Reformulating the Disjunctive Cut Generating Linear Program

Lift-and-project cuts can be obtained by defining an elegant optimization problem over the space of valid inequalities, the cut generating linear program (CGLP). A CGLP has two main ingredients: (i) an objective function, which invariably maximizes the violation with respect to a fractional solution x to be separated; and (ii) a normalization constraint, which limits the scale in which cuts are represented. One would expect that CGLP optima entail the best cuts, but the normalization may distort how cuts are compared, and the cutting plane may not be a supporting hyperplane with respect to the closure of valid inequalities from the CGLP. This work proposes the reverse polar CGLP (RP-CGLP), which switches the roles conventionally played by objective and normalization: violation with respect to x is fixed to a positive constant, whereas we minimize the slack for a point p that cannot be separated by the valid inequalities. Cuts from RP-CGLP optima define supporting hyperplanes of the immediate closure. When that closure is full-dimensional, the face defined by the cut lays on facets first intersected by a ray from x to p, all of which corresponding to cutting planes from RP-CGLP optima if p is an interior point. In fact, these are the cuts minimizing a ratio between the slack for p and the violation for x. We show how to derive such cuts directly from the simplex tableau in the case of split disjunctions and report experiments on adapting the CglLandP cut generator library for the RP-CGLP formulation

Against the Virtual: Kleinherenbrink’s Externality Thesis and Deleuze’s Machine Ontology

Drawing from Arjen Kleinherenbrink's recent book, Against Continuity: Gilles Deleuze's Speculative Realism (2019), this paper undertakes a detailed review of Kleinherenbrink's fourfold "externality thesis" vis-à-vis Deleuze's machine ontology. Reading Deleuze as a philosopher of the actual, this paper renders Deleuzean syntheses as passive contemplations, pulling other (passive) entities into an (active) experience and designating relations as expressed through contraction. In addition to reviewing Kleinherenbrink's book (which argues that the machine ontology is a guiding current that emerges in Deleuze's work after Difference and Repetition) alongside much of Deleuze's oeuvre, we relate and juxtapose Deleuze's machine ontology to positions concerning externality held by a host of speculative realists. Arguing that the machine ontology has its own account of interaction, change, and novelty, we ultimately set to prove that positing an ontological "cut" on behalf of the virtual realm is unwarranted because, unlike the realm of actualities, it is extraneous to the structure of becoming-that is, because it cannot be homogenous, any theory of change vis-à-vis the virtual makes it impossible to explain how and why qualitatively different actualities are produced

Thinking time through difference and repetition: duration, memory, perception and the virtual time of media events

"This dissertation examines two ways by which duration can come to be experienced in analog cinema and digital installations: the interstice and the fold. Whereas the interstice is a material fissure that brings about temporal disruptions between shots/images, the fold is the ontological ground upon which the continuous relations between image and mind arise. These two conceptual figures of time are contradictory, asymmetrical and unequal, giving rise to the question: how might duration be examined from two contrasting and contradictory points of view? If interstices present temporal disjunctions, how might temporal continuities also be a valid point of view? The fold introduces a difference by which a different type of thinking might occur about duration: it introduces a rupture in the orientation of thought about the interstice. Each figure is a different node of thinking of the rhizome, making up the multiplicity by which duration can come under scrutiny in media-objectiles. Each is part of the difference that constitutes the whole. Time is also the method and process by which duration is examined. As method, time is examined through the difference and repetition of the image. Important to the return is the nature of what returns: does the return bring about the same duration, or does it bring difference? Whereas the time-images of cinema give rise to movements between pasts and futures, the digital installations examined give rise to a continual ""now,"" or to presentism. The digital-image as the returning difference to the analog-image presents its ontological difference, producing a different image of time. As process, the lived time of media-events queries the type of duration endured in nonlinear, asynchronous time. Pivoting between pasts and futures, this open and free time of duration gives rise to memories and visions in the experience of media. The media examples discussed are Claire Denis' s film L'lntrus (2004), Susan Collins's installations Glenlandia, Fenlandia and The Spectroscope (2004-7), Andrei Tarkovsky's film Mirror (1975), Sound Research Laboratories's performance in Barcelona (1991), Granular Synthesis's performances Modell 5 (1997) and POL (1998) and Toni Dove's interactive cinema Spectropia (2008).

Grand Tour – a film in-debt(ed): Exploring the possibilities of the essayistic filmmaking form.

This practice-as-research thesis concentrates on the field of essayistic filmmaking. Through my practice and the written thesis, I explore how the montage of interwoven layers of images, sound, interactivity and networking connectivity can potentially expand the conventions of essayistic filmmaking practice. At the heart of my research is the creative practice of researching and developing an online essay film, Grand Tour a film in-debt(ed). The film explores an alternative reading of the recent Greek financial crisis without explicitly addressing the crisis, but in the tradition of essayistic filmmaking, by exploring the disjunctive threads that make links with the past and open the present to new interpretations. The development of Grand Tour is grounded in multiple iterative prototypes. Based on this incremental research process, I explore the possibilities of multiple interwoven layers of montage and the new creative potentials this creates for essayistic filmmaking practice. I define the montage of multiple interwoven temporalities as metabatic, and through the practice of developing Grand Tour, I suggest an alternative way of thinking about the recent Greek financial crisis which challenges the dominant narratives. My inspiration for developing Grand Tour is drawn from the writings of European travellers who visited Greece in the 18th and 19th centuries. For more than eight years I immersed myself in extensive archival research and developed several online film prototypes. Through this research I understood the role that these travellers had in the formation of the emerging modern Greek identity and explored their links to subsequent political and financial interventions and the accumulation of debt in the modern Greek state. Following the essayistic filmmaking tradition, I dialectically associate the financial debt with the cultural debt of ancient Greece, suggesting modes of ambiguity and speculative thinking that describe Greece as a place in a constantly disjointed state, defined by a series of fragmented political, economic and cultural past and present encounters. The creative process of my practice is a montage of multiple disjunctive fragments where linearity is constantly disrupted. My iterative creative practice and the disjunctive nature of the film do not offer specific answers and fixed interpretations. Instead, they suggest and explore questions, and enable new essayistic threads, that challenge the current limited narratives about the Greek financial crisis

From flows of culture to the circuits of logistics : borders, regions, labour in transit

In Transit Labour: Circuits, Regions, Borders. No. 2 (Dec. 2010). When jurisdiction can no longer be aligned with territory and governance does not necessarily assume liberalism, there is a need to rethink the relations between labour, mobility and space. Bringing together researchers from different parts of the world to discuss and pursue various paths of investigation and collaboration, the Shanghai Transit Labour Research Platform moved between online and offline worlds. Sometimes sequestered in seminar spaces and at other times negotiating the city and the regulatory environment, the participants drifted toward a collective enunciation. We could say this was about the production of new kinds of labouring subjectivities that build connections between domains which are at once becoming more irreconcilable and more indistinct: life and work, public and private, political and economic, natural and cultural

Precarious bodies: occupational risk assemblages in Bolivia and Trinidad

This article develops a concept of “precarious bodies” to theorise the lived experience of labour precariousness in the 21st century and its implications for workers’ health, wellbeing and household reproduction. Drawing on ethnographic research with Bolivian miners and Trinidadian garment workers, we explore the relationship between workers’ exposure to global market forces and their everyday experiences of work, health and risk in these industries. “Precarious bodies” is a heuristic that takes into a single frame the macro-level economic and regulatory processes that create risks for workers, and the various ways in which workers negotiate these risks through their work practices and livelihood choices. We show precarious bodies to be both vulnerable and strategic. Positioned in situations of exploitation and risk, their choices to protect their livelihoods can harm their health and reinforce—rather than counteract—the precarious circumstances of their households

Art, public authorship and the possibility of re-democratization

The subject of this study is a large public art project by German artist Jochen Gerz, which was part of the urban regeneration program The Phoenix Initiative in Coventry City, 1999-2004. The study presents a short historical backdrop to Gerz’s work by way of defining ‘public authorship’ of which the Coventry project is one example. It extends the literature on contemporary countermonument by assessing Gerz’s artistic strategy in using a monument to exploring the conditions of public culture and possible shape of a cultural public sphere in the contemporary city. The public art project lasted over five years and was a mechanism by which the political issues at stake in the public life of Coventry, particularly the socio-historic conflicts that are constitutive of its civic identity, were articulated. The study argues that public authorship succeeded in identifying some crucial coordinates in the political constitution of public culture in Coventry, but in the face of competing civic rhetoric and new urban policy initiatives, the project remains an open inquiry. This study concludes by identifying some critical lines of inquiry for future studies in art’s critical role in the public sphere

Indentity-in-motion : the narrative duration of the dis/continous film moment

The trajectorv of this thesis is set out like a journey upon which encounters are staged between two films. film theor), and philosophers. such as Slavoj Zizek. Gilles Deletize, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. An encounter with a moment of image suspension. a cut to the blank screen- in Tacita Dean's film, Disappearance atSea (1996). motivates the beginning of this journey's narrative. My reading of this moment counters the way that suspended film moments have been discussed in terms of non-narrative in 1970s film theory and in the contemporary psychoanalýlic filin theory of Slavoj Zizek. Using Gilles Deleuze's notion of narrativization as a process of serialization. I argue that the supposedly non-narrative moment is coextensive with the spectator's dis/continuity in time as opposed to Slavoj Zizek's static suspension or film theory's distanciation. A performative text based on Disappearance at Sea, which I refer to as a 'montage text' and for which precedence is found in Roland Barthes' writing, acts as an interlude that runs in tandem to the main theoretical trajectory. The generativity of absence that emerges from these encounters, both theoretical and poetic. is heightened in the second half of the thesis by the appearance of another 'montage text' based on Chantal Akerrnan's News From Home (1976). In this text. I reconfigure the negativity of historical readings of absence in Neus From Home where it was related to the impossible question of a woman's desire. In my reconfiguration, absence. rather than suspending time. generates a temporalized space and a spatialized time in which the spectator performs the dis/continuity of narrative duration. In the theoretical trajectory of this movement, Gilles Deleuze is hybridized with aspects of Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, my argument being that the sublime infinity of Deleuzian serialization requires a relation to embodiment in order for it to be useftil in considering the spectator's relation to the two film encounters with absence. I read this hybridization in terms of a feminine mode of the sublime, which suggests the possibility of the real rather than its negation in representation and contributes to current thinking in feminist philosophy, particularly the work of Elizabeth Grosz

Disability and Citizenship in Post-Soviet Ukraine: An Anthropological Critique

[Excerpt] In this paper I examine Ukraine’s burgeoning disability rights movement through the lens of citizenship to illustrate the complex processes through which certain categories of people (here, persons with disabilities) are transforming themselves—and being transformed— into particular types of citizens in a changing welfare state. I take an institutional and relational approach to understanding “citizenship,” a tack that has recently been suggested by scholars such as Margaret Somers (1994, 1995) and Allison Carey (2003), to suggest approaches to understanding citizen-state relations that shed light on the complex intersections of agency, power, and personhood that post-socialist social justice struggles entail