Giovanni Matteucci

Technoculture of handcraft: fine gesture recognition for haute couture skills preservation and transfer in Italy

In many different fields specialized artisans have become difficult to find, as their knowledge and their practical abilities are anything but easy to teach and transfer with training models that are no longer based on traditional master-apprentice relationships. This situation is particularly exacerbated in all those high-end haute couture companies that have built their glory on their style, as well as on their highly specialized craftsmen capable of turning leather, wool and other materials into inestimably valued shoes, bags and clothes. Today, alternative solutions can be found as technology can be put to good use to encode, and thus preserve, all this expertise, providing digital means of passing it on to new generations. Modern technologies have already been experimented with manual craftsmanship, for example, in the context of knitting [Rosner and Ryokai, 2009], although focusing most on its amusement and social aspects rather than on its knowledge encoding ones. Tracking techniques could support, instead, a system capable of digitizing the hand gestures performed by an artisan while handcrafting. However, such proposals very often require users to wear specific garments, not always suiting the scenario, as artisans reluctantly bear the use of invasive modern technologies. We show that noninvasive technologies can be exploited to encode and thus preserve artisanal knowledge by presenting a system based on a set of fine gesture recognition algorithms, as derived by [Roccetti et al., 2010], that require no peculiar attire as they solely utilize a frontal webcam, positioned at a close distance from a handcrafter. We witness the viability of using such system for tracking a handcrafter in two important phases of shoe making: hammering and sewing a shoe.

Everyday Aesthetics and Aestheticization: Reflectivity in Perception

Undoubtedly, the relationship between Everyday Aesthetics and aestheticization is controversial, although they share the same historical context. Against everyday aestheticians’ tendency to refuse any proximity between everyday aesthetic experience and aestheticization as the “contagion-logic” underlying commodified reality, we will show how they are both based on the reflective structure of aisthesis. The latter emerges thanks to a critical conception here illustrated through both an archeological path (involving Sibley, Kant, and Herder), and the consideration of the determining factors for current aesthetic practices. Our thesis is, therefore, that Everyday Aesthetics can take advantage of a non-ideological approach to aestheticization, in order to become aware of the perception theory it actually needs and to promote an incisive critical stance.

Rethinking User Generated Location Rating: Where Does the Lion Get its Share?

Mobile devices and web pages increasingly set not only the direction, but also the pace taken in many everyday life activities. In essence, the lives of many people today follow algorithmic paths, provided by navigation units and by social recommendation systems. Although this improves the efficiency and functionality of many tasks, this process may also lead to a standardized, and, perhaps, oversimplified approach to reality. In essence, many likes on social pages (e.g., Facebook), star ratings on leading traveler websites (e.g., Tripadvisor) and reviews provided by the online crowd may lead the lions share of users to visit only a limited number of locations. This means that in many cases, people with very different backgrounds, taste, cultural awareness and sensitivity may end in the very same places while missing more appropriate ones, be them historical or commercial. The work presented in this paper aims at moving a first step in unveiling such problem, and experimenting with possible working strategies which may better represent the significance of a location, while still conserving the simplicity of the most commonly utilized evaluation systems.

Listening to unanimated objects' stories for treatment and repair: A computer vision approach

In any medical practice an important part of the treatment strategy includes listening to what a patient has to say. Considering a broken object as a subject of treatment, we claim that listening to an objects story provide an aid to its repair. A prominent question emerges hence: how can objects tell their stories? Based on the consideration that an objects story corresponds to its peculiar lifecycle, we are confident that it can be acquired by “observing” how that object is crafted, manipulated and operated along its life. Two sweaters, for example, may be exactly the same at the beginning, but depending on how they have been worn, and on the decay process to which they have been subjected, their correspondent stories may be very different. With this in mind, we have tried to exploit fine gesture recognition algorithms that have been put to good use to capture the stories of unanimated objects that are crafted and then manipulated by human beings. This approach appears very promising when searching for mechanisms capable of automatically understand what objects have to tell to us.

Campo artistico e apriori storico-materiale

In order to grasp the link between the “natural” and the “historical” that characterizes the reality of art, this paper aims to an examination of the concept of “artistic field” in contrast with “art world”. The notion of field reflects the dynamical status of the reality of art as institutional process, that roots in the sociological and anthropological experience of human being in his interaction with his environment. The analysis of this interaction carried out by Pierre Bourdieu and Arnold Gehlen shows how an institution such as art arises as stabilization of nature and “habitualization” of experience structures which are operating already at the level of perception and which culminate in the praxis of figuration. This means that an artistic field implies an historical and material (rather than formal) apriori, that the notion of “art world” tends to hide and to repress.

Plessners und Schelers Stellung zum Cartesianismus

Der Titel, den ich meinem Vortrag gegeben habe, verspricht vielleicht zu viel. In den folgenden Bemerkungen werde ich tatsächlich nur bei einem Problem verweilen, welches dennoch nicht irgendein Problem ist. Ich glaube nämlich, dass es hilfreich ist, um zu zeigen, dass die Gründung der philosophischen Anthropologie des 20. Jahrhunderts mit der Loslösung vom cartesianischen Paradigma einhergeht, das die moderne Philosophie dominiert und ihre Hauptentwicklungen begleitet hat. Die These, die ich vertreten werde, ist, dass diese Loslösung von der Moderne in einer nicht sekundären Weise das Problem der Aisthesis betrifft. Nur nach Verabschiedung einiger Schwerpunkte der cartesianischen Wahrnehmungstheorie ist es nämlich möglich, eine Auffassung fallen zu lassen, der zufolge die Erfahrung grundsätzlich eine Beziehung innerhalb des Bewusstseins ist, und zu einer Auffassung der Erfahrung überzugehen, die auf der komplexen Interaktion zwischen Organismus und Milieu beruht, wie es gerade charakteristisch für die philosophische Anthropologie ist. Von Scheler und Plessner werde ich Texte in Betracht ziehen, die der vollendeten Ausarbeitung der jeweiligen philosophischen Anthropologieprogramme vorausgehen oder ihr zur Seite stehen und gleichzeitig implizit von einem kritischen Vergleich mit der Phänomenologie gekennzeichnet sind. Die oben formulierte These ist also kombiniert mit einer Hypothese, die ich zwar nicht vollständig verifizieren werde, die sich aber in die Form dieser Frage bringen ließe: In welchem Ausmaß ist die philosophische Anthropologie des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts notwendigerweise aus einer Rippe der husserlianischen Phänomenologie entstanden?