Ambivalent surfaces: An encounter with Rococo paintings

This project sets out from an encounter with a series of rococo paintings by Francois Boucher's and my unexpected fascination with them that I try to understand. I presume it is the mimetic texture of a fabric and the shimmer of the paint itself that prompts me to the strange difference between them. In the sensual absorption, on the other hand, paint becomes its own presentation. This in turn raises questions about the painting surface. The surface carries judgement, that is intertwined with the judgement about the rococo. With formalism as the dominant art criticism of modernity, I discuss the concept of the painting surface as predicated on a split between material and image, connected to the distinctions of form and idea, presentation and representation. My key research question thus concerns the role of the surface. The surface is not understood as an isolated picture plane but rather as one of passages and relationships. The play between substance, subject and surface constitutes a network of meaning. The relevance to my practice is explored through the figures of the stain and the splotch, plastic surfaces, and movement on the surface. The research method is developed as an exchange between three main component strands of writing. The poetic serves as a generative, intuitive interface, the art historical and aesthetic a sober grounding for observation, attentions, and factual encounters, and the philosophical arena provides the structure for speculation and projection. There is in turn no privileging of one over the other but rather a series of passages and circulations that provide connections. This triangulation serves to articulate other structural conjunctions such as the relationship between affects, percepts, and concepts, and the structure of spacing within the project of the studio, gallery, and library, which all serve as a play of triangles within triangles. Boucher's paintings evoke ambivalent affects in me. I partially feel repulsion towards their representations and simultaneous attraction to the way they are painted and the effects of their materiality. An object of research that puts me in a place of uncertainty allows for an exploration that is open to experiment, experience, and surprise as is the process in the studio. Ambivalence, as the suspension of judgment, opens up a space for me to move within and inhabit different positions. I thus consider a politics of ambivalence and pose the question of its capability as a method or even as an aim. The key references this thesis is built around are Boucher's paintings as much as the recent discussion by Ewa Lajer-Burcharth that investigates Boucher's artistic individuation through the materiality of his work. This provided me with perspectives that in turn entered the act of looking to forge connections with my practice. Rococo spatiality evokes a floating movement. Another key reference is Timothy Morton's argument for an (im-)possible ecology sensibility within consumerism that connects ambivalence and floating in speculating about the potential of ambivalence to question our categorical dualist thinking of subject and object at the expense of the latter. What this project proposes is therefore a way of looking that opens out another way of encountering art history that is usually governed by the authority of iconography that in turn relies on representation as the dominant system of signification. With this, it is also an exploration of how looking differently can be a method to painting. The contribution of rococo to practice is a notion of the in-betweenness of the surface of painting that de-centres the subject and opens out to a subject/object encounter in the experience of ambivalence. The starting point of this research was a state of ambivalence the object of research put me or I put the object in. From this moment of suspended judgment, ambivalence finds its expression in the a-signifying movements of floating and drifting. This gives rise to the exploration of contradiction, the production of dialectics and the liberation of uncertainty

Hypertext Semiotics in the Commercialized Internet

Die Hypertext Theorie verwendet die selbe Terminologie, welche seit Jahrzehnten in der semiotischen Forschung untersucht wird, wie z.B. Zeichen, Text, Kommunikation, Code, Metapher, Paradigma, Syntax, usw. Aufbauend auf jenen Ergebnissen, welche in der Anwendung semiotischer Prinzipien und Methoden auf die Informatik erfolgreich waren, wie etwa Computer Semiotics, Computational Semiotics und Semiotic Interface Engineering, legt diese Dissertation einen systematischen Ansatz für all jene Forscher dar, die bereit sind, Hypertext aus einer semiotischen Perspektive zu betrachten. Durch die Verknüpfung existierender Hypertext-Modelle mit den Resultaten aus der Semiotik auf allen Sinnesebenen der textuellen, auditiven, visuellen, taktilen und geruchlichen Wahrnehmung skizziert der Autor Prolegomena einer Hypertext-Semiotik-Theorie, anstatt ein völlig neues Hypertext-Modell zu präsentieren. Eine Einführung in die Geschichte der Hypertexte, von ihrer Vorgeschichte bis zum heutigen Entwicklungsstand und den gegenwärtigen Entwicklungen im kommerzialisierten World Wide Web bilden den Rahmen für diesen Ansatz, welcher als Fundierung des Brückenschlages zwischen Mediensemiotik und Computer-Semiotik angesehen werden darf. Während Computer-Semiotiker wissen, dass der Computer eine semiotische Maschine ist und Experten der künstlichen Intelligenz-Forschung die Rolle der Semiotik in der Entwicklung der nächsten Hypertext-Generation betonen, bedient sich diese Arbeit einer breiteren methodologischen Basis. Dementsprechend reichen die Teilgebiete von Hypertextanwendungen, -paradigmen, und -strukturen, über Navigation, Web Design und Web Augmentation zu einem interdisziplinären Spektrum detaillierter Analysen, z.B. des Zeigeinstrumentes der Web Browser, des Klammeraffen-Zeichens und der sogenannten Emoticons. Die Bezeichnung ''Icon'' wird als unpassender Name für jene Bildchen, welche von der graphischen Benutzeroberfläche her bekannt sind und in Hypertexten eingesetzt werden, zurückgewiesen und diese Bildchen durch eine neue Generation mächtiger Graphic Link Markers ersetzt. Diese Ergebnisse werden im Kontext der Kommerzialisierung des Internet betrachtet. Neben der Identifizierung der Hauptprobleme des eCommerce aus der Perspektive der Hypertext Semiotik, widmet sich der Autor den Informationsgütern und den derzeitigen Hindernissen für die New Economy, wie etwa der restriktiven Gesetzeslage in Sachen Copyright und Intellectual Property. Diese anachronistischen Beschränkungen basieren auf der problematischen Annahme, dass auch der Informationswert durch die Knappheit bestimmt wird. Eine semiotische Analyse der iMarketing Techniken, wie z.B. Banner Werbung, Keywords und Link Injektion, sowie Exkurse über den Browser Krieg und den Toywar runden die Dissertation ab

From Mirror to Mirage: The Idea of Logical Space in Kant, Wittgenstein, and van Fraassen

This dissertation investigates the origin, intellectual development and use of a semantic variant of the idea of logical space found implicitly in Kant and explicitly in early Wittgenstein and van Fraassen. It elucidates the idea of logical space as the idea of images or pictures representative of reality organized into a logico-mathematical structure circumscribing a form of all possible worlds. Its main claim is that application of these images or pictures to reality is through a certain conception of self. The first chapter presents a novel interpretation of Kant’s semantic theory of schemata in the Critique of Pure Reason, showing that a structure of the imagination induced by the transcendental self informs an implicit idea of logical space. The second chapter offers an intellectual history of the idea through developments in the organization of images introduced by Helmholtz and Hertz. The third chapter reveals early Wittgenstein’s idea of logical space to be his notion of the self, demonstrating how this serves to unify propositions of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus concerning solipsism, realism, ethics, aesthetics and mysticism with those pertaining to the picture theory of meaning. The fourth chapter provides a historical overview of the development of van Fraassen’s empiricism in relation to his adaptation of logical space, and evaluates his recent proposal in Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective that the problem of coordination in the semantic view of theories is dissolved through self-location in logical space. After identifying a number of problems this proposal creates for his empiricism, a brief suggestion is made about how van Fraassen might improve upon his conception of logical space, and how an empiricist view of scientific representation might be understood as a result

The Sublime as Model: Formal Complexity in Joyce, Eisenstein and Stockhausen

The Sublime as Model: Formal Complexity in Joyce, Eisenstein and Stockhausen, undertakes an investigation of three paradigmatic late-modernist works in three mediums James Joyces novel, Finnegans Wake, Sergei Eisensteins film, Ivan the Terrible I & II, and Karlheinz Stockhausens orchestral work, Gruppen for Three Orchestras with an aim to demonstrating cross-media similarities, and establishing a model for examining their most salient trait: formal complexity. This model is based on a reading of the Kantian mathematical sublime as found in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, as well as borrowing vocabulary from phenomenology, particularly that of Edmund Husserl. After establishing a critical vocabulary based around an analysis of the mathematical sublime and a survey of the phenomenology of Husserl and Heidegger, the dissertation investigates each of the three works and many of their attendant critical works with an aim to illuminate the ways in which their formal complexity can be described, how this type of complexity is particular to late-modernism in general, and these works in particular, and what conclusions can be drawn about the structure and meaning of the works and the critical analyses they accrue. Much of this analysis fits into the rubric of the meta-critical, and there is a strong focus on critical surveys, as the dissertation attempts to provide cross-media models for critical vocabulary, and drawing many examples from extant criticism. The dissertation concludes with reflections on the concept of models for criticism, their construction and their value

NBS monograph

From Introduction: "This report is the first of a series intended to provide a selective overview of research and development efforts and requirements in the somewhat overlapping fields of the computer and information sciences and technologies. The projected series of reports will attempt to outline the probable range of R & D activities in the computer and information sciences and technologies through selective reviews of the literature and to develop a reasonable consensus with respect to the opinions of workers in these and potentially related fields as to areas of continuing R & D concern for research program planning or review in these areas.

Negotiating Matters of Concern: Expertise, Uncertainty, and Agency in Rhetoric of Science

Debates over GMOs, vaccines, and climate change are but a few examples that highlight a growing body of high-stakes scientific controversies and the manifest difficulties inherent in communicating about them. Addressing these and similar issues requires navigating a wide array of competing scientific, technological, social, democratic, environmental, and economic exigencies. The development of scholarly approaches that can account for the complexity and dynamism of these cases is an essential part of ensuring effective, ethical interaction between scientists and publics. In this dissertation, I explore one such case, the L’Aquila earthquake controversy, in which seven technical experts were charged with manslaughter for failing to warn the public. With the addition of the trial, this earthquake overflowed the boundaries of seismology, entangling the public, political, and technical and foregrounding the specific challenges of public-expert communication about risk and uncertainty. To better account for and negotiate public-expert interaction, my dissertation develops rhetorically-oriented approaches for improving communication about risk and uncertainty. In so doing, I explore new synergies among three concepts – agency, expertise, and uncertainty – which have previously been treated separately by rhetoricians but are inextricably entangled in situations like L’Aquila

Designing for complexity: data visualizations in megaproject management

Focusing on the format of dashboards and the visualisations of performance indicators, this thesis explores the design features that make accounting visualisations influential in shaping the management of highly complex and dynamic organisational settings. Informed by empirical research on the reporting design practices in Crossrail, Europe's largest infrastructure megaproject, this thesis theorises how the design of data visualisations is consequential in supporting engagement with the challenges of project delivery and how they enable and constrain interaction. To address these concerns, this thesis develops a comprehensive design framework for the study of the visual in accounting. It does so by drawing from the design theory concepts of affordances, visual and aesthetics literacy, and visual conventions to investigate how designers deploy specific forms and features to pre-form practices of future interaction with visual artefacts. Theorising five interrelated design principles – multimodal balance, visual relationality, optical consistency, functional beauty, and the emphasis on incompleteness and the visualisation of consequences – this study makes three contributions to the study of the visual in interdisciplinary accounting. The first contribution informs the accounting literature on the design of accounting visualisations unpacking how designers visualise the multiplicity and interconnectedness of complex organisational phenomena and theorises how such artefacts can support the creation associations to tackle complexity and emergence. The second contribution is to the literature on numerical pictures in accounting and relates to how aesthetic attributes can augment the power and interactional possibilities of visualisations. The third contribution of this study consists in the fact that it offers a design perspective to the study of the visual in accounting. In fact, this thesis investigates how reporting designers construct visualisations and does so relying on a theoretical framework developed based on notions borrowed from design theory

Encounters with the Virtual : The Experience of Art In Gilles Deleuze's Philosophy

My thesis concerns the notion of existence as an encounter, as developed in the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (1925 1995). What this denotes is a critical stance towards a major current in Western philosophical tradition which Deleuze nominates as representational thinking. Such thinking strives to provide a stable ground for identities by appealing to transcendent structures behind the apparent reality and explaining the manifest diversity of the given by such notions as essence, idea, God, or totality of the world. In contrast to this, Deleuze states that abstractions such as these do not explain anything, but rather that they need to be explained. Yet, Deleuze does not appeal merely to the given. He sees that one must posit a genetic element that accounts for experience, and this element must not be naïvely traced from the empirical. Deleuze nominates his philosophy as transcendental empiricism and he seeks to bring together the approaches of both empiricism and transcendental philosophy. In chapter one I look into the motivations of Deleuze s transcendental empiricism and analyse it as an encounter between Deleuze s readings of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. This encounter regards, first of all, the question of subjectivity and results in a conception of identity as non-essential process. A pre-given concept of identity does not explain the nature of things, but the concept itself must be explained. From this point of view, the process of individualisation must become the central concern. In chapter two I discuss Deleuze s concept of the affect as the basis of identity and his affiliation with the theories of Gilbert Simondon and Jakob von Uexküll. From this basis develops a morphogenetic theory of individuation-as-process. In analysing such a process of individuation, the modal category of the virtual becomes of great value, being an open, indeterminate charge of potentiality. As the virtual concerns becoming or the continuous process of actualisation, then time, rather than space, will be the privileged field of consideration. Chapter three is devoted to the discussion of the temporal aspect of the virtual and difference-without-identity. The essentially temporal process of subjectification results in a conception of the subject as composition: an assemblage of heterogeneous elements. Therefore art and aesthetic experience is valued by Deleuze because they disclose the construct-like nature of subjectivity in the sensations they produce. Through the domain of the aesthetic the subject is immersed in the network of affectivity that is the material diversity of the world. Chapter four addresses a phenomenon displaying this diversified indentity: the simulacrum an identity that is not grounded in an essence. Developed on the basis of the simulacrum, a theory of identity as assemblage emerges in chapter five. As the problematic of simulacra concerns perhaps foremost the artistic presentation, I shall look into the identity of a work of art as assemblage. To take an example of a concrete artistic practice and to remain within the problematic of the simulacrum, I shall finally address the question of reproduction particularly in the case recorded music and its identity regarding the work of art. In conclusion, I propose that by overturning its initial representational schema, phonographic music addresses its own medium and turns it into an inscription of difference, exposing the listener to an encounter with the virtual.Väitöskirjani tutkii ranskalaisfilosofi Gilles Deleuzen (1925 1995) ajatusta olemassaolosta kohtaamisena. Tämä tarkoittaa filosofian historiassa esiintyvän representatiivisen perinteen kritiikkiä. Representatiivinen ajattelu pyrkii perustamaan asioiden identiteetin niiden ilmiasun tuolla puolen oleviin transsendentteihin rakenteisiin ja selittämään ilmenevän maailman monimuotoisuuden olemuksen, idean, jumalan tai totaliteetin kaltaisilla käsitteillä. Tämän ajattelutavan vastaisesti Deleuze väittää, että abstraktiot eivät lopulta selitä mitään, vaan niiden olemassaololle täytyy kyetä antamaan selitys. Filosofiassaan Deleuze ei kuitenkaan tukeudu vain ilmenevään maailmaan. Hänen mukaansa kokemukseen vaikuttaa sen ulkopuolinen tuottava tekijä, eikä tätä tekijää voida naiivisti päätellä pelkän empiirisen kokemuksen perustalta. Deleuze nimeääkin filosofiansa transsendentaaliseksi empirismiksi ja pyrkii näin yhdistämään sekä empirismin että transsendentaalifilosofian lähestymistapoja. Deleuze päätyy käsitykseen identiteetistä, joka on ei-olemuksellisen prosessin ilmentymä. Ennalta annettu identiteetti ei selitä jonkin asian laatua, vaan identiteetin muotoutuminen pitää pyrkiä selittämään. Tästä lähtökohdasta yksilöitymisen prosessista tulee tutkimukseni keskeinen kysymys. Deleuzen mukaan affektiiviset vaikutussuhteet muodostavat asioiden identiteetin. Tämän käsityksen taustalla ovat Gilbert Simondonin ja Jakob von Uexküllin yksilöitymisteoriat. Näin voidaan hahmotella morfogeneettinen näkemys yksilöitymisestä prosessina, jossa virtuaalisen käsitteellä on tärkeä osa: virtuaalinen on avoin ja määrittämätön mahdollisuuden muoto. Koska ajatus virtuaalisuudesta koskee olemista muutoksena tai aktualisoitumisen prosessina, on ajan käsite tällöin merkittävä tekijä. Deleuze ymmärtää subjektin muodostumisen prosessin ensisijaisesti ajalliseksi ja tämä johtaa käsitykseen subjektista epäyhtenäisten aineksien koosteena. Tämän vuoksi taide ja esteettinen kokemus ovat Deleuzelle tärkeitä, sillä niiden sommitelmamainen koostumus paljastaa hänen mukaansa myös subjektin tai yksilöllistymisen yleisen rakenteen. Esteettisen kokemuksen subjekti kohtaa maailman monimuotoisuuden affektiivisten suhteiden verkostona. Tarkastelen kuvajaista tai postmodernia simulakrumin käsitettä, joka ilmentää tätä epäyhtenäisen identiteetin periaatetta. Koska simulakrumin kysymys koskee ennen muuta taiteellisen esittämisen tapaa, tarkastelen taideteoksen sommitelmamaista olemista. Esimerkikseni olen valinnut jäljitelmän ja toiston teemoja edustavan musiikkitallenteen ja tarkastelen sen identiteettiä taideteoksena. Päätelmänä esitän, että kyseenalaistaessaan asemana representaationa niin sanottu fonografinen musiikki paljastaa oman esitysvälineensä epäluonnollisuuden ja identiteetin konstruktioluonteen ylipäätään. Näin taide on maailman prosessiluonteen virtuaalisuuden kohtaamista

Notes in Pure Mathematics & Mathematical Structures in Physics

These Notes deal with various areas of mathematics, and seek reciprocal combinations, explore mutual relations, ranging from abstract objects to problems in physics.Comment: Small improvements and addition