Toronto Metropolitan University Open Journals
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Augmentation of Pool Boiling Heat Transfer with Open Micro-Channel Surfaces
No full textNucleate pool boiling is a highly effective mode of heat transfer widely used in thermal management applications such as electronic cooling and nuclear power systems. Enhancing the heat transfer coefficient (HTC) and critical heat flux (CHF) is essential for improving system efficiency and ensuring thermal safety. Surface modifications, particularly microchannel integration, have shown great potential in improving nucleate boiling performance by increasing active nucleation sites, enhancing liquid rewetting, and enlarging the available surface area for heat dissipation. This study focuses on circular copper surfaces featuring microchannels with varying depths (0.5–1.5 mm), while the channel pitch and width were kept constant at 0.5 mm. The resulting surface area factor (SAF) ranged from 1.64 to 3.87. Pool boiling experiments were conducted using saturated deionized water at atmospheric pressure. The results revealed significant enhancements of up to 343% in CHF and 320% in HTC compared to a plain surface, highlighting the effectiveness of microchannel design in advanced thermal management systems
Howlround: Urban Resonances and Feedback Loops in the Aart of Loopntale
No full text“Howlround” is British slang for the screeching sound of a feedback loop, where one sound is echoed and amplified through a system until it becomes uncontrollable. This paper takes up the metaphor of resonances and feedback loops to interrogate the interactive systems of Korean artist team Loopntale (Youngju Kim & Hoyoun Cho). Based in Seoul, a megacity that has famously embraced smart city technology, the duo utilizes interactive storytelling and video to engage audiences with non-human urban perspectives, including animals and machines.
Resonance occurs when two elements share a frequency, and therefore amplify and strengthen each other based on similarity. This functions as a lovely metaphor for social solidarities and collective action that emphasize agreement, and when applied towards creative practices might be considered under the framework of relational aesthetics. Curator Nicholas Bourriaud coined the term in 1998 to describe artworks that take up social relationality and contexts as a creative material, yet the idea has been famously critiqued by art critic Claire Bishop, who points out that his idea of social relationships is too easy. Antagonism, she argues, is crucial to democratic participation, which requires resonances but also dissonance to properly represent a plurality of viewpoints. For Bishop, merely participating (interacting) in a relational exchange is not enough—the encounter must also the quality of the meaning production that takes place. Therefore, a rich encounter must include both resonance and dissonance.
While Loopntale use the medium of video games—a media that is often associated with play and pleasure—their interaction design often relies on challenging mechanics that disrupt the player’s ability to smoothly interact with the artwork. For instance, Code and Cartography (2022) requires players to navigate a series of spaces built around non-human perspectives that disrupt human senses of direction, while Layers of Reality: The Cat (2018/2023) symbiotically links the player character and a companion animal as they strive to evacuate an urban disaster. Other works like Ro (2023) feeds player movements and interactions into an AI story generating system that then populates new narratives that feed back into the system, and Manipulating the World (2020) similarly highlights fragmented narrative and unstable truths by using smartphones to stage local multiplayer interactions.
This paper hypothesizes that the artists use glitched and disrupted perspectives to create critical and self-reflexive gameplay dynamics (See: Menkman). These tools highlight both the resonances and dissonances of the topics that they explore, including non-human perspectives in urban environments, and the fragmented ways that human storytelling shapes the world around us. The writing will position their work as an important intervention into the homogenized urban spaces that are created by economically driven development and the technocratic urban technologies of the smart city (See: Lindner), using a methodology of close analysis on a selection of case-studies from the artists body of work, alongside interviews with the Loopntale team to understand their thinking and material practice more deeply
Living Room: An Interactive Documentary
No full textLiving Room is an interactive, multimodal online documentary. It engages with the demolition of a modernist public housing estate in inner London (UK). The demolition is presented through the point of view of those working-class and racialized residents who find themselves at risk of displacement and dispossession through the regeneration/demolition project, and who refuse its logics. Rather than understanding ‘demolition’ as a one-off spectacular event, the project posits it as an assemblage of processes unfolding in space and time, and across domains and scales. The architecture of the website reflects this understanding of the demolition assemblage as a range of interlocking dynamics which braid together political, economic, legal and architectural concerns with notions of deservingness, domestic space, emotional and financial investments and value creation. The central location of the i-doc is a living room on the estate, which references the everyday living space, where the private realm of domestic life and the public realm of economics and politics bleed into each other. From this central living room the user can chose between 5 different pathways, each linked to a key theme (the law, the media, housing campaigns, walkways, house stories), and a timeline. Each pathway reflects an element of the demolition assemblage, and instantiations of the residents’ refusal emerge within each pathway, at times explicitly, and at times more implicitly. The users of Living Room experience a polyphonic range of counternarratives and oppositional practices that dissenting residents have been producing over 20 years of refusing regeneration/demolition. The non-linear structure of the site follows the anticipatory, recursive and reiterative temporalities that characterise regeneration/demolition and its refusals
And Yet… The Paradox of Generative AI Griefbots
No full text“And Yet… The Paradox of Generative AI Griefbots” addresses current advances in generative artificial intelligence technologies that offer LLMs and/or chatbots that can be customized to simulate the personae of lost loved ones with the input of digitized materials (text, image, video, audio). This paper examines the benefits and the dangers of intimate interactions with personalized, always-on chatbots that can provide users with deeply immersive experiences through three distinct theoretical frameworks.
The first uses the qualitative research method of autoethnography to reflect on the months-long research-creation process of remediating a single photograph of myself and my father via the AI image generator, Midjourney. This project was undertaken as an experiment in elegy and culminated in two works of e-literature, the Twine visual novels, Infinity +1 and Infinite Eddies, and an early critical essay presented at the British Library MixConference 2023. Each reflects differently on the precarity of memory and the affect I experienced in Midjourney’s capacity to identify and remediate a set of identifiable elements that emphasize an emotional relationship configured through the positioning of our bodies in the frame, while simultaneously reinventing through infinite variations in time and place. Critical references include Hiroki Azuma’s conceptualization of “moe-elements” in anime in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (2009), Walter Benjamin’s ““The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” and Nettrice Gaskins’ essay, “The Aura of AI-Generated Art.”
The second theoretical framework examines the phenomenon of griefbots and human grieving for the beloved, looking back to Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu and Orpheus’ attempt to recover Eurydice from the Underworld recontextualized from the contemporary vantage of new technological products offered by Replika AI, Project December, Super Brain, and Seance AI. These simulations clearly can be beneficial as (re)mediations bridge the void felt after the loss of loved ones. Notably, Replika AI launched after founder Eugenia Kudya created a chatbot from the emails and text messages of her best friend after his death and a Stanford study (2024) has documented emotional benefits for users, including a decrease in suicidal ideation. Joshua Barbeau has written movingly on his experience of interacting with his lost girlfriend Jessica via game-developer Jason Roher’s AI chatbot platform, December Project, stating that “The whole experience gave me a sense of closure I didn’t even know I still needed.” Intertexts informing this critique include Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror, Derrida’s reading of the phármakon as remedy and poison, and Joseph Weisenbaum\u27s warning of the “powerful delusional thinking” in user responses to the first AI Chatbot, Eliza (1976).
The third section examines existing and proposed regulatory frameworks, the ethics of AI products, or lack thereof, in the “digital afterlife industry. Of particular note is the categorization of harm from “high risk anthropomorphic behaviour” detailed in Garcia v. Character Technologies Inc., et al. The charge that technology companies intentionally design “generative AI systems with anthropomorphic qualities to obfuscate between fiction and reality.…launching their systems without adequate safety features” provides the critical framework for my analysis
Recycling Images and Creating New Meanings: The Use of Amateour and Family Fotographies in Brazilian Contemporary Short Movies
No full textIn this article we intend to analyze three Brazilian contemporary short films made from preexisting amateour photography. The works embrace topics such as image appropriation and recycling in order to create new narratives. The short movies here analyzed can be defined as experimental documentaries made from material found in flea markets and family photographs.
Travessia (Dir. Safira Moreira, 2017) starts with a photo found in the album of a white family in a flea market in Rio de Janeiro. The picture shows a black woman holding a white baby in her arms. The montage shows parts of the image while the voice over reads a poem by Conceição Evaristo. At the end of the reading, we see the full picture and then the verse, where we see the child\u27s name written accompanied by his nanny, in a gesture that denies the woman\u27s naming. The movie follows interviewing black families about the topics and changing the game. By using this and other imagens, the movie creates a critical fabulation, according to the concept developed by Saidiya Hartman.
O Pantanal é Preto (Dir. Raylson Chaves, 2022), follows the resistance trajectory of the black population in the Pantanal between the 1980s and 1990s. By using analogical photos of his own family, the director demarcates that the Pantanal is made, like much of the country, by black and indigenous people. They are not just pawns or maids, they are the Pantanal itself. The montage shows pictures of Pantanal farms and uses quotes by Frantz Fanon. In the sound band, we hear dialogues that reproduce the accent common in the region, but little recognized externally, even within Brazil itself.
The last short we intend to investigate, Thynia (Dir. Lia Letícia, 2019), uses pictures from a family album found in a flea market in Germany. The montage shows the photographs accompanied by texts from books such as Travel to Brazil, by Hans Staden, translated to the Yantê language and read by the indigenous woman Maria Pastora. The film problematizes a kind of archive image of the original inhabitants of Latin America created by European colonizers (BARRIENDOS, 2019), comparing, in the present, words from a then best-seller with photographs of an unknown German family.
Through these films, we intend to analyze how, through the use of our own repositories of technical images, new narratives are created that confront colonialist perspectives and their legacies. The use of amateur materials, in fact, can be seen as one of the aspects of the subjective turn (SARLO, 2007) in memory studies, characterized, among other things, by disbelief in hegemonic points of view and the valorization of local stories and micronarratives .Through archives that would otherwise not be publicly deposed, these films show other perspectives through the appropriation of technical images, bringing, in the present, the opportunity to create from the erasures of the past
The First Time I Asked For A Seatbelt Extender
No full textCurrently, I weigh about 100+ pounds over what many doctors would name my ‘goal weight’ to be, particularly as a petite woman. This is, undoubtedly, a strange way to begin an abstract but, because of where my body hug-holds its excess folds, there are some folks who flinch at my words when I claim my own fatness. My body is sculpted specially by my multiple chronic illnesses—its shape in constant flux, which makes my grasp of my own identity a bit slippery and warps my experiences of time. This poem explores these ideas—opening with storytelling the uncomfortable bits and pieces of my first time asking for a seatbelt extender and moving into the slippery, the time-distortion, the not-quite-reality where I envision a plane (and a world) designed for the illest and fattest of us, which would only benefit us all
Healthy. Looking.: Health Aesthetics, Affect and Eroticism from HIV to Ob*sity
No full textBridging Fat Studies with Queer of Color critique, this article reads the so-called ob*s*ty epidemic and HIV/AIDS crisis as twinned events that have shaped how queer male, and especially queers of color, think about their bodies in the 22nd century. Placing pressure on the colonial logics of science and medicine through the racializing mechanisms of fat embodiment, I extend this biopolitical function to the HIV/AIDS crisis. In the 1980’s and 1990’s, queer men became deeply aware of how their bodily production signaled illness or health in a moment of collective crisis. This moment also saw the rise of bear communities, partially in response to extreme thinness as evidence of ill health. I consider how this crisis, alongside the subsequent declaration of the ob*s*ty epidemic in 1999, have been instrumental in shaping affective orientations towards queerness and fatness through associating both with disease and early death for queers of color especially. Ultimately, I connect cultural discourses of health with eroticism—shaped by fatphobia as an affective structure—that impact how we relate to our own and each others’ bodies
Evaluating the ability of artificial intelligence chatbots to respond to oral cancer questions: A descriptive study
No full textBackground: Individual diagnosed with cancer have excessive informational needs regarding various aspects of their disease. This need pushes them to search for information from multiple sources including Artificial Intelligence chatbots. This study aimed to evaluate the accuracy of responses of Artificial Intelligence chatbots to questions regarding different aspects of oral cancers. Methods: Nineteen dichotomous (yes/no) questions were posed to 8 different Artificial Intelligence Chatbots (Chat GTP 3.5, Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, Chat GTP alternative, TextCortex, YouChat, and CoPilot). The responses were recorded and compared with the correct answers. Statistical analyses, including independent sample t-tests, were conducted to compare differences in mean scores. Results: Most (n=14, 73.7%), questions were answered correctly, and only 1 (5.3%) question got two incorrect responses. Only 4 (50.0%) AI chatbots answered all questions perfectly, and only one chatbot scored less than 80% for all questions. The combined mean score for the AI chatbots was 18.22 ± 1.3, and the differences in the mean score of responses between the AI chatbots and blueprint were statistically insignificant (p= 0.562). Conclusion: The general accuracy of responses to different oral cancer-related questions raised by the patients was high. However, not all AI chatbots give correct responses to all questions, therefore it is the role of health professionals to ensure that patients are educated well regarding their diseases and cautioned on relying on AI chatbots totally
Understanding the impact of cholera across Africa: Insights and strategies towards disease control
No full textCholera, caused by Vibrio cholerae, poses a significant public health challenge in Africa, especially the Sub-Saharan regions with Zambia, Zimbabwe, Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, and Comoros experiencing the most scourge. It is an acute diarrheal disease propagated by several factors including poor sanitation, inadequate potable water, political unrest as well as climate change. Prompt diagnosis, replacement of fluids and electrolytes, antibiotic therapy and enhanced hygiene measures are necessary for the effective management of cholera cases while international collaboration and vaccination initiatives are essential for managing epidemics. Limiting the transmission and enhancing public health measures is heavily reliant on community involvement and grassroots awareness, meanwhile, sustainable cholera control requires regional cooperation, surveillance systems and significant investments in water and sanitation infrastructure. International agencies such as WHO and UNICEF are essential in providing impacted nations with resources, vaccines as well as technical support to curb spread of the disease.