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Gentling The Savage Enormity Of Gargantuan Space: Ann Hamilton at the Armory
No full textGentling The Savage Enormity Of Gargantuan Space: Ann Hamilton at the Armory
by Ellen Handler Spitz
The Event of a Thread by Ann Hamilton at the Park Avenue Armory
December 5, 2012 to January 6, 2013 643 Park Avenue, between 66th and 67th streets New York City, (212) 616-3930
Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem ‘The Swing’ (from A Child’s Garden of Verses) offers an ebullient summons to Ann Hamilton’s wondrous new work at the Park Avenue Armory. A line from Stevenson sails into mind as—in the company of visitors ranging in age from infancy to near dotage, including portly businessmen whose well-cut jacket flaps trail behind them like the tails of flying fish—-I ascend weightless, airborne on one of 42 wooden plank swings. Reminiscent of garment workers’ benches, these are suspended by chains some 70 feet from the drill hall ceiling . “Up in the air I go flying again,/ Up in the air and down!” These blissful words might well have been known to the artist’s grandmother, who is lovingly credited by the artist as a prime source of inspiration for this entrancing piece.
The Gothic Revival Park Avenue Armory , erected just five years before the poem’s publication in 1885, provides a perfect venue for Hamilton’s swings, her 42 pigeons in miniature, stacked dovecotes, and the immense white silken fabric that billows from on high, responsively rising and falling according to the visitors’ velocities as they sway on their swings, pushed often by perfect strangers. And the site irresistibly harks back to that other Armory, the one where in 1913 Modern Art erupted upon America. Like Theodore Roosevelt back then, New York Times critic Roberta Smith (reviewing this show on December 6) wonders whether what surrounds us inside these Armory walls is art. But, oh! It is!
Looming vast and drafty, 250 by 150 feet, the uncanny erstwhile home to military maneuvers, Wade Thompson Drill Hall seems forbidding at first glance. Lit dimly by Hamilton’s cunning lighting design, its awe and tremendum could easily dwarf anyone cursed with even a trace of agoraphobia. But any initial frisson of anxiety soon dissipates, for one of the triumphs of the art is how it “meets” that presenting enormity of space and—to borrow the verb chosen by the artist herself—“animates’ it. She tames it but without completely sacrificing its inherent wildness. Intimations of ambivalence about wildness abound as we enter the hall and try ourselves out in its immensity. Live pigeons, for example, greet our view, but caged, not free (at least most of the time, for there is a plan to release them once each day). Pigeons, moreover, we note, are members of the same genus as doves (columbidae), which are symbols of peace; thus concord enters symbolically into a place devoted to the trappings of war. And Emily Dickinson’s delicate trembling comes to mind, for, just as she, with her poesy, engages and magnifies the infinitesimal, so Ann Hamilton, artisan and conceptual visual artist, gentles, for us, the savage enormity of gargantuan space.
Hamilton’s enigmatic title strings words together that don’t at first make sense: for how can there be an event of a thread? But wait! ‘Event’ denotes not simply a happening but an outcome, as it joins the Latin prefix ‘ex,’ meaning ‘out,’ with ‘venire,’ meaning ‘to come.’ The outcome of a thread, when we parse it, takes us back to weaving, the craft with which Ann Hamilton began her trade as an artist. And the outcome of a thread can be, indeed must be, open, free, undecidable. This realization leads to an astonishing feature of the piece, namely, a large glass window seemingly cut through the exterior wall on the Armory’s Lexington side (in fact, this was achieved by rolling up a garage door and inserting glass) expressly as a way to release the work from its confines within the building and expand its metaphoric extension into the city streets.
Quality of attention matters profoundly. Imagine readers in furry capes sitting beside pigeons and reading aloud to them—words of complex texts, which are simultaneously transmitted into paper bag radios scattered about the floor of the Armory, among the swings, so that visitors can pick them up and carry them hither and yon. Through them, we become attuned to the notion that listening intently for individual words so as to catch their meaning only causes us to miss everything else that is going on in the space around us: our driven, unilateral search for logical connection lures us away from greater proto-logical and trans-logical states of mind and of being. Hamilton’s dense texts moreover cannot be followed logically, for they mirror woven fabrics, where the warp-and-woof is what matters. We become like pigeons, who attend on a wholly other plane, or like children too young to grasp the intended meaning but not to feel embraced by the warmth of the reading human voice.
The Sufi epic by Farid al-din ‘Attar floated into consciousness as I swung through Hamilton’s installation. In this work, paradox, reversal and mystery reveal truths inaccessible by the tools of reason and where, as led by the hoopoe bird, feathered creatures of all sorts (Hamilton’s pigeons) go in search of the unknown Simorgh. Simorgh is found in the end by means of a mirror, just as one is set up in this piece to reflect the Armory space and its visitors while the transparent window extends it all in another direction. Antimonies unsteadily holds truth, like a swing: large and minute, individual and communal, human and animal, war and peace, inside and out, voice and motion (the rhythm of the spoken words, for example, which reiterate synaesthetically the back-and-forth motion of swinging). And high and low, as the swings are attached by giant pulleys to the billowing white oceans of fabric which, suspended from the ceiling, extend across the entire space of the Armory hall. By the most gossamer of threads— of silk and of sound—connections proliferate.
Gertrude Stein, in her celebrated 1935 essay ‘Pictures,’ seeks to separate the notion of literary idea from visual one. Ann Hamilton blends these in her work. By so doing, she unwittingly and uncannily evokes Stein; their streams of consciousness mutually establish intricate filaments of connection. And one small wise child, standing at the entrance to the drill hall remarked: This is not like play, but like “wonder!
An Analysis of Discourse and Disagreement - The British & American Medical Associations Following WW II
No full textAbstract Title of Thesis: An Analysis of Discourse and Disagreement, The British & American Medical Associations Following WW II James Philip Furgol, Master of Arts, 2011 Thesis directed by: Professor Daniel Ritschel, History Department My thesis examines the contentious debates on health care reform in U.S. and British society from 1945-50. In particular, this analysis juxtaposed the positions of the U.S.'s American Medical Association (AMA) and National Medical Association (NMA) and the United Kingdom's British Medical Association (BMA) and Socialist Medical Association (SMA). From the 1940s to today specialists on health care reform have conducted numerous studies on the development of U.S. and British health care. However, this project focuses on the discourse utilized by these associations and the ideological values that largely fueled their efforts. This is a comparative study that considers issues and topics both associations addressed. These topics include the associations' proposed health care/insurance reforms as well as the actual successes/failures of such reforms. Specifically, the analyses explored each association's proposals in relation to the doctor-patient relationship, method of remuneration, and how it viewed the doctor's status within society. These analyses reveal ideological values that propelled such views. In essence, this study necessitated the comprehension of two western world powers that ultimately went in opposite directions concerning health policy. The medical associations' values reflect a part of the overall sociopolitical context of each respective country. Most importantly, this study reflects the actual degrees of conservatism, capitalism, socialism and libertarianism each association harbored by comparing its values and tactics to one another. In particular, the AMA's platform was far more conservative and capitalistic than the BMA while the SMA offered a socialistic alternative to British politicians, which was not complementary to either the AMA's or NMA's plans. The NMA promoted equal care for African American communities during a time of racial segregation. Finally, the debates amongst these groups reflect the contributions of the victors, the less successful and the outright losers in the U.S.'s and Britain's health policy development
The People's House? White House Public Access
No full textThe White House has been a symbol of American democracy since its construction in 1800. It was intended by the builders to be a symbol of the people's access to and participation in their governance. However, in its 200 year history The People's House has gone from open to all visitors to closed to the general public. The participatory nature of American democracy and the awareness of both early and contemporary citizens of their ability to shape and develop the republic have created a complicated and often tension-filled relationship between the representatives of government and those being governed. That relationship has been exhibited and shaped through the security and visitation policies of the White House, with the level of public access to the building often corresponding to the level of approved public interaction with the government during a given political administration. The attitude of the people and those in power towards White House public access reveal their attitudes towards larger ideas such as the appropriate amount of the people's participation in government. This study seeks to better understand themes such as American democracy and the people's struggle to take ownership of their government by exploring three major factors in White House openness: the political agendas of the presidents, the public's attitudes towards their use of White House space and the security of the president
Efficient Time Integration Methods for Stiff Stochastic Dynamical Systems
No full textDynamic systems that consist of multiple time scales where the faster time scales are stable are said to be stiff. Stiff systems pose particular challenges when it comes to numerical methods of simulation that advance the system via finite time steps. In deterministic systems modeled by ordinary differential equations (ODEs), stiff systems are well understood and efficient numerical time integration methods of such systems are available. In general implicit methods are better suited for stiff systems while explicit methods are not. The main reason for this is that due to their better stability property the implicit methods are able to take large time steps of the order of the slowest time scales without compromising accuracy. Stiffness manifests in stochastic dynamical systems modeled by stochastic differential equations (SDEs) in a far more complex manner. Even implicit methods while stable are unable to capture the behavior accurately by taking time steps only on the order of the slowest time scale. This thesis introduces a new numerical method for stiff SDEs, called the Interlaced Euler Method, which consists of interlacing large implicit Euler time steps with a sequence of small explicit Euler time steps. It is shown that the asymptotic moment analysis applied to a suitable test problem provides the appropriate number of small explicit time steps to be used. It is emphasized that uniform convergence with respect to the time scale separation parameter is a desirable property of a stiff solver and it is proven that the mean and variance of the interlaced Euler method converge uniformly in the time scale separation parameter for a suitably chosen test problem. The effectiveness of this method is also illustrated via some numerical examples
Privacy Preservation in Context-Aware Systems
No full textRecent years have seen a confluence of two major trends - the increase of mobile devices such as smart phones as the primary access point to networked information and the rise of social media platforms that connect people. Their convergence supports the emergence of a new class of context-aware geo-social networking applications. While existing systems focus mostly on location, our work centers on models for representing and reasoning about a more inclusive and higher-level notion of context, including the user's location and surroundings, the presence of other people and devices, feeds from social networking systems they use, and the inferred activities in which they are engaged. A key element of our work is the use of collaborative information sharing where devices share and integrate knowledge about their context. This introduces the need for privacy and security mechanisms. We present a framework to provide users with appropriate levels of privacy to protect the personal information their mobile devices are collecting including the inferences that can be drawn from the information. We use Semantic Web technologies to specify high-level, declarative policies that describe user's information sharing preferences. We have built a prototype system that aggregates information from a variety of sensors on the phone, online sources, and sources internal to the campus intranet, and infers the dynamic user context. We show how our policy framework can be effectively used to devise better privacy control mechanisms to control information flow between users in such dynamic mobile systems
Feature Extraction using a Hierarchical Growing Neural Gas
No full textUpsupervised, data driven, automatic feature extraction from image data is an interesting and difficult problem. High dimensional data, such as images, often contain less information than they do data. In order for an agent to better reason about this data, finding the interesting features of the data is helpful. A current technique, known as the Growing Neural Gas(GNG), is a neural network approach to feature extraction. There are, however, adaptations that can be made to the Growing Neural Gas in order to increase its performane. Contributions of this work include development of a new neural network algorithm extending the Growing Neural Gas framework, known as the Hierarchical Growing Neural Gas(HGNG), identifications of the parameters of this HGNG which effect feature extraction performance, and a comparison of performance between the normal GNG and the HGNG neural networks
APPLICATION OF NANOSCOPIC DYNAMIC MECHANICAL ANALYSIS FOR EVALUATING THE MECHANICAL BEHAVIOR OF HARD TISSUES AND BONDED INTERFACES
No full textIn this study Dynamic Mechanical Anlaysis (DMA) was applied to dentin, the macro hybrid layer and intact hybrid layers of the bonded dental restorative interface using nanoindentation. Both intertubular and peritubular dentin were evaluated by DMA using discrete and scanning mode nanoindentation. The complex (E*), loss (E), and storage (E') moduli were quantified over a range of indentation loads and scanning frequencies. The storage modulus of the peritubular cuff (22.19 GPa0.05). A model bonded interface (i.e. the macro hybrid) was evaluated using scanning DMA. A new approach for hydrating samples using ethylene glycol solution was developed and then applied to identify the importance of hydration on the measured properties. Fully hydrated samples exhibited mean values of E*, E' and E of 3.54 GPa, 3.42 GPa and 0.86 GPa, respectively, whereas fully dehydrated samples exhibited values of 4.01 GPa, 3.88 GPa and 0.94 GPa, respectively. There were significant differences in the complex modulus (p0.05). A dynamic loading frequency of 100 Hz and scanning frequency of 0.2 Hz were identified to provide the most reliable results in scanning the collagen-based systems. Lastly, the optimal testing parameters obtained from studying the macro hybrid layer were used to evaluate intact resin-dentin bonded interfaces. The property maps clearly distinguished variations in properties as a function of the constituents. It was identified that scanning based nanoDMA is a potent tool for evaluating mechanical properties of the hybrid layer but testing parameters and maintenance of the hydration are critical to the interpretation of apparent mechanical behavior
IMAGE CLASSIFICATION AND AUTOMATED EXTRACTION OF COLLOCATED ACTIN/ MYOSIN REGIONS
No full textThis study illuminates the aspects of cell migration, which is central to many biological processes. To understand cell migration we examine the relationship between local cytoskeletal features and local morphology. We demonstrate this relationship on cells stained for Actin and Myosin We connect the actin/myosin co-localizated structural organization to movements such as membrane protrusions. Membrane protrusions are good indicators of cell migration. Cells can sense the mechanical stiffness or the chemical identity of the surfaces they attach to. We show that these surfaces impact cytoskeletal structure. We develop a classifier to correlate the contextual features extracted from actin/myosin co-localized structure to different cell surfaces. We also describe a new distance based metric to measure the strength of collocated multi-channel two dimensional data for user selected regions. We provide tools, implemented as plugins for the popular ImageJ toolkit, that are available for download by the general public. These tools allow biologists to specify and score regions of interest by drawing a polygon on their image with a point and click interface. Furthermore, we provide an algorithm that automatically identifies, annotates, and scores an interesting donut shaped region commonly occurring in vascular smooth muscle cells on extra cellular matrix such as dry collagen, wet collagen, fibronectin and monolayer collagen
Community Detection in Twitter
No full textTwitter has evolved into a source of social, political and real time information in addition to being a means of mass-communication and marketing. Monitoring and analyzing information on Twitter can lead to invaluable insights, which might otherwise be hard to get using conventional media resources. An important task in analyzing highly networked information sources like twitter is to identify communities that are formed. A community on twitter can be defined as a set of users that are more similar to other members than to non-members. We present a technique to devise a similarity metric between any two users on twitter based on the similarity of their content, links and metadata. The link structure on Twitter can be characterized using the twitter notion of followers, being followed and the @Mentions, @Reply and @RT tags in tweets. Content similarity is characterized by the words in the tweets combined with the hash-tags they are annotated with. Meta-data similarity includes similarity based on other sources of user information such as location, age and gender. We then use this similarity metric to cluster users into communities using spectral and bottom-up agglomerative hierarchical clustering. We evaluate the performance of clustering using different similarity measures on different types of datasets. We also present a heuristic to find communities in twitter that take advantage of the network characteristics of twitter