A Critical Phenomenological Inquiry into Disabled Embodiment and Identity

This thesis uses critical phenomenology to investigate disabled embodiment and identity. I argue that (in)accessible subjective accounts of disability experience reveal disability to be a unique form of ever-changing embodiment: disability is the lived experience of a critical phenomenology. I turn to eclectic art, film, and poetry case studies involving a medical, surgical gaze to explore how ableist, sexist, and racist systems structure daily experience, forcing disabled people who “misfit” to analyze and confront systems of oppression, exclusion, and stigmatization. Disability experience challenges and resists ableist binaries of ability/disability, well/unwell, subject/object, mind/body, and inside/outside. The interdependence of these fluid, intertwining threads of existence defy even the categorization of a continuum, unless, as I argue, the continuum is non-linear and allows simultaneity. Understanding the interconnection between ability and disability is a never-ending journey that will always remain incomplete

"Consciousness". Selected Bibliography 1970 - 2001

This is a bibliography of books and articles on consciousness in philosophy, cognitive science, and neuroscience over the last 30 years. There are three main sections, devoted to monographs, edited collections of papers, and articles. The first two of these sections are each divided into three subsections containing books in each of the main areas of research. The third section is divided into 12 subsections, with 10 subject headings for philosophical articles along with two additional subsections for articles in cognitive science and neuroscience. Of course the division is somewhat arbitrary, but I hope that it makes the bibliography easier to use. This bibliography has first been compiled by Thomas Metzinger and David Chalmers to appear in print in two philosophical anthologies on conscious experience (Metzinger 1995a, b). From 1995 onwards it has been continuously updated by Thomas Metzinger, and now is freely available as a PDF-, RTF-, or HTML-file. This bibliography mainly attempts to cover the Anglo-Saxon and German debates, in a non-annotated, fully formatted way that makes it easy to "cut and paste" from the original file. To a certain degree this bibliography also contains items in other languages than English and German - all submissions in other languages are welcome. Last update of current version: July 13th, 2001

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 354)

This bibliography lists 225 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during September, 1991. Subject coverage includes aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

Computed fingertip touch for the instrumental control of musical sound with an excursion on the computed retinal afterimage

In this thesis, we present an articulated, empirical view on what human music making is, and on how this fundamentally relates to computation. The experimental evidence which we obtained seems to indicate that this view can be used as a tool, to systematically generate models, hypotheses and new technologies that enable an ever more complete answer to the fundamental question as to what forms of instrumental control of musical sound are possible to implement. This also entails the development of two novel transducer technologies for computed fingertip touch: The cyclotactor (CT) system, which provides fingerpad-orthogonal force output while tracking surface-orthogonal fingertip movement; and the kinetic surface friction transducer (KSFT) system, which provides fingerpad-parallel force output while tracking surface-parallel fingertip movement. In addition to the main research, the thesis also contains two research excursions, which are due to the nature of the Ph.D. position. The first excursion shows how repeated and varying pressing movements on the already held-down key of a computer keyboard can be used both to simplify existing user interactions and to implement new ones, that allow the rapid yet detailed navigation of multiple possible interaction outcomes. The second excursion shows that automated computational techniques can display shape specifically in the retinal afterimage, a well-known effect in the human visual system.Computer Systems, Imagery and Medi

Repositioning Neuroaesthetics Through Contemporary Art

Neuroaesthetics has tended to privilege neuroscientific understandings of art, eliding centuries of art historical research on perception and culture. Instead, this dissertation extends neuroaesthetic research to examine the specific social, sensorial and perceptual processes occurring as artworks are encountered in exhibition contexts. How does neuroaesthetic perception operate in contemporary artworks? What modes of cognitive address are involved? How can neuroaesthetic engagement facilitate embodied knowledges? This dissertation first inquires into the neuroaesthetic literature in order to establish its neuroscientific foundations, and then advances a perceptual standpoint stemming from art and art history. Drawing from feminist theories of embodiment, I reposition neuroaesthetics to incorporate art historical inquiries into body and mind through direct engagement with art. I argue that such a revised neuroaesthic perception must take into account post-humanist troublings of nature/culture dichotomies. I also suggest that the paradigm for embodied perception that has emerged from both cognitive neuroscience and affect theory can expand neuroaesthetic understanding. My investigation has led me to first-hand experience as a research subject of neuroscience experiments, which show that current fMRI contexts in fact delimit the perception of art and inhibit possible neuroaesthetic significance. Instead, I undertake neuroaesthetic research in exhibition contexts where self-reflexive awareness facilitates insights into perception and cognition that are inaccessible within the epistemological conditions of neuroscience labs. The first case study examines how an installation by the FASTWÜRMS collective reveals cognitive processes of abduction by inviting navigation through an infinitely complex web of objects and images. Turning from association to visual cognition, I consider how Olafur Eliasson’s immersive light installations manipulate colour perception thereby facilitating critical awareness of techno-mediated environments. Third, my analysis of a conceptual work by Kristin Lucas explores how the performance of digital and legal technology invites embodied transformations. Finally, I examine how the affective tensions produced in a video by Omer Fast activate an awareness of intersubjective communication that corresponds with recent neuroscientific developments in mirror-neuron theory. By taking contemporary artworks as its focus, the dissertation extends neuroaesthetic inquiry to demonstrate contextual understandings of how the cognitive processes of art constitute physiological engagements between body, brain and world

Reclaiming the image. Béla Tarr's world of 'inhuman' becoming: an artistic and philosophical inquiry

The thesis entitled 'Reclaiming the Image' is an artistic and philosophical enquiry. It aims at a radical re-thinking of the concept of the image outside the accepted notions of realism and representation by opening up the photographic real in the process of bringing together photography and cinema, stillness and movement, life and art, aesthetics and politics. It involves a thinking and writing with Béla Tarr's cinematic imagery through Gilles Deleuze's philosophical concepts. Its objective is not to illustrate Deleuze's ideas with Tarr's images, nor to read Tarr's cinema through Deleuze as such, but to think with images philosophically, in the hope of opening up the area of theory to the creative 'powers of the false'. I wish it to be seen as an aesthetico-ethical experiment which, rather than developing an overarching theoretical argument, constructs a critical and creative assemblage of different ideas and voices. On the one hand, the project seeks to creatively re-think Deleuzian concepts while thinking 'about' still and moving images, in relation to the real as affect and thought. On the other, to 'continue' films' images by opening their thinking further. The project of reclaiming the image as re-thinking in non-representational terms of immanent becoming will engage the Deleuzian- Bergsonian- Nietzschean concepts of time, life and aesthetics, and Tarr's intensely felt image-world in the series of encounters – affect-thoughts – that will undermine the normative notion of reality. The two modes – critical and creative – are not constructed separately but weaved together throughout what is 'enacted' as filmosophical "free indirect discourse" – a poetic coming together of film, philosophy and writing (as art). It is hoped that this will enable the potential for opening new areas of thinking and writing about/ with film/ photographic imagery outside the main discourses concerning theory and practice, the critical and the creative

Orbital transfer vehicle launch operations study: Automated technology knowledge base, volume 4

A simplified retrieval strategy for compiling automation-related bibliographies from NASA/RECON is presented. Two subsets of NASA Thesaurus subject terms were extracted: a primary list, which is used to obtain an initial set of citations; and a secondary list, which is used to limit or further specify a large initial set of citations. These subject term lists are presented in Appendix A as the Automated Technology Knowledge Base (ATKB) Thesaurus