From Art Image to Video/Comic-Image Learning. The Video Spot Stay at Home

From the Covid-19 health emergency entered our lives, the web continues to alleviate moments of isolation with ironic memes, photos and videos that, despite having been considered an irreverence to the masterpieces of Art and/or one of the many uses of irony to exorcise fear, they have favored the staging of video-graphic products with a strong ‘humor' component. Within these premises, in the context of graphic design, this paper will evaluate aspects as the analysis of fashion environment as expressive language of living indoor during Covid-19 pandemic;the audiovisual languages and compositional criteria for the creation and multimedia communication of a video-graphic spot on Stay at home communication campaign. The video-graphic products were analyzed on the basis of: relationship between ‘humor' message and supporting artwork;integration between image and photo-cinematography;figurative languages generative of graphic signs;duration of audiovisual spot;sound component as key to emotional reading;communication strategies. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

@Re-Art Archive Experience. Innovation and Beauty

The forced closure of cultural realities, dictated by the Coronavirus emergency, generated new needs for urgent solutions. Italy has heavily suffered as everything has been interrupted: exhibitions, trade fairs and museums, between more or less hard lockdowns and #iorestoacasa. From the spread of the virus, that thanks to vaccines sooner or later will begin to wane, to the spread of beauty that will help us revive the world. This is the path to follow and Italy a generator of beauty since ancient times, will have to be at the forefront of this mission. The reason is soon to be said. The aesthetic emotion brings man closer: the first sensation we experience in front of something beautiful - whatever it is - is that of not being alone. To encourage the meeting of beauty and people, many have done their utmost, let's think for example of the campaigns #museichiusimuseiaperti, #laculturanonsiferma, #MuseumFromHome, so well organized as to successfully substitute real life visits to museums and galleries, at least for the moment. Thanks to digital technology that allows activities to be carried out in places of art and culture and the distribution of content by all the main cultural institutions through social media. For the first time, the doors of the Web open wide and present to the public, through viewing rooms and virtual exhibition spaces, shows of all kinds. Broadening the horizon, the same choice is made by art galleries around the globe. Changing only the exhibition spaces, no longer physical but digital. Thanks to immersive 3D technology, one can enjoy the sensations and atmospheres of traditional visits. Therefore, the cultural mission of museums is not interrupted, rather it is strengthened and new projects are born exclusively for the Web that follow the themes of the moment. The @Re-Art project fits into this scenario which aims to combine the dynamism of multimedia and digital means of communication (webinar, podcast, social network, virtual tour, and exhibitions intended for the Web) with the uniqueness of the carefully archived heritage from Milanese exhibitions of the past two decades. A way to make them accessible, galvanize them and bring them into circulation, making them live again. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Newbie at CUHKSZ: A Voxel Art Puzzle Game for Campus Orientation

Due to the COVID-19 epidemic prevention policy, many university freshmen are unable to visit their schools in person. As a remote campus orientation tool, we propose Newbie at CUHKSZ, a voxel art puzzle game, for the incoming students to explore The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHKSZ) in an interactive way. We crowd-sourced the digital model of the CUHKSZ campus and created Non-Player Characters (NPCs) as digital twins of our staffs in the virtual campus. Furthermore, we designed school traditions related puzzle tasks to lead an interactive campus tour and deliver humanistic values. The design of Newbie at CUHKSZ sheds light on a new way to engage the incoming students in a remote campus orientation event. © 2023 IEEE.

Bringing Agility to the Classroom: Integrating Professional Scrum Trainings to an Undergraduate IT Project Management Course

This Innovative Practice Full Paper examines the integration of Professional Scrum Trainings (PST) into an undergraduate class. The PST was integrated into the IT project management course in 2016. The course deals with challenges in IT projects, agile project management, intercultural project teams and IT project controlling. It is held in the Bachelor of Science programs Business Information Systems and Electronic Government, which is provided by the department of business computing at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts -Hochschule Hannover in Germany. We integrate PSTs into the course with the aim to provide the opportunity to our students of a deep dive into the most commonly used agile method Scrum. Also, we collaborated with visiting lecturers from the industry mainly to include practice-relevant problems, challenges, and examples to the students. We prepared, planned, and performed the integration of the PST since 2016 in every term, except the summer term in 2020 due to Covid-19 reasons. This paper presents our approach to integrate PSTs as Scrum seminars into an undergraduate course in higher education. We also analyzed how the students value the integration of PSTs into the IT project management course. Based on our experience and learnings including the quantitative evaluation data, which we conduct regularly, we describe that the students value attending a PST in their studies and benefit from specific experiences related to Scrum in practice. The results include both, classroom and virtual distance teaching during Covid-19. Furthermore, we give three recommendations for other lecturers, which are interested integrating PSTs into their teaching activities. The recommendations refer to the collaboration with professionals from practice, the importance of providing practical relevant knowledge to the students and the possibility of integrating certification providers to the integrated PST. Thus, the paper contributes to an understanding how to integrate agile methods and professional trainings into a higher education context both in the classroom and virtual distance teaching environments. © 2022 IEEE.

Metaverse-Driven Interactive Performing Arts Content Development

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic necessitated platform diversification and the revitalization of interactive performance (the metaverse), a new paradigm for the performing arts. In 2019, the authors implemented an online, audience-participatory, interactive dance performance content using AI. This study analyzed the effect of the metaverse on performance content in terms of performer–audience interaction, examining the distinction between face-to-face performances using AI-based Korean dance content on the metaverse platform. Interactive metaverse performances break free from the unidirectional limitations of traditional face-to-face performances, which can only be viewed, and enables audiences guide the performance by expressing emotions through VR avatars during the performance and expressing opinions through chats. This study sought to derive a meaningful application plan after confirming the usefulness and limitations of metaverse convergence with the performing arts by focusing on an interactive Korean dance performance. The findings should enhance performing arts content development and academic and industrial values. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Exploring digital tourism application for medieval period reconstruction

Europe, with all its common sights, has an enviable wealth of history and cultural heritage. With its many monuments, sites, traditions, history, art, and culture, it has always attracted curious views and tells centuries-old stories to many tourists and visitors. At the heart of Europe, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), founded in the 11th century, with its picturesque past, has always been at the crossroads of faith and civilizations. The key audience of tourism in BiH are nature lovers, adventurers and young and digital nomads, who represent great potential for the development of this sector given their nature of work, to be able to work from any location, and during the COVID-19 period. Furthermore, the importance of the diaspora for the development of tourism in BiH goes beyond tourist visits and helps BiH on its path to digital transformation. Digital tourism refers to how we use digital tools to organize, manage and even enjoy the travel experience. It uses all of the tools of digital transformation to change how we travel and experience different sites. Through digitalization, we want to reach every individual who passes through this country and further attract lovers of European history and culture, offer them a different, more creative, and innovative approach to learning about the cultural and historical treasures it hides. The goal of digital tourism is to raise awareness of the importance of cultural heritage, provide new opportunities for visitors and bring new knowledge. Therefore, this paper provides an overview of the possibilities of digital representations of the medieval historical period of BiH through identified pillars of digital reconstruction, and ways to connect the movable cultural heritage residing in the museums with real sites in an attempt to contribute to its promotion through digital tourism. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.

Investigating the Process of Teaching the Creation of Interactive Art in a Collaborative Virtual Environmental Context

Due to the outbreak of COVID-19 pandemic, higher education institutes quickly turn to the use of online tools, radically transforming the modes of teaching and communication with students. This educational shift significantly affected the conduct of artistic laboratory courses, where physical presence is essential for students and teaching staff. In order to address this shift, the teaching staff for the laboratory course 'Digital Artistic Creation 2', of the Department of Digital Arts and Cinema of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens adopted a project-based learning methodology and used a combination of teleconferencing tools and multiuser 3D Social Virtual Environments, to teach the creation of interactive and possibly dynamically evolving 3D assemblages and spatial compositions. This paper presents a research study which aims at investigating the result of this teaching course with regards to the educational impact and the experience of the students. The study was conducted at the end of the semester with the use of questionnaires delivered to the students in order to explore the learning experiences, outcomes and improvisation suggestions concerning this novel, combined form of teaching, as well as to detect the emerging collaborative and self-regulated learning patterns that emerged throughout the course. © 2022 IEEE.

From Digital Divide to Digital Discovery: Re-thinking Online Learning and Interactions in Marginalized Communities

The digital divide presented between the Global South and North has been exacerbated due to the Covid-19 pandemic causing unequal access to technologies in education, public services, and healthcare. Through an exploratory study in the northeastern region of Mexico, a marginalized community used a hyperlocal network to engage in creative Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) activities. The study uses a qualitative methodology with a reflective approach, informed by sociocultural and dialogic concepts. Data collection primarily involved semi-structured interviews, observations, focus groups, and collection of artifacts. The findings present a rich framework of sociocultural factors and capital knowledge from the community. From the study emerged participants’ meanings in three categories: i) the use of offline mobile learning, ii) the educational practices in the non-formal context, and iii) the dialogic opportunities created among participants. From this non-formal context of education experience emerged creative lessons in innovation, agency from the learners, and genuine involvement from the participants. © 2022, IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.

E-Business and E-Commerce as facilitators of digital consumption of art. The case of Gallery Weekend Santiago and Mexico

This study seeks to explore whether E-Business, E-Commerce can facilitate the digital consumption of art. Gallery Weekend Santiago and Mexico are selected as a case study, since (1) it is an event present in the two Latin American countries with the possibility of trading works of art with NFT, (2) it is the first event of art galleries adapted 100% to e-payment and virtual currency (3) both were developed in the context of the covid-19 pandemic, so they have important online strategies to bring the event to the public (4) The sale of art with ethereum cryptocurrencies it is outsourced to the MarketPlace (OpenSea) (5) both countries are in various stages of development and implementation of technological initiatives in the field of e-business and art galleries. The methodology developed is based on reviewing in detail the construction and logic of each official website of gallery weekend santiago and mexico, along with analyzing the composition of the websites and work system of each of the art galleries, attached to the event, based on predefined parameters. It ends with an analysis of OpenSea regarding the upload of works to review how they are displayed on said sales platform, both for Mexico and for Chile. It is concluded that the development of E-Business and E-Commerce can facilitate the digital consumption of art, as has happened in the case of Galerry weekend stgo © 2022 ACM.

Creation of neural melodies in the frame of an international student project

This work is a collaborative project between the University of Tokyo and the University of Bordeaux. Students are enrolled in their second year of a technical diploma in EEIC (Electrical Engineering and Industrial Computing) major, at IUT Bordeaux, University of Bordeaux, France. One from the University of Tokyo, Japan and two researchers from the University of Bordeaux were supervising the project. The purpose of this project is to create a melody from the electrical activity of in vitro neuronal culture. This music creation has a twofold objective of artistic performance and diagnostic use. The changes in music allow researchers to identify differences between healthy activity of neuronal cultures and activity of cultures affected by neurological disorders. From recordings of neuronal activities performed at the University of Tokyo, the students classified and sorted the different activities in groups of amplitudes associated to notes in the minor pentatonic scale. Taking place during the COVID19 pandemic, this online project shows the importance of international collaborations and their potential to stimulate student interest while developing new skills. These projects also offer the opportunity for students to pursue in an internship. © 2022 IEEE.

To be or not to be digital: Digitalization Needs and Clustering-based Profile Analysis of Theatre Artists for Scene 2.0 Pandemic Recovery Programme

Due to the indefinite cancellation of the stage performances during the Covid-19 pandemic, socio-economically vulnerable artists urgently needed new sources of income. Digitization of the stage arts, especially theatre performances have been rapidly accelerated during this period. In a unique social intervention case on the civil initiatives towards the digitalization of arts through online platforms, this study aims to present a needs analysis and beneficiary profiling application by Ward's method with Canberra Distance. The data were gathered from 172 respondents of different socio-cultural backgrounds amongst Theater Cooperative members,. The results indicate that although the magnitude of the needs varies amongst different profiles, the economic, technical, and technological constraints are the primary obstacles in the digitization process. © 2022 IEEE.

GBLNet: Detecting Intrusion Traffic with Multi-granularity BiLSTM

Detecting and intercepting malicious requests are some of the most widely used ways against attacks in the network security, especially in the severe COVID-19 environment. Most existing detecting approaches, including matching blacklist characters and machine learning algorithms have all shown to be vulnerable to sophisticated attacks. To address the above issues, a more general and rigorous detection method is required. In this paper, we formulate the problem of detecting malicious requests as a temporal sequence classification problem, and propose a novel deep learning model namely GBLNet, girdling bidirectional LSTM with multi-granularity CNNs. By connecting the shadow and deep feature maps of the convolutional layers, the malicious feature extracting ability is improved on more detailed functionality. Experimental results on HTTP dataset CSIC 2010 demonstrate that GBLNet can efficiently detect intrusion traffic with superior accuracy and evaluating speed, compared with the state-of-the-arts. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Designing a Choreographic Interface During COVID-19

In 2019, metaLAB (at) Harvard began work on Curatorial A(i)gents, a digital exhibition that was slated to premiere at the Harvard Art Museums' Lightbox Gallery in 2020. Half of the projects would be interactive, using mouse and keyboard conventions. With the advent of Covid-19 and the postponement of the show, the authors set out to develop an interface solution that would enable visitors to interact with the works without having to touch any public devices like a tablet. Toward this end, we prototyped a "choreographic interface"that uses machine vision and machine learning to interpret a full-torso gestural vocabulary, which is then translated into interactions. To make the choreographic interface, we relied on open-source solutions, which have all come with equal limitations and opportunities. In 2022, Curatorial A(i)gents was presented in the Lightbox Gallery, where we had the opportunity to test and demonstrate the interface. This paper discusses our design journey in making a choreographic interface using open-source technologies during Covid-19. © 2022 ACM.

Curating Interactive Art for Online Conferences: Artist, Curator and Technologist Experiences in Gather.Town

We present the results of a reflective, practice-based study with creative practitioners who contributed to the Art Track at Creativity & Cognition 2021. We investigate curating an interactive online gallery in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on the opportunities afforded and design constraints imposed by the Gather.Town platform and the experiences of the participating practitioners. We present auto-ethnographic reflections from Author 1, who created the online gallery space. We draw on the experience of Author 2 in curatorial research to analyze the experience of emerging practice through interviews with participating artists and curators. Results show that many of the artists were positively surprised by the platform engagement opportunities and conference attendees' engagement with the artworks at the gallery opening, and appreciated the equitable, global reach. Further analysis reveals a desire for future iterations, and an exploration of the platform in a hybrid context, alongside an in-person exhibition. © 2022 ACM.

Portraying What is in front of You: Virtual Tours and Online Whiteboards to Facilitate Art Practice during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The arts and education fields recognize the importance of museums and art galleries as not only buildings that house hundreds, often thousands, of specialized objects, artworks, research, and conservation but rather as institutions sharing the history of people and their environment, thus they play a substantive role in modern society. For art students, practitioners, and hobbyists, these institutions are often visited to provide inspiration and practice, although the COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact. National lockdowns and restrictions, and social distancing measures meant museums and art galleries underwent mandated temporary closures, and socially distanced specified visitor routes often meant onsite art practice was no longer permitted. This exploratory pictorial takes a first-person research method to present a collection of reflections, experiences, and example artworks by facilitators of an art practice group that moved from on-site to online practice during the pandemic. © 2022 ACM.

Pelican Stairs

Pelican Stairs is a multimedia art project started during the depths of Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. The project's reflections on how one's umwelt (one's unique experience of living in one's environment) changes in response to an all-encompassing crisis can serve as a guide, or a provocation, about how future cities need to be reimagined to encompass flexible life-pattern options for their denizens not only to survive but to thrive through the challenges before us. I took photos of my local neighbourhood, Wapping in London, on my daily walks between March and September. I often visited the Thames shore area by climbing a set of steps known as Pelican Stairs. Using those photos as a training set, I generated new images with a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), which I paired with excerpts from my diary during the same period. The unsettling, almost-real images contrasted with the mundane reality of the diary entries allow the viewer to viscerally (re)experience the inherent tension between an increasingly uncertain external reality and internal attempts at control or sense-making through normal, everyday habits. The project is hosted at https://pelicanstairs.art, and the project includes an interactive element through a Twitter bot which responds to a specific prompt by sharing a random image of generated art from the project. © 2022 Owner/Author.

Experiential Learning Through Virtual Tours in Times of COVID-19

Many argue that experience plays a significant role in learning. However, previous research has shown that experience alone does not necessarily produce learning. This study describes the application of Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (experiencing, reflecting, thinking and acting) as a framework to design assignments for an English for Tourism Industry course at a private university in Japan. The scope of the study was to ensure students a firsthand tourism experience through active participation in virtual tours and events during emergency remote teaching due to COVID-19 pandemic, as well as to explore the implications such an approach may have on students’ learning, in acquiring new knowledge and reflecting on its further use. Through the use of free virtual tours available online, students completed three assignments over a 15-week semester. Each assignment included a different type of virtual activity: (1) a tour of a UNESCO World Heritage Site using Google Earth, (2) an online event, museum exhibition or concert, and (3) a walking tour of a major world city using 360° interactive video. Analysis of the collected data, in form of students’ assignments, revealed how the implementation of such an approach not only allowed for various realizations about the perceived usefulness and benefits of virtual tours, but also motivated students themselves to think more about the use of virtual tours in the tourism industry beyond COVID-19 pandemic. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Transformation of Plants into Polka Dot Arts: Kusama Yayoi as an Inspiration for Deep Learning

Museums and galleries are places that stimulate the imagination and creativity of people. However, against the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, many museums have been forced to close. As a result, more visitors have had to start visiting online exhibitions. Under this trend, the quality of the online exhibition experience is facing unprecedented challenges, and visitors need to be provided with a high-quality online experience. With the rapid development of emerging technologies, museums and galleries have started to use technology to create “digitalization” experiences, such as 3D virtual exhibitions and VR interactive experiences. The current online exhibition format focuses more on improving the visitor’s experience of viewing and browsing works and related information and less on how visitors create their artworks. In order to remedy the experience of visitors actively creating artworks, this study uses Yayoi Kusama’s works as a case study to help form an utterly interactive process between visitors and artworks. We propose a Polka Dot Arts Transfer Network (PDAT-net), mixing realistic-looking and Polka Dot Art-style reference images. The output image looks like an actual natural image “drawn” in the polka dot art style. The PDAT-net is trained to compose an image in the style of Polka Dot Arts, based on neural style transfer. Convolutional networks implemented the training. Plant images performed the final test. The results showed that the generated polka dot images have similar styles to the style images, proving that our PDAT-network has good transfer performance of Polka Dot Arts. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Unfinished Farewell

As COVID-19 spreads across the globe and the number of deaths continues to rise, the heartbreaking experiences are being replaced by collective mourning. As German journalist and pacifist Kurt Tukholsky once said: "The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic". When we look back at the help-seeking posts of those who were lost, those who died of unconfirmed COVID-19 testing reports;those who committed suicide out of despair;those whose life-saving medical equipment were being taken away and those who lost their lives due to overwork and infection from their patients... Many of them were not included in the official statistics, and they are likely to be forgotten over time. They were not being treated fairly when they were alive, and they were not being mentioned after they passed away. We spoke to one of those families. One daughter said: "After this pandemic, who will remember someone such as my mother-she had nowhere to go for medical treatment;she was rejected by the hospital, and she had to die at home?"This is one of the reasons why we built this online platform. We want to document as many people who have left us because of the pandemic as possible. Our website also includes the help-seeking information these people posted before they passed away. These are the evidences they have left in a particular moment in this pandemic. We hope to provide a space for family members to express their grief and for the public to mourn the dead. Behind every number is a life. "Unfinished Farewell"can be viewed at www.farewell.care and www.jiabaoli.org/covid19 © 2022 Owner/Author.

Will AI Image Synthesis Technology Help Constructivist Education at The Online Art Museum?

Motivated by the outbreak of COVID-19, museums have increased interests in online museum and online museum education. This study presents a way to use AI image synthesis technology for online art education guided by a constructivist design approach. An experiment was conducted to empirically test the effectiveness of AI-based art education in the online museum context. A total of 83 participants visited one of 3 different web-based art museums (i.e., AI image synthesis not applied vs. AI image synthesis applied with given photos vs. AI image synthesis applied with self-uploaded photos). Those who experienced the online museum with synthesized images using self-uploaded photos reported a higher level of motivation and satisfaction and to experience in a more constructivist way compared to other conditions. © 2022 ACM.