We conducted an experiment to test whether the use of the golden ratio as a design guideline in interactive products has aesthetic value, that is, whether it influences users’ aesthetic evaluation of the product and their preferences for it over other product of the same type. We studied two types of products (mobile phones and web pages), each was wireframed in two design versions and then man...

The proportion and visibility of Brazilian women and particularly the specific images of Brazil and Brazilians in the Portuguese imaginary have contributed to the construction of new versions of stigma and stereotypes surrounding them. Mainstream images of Brazilian women have incorporated prejudices about the sensuality of Creole women who are reminiscent of the Portuguese colonial imaginary. ...

It may seem a little surprising to consider Kenneth Slessor, who was born in the year 1901, in a context of aestheticism and fin-de-siècle writing. Such a procedure may seem more appropriate to earlier Australian authors such as Christopher Brennan, Hugh McCrae or Victor Daley. Nevertheless, the influence of the Aesthetic Movement, of certain nineteenth-century French authors, directly or via E...

The field of neuroaesthetics has gained in popularity in recent years but also attracted criticism from the perspectives both of the humanities and the sciences. In an effort to consolidate research in the field, we characterize neuroaesthetics as the cognitive neuroscience of aesthetic experience, drawing on long traditions of research in empirical aesthetics, on the one hand, and cognitive ne...

Although existing research has established that aesthetic pleasure and aesthetic interest are two distinct positive aesthetic responses, empirical research on aesthetic preferences usually considers only aesthetic liking to capture participants' aesthetic response. This causes some fundamental contradictions in the literature; some studies find a positive relationship between easy-to-process st...

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) we investigated whether a culturally defined context modulates the neurocognitive processing of artworks. We presented subjects with paintings from the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and labeled them as being either from the MoMA or from an adult education center. Irrespective of aesthetic appreciation, we found higher neural activati...

The paper is departing from a position in aesthetic theory, in which order of some sort is considered a contributing factor to aesthetic value. It is likewise departing from a position, that generative art, drawing on rule based systems and algorithms, is a legitimate art practice. Instead of generating order by falling back on an artistic master mind or the sensibility and skill of an artist, ...

We describe a corpus-based poetry generation system which uses templates to construct poems according to given constraints on rhyme, meter, stress, sentiment, word frequency and word similarity. Moreover, the software constructs a mood for the day by analysing newspaper articles; uses this to determine both an article to base a poem on and a template for the poem; creates an aesthetic based on ...

What sets a great music performance apart? In this study, we addressed this question through an examination of value judgments in written criticism of recorded performance. One hundred reviews of recordings of Beethoven's piano sonatas, published in the Gramophone between 1934 and 2010, were analyzed through a three-step qualitative analysis that identified the valence (positive/negative) expre...

Humans uniquely appreciate aesthetics, experiencing pleasurable responses to complex stimuli that confer no clear intrinsic value for survival. However, substantial variability exists in the frequency and specificity of aesthetic responses. While pleasure from aesthetics is attributed to the neural circuitry for reward, what accounts for individual differences in aesthetic reward sensitivity re...