Browsing by Subject "Abstraction"
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Item Abstraction, representation, and entropy(2012-05) Payzant, Marcus Ray, 1982-; Mutchler, Leslie; Petersen, BradleyThe following graduate report is an overview of my artistic endeavors spanning the past three years at the University of Texas at Austin. While at UT, I have concentrated on making paintings that focus on the relationship between abstraction, representation, and entropy. Using banal, often overlooked cultural objects as subject matter, I paint ambiguous scenes that teeter between disintegration and formation. Representations of banal detritus within an ambiguous natural space become a metaphor for memory, culture, and life and death alluding to unseen forces and, ultimately, a lack of control. Using a combination of random and deliberate decisions, I aim to create a commentary about the unpredictable yet conformist aspects of the world in which we participate.Item A culture of dissonance : Wassily Kandinsky, atonality, and abstraction(2014-05) Boland, Lynn; Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, 1948-A Culture of Dissonance: Wassily Kandinsky, Atonality, and Abstraction by Lynn Edward Boland, Ph.D. Supervisor: Linda D. Henderson Wassily Kandinsky's interest in music as a source for abstraction in painting has often been noted in the scholarship on his art. However, no studies have sufficiently explained how the artist employed musical strategies, especially as he was developing his abstract style in the first decade of the twentieth century. Kandinsky's looked primarily to Arnold Schoenberg's new musical idioms and theories, and he was deeply inspired by highly dissonant music, but his ideas were set within a much broader context that further suggested and encouraged the expressive and transformative power of dissonance. By the late nineteenth century, extended passages of dissonance were common in musical compositions. At the same time, the concept of dissonance as a positive force was suggested in a wide range of late nineteenth-century literature, including the writings of Friedrich [should be this spelling throughout] Nietzsche, occult authors, popular texts on physics and experimental psychology, as well as within music and art theory. Close readings of Kandinsky's theoretical texts and selected works of art provide insights into how he might have understood and employed these concepts in his formation of an abstract style. Kandinsky's paintings Impression III (Concert) of 1911 and Composition VII of 1913 are the primary artistic foci of this study, along with his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art and the anthology Der Blaue Reiter, which he co-edited. This dissertation will seek to restore the concept of musical dissonance and its application in the visual arts to its historical context for Kandinsky. This will facilitate more informed formal analyses of Schoenberg's music and Kandinsky's paintings, which, in turn, suggest strategies of atonal musical composition applied to abstract painting. Additionally, this dissertation will establish an artistic context of visual dissonance that goes beyond Kandinsky, including artistic movements in France and Russia, allowing additional comparisons and a consideration of the larger impact of these ideas.Item Degrees of abstraction in French and English generic nouns : an analysis of word association tasks(2010-12) Hirsh, Timothy William; Blyth, Carl S. (Carl Stewart), 1958-; Russi, CinziaIn language, there exists a distinction between abstract words and concrete words. It can be said that abstract words refer to generic concepts, while concrete words pertain to physical actions or objects associated with physical movement. With respect to the linguistic community, it is often claimed that French words function at a higher degree of abstraction than English words. However, this claim lacks empirical evidence. The present study aims to examine the usage of concrete and abstract words in word association tasks, which are part of Cultura: an intercultural, web-based project that brings foreign language students from different countries and linguistic backgrounds together in a telecollaborative exchange of ideas. Specifically, this study examines the degrees of abstraction of generic nouns in French and English.Item Experimentation, diversity, and feeling : Adolph Gottlieb’s career in painting reconsidered(2013-08) Katzin, Jeffrey James; Shiff, RichardAdolph Gottlieb’s (1903–1974) mature career in abstract painting has been described in previous scholarship in terms of three phases: the time of his Pictograph paintings, beginning in 1941; a period of transition primarily involving his Imaginary Landscape paintings, beginning in 1951; and the time of his Burst paintings, from 1956 until his death. Dividing the artist’s career into early, transitional, and late periods has provided scholars with a clear and tidy narrative as a basis for interpretations of his work. However, in this thesis I argue that this schematization, created in hindsight, has obscured the character of Gottlieb’s working process as it occurred in real time. By nature, Gottlieb would not have been content to produce only a few narrow varieties of painting over a thirty-year period. I thus advance a new conception of Gottlieb as an inventive and constantly adventurous artist. ----- To make these claims, I examine Gottlieb’s written and spoken statements in order to define his central terminology (words like “feeling” and “self-discovery”) and to investigate his interests in myth and alchemy. I find that his work in painting was deeply intuitive and literally experimental—Gottlieb could not predict whether a painting would succeed until he had completed it, and so his career was an iterative process of painting, observing the results, and then painting again. I go on to consider Gottlieb’s paintings themselves as a record of how this experimental process functioned in practice. By presenting his diverse body of work in its full breadth, I demonstrate that the artist was not limited by his major styles, and indeed that he always presented himself with multiple possibilities. I conclude that Gottlieb’s work remains vital because he worked without an end goal or predetermined outcome in mind, and instead gave himself over to a continuous process of creativity and discovery.Item Exploiting language abstraction to optimize memory efficiency(2010-08) Sartor, Jennifer Bedke; McKinley, Kathryn S.; Blackburn, Stephen M.; Hirzel, Martin; Keckler, Stephen W.; Witchel, EmmettThe programming language and underlying hardware determine application performance, and both are undergoing revolutionary shifts. As applications have become more sophisticated and capable, programmers have chosen managed languages in many domains for ease of development. These languages abstract memory management from the programmer, which can introduce time and space overhead but also provide opportunities for dynamic optimization. Optimizing memory performance is in part paramount because hardware is reaching physical limits. Recent trends towards chip multiprocessor machines exacerbate the memory system bottleneck because they are adding cores without adding commensurate bandwidth. Both language and architecture trends add stress to the memory system and degrade application performance. This dissertation exploits the language abstraction to analyze and optimize memory efficiency on emerging hardware. We study the sources of memory inefficiencies on two levels: heap data and hardware storage traffic. We design and implement optimizations that change the heap layout of arrays, and use program semantics to eliminate useless memory traffic. These techniques improve memory system efficiency and performance. We first quantitatively characterize the problem by comparing many data compression algorithms and their combinations in a limit study of Java benchmarks. We find that arrays are a dominant source of heap inefficiency. We introduce z-rays, a new array layout design, to bridge the gap between fast access, space efficiency and predictability. Z-rays facilitate compression and offer flexibility, and time and space efficiency. We find that there is a semantic mismatch between managed languages, with their rapid allocation rates, and current hardware, causing unnecessary and excessive traffic in the memory subsystem. We take advantage of the garbage collector's identification of dead data regions, communicating information to the caches to eliminate useless traffic to memory. By reducing traffic and bandwidth, we improve performance. We show that the memory abstraction in managed languages is not just a cost to be borne, but an opportunity to alleviate the memory bottleneck. This thesis shows how to exploit this abstraction to improve space and time efficiency and overcome the memory wall. We enhance the productivity and performance of ubiquitous managed languages on current and future architectures.Item The Leo Castelli Gallery in Metro magazine : American approaches to post-abstract figuration in an Italian context(2012-08) McKetta, Dorothy Jean; Shiff, RichardBetween the years 1960 and 1970, New York gallerist Leo Castelli was closely involved with Milanese editor and publisher Bruno Alfieri's Metro magazine--an international review of contemporary art. By placing his artists in Metro, Castelli inserted them into the world of Italian art criticism and theory. This recontextualization familiarized the American artists of Castelli's gallery to a European audience and positioned them at the end of a succession of modern European styles. Specifically, Castelli's artists, each of whom engaged in a form of pictorial figuration, were seen as ending the dominance of the "pure" abstraction of the French informel style. This thesis uses the archive of correspondence between Bruno Alfieri and Leo Castelli to examine Castelli's contribution to Metro during the 1960s. Departing from this chronology, it also seeks to understand the unique brand of figuration that each of Castelli's artists brought to Metro, given cues from contemporary Italian theory and criticism--particularly that of Gillo Dorfles, who wrote on several of Castelli's artists.Item Painting in 2010(2010-05) Lane, Daniel Barlow; Sutherland, Dan, 1966-; Jordan, Richard MThe paper is a report of the work done by Daniel Barlow Lane as a Master of Fine Arts in graduate school. The paper outlines his understanding of what painting is in today’s world as well as his individual work. The paper describes three different series of work in chronological order. Pictures of the work at its different stages are provided for reference along with pictorial references of his major influences throughout his time in graduate school. The paper focuses on the reasons and decisions Daniel has made throughout his time at the University of Texas at Austin and documents in retrospect his understanding of what happened, what he made, and why.Item The effects of distraction on the vigilance performance of paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics(Texas Tech University, 1979-12) Parkison, Steven C.The purpose of this research was to examine and evaluate two theories related to attentional deficits in persons with schizophrenia. While attentional deficits in schizophrenics have been investigated for some twenty years, the present study was an attempt to investigate and elucidate the contradictions between the theory of Silverman (1964a) and that of Broadbent (1958) concerning attention. Both theories appear to have considerable research support, but they differ diametrically on the concept of distraetibility in subtypes of schizophrenia. The investigation attempted to assess the concept of distraetibility as one manifestation of attentional defificts among paranoid and nonparanoid schizophrenics while considering the conceptualization of the two theories on this point. The purpose of such an examination was to resolve the apparent conflict between the two theories and secondarily, to add to the understanding of individuals currently considered to be schizophrenic. In the first chapter the areas of major conflict between the theories are developed and research hypotheses delineated. The initial section of this chapter describes both theories and the research support of each. Following sections summarize the position of each theory on the concept of distraetibility and provide a statement of the general research question. The visual vigilance task and its relevance to the study of attentional deficits among schizophrenics is presented in the next section. Finally, the hypotheses are presented which merge the theoretical and empirical directions that were investigated.