Entangled histories, part 2: releasing the de-generate body

This second part of writing on the research project Releasing the Archive, undertaken by Carol Brown and Thomas Kampe in collaboration with dancers of New Zealand Dance Company (NZDC), aims to discuss notions of contemporary somaticinformed re-transmission of the work of Gertrud Bodenwieser (Vienna 1890 – Sydney 1959) as acts of cultural repair. The article unpacks, through historical texts and dancers’ notebooks, how the diasporic work of Gertrud Bodenwieser, influenced by Modernist body-culture pioneer Bess Mensendieck (c. 1866–1957 ), aimed to construct a practice of somatic realism concerned with emancipatory perspectives on twentieth century western personhood. The author discusses proto-somatic and proto-feminist roots of Bodenwieser’s corporeal practices as critical processes, and reveals how Bodenwieser’s discovery-based pedagogies invite and foster dancers’ psycho-physical agency within collaborative modes of creation. The article critiques the application of The Feldenkrais Method as a contemporary somatic modality to support the revitalizing of a re-emerging ecstatic and eccentric highly dynamic bodycoding. It contextualizes Releasing the Archive as a trans-cultural and intergenerational articulation of coming to terms with the complexities of a nearly forgotten European exiled dance legacy

Dystopias of Tyranny and Misogyny: The Handmaid’s Tale and The Carhullan Army

Displaying the probable future and the doom of humanity and the Earth, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007) are two dystopian novels that present the terrible state of women along with the degradation of the society and the nonhuman environment. Atwood’s the Republic of Gilead and Hall’s the Authority enforce an extremely oppressive, exploitative, and misogynist order on women, which corrupts the natural flow of daily life and destroys the human and nonhuman spheres. Depicting the resistance of women against tyranny through female protagonists, these novels picture dystopian worlds of chaos and destruction ruled by anthropocentric and patriarchal dictate. With this perspective, this article aims to discuss the problem of patriarchal oppression on women in dystopian societies as portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale and The Carhullan Army from the perspectives of the feminist and ecofeminist theories. &nbsp

Methodological individualism : true and false

I apply Hayek’s distinction between ‘true’ and ‘false’ individualism to methodological individualism. Hayek traced ‘false’ individualism to Cartesian rationalism; Hayek’s rejection of Mises’ praxeology was due to its rationalist underpinnings. The first half of this paper identifies praxeology’s foundational philosophical concepts, emphasising their Cartesian nature, and illustrates how together they constitute a case for methodological individualism: intuition and deduction; reductionism; judgement; dualism. In the second half of this paper, I draw upon philosophy and cognitive science to articulate ‘Hayekian’ (N.B. not Hayek’s) alternatives to these Cartesian concepts. The Hayekian alternative allows a ‘gestalt switch’ from the individual- to the system-level perspective. I therefore suggest that methodological individualism is both true and false: true, in that economic phenomena are grounded in the actions of individuals; false, in that certain problems might be reconceived/discovered at the system-level. I finish by suggesting three avenues of research at system-level: optimisation; stigmergy; computational complexity

The genealogy of Nick Land's anti-anthropocentric philosophy: a psychoanalytic conception of machinic desire.

Ph.D thesisIn recent years the philosophical texts of Nick Land have begun to attract increasing attention, yet no systematic treatment of his work exists. This thesis considers one significant and distinctive aspect of Land's work: his use of a psychoanalytic vocabulary, which is deployed to try and avoid several problems associated with metaphysical discourse. Land's larger project of responding to the Kantian settlement in philosophy is sketched in the introduction, as is his avowed distaste for thought which is conditioned by anthropocentricism. This thesis then goes on to provide a genealogical reading of the concepts which Land will borrow from psychoanalytic discourse, tracing the history of drive and desire in the major psychoanalytic thinkers of the twentieth century. Chapter one considers Freud, his model of the unconscious, and the extent to which it is anthropocentric. Chapter two contrasts Freud's materialism to Lacan's idealism. Chapter three returns to materialism, as depicted by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus. This chapter also goes on to consider the implications of their 'schizoanalysis', and contrasts 'left' and 'right' interpretations of Deleuze, showing how they have appropriated his work. Chapter four considers Lyotard's works from his 'libidinal period' of the late sixties to early seventies. These four readings, and the various theories of drive and desire they contain, are then contextualised in relation to Land's work in chapter five. This final chapter considers Land's theory of 'machinic-desire', and evaluates if his construction of the concept, via psychoanalysis, offers a superior approach to anti-anthropocentric positions constructed in metaphysics. The role of psychoanalytic thought in constructing Land's cosmological theory of thermodynamic entropy and extropy is also considered

Can a machine think (anything new)? Automation beyond simulation

This article will rework the classical question ‘Can a machine think?’ into a more specific problem: ‘Can a machine think anything new?’ It will consider traditional computational tasks such as prediction and decision-making, so as to investigate whether the instrumentality of these operations can be understood in terms of the creation of novel thought. By addressing philosophical and technoscientific attempts to mechanise thought on the one hand (e.g. Leibniz’s mathesis universalis and Turing’s algorithmic method of computation), and the philosophical and cultural critique of these attempts on the other, I will argue that computation’s epistemic productions should be assessed vis-à-vis the logico-mathematical specificity of formal axiomatic systems. Such an assessment requires us to conceive automated modes of thought in such a way as to supersede the hope that machines might replicate human cognitive faculties, and to thereby acknowledge a form of onto-epistemological autonomy in automated ‘thinking’ processes. This involves moving beyond the view that machines might merely simulate humans. Machine thought should be seen as dramatically alien to human thought, and to the dimension of lived experience upon which the latter is predicated. Having stepped outside the simulative paradigm, the question ‘Can a machine think anything new?’ can then be reformulated. One should ask whether novel behaviour in computing might come not from the breaking of mechanical rules, but from following them: from doing what computers do already, and not what we might think they should be doing if we wanted them to imitate us

High Performance P3M N-body code: CUBEP3M

This paper presents CUBEP3M, a publicly-available high performance cosmological N-body code and describes many utilities and extensions that have been added to the standard package. These include a memory-light runtime SO halo finder, a non-Gaussian initial conditions generator, and a system of unique particle identification. CUBEP3M is fast, its accuracy is tuneable to optimize speed or memory, and has been run on more than 27,000 cores, achieving within a factor of two of ideal weak scaling even at this problem size. The code can be run in an extra-lean mode where the peak memory imprint for large runs is as low as 37 bytes per particles, which is almost two times leaner than other widely used N-body codes. However, load imbalances can increase this requirement by a factor of two, such that fast configurations with all the utilities enabled and load imbalances factored in require between 70 and 120 bytes per particles. CUBEP3M is well designed to study large scales cosmological systems, where imbalances are not too large and adaptive time-stepping not essential. It has already been used for a broad number of science applications that require either large samples of non-linear realizations or very large dark matter N-body simulations, including cosmological reionization, halo formation, baryonic acoustic oscillations, weak lensing or non-Gaussian statistics. We discuss the structure, the accuracy, known systematic effects and the scaling performance of the code and its utilities, when applicable.Comment: 20 pages, 17 figures, added halo profiles, updated to match MNRAS accepted versio

Private Communication Detection via Side-Channel Attacks

Private communication detection (PCD) enables an ordinary network user to discover communication patterns (e.g., call time, length, frequency, and initiator) between two or more private parties. Analysis of communication patterns between private parties has historically been a powerful tool used by intelligence, military, law-enforcement and business organizations because it can reveal the strength of tie between these parties. Ordinary users are assumed to have neither eavesdropping capabilities (e.g., the network may employ strong anonymity measures) nor the legal authority (e.g. no ability to issue a warrant to network providers) to collect private-communication records. We show that PCD is possible by ordinary users merely by sending packets to various network end-nodes and analyzing the responses. Three approaches for PCD are proposed based on a new type of side channels caused by resource contention, and defenses are proposed. The Resource-Saturation PCD exploits the resource contention (e.g., a fixed-size buffer) by sending carefully designed packets and monitoring different responses. Its effectiveness has been demonstrated on three commercial closed-source VoIP phones. The Stochastic PCD shows that timing side channels in the form of probing responses, which are caused by distinct resource-contention responses when different applications run in end nodes, enable effective PCD despite network and proxy-generated noise (e.g., jitter, delays). It was applied to WiFi and Instant Messaging for resource contention in the radio channel and the keyboard, respectively. Similar analysis enables practical Sybil node detection. Finally, the Service-Priority PCD utilizes the fact that 3G/2G mobile communication systems give higher priority to voice service than data service. This allows detection of the busy status of smartphones, and then discovery of their call records by correlating the busy status. This approach was successfully applied to iPhone and Android phones in AT&T's network. An additional, unanticipated finding was that an Internet user could disable a 2G phone's voice service by probing it with short enough intervals (e.g., 1 second). PCD defenses can be traditional side-channel countermeasures or PCD-specific ones, e.g., monitoring and blocking suspicious periodic network traffic

Evaluation of automated decisionmaking methodologies and development of an integrated robotic system simulation

A generic computer simulation for manipulator systems (ROBSIM) was implemented and the specific technologies necessary to increase the role of automation in various missions were developed. The specific items developed are: (1) capability for definition of a manipulator system consisting of multiple arms, load objects, and an environment; (2) capability for kinematic analysis, requirements analysis, and response simulation of manipulator motion; (3) postprocessing options such as graphic replay of simulated motion and manipulator parameter plotting; (4) investigation and simulation of various control methods including manual force/torque and active compliances control; (5) evaluation and implementation of three obstacle avoidance methods; (6) video simulation and edge detection; and (7) software simulation validation