Toronto Metropolitan University Open Journals
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Thermal Modeling of Scott Transformer based on Thermal Electrical Analogy
No full textIn rail transportation systems, Scott connected transformers are a preferred type of transformer due to technical reasons. The insulation temperature level is a critical factor that influences the life expectancy of power transformers. High operating temperatures can cause accelerated aging of the insulation material, which can lead to insulation breakdown and failure of the transformer. In this study, thermal modeling of Scott transformers has been developed. To perform the modeling, a simulation model of Scott transformers has been developed in MATLAB/SIMULINK environment. For the realization of the simulation, a 10 MVA (5+5 MVA) 154kV/25 kV Scott transformer has been designed
Development and validation of the Self-Administered Internet Addiction Scale (SAIAS-10)
No full textThe number of people using the internet has skyrocketed during the past two decades, making screen addiction a threat greater than substance addiction. Clinical instances of screen addiction symptoms have emerged in the midst of the rising social media popularity. The existing scales for assessing screen addiction are dated and are lengthy, hence our primary objective was to develop a novel brief self-diagnostic scale that can detect internet addiction disorder. Our secondary objective is to conduct psychometric evaluations of this scale. The scale was administered to a total of 1057 participants (493 males, 564 females) with ages ranging from 14-24 years of age. Face and content validity, reliability, and internal consistency were assessed. Participants did not report any difficulty in understanding the questions. The final version of the scale comprises 10 items. A content validity index of 1, a Pearson correlation value of 0.98, and a Cronbach’s alpha of 0.923 were obtained. Findings suggest the SAIAS-10 is a reliable and valid tool for screening screen addiction and may aid in the clinical evaluation of symptomology and research
Intersections between Technology, Journalism and Civic Participation in India
No full textThe adaptation of evolving technology in Indian filmmaking has been a process of embracing it as a valuable tool rather than perceiving it as an alien imposition from formerly colonized nations. Developments in telecommunications since 1995 have profoundly impacted filmmaking in India, from the technology employed to the evolution of non-fiction storytelling. In an environment where mainstream journalism faces challenges and grassroots media gradually gains viewership on digital platforms, immersive journalism can enhance civic participation by providing a heightened sense of \u27immersion\u27 and \u27presence\u27 compared to traditional two-dimensional formats.
This paper examines 360-degree immersive journalism videos produced by ElseVR, a non-fiction subsidiary of Mumbai-based Memesys Cultural Lab, a pioneer in mixed-reality filmmaking in India. During the first wave of VR immersive non-fiction, ElseVR released app-based quarterly magazines featuring 360 video documentaries. These films not only offered narrative experiences but also encouraged viewers to assume various perspectives while watching them.
Utilizing Nash\u27s (2022) concepts for interpreting first-person experiences in VR documentaries, this study employs the positions of tourist, encounter, and witness to analyze three immersive journalistic documentaries using ElseVR\u27s technology: Nishtha Jain\u27s Submerged (2016), Naomi Shah and Pourush Turel\u27s Caste is Not a Rumour (2017), and Faiza Khan\u27s When Land Is Lost, Do We Eat Coal (2016). Each position provides insight into the experience of entering unfamiliar spaces, as interest, curiosity, and the VR environment’s affordances give rise to a multi-sensory experience where the positions of tourist, encounter, and witness uniquely intersect.
In India, where digital and smartphone penetration varies significantly, the potential for widespread adoption of such technology remains uncertain. However, the intersections between journalism, civic engagement, and technology in ElseVR\u27s documentaries are noteworthy. By avoiding a technologically deterministic perspective, a heightened understanding of VR technology\u27s role in journalism from non-Western environments could enhance civic participation and encourage reevaluating emerging media practices in the Global South.
Reconstructing Transnational History: Exploring the Interactive Documentary\u27s Impact on Shared Historical Perspectives
No full textWeb-based interactive documentaries offer an innovative approach to reconstructing history, allowing users to explore historical content within a specific thematic context freely. This paper explores how transnational shared history, exemplified by World War I (WWI), is integrated into such documentaries, using the interactive documentary A Global Guide to the First World War (2014) as a case study.
This documentary, a collaboration between the Guardian, historians, and the Imperial War Museum, employs interactive technologies and transnational historical narratives. It presents seven video chapters that allow audiences to explore WWI from a global perspective, going beyond the traditional single-narrative viewpoint. The interactive sections are based on a well-designed digital world map that provides users with diverse perspectives on the war, facilitating a broader emotional resonance.
However, while ensuring authenticity, the documentary\u27s use of authoritative narrative strategies tends to create a sense of alienation among viewers. It underscores the importance of incorporating personal narratives alongside official histories to foster deeper engagement and understanding. The paper argues for a more nuanced approach that balances the authoritative historical narratives with individual perspectives.
This study demonstrates that the representation of transnational shared history and multiple perspectives is highly compatible with the interactive technology of web documentaries. The paper concludes that these digital platforms can effectively facilitate global understanding of shared historical events while encouraging critical and dialectical historical reflection
Unlearning Listening Practices: Noise as Vital Space of Indeterminacy
No full textThe central question of reverberating interferences – explorations into thingness, a recent performative research project, pertains to listening. Asking, "How do things speak?" inspired an investigation into what constitutes a thing, revealing potential imbalances arising from Western metaphysics\u27 denial of other matters\u27 agency. Karen Barad\u27s term of intra-action, which depicts a physicist-materialist interpretation of entanglement, is used to investigate this distortion theoretically and open up to the question of how to listen to the unfamiliar and unknown.
According to the conceptual framework of motion, the project\u27s methodological orientation focused on movement patterns and countermovement. These, created by human and non-human bodies, indicated the intertwinement of indeterminacy (Barad) and the uncertainty of change (Rose). The intention was to amplify the emerging reverberations of interferences that accompany any motion before these become sedimentary and matter(ing) by being ingrained in planetary memory. This imposition aimed to raise the awareness that these resoundings are manifestations of human and non-human planetary others. Despite considering these \u27noises\u27 within Western modernity\u27s metaphysics as opaque voicings and thus irrelevant, these voices matter regardless of the induced warped situations and diverted paths they are forced to take. On this speculation, movement-based intra-actions are launched as amplified noise via digital sensory devices as audible acoustic signals of resonant interferences. The project attempts to shift knowledge production from one one-world view (Law) toward a pluriversal approach. New materialism\u27s notion of situatedness emphasizes encounters that question the researcher’s (performers’) ability to classify ‘things’ into their educational epistemic realm. The thereby induced flattening of de- and inhuMan categorizations (Wynter 2015; Singh 2018) indicated the necessity to engage with other knowledge without appropriating them through \u27our\u27 inherited way of thinking. However, by considering Robinson\u27s critical positionality (2020), the notion of noise can be accessed as an experimental indicator of the unknown or ignored. In classical information theories, noise increases the variability of information, with extremes of too much or too little indicating a shift in the system\u27s exchange towards overload or flat sameness (Malaspina 2012; Thompson 2020).
Inquiring how to facilitate a system\u27s (ex)change with and towards the disregarded, suppressed, or denied is whether an increased noise allowance can enhance interaction with other matters and their knowing
Microbial Syntrophy: Is it a Gift, a Grift, or Other Collaborative Economy?
No full textWhile the gift economy is often considered a mechanism to strengthen social ties, the grift economy is often considered detrimental. However both systems rely on reciprocal play adding complexity to and questioning the ‘valuation’ mythology in contemporary free market logic. While traditional markets rely on so-called mutually agreed upon standards or market levers (value of currency, democratically decided upon regulations, legal precedents for civil behavior, global agreements for free exchange, supply-demand curves driving price), it is clear that this system has many games, loopholes, subsidies, institutional baggage, infrastructural lineages, national perversions, and theoretical distortions that make this free market, not actually free to correct its perversions on contemporary ‘value’ or inherited wealth inequity based on historic values. Gifters and grifters both contest value and do so by engaging existing social systems in unconventional ways. They work together, differently.
In this presentation, I will playfully explore various theories about microbial economies that share gift/grift-like economies that support diverse bodies of life within a finite ecosystem of natural resources. For example, imagine a humanly visible maize root compared to an invisible microorganism; the single-celled bacteria cannot simply chew up the root that is orders of magnitude larger than itself (most microbes have a diameter between 0.5-10 microns, roughly the same range in size of ground corn starch). The scale of the opportunity for a microbe to eat a complex foodstuff like maize is Herculean! One form of microbial collaboration is called syntrophy. In this example, microbes living in environments without oxygen participate in an enzymatic potlatch. Different species contribute different enzymes to the extracellular matrix (outside the microbe body where the large molecule resides). Collectively these different donated enzymes with different capacities incrementally breakdown the complex substrate (the food). When the food is broken down into small enough metabolites, these basic building blocks of life in the extracellular matrix are now small enough to be absorbed by the small microbes (not unlike what happens in our stomachs) for maintenance, growth, or reproduction. Microbes share their genetic resources (in the form of donated enzymes) to then be able to collectively harvest the resulting metabolites in the commons of their extracellular space. In this case, it literally takes a village to make the village; losing certain species (and associated enzymes in the shared metabolic supply chain), breaks the collective system of metabolism to access the building blocks of the maize root. Just as in gift, grift, and current capitalist markets, the microbes deploy different agents to play different roles to access and distribute resources necessary for life. What is missing from this microbial system (in my anthropocentric read) is a perverse consent to value oneself and others’ worth, independent of the material needs of all. This talk will share observations from my art practice of transforming microbial ecosystems, present synopses of various theories on microbial ‘economies’, and then reflect back on two fringe human economies (gift/grift) to re-consider how we might build equitable and just collaborations to live sustainably within our own finite world.
Reflections : The Game-Like Experience of Corridor (2023)
No full textThis paper introduces my experimental game prototype titled Corridor which puts public transportation into conversation with survival struggle. As a performative role-playing game experience and experiment, Corridor is about a trip using public transportation, inspired by the Metrobus systems of Istanbul, Turkey. Metrobus in Istanbul is a rapid public transportation system that combines metro and bus implemented in a separate corridor on the highway (Berdiyorov 2020). Besides my own experiences in Metrobus, I utilize the interactions of a workshop that I co-operated at the Interactive Film and Media Conference (IFM22), titled “Listening to Passengers Listening to Stories: Interactive Storytelling” to contextualize Corridor. By building dialogical exchange of stories, participants of the workshop explored the experiences of public transportation users in relation to the survival of the body (Simsek and Andic 2022). Eventually, the conflicts that the participants shared in the workshop resonated with me to build intersections between survival struggles in the wilderness and a trip on public transportation.
Survival is the oldest quest of living beings and is assumed as another term for being alive, and more importantly for being in the world. Survival of living beings is closely related to stability maintained in their bodies and for humans, this includes motivation and emotion (Evans 2015). At the same time, beyond simply a life and death matter, “survival invokes a complex bundle of existential struggles, political convictions, and cultural experiences” (Zeilinger 2018, 16). Reading survival from an ecological point of view, life on earth is collaborative survival (Tsing 2015).
In metropolitan life, transportation is essential to the everyday commute of people, and this is part of survival. Although transportation systems manifest important aspects of our culture, they also sometimes present issues of conflict through the violation of personal space, privacy, and other harmful and abusive behavior. To overcome survival struggles, it is necessary to take meaningful actions, in games or real life. In the gameplay of Corridor, the participants need to maintain an Energy and Morale level Meter by collecting item cards and playing encounter cards strategically. Encounter cards present challenges such as social interactions between riders, protests about the economic situations, and seasons that are affected by climate crisis influencing the participants’ survival level. The matrix of the points ranging between 0 and 4 comes from nature writer Henry David Thoreau\u27s “necessities of life” which are limited accessibility of food, shelter, fuel (modified as health), and clothing (1980).
With Corridor, I intervene in the discussions of environmental humanities and game studies with the creative application of survival in an urban context, public transportation. In the experience of Corridor, the players can find a space to reflect on urban survival from the lenses of riders that include human experience, societal factors, and ecological thinking. Redressing the transportation game mechanics related to movement and mixing them with survival builds a critical reflection on human and nature relations in urban. Looking at and rethinking transportation as survival would light the way towards sustainable cities, and policies of living or moving together
Decolonizing Documentary Spaces: Enacting Care-Full Methods within Educational Frameworks & Fissures
No full textIn this paper we consider how grassroots community partnerships can transform academic spaces into creative and interactive sites of Indigenous agency and advocacy. Focusing on two projects based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), we bring these initiatives into a discussion that takes into account the larger context of documentary filmmaking in the territory often referred to as Québec. We address how each project uses care and collaboration towards a practice of visual sovereignty.
We start with a discussion of the First Peoples’ Postsecondary Storytelling Exchange (FPPSE), an Indigenous led, multi-institutional, five-year initiative using decolonizing film and research methods to understand the needs and aspirations of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis post-secondary learners. This multi-year project involved 22 communities, 10 nations and generated over 100 video stories. The group used talking circles, filmmaking, and community engagement as methods to validate indigenous ways of learning and teaching. The facilitators created safe space through the sharing of food, the attentiveness to languages, the foregrounding of shared decision making, interactive methods and more. Following this, we discuss Circle Visions, a settler-initiated partnership project based at Concordia, which has collaborated with the non-profit Wapikoni Mobile since 2016 to facilitate care-full creative spaces on the university campus for emerging Indigenous artists. This initiative features an annual cross-platform media-making Summer Institute for Indigenous filmmakers with workshops focusing on animation, experimental video, podcasting, documentary, and 360-degree / VR filmmaking as a tool for decolonization. We reflect on how we can activate decolonized documentary spaces within existing settler institutions and use care-full methods to unsettle hierarchies, promote well-being, and foster Indigenous productions. We then offer some context about the documentary traditions that we are building on within the place now known as Quebec
Inner Congo: Unveiling Matters of Violence through Art and Interactive Documentary
No full textThis research-creation project, part of the DE\GLOBALIZE artistic research cycle, investigates the complexities of Congo violence, care, and colonialism. Drawing on Michel Serres\u27 metaphor of the great estuaries, the study explores the topology of interactive documentaries, blending theory, emotion, and personal experiences. Accessible through the interactive web documentation at http://deglobalize.com, the platform offers a media-archaeological archive for speculative ethnography, enabling the forensic processing of single documents in line with actor-network theory.
Focusing on the ambivalence of violence and care, the field trip to the Congo in March 2022 involved collaboration with local artists and was based on a postcolonial reflection from 1996. The outcome, a 30-minute autoethnographic essay titled Inner Congo, reflects on inner violence and its connection to colonialism, transcending the dichotomy between art and science. The study examines political, technological, and psycho-geographic borders, engaging with local communities to interrogate the displaced consumption of resources, ghost acreages, and self-lies.
Informed by the works of Achille Mbembe and Franz Fanon, the research confronts the foreign, the dark, and the displaced ghosts within the participants. DE\GLOBALIZE is problematized as an example of epistemic violence for the ethnographic memory of (Western) knowledge. The study emphasizes the importance of caring for the sensitivity of the researchers\u27 skin, the g/hosts, and mother earth.
The encounters in the Congo reveal the palpable legacy of violence and the continued exploitation in post-colonialism. The Art Academy and the Mission Station serve as both havens for wounded souls and witnesses of a bloody European heritage. In Isiro, the researchers confront their own greed when meeting Trésor, a mine owner with 6,000 workers digging for gold. Violence constantly finds new ground, with totalitarian folds increasing in our psyches.
Inspired by Sven Lindqvist\u27s Gräv där du står (1978), the research emphasizes the need to face our brutality and demons through symbols and calculations that protect yet disenchant us simultaneously. Inner Congo offers a poignant and immersive exploration of the complexities of violence in the Congo, unearthing hidden narratives and inspiring critical reflection
Reclamation
No full textPoem about fatness, identity, and “coming out as fat” (Saguy & Ward, 2011