Aesthetic knowing and ecology:Cultivating perception and participation during the ecological crisis

This paper develops the concept of aesthetic knowing, its significance in perceiving and participating in ecologies writ large, and challenges that arise in engaging it during a time of ecological crises. I define aesthetic knowing as perception of the quality of relationship, and suggest it offers insight into how ecologies are intra- and/or inter-connected. Aesthetic knowing is the epistemological basis of a relational empiricism, a philosophical position which foregrounds the capacity to receive and respond to otherness, and I claim it offers an antidote to the isolating overreach of some theorising prevalent in environmental education (EE). My main purpose is to clarify the scope and nature of the relationship between aesthetic knowing and ecologies, so to offer methodological and theoretical context for educators and education researchers seeking to attend to healthy and threatened ecologies. Cultivating aesthetic knowing is necessary for responsive participation with/in any ecology, but can be emotionally difficult. As ecological destruction escalates, sustaining aesthetic knowing demands perception of, and participation with fear, while working with fear in turn requires aesthetic openness. I discuss approaches to cultivating aesthetic openness given this apparently wicked recursion

Cognitive Grammar in Contemporary Fiction

This book proposes an extension of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, 1991, 2008) towards a cognitive discourse grammar, through the unique environment that literary stylistic application offers. Drawing upon contemporary research in cognitive stylistics (Text World Theory, deixis and mind-modelling, amongst others), the volume scales up central Cognitive Grammar concepts (such as construal, grounding, the reference point model and action chains) in order to explore the attenuation of experience – and how it is simulated – in literary reading. In particular, it considers a range of contemporary texts by Neil Gaiman, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Safran Foer, Ian McEwan and Paul Auster. This application builds upon previous work that adopts Cognitive Grammar for literary analysis and provides the first extended account of Cognitive Grammar in contemporary fiction

Doing Duo - a case study of entrainment in William Forsythe's choreography "Duo"

Waterhouse E, Watts R, Bläsing B. Doing Duo - a case study of entrainment in William Forsythe's choreography "Duo". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 2014;8:812.Entrainment theory focuses on processes in which interacting (i.e., coupled) rhythmic systems stabilize, producing synchronization in the ideal sense, and forms of phase related rhythmic coordination in complex cases. In human action, entrainment involves spatiotemporal and social aspects, characterizing the meaningful activities of music, dance, and communication. How can the phenomenon of human entrainment be meaningfully studied in complex situations such as dance? We present an in-progress case study of entrainment in William Forsythe's choreography Duo, a duet in which coordinated rhythmic activity is achieved without an external musical beat and without touch-based interaction. Using concepts of entrainment from different disciplines as well as insight from Duo performer Riley Watts, we question definitions of entrainment in the context of dance. The functions of chorusing, turn-taking, complementary action, cues, and alignments are discussed and linked to supporting annotated video material. While Duo challenges the definition of entrainment in dance as coordinated response to an external musical or rhythmic signal, it supports the definition of entrainment as coordinated interplay of motion and sound production by active agents (i.e., dancers) in the field. Agreeing that human entrainment should be studied on multiple levels, we suggest that entrainment between the dancers in Duo is elastic in time and propose how to test this hypothesis empirically. We do not claim that our proposed model of elasticity is applicable to all forms of human entrainment nor to all examples of entrainment in dance. Rather, we suggest studying higher order phase correction (the stabilizing tendency of entrainment) as a potential aspect to be incorporated into other models

Object-relational spatio-temporal databases

We present an object-relational model for uniform handling of dimensional data. Spatial, temporal, spatio-temporal and ordinary data are special cases of dimensional data. The said uniformity is achieved through the concept of dimension alignment, which automatically allows lower dimensional data and queries to be used in a higher dimensional context;Unlike ordinary data, dimensional objects are interwoven. We introduce object identity (oid) fragments to circumvent data redundancy at logical level. Computed types are placed appropriately in a type hierarchy to allow maximal use of existing methods. A query language for spatio-temporal data is presented for associative navigation. A framework for algebraic optimization of the query language is suggested;A pattern matching language is designed for complex querying of spatio-temporal data which seamlessly extends the associative navigation in our query language. The pattern matching language recognizes special features of time and space providing an appropriate level of abstraction for application development compared to traditional languages. This reduces the need for embedding the query language in a lower level language such as C++. The pattern matching language is also dimensionally extensible. The pattern matching allows query of data with multiple granularities and continuous data. It also provides hooks for direct query of scientific data (observations);Our model is dimensionally extensible, and also an extension of a relational model for dimensional data. Moreover the dimensionality and addition of oids are mutually orthogonal concepts. Thus starting from classical ordinary data, one may migrate to higher forms of relational or object-relational data in any sequence, without having to recode application software. Our model does not deal with complex objects, which is left as a future extension

Sound and Image: Experimental Music and the Popular Horror Film (1960 to the present day)

This study investigates the functional relationship between sound and image within a particular generic and historical context - experimental music and the popular horror film, from 1960 to the present day. The study responds to a significant gap in the literature that requires sustained and in-depth academic attention. Despite recent expansion, the field of film music studies has yet to deal with alternative functional models that challenge the overall applicability of the dominant narrative-based theoretical framework. Recent scholarship suggests that a proper theoretical comprehension of horror film music's primary function requires a refocusing of the hermeneutic emphasis upon dimensions of the cinematic (or audio-visual) sign that can be described as `nonrepresentational.' This study applies a relatively new psychoanalytical framework to explain how the post-1960 horror film deploys these non-representational elements, incorporating them into an overall cinematic strategy which indexes the transition towards a post-classical cinematic aesthetics. More specifically, this study assessesju st how efficiently experimental musical styles and techniques aid the reconfiguration of the syntactical components of horror film to these very ends. Using three case study directors, this study focuses upon major developments in musical style and cinematic technology, describing the ways in which these have facilitated this cinematic strategy. A particularly useful contribution to the knowledge is made here via the study's explanation as to how the particular psychoanalytical framework applied can illuminate the functional and theoretical relationships often posited between both the formal and subjective dimensions of the post-1960 horror film experience. The conclusions reached suggest this theoretical explication of post-1960 horror film music's function can now take its place alongside previously dominant narrative frameworks. Given the influential status of the horror genre, the findings of this investigation prove useful for comprehending the increasing heterogeneity of postclassical film music in general, and the functional relationship(s) of sound and image in particular

PRESERVING THE VERNACULAR POSTINDUSTRIAL LANDSCAPE: BIG DATA GEOSPATIAL APPROACHES TO HERITAGE MANAGEMENT AND INTERPRETATION

Redundant historical industrial sites, or postindustrial landscapes, face numerous preservation challenges. Functionally obsolete, and often derelict and decaying, these cultural landscapes often retain only a fraction of their original infrastructure. With their historical interconnections made indistinct by their physical separation and obscured by the passage of time, surviving remnants are isolated and disjunct, confounding both their legibility and their consideration for formal historic preservation. Nevertheless, they persist. This dissertation presents a theoretical understanding of the nature of postindustrial landscape preservation, and argues that the material persistence of its historical constituents is the result of previously overlooked processes of informal material conservation, here termed vernacular preservation. Further, this dissertation examines ways that heritage professionals can manage and interpret these vast, complex, and shattered landscapes, using 21st-century digital and spatial tools. Confronted by ongoing depopulation and divestment, and constrained by limited financial capacity to reverse the trend of blight and property loss, communities and individuals concerned with the preservation of vernacular postindustrial landscapes face many unique management and interpretation challenges. The successful heritagization of the postindustrial landscape depends on its comprehension, and communication, as a historically complex network of systems, and I argue that utilizing advanced digital and spatial tool such as historical GIS and procedural modeling can aid communities and heritage professionals in managing, preserving, and interpreting these landscapes. This dissertation presents heritage management and interpretation strategies that emphasize the historical, but now largely missing, spatial and temporal contexts of today’s postindustrial landscape in Michigan’s Copper Country. A series of case studies illustrates the demonstrated and potential value of using a big-data, longitudinally-linked digital infrastructure, or Historical GIS (HGIS), known as the Copper Country Historical Spatial Data Infrastructure (CC-HSDI), for heritage management and interpretation. These studies support the public education and conservation goals of the communities in this nationally-significant mining region through providing accessible, engaging, and meaningful historical spatiotemporal context, and by helping to promote and encourage the ongoing management and preservation of this ever-evolving postindustrial landscape

The objects of consciousness: a non-computational model of cell assemblies

The premise of this paper is that an adequate model of consciousness will be able to account for the fundamental duality in experience typified by thought and feeling, objectivity and subjectivity, science and art, and that it will do so without any of these terms assimilating its counterpart. The paper argues that such an account is possible using existing models of the cell assembly, but only if consciousness is conceived in structural rather than information-processing terms. To this end, the paper contests the viability of information-processing models that identify consciousness with a substrate-independent flow of information, and instead identifies consciousness with the physical structure of the cell assembly itself. This allows a fuller and more parsimonious account of consciousness than existing information-processing models, as well as the integration of a range of key related matters from the fields of neuroanatomy, psychology, philosophy, and the physical sciences

On the Appearance of the Comedy LP, 1957–1973

Many observers of contemporary comedy in the United States during the 1960s referred to musical aspects of extra-musical performances. Comedy LP records furnish important artifacts for the study of the musical appearances these observers produced for themselves. Where contemporaries described appearances characterized by printable words and polemics as “satirical,” the musical appearances discussed in this dissertation can instead be described as “comic”: instead of mocking persons or ideas, they show people and things becoming involved with one another in absurdly triumphant ways. These two different sorts of appearances correspond to two different uses for comedy in a class society, one consolidating a hegemonic middle-class “consensus” against ridiculous adversaries, the other exploring surprising potentials in even the most ridiculous circumstances. A history of antagonistic ways of listening to sixties comedy can be read as a history of the making of class relations in an advanced capitalist society. This dissertation discusses four case studies selected with two complementary aims: to produce an appearance of the comedy LP as a densely varied form and to produce knowledge of the political stakes involved in historical conflicts over formal appearances. In each study, a musical appearance becomes involved in the making of class. The jazz critic Nat Hentoff insisted on musical appearances of the iconic sixties comedian Lenny Bruce over and against what he derided as “liberal” readings for printable messages. His chief artifacts were comedy LP records. Elaine May and Mike Nichols—television stars, dinner club sensations, and luminaries of the most popularly influential improvisatory theater in the United States—used a tangled musical texture associated with affluent social circles. By invoking descriptions of the self as she might have found them in her widely reported readings of Freud, May seems to undermine the ethical significance of the tangled texture as previously determined by Katharine Hepburn’s films. The “blue record” or “party record” produced by and for black Americans in the 1970s was advertised in middle-class periodicals as a genre characterized by “dirty words.” But Tramp Time Volume 1 (La Val LVP 901, 1967), a purportedly early example of the party record featuring an itinerant Midwestern performer named Jimmy “Mr. Motion” Lynch, instead seems characterized most importantly by features of blues music. The Firesign Theatre, a Californian comedy troupe popular with the “dormitory debauchee set,” performed a peculiar involvement in history using a quasi-musical style based upon the characteristics of radio as a broadcast medium. This radiophonic style places observers “inside” history after the perceived closures of 1968. Art-critical, archival, and philological methods shape this dissertation’s argument. Formalistic descriptions based upon vocabularies critically adapted from modern and contemporary writings produce “abstract” appearances. Artifacts collected through archival research ground these abstract appearances as “historically possible appearances.” As a formalism, this historical method uses its thickening self-referential vocabulary to invent its own critical universe. As a historical method, this formalism produces knowledge of appearances which, because they are grounded in activities, leave no self-contained artifacts