684 research outputs found

    Fictocritical Cyberfeminism: A Paralogical Model for Post-Internet Communication

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    This dissertation positions the understudied and experimental writing practice of fictocriticism as an analog for the convergent and indeterminate nature of “post-Internet” communication as well a cyberfeminist technology for interfering and in-tervening in metanarratives of technoscience and technocapitalism that structure contemporary media. Significant theoretical valences are established between twen-tieth century literary works of fictocriticism and the hybrid and ephemeral modes of writing endemic to emergent, twenty-first century forms of networked communica-tion such as social media. Through a critical theoretical understanding of paralogy, or that countercultural logic of deploying language outside legitimate discourses, in-volving various tactics of multivocity, mimesis and metagraphy, fictocriticism is ex-plored as a self-referencing linguistic machine which exists intentionally to occupy those liminal territories “somewhere in among/between criticism, autobiography and fiction” (Hunter qtd. in Kerr 1996). Additionally, as a writing practice that orig-inated in Canada and yet remains marginal to national and international literary scholarship, this dissertation elevates the origins and ongoing relevance of fictocriti-cism by mapping its shared aims and concerns onto proximal discourses of post-structuralism, cyberfeminism, network ecology, media art, the avant-garde, glitch feminism, and radical self-authorship in online environments. Theorized in such a matrix, I argue that fictocriticism represents a capacious framework for writing and reading media that embodies the self-reflexive politics of second-order cybernetic theory while disrupting the rhetoric of technoscientific and neoliberal economic forc-es with speech acts of calculated incoherence. Additionally, through the inclusion of my own fictocritical writing as works of research-creation that interpolate the more traditional chapters and subchapters, I theorize and demonstrate praxis of this dis-tinctively indeterminate form of criticism to empirically and meaningfully juxtapose different modes of knowing and speaking about entangled matters of language, bod-ies, and technologies. In its conclusion, this dissertation contends that the “creative paranoia” engendered by fictocritical cyberfeminism in both print and digital media environments offers a pathway towards a more paralogical media literacy that can transform the terms and expectations of our future media ecology

    Complexity Science in Human Change

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    This reprint encompasses fourteen contributions that offer avenues towards a better understanding of complex systems in human behavior. The phenomena studied here are generally pattern formation processes that originate in social interaction and psychotherapy. Several accounts are also given of the coordination in body movements and in physiological, neuronal and linguistic processes. A common denominator of such pattern formation is that complexity and entropy of the respective systems become reduced spontaneously, which is the hallmark of self-organization. The various methodological approaches of how to model such processes are presented in some detail. Results from the various methods are systematically compared and discussed. Among these approaches are algorithms for the quantification of synchrony by cross-correlational statistics, surrogate control procedures, recurrence mapping and network models.This volume offers an informative and sophisticated resource for scholars of human change, and as well for students at advanced levels, from graduate to post-doctoral. The reprint is multidisciplinary in nature, binding together the fields of medicine, psychology, physics, and neuroscience

    TRANSEUNTIS MUNDI, A NOMADIC ARTISTIC PRACTICE

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    In this practice-led Ph.D. research, I investigate how an artistic practice can respond to the migration phenomena performed by human beings across the planet over millennia ¬– what I refer to as the millennial global human journey. Based on the idea of mobility, I chose to frame this research in the articulation of concepts deriving from the prefix trans: transculture, transhumance and transmediality. This research contributes to studies in art composition by developing the processes and concept of transmedial composition, mainly contributing to the field of New Media Art. This investigation resulted in the work Transeuntis Mundi (TM) Project – a nomadic artistic practice that encompasses: the TM Derive and manual, the TM Archive, the TM VR work Derive 01 and two forms for its notation. Transeuntis mundi (TM), from the Latin language, means the ‘passersby of the world’ and metaphorically personify in this work the millennial migrants and their global journeys. Based on proposals from the Realism art movement and the walking-based methodologies of Walkscapes and Dérive, the TM Derive was created as a nomadic methodology of composition in response to the ideas of migration and ancestry. It is framed by the minimal stories ¬– the form of narrative of this work, captured from field recordings with 3D technology of everyday life worldwide. This material formed the TM Archive, presented in the TM VR work. The TM VR work Transeuntis Mundi Derive 01 is an immersive and interactive performative experience for virtual reality, that artistically brings together stories, sounds, images, people, and places worldwide, ¬as a metaphor of the millennial global human migration. This work happens as a VR application using 3D technology with 360º image and ambisonic sound, in order to promote an engaged experience through the immersion and interactivity of the participant. This thesis presents and contextualizes these creations: the scope, references, concepts, origin, collaborations, methodology, technologies, and results of this work. It is informed and accompanied by reflexive and critical writing, including an articulation with references of works across different artistic media and fields.UNIRIO Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeir

    Gestures in the virtual environment: the use of deixis in Youtube gaming tutorials

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    As natural communicators, humans establish meaning by anchoring their language to the space around them. One method that is used to establish communication is through the use of deictic gestures and expressions. Much of the research to date has focused on use of deictic behaviors in face-to-face interactions within the physical world. However, with the advent of new technology and new ways to communicate, researchers have taken interest in the ways humans interact in the virtual environment. This thesis investigates a small portion of virtual communication by examining the use of deictic behaviors in YouTube gaming tutorials. The goal of the creators of these tutorials is to communicate with their audience, in this research I posit that one of the ways they do so is through deictic behaviors that have parallels to those used in the physical world. In order to examine if this is the case, I analyzed video data through the program ELAN and formulated a unique typology of virtual deictic gestures that have roots in previously established gesture theory

    Behavior quantification as the missing link between fields: Tools for digital psychiatry and their role in the future of neurobiology

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    The great behavioral heterogeneity observed between individuals with the same psychiatric disorder and even within one individual over time complicates both clinical practice and biomedical research. However, modern technologies are an exciting opportunity to improve behavioral characterization. Existing psychiatry methods that are qualitative or unscalable, such as patient surveys or clinical interviews, can now be collected at a greater capacity and analyzed to produce new quantitative measures. Furthermore, recent capabilities for continuous collection of passive sensor streams, such as phone GPS or smartwatch accelerometer, open avenues of novel questioning that were previously entirely unrealistic. Their temporally dense nature enables a cohesive study of real-time neural and behavioral signals. To develop comprehensive neurobiological models of psychiatric disease, it will be critical to first develop strong methods for behavioral quantification. There is huge potential in what can theoretically be captured by current technologies, but this in itself presents a large computational challenge -- one that will necessitate new data processing tools, new machine learning techniques, and ultimately a shift in how interdisciplinary work is conducted. In my thesis, I detail research projects that take different perspectives on digital psychiatry, subsequently tying ideas together with a concluding discussion on the future of the field. I also provide software infrastructure where relevant, with extensive documentation. Major contributions include scientific arguments and proof of concept results for daily free-form audio journals as an underappreciated psychiatry research datatype, as well as novel stability theorems and pilot empirical success for a proposed multi-area recurrent neural network architecture.Comment: PhD thesis cop

    Animate Being: Extending a Practice of the Image to New Mediums via Speculative Game Design

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    This post-disciplinary practice as research thesis examines the potential of Carl Jung's therapeutic method of active imagination as a strategy for engaging with an increasingly complex and interconnected technological reality. Embracing a non-clinical, practice-driven approach, I harness James Hillman’s notion of the image and the imaginal to investigate the interdisciplinary capacity and ethical dimensions of an expansive mode of image-work. My approach to practice theoretically and practically intertwines analytical psychology, feminist worlding and design speculation. Building upon Susan Rowland’s work, I study image-work as an ecological alchemical craft that seeks to matter the immaterial. Through the cyclic iterative design of a video game, I mobilise and respond to image-work as a mode of myth-making that may facilitate dialogue between human and non-human intelligences. Departing from the essentialism of the hero's journey, I adopt Le Guin's Carrier Bag (1986/2019) as a feminist video game form and by utilising the framework of a video game (Bogost, 2007; Flannigan, 2013), the alchemical processes of image-work are transformed into novel interactive game mechanics. The game I design is both a vessel and a portal to an imaginal ecological realm, an open-world, procedurally generated ‘living world’ sandbox exploration game. This game integrates real-time, real-world data streams to invite the non-human to enter into play as player two, facilitating experimentation with possible new forms of cross-species dialogue, collaboration, and healing

    EC^2: Emergent Communication for Embodied Control

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    Embodied control requires agents to leverage multi-modal pre-training to quickly learn how to act in new environments, where video demonstrations contain visual and motion details needed for low-level perception and control, and language instructions support generalization with abstract, symbolic structures. While recent approaches apply contrastive learning to force alignment between the two modalities, we hypothesize better modeling their complementary differences can lead to more holistic representations for downstream adaption. To this end, we propose Emergent Communication for Embodied Control (EC^2), a novel scheme to pre-train video-language representations for few-shot embodied control. The key idea is to learn an unsupervised "language" of videos via emergent communication, which bridges the semantics of video details and structures of natural language. We learn embodied representations of video trajectories, emergent language, and natural language using a language model, which is then used to finetune a lightweight policy network for downstream control. Through extensive experiments in Metaworld and Franka Kitchen embodied benchmarks, EC^2 is shown to consistently outperform previous contrastive learning methods for both videos and texts as task inputs. Further ablations confirm the importance of the emergent language, which is beneficial for both video and language learning, and significantly superior to using pre-trained video captions. We also present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the emergent language and discuss future directions toward better understanding and leveraging emergent communication in embodied tasks.Comment: Published in CVPR202

    Learning Multi-Object Positional Relationships via Emergent Communication

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    The study of emergent communication has been dedicated to interactive artificial intelligence. While existing work focuses on communication about single objects or complex image scenes, we argue that communicating relationships between multiple objects is important in more realistic tasks, but understudied. In this paper, we try to fill this gap and focus on emergent communication about positional relationships between two objects. We train agents in the referential game where observations contain two objects, and find that generalization is the major problem when the positional relationship is involved. The key factor affecting the generalization ability of the emergent language is the input variation between Speaker and Listener, which is realized by a random image generator in our work. Further, we find that the learned language can generalize well in a new multi-step MDP task where the positional relationship describes the goal, and performs better than raw-pixel images as well as pre-trained image features, verifying the strong generalization ability of discrete sequences. We also show that language transfer from the referential game performs better in the new task than learning language directly in this task, implying the potential benefits of pre-training in referential games. All in all, our experiments demonstrate the viability and merit of having agents learn to communicate positional relationships between multiple objects through emergent communication.Comment: 15 page

    Communication Drives the Emergence of Language Universals in Neural Agents: Evidence from the Word-order/Case-marking Trade-off

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    Artificial learners often behave differently from human learners in the context of neural agent-based simulations of language emergence and change. A common explanation is the lack of appropriate cognitive biases in these learners. However, it has also been proposed that more naturalistic settings of language learning and use could lead to more human-like results. We investigate this latter account focusing on the word-order/case-marking trade-off, a widely attested language universal that has proven particularly hard to simulate. We propose a new Neural-agent Language Learning and Communication framework (NeLLCom) where pairs of speaking and listening agents first learn a miniature language via supervised learning, and then optimize it for communication via reinforcement learning. Following closely the setup of earlier human experiments, we succeed in replicating the trade-off with the new framework without hard-coding specific biases in the agents. We see this as an essential step towards the investigation of language universals with neural learners.Comment: Accepted to TACL, pre-MIT Press publication versio
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