Catastrophe Aesthetics: Affective Epistemologies of Climate Change in Experimental Media Art

Catastrophe is no longer an exception to the everyday. Anthropogenic (or capitalogenic) climate change is slowly but radically altering Earth. But climate catastrophe does not abide by conventional understandings of the catastrophic. Rather than a temporally and spatially bound rupture, climate change is slow-moving, vast, and in the everyday, imperceptible. This complicates its representation. My dissertation contributes to a growing conversation that asks: how do we effectively (and affectively) convey the slow warming of Earth, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, or the geological imprint of the human species? These are crucial questions for making sense of a complex present and for exposing and resisting the structures and systems that have produced this present. I argue that the aesthetic realm is a privileged space in which climate change catastrophe can be made visible and, more broadly, sensible. I examine a diverse group of experimental media artworks: Buckminster Fullers expanded cinema environments, The Geoscope and World Game; the fossil-fuel themed interactive documentaries Offshore (Brenda Longfellow, 2013) and Fort McMoney (David Dufresne, 2013); and a collection of contemporary, geological experimental film and photography. While emerging from diverse contexts and focusing on different climate-related themes, these artworks provide a rich arena to explore what I am calling catastrophe aesthetics. Catastrophe aesthetics is a mode of critical art making that attempts to express the catastrophic nature of climate change. Not trying to provide solutions to climate change, my case studies instead offer fertile grounds for elucidating the indiscernible contours, interrelations, and violence that make up this quotidian catastrophe. They do so by employing innovative image technologies and experimental formal strategies, which engender affective encounters with various worlds and entities on screen. In producing novel experiences and modes of relation with a changing Earth new affective epistemologies of climate change can emerge

The Tiger Vol. 86 Issue 7 1992-10-09

https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/tiger_newspaper/3114/thumbnail.jp

The Best Children\u27s Books of the Year [2020 edition]

Includes more than 600 titles chosen by the Children’s Book Committee as the best of the best published in 2019. In choosing books for the annual list, committee members consider literary quality and excellence of presentation as well as the potential emotional impact of the books on young readers. Other criteria include credibility of characterization and plot, authenticity of time and place, age suitability, positive treatment of ethnic and religious differences, and the absence of stereotypes.https://educate.bankstreet.edu/ccl/1010/thumbnail.jp

Dakota Datebook: North Dakota Stories from Prairie Public

Prairie Public’s beloved Dakota Datebook radio series is now in book form! The students of the University of North Dakota’s Writing, Editing, and Publishing program combed the archives and selected 365 of their favorites for this endearing, compelling, and humorous collection. North Dakota’s history includes many strange stories of eccentric towns, unforgettable animals, war heroes, crafty criminals, and various colorful characters. Read all about them with this Dakota Datebook. Published in collaboration with Prairie Public Broadcasting, Inc.https://commons.und.edu/press-books/1011/thumbnail.jp

Learning discrete word embeddings to achieve better interpretability and processing efficiency

L’omniprésente utilisation des plongements de mot dans le traitement des langues naturellesest la preuve de leur utilité et de leur capacité d’adaptation a une multitude de tâches. Ce-pendant, leur nature continue est une importante limite en terme de calculs, de stockage enmémoire et d’interprétation. Dans ce travail de recherche, nous proposons une méthode pourapprendre directement des plongements de mot discrets. Notre modèle est une adaptationd’une nouvelle méthode de recherche pour base de données avec des techniques dernier crien traitement des langues naturelles comme les Transformers et les LSTM. En plus d’obtenirdes plongements nécessitant une fraction des ressources informatiques nécéssaire à leur sto-ckage et leur traitement, nos expérimentations suggèrent fortement que nos représentationsapprennent des unités de bases pour le sens dans l’espace latent qui sont analogues à desmorphèmes. Nous appelons ces unités dessememes, qui, de l’anglaissemantic morphemes,veut dire morphèmes sémantiques. Nous montrons que notre modèle a un grand potentielde généralisation et qu’il produit des représentations latentes montrant de fortes relationssémantiques et conceptuelles entre les mots apparentés.The ubiquitous use of word embeddings in Natural Language Processing is proof of theirusefulness and adaptivity to a multitude of tasks. However, their continuous nature is pro-hibitive in terms of computation, storage and interpretation. In this work, we propose amethod of learning discrete word embeddings directly. The model is an adaptation of anovel database searching method using state of the art natural language processing tech-niques like Transformers and LSTM. On top of obtaining embeddings requiring a fractionof the resources to store and process, our experiments strongly suggest that our representa-tions learn basic units of meaning in latent space akin to lexical morphemes. We call theseunitssememes, i.e., semantic morphemes. We demonstrate that our model has a greatgeneralization potential and outputs representation showing strong semantic and conceptualrelations between related words

Semper floreat

Title varies: Gamut; Time off: Semper; The press. Numbering system very erratic

Appalachia Summer/Fall 2011: Complete Issue

Summer/Fall 2011 - Volume LXII, Number 2 - issue #232. Off the Turnpike: Rediscovering Wild New Jerse

Simulation FX: Cinema and the R&D Complex

This study looks at the ongoing development of tools and practices used to animate nonlinear physical phenomena, such as the crash of ocean waves or the movement of human hair, in the visual effect and animation industries. These tools and practices are developed in a nexus between public funding, research universities, the film industry, and various other sectors, such as aerospace and meteorology. This study investigates how technological development became integrated with film production, and in turn how epistemic paradigms were shared between the film industry, scientific research institutions and other industries. At the heart of these animation tools and practices, and the networks of institutions that developed them, is a way of thinking that seeks to make use of unpredictable nonlinear complexity by shaping it toward specific applications. I observe this in the way animation and visual effect studios seek the realistic appearance of nonlinear natural movement through simulation, while also implementing technologies and practices to direct the look of these simulations. I also observe this in a variety of related examples, from the way the concept of research and development unites science and application, to the way management science promotes hands off approaches that preserve the unpredictable nature of creative work. My methods consist of charting the circulation of ideas, technologies, moving images and people through contact zones such as the computer science special interest group ACM SIGGRAPH, using archival research of trade communications, scholarly publications and conference proceedings, as well as interviews with industry workers

The evolution of Iurii Trifonov as a writer

The thesis chronologically examines the works of Iurii Trifonov (1925-81) to show his evolution as a writer, from his first novel, the Socialist Realist Studenty, awarded a Stalin Prize in 1950, to his works of the 1970s and 1980s, in which he truthfully portrayed contemporary Soviet society and questioned the residual Communist ethic of the Brezhnev era. Trifonov occupied an interesting postion in Russian literary history, somewhere between the 'official' Soviet writers and the dissidents, trying to publish honest works under strict censorship in the USSR. I shall examine how under different political climates his works were republished and their content changed, while the final chapter covers post-humous works published thanks to glasnost, which show what he was forced to omit during his own lifetime. As he changes with time as a person, so do his works. The first chapter looks at Trifonov's family background and the death of his father during Stalin's purges. This was to have a great influence on Trifonov's life and works, in many of which he tried to understand his father's fate and that of his nation. Throughout his often heavily autobiographical works, Trifonov examines his country’s past and present while trying to understand himself too. He showed the roots of the degeneration of his society both before and after the Russian Revolution, but also showed the beginnings of the current consumerism of post-communist Russia. Trifonov speaks for many of his fellow countrymen in his works and shows the totality of the Soviet experience over six decades, and beyond