RCAAP Repository

In this work, we established the foundations of a framework with the goal to build an end-to-end naturalistic expressive listening agent. The project was split into modules for recognition of the user’s paralinguistic and nonverbal expressions, prediction of the agent’s reactions, synthesis of the agent’s expressions and data recordings of nonverbal conversation expressions. First, a multimodal multitask deep learning-based emotion classification system was built along with a rule-based visual expression detection system. Then several sequence prediction systems for nonverbal expressions were implemented and compared. Also, an audiovisual concatenation-based synthesis system was implemented. Finally, a naturalistic, dyadic emotional conversation database was collected. We report here the work made for each of these modules and our planned future improvements.

Developed for the context of the V Narrative, Media, and Cognition Colloquium, this article focuses on the narratives generated by the works of Juliana Huxtable and DeForrest Brown Jr. With the intention of focusing on marginal productions, and using “Outwardly Coiling Context Collapse” by DeForrest Brown Jr. and “THERE ARE CERTAIN FACTS THAT CAN NOT BE DISPUTED” by Juliana Huxtable as case studies, this paper tries to understand what narratives try to be asserted, and how are they put in practice by these works. With the help of the contributions made by Patrícia Castello Branco and Levinas, the article concludes that the works of the artist’s move towards the creation of collective narratives with a clear social impact that simultaneously tries to steer away from a dominant historical narrative.

 In this paper, we intend to reflect on how audiovisual performance forces us to rethink the concept of narrativity. After a brief review on the fundamentals of narrative theory and audiovisual performance, we will analyse three cases that illustrate different manifestations of narrativity in audiovisual performance.

This article stands for innovative learning opportunities to social inclusion by film education. The theoretical model is a combined structure coming from approaches and projects of social inclusion by film education. The aim is to describe and analyze the film education process in a project outside school. This research is based on a participant observation research conducted on children in a Brazilian slum. Cinema, as other art forms, is a political and ideological tool that can be used with different purposes. Film education is a strong mediator to facilitate transformative learning, changing one’s dysfunctional views and beliefs about oneself and the world by revising their frames of reference (Mezirow & Taylor, 2009). Films have a unique ability to promote empathy towards a role model, and promote resilience in situations similar to those the role model goes through. Furthermore, media, such as films, is capable of reaching people that might otherwise be uninterested (Buckingham, 2007; Gonnet, 2007; Silverstone, 2005; UNESCO, 2013).  

The figure of Queen Nzinga Mbandi continues to be appreciated in fictional and/or historical narratives as a myth of postcolonial Angolan identity, allowing a continuous approach as to what concerns the modes of cultural representation. In this article, the works of Manuel Pedro Pacavira, Nzinga Mbandi (1975), Pepetela, A gloriosa família: o tempo dos flamengos (1997) and José Eduardo Agualusa, A Rainha Ginga e de como os africanos inventaram o mundo (2014) will be analyzed, as these authors, in different moments of the recent Angolan history, look at this emblematic figure, drawing on historical information produced by Cavazzi, Cadornega or Jean Louis Castilhon, among others. The works now in analysis reiterate the mythical figure of resistance to the European invaders, which was Nzinga Mbandi, or a strong orientation towards the nationalist exaltation supported by it, an evident strategy which, by the rescue of figures and cultural practices, is defined as a means to affirm negritude.

At the border between information and entertainment, memes and newsgames aresome of the news formats that, made viral in social networks, complement the informational experience and compete with the traditional news media in constructing alternative readings of the real. If in the light of Bakhtine (apud Ponte, 2004) journalism can be understood as a secondary discursive genre that feeds on primary genres, how to understand the circulation of these discourses produced from journalistic events in social networks? On the other hand, how are these narratives appropriated by the media? What functions do they play in media discourse? In this article we present some examples of products created from events of political impact for than register, by the analysis of a set of news stories, how the digital press, in the Iberian context, make use of them. The purpose of this article is to contribute to the reflection on how the information media relate to these new narratives. 

No summary/description provided

Artificial intelligence is quietly shaping social structures and private lives. Although it promises parity and efficiency, its computational processes mirror biases of existing power even as often-proprietary data practices and cultural perceptions of computational magic obscure those influences. However, intersectionality—which foregrounds an analysis of institutional power and incorporates queer, feminist, and critical race theories—can help to rethink artificial intelligence. An intersectional framework can be used to analyze the biases and problems built into existing artificial intelligence, as well as to uncover alternative ethics from its counter-histories. This paper calls for the application of intersectional strategies to artificial intelligence at every level, from data to design to implementation, from technologist to user. Drawing on intersectional theories, the research argues these strategies are polyvocal, multimodal, and experimental—suggesting that community-focused and artistic practices can help imagine AI’s intersectional possibilities and help begin to address its biases

In the last years, there has been a surge in AI-powered products. Often marketed as "free", these services operate as hooks to lure unsuspecting users into voluntarily giving up data about every aspect of their life. Their data is the primary fuel of surveillance capitalism, a new economic system that exclusively benefits so-called Big Tech organisations at the expense of personal privacy and freedom of choice. This paper argues the ways these AI-powered products are being imagined and designed is further generalising a kind of, "enframing" that encourages a bureaucratic relationship with the world disguised as (a false sense of) augmented agency. This paper shows that technologically informed philosophical reflections can contribute to getting ourselves back into the feedback loop of technological mediation by helping us recognise our "becoming" with technologies as a design process.

The incorporation of algorithmic procedures into the automation of image production has been gradual, but has reached critical mass over the past century, especially with the advent of photography, the introduction of digital computers and the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). Due to the increasingly significant influence algorithmic processes have on visual media, there has been an expansion of the possibilities as to how images may behave, and a consequent struggle to define them. This algorithmic turnhighlights inner tensions within existing notions of the image, namely raising questions regarding the autonomy of machines, author- and viewer- ship, and the veracity of representations. In this sense, algorithmic images hover uncertainly between human and machine as producers and interpreters of visual information, between representational and non-representational, and between visible surface and the processes behind it. This paper gives an introduction to fundamental internal discrepancies which arise within algorithmically produced images, examined through a selection of relevant artistic examples. Focusing on the theme of uncertainty, this investigation considers how algorithmic images contain aspects which conflict with the certitude of computation, and how this contributes to a difficulty in defining images.

This paper presents a novel descriptive model for agency in videogames as communication. Literature pertaining to interactive works including videogames has identified the need to overcome dyadic perspectives of communication in such works. Research specifically to do with agency has called for agency to no longer be confused with freedom of action, for an integrated perspective of the player and the system, and for that relationship to be viewed as a conversation. The transactional model in this paper achieves this by proposing a nested hierarchy of levels of communication that operate as an implicit contract, negotiated between the system and the player, where the object of the transaction is bio-costs, effected through the signalling of the attainability of understandings. The paper describes research antecedents, a research agenda, the basis for the model, the model itself, examples of how the model can be used to describe videogame designs, and future research.

The goal of this research is to characterize representative performances by famous pianists in order to determine main influential trends in performance, derived specifically from traditional piano practices referred to as National Piano Schools. Previous research (Lourenço, 2005, 2007) has shown strong musical correlation of particular characteristics, namely the aesthetic, the technical, the historic and the repertoire. The concept of piano interpretation school is a useful concept for analyzing the universe of piano performance. Piano pedagogy literature of each European National Piano School has been analyzed together with an empirical audio analysis of recordings through a check-list survey. Overall the main National Piano Schools consist of three essential branches: the Russian school; the German school; the French school. The identification of National Piano Schools provides a powerful framework of study and an awareness of Europe's elusive music heritage and it main influences. Furthermore, as pianists use their whole body to enhance their communication of the music's spiritual, emotional and dramatic essence, this study also aims to contribute into research on performance practice.

The generative art changed our concepts of image and art. They are so embedded in they way we can create new visual artistic expression. This paper will present some ideas regarding generative art and introduce Untitled*, piece developed using those principles.

Television and Cinema present specific behaviour and language in relation to reality. If film focuses on its proximity to artistic practices, and this reflects the viewer’s relationship with the film, television, in turn, seeks in directness or the transposition of the real to the imaginary, the key to its success, the audience. We all see the possibilities that television has for viewers. Even those most aware of the various con- straints, and who claim themselves to be not influenced, come under the hypnotic power of the television screen. The quality of the programming continues to decline, succumbing to the claim that television channels have to get into the audience “ratings”.

No summary/description provided

This review refers to an artistic residency which took place at LCD LAB -  CAAA at Guimarães, in March, exploring a strategy for media art called Media Displacement. The text introduces the strategy very briefly and describes the residency's organization, structure, processses and the results produced.

No summary/description provided

No summary/description provided

This brief review explores the evolving relationship between the music and the image up to newer art forms. From the experimental cinema of the early 20th century, among other things related to music and to the attempts to sound the filmic image, to the success and flooding of, at first, the cinematic image and then the television image (with the production of countless musical and music related movies in the first case, with the creation of TV networks dedicated to the "music to see" in the second), up to their assimilation and processing in the artistic field, today it happens to witness the neutralization of all the examples of union between music and image because of excessive audio-visual production. In this situation, the art can, as in the past, intervene to bring out the quality of the music or the visual, or both in real complete works, by renewing the language and elevating it from a subculture level to a more authoritative one, as well as "positive" for new art markets

The foundation of painting on its sources or “influences” serves to achieve its integration in a group of reference from which painting, any true painting that aims at the present, can and should take part. This work aims at an updating of the analysis these influences from the means that serve as references to the pictorial analysis and creation, the images (reproductions) and the paintings themselves, by crossing two major references of Art History and Modern Painting (Aby Warburg and Serge Poliakoff).