312 research outputs found
Amnesia Lab - exhibition
No full textThe Amnesia Lab exhibition at UNSW Galleries, 20 September to 8 November, was co-curated by Jill Bennett, Shona Illingworth and Felicity Fenner. The exhibition presented research-in-progress for Lesions in the Landscape: Claire and the Island of Hirta, a project led by Illingworth (PI), with Professor Martin A. Conway and Dr Catherine Loveday, (funded by the Wellcome Trust, UK), alongside: the Amnesia Atlas (prototype), a 3D immersive SenseCam interface for exploring memory, Volker Kuchelmeister, Jill Bennett, Dennis Del Favero and students at UNSW; Did I? (2011), a video installation by Hiraki Sawa and the Glass Brain, an anatomically realistic 3D visualisation depicting activity from EEG (electroencephalographic) signals, Gazzaley Lab/Neuroscape Lab, UCSF. The exhibition was reviewed in the Australian, print and online, by Penny Durham, 26 September 2014. Shona Illingworth and Felicity Fenner were interviewed by Michael Cathcart for Books and Art Daily, ABC Radio, Tuesday 30 September 2014 10:21am
Home ground.
No full textCatalogue of exhibition held at the Ivan Dougherty Gallery, 21 April - 3 June 2006.
Curator: Felicity Fenner.Art of: Jenny Bell (Australia), Juan Manual Echavarria (Colombia), Yukultji Napangati (Australia), Ahlam Shibli (Palestine)Includes bibliographical references
Rival Queens : Actresses, Performance, and the Eighteenth-Century British Theater /
No full textHistorians of British theater have often noted that the eighteenth century was an age not of the author but of the actor. In Rival Queens, Felicity Nussbaum argues that the period might more accurately be seen as the age of women in the theater, and more particularly as the age of the actress.Historians of British theater have often noted that the eighteenth century was an age not of the author but of the actor. In Rival Queens, Felicity Nussbaum argues that the period might more accurately be seen as the age of women in the theater, and more particularly as the age of the actress.Electronic reproduction.Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.Felicity Nussbaum is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of numerous books, including The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century.Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher’s Web site, viewed October 27 2015
The felicity of Queen Elizabeth and her times, with other things /
No full textMode of access: Internet
Amnesia Lab - symposium
No full textThe Amnesia Lab, was an experimental symposium in an exhibition setting, co-designed by Shona Illingworth and Jill Bennett (UNSW). It took place at the UNSW Galleries and NIEA iCinema Lab 23 – 25 September 2014 as part of the Signs of Life; Brain and Amnesia Week and brought together memory experts, artists and writers to explore how photographic images, sound and immersive media can advance our understanding of memory and forgetting. The Lab is part of an ongoing research collaboration led by artist Shona Illingworth with cognitive neuropsychologist Martin A. Conway (City University, London) and neuropsychologist Catherine Loveday (Westminster) in the UK, and by Jill Bennett (UNSW) in Australia. Ilingworth, Conway, Loveday, Bennett and colleagues staged a series of discussions in specially designed environments, utilising techniques such as EEG sonification, drawing, and immersive interaction. The Lab presented research-in-progress for Lesions in the Landscape: Claire and the Island of Hirta, a project led by Shona Illingworth and funded by the Wellcome Trust, UK, and focused in particular on the use of imagery from Sense Cam (a wearable sensory operated camera) as memory cue in the context of amnesia. Sessions included a focus on the workings of episodic memory and memory cues, and their relationship to photographic imagery; the issues of perspective and viewpoint in memory, and visual-kinaesthetic perception. Presentations were given by the research team and by cognitive scientist and philosopher John Sutton (Macquarie), psychologists Amanda Barnier and Celia Harris (Macquarie University) and Elise van den Hoven (UTS). Public lectures included Digital Amnesia: Design for Forgetting, Corina Sas (Lancaster) and iMemory: Why the past is all over, Andrew Hoskins (Glasgow)
Perpetua and Felicity: Faith and Courage in the Face of Death
Full text linkPerpetua was a young, educated wife and mother who was martyred for her Christian faith. Because she was educated, she was able to record most of the events leading to her martyrdom in her diary. Her account was later supplemented by another author and narrator. The account also includes details about Felicity, a slave girl who was arrested with Perpetua. While Felicity is included in Perpetua’s story, most of the information about them focuses on Perpetua. Throughout history, and particularly in Medieval times, the Church has painted her as a perfect saint who rejected her family for unity with Christ. On the other hand, feminists and some egalitarians have used Perpetua as an example of a woman fighting for equality under the patriarchy. However, both of these views misinterpret Perpetua’s motives for the sake of their own gain when in reality, Perpetua was simply a faithful Christian who gave her life for the sake of Christ
How We Change Our Minds Matters: Misinformation, ABMs, and Deep Uncertainty
No full textMisinformation on social media is an urgent grand challenge. Misinformation has caused excess deaths because people abstain from getting vaccinated and other evidence-based prevention behaviors. Misinformation also influences various other important topics such as climate change. And it has the potential to influence countless other areas. In order to exemplify the broader point, this project focuses on simple example of beliefs around the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations. To find ways to successfully tackle this grand challenge, it is crucial to have thorough understanding of the system. Modeling and simulation can be a powerful tool to support our reasoning about big and complex systems such as misinformation on social media. Therefore, I choose to look at how modeling and simulation can be useful for the study of misinformation on social media and of potential counter-measures.Agent-based models (ABMs) are one of the useful modeling paradigms for this grand challenge. And while there is a body of literature on ABMs in the field of misinformation research, there is structural uncertainty about how to represent the way that people change their minds on social media. Different types of representations of this updating process are used. It is unclear which of them is the most suitable representation of the real-world process and also to what extent it makes a difference for the choice of counter-measures. Moreover, the choice between these different belief update functions is usually not discussed. And to the best of my knowledge, nobody has explored the issue of whether the choice between belief update functions makes a substantial difference in the conclusions from the studies.Because of the significance of this grand challenge and the lack of exploring a key structural uncertainty, I choose to apply a method for exploring uncertainty in the context of ABMs. More specifically, because the structural uncertainty about the belief update function is a central component of models in this field, I explore a method for handling this structural uncertainty. This project is a show case of the value that methods from the field of Decision-Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) have for the field of misinformation focused ABMs.Yet, applying a DMDU approach is not only useful for enabling exploration of uncertainties. With many DMDU methods, it is possible to evaluate policies based on not only a single, but on multiple objectives. As far as I know, also the evaluation of multiple objectives has not previously been done in the field of opinion dynamic models such as ABMs which focus on misinformation on social media. However, policies that aim at tackling the misinformation challenge do not only impact one single stakeholder, but a multitude of diverse stakeholders who care about various aspects of the system. If we pick policies by only optimizing for one objective, we run the risk of merely shifting the problem. To find solutions that are sustainable and work for the whole system, it is helpful to consider multiple metrics that stakeholders care about. The ranking and filtering by multiple objectives is not trivial. But there is a method called non-dominated ranking which can be applied to do exactly that. This results in so-called Pareto-optimal policies. It is in this specific niche that I pursue the following methodological question within the field of agent-based misinformation modeling:Main Research QuestionHow does the consideration of structural uncertainty with respect to the choice between different belief update functions influence the resulting Pareto-optimal policies and their performance?I look at three alternative belief update functions, where each belief update function is represented by one model. I show that the choice of the belief update function makes a significant difference for what kind of policies are Pareto-optimal and for the outcomes that stem from these policies. To investigate how the choice of the belief update function influences which policies are Pareto-optimal and what kind of outcomes result, I apply the DMDU-method of Many-Objective Robust Decision-Making (MORDM) approach. With DMDU methods, modellers can acknowledge the uncomfortable situation in which we know that we have uncertainties, ruining the possibility of using models as reliable prediction machines. These uncertainties can be about the real world's states (i.e., parametric uncertainties) or its processes (i.e., structural uncertainty). When applying DMDU methods, modellers can aim to find policies that perform robustly over a large number of possible instantiations of parametric or structural uncertainties. In this project, I first evaluate more than 26'000 candidate policies with each of the three belief update functions. Then, I select a set of Pareto-optimal policies for each belief update function. Additionally, I select a set of policies that seem optimal when only considering a single metric. Subsequently, I re-evaluate Pareto-optimal policies of each belief update function under deep uncertainty to gain a better impression of their performance. Finally, I compare the commonalities and differences between the selected policies and their performances. This, I do for either method of selection and for all three belief update functions.To explore the structural uncertainty, I use a model which can be instantiated with either of the alternative belief update functions. I refer to these three possible instantiations as the three different models. The first model uses the commonly used function based on the research by Deffuant (hereafter 'DEFFUANT model'). In it, beliefs are always updated by a fix percentage towards the newly incoming information. In this project, this newly incoming information is the belief that is represented in a seen post. The second model samples whether a belief update happens or not. If an update happens, the new belief is the average between the previous belief and the newly incoming information. We call this the 'SAMPLE model'. Unfortunately, neither of these two models includes well-established phenomena from social psychology. Examples of such phenomena include for instance that we are more willing to update towards beliefs that are more similar to ours, that we have limited attention capacity, and that it takes more to change someone's mind when they are very convinced of their current belief than when they are uncertain. The third model was chosen to fill this void by basing its belief update function on Social Impact Theory (SIT) and adjusting this theory to the context of social media. This model is referred to as the 'SIT model'.Main Findings- There is a clear distinction between the models' optimal policies as well as their outcomes.- Differences in parameters do make a difference.- The models' optimal policies exhibit an order in how optimistic their outcomes are. This order (in descending direction) is DEFFUANT, SAMPLE, and SIT.- The outcomes of the DEFFUANT and the SAMPLE model are more similar to each other than to the SIT model.The main methodological take-away is that the DMDU approach can bring substantial value to the field of ABM-based studies on the grand challenge of misinformation on social media platforms. While this is shown by a simple exploration of the structural uncertainty with respect to the belief update, many more insights could be gathered by utilizing the DMDU approach. For instance, the DMDU approach offers state-of-the-art methods to identify vulnerable scenarios, i.e., scenarios which would be particularly bleak. Another example could be to explore different problem formulations with different sets of objectives or other structural uncertainties such as the posting behavior.Furthermore, by utilizing the tools of DMDU, also society as a whole can benefit. By including multiple objectives and a wide range of considered uncertainties, the many different world-views and values of the diverse stakeholders can be taken into account in order to avoid potential policy gridlock situations. This could contribute to tackling the misinformation grand challenge more successfully and thus for instance lead to more people embracing evidence-based medical interventions.https://github.com/felicity-reddel/MisinfoPyEngineering and Policy Analysi
Echo writes back: the figure of the author in 'true short story' by Ali Smith
No full textAli Smith’s 2008 collection The First Person And Other Stories re-examines the implied contract between reader and writer. In particular, the first piece in the collection, ‘True Short Story’, challenges our reading of the text as ‘story’. It is highly metafictive, with little conventional structure, and apparently autobiographical, and the narrator must be the author too – mustn’t she(it)? Smith insists that we read the author into the work, in order to create a new set of questions around the debate of authorial identity. ‘True Short Story’ considers what difference it makes to the reader when the author’s voice is apparently unmediated by any fictional narrator. Does this make the story autobiography rather than fiction? If it is not fiction, does that mean it is not a story either? If it is fiction, why use so many apparently verifiable facts? The article also considers whether Jorge Luis Borges has anything to say about Smith’s disruption of the sujet. The figure of the author in ‘Borges and I’ is compared with that in ‘True Short Story’, together with Paul Auster’s apparent appearance in his City of Glass.(1987
Your Place or Mine? Curatorial approaches to place through the prism of home
Full text linkThe outward image of the place we call home – Australia – historically dominates and subsumes personal experiences of home in exhibitions of Australian art. The thesis argues, and demonstrates through a series of curatorial projects, that exhibitions can, alternatively, embody intimate experiences of place that more accurately describe the experience of 21st century Australia. Citing recent Australian socio-political and literary culture as a backdrop, it is shown that the prism of home is an effective curatorial device through which to transmit and receive new insights into aspects of this place we call home, Australia.
The conceit of ‘home’ is adopted in the thesis both as a curatorial theme and as a framework for engagement. The research reveals how reference to home can guide viewers from simply ‘understanding’ meaning to ‘inhabiting’ (being at home within) the intellectual and sensory space of artworks and exhibitions. When the idea of home is embedded in the curatorial approach, artists’ knowledge and experience – particularly those at odds with mainstream perceptions of Australian culture – can be articulated. Thus, the exhibition becomes a catalyst for new ways of seeing and thinking about place.
Contextualising the author’s curatorial projects with others in the region seeking to define a post-global sense of identity, the thesis reveals how the curator can employ the framework of home to facilitate new insights into place. To achieve this, three key curatorial strategies are applied to exhibitions of Australian art: the inclusion of works that are based on real life, intersect with or are real life occurrences; the creation of installations in the gallery space that are physically immersive or inhabitable; and the co-production with artists of participatory works in public and non-institutional spaces.
Through a series of curated projects, the prism of home gives voice to internal (bottom-up) understandings of place, providing an alternative to external (top-down) perceptions typically associated with the visual lexicons of national and cultural identity
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