Periodicity and Chaos Amidst Twisting and Folding in Two-Dimensional Maps

We study the dynamics of three planar, noninvertible maps which rotate and fold the plane. Two maps are inspired by real-world applications whereas the third map is constructed to serve as a toy model for the other two maps. The dynamics of the three maps are remarkably similar. A stable fixed point bifurcates through a Hopf-Neimark-Sacker which leads to a countably infinite set of resonance tongues in the parameter plane of the map. Within a resonance tongue a periodic point can bifurcate through a period-doubling cascade. At the end of the cascade we detect Henon-like attractors which are conjectured to be the closure of the unstable manifold of a saddle periodic point. These attractors have a folded structure which can be explained by means of the concept of critical lines. We also detect snap-back repellers which can either coexist with Henon-like attractors or which can be formed when the saddle-point of a Henon-like attractor becomes a source

Dynamics amidst folding and twisting in 2-dimensional maps

Dynamica van het vouwen en draaien bij 2-dimensionale afbeeldingen Een prooi-roofdier model uit de biodynamica was de inspiratie tot een wiskundig model waarbij een vlak wordt dubbel gevouwen en daarna gedraaid. (fold and twist) Deze vouw en draai worden steeds herhaald. Dan blijkt dat een aantal belangrijke wiskundige eigenschappen, waaronder het chaotisch gedrag, in beide modellen op vergelijkbare manier terug te vinden zijn. De vouw en draai is een fundamentele eigenschap van het prooi-roofdier model. Echter niet alleen in het prooi-roofdier model is de vouw en draai fundamenteel maar ook een ander model, het discrete Lorenz-63 model afkomstig uit de weerkunde, blijkt beter te worden begrepen als het vergeleken wordt met de vouw en draai afbeelding. Daarmee is duidelijk geworden dat de vouw en draai afbeelding geschikt is als een fundamenteel model voor de bestudering van 2-dimensionale afbeeldingen met de eigenschap dat verschillende toestanden op een bepaald moment leiden tot een dezelfde toestand op het volgende moment

Metalogues on the thickened ground: landscape production and urban morphologies

Could we consider urban morphologies as figures that emerge as ‘horizontal phenomena’? Could we consider urban morphologies as embedded within the complex systems of the city rather than assume they demarcate the city through an overlay of lines? Could the urban form then be considered as an affect which emerges from a dynamic thickened ground, creating a new landscape? If landscapes are understood in terms of their connectability to the order of things in the universe (as, for example, in physics), where landscape’s connectability is a reciprocation of forces between itself and its context at all scales, then each connection is a shared force, a received and distributed force. If the order of the landscape is inherent in its process of transformations, to what extent does this order produce the city? This research aims to contribute to the discourse on Landscape Urbanism which is often positioned and grounded within the philosophical and scientific fields. However, it is argued that the ability to open up new possibilities, new ways of thinking and acting, lies in the act of design. This research, therefore, aimed to reveal these possibilities through a structured design process which linked the disciplinary fields of Landscape Architecture and Architecture

Zētēsis, Vol 2, no. 1: Twice Upon a Time: Magic, Alchemy and the Transubstantiation of the Senses

Twice Upon A Time: Magic, Alchemy and the Transubstantiation of the Senses In this, the third volume of Zetesis, a neatly packaged Molotov was launched into the ‘out-there’ of art, of science and of life in the disguised form of an international call for papers. We were curious if there might be a different way to re-think/re-make the links between and amongst speculation, materiality, performativity, the senses and sensualities, with bodies both real and imagined, without having to resort to the somewhat staid methodologies of “dialectical materialism” or “objected oriented ontologies” or the seemingly overrated metrics of “scientistic deduction.” Recognising, at the same time, that we were riding the wave of a massive, revolutionary paradigm shift brought on by advances in complexity, radical materiality and the quanta, quarks and feedback loops, robotics, artificial intelligences, transsexualities and ecological verisimilitude our task could not have been more urgent. The Call went out. But rather than ask for a direct or literal response to this ‘re-think/re-make’, the collective chose instead to journey onto a slightly more dangerous, curious path, one not usually linked with formal research, but instead cast often as frivolous or whimsical, illusionary, religious or just plain wrong. We chose to partner with the wild side and take a stronger look-see at the forerunners to all contemporary art, philosophy and science; to wit: magic, alchemy and the transubstantiation of the senses. Under the illusive cloak of magic, the curiosity of alchemists introduced a means for experimentation into the innate properties of materials. The transformation of raw matter into precious metals, the combination of hot sulphur and wet, cold mercury to birth the philosopher’s stone; to bring the inanimate to life, to vanish miraculously and conjure the body, as well as providing a foundation for the laws of substance based on sensory interaction and its potentiality. The scientific practices of today echo this inherent desire for material vitally ‘alive’ transformations, yet Western tradition remains cautious of unreasoned sensorial data, often treating it with trepidation. While this paradigm has proven an efficient methodology, it has installed a discriminatory partition between that which can be rationalised or mathematized and that which is supposedly ‘only’ sensory. These energised and sensate transformations mark the beginning of a new challenge against tradition, returning to curiosity, experimentation and the intensity of the senses away from conventional modes of thought. The Centre for Fine Art Research (CFAR) and the Research Centre for Creative Making (S.T.U.F.F.) based at the Faculty of Arts, Design and Media (ADM) joined forces at Birmingham School of Art – BCU to welcome papers/ performances/exhibition installations that responded to magic/alchemic practices in all their forms, including but not limited to the origins of alchemy and its contemporary relevance in science, magic performance, illusion, automata, the sensory in artificial intelligence and radical thinking in relation to concepts of time. We invited artists, scientists and philosophers to explore again the threshold between these paradigms, dwelling on curiosity and the tradition of scientific questioning. This bold and viscerally complex conference, laid the groundwork for this volume 3 of Zetesis: Twice Upon a Time: Magic, Alchemy and the Transubstantiation of the senses. The exhibitions, artwork, papers and prose contained in this volume include some of the best international practice-led and theoretically emboldened research on this topic today. By foregrounding the alchemist’s vision, we now present here in Zetesis our initial findings: a profane renegotiation of the very boundaries that seemed heretofore always insistent upon separating into binaric unities the so-called texture-realities of representation vs thought, sensation vs logic, image vs text. In challenging those easy divisions, we celebrate the (re-)turn to a ‘twice upon a time’ when transubstantiation, metamorphosis and morphogenesis gives succour to this energy we so nonchalantly call art

The Ecology of Paradox: Disturbance and Restoration in Land and Soul

This heuristic study explores environmental disturbance and ecological restoration in several North American settings in order to uncover epistemological, philosophical, aesthetic and ethical considerations revolving around those place-based processes. With fire as one of the central metaphors of this work, the initial place-based chapter examines Northern New Mexico\u27s Pajarito Plateau to explore the region\u27s fire ecology. The study then moves to the Pacific Northwest to draw restoration practice that attempt to restore wild salmon to urban Seattle habitat. The third place-based chapter focuses on the Midwest grass and farmlands in order to investigate the seeming contradictions between commodity and diversity in prairie landscapes. In the final chapter, the metaphorical implications of disturbance and restoration are explored in terms of individuals, communities and as a society. In explicating the philosophical and phenomenological foundations of disturbance and restoration, personal experiences are used in the study as examples to develop applied practice of paradox. It also examines and illuminates correspondences between ecological and eco-psychological cycles of disturbance and restoration within the context of paradox, which for the purpose of this work is defined as any place or context where seemingly contradictory elements coexist without canceling each other out. Drawing from place and literary sources, the study seeks to extrapolate a metaphorical correspondence in exterior and interior realms of paradox. The conclusion is that attention to processes of disturbance and restoration in nature can yield wisdom that informs our relationships with our ecological surroundings, our communities, and our individual selves. Furthermore, specific practices can emerge to help humans deal more healthfully and strategically with the complex, divisive issues of our places and times

The Ecology of Paradox: Disturbance and Restoration in Land and Soul

This heuristic study explores environmental disturbance and ecological restoration in several North American settings in order to uncover epistemological, philosophical, aesthetic and ethical considerations revolving around those place-based processes. With fire as one of the central metaphors of this work, the initial place-based chapter examines Northern New Mexico\u27s Pajarito Plateau to explore the region\u27s fire ecology. The study then moves to the Pacific Northwest to draw restoration practice that attempt to restore wild salmon to urban Seattle habitat. The third place-based chapter focuses on the Midwest grass and farmlands in order to investigate the seeming contradictions between commodity and diversity in prairie landscapes. In the final chapter, the metaphorical implications of disturbance and restoration are explored in terms of individuals, communities and as a society. In explicating the philosophical and phenomenological foundations of disturbance and restoration, personal experiences are used in the study as examples to develop applied practice of paradox. It also examines and illuminates correspondences between ecological and eco-psychological cycles of disturbance and restoration within the context of paradox, which for the purpose of this work is defined as any place or context where seemingly contradictory elements coexist without canceling each other out. Drawing from place and literary sources, the study seeks to extrapolate a metaphorical correspondence in exterior and interior realms of paradox. The conclusion is that attention to processes of disturbance and restoration in nature can yield wisdom that informs our relationships with our ecological surroundings, our communities, and our individual selves. Furthermore, specific practices can emerge to help humans deal more healthfully and strategically with the complex, divisive issues of our places and times

Imagining and imaging the city – Ivan Vladislavić and the postcolonial metropolis

Philosophiae Doctor - PhDThis thesis undertakes an analysis of how six published works by the South African writer Ivan Vladislavić form the perspective of writing the city – Johannesburg – into being. Beginning from the basis that Vladislavić’s writing constitutes what I have coined dialogic postcolonialism, the thesis engages with both broader contemporary urban and postcolonial theory in order to show the liminal imaginative space that the author occupies in his narrations of Johannesburg. Underlining the notion of postcolonialism being a “work in progress” my thesis problematises the issue of representation of the postcolonial city through different aspects like space, urbanity, identity and the self, and thus locates each of the texts under consideration at a particular locus in Vladislavić’s representational continuum of the continually transforming city of Johannesburg. Until the recent appearance of Mariginal Spaces – Reading Vladislavić (2011) the extant critical literature and research on the writing of Ivan Vladislavić has, as far as I can tell, not engaged with his work as a body of creative consideration and close analysis of the city of Johannesburg. Even this latest text largely consists of previously published reviews and articles by disparate critics and academics. The trend has therefore largely been to analyse the texts separately, without treating them as the building blocks to an ongoing and perhaps unending project of imaginatively bringing the city into being. Such readings have thus been unable to decipher and characterise the threads which have emerged over the period of the writer’s literary engagement with and representation of Johannesburg. I suggest that, as individual texts and as a collection or body of work, Ivan Vladislavić’s Missing Persons (1989), The Folly (1993), Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories (1996), The Restless Supermarket (2006 – first published in 2001), The Exploded View (2004) and Portrait with Keys: Joburg & what-what (2006), are engaged in framing representations of the postcolonial city, representations which can in my view best be analysed through the prism of deconstructive engagement. To this end, the thesis examines contemporary South African urbanity or the post-apartheid metropolitan space (as epitomised by the fictive Johannesburg) and how it is represented in literature as changing, and in the process of becoming. As a consequence, the main conclusion I arrive at is on how the irresolvable nature of the city is reflected in the totality of Ivan Vladislavić’s writing. In that way, it was possible to treat every text in its own right (rather than forcing it to conform to an overarching thesis). This central insight allowed for the effective application of urban theory to the close readings of the texts

Intimate Cartographies: Irish and Diasporic Explorations of Gendered Space

Juxtaposing different chronological periods and genres from the ninth century to the present, Intimate Cartographies contends that contemporary Irish and diasporic artists employ an “ecologistical,” anthropocenic aesthetics in an effort to re-territorialize geopolitical, sociocultural, and “psychic space.” Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Nora Roberts, Nuala O’Faolain, and Tana French, among others, explore the gendered body politic of the Irish State and of individuals in various milieux. My dissertation contextualizes their work with regard to events in Irish and diasporic history and considers these authors in relation to other more established counterparts from W.B. Yeats, P.H. Pearse, and James Joyce to John Ford and Francis Bacon. Poised at the intersection of postcolonial cultural geography, transnational feminisms, and various theologies in engagement with various media from international archives, Intimate Cartographies demonstrates the ways in which contemporary authors and filmmakers cross borders literally (in terms of location), ideologically (in terms of syncretive politics and faiths), figuratively (in terms of conventions and canonicity), and linguistically to develop an epistemological “Fifth Space” of cultural actualization beyond borders. Through radical awareness of embeddedness in their respective environments, these writers/filmmaker-cartographers reshape Ireland both as real landscape and fantasy island, traversed in order to negotiate place in terms of terrain and subjectivity both within and outside of history in the realm of desire. I chart mutual fascinations and engagements with the biopolitics of transformative (re)production in spatial, communal, and intimate mis-en-scènes in addition to the dearth of comparative work concerning Irish-language, Anglo-Irish, and diasporic cultural production across forms necessitates such a uniquely geofeminist, bilingual study of these neglected artists. Ireland in these terms is charted through places on the map which address and redress past imaginings of both sovereignty and gender as they continue to be palimpsestically refigured in the present.Doctor of Philosoph