiments were expressed in visual form while also revealing the power of ephemeral materials as historical sources. Full article

This article explores the transformative potential of Artful Ageing as a conceptual framework for enriching experiences in later life. By synthesising Manning’s theory of minor gestures with Basting’s creative care approach, the article demonstrates how Artful Ageing fundamentally reconfigures our understanding of the ageing experience. The findings indicate that this framework transforms ageing from a narrative of decline into a dynamic process of becoming, where physical and existential spaces intertwine to create opportunities for emancipatory experiences. The transformative power emerges through what Manning terms “art-as-practice” and Basting describes as “moments of awe”—small, ephemeral encounters that carry profound potential for connection and meaning-making. This study reveals how Artful Ageing transforms conventional care environments into cultural spaces where creativity becomes embedded in everyday interactions rather than isolated to scheduled activities. The author identifies how this approach enables a shift from outcome-oriented interventions focused primarily on physical health to process-oriented engagements that honour the non-rational and in-between elements of ageing lives. The research demonstrates that when implemented, Artful Ageing transforms not only individual experiences but also relational dynamics and institutional structures, challenging biopolitical agendas embedded in current regimes of active ageing. This transformative framework ultimately offers new pathways for understanding and supporting meaningful engagement throughout later life. Full article

Group recommender systems aim to provide recommendations to a group of users as a whole rather than to individual users. Nonetheless, prevailing methodologies predominantly aggregate user preferences without adequately accounting for the unique individual intents influencing item selection. This oversight becomes particularly problematic in the context of ephemeral groups formed by users with limited shared historical interactions, which exacerbates the data sparsity challenge. In this paper, we introduce a novel Disentangled Self-Attention Group Recommendation framework with auto-regressive contrastive learning method, termed DAGA. This framework not only employs disentangled neural architectures to reconstruct the multi-head self-attention network but also incorporates modules for mutual information optimization via auto-regressive contrastive learning to better leverage the context information of user–item and group–item historical interactions, obtaining group representations and further executing recommendations. Specifically, we develop a disentangled model comprising multiple components to individually assess and interpret the diverse intents of users and their impacts on collective group preferences towards items. Building upon this model, we apply the principle of contrastive mutual information maximization to train our framework, aligning the group representations with the corresponding user representations derived from each factor of the disentangled model, thereby enriching the contextual understanding required to effectively address the challenges posed by ephemeral groups. Empirical evaluations conducted on three real-world benchmark datasets substantiate the superior performance of our proposed framework over existing state-of-the-art group recommendation approaches. Full article

This manuscript investigates the cultural and educational dimensions of murals and graffiti in the ruins of the Aliko Hotel on Naxos Island. Moving beyond their aesthetic value, these artworks are examined as conduits for complex sociocultural and educational discourses. Employing semiotic analysis, particularly informed by Roland Barthes’ conceptual framework, the study offers a multi-layered interpretation of the significance of street art. A systematic approach guided the empirical data collection, entailing the careful selection and categorisation of 76 photographs, eventually honed down to 21 key images for detailed analysis. This set, comprising 6 murals and 15 graffiti pieces, was subjected to meticulous examination to discern both dominant themes and motifs (‘studium’) and the elements evoking personal connections (‘punktum’), thereby facilitating emotional and intellectual engagement. The methodology of the study is tailored to uncover the collective narratives encapsulated within these visual forms, as well as the individual responses they provoke. It probes how personal interpretations are influenced by the viewers’ beliefs and backgrounds, thereby expanding the semiotic analysis to encompass both shared and individual meanings. This balanced analytical approach deepens the understanding of visual expressions as dynamic interactions between the artwork and its audience. It underscores the transformative role of street art in urban environments and its contribution to public art discourse. The impending demolition of the Hotel Aliko ruins underscores the ephemeral nature of street art. The murals and graffiti, as transient custodians of cultural and social narratives, accentuate the fragile nature of this cultural heritage. This critical moment underscores the importance of documenting and preserving such art forms and the stories they encapsulate, highlighting their significant role in shaping community identity and cultural education. Full article

This article examines Jesuit representation of the exploits of Francis Xavier, ‘the Apostle of the East’, in celebration of his canonization in 1622 and in the Jesuit campaign to have him canonized prior to that. Pageants in Madrid, Lisbon and Antwerp are examined, along with prior pictorial depictions of Francis’ miracles and activities, taking into account the gulf between the political realities of proselytization in the Portuguese territories of influence in the East and the hagiography of 1622. The work of Rubens, the Portuguese painter André Reinoso and three Spanish Golden Age poet/playwrights are analyzed, exploring variance in the application of a universal Jesuit aesthetic founded on the melding of the Classical and the Catholic in response to the local conditions for which each ephemeral event and work of art were produced. Full article

Recently, a notable change has occurred in how street art murals are perceived by art history and the general public, with a growing recognition of their social and cultural significance and a new focus on preserving the most representative modern urban murals for future generations. An interesting case study is constituted by the “UBUNTU” mural (Ivan Pontevia and Daniele Castagnetti, Reggio Emilia, 2018), whose appearance has radically changed in a few years. Indeed, the intense and direct exposure to sunlight as well as the environmental and polluting agents have induced the bleaching and fading of the original highly fluorescent hues. To investigate the degradation processes that are occurring, five micro-samples were collected from different fluorescent-coloured areas and analysed by a combined approach based on µ-Raman and Surface Enhanced Raman Spectroscopy (SERS), High Performance Liquid Chromatography coupled with Diode Array Detector and mass spectrometry (HPLC-DAD and HPLC-MS), and Pyrolysis Gas Chromatography coupled with Mass Spectrometry (Py-GC-MS). The analytical protocol applied allowed us to disclose the painting materials used by the artist and fully characterise the ageing phenomena occurring in the mural that are possibly responsible for its colour ephemerality. Full article

The ubiquity of Android smartphones makes them targets of sophisticated malware, which maintain long-term stealth, particularly by offloading attack steps to benign apps. Such malware leaves little to no trace in logs, and the attack steps become difficult to discern from benign app functionality. Endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems provide live forensic capabilities that enable anomaly detection techniques to detect anomalous behavior in application logs after an app hijack. However, this presents a challenge, as state-of-the-art EDRs rely on device and third-party application logs, which may not include evidence of attack steps, thus prohibiting anomaly detection techniques from exposing anomalous behavior. While, theoretically, all the evidence resides in volatile memory, its ephemerality necessitates timely collection, and its extraction requires device rooting or app repackaging. We present VEDRANDO, an enhanced EDR for Android that accomplishes (i) the challenge of timely collection of volatile memory artefacts and (ii) the detection of a class of stealthy attacks that hijack benign applications. VEDRANDO leverages memory forensics and app virtualization techniques to collect timely evidence from memory, which allows uncovering attack steps currently uncollected by the state-of-the-art EDRs. The results showed that, with less than 5% CPU overhead compared to normal usage, VEDRANDO could uniquely collect and fully reconstruct the stealthy attack steps of ten realistic messaging hijack attacks using standard anomaly detection techniques, without requiring device or app modification. Full article

In this article, we develop a tentative philosophy to orchestrate and support possibilities for artful ageing. This effort argues that older adults need a broader range of opportunities to explore the manifold ephemeral, non-rational, and in-between elements of an ageing life. The philosophy is rooted in the notion that older adults need space (literally and metaphorically) to explore and process their existence and that engaging in such processes can entail emancipatory effects in everyday life. The perspective unfolded throughout the article is a philosophical venture, or, rather, a preliminary work, developing the concept of artful ageing as a tool applicable in rethinking and broadening the range of activities occurring in institutional settings dedicated to older adults. Furthermore, the perspective also presents a critical stance towards normative footings and biopolitical agendas embedded in current regimes of active ageing. Artful ageing represents the ambition to enable and support artful lives, events, and activities among residents and participants in care homes and other contexts. We argue that physical and existential spaces are closely intertwined entities and that initiatives aimed at maintaining adequate measures of openness, ambiguity, and sensory intimacy, i.e., events that allow for the experience of metaphorical cracks, can afford artful pockets in which to reside for a while, seek refuge, recharge, stray from the beaten track, and obtain an always partial feeling of emancipation. In qualifying the concept of artful ageing, we hope to open new avenues to contemplate and subsequently initiate activities for older adults that are not just orientated towards physical health in later life. At the same time, our ambition is to develop a critical perspective aimed at challenging existing notions of successful ageing in (re)invigorating the importance of artful processes and experiences as an element inherent to successful ageing, as well. Full article

This article uses collaborative auto/ethnography to explore the circulation and potentiality of affect in the live performances and archive of Pretty Porky and Pissed Off (PPPOd), a Toronto-based queer fat activist performance art collective active during the late 1990s and mid-2000s. Drawing on video and audio recordings of five PPPOd performances alongside other performance ephemera and a series of conversations relating to these archival objects among the article’s three authors, we identify and theorize our affective responses to and situated recollections of these performances, both in their current form as archival objects and as historical live events. We argue that PPPOd’s archival objects/live performances disrupt the constellation of affects that constitute fat hate (e.g., fear, loathing, shame) and set in motion more affirmative affects (e.g., playfulness, pride, desire, love) that contribute to micro-worldings and prefigurative fat politics, as ephemeral as these might be. In capturing these fleeting moments of radical possibility, PPPOd’s activism and archive offer opportunities for touching and feeling a future where fat lives are more livable. Full article

Blockchain has become an integral part of various IoT applications, and it has been successful in boosting performance in various aspects. Applying blockchain as a trust solution for Internet-of-Things is a viable approach. The immutability of blockchain is essential to prevent anyone from manipulating registered IoT data transactions for illegitimate benefits. However, the increasing abuse of blockchain storage negatively impacts the development of IoT blockchain and potential stakeholders are discouraged from joining the IoT data sharing as the IoT data recorded on the blockchain contains private information. Hence, it is crucial to find ways to redact data stored on the IoT blockchain, which is also supported by relevant laws and regulations. Policy-based chameleon hash is useful primitive for blockchain rewriting, allowing the modifier to rewrite the transaction if they possess enough rewriting privileges that satisfy the access policy. However, this approach lacks traceability, which can be exploited by malicious modifiers to grant unauthorized user modification privileges for personal gain. To overcome this deficiency, we introduce a new design of policy-based chameleon hash with black-box traceability (PCHT), which enables the authority to identify the set of producers responsible for generating the pirate decoder. Specifically, PCHT is constructed by practical attribute-based encryption with black-box traceability (ABET) and collision-resistant chameleon hash with ephemeral trapdoor (CHET). After modeling PCHT, we present its concrete instantiation and rigorous security proofs. Finally, a PCHT-based redactable transaction scheme for IoT blockchain is given. Compared to the state-of-the-art mutable blockchain solutions, our scheme provides fine-grained blockchain rewriting and black-box traceability. The evaluation results demonstrate that our scheme is efficient and practical while still ensuring that no computational overhead is placed on IoT devices with limited computing resources. Full article

In urban centers around the world, street art has become an unavoidable element of the landscape. Located in west-central Portugal, Aveiro is no exception to this trend, and the art form has been used to enhance the cultural vibrancy of a place where tourism is one of the most important economic pillars. Seeking to look beyond the value of street art as a tourism product, by combining observations and photos from field research with bibliographic and documental data, as well as residents’ responses on social media, this paper adopts an autoethnographic approach to offer an exploratory, (self-)reflexive perspective on how street art has evolved into a phenomenon that has contributed to locals’ cultural identity (re)construction. Drawing on Jan Assmann’s cultural memory theory, it is argued that street art can be understood as a form of communicative memory, an ephemeral vehicle into our history, knowledge, traditions and practices, one that, by retelling the story of who we are, stimulates awareness of selfhood and a feeling of belonging to a place and a community. Full article

The paper aims to analyze, on one hand, the evolution and interpretation of graffiti and street art phenomenon in the Romanian capital, Bucharest, and at international level, and on the other hand how this subculture is related to aspects of culture and heritage. The analysis of the evolution followed by graffiti and street art in Bucharest is doubled by the investigation of the messages transmitted in relation to the national and local culture and history, as street art may be seen as an efficient tool contributing to local cultural identity building. The methods used rely on a complex approach, combining observation and photos from field research, documentation, and data collection from different organizations and online communities. Street art works have various positive effects on the urban landscape, including in relation to culture and heritage in time. The results demonstrate that in Bucharest, street art contributes to highlighting mainly the key-moments and the personalities in culture and history that contribute to shaping a part of cultural identity. Full article

The application of the systemic approach in architecture aims to promote an integral, holistic view of the architectural design process. The literature reviewed calls for models with systemic behavior, and for these models to be applied in concrete cases. This paper proposes an original approach, using the foundation matrix and the constructive logic matrix. Both matrices are part of a developing model that is being tested on a case study. The work presented here had two objectives: to check this part of the model and gain more knowledge about the model itself. The selected case study, the 2005 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, is a contemporary ephemeral construction of significant architectural interest. It is a reciprocal frame structure, linked to the construction history. The methodology used was a systemic analysis. In the first phase of the analysis, the reciprocal structures documented historically in the West were reviewed. The other two phases corresponded to the application of the two model matrices. Conceptual diagramming was used in all phases of the process. The results show the importance of the study of historical building solutions. The use of matrices facilitates the identification and understanding of the operations carried out in the design process of the case study. Matrices favor the organization of concepts and relationships from through a systemic approach. Understanding generation operations in an integrated way leads to a type of knowledge (relational knowledge) that allows architecture to be thought about in a holistic way. This makes the systemic view of art and technology as a unit possible, attending to the whole complexity of architectural thinking. Full article