Recently, recommendation systems have become one of the important elements for sales and marketing, and their application is almost essential in the shopping and cultural industries. Despite the ...increase in online exhibitions and the growing audience engaging with artworks in digital spaces, the utilization of artwork recommendation systems remains inadequate. Thus, this study proposes an artwork recommendation system, which provides artwork groups based on a visual clustering technique and user preferences with WikiArt datasets. The visual attributes of artworks were extracted using VGG16, and k -means clustering was utilized to group a set of images according to their feature similarities. To generate recommendations, new artworks were randomly selected from particular clusters, taking into account users’ preferences. Then, an experiment was conducted to investigate whether the recommended artworks satisfied the users. The statistical results indicate that users’ perceived satisfaction with the recommended artworks is notably more positive compared to their satisfaction with traditional suggested artworks. Based on this study’s findings, we present implications and limitations for future research.
We present an approach enabling large-scale pretrained latent diffusion models to generate transparent images. The method allows generation of single transparent images or of multiple transparent ...layers. The method learns a "latent transparency" that encodes alpha channel transparency into the latent manifold of a pretrained latent diffusion model. It preserves the production-ready quality of the large diffusion model by regulating the added transparency as a latent offset with minimal changes to the original latent distribution of the pretrained model. In this way, any latent diffusion model can be converted into a transparent image generator by finetuning it with the adjusted latent space. We train the model with 1M transparent image layer pairs collected using a human-in-the-loop collection scheme. We show that latent transparency can be applied to different open source image generators, or be adapted to various conditional control systems to achieve applications like foreground/background-conditioned layer generation, joint layer generation, structural control of layer contents, etc. A user study finds that in most cases (97%) users prefer our natively generated transparent content over previous ad-hoc solutions such as generating and then matting. Users also report the quality of our generated transparent images is comparable to real commercial transparent assets like Adobe Stock.
This article is dedicated to the Teatr Węgajty archive, created as part of the Teatr Węgajty – 35 Years of an Anthropological Theatre project and socio-cultural quests. The authors refer to studies ...by, i.a. Jacques Derrida, Pierre Nora, Ernst van Alphen, and Aleida Assmann, focused on archives, bringing the reader closer to the archivisation activity of Erdmute and Wacław Sobaszek, associated with their undertakings at Teatr Węgajty, and problematizing their work performed as creators of the digital archive. The article explains the work methods and decisions made by the research team, connected with the construction of the collection and the systematization of accumulated and newly produced material. Furthermore, the authors disclose their hopes and doubts concerning the specificity of the Internet archive, and analyse relations between material kept in the archive and the context surrounding the latter. Finally, the article describes the evolution-transition from an analogue props room at the home of the founders of Teatr Węgajty to an accessible digital collection widely open to new users.
Essay dedicated to a piano on the barricades of Ukraine at war – with reference to the paradoxical motif of a piano set up in the Alps by Jean Arthur Rimbaud, described by the author as “a well-known ...destroyer of European bourgeois imagination and one of the first performers in Europe”.
Recorded conversation about Jak ocalić świat na małej scenie? (How to Save the World on a Small Theatre Stage?) held on 14 May 2021 with the ensemble of Teatr Powszechny im. Zygmunta Hübnera in ...Warsaw as part of the Between. Pomiędzy. Festival of Literature and the Theatre. Participants of the meeting included the director, the playwright, and actors: Paweł Łysak, Paweł Sztarbowski, Anna Ilczuk, Mamadou Góo Bâ, Andrzej Kłak, Artem Manuilov and Kazimierz Wysota.
“Whose is this song?” – director Adela Peewa asks her interlocutors and herself in a tragic comic document bearing the same title. The song was “here” and is “ours” for always, but on a geographical ...map these numerous instances of “here” are separated by several hundred kilometres. On a mental map they might be even more distant, although, after all, they are close since they are linked not only by that one melody but by an entire cultural plexus, albeit frayed by variously defined borders. The song roams while assuming increasingly new voices singing their stories – different or identical. Polish Christmas carols are part of the repertoire of Bulgarian Catholics from the region of Plovdiv and Svishtov, and mazurkas and polkas brought over by Polish exiles after the Spring of Nations and the January Uprising constituted an important part of the repertoire of the first Bulgarian orchestra performing in “the European spirit”. Poles also participated in the Bulgarian nineteenth-century school system (music and choral studies). “Unfamiliar” rather rapidly becomes “familiar”, but even quicker appears to be the collective oblivion of this process, while seeking its source, assuming that such a feat is possible, can prove to be inconvenient. Today, the song travels with even greater impetus, carried by a live human voice and transferred by a virtual Internet medium. The Balkan song has for long enjoyed the particular esteem of Polish (and not only) researchers and practicians of traditional and folk singing alike. A look taken at the wanderings and domestication of a song / singing through the prism of the categories of “multi-strata identity” and “transcultural medium” permits a fairer description of examined phenomena, without ascribing superiority to one of the elements of the musical-cultural jigsaw puzzle. In this case the biculturalism of the researcher, which I share, is an added value, although not always one that makes it easy to capture methodological distance, especially when self-reflection pertaining to undertaken research problems is at stake. The author considers the above-mentioned problems and issues by referring to her personal research and cultural experiences, and, additionally, by speaking of reflections and works by other authors dealing with, i.a. such categories as: multicultural identity, cultural transfer, borderline quality, wandering, itinerant repertoire or the familiar-unfamiliar antinomy. The cohesive motif is the song/singing conceived as a factor of self-reference, interpersonal communication, and telling “small” narratives.
The text examines the relationship between the Węgajty Theatre and the space in which it operates and which it creates. The analysis of successive places is a pretext to describe the way in which the ...Theatre functions and, more extensively, the culture that emerged around it. The authors define the entity shaping local space and spirit as a holobiont, a being composed of many beings, an ecosystem of volunteers, workshop participants, team members, and inhabitants of the surrounding villages, with the Sobaszek couple, the founders of the Theatre, in the very centre. The article formulates a thesis claiming that one of the most important principles followed by the hosts is the ready-made attitude, which assumes a readiness to accept the works of each person individually and the community as a whole in an emergent process set in motion by them.
In 1794 November (Polish: listopad) could have still turned into Novembre, the first month in the non-existent Polish revolutionary calendar. At least, this could be the assumption made while ...browsing through the visual essay by Jakub Woynarowski, a historical variation on the theme of the Kościuszko Insurrection. The process of comprehending alternative history signifies also taking a look at oneself in one’s dream, in which the longing for modernity, in reality never accomplished to the very end – that tomorrow which never comes, has an obverse in the form of “fear of modernity”. November is suffused with viscous elements of melancholy, such as mud, that emblematic suspension of November and possibly even the quintessence of Polishness. Not only armies veer – the same is true of ideas, always becoming misshapen far from the metropolises that gave birth to them. Ideas are not only deformed by mud but in some way tamed and moulded into something that is known and familiar. Mud is, simultaneously, a curse and – ex luto lux! – a blessing. When “tomorrow” flounders in it, it becomes possible to dream safely about it.
