Computational model validation using a novel multiscale multidimensional spatio-temporal meta model checking approach

This thesis was submitted for the award of Doctor of Philosophy and was awarded by Brunel University LondonComputational models of complex biological systems can provide a better understanding of how living systems function but need to be validated before they are employed for real-life (e.g. clinical) applications. One of the most frequently employed in silico approaches for validating such models is model checking. Traditional model checking approaches are limited to uniscale non-spatial computational models because they do not explicitly distinguish between different scales, and do not take properties of (emergent) spatial structures (e.g. density of multicellular population) into account. This thesis defines a novel multiscale multidimensional spatio-temporal meta model checking methodology which enables validating multiscale (spatial) computational models of biological systems relative to how both numeric (e.g. concentrations) and spatial system properties are expected to change over time and across multiple scales. The methodology has two important advantages. First it supports computational models encoded using various high-level modelling formalisms because it is defined relative to time series data and not the models used to produce them. Secondly the methodology is generic because it can be automatically reconfigured according to case study specific types of spatial structures and properties using the meta model checking approach. In addition the methodology could be employed for multiple domains of science, but we illustrate its applicability here only against biological case studies. To automate the computational model validation process, the approach was implemented in software tools, which are made freely available online. Their efficacy is illustrated against two uniscale and four multiscale quantitative computational models encoding phase variation in bacterial colonies and the chemotactic aggregation of cells, respectively the rat cardiovascular system dynamics, the uterine contractions of labour, the Xenopus laevis cell cycle and the acute inflammation of the gut and lung. This novel model checking approach will enable the efficient construction of reliable multiscale computational models of complex systems.Brunel University Londo

Spectres of minimalism

My thesis plays host to a variety of spectres. Taking the peripheral, overlooked qualities of shadows and reflections as a starting point, I show how discourse can narrow one's perceptual focus. 1960s polemics have concentrated the beam of light by which minimalist objects now appear, obscuring the marginal but tangible effect of Donald Judd's reflections. I ask why such reflections were ignored in his own writings, why they were regarded as problematic by contemporary critics concerned about `illusionism', and why they have remained (largely) unexamined since; I conclude that quandaries about seductive illusion were of a similar order to contemporary worries around immersive spectacle. While these `spectres' of minimalism - unacknowledged optical effects and repressed anxieties - have been omitted in historical discourse, they have re- materialised in later works by Susan Hiller, Mona Hatoum, Joanne Tatham and Torn O'Sullivan, and Jan de Cock - works which can be characterised as parades of reflections, shadows, ghosts and avatars. In these artists' negotiations of their minimalist `inheritance', they acknowledge and engage with the optical illusions, uncanny elements, and unspoken anxieties that inhabit Judd's works. Having experienced something akin to a haunting as hitherto hidden aspects of Judd's work have suddenly come to light, I now adopt an art historical methodology that not only takes account of, but is founded on, such spectral revelations. Seeing through the lenses that later artistic practices provide, I offer a contemporary re- reading of Judd's work: I propose a new set of associations with cinemas, cities, crystals and cars, and argue that, after all these years, Judd's works are still well placed to prompt philosophical reflections on contemporary experience

Obiter Dicta

"Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought—gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic—interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran’s approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what’s granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird’s-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

Romantic Citation and the Receding Future

This dissertation reads citation in Romantic literature as an aporetic movement between present and past, whereby what is cited becomes the receding ground on which the present and future’s erosion is inscribed. Citation exceeds quotation in that it forwards a disastrous intertextuality that retroactively determines not only past texts but events, histories, objects, and genres as accelerants that overshadow and ghost the present with its own extinction. Against generative modes of intertextuality such as those of Kristeva and Bakhtin in which texts’ repetitions of other texts facilitates the open-ended overturning and transformation of prior writing, citation precipitates a no future. This no future of Romantic citation, inflected by the period’s geological insights into the earth’s history as layers of sedimented disasters and extinctions, registers anteriority as topographical depths whose pre-spent force attenuates futurity. Citation thus discloses the destructive feedback loop underlying the generation of “progress” or open-ended futures from the past. Chapter 1 examines how in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Byron’s re-collection of history’s ruins becomes a symptom of a post- and pre-post-Waterloo history entropically recycling itself and backdating its “end of history” further into the past and expansively across the globe. In chapter 2, Mary Shelley’s The Last Man cites literary texts as a form of déjà vu by which we discover ourselves as extinct proleptically in the literary past. Chapter 3 proposes that Percy Shelley’s re-cycled tropes and circular plots in the later poems encode the later poetry’s archaeological pull toward his corpus’s dark ground in the form of his early novel St. Irvyne and his other early Gothic texts that shadow his corpus with the specter of its exhaustion. And in chapter 4, Blake’s Jerusalem ends (Blake’s) history by re-citing his earlier works as if they were engines of apocalypse conspiratorially orientated toward Jerusalem’s abyssally predestined redemption, a volatile redemption that accelerates the burnout of Blake’s “System” rather than its survival into the future

Some Ways of Making Nothing

"What if all works of art were better understood as functioning apparatuses, entangling their human audiences in experiences of becoming? What if certain works of art were even able to throw the brakes on becoming altogether, making nothings rather than somethings? What would be the ethical value of making nothing, of stalling becoming; and how might such nothings even be made? Some Ways of Making Nothing: Apophatic Apparatuses in Contemporary Art borrows its understanding of apparatuses from quantum mechanics and the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead, and its understanding of nothing from apophatic (negative) theology. It then proposes a new way of understanding art, applying this understanding to artworks by Arakawa and Gins, Robert Fludd, David Crawford, Joshua Citarella, William Pope.L, and Haim Steinbach. Philosophy, physics, theology, and media theory are traversed and involved in order to understand art differently so that it might be made to matter more.

Sustainability in design: now! Challenges and opportunities for design research, education and practice in the XXI century

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