Today, we are living in the New Space Age, where mass commercial space travel is almost within our grasp. This otherworldly possibility has opened up new cultural images of space, both real and fictional, and has caused fashion design and spacesuit engineering to intersect in new, exciting ways. Spacewear traverses this uncharted territory by exploring the changing imagination of space in fashion-and fashion in space-from the first Space Age to the 21st century. Exploring how space travel has stylistically and technologically framed fashion design on earth and how we need to revisit established design practices for the weightless environment, Spacewear connects the catwalk and the space station. This book draws together speculative fantasies in sci-fi films such as Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, with the engineered spacesuits Biosuit, and the NASA Z-2 and with catwalk interpretations by the likes of Alexander McQueen, Hussein Chalayan, André Courrèges, and Iris van Herpen. While the development of commercial space agencies has led to new concerns for style in garments for outer space that re-think fundamental design principles such as drape, high fashion has experimented with new possibilities for weightlessness that extend far beyond the 1960s vision of Space Age metallic fabrics and helmet-style headwear. Brownie takes the reader on a fascinating journey from fantasy to function and to form, deepening our understanding of this new category of fashion that is prompting new approaches to garment design and construction both on earth and in outer space.

All the papers read at the meeting (sessions, symposia and panels) are recorded in the CD-ROM.

How does a visual artist manage to narrate a story, which has a sequential and therefore temporal progression, using a static medium consisting solely of spatial sign elements and, what is more, in a single image? This is the question on which this work is based, posed by its designer, Alberto Argenton, to whose memory it is dedicated. The first explanation usually given by scholars in the field is that the artist solves the problem by depicting the same character in a number of scenes, thus giving indirect evidence of events taking place at different times. This book shows that artists, in addition to the repetition of characters, devise other spatial perceptual-representational strategies for organising the episodes that constitute a story and, therefore, showing time. Resorting to the psychology of art of a Gestalt matrix, the book offers researchers, graduates, advanced undergraduates, and professionals a description of a large continuous pictorial narrative repertoire (1000 works) and an in-depth analysis of the perceptual-representational strategies employed by artists from the 6th to the 17th century in a group of 100 works narrating the story of Adam and Eve.

Comparative aesthetics compares the aesthetic concepts and practices of different cultures. This anthology of essays by internationally recognized scholars brings together some of the most important research in comparative aesthetics, from classic early essays to previously unpublished contemporary pieces. Ranging across cultures and time periods, the essays reveal both similarities and differences between various aesthetic traditions.

This book contains the joint proceedings of the Winter School of Hakodate (WSH) 2011 held in Hakodate, Japan, March 15–16, 2011, and the 6th International Workshop on Natural Computing (6th IWNC) held in Tokyo, Japan, March 28–30, 2012, organized by the Special Interest Group of Natural Computing (SIG-NAC), the Japanese Society for Artificial Intelligence (JSAI). This volume compiles refereed contributions to various aspects of natural computing, ranging from computing with slime mold, artificial chemistry, eco-physics, and synthetic biology, to computational aesthetics.