Visual Arts

(Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsac20 Artefacts of history: archaeology, historiography, and Indian pasts, by Sudeshna Guha, Delhi, Sage India, 2015, 273 pp., Rs. 995 (hardback), ISBN 978-93-515-0164-0 Sraman Mukherjee To cite this article: Sraman Mukherjee (2017): Artefacts of history: archaeology, historiography, and Indian pasts, by Sudeshna Guha, Delhi, Sage India, 2015, 273 pp., Rs. 995 (hardback), ISBN 978-93-515-0164-0, South Asian History and Culture,

This paper explores the possibility of reading the shifts in locations of objects as processes of translation and change in art history. The study focuses on the journeys and material reconstitutions of ancient Buddhist corporeal relics as they travelled from an archaeological site in British India, Piprahwa Kot, to a new relic temple in Bangkok, the capital of the Kingdom of Siam (Thailand), during the late nineteenth century. Mapping the shifting locations of the Piprahwa relics across changing geographical, institutional, cultural, and political spaces, the paper traces the changing materiality and multiple identities that accrued around these objects. This study does not ascribe these new identities of Buddhist relics solely to the "inventive" capacity of the cultural politics of British colonialism. Rather, it seeks to bring out the complexities of antiquarian collecting and market , connoisseurship, display, and scholarship; rituals of state diplomacy; and religious reclamations across transnational Southern Buddhist worlds, as constitutive of the new and multiple identities of ancient Buddhist corporeal relics.

'cargo'. More importantly these cities, spread across Nigeria, Benin, Togo and Ghana, served as ports of return for freed slaves from Brazil towards the end of the nineteenth century. Some suggest that the impetus behind this reverse transportation lay in one of the most significant uprisings that took place in Bahia in 1835 in the month of Ramadan (2). Known as the Malê Revolt (malê was a term used for Muslims in Bahia), this uprising was led by freed slaves many of whom were Muslims of Yoruba and Hausa ethnicities. The revolt was violently suppressed but

The need for maximizing the performance of processors opened doors for a new approach which emphasizes parallelism. This paper discusses how various architectures, like Superscalars and VLIWs, implement this parallelism and presents a case study on Intel’s Itanium processor that uses EPIC (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing)

One of W. J. T. Mitchell’s counter-theses on visual culture reveals certain non-visual phenomena that the field demands attention to. An investigation on these non-visual phenomena and why they are given attention by visual culture points out the following:  the encompassing perimeters of the visual culture in contrast to those of art history and aesthetics; A sensorial shift that could overturn the hegemony of sight; and the possible emergence of a new field of sensorial cultural studies.
This paper analyzes the aforementioned sensorial shift in the light of new technological advancements in Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.

This essay introduces a shift in the modern commonplace towards a functionality-centered lifestyle with the rise of Information Technology. This paper draws parallels from Tanizaki's Praise of Shadows to further illustrate the mechanisms of the aforementioned shift, claims its relevance in the modern world, and suggests its implications on the future of aesthetics.

Sen’s capability approach to assessing human development branches life into a set of functionings and values an individual’s capability to function. This approach evaluates enrichment of life through instrumental and intrinsic views of freedom; the former values only the end-state that was chosen by the individual while the latter values the freedom to choose between available states. While determining “what was chosen and achieved” is simple, the estimation of “what could have been chosen is” is highly problematic owing to data limitations. Therefore, the practical application of the intrinsic view of freedom remains to be a hurdle for the capability approach. In this paper, I will offer a possible solution to the problem of accommodating the intrinsic view of freedom in the practical application of Amartya Sen’s capability approach. In formulating the solution, I shall employ concepts of information retrieval proposed by Karen Spärck Jones.

Given a grayscale image of dimensions 256x256, our model aims to produce a colored image corresponding to the input. This paper describes the process of constructing an appropriate model, the difficulties we faced, and the final model that we selected as being most efficient. We used a feed-forward convolutional neural network with three two-dimensional convolutional layers, this being the most computationally feasible given our computational limitations. The output layer has three feature maps, representing RGB (red, green and blue) feature sets. The model was tested extensively on a diverse range of images, but eventually we chose to focus on a specific category to enable our model to specialize in that category. 2 | P a g e

A review of Word Embedding Models through a deconstructive approach reveals their several shortcomings and inconsistencies. These include instability of the vector representations, a distorted analogical reasoning, geometric incompatibility with linguistic features, and the inconsistencies in the corpus data. A new theoretical embedding model, 'Derridian Embedding,' is proposed in this paper. Contemporary embedding models are evaluated qualitatively in terms of how adequate they are in relation to the capabilities of a Derridian Embedding.

The new class of neural network architectures introduced in 2014, called generative adversarial networks (GANs), can be used to mimic any distribution in any domain: images, music, speech, prose etc. We propose a pipeline SDCGAN to produce paintings from extremely small datasets using a combination of VAE, DCGAN and image translation frameworks.

The emergence of technologies that blur the categorical distinction between humans and machines questions the centrality and supremacy of the liberal humanist subject. This development calls for a reconceptualization of the machine against its traditional instrumental conception as a passive resource that furthers human progress. The following essay explores the need to separate the machine from its anthropocentric ontologies, and introduces an alternate multicentered framework, based on new materialist and post-phenomenoligcal perspectives, to foster an inclusive post-human future that extends subjectivity and autonomy to machines and non-human others.