2008 IMSAloquium, Student Investigation Showcase

Marking its twentieth year, IMSA’s Student Inquiry and Research Program (SIR) is a powerful expression of the Academy’s mission, “to ignite and nurture creative ethical minds that advance the human condition.”https://digitalcommons.imsa.edu/archives_sir/1000/thumbnail.jp

Off-Base: Rethinking New Media Technologies and Military Everydayness

Off-Base: Rethinking New Media Technologies and Military Everdayness, provides an alternative account of contemporary military transformations, particularly in their relation to new media technologies and formations. While many academic discussions of contemporary militarization focus on its more general impacts, and the new types of weapons and warfare it deploys and makes possible, this work provides an account of some of the seemingly banal deployments of new military technologies and techniques, particularly the ways in which they construct different modes of military embodiment and military space--for example, the way new media technologies and mobile health platforms reconfigure understandings of military health or wellness, or the ways in which affectively charged robots or animals are used to change understandings of soldiering or military families. It draws on a diverse archive of policy documents, media texts, and new technologies to provide an account of how notions like resilience, wellness, and post-traumatic growth are increasingly central to military culture, and are envisioned as being desirable and achievable through a combination of new forms of governmentality and new media technologies (like PTSD mobile applications, immersive virtual environments, etc.) This dissertation develops an account of the technologies of military everydayness, to be placed in conversation with some of the more developed discourses and accounts of the militarization of everyday life.Doctor of Philosoph

Art as we don't know it

2018 marked the 10th anniversary of the Bioart Society and created the impetus for the publication of Art as We Don’t Know It. For this publication, the Bioart Society joined forces with the School of Arts, Design and Architecture of the Aalto University. The close history and ongoing collaborative relationship between the Bioart Society and Biofilia – Base for Biological Arts in the Aalto University lead to this mutual effort to celebrate together a diverse and nurturing environment to foster artistic practices on the intersection of art, science and society. Rather than stage a retrospective, we decided to invite writings that look forward and invite speculations about the potential directions of bioarts. The contributions range from peer-reviewed articles to personal accounts and inter-views, interspersed with artistic contributions and Bioart Society projects. The selection offers a purview of the rich variety, both in content and form, of the work currently being made within the field of bioart. The works and articles clearly trouble the porous and provisional definitions of what might be understood as bioart, and indeed definitions of bioart have been usefully and generativity critiqued since the inception of the term. Whilst far from being definitive, we consider the contributions of the book to be tantalising and valuable indicators of trends, visions and impulses. We also invite into the reading of this publication a consideration of potential obsolescences knowing that some of today’s writing will become archaic over time as technologies driven by contemporary excitement and hype are discarded. In so doing we also acknowledge and ponder upon our situatedness and the partialness of our purview in how we begin and find points of departure from which to anticipate the unanticipated. Whilst declining the view of retrospection this book does present art and research that has grown and flourished within the wider network of both the Bioart Society and Biofilia during the previous decade. The book is structured into four thematic sections Life As We Don’t Know It, Convergences, Learnings/Unlearnings, Redraw and Refigure and rounded off with a glossary

Hearing in Time: Bergsonian Concepts of Time in Maurice Ravel’s L’Heure espagnole

This dissertation examines Maurice Ravel’s first opera, L’Heure espagnole (1907–1911), as a turning point in the composer’s aesthetic approach, marking a moment at which he reacted strongly against Debussy’s influence and seems to have increasingly oriented his compositional perspective toward comedy, mechanism, and manipulations of musical time. In recent years, Ravel scholars have identified promising connections between Ravel’s aesthetics and Bergsonism, but the musical underpinnings of Bergson’s philosophy of time itself have remained vastly undertheorized. My project sets out to rectify this by locating both Ravel’s aesthetics and Bergson’s philosophy of time within the music-historical context of debussysme, and identifying a Bergsonian strain of music criticism in the writings of Louis Laloy and Vladimir Jankélévitch, both of whom studied under Bergson. Laloy and Jankélévitch’s writings, in turn, reveal important information about the practical application of Bergsonism to music and the intertwining of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande with Bergsonian philosophical ideals. The dissertation culminates in an analysis of L’Heure espagnole as a site of exchange between music and Bergson’s philosophy of time, analyzing it as a testing ground for the Bergsonian concept of duration, a theory of time that reflects our lived experience as it unfolds in the present. Ultimately, I theorize that Ravel’s unique use of rhythm and meter in L’Heure espagnole encourages a practice of real-time analysis through the act of hearing, which in turn allows the listener to provisionally enact durational time through a constant re-evaluation of the metric and rhythmic frame based on material that was just heard. My dissertation employs a twofold methodological approach to investigate the shift in Ravel’s aesthetic direction around the time he was composing L’Heure espagnole: an archival approach (Chapters 1–3) and a hermeneutic approach (Chapter 4). The first half of my study (Chapters 1 and 2) surveys Ravel’s personal correspondence with the Godebski family and the press reception of his works between roughly 1905 and 1910 as evidence for the creation of a new aesthetic posture that would distance him from Debussy and catalyze his novel use of time and meter as a distinctive aspect of his style. Chapter 3 presents archival research on Bergson and his interlocutors, linking his philosophy of time to contemporaneous research on music, sensation, and consciousness by Gustav Fechner, Théodule Ribot, and Paul and Pierre Janet. Here, I develop the grounds for a Bergsonian approach to Ravel’s music by exploring the practical implementation of Bergson’s theories of duration and intuition in music through Bergson’s disciples, Laloy and Jankélévitch. My study concludes with a hermeneutic analysis of L’Heure espagnole that uses Bergson’s theory of duration as an interpretive lens to make sense of the complex interaction between comedy, mechanism, and time in the opera

Art in the Global Present

Art in the Global Present presents a fascinating collection of essays that together reveal how art is currently navigating a globalised world. It addresses social issues such as the impact of migration, the ‘war on terror’ and the global financial crisis, and questions the transformations produced by new forms of flexible labour and the digital revolution. Through examining the resistance to the politics of globalisation in contemporary art, presenting the construction of an alternative geography of the imagination and reflecting on art’s capacity to express the widest possible sense of being, this book explores the worlds that artists make when they make art. A multifaceted perspective on the complexity of these issues is reached through the words of a diverse range of art practitioners and commentators, including acclaimed artists Lucy Orta, Callum Morton, Danae Stratou and the collective Postcommodity, international curators Hou Hanru, Cuauhtémoc Medina, Ranjit Hoskote and Linda Marie Walker and art critics, academics, writers and theorists Jean Burgess, Paul Carter, Barbara Creed, Geert Lovink, Scott McQuire, Nikos Papastergiadis, Gerald Raunig and Jan Verwoert

Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene

This open access edited volume invites transdisciplinary scholars to re-vision science education in the era of the Anthropocene. The collection assembles the works of educators from many walks of life and areas of practice together to help reorient science education toward the problems and peculiarities associated with the geologic times many call the Anthropocene. It has become evident that science education—the way it is currently institutionalized in various forms of school science, government policy, classroom practice, educational research, and public/private research laboratories—is ill-equipped and ill-conceived to deal with the expansive and urgent contexts of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to myopic knowledge systems, rigid state education directives, and academic-professional communities intent on reproducing the same practices, knowledges, and relationships that have endangered our shared world and shared presents/presence is misdirected. This volume brings together diverse scholars to reimagine the field in times of precarity

Diversity and Otherness

This book critically examines multiple ways in which cultural diversity is, and has been represented and handled. It questions the construction of differences in doing culture while emphasizing the fluidity of cultural entanglements. It is an invitation to re-think norms, practices and negotiations of diversity and otherness, to distinguish emancipatory from standardizing approaches and to “transculturalize” the study and the politics of culture

Reimagining Science Education in the Anthropocene

This open access edited volume invites transdisciplinary scholars to re-vision science education in the era of the Anthropocene. The collection assembles the works of educators from many walks of life and areas of practice together to help reorient science education toward the problems and peculiarities associated with the geologic times many call the Anthropocene. It has become evident that science education—the way it is currently institutionalized in various forms of school science, government policy, classroom practice, educational research, and public/private research laboratories—is ill-equipped and ill-conceived to deal with the expansive and urgent contexts of the Anthropocene. Paying homage to myopic knowledge systems, rigid state education directives, and academic-professional communities intent on reproducing the same practices, knowledges, and relationships that have endangered our shared world and shared presents/presence is misdirected. This volume brings together diverse scholars to reimagine the field in times of precarity

Diversity and Otherness

This book critically examines multiple ways in which cultural diversity is, and has been represented and handled. It questions the construction of differences in doing culture while emphasizing the fluidity of cultural entanglements. It is an invitation to re-think norms, practices and negotiations of diversity and otherness, to distinguish emancipatory from standardizing approaches and to “transculturalize” the study and the politics of culture