Journal articles on the topic 'Sketch object recognition'

Deep learning systems can perform well on some image recognition tasks. However, they have serious limitations, including requiring far more training data than humans do and being fooled by adversarial examples. By contrast, analogical learning over relational representations tends to be far more data-efficient, requiring only human-like amounts of training data. This paper introduces an approach that combines automatically constructed qualitative visual representations with analogical learning to tackle a hard computer vision problem, object recognition from sketches. Results from the MNIST dataset and a novel dataset, the Coloring Book Objects dataset, are provided. Comparison to existing approaches indicates that analogical generalization can be used to identify sketched objects from these datasets with several orders of magnitude fewer examples than deep learning systems require.

A sketch is a black-and-white, 2-D graphical representation of an object and contains fewer visual details as compared to a colored image. Despite fewer details, humans can recognize a sketch and its context very efficiently and consistently across languages, cultures, and age groups, but it is a difficult task for computers to recognize such low-detail sketches and get context out of them. With the tremendous increase in popularity of IoT devices such as smartphones and smart cameras, etc., it has become more critical to recognize free hand-drawn sketches in computer vision and human-computer interaction in order to build a successful artificial intelligence of things (AIoT) system that can first recognize the sketches and then understand the context of multiple drawings. Earlier models which addressed this problem are scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and bag-of-words (BoW). Both SIFT and BoW used hand-crafted features and scale-invariant algorithms to address this issue. But these models are complex and time-consuming due to the manual process of features setup. The deep neural networks (DNNs) performed well with object recognition on many large-scale datasets such as ImageNet and CIFAR-10. However, the DDN approach cannot be carried out for hand-drawn sketches problems. The reason is that the data source is images, and all sketches in the images are, for example, ‘birds’ instead of their specific category (e.g., ‘sparrow’). Some deep learning approaches for sketch recognition problems exist in the literature, but the results are not promising because there is still room for improvement. This article proposed a convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture called Sketch-DeepNet for the sketch recognition task. The proposed Sketch-DeepNet architecture used the TU-Berlin dataset for classification. The experimental results show that the proposed method beats the performance of the state-of-the-art sketch classification methods. The proposed model achieved 95.05% accuracy as compared to existing models DeformNet (62.6%), Sketch-DNN (72.2%), Sketch-a-Net (77.95%), SketchNet (80.42%), Thinning-DNN (74.3%), CNN-PCA-SVM (72.5%), Hybrid-CNN (84.42%), and human recognition accuracy of 73% on the TU-Berlin dataset.

Now-a-days need for technologies for identification, detection and recognition of suspects has increased. One of the most common biometric techniques is face recognition, since face is the convenient way used by the people to identify each-other. Understanding how humans recognize face sketches drawn by artists is of significant value to both criminal investigators and forensic researchers in Computer Vision. However, studies say that hand-drawn face sketches are still very limited in terms of artists and number of sketches because after any incident a forensic artist prepares a victim’s sketches on behalf of the description provided by an eyewitness. Sometimes suspect uses special mask to hide some common features of faces like nose, eyes, lips, face-color etc. but the outliner features of face biometrics one could never hide. Here we concentrate on some specific facial geometric feature which could be used to calculate some ratio of similarities from the template photograph database against the forensic sketches. The project describes the design of a system for face sketch recognition by a computer vision approach like Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), Local Binary Pattern Histogram (LBPH) algorithm and a supervised machine learning model called Support Vector Machine (SVM) for face recognition. Tkinter is the standard GUI library for Python. Python when combined with Tkinter provides a fast and easy way to create GUI applications. Tkinter provides a powerful object-oriented interface to the Tk GUI toolkit.

Abstract: In todays world during this pandemic situation Online Learning is the only source where one could learn. Online learning makes students more curious about the knowledge and so they decide their learning path . But considering the academics as they have to pass the course or exam given, they need to take time to study, and have to be disciplined about their dedication. And there are many barriers for Online learning as well. Students are lowering their grasping power the reason for this is that each and every student was used to rely on their teacher and offline classes. Virtual writing and controlling system is challenging research areas in field of image processing and pattern recognition in the recent years. It contributes extremely to the advancement of an automation process and can improve the interface between man and machine in numerous applications. Several research works have been focusing on new techniques and methods that would reduce the processing time while providing higher recognition accuracy. Given the real time webcam data, this jambord like python application uses OpenCV library to track an object-of-interest (a human palm/finger in this case) and allows the user to draw bymoving the finger, which makes it both awesome and interesting to draw simple thing. Keyword: Detection, Handlandmark , Keypoints, Computer vision, OpenCV

As the number of students who attend the arts exams has been growing, each admission institutions need to score the human head portraits of art sketch with the number of ten thousand and even 100 thousand. Thus it is an innovative research on how to conduct image recognition with the help of advanced computer technology. Image Recognition Technology is to give the computer the intelligence of human vision, so that the computer can quickly and accurately recognize the object on the input images. However, in the recognition process such factors as light, rotation and shield increase the difficulty of identifying the human head portrait images. In order to get better recognition performance, this paper studies the feature extraction of human head portrait based on SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform). From the practical application, it can be seen that the approach proposed in this paper is feasible and is of good recognition performance.

Following the study on computational neuroscience through functional magnetic resonance imaging claimed that human action recognition in the brain of mammalian pursues two separated streams, that is, dorsal and ventral streams. It follows up by two pathways in the bioinspired model, which are specialized for motion and form information analysis (Giese and Poggio 2003). Active basis model is used to form information which is different from orientations and scales of Gabor wavelets to form a dictionary regarding object recognition (human). Also biologically movement optic-flow patterns utilized. As motion information guides share sketch algorithm in form pathway for adjustment plus it helps to prevent wrong recognition. A synergetic neural network is utilized to generate prototype templates, representing general characteristic form of every class. Having predefined templates, classifying performs based on multitemplate matching. As every human action has one action prototype, there are some overlapping and consistency among these templates. Using fuzzy optical flow division scoring can prevent motivation for misrecognition. We successfully apply proposed model on the human action video obtained from KTH human action database. Proposed approach follows the interaction between dorsal and ventral processing streams in the original model of the biological movement recognition. The attained results indicate promising outcome and improvement in robustness using proposed approach.

Recently, the intuitive-oriented program for designers and architects, which is used to quickly create three-dimensional models of objects, structures, buildings and interiors – SketchUp, has gained widespread recognition in the world of 3D. So now almost all other developers include in their software products or direct support for models (files) SketchUp, or data exchange with it through special plug-ins. SketchUp is designed primarily for sketch, searchable 3D modeling in three-dimensional space. However, SketchUp is successfully used to develop a variety of projects in all genres of design, advertising, engineering design, film and game production. The saltation in the increasing popularity of SketchUp has occurred since the program was “tied” to the new owner’s Internet projects – Google 3D models and Google Earth. The reason for choosing and acquiring SketchUp by Google, apparently, was its simplicity and accessibility. By creating a model of an architectural structure or any other object in SketchUp, users could place their creations in the public online collections of Google. So, in particular, the selection of collections “Cities under development” contains several thousand models of real architectural buildings of the world. At the same time, Google accepted 3D models only with the requirement that they were textured and equipped with the correct geographical reference. Compared to many other popular packages, SketchUp has a number of features that are positioned as advantages. The main feature of this program is the almost complete absence of pre-configuration windows. All geometric characteristics during or immediately after the end of the tool are set from the keyboard in the Value Control Box. Another key feature is the Push/Pull tool, which allows any plane to be “pulled out” to the side, creating new side walls as it moves. You can move the plane against the predetermined curve, using a special tool Follow Me. The program is also characterized by extreme accuracy of calculations and measurements.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to sketch out what one can see as the emerging “therapeutic turn” in a wide range of areas of contemporary social life including education, especially in relation to understandings of vulnerability and social justice, and then poses the question of what emotional regime has accompanied the emergence of this “therapization” movement, making emotional life in schools the “object-target” for specific technologies of power. Design/methodology/approach The psychologization of social problems has been very much in evidence in the development of educational policies and practices – an approach which not only pathologizes social problems as individual psychological deficiencies or traits, but also obscures the recognition of serious structural inequalities and ideological commitments that perpetuate social injustices through educational policy and practice. In the present paper, the author adopts a different perspective, that of the history, sociology and politics of emotions and affects to show how and why the therapization of social justice is part of the conditions for the birth of particular forms of biopower in schools. Findings There is an urgent need to expose how psychologized approaches that present social justice as an individualizing responsibility are essentially depoliticizing vulnerability by silencing the shared complicities. It is argued, then, that it is crucial to pay attention to the political and structural dimensions of vulnerability. Originality/value Attending to the emotional regime of therapization of social justice has important implications to counter forms of biopower that work through processes of normalization.

This paper describes an updated version of a co-creative drawing system called the Drawing Apprentice. The system collaborates with users by analyzing their drawn input and responding in a real time dialogical and improvisational interaction. The current system includes an object recognition module that employs deep learning to classify sketched objects. The system architecture and implementation are described along with its evaluation during a public demonstration during which artists, non-artists, and designers provided feedback about the experience interacting with the system.

Digitalization of handwritten documents has created a greater need for accurate online recognition of hand-drawn sketches. However, the online recognition of hand-drawn diagrams is an enduring challenge in human-computer interaction due to the complexity in extracting and recognizing the visual objects reliably from a continuous stroke stream. This paper focuses on the design and development of a new, efficient stroke-based online hand-drawn sketch recognition scheme named SKETRACK for hand-drawn arrow diagrams and digital logic circuit diagrams. The fundamental parts of this model are text separation, symbol segmentation, feature extraction, classification, and structural analysis. The proposed scheme utilizes the concepts of normalization and segmentation to isolate the text from the sketches. Then, the features are extracted to model different structural variations of the strokes that are categorized into the arrows/lines and the symbols for effective processing. The strokes are clustered using the spectral clustering algorithm based on p-distance and Euclidean distance to compute the similarity between the features and minimize the feature dimensionality by grouping similar features. Then, the symbol recognition is performed using modified support vector machine (MSVM) classifier in which a hybrid kernel function with a lion optimized tuning parameter of SVM is utilized. Structural analysis is performed with lion-based task optimization for recognizing the symbol candidates to form the final diagram representations. This proposed recognition model is suitable for simpler structures such as flowcharts, finite automata, and the logic circuit diagrams. Through the experiments, the performance of the proposed SKETRACK scheme is evaluated on three domains of databases and the results are compared with the state-of-the-art methods to validate its superior efficiency.

Objects in freely-drawn sketches often have no spatial or temporal separation, making object recognition difficult. We present a two-step stroke-grouping algorithm that first classifies individual strokes according to the type of object to which they belong, then groups strokes with like classifications into clusters representing individual objects. The first step facilitates clustering by naturally separating the strokes, and both steps fluidly integrate spatial and temporal information. Our approach to grouping is unique in its formulation as an efficient classification task rather than, for example, an expensive search task. Our single-stroke classifier performs at least as well as existing single-stroke classifiers on text vs. nontext classification, and we present the first three-way single-stroke classification results. Our stroke grouping results are the first reported of their kind; our grouping algorithm correctly groups between 86% and 91% of the ink in diagrams from two domains, with between 69% and 79% of shapes being perfectly clustered.

Implementation of various software tools in the educational process affects formation of students’ professional competencies. This influence should be taken into account in scientific and methodological support of the modern education system. The purpose of the article is to develop a technology for creating educational VR content that provides immersion into a virtual thematic space using a variety of different software environments and improves the effectiveness of teaching. In this article, the technology of creating an electronic course using a complex of specialized software tools is considered. The initial stage of such technology is to develop a course description that includes data and knowledge about the object or phenomenon under study. Three-dimensional models of virtual objects created in SketchUp, Blender. Solidworks, Compass-3D, etc. are used for technical objects. Then 3D models of objects and landscape are used for creating a virtual space in the Twinmotion software package. Then photorealistic panoramas, images and videos are imported from Twinmotion into 3DVista Virtual Tour Pro to create a virtual tour. At the final stage, the virtual tour is integrated into the LMS Moodle learning management system. The implementation of the technology of integrated use of specialized software tools was tested in the creation of educational content that provides immersion into a virtual thematic space on the example of the course "History of the Tambov Region", which is included in many educational programs at Tambov educational institutions. High efficiency of developed educational content is confirmed by the survey results of several groups of students and its further analysis using Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) methodology; as well as by checking learning achievements based on testing two groups of students of 12 people each. The first test group studied the discipline using the proposed electronic content, and the second one without it. The test results showed that the proportion of correct answers to test questions in the first group was 17% higher than for the students of the second group. Thus, the authors proposed the technology for development of educational content, which includes a number of specialized software tools, as well as the organization of the educational process using innovative educational means. Moreover, the use of the proposed technology allows students to develop teamwork and interpersonal communication skills by interactive lectures and group discussions.

Abstract Objective In Huntington’s disease (HD), a hereditary neurodegenerative disorder, cognitive impairment in early disease stages mainly involves executive dysfunction. However, visual cognitive deficits have additionally been reported and are of clinical relevance given their influence on daily life and overall cognitive performance. This study aimed to assess visual perceptual skills in HD gene carriers. Methods Subtasks of the Visual Object and Space Perception battery and Groningen Intelligence Test were administered in 62 participants (18 healthy controls, 22 participants with a genetic confirmation of HD without symptoms, i.e., premanifest HD, and 22 participants with a genetic confirmation of HD with symptoms, i.e., manifest HD). Group differences in task performance were measured using analysis of covariance with and without correction for age. Receiver Operating Characteristics (ROC) analysis was performed to examine which task best discriminated between groups and cut-off scores were provided. Results Manifest HD performed significantly worse compared to both controls and premanifest HD on all visual perceptional tasks. Premanifest HD did not differ in task performance from controls. Besides the Shape Detection, all tasks were robust in discriminating between groups. The Animal Silhouettes test was most accurate in discriminating manifest HD from premanifest HD (AUC = 0.90, SE = 0.048, p < .001). Conclusion Visual perceptual deficits are present in early manifest HD, especially an impaired recognition of animals and objects from sketched silhouettes, and not in premanifest HD. This suggests that decline in visual processing only occurs in clinical disease stages. The visual cognitive battery, especially the Silhouettes tasks used in this study is sensitive in discriminating manifest HD from premanifest HD and controls.

Humans have mastered the skill of creativity for many decades. The process of replicating this mechanism is introduced recently by using neural networks which replicate the functioning of human brain, where each unit in the neural network represents a neuron, which transmits the messages from one neuron to other, to perform subconscious tasks. Usually, there are methods to render an input image in the style of famous art works. This issue of generating art is normally called nonphotorealistic rendering. Previous approaches rely on directly manipulating the pixel representation of the image. While using deep neural networks which are constructed using image recognition, this paper carries out implementations in feature space representing the higher levels of the content image. Previously, deep neural networks are used for object recognition and style recognition to categorize the artworks consistent with the creation time. This paper uses Visual Geometry Group (VGG16) neural network to replicate this dormant task performed by humans. Here, the images are input where one is the content image which contains the features you want to retain in the output image and the style reference image which contains patterns or images of famous paintings and the input image which needs to be style and blend them together to produce a new image where the input image is transformed to look like the content image but “sketched” to look like the style image.

Abstract - The Arab Panjunan kampong serving as the research object happens to be one of the heritage areas of Cirebon Town. This urban kampong has certain ethnic characteristics typical of Arab quarters that make it unique, thus contributing to the rich cultural history of Cirebon. As a heritage area, it is important for this ethnic Arab neighbourhood of Panjunan to draw up an inventory of the specific architectural elements that are still traceable, such as the urban lay-out and its contents as well as the landmarks of this area observed from a physical-spatial angle. The aim of this research project is to find out about this kampong’s various architectural elements that are recognized as such by the locals. This will be the contributing factor in the process of determining which environmental elements can be classified as typical landmarks. The first step taken in the research conducted is field observation in order to establish the elements that have survived in the kampong, including the architectural, social, and cultural ones. The observation related to architectural elements has been identified in accordance with the theory concerning Elements of Urban Design as proposed by Hamid Shirvani in his book The Urban Design Process. The next step is conducting research using the Cognitive Method as applied to the kampong dwellers in Panjunan by way of sketched maps and guided interviews. The respondents, classified based on ethnic heritage (descent) and gender, were requested to describe the environmental elements in this ethnic Arab kampong as far as they could recognize or identify them. Those who experienced difficulties in describing the sketches were assisted by the researcher based on the stories that had been supplied. Based on the acquired data containing these environmental elements, the aspect of memories contained therein was studied by way of interviews linked to the Continuity Theory by Breakwell. Subsequently, an analysis was made of the basis underlying the recognition of these elements based on the Landmark Theory by Kevin Lynch, and classified based on the criteria drawn up by Eko Budihardjo. Through the analysis, it was discovered that Panjunan’s Merah Mosque and its Asy Syafi’i Mosque indeed qualify as as architectural elements that show continuity of memory, gaining validity as iconic elements or landmarks on the regional scale of Cirebon’s ethnic Arab kampong of Panjunan. Keywords : mosque, landmark, recognition, local community, Arab Panjunan kampong

Offline hand-drawn diagram recognition is concerned with digitizing diagrams sketched on paper or whiteboard to enable further editing. Some existing models can identify the individual objects like arrows and symbols, but they become involved in the dilemma of being unable to understand a diagram’s structure. Such a shortage may be inconvenient to digitalization or reconstruction of a diagram from its hand-drawn version. Other methods can accomplish this goal, but they live on stroke temporary information and time-consuming post-processing, which somehow hinders the practicability of these methods. Recently, Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) have been proved that they perform the state-of-the-art across many visual tasks. In this paper, we propose DrawnNet, a unified CNN-based keypoint-based detector, for recognizing individual symbols and understanding the structure of offline hand-drawn diagrams. DrawnNet is designed upon CornerNet with extensions of two novel keypoint pooling modules which serve to extract and aggregate geometric characteristics existing in polygonal contours such as rectangle, square, and diamond within hand-drawn diagrams, and an arrow orientation prediction branch which aims to predict which direction an arrow points to through predicting arrow keypoints. We conducted wide experiments on public diagram benchmarks to evaluate our proposed method. Results show that DrawnNet achieves 2.4%, 2.3%, and 1.7% recognition rate improvements compared with the state-of-the-art methods across benchmarks of FC-A, FC-B, and FA, respectively, outperforming existing diagram recognition systems on each metric. Ablation study reveals that our proposed method can effectively enable hand-drawn diagram recognition.

The goal of this work is to investigate representations of the school institution held by graduate students of the Science Teacher Education Program at a public university in Brazil. We aim to answer the following questions: What are the representations of the school institution imagined by the researched students? How important are those representations to the process of teacher education? We analyzed 79 sketches made by the students in the period 2011 to 2013 during their internship program. Students complemented their sketches by brief oral and written narratives about them. Using qualitative analysis of social representations about school institution from a cultural and historic perspective, we identified three major and not exclusive conceptions of school: 1) the school environments produce an open-close play, with various levels of control and disciplining; 2) the pedagogical relationships are associated to teacher authority, disciplining and transmission of knowledge; and, finally, 3) the objects of the school point to the idea of the school institution as an isolated environment, with its own culture. The presence of these representations indicates the prevalence of a long process of production and recognition of aspects of the scholar culture by the students, which could contribute to reflexive practices in the proposals of teacher education programs.

Photoacoustic imaging is a novel, rapidly expanding technique, which has recently found several applications in artwork diagnostics, including the uncovering of hidden layers in paintings and multilayered documents, as well as the thickness measurement of optically turbid paint layers with high accuracy. However, thus far, all the presented photoacoustic-based imaging technologies dedicated to such measurements have been strictly limited to thin objects due to the detection of signals in transmission geometry. Unavoidably, this issue restricts seriously the applicability of the imaging method, hindering investigations over a wide range of cultural heritage objects with diverse geometrical and structural features. Here, we present an epi-illumination photoacoustic apparatus for diagnosis in heritage science, which integrates laser excitation and respective signal detection on one side, aiming to provide universal information in objects of arbitrary thickness and shape. To evaluate the capabilities of the developed system, we imaged thickly painted mock-ups, in an attempt to reveal hidden graphite layers covered by various optically turbid paints, and compared the measurements with standard near-infrared (NIR) imaging. The obtained results prove that photoacoustic signals reveal underlying sketches with up to 8 times improved contrast, thus paving the way for more relevant applications in the field.

Archaeology, anthropology, human geography: three disciplines born out of a nineteenth-century imperative among Europeans to apply a coherent model of understanding (Wissen-schaft) to varied forms of social life within a differentiated physical world; three disciplines stretched between the epistemology and methods of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) which promised certainty, and the hermeneutic reflexivity and critical doubt of the Humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) which promised self-knowledge. Each of these disciplines is today in crisis, and for the same reason. Europe as the place of authoritative knowledge, of civilization, has been decentred upon a post-colonial globe; the white, bourgeois European male has been dethroned as the sovereign subject of a universal and progressive history. Thus, the enlightened intellectual project represented by archaeology, anthropology and human geography, whose findings were unconsciously designed to secure the essentially ideological claims of liberal Europeans, are obliged to renegotiate their most fundamental assumptions and concepts (Gregory, 1993). The linguistic turn in the social sciences and humanities which has so ruthlessly exposed the context-bound nature of their scientific claims — what Ton Lemaire refers to as a critical awareness of their inescapable cultural and historical mediation — forces a recognition that their central conceptual terms, such as ‘culture’, ‘nature’, ‘society’, and ‘landscape’, are far from being neutral scientific objects, open to disinterested examination through the objective and authoritative eye of scholarship. They are intellectual constructions which need to be understood in their emergence and evolution across quite specific histories. Ton Lemaire seeks to sketch something of the history of landscape as such a socially and historically mediated idea: as a mode of representing relations between land and human life, which has played a decisive role in the development of archaeology as a formal discipline. On the foundation of this history he develops a critique of the social and environmental characteristics and consequences of modernity, and seeks to relocate archaeological study within a reformed project of sensitive contemporary ‘dwelling’ on earth.

The word “Anthropocene” appeared for the first time in printed form in 2000. It was introduced by the Dutch chemist Paul Crutzen and the U.S. limnologist Eugene Stoermer in a two-page paper jointly published in the issue number 41 of the IGBP Newsletter. They coined the neologism to express the idea shared by both that we have already entered a new unprecedented age in which our species has become a major geological agent. Since then, a veritable explosion in the number of publications dedicated to the concept has occurred. Taking in consideration only the data provided by Web of Science, until 2010 around 100 books and papers were published about the Anthropocene, in 2015 that number increased eightfold, and in the last three years again this number has doubled, making a total that goes beyond 2000 publications in less than two decades. Another thing to be noticed is the broadening of the discussion of the concept from the Geosciences (aiming at its explanation, i.e., at finding out if there is enough reliable evidence available for its formal incorporation in the scientific discourse) to the Social Sciences (seeking its understanding, that is, the uncovering of the historical reasons that led to its emergence and what political, economic, social and cultural consequences derive from it) and to the Humanities (attempting at a critique of its theoretical and practical implications). This is giving rise to the formation of the multidisciplinary field of the Anthropocene studies. The Anthropocene did not go unnoticed to the philosophers too, leading them to inquire its ontological, epistemological, moral and aesthetic assumptions and implications. Moreover, because it seems to be provoking a deep transformation of Philosophy itself, a sense of urgency to think it through is now arising in the wider philosophical community. With the purpose of producing a relevant contribution to the ongoing debate on the theme, within the 9th Braga Meetings on Ethics and Political Philosophy (BMEPP 9), between June 11 and 12, a special session with the title “Philosophical challenges of the Anthropocene” was organized. This dossier includes a selection of the best papers, from more than two dozen, delivered during that event. The first is authored by one of the keynote speakers of the BMEPP 9, Professor Darrel Moellendorf (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt), and has the title “Three Interpretations of the Anthropocene: Hope and Anxiety at the End of Nature”. We are very grateful to Professor Moellendorf for having had the generosity to offer us his text for publication in this dossier. In his paper he argues that there are three plausible interpretations, or attempts to make sense of the Anthropocene as an ongoing process: the Promethean, generating great expectations about our capacities to manage the planet; the destructive, provoking considerable anxiety regarding our environmental-civilizational destiny; and the inegalitarian, raising growing concern about our collective coexistence. According to him, any of them is equally plausible, and it is quite difficult to predict which trajectory the Anthropocene will take in the future. The second contribution, from Cláudia Toriz Ramos (Fernando Pessoa University), entitled “Ecopolitics and global security: from discourse to policies”, shows, with great clarity, how the ecopolitical discourse has been crafted, assimilated to public policies, and ultimately contributed to the development of international and global security policies that pay increasing attention to environmental sustainability and security in contemporary times. Bernhard Sylla (University of Minho) in “Anti-dualism in the discourse on the Anthropocene” carried out a thorough analysis and criticism of the more or less widely adopted claim among scholars of the “three cultures”, Natural Sciences, Social Sciences and Humanities, that the recognition of the Anthropocene implies the obsolescence of philosophically entrenched dualisms, such as nature vs. culture, social system vs. ecological system, or subject vs. object, and the resulting need to overcome that way of thinking that is incapable of coping with the environmental challenges of today. Focusing on the criticism that Andrew Feenberg and Gernot Böhme addressed at Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour`s purported forms of anti-dualism, he argues that although valuable it is not sufficiently convincing. The last piece, “The cosmopolitan and environmental challenges of the idea of Europe in the age of the Antropocene”, penned by Bruno Rego (University of Minho), attempts a reassessment of the principles of classical contractualism and sketches a revamp of the idea of Europe for the 21st century in response to the problems triggered by the anthropogenic global environmental crisis. He also proposes that cities in the EU space can be thought of as cosmopolitan political agents and foster an effective socioecological contribution to the Anthropocene challenges.

Image understanding is often conceived as a hierarchical process with many levels, where complexity and invariance of object representation gradually increase with level in the hierarchy. In contrast, neurophysiological studies have shown that figure-ground organization and border ownership coding, which imply understanding of the object structure of an image, occur at levels as low as V1 and V2 of the visual cortex. This cannot be the result of back-projections from object recognition centers because border-ownership signals appear well-before shape selective responses emerge in inferotemporal cortex. Ultra-fast border-ownership signals have been found not only for simple figure displays, but also for complex natural scenes. In this paper I review neurophysiological evidence for the hypothesis that the brain uses dedicated grouping mechanisms early on to link elementary features to larger entities we might call “proto-objects”, a process that is pre-attentive and does not rely on object recognition. The proto-object structures enable the system to individuate objects and provide permanence, to track moving objects and cope with the displacements caused by eye movements, and to select one object out of many and scrutinize the selected object. I sketch a novel experimental paradigm for identifying grouping circuits, describe a first application targeting area V4, which yielded negative results, and suggest targets for future applications of this paradigm.

Drawings offer a simple and efficient way to communicate meaning. While line drawings capture only coarsely how objects look in reality, we still perceive them as resembling real-world objects. Previous work has shown that this perceived similarity is mirrored by shared neural representations for drawings and natural images, which suggests that similar mechanisms underlie the recognition of both. However, other work has proposed that representations of drawings and natural images become similar only after substantial processing has taken place, suggesting distinct mechanisms. To arbitrate between those alternatives, we measured brain responses resolved in space and time using fMRI and MEG, respectively, while human participants (female and male) viewed images of objects depicted as photographs, line drawings, or sketch-like drawings. Using multivariate decoding, we demonstrate that object category information emerged similarly fast and across overlapping regions in occipital, ventral-temporal and posterior parietal cortex for all types of depiction, yet with smaller effects at higher levels of visual abstraction. In addition, cross-decoding between depiction types revealed strong generalization of object category information from early processing stages on. Finally, by combining fMRI and MEG data using representational similarity analysis, we found that visual information traversed similar processing stages for all types of depiction, yet with an overall stronger representation for photographs. Together our results demonstrate broad commonalities in the neural dynamics of object recognition across types of depiction, thus providing clear evidence for shared neural mechanisms underlying recognition of natural object images and abstract drawings.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT:When we see a line drawing, we effortlessly recognize it as an object in the world despite its simple and abstract style. Here we asked to what extent this correspondence in perception is reflected in the brain. To answer this question, we measured how neural processing of objects depicted as photographs and line drawings with varying levels of detail (from natural images to abstract line drawings) evolves over space and time. We find broad commonalities in the spatiotemporal dynamics and the neural representations underlying the perception of photographs and even abstract drawings. These results indicate a shared basic mechanism supporting recognition of drawings and natural images.

Abstract The primate visual system is often described as a hierarchical feature-conjunction pathway, whereby each level represents an increasingly complex combination of image elements, culminating in the representation of whole coherent images in anterior inferior temporal cortex. Although many models of the ventral visual stream emphasize serial feedforward processing ((Poggio T, Mutch J, Leibo J, Rosasco L, Tacchetti A. The computationalmagic of the ventral stream: sketch of a theory (and why some deep architectures work). TechRep MIT-CSAIL-TR-2012-035. MIT CSAIL, Cambridge, MA. 2012); (Yamins DLK, DiCarlo JJ. Eight open questions in the computational modeling of higher sensory cortex. Curr Opin Neurobiol. 2016:37:114–120.)), anatomical studies show connections that bypass intermediate areas and that feedback to preceding areas ((Distler C, Boussaoud D, Desimone R, Ungerleider LG. Cortical connections of inferior temporal area TEO in macaque monkeys. J Comp Neurol. 1993:334(1):125–150.); (Kravitz DJ, Saleem KS, Baker CI, Mishkin M. A new neural framework for visuospatial processing. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2011:12(4):217–230.)). Prior studies on visual discrimination and object transforms also provide evidence against a strictly feed-forward serial transfer of information between adjacent areas ((Kikuchi R, Iwai E. The locus of the posterior subdivision of the inferotemporal visual learning area in the monkey. Brain Res. 1980:198(2):347–360.); (Weiskrantz L, Saunders RC. Impairments of visual object transforms in monkeys. Brain. 1984:107(4):1033–1072.); (Kar K, DiCarlo JJ. Fast recurrent processing via ventrolateral prefrontal cortex is needed by the primate ventral stream for robust Core visual object recognition. Neuron. 2021:109(1):164–176.e5.)). Thus, we sought to investigate whether behaviorally relevant propagation of visual information is as strictly sequential as sometimes supposed. We compared the accuracy of visual recognition after selective removal of specific subregions of inferior temporal cortex—area TEO, area TE, or both areas combined. Removal of TEO alone had no detectable effect on recognition memory, whereas removal of TE alone produced a large and significant impairment. Combined removal of both areas created no additional deficit relative to removal of TE alone. Thus, area TE is critical for rapid visual object recognition, and detailed image-level visual information can reach area TE via a route other than through TEO.

We contrast two theses that make different assumptions about the developmental onset of human-unique sociality. The primary intersubjectivity thesis (PIT) argues that humans relate to each other in distinct ways from the beginning of life, as is shown by newborns' participation in face-to-face encounters or “primary intersubjectivity.” According to this thesis, humans' innate relational capacity is the seedbed from which all subsequent social-emotional and social-cognitive developments continuously emerge. The shared intentionality thesis (SIT) states that human-unique forms of interaction develop at 9–12 months of age, when infants put their heads together with others in acts of object-focused joint attention and simple collaborative activities. According to this thesis, human-unique cognition emerges rapidly with the advent of mind-reading capacities that evolved specifically for the purpose of coordination. In this paper, we first contrast the two theses and then sketch the outlines of an account that unifies their strengths. This unified account endorses the PIT's recognition of the fundamental importance of primary intersubjectivity. Any act of sharing experiences is founded on the communicative capacity that is already displayed by young infants in primary intersubjectivity. At the same time, we question the PIT's interpretation that dyadic encounters have the triadic structure of joint attention. Lastly, we draw on empirical work on the development of joint attention, imitation, and social referencing that serves as evidence that primary intersubjectivity continuously unfolds into the capacity for triadic joint attention.

Sketches are a ubiquitous form of communication in engineering design due to their simplicity and efficiency. However, because of a lack of suitable machine-interpretation techniques, they are virtually unusable with current computer-aided design and engineering tools. The informal nature of sketches and their inherent ambiguity present a number of challenges to the development of such techniques. Here we address one particular challenge, the task of reliably locating and recognizing the intended visual objects from a continuous stream of pen strokes. We present an integrated sketch parsing and recognition approach, based on a novel mark-group-recognize paradigm, which is tailored to the domain of mechanical systems. In the first step of processing, the sketch is examined to identify certain delimiting symbols called “markers.” The remaining pen strokes are then partitioned into distinct clusters, each representing a single symbol. Finally, a trainable symbol recognizer is used to find the best interpretation of each cluster. We have used these techniques to build a sketch-based tool for designing and analyzing vibratory mechanical systems. This tool enables designers to analyze and animate vibratory systems by simply sketching them on a tablet computer. User studies indicate that even first-time users find our tool to be effective.

A digital object identifier (DOI) is an increasingly prominent persistent identifier in finding and accessing scholarly information. This paper intends to present an overview of global development and approaches in the field of DOI and DOI services with a slight geographical focus on Germany. At first, the initiation and components of the DOI system and the structure of a DOI name are explored. Next, the fundamental and specific characteristics of DOIs are described and DOIs for three (3) kinds of typical intellectual entities in the scholar communication are dealt with; then, a general DOI service pyramid is sketched with brief descriptions of functions of institutions at different levels. After that, approaches of the research data librarianship community in the field of RDM, especially DOI services, are elaborated. As examples, the DOI services provided in German research libraries as well as best practices of DOI services in a German library are introduced; and finally, the current practices and some issues dealing with DOIs are summarized. It is foreseeable that DOI, which is crucial to FAIR research data, will gain extensive recognition in the scientific world.

I. Happy Endings Chaplin’s Modern Times features one of the most subtly strange endings in Hollywood history. It concludes with the Tramp (Chaplin) and the Gamin (Paulette Goddard) walking away from the camera, down the road, toward the sunrise. (Figure 1.) They leave behind the city, their hopes for employment, and, it seems, civilization itself. The iconography deployed is clear: it is 1936, millions are unemployed, and to walk penniless into the Great Depression means destitution if not death. Chaplin invokes a familiar trope of 1930s texts, the “marginal men,” for whom “life on the road is not romanticized” and who “do not participate in any culture,” as Warren Susman puts it (171). The Tramp and the Gamin seem destined for this non-existence. For the duration of the film they have tried to live and work within society, but now they are outcasts. This is supposed to be a happy ending, though. Before marching off into poverty, the Tramp whistles a tune and tells the Gamin to “buck up” and smile; the string section swells around them. (Little-known [or discussed] fact: Chaplin later added lyrics to this music, resulting in the song “Smile,” now part of the repertoire of countless torch singers and jazz musicians. Standout recordings include those by Nat King Cole and Elvis Costello.) It seems like a great day to be alive. Why is that? In this narrative of despair, what is there to “buck up” about? The answer lies outside of the narrative. There is another iconography at work here: the rear-view silhouette of the Tramp strolling down the road, foregrounded against a wide vista, complete with bowler hat, baggy pants, and pigeon-toed walk, recalls previous Chaplin films. By invoking similar moments in his oeuvre, Chaplin signals that the Tramp, more than a mere movie character, is the mass-reproduced trademark image of Charlie Chaplin, multimillionaire entertainer and worldwide celebrity. The film doubles Chaplin with the Tramp. This double exposure, figuratively speaking, reconciles the contradictions between the cheerful atmosphere and the grim story. The celebrity’s presence alleviates the suspicion that the protagonists are doomed. Rather than being reduced to one of the “marginal men,” the Tramp is heading for the Hollywood hills, where Chaplin participates in quite a bit of culture, making hit movies for huge audiences. Nice work if you can get it, indeed. Chaplin resolves the plot by supplanting narrative logic with celebrity logic. Chaplin’s celebrity diverges somewhat from the way Hollywood celebrity functions generally. Miriam Hansen provides a popular understanding of celebrity: “The star’s presence in a particular film blurs the boundary between diegesis and discourse, between an address relying on the identification with fictional characters and an activation of the viewer’s familiarity with the star on the basis of production and publicity” (246). That is, celebrity images alter films by enlisting what Hansen terms “intertexts,” which include journalism and studio publicity. According to Hansen, celebrity invites these intertexts to inform and multiply the meaning of the narrative. By contrast, Modern Times disregards the diegesis altogether, switching focus to the celebrity. Meaning is not multiplied. It is replaced. Filmic resolution depends not only on recognizing Chaplin’s image, but also on abandoning plot and leaving the Tramp and the Gamin to their fates. This explicit use of celebrity culminates Chaplin’s reworking of early twentieth-century celebrity, his negotiations with fame that continue to reverberate today. In what follows, I will argue that Chaplin weds visual celebrity with strategies of author-production often attributed to modernist literature, strategies that parallel Michel Foucault’s theory of the “author function.” Like his modernist contemporaries, Chaplin deploys narrative techniques that gesture toward the text’s creator, not as a person who is visible in a so-called real world, but as an idealized consciousness who resides in the film and controls its meaning. While Chaplin’s Hollywood counterparts rely on images to connote individual personalities, Chaplin resists locating his self within a body, instead using the Tramp as a sign, rather than an embodiment, of his celebrity, and turning his filmmaking into an aesthetic space to contain his subjectivity. Creating himself as author, Chaplin reckons with the fact that his image remains on display. Chaplin recuperates the Tramp image, mobilizing it as a signifier of his mass audience. The Tramp’s universal recognizability, Chaplin suggests, authorizes the image to represent an entire historical moment. II. An Author Is Born Chaplin produces himself as an author residing in his texts, rather than a celebrity on display. He injects himself into Modern Times to resolve the narrative (and by extension assuage the social unrest the film portrays). This gesture insists that the presence of the author generates and controls signification. Chaplin thus echoes Foucault’s account of the author function: “The author is . . . the principle of a certain unity of writing – all differences having to be resolved” by reference to the author’s subjectivity (215). By reconciling narrative contradictions through the author, Chaplin proposes himself as the key to his films’ coherence of meaning. Foucault reminds us, however, that such positioning of the author is illusory: “We are used to thinking that the author is so different from all other men, and so transcendent . . . that, as soon as he speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. The truth is quite the contrary: the author does not precede the works. The text contains a number of signs referring to the author” (221). In this formulation, authors do not create meaning. Rather, texts exercise formal attributes to produce their authors. So Modern Times, by enlisting Chaplin’s celebrity to provide closure, produces a controlling consciousness, a special class of being who “proliferates” meaning. Chaplin’s films in general contain signs of the author such as displays of cinematic tricks. These strategies, claiming affinity with objects of high culture, inevitably evoke the author. Chaplin’s author is not a physical entity. Authorship, Foucault writes, “does not refer purely and simply to a real individual,” meaning that the author is composed of text, not flesh and blood (216). Chaplin resists imbuing the image of the Tramp with the sort of subjectivity reserved for the author. In this way Chaplin again departs from usual accounts of Hollywood stars. In Chaplin’s time, according to Richard Dyer, “The roles and/or the performance of a star in a film were taken as revealing the personality of the star” (20). (Moreover, Chaplin achieves all that fame without relying on close-ups. Critics typically cite the close-up as the device most instrumental to Hollywood celebrity. Scott J. Juengel writes of the close-up as “a fetishization of the face” that creates “an intense manifestation of subjectivity” [353; also see Dyer, 14-15, and Susman, 282]. The one true close-up I have found in Chaplin’s early films occurs in “A Woman” [1915], when Chaplin goes in drag. It shows Chaplin’s face minus the trademark fake mustache, as if to de-familiarize his recognizability.) Dyer represents the standard view: Hollywood movies propose that stars’ public images directly reflect their private personalities. Chaplin’s celebrity contradicts that model. Chaplin’s initial fame stems from his 1914 performances in Mack Sennett’s Keystone productions, consummate examples of the slapstick genre, in which the Tramp and his trademark regalia first become recognizable trademarks. Far from offering roles that reveal “personality,” slapstick treats both people and things as objects, equally at the mercy of apparently unpredictable physical laws. Within this genre the Tramp remains an object, subject to the chaos of slapstick just like the other bodies on the screen. Chaplin’s celebrity emerges without the suggestion that his image contains a unique subject or stands out among other slapstick objects. The disinclination to treat the image as container of the subject – shared with literary modernism – sets up the Tramp as a sign that connotes Chaplin’s presence elsewhere. Gradually, Chaplin turns his image into an emblem that metonymically refers to the author. When he begins to direct, Chaplin manipulates the generic features of slapstick to reconstruct his image, establishing the Tramp in a central position. For example, in “The Vagabond” (1916), the Tramp becomes embroiled in a barroom brawl and runs toward the saloon’s swinging doors, neatly sidestepping before reaching them. The pursuer’s momentum, naturally, carries him through the doorway. Other characters exist in a slapstick dimension that turns bodies into objects, but not the Tramp. He exploits his liberation from slapstick by exacerbating the other characters’ lack of control. Such moments grant the Tramp a degree of physical control that enhances his value in relation to the other images. The Tramp, bearing the celebrity image and referring to authorial control, becomes a signifier of Chaplin’s combination of authorship and celebrity. Chaplin devises a metonymic relationship between author and image; the Tramp cannot encompass the author, only refer to him. Maintaining his subjectivity separate from the image, Chaplin imagines his films as an aesthetic space where signification is contingent on the author. He attempts to delimit what he, his name and image, signify – in opposition to intertexts that might mobilize meanings drawn from outside the text. Writing of celebrity intertexts, P. David Marshall notes that “the descriptions of the connections between celebrities’ ‘real’ lives and their working lives . . . are what configure the celebrity status” (58). For Chaplin, to situate the subject in a celebrity body would be to allow other influences – uses of his name or image in other texts – to determine the meaning of the celebrity sign. His separation of image and author reveals an anxiety about identifying one specific body or image as location of the subject, about putting the actual subject on display and in circulation. The opening moment of “Shoulder Arms” (1920) illustrates Chaplin’s uneasy alliance of celebrity, author, and image. The title card displays a cartoon sketch of the Tramp in doughboy garb. Alongside, print lettering conveys the film title and the words, “written and produced by” above a blank area. A real hand appears, points to the drawing, and elaborately signs “Charles Chaplin” in the blank space. It then pantomimes shooting a gun at the Tramp. The film announces itself as a product of one author, represented by a giant, disembodied hand. The hand provides an inimitable signature of the author, while the Tramp, disfigured by the uniform but still identifiable, provides an inimitable signature of the celebrity. The relationship between the image and the “writer” is co-dependent but antagonistic; the same hand signs Chaplin’s name and mimes shooting the Tramp. Author-production merges with resistance to the image as representation of the subject. III. The Image Is History “Shoulder Arms” reminds us that despite Chaplin’s conception of himself as an incorporeal author, the Tramp remains present, and not quite accounted for. Here Foucault’s author function finds its limitations, failing to explain author-production that relies on the image even as it situates the author in the text. The Tramp remains visible in Modern Times while the film has made it clear that the author is present to engender significance. To Slavoj Zizek the Tramp is “the remainder” of the text, existing on a separate plane from the diegesis (6). Zizek watches City Lights (1931) and finds that the Tramp, who is continually shifting between classes and characters, acts as “an intercessor, middleman, purveyor.” He is continually mistaken for something he is not, and when the mistake is recognized, “he turns into a disturbing stain one tries to get rid of as quickly as possible” (4). Zizek points out that the Tramp is often positioned outside of social institutions, set slightly apart from the diegesis. Modern Times follows this pattern as well. For example, throughout the film the Tramp continually shifts from one side of the law to the other. He endures two prison sentences, prevents a jailbreak, and becomes a security guard. The film doesn’t quite know what to do with him. Chaplin takes up this remainder and transforms it into an emblem of his mass popularity. The Tramp has always floated somewhat above the narrative; in Modern Times that narrative occurs against a backdrop of historical turmoil. Chaplin, therefore, superimposes the Tramp on to scenes of historical change. The film actually withholds the tramp image during the first section of the movie, as the character is working in a factory and does not appear in his trademark regalia until he emerges from a stay in the “hospital.” His appearance engenders a montage of filmmaking techniques: abrupt cross-cutting between shots at tilted angles, superimpositions, and crowds of people and cars moving rapidly through the city, all set to (Chaplin’s) jarring, brass-wind music. The Tramp passes before a closed factory and accidentally marches at the head of a left-wing demonstration. The sequence combines signs of social upheaval, technological advancement, and Chaplin’s own technical achievements, to indicate that the film has entered “modern times” – all spurred by the appearance of the Tramp in his trademark attire, thus implicating the Tramp in the narration of historical change. By casting his image as a universally identifiable sign of Chaplin’s mass popularity, Chaplin authorizes it to function as a sign of the historical moment. The logic behind Chaplin’s treating the Tramp as an emblem of history is articulated by Walter Benjamin’s concept of the dialectical image. Benjamin explains how culture identifies itself through images, writing that “Every present day is determined by the images that are synchronic with it: each “now” is of a particular recognizability”(462-3). Benjamin proposes that the image, achieving a “particular recognizability,” puts temporality in stasis. This illuminates the dynamic by which Chaplin elevates the mass-reproduced icon to transcendent historical symbol. The Tramp image crystallizes that passing of time into a static unit. Indeed, Chaplin instigates the way the twentieth century, according to Richard Schickel, registers its history. Schickel writes that “In the 1920s, the media, newly abustle, had discovered techniques whereby anyone could be wrested out of whatever context had originally nurtured him and turned into images . . . for no previous era is it possible to make a history out of images . . . for no subsequent era is it possible to avoid doing so. For most of us, now, this is history” (70-1). From Schickel, Benjamin, and Chaplin, a picture of the far-reaching implications of Chaplin’s celebrity emerges. By gesturing beyond the boundary of the text, toward Chaplin’s audience, the Tramp image makes legible that significant portion of the masses unified in recognition of Chaplin’s celebrity, affirming that the celebrity sign depends on its wide circulation to attain significance. As Marshall writes, “The celebrity’s power is derived from the collective configuration of its meaning.” The image’s connotative function requires collaboration with the audience. The collective configuration Chaplin mobilizes is the Tramp’s recognizability as it moves through scenes of historical change, whatever other discourses may attach to it. Chaplin thrusts the image into this role because of its status as remainder, which stems from Chaplin’s rejection of the body as a location of the subject. Chaplin has incorporated the modernist desire to situate subjectivity in the text rather than the body. Paradoxically, this impulse expands the role of visuality, turning the celebrity image into a principal figure by which our culture understands itself. References Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1999. Chaplin, Charles, dir. City Lights. RBC Films, 1931. –––. Modern Times. Perf. Chaplin and Paulette Goddard, United Artists, 1936. –––. “Shoulder Arms.” First National, 1918. –––. “The Vagabond.” Mutual, 1916. Dyer, Richard. Stars. London: BFI, 1998. Foucault, Michel. Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 1998. Hansen, Miriam. Babel and Babylon. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1998. Juengel, Scott J. “Face, Figure and Physiognomics: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the Moving Image.” Novel 33.3 (Summer 2000): 353-67. Schickel. Intimate Strangers. New York: Fromm International Publishing Company, 1986. Susman, Warren I. Culture as History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973. Zizek, Slavoj. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge, 1992. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Goldman, Jonathan. "Double Exposure: Charlie Chaplin as Author and Celebrity." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/05-goldman.php>. APA Style Goldman, J. (Nov. 2004) "Double Exposure: Charlie Chaplin as Author and Celebrity," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/05-goldman.php>.

During his speech in Plato’s The Symposium, Aristophanes explains that humans were originally round, composed of two people joined together in a perfect sphere with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Unfortunately, humans grew arrogant and ambitious; as a result, Zeus punished them by cleaving them in two. Now altered from their natural form, humans yearn for their former selves: “It is from this situation, then, that love for one another developed in human beings. Love collects the halves of our original nature, and tries to make a single thing out of the two parts so as to restore our natural condition. Thus, each of us is the matching half of a human being, since we have been severed like a flatfish, two coming from one, and each part is always seeking its other half” (191d). So it is that what we call “love” is but the “desire for wholeness” (193a). Love is not, for Aristophanes, a union but a re-union/reuniting. While Aristophanes’ account is simultaneously comedic and horrific, and consequently also absurdly ridiculous, there persists an undercurrent of some nebulous tickle, a recognition of something tangibly familiar in his myth, even now. Were space-time not linear and Plato could have Barbara Streisand speak next at that Athenian table (though of course he wouldn’t, as she’s a woman), he would undoubtedly have her sing “People”: “Lovers are very special people. They’re the luckiest people in the world. With one person, one very special person, a feeling deep in your soul, says you were half, now you’re whole.” “You complete me,” Jerry (played by Tom Cruise) says to Dorothy (played by Renée Zellweger) in the movie Jerry Maguire. How many lovers today claim their relationship with their beloved was meant to be? Even in a postmodern world, we seemingly have not strayed far from the Platonic ideal in which “lovers are incomplete halves of a single puzzle, searching for each other in order to become whole” (Ackerman 95). Implied by this model—described by Irving Singer as the “idealist tradition” (Modern 12)—is an uncomplicated conception of self. A self posited as fundamentally incomplete must be viewed as fixed and virtually invariable; otherwise, a multiplicity of ways in addition to a soul mate might be found to give the impoverished self what it needs. Viewed as yearning for his or her “other half,” the individual is positioned outside of/separated from the wider culture because only the “one true love” can make the person “whole.” Even biological impulses and psychological factors can be dismissed as irrelevant or possibly even dangerous distractions when all that truly matters is finding one’s “better half.” A self thus conceived also suggests a rather simplistic view of romantic love, which becomes merely the desire to achieve wholeness by connecting—or reconnecting, as Plato’s Aristophanes would have it—with a complementary lover. Unfortunately, the idealist model’s emphasis on deficiency codifies an ontology of lack that tends to foster omissions, oversimplifications, and misinterpretations. But, as numerous influential thinkers have convincingly argued, identity is neither uniform nor stable—nor even uncontested. Subjectivity is more accurately characterised by complexity and multiplicity than by simplicity and singularity. What, then, of romantic love? Is romantic love in contemporary Western cultures similarly complex, and if so, so what? How would (re)conceptualising romantic love as complex extend our knowledge and understanding of complex systems? I want to contribute to this themed issue of M/C Journal on complex by approaching romantic love as a point of departure, as an analytical methodology. I maintain that a critical study of romantic love—one that begins rather than concludes with romantic love’s complexity—helps illustrate the productive nature of complex and the utility of employing complex as a conceptual/theoretical point of origin and inquiry. Crucially, my formulation configures complex as a productive process that is itself a product. In other words, complex can be usefully defined as an effect that produces other effects—including potentially subversive ones. While other definitions are certainly valid, conceiving complex as an outcome that generates further outcomes not only emphasises the dynamic, multifaceted nature of systems but also helps to explain that multifaceted dynamism. Romantic love illustrates well this conception of complex (as productive product) because romantic love only has meaning, only works, because it is complex to begin with. In this manner, romantic love is a process of creating complexity from complexity. An examination that begins from a point of complexity gains much, I feel, by beginning with a historicisation of that complexity, for complex, as outcome/effect, is always already contextualised, situated, and diachronic. Historicising romantic love is particularly crucial because the idealist model tends to dismiss the past (what matters the past once one has finally met the love of one’s life?) and confuse history—especially its own—with nature (as with the supposedly natural passivity of the feminine). According to Singer, the idealist tradition, first codified by Plato, was taken up by medieval theologians who, drawn by the tradition’s ideal of merging, sought to produce a mystical oneness with the divine (Courtly 23). Emphasis eventually moved from merging to the experience of merging, a move that facilitated the rise of courtly love. Transmuting religious reverence into human devotion, courtly love introduced such revolutionary and potentially heretical notions as the belief that “love is an intense, passionate relationship that establishes a holy oneness between man and woman” (23). The desire for oneness appears even more prominently in the Romanticism of the 19th century (288). Importantly, erotic love becomes for the first time conjoined with romantic love in a causal rather than antithetical or consequential relation: “To the Romantic, sexual desire is usually more than just a vehicle or concomitant of love; it is a prerequisite” (Modern 10). Little wonder, given such a trajectory, that romantic love today has virtually no meaning independent of sexual love (though sexual desire may or may not be linked to romantic love). Little wonder as well that romantic love is so complex. But there’s more. As Stephanie Coontz explains, marriage in the West was until only about two centuries ago a political and economic institution having little or nothing to do with romantic love (33). Anthony Giddens also points out the relatively recent shift from an economic to a romantic basis for marriage (26). Giddens associates this shift with the emergence of what he terms “plastic sexuality”: “decentered sexuality, freed from the needs of reproduction” (2). Plastic sexuality resulted from a combination of factors, most notably societal trends toward limiting family size coupled with advances in contraceptive and reproductive technologies (27). Allowing for greater freedom and pleasure (especially for women), plastic sexuality is for Giddens linked not only to romantic love but also, intrinsically, to self-identity (2, 40). This connection—along with the plastic sexuality that undergirds it—creates narratives of self (and other) that can project “a course of future development” (45), lead to greater reflexivity for the body and the self (31), and transform intimacy in ways potentially subversive and emancipative (3, 194). In any case, our (inter)personal existence is currently undergoing active transfiguration, Giddens asserts, to the point that “personal life has become an open project, creating new demands and anxieties” (8). My reading of Giddens places this continuous, reflexive project of self (what one might alternatively term the ongoing production of selves-in-process) against the plastic sexuality and pure relationships that engendered the project. Only a view of romantic love as productive, evolving, and full—in other words, complex—can account for the complex transformations of intimacy and self described by Giddens. Viewed more broadly, romantic love corresponds—in both the analogous and communicative meanings of the term—to/with the very poststructural/postmodern subject it helps to enact. Tamsin Lorraine’s lucid articulation of embodied subjectivity is worth quoting at length in this context: I assume that the selves we experience as our own are the product of a historically conditioned process involving both corporeal and psychic aspects of existence, that this process needs to be instituted and continually reiterated in a social context in order to give birth to and maintain the subject at the corporeal level of embodiment as well as the psychic level of self, and that language and social positioning within a larger social field play a crucial role in this process. In taking up a position in the social field as a speaker of language, a human being takes up a perspective from which to develop a narrative of self. (ix-x) Others have theorised identity as a narrative construct (Holstein and Gubrium; Rosenwald and Ochberg). What is significant here in reading Lorraine’s embodied subjectivity through the interpretative lens provided by Giddens is the particular kind of narrative suggested by such a reading. After all, not just any narrative will do. The “perspective” taken up by the reflexive subject (as described by Giddens) in the process of constructing a storied self necessarily requires a productive integration of the many “aspects of existence.” Otherwise, no such “position” could be taken, no agency established; the particular self would not even be. As such, the perspective is a product of complexity even as it attempts to compose its own complex product (a narrative identity). Additionally, romantic love conceived as complex, as a productive force, opens up possibilities for new stories and new selves, even when, as in Lacanian theory, desire is correlated with lack. Lacan maintains that “desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction nor the demand for love, but the difference which results from the subtraction of the first from the second—the very phenomenon of their splitting” (287). Lack presented thusly is positive inasmuch as lack causes desire, which in turn produces the subject as a subjectivity. “Without lack,” Bruce Fink asserts, “the subject can never come into being, and the whole efflorescence of the dialectic of desire is squashed” (103). For clarification, Fink provides a simple illustration: “Why would a child even bother to learn to speak if all its needs were anticipated?” (103). Desire here is correlated with lack in a manner that suggests movement and change, bringing to mind Anne Carson’s famous quip, “Desire moves. Eros is a verb” (17). Keeping in mind that romantic love has become inextricably entwined with sexual desire in the West, designs that interrogate desire vis-à-vis lack (a strategy that also characterises the approaches taken by Hegel and Sartre) operate equally well in regards to self-identities formed via romantic love. Certainly, then, if desire constituted as lack can produce complexity by remaining unsatisfied and unfilled, what then of an approach that configures desire itself as production? Such a theoretical grounding is central to the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. For them, “everything is production” (Anti-Oedipus 4). In this view, life, the self, and even the body are not unified things but rather processes characterised by flow and multiplicity. Deleuze and Guattari emphasise the dynamic process of various sorts of “becoming” (Thousand 279). Becoming, in relation to romantic love and to other processes, involves not just individuals but assemblages. In this, Deleuze and Guattari present a collaborative conception of self involving the multiplicity of the two selves as well as the multiplicity “formed through the collaboration” (Lorraine 134). As Deleuze and Guattari explain, multiplicity “is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities” (Thousand 249). To my mind, this “string” of multiplicities directly parallels the complex. Luce Irigaray’s project similarly views subjectivity as embodied, potentially collaborative, and creative. Specifically, however, Irigaray seeks to challenge the masculine specular subjectivity that fosters divisive dualisms and a sexual division of labour that privileges the masculine. She critiques the subject-object distinction that has always defined female sexuality “on the basis of masculine parameters” (This 204) and relegated the feminine to the role of other to the masculine subject. One of the more interesting aspects of Irigaray’s enterprise is her project of symbolic transformation, an attempt to symbolise an alternative feminine subjectivity: “Irigaray insists that we need to acknowledge two genders and work on providing the hitherto impoverished gender the symbolic support it needs to become more than the counterpart of masculinity. If the feminine were given the support of a gender in its own right, then feminine subjectivity could finally emerge” (Lorraine 91). What Irigaray advocates is a dialectical interaction between subjects that embraces both difference and corporeality, that is temporal, playful, reciprocal, and mutually nourishing (I Love 148). Elizabeth Grosz’s refiguring of desire somewhat echoes Irigaray’s stance. Drawing upon Deleuze and Guattarai, Grosz also conceptualises desire as productive and full. She insists that in order to understand this expanded conception of desire we must first “abandon our habitual understanding of entities as the integrated totality of parts, and instead focus on the elements, the parts, outside their integration or organisation; we must look beyond the organism to the organs comprising it” (78). Totalities remain and must be recognised, but an understanding of the dynamics of those totalities is better accomplished through an investigation of the parts rather the whole. In her privileging of parts I see reflections of Irigaray’s respect for difference and dialectical creation. Indeed, one can easily see themes of fluidity and multiplicity running through the work of the theorists we have examined. This thematic/analytical consistency, I would argue, is at least partially explained by their active engagement in the complexity of romantic love. How not to theorise subjectivities formed via narratives of romantic love in a manner that resists dualisms when romantic love itself overflows with multiplicities? This is not, of course, to downplay the role of other factors, contingencies, and motivations. Still, that some feminists are critical of certain aspects of Foucauldian theory (his failure to adequately account for unequal power relations; his seeming denial that one group or class may dominate another) strikes me as directly related to issues located (if not exclusively) within the contemporary concept of romantic love (see Hartsock; Ramazanoğlu; Sedgwick). That such is the case is, for me, no surprise. Ultimately, in spite of its long history of repression and inequity, romantic love’s ever-increasing complexity points to possible future transformations (as Giddens details). My optimism stems from the fact that romantic love’s productive force can potentially open up whole new ranges of (complex) possibilities. In the theories of Giddens, Deleuze, Irigaray, Grosz, and numerous others, we witness some of these emerging possibilities. Framing complex as an outcome that produces other complex outcomes allows me to envision the possibility of even more possibilities—something akin to Irigaray’s “expanding universe” (This 209). In the final (for now) analysis, let us follow Grosz’s lead and privilege parts over the whole. Viewed from this perspective, a given system cannot be considered as a complex thing, as though it were an isolated singularity. Focusing on the specific, the particular, and the concrete serves to highlight the contingencies, fragments, flows, shifts, multiplicities, instabilities, and relations that constitute and produce the complex. In saying this, I am not simply asserting a tautology: the complex is complex. Because the components of something complex interact in ways both provisional and productive, the complex must inevitably produce new components, parts that constitute and change the system, as well as other parts that eventually form and/or alter other complex systems. Put another way, the individual parts of a complex are themselves complex. Consequently, a deeper understanding can be gained by stepping back and re-visioning the parts-to-the-whole paradigm as complexoutcomes-ofcomplex-outcomes. Romantic love, I believe, is such an example, and an especially ubiquitous and influential one at that. Only by beginning with an understanding of love as complex can we adequately explain how it operates and produces the kinds of effects that it does. Nothing simple could produce such profoundly complex effects as identities, discourses, and material objects. Something simple may very well produce simple outcomes that eventually conjoin into something complex, a whole composed of many individual parts. But only something already complex (i.e., an existing outcome of outcomes) can produce complex outcomes instantly and automatically as a matter of course in an intricate unfolding of relationships that, like love, circulate, bond, motivate, and potentially transform. References Ackerman, Diane. A Natural History of Love. New York: Random House, 1994. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1986. Coontz, Stephanie. Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. New York: Viking, 2005. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. ———. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Trans. Brian Massumi. 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Chicago: Chicago UP, 1984. ———. The Nature of Love: The Modern World. Vol. 3. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1987. Streisand, Barbra. “People.” By Bob Merrill and Jule Styne. People. Columbia, 1964. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Carpenter, Richard. "The Heart of the Matter: Complex as Productive Force." M/C Journal 10.3 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/02-carpenter.php>. APA Style Carpenter, R. (Jun. 2007) "The Heart of the Matter: Complex as Productive Force," M/C Journal, 10(3). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0706/02-carpenter.php>.