The Weak Circular Repetition Threshold Over Large Alphabets

The repetition threshold for words on $n$ letters, denoted \mbox{RT}(n), is the infimum of the set of all $r$ such that there are arbitrarily long $r$-free words over $n$ letters. A repetition threshold for circular words on $n$ letters can be defined in three natural ways, which gives rise to the weak, intermediate, and strong circular repetition thresholds for $n$ letters, denoted \mbox{CRT}_{\mbox{W}}(n), \mbox{CRT}_{\mbox{I}}(n), and \mbox{CRT}_{\mbox{S}}(n), respectively. Currie and the present authors conjectured that \mbox{CRT}_{\mbox{I}}(n)=\mbox{CRT}_{\mbox{W}}(n)=\mbox{RT}(n) for all $n\geq 4$. We prove that \mbox{CRT}_{\mbox{W}}(n)=\mbox{RT}(n) for all $n\geq 45$, which confirms a weak version of this conjecture for all but finitely many values of $n$.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1911.0577

Edges of Bodies: Camouflage, Correspondence and the Choreography of Alterity

This practice-based research project reconfigures a novel conception of the phenomenon of camouflage to both exercise and theorize new relational models of subjectivity through choreographic practice and writing. Camouflage is here understood as a spatio-temporal act—a process through which bodies are negotiated in correspondence with their surrounding environments, processes that are intrinsic to choreography as well. Camouflage, at heart, rehearses the problem of distinction: between self and environment, subject and object, and being and appearing. It operates at the threshold of a corporeal localization, osculating at the contours of where bodies meet their surroundings, and ultimately surfaces as an interweaving of an interior-exterior, real-virtual, and visible-invisible intersection. Building on this alteric reading of camouflage, this project probes the various ways how the chameleonic term may not only queer the visual sphere by sparking another kind of “here-ness” that is inherently changeable, but also highlight the porosity of boundaries and thus become a technology to embody the material thresholds of multiple possibilities of realities. Both camouflage and choreography are morphological processes that rehearse new formations of figure-ground relationships. Choreography organizes bodies in times and spaces around thresholds of visibilities and offers methods for bringing bodies together in novel ways: both human and nonhuman, as well as bodies of knowledge. These are the very negotiations that are pertinent to camouflage too, and as such the overall objective of this thesis is for them to interlace. Accordingly, this project expands camouflage as somatic knowledge, not in terms of concealment and deception, but rather as a mimetic, interspecific and sensuous potentiality through which a different being-of-the-world, and ultimately new worlds, can be embodied and opened up. It reaches towards multi-natural becomings and phenomenologies of permeability, softening the edges of the subject as a distinct entity acting against the world, and, by shedding light on a new way of being, demonstrates that embodiment is always already an extension of oneself, an accession to an exterior world. Furthermore, this thesis introduces the term correspondence as a relational device animating intra-subjective exchanges between bodies, entities and forces: to corespond is to participate in and be in movement with a much wider animate sociality. The practice component of the thesis develops a series of choreographic works under the title of Correspondance. The wordplay alludes to the notion of correspondence as a dynamic, living and ongoing relationship between things, i.e., the ability to corespond to a world that is always moving. The Correspondance series develops camouflage as a performance strategy to generate a series of choreographic inquiries that engage camouflage choreographically. Alongside the practice, the written component of the thesis constellates the terms camouflage, correspondence and choreography in order to articulate highly multidisciplinary fields of inquiry by weaving together a trans-disciplinary web of fields that bring together minoritarian and marginalized bodies of knowledge including Amazonian indigenous cosmologies, queer and feminist theory, new materialisms and post-humanism, ecology, philosophy, zoology, anthropology, psychoanalysis, critical theory and dance and performance studies. Together, both practice and writing crisscross and interfere with one another to generate new artistic, somatic and discursive forms of knowledge. Both practice and writing demonstrate that it is in movement, that choreography establishes a relational correspondence with the environment, a mobile architecture that allows for an embodied ecology, or inversely, an ecological embodiment, namely to camouflage

Thermal Biology of Insect Immunity and Host-Microbe Interactions

The influence of temperature on interactions with pathogenic or symbiotic microbes is a driving force behind the survival of insects under climate change. However, we know little of how insects physiologically respond to these pressures. In temperate climates, winter dominates the thermal landscape; thus, I am particularly interested in how cold interacts with insect responses to microbes. Here I explore the thermal biology of the insect immune system and the impacts of cold on host-microbe interactions. First, I demonstrate that acute exposure to cold activates selective components of immunity in Drosophila melanogaster, as a compensatory response to trade-offs or injury. Next, I show that cold acclimation decreases immune function at low temperatures in Gryllus veletis at the same time that cold tolerance increases. I conclude that this is a trade-off between immunity and the response to cold. Third, I demonstrate that immune activity varies seasonally in insects, but that each species responds differently. These shifts were likely driven by species-specific responses to multiple overwintering pressures. Fourth, I demonstrate that thermal plasticity in both Gryllus veletis and the fungal pathogen Metarhizium brunneum contribute to the outcome of infection. Further, fluctuating temperatures produce different outcomes of infection than constant temperatures, but we can predict these outcomes based on additive thermal performance under constant conditions. Lastly, I observe that the composition of the hindgut microbiome in Gryllus veletis, containing both beneficial and pathogenic microbes, shifts irreversibly across seasons. Further, microbial shifts coincide with changes in both cold tolerance and immune activity, which indicate that there is a functional relationship between the microbiome and host survival of low temperatures. Overall, changes in temperature are inextricably linked to changes in insect responses to both pathogenic and symbiotic microbes, which has likely selected for an adaptive physiological connection between insect immunity and the response to cold. I demonstrate that the connection between physiological responses to abiotic and biotic pressures modify our interpretation of phenotype. Therefore, we cannot rely on a univariate and species-isolated understanding of how insects respond to temperature if we are to predict the impact of climate change on their fitness

Radicle Assemblages

Radicle Assemblages explores aesthetic praxis through an experiential research-creation doctorate in the Interdisciplinary Humanities Fine Arts program. This studio-based project interwove diverse phenomena through speculative narratives inclusive of matter, thinking with techné, and in contemplation with living entities. The artworks that were developed in this study explored aesthetic modes of relational play among natureculture assemblages. The artworks acted as a form of dialogue to contemplate what would become defined as relations of tender curation. Individual gestures were composed for learning care and expanded perception through artistic experiments with domesticated natures such as houseplants, bacteria, algae, gastropods, and yeast (among others). The concept of tender curation emerged where what became a central component of an artwork required daily attendance. These experiences opened to a kind of tending that inspired affection and concern for the living creatures that were assembled within artworks. Another concept that formed was the radicle assemblage as a motif for thinking with differences among beings that are unique yet unfolding together in shared or common space. Comprehending subtle affects through interactions with vegetal life led to concern regarding personal and ethical implications of artworks that were composed with living phenomena. The living beings changed one another in their interactions. As a result, the artworks shifted over the duration of the study increasingly towards co-creative relations with domesticated, urbanized, or shared-territory beings as a way that incrementally expanded the artist-researcher’s ability to respond. Through practice and in the dissemination of multiple artworks, this research-creation doctorate eventually gravitated towards a post-anthropocentric art of response-responsibility. In this sense, the research-creation methodology evolved as a form of contemporary art practice that performed an expansion of possible social relations through generative propositions as incremental research

LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volume

LIPIcs, Volume 261, ICALP 2023, Complete Volum

"In the blank of mere possibility": liminal transformations in the poetry of Christina Rossetti

This thesis offers a new reading of Christina Rossetti’s poetic texts which situates them within the context of liminality. I define liminality here as a site of ambiguity, change and unfulfilment between two states, whilst emphasising its potential for transformation and transgression. I examine multiple narratives – personal and communal, linear and cyclical, spatial and temporal – which emerge from Rossetti’s complex texts, and highlight two major approaches used: layering and silencing. The range of works I analyse includes both famous and lesser known poems, secular and spiritual writing, from “Winter: My Secret” (1857) and “Goblin Market” (1859) to “The Iniquity of the Fathers Upon the Children” (1865) and ““Resurgam” (1883). With this wide range, I demonstrate that similar approaches are used throughout Rossetti’s writing from her earliest poems to her later work. I begin the thesis with a focus on the fragmentation of the poetic self into observer and observed and examine the power acquired by the speakers/protagonists through the distance and seclusion of the liminal space. This enables the liminal space to shape a new identity for the speakers/protagonists. In Rossetti’s poetry, the liminal personae become defined by the space they inhabit, or are trapped in, on visual, physical, psychological and sound levels. This positioning helps them to acquire (or re-gain) personal history, memory and a voice. I proceed to explore the conflict between the seen and the unseen, revelation and illusion, in Rossetti’s work, paralleling this with photographic experiments by Lady Hawarden. This enables me to trace the use of the threshold in both poetic and visual languages. Rossetti’s speakers are unable to cross this threshold yet they still struggle to gain control over the outside world. From visual explorations I move on to consideration of sound and suggest that rhythm and rhyme function in the same way as Rossetti’s use of tropes of sight/deprivation of sight. Rossetti introduces rhythmical lapses and repetitive constructions as a means of controlling and shaping reality. Sound repetition subverts our expectations, while sound disruptions create negative spaces which serve as markers of the apocalyptic and the threshold. This idea of negative space is closely linked to the ideas of absence and unfulfilment and is pivotal in understanding Rossetti’s poetry. I argue that Rossetti’s theology is based on negation and that this is extended to her secular poems as well. Christina Rossetti’s poems are characterised by oppositions of absence and exuberant presence on all textual levels. In the final part of my thesis, I examine the transformation of the speaker’s/narrator’s self. I read the ideas of unfulfilment against the self-recognition of the speakers and show their inner splits and subsequent alienation. In this way, unnaming and silencing work as ways of defining the boundaries of the self through negation

Ways of making: producing artworks in the studio in response to experiential walking

This thesis includes a body of paintings, drawings and assembled objects that have been made in response to the Crossing England walks (2014 - 2018). This body of work is entitled The English Diagrams (2018). The research draws upon the varied perspectives of Fine Art, Performance Studies and Cultural Geographies, to examine the relationship between the activities of walking as art, and making in the studio. Drawing from experiential phenomenology, I set out a model for rigorous, reflexive, creative practice and map the looping affiliations between the embodied world of the walked landscape, the subjective terrain of the practitioner, and the fabrication of paintings, drawings and assemblage within the studio. This interdisciplinary study takes a neo-vitalist approach, tracking a series of walks on a single route across England. Artist and terrain are explored as integrated, the boundaries between them fluid or porous, Autobiographical story, personal mythology, and sediments of collective memory interred within the earth are drawn out by the sensory, somatic rhythms of walking, and through selection of specific materials found along the way. Through studying bodily, psychical and material fluxes and flows within the studio, the thesis considers optimal conditions for flow in practice, and scrutinizes interrelations between the space of the studio and the body/mind of the practitioner, during the production of drawings, paintings and assemblage. It explores how the fields, gaps, lines and folds of the landscape can be translated into a bricolage of visual and painterly languages that is as heterogeneous as the terrain it refers to. The research shows how a sustained and looping threefold process of walking, reflective writing and making can lead not just to new ways of fabricating, but of surveying and plotting human experience. This renewed, unified sensibility, is subsequently conveyed back outside to the landscape during new walks, offering altered perceptions and new readings of the landscape. This is a study with potential to be of interest for creative practitioners from a variety of disciplines, and to theorists and scholars of artistic process