136 research outputs found
Performativities, Virtualities, Abstractions, and Cunningham's BIPED
No full textThis thesis explores the complex relations between subjective perception and dance movements, mainly exemplified by drawing on two short extracts from Merce Cunningham's choreography BIPED (1999). The central aim of the study is to formulate a performative phenomenological inquiry, which moves beyond an identification of essences, and towards an understanding of the lived experience of a dance performance as being grounded on iterations of the "abstract". The concept of the abstract primarily signifies an alternative mode of understanding Henry Bergson's notion of duration. Considering Gilles Deleuze's reading of Bergson's intuition as a method to divide the experience of a lived present into a temporal difference in kind between the virtual and the actual, this thesis suggests a complementary division of duration into virtual and actual kinds of abstraction.
In addition to Bergson's method of intuition, the discussion is phenomenologically rooted in Maurice Merleau-Ponty's concept of the body image and Gaston Bachelards idea of non-causal reverberation. As with the case of intuition, those phenomenological concepts are applied unconventionally. Rather than serving as a pre-objective ontological basis for an analytical and scientific understanding of subjective embodiment, the notion of a reverberating body image is here treated as a form of mimesis, performatively constituted through symbolic and representational practices. Hence, in phenomenological terms, the rationale of the thesis is predominantly sustained by the philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, arguing that reality cannot be approached directly, but only through the concept of the symbol.
The viewpoint from where I speak has performative cybernetic characteristics, continuously and dynamically transgressing boundaries and reconstituting itself through iterative and citational practices. Additionally, as I move between the analytical and the intuitive, as well as between the virtual and the actual, the formal structure of the thesis corresponds to a liminal transformation of the speaking subjectivity
Merce Cunningham and his Technique
No full textThis thesis approaches the personal life, artistic creation and dance technique of American dancer and choreographer Mercier Philip Cunningham. The first part focuses on the artist?s life stages during his evolution in dance from the beginnings of his choreographic work, and seeks the origins for the establishment of his own dance company ? Merce Cunningham Dance Company. A chronological overview of his extensive repertoire is also incorporated. The second part deals with collaboration, connection and interaction among the dance, music, design and film fields during the artistic work of Merce Cunningham. Following the author?s experience with Cunningham technique, the final part is directed to an understanding of this dance technique, its principles and specific elements used in contemporary dance world
Data publishing while preserving data privacy
No full textOver the last decade, the Data Science team at Harvard's Institute for Quantitative Social Science has been iteratively developing Dataverse, a data repository framework to facilitate and enhance research transparency through data sharing, preservation, citation, reuse and analysis. During the last two years, the group has implemented extensible data publishing workflows and effective ways to link articles to data. This talk will focus on the latest data publishing workflows and data publishing for sensitive data
Cosmic rays in active galactic nuclei
No full textThis work explores the connection between cosmic rays and light element production in an active galaxy environment.
Cosmic rays generated in an active galactic nucleus (AGN) interact with the local, line-emitting gas and spall the light elements, Li, Be and B. Careful consideration of the propagation of cosmic rays from AGNs to Earth yields a variety of models that are consistent with the observed cosmic ray spectrum. However, by using observed upper limits for BIII 2066A line emission from AGNs, we are able to rule out certain cosmic ray flux models. This analysis requires a detailed study of boron ionization balance under typical AGN conditions, a study that is carried out here for the first time. Models with a total cosmic ray luminosity L\sb{CR}=10\sp{45} erg s\sp{-1} and a diffusion coefficient in the line emission region of D\le 10\sp{28} cm\sp2 s\sp{-1}, and those with L\sb{CR}=10\sp{45} erg s\sp{-1} and D\le 3\times 10\sp{26} cm\sp2 s\sp{-1} do not satisfy the spectroscopic constraints. However, models with lower cosmic ray luminosities or larger diffusion coefficients are acceptable.
The results of spallation in AGNs are also applied to our Galaxy, under the assumption that it has passed through an active phase. An additional source of light elements during this active phase can reproduce the B and Be abundances observed in the halo, and contribute partially to the light element abundances observed in the disk
The Research Data Alliance: Benefits and Challenges of Building a Community Organization
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Energy Geared to an Intensity High Enough to Melt Steel: Merce Cunningham, Movement, and Motion Capture
No full textThe paper is concerned with the relation between everyday human social conditioning and the specialized skills demanded by choreography. Exploring the choreographic methods of Merce Cunningham, the author shows how choreography requires an entrainment of the body that mirrors modes of corporeal socialization while deviating in significant ways from the conditioning normally received. Cunningham works with constraints that have little to do with social convention, but that remain historical insofar as they reflect the technological conditions of a particular era. In the paper, his methods are traced from the inception of chance operations to the employment of Life Forms and the software-aided creative process
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Physical Parameters of the IRC +10216 Circumstellar Envelope: New Constraints from Submillimeter Observations
No full textWe have studied the temperature distribution and other physical properties of the circumstellar envelope of the prototypical high mass-loss carbon star IRC + 10216 by calculating the thermal balance and the radiative transfer in the envelope self-consistently. Cooling is dominated by CO line emission and adiabatic expansion, and heating by dust-gas collisions throughout most of the envelope. Heating by the grain photoelectric effect is important in the outer part of the envelope. The radiative transfer is calculated by using a Monte Carlo method. The mass-loss rate, the CO abundance, the dust-gas momentum transfer efficiency, and the distance to the source are free parameters in our model. These physical parameters are constrained by the comparison of our model results with the observations of various (CO)-C-12 and (CO)-C-13 lines. In particular, recent submillimeter-wavelength observations of moderately high excitation transitions, such as the J = 6 --> 5 line, put very important constraints on the temperature distribution in the inner part of the envelope, and they do not support the presence of very high temperatures (T similar to 500-1000 K) in the inner part of the envelope (at about 5 x 10(15) cm from the central star) suggested by a previous study. We also find that a mass-loss rate of 3.25 x 10(-5) M. yr(-1) and a distance of 150 pc provide the best agreement between our model results and observations.Version of Recor
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