Instruments for New Music: Sound, Technology, and Modernism

Player pianos, radio-electric circuits, gramophone records, and optical sound film—these were the cutting-edge acoustic technologies of the early twentieth century, and for many musicians and artists of the time, these devices were also the implements of a musical revolution. Instruments for New Music traces a diffuse network of cultural agents who shared the belief that a truly modern music could be attained only through a radical challenge to the technological foundations of the art. Centered in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, the movement to create new instruments encompassed a broad spectrum of experiments, from the exploration of microtonal tunings and exotic tone colors to the ability to compose directly for automatic musical machines. This movement comprised composers, inventors, and visual artists, including Paul Hindemith, Ernst Toch, Jörg Mager, Friedrich Trautwein, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttmann, and Oskar Fischinger. Patteson’s fascinating study combines an artifact-oriented history of new music in the early twentieth century with an astute revisiting of still-relevant debates about the relationship between technology and the arts

Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America

Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America is a cutting-edge study of the expanding worlds of Latin American comics. Despite lack of funding and institutional support, not since the mid-twentieth century have comics in the region been so dynamic, so diverse and so engaged with pressing social and cultural issues. Comics are being used as essential tools in debates about, for example, digital cultures, gender identities and political disenfranchisement. Rather than analysing the current boom in comics by focusing just on the printed text, however, this book looks at diverse manifestations of comics ‘beyond the page’. Contributors explore digital comics and social media networks; comics as graffiti and stencil art in public spaces; comics as a tool for teaching architecture or processing social trauma; and the consumption and publishing of comics as forms of shaping national, social and political identities. Bringing together authors from across Latin America and beyond, and covering examples from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay, the book sets out a panoramic vision of Latin American comics, whether in terms of scholarly contribution, geographical diversity or interdisciplinary methodologies. Comics Beyond the Page in Latin America demonstrates the importance of studying how comics circulate in all manner of ways beyond print media. It also reminds us of the need to think about the creative role of comics in societies with less established comics markets than in Europe, the US and Asia

Combatting AI’s Protectionism & Totalitarian-Coded Hypnosis: The Case for AI Reparations & Antitrust Remedies in the Ecology of Collective Self-Determination

Artificial Intelligence’s (AI) global race for comparative advantage has the world spinning, while leaving people of color and the poor rushing to reinvent AI imagination in less racist, destructive ways. In repurposing AI technology, we can look to close the national racial gaps in academic achievement, healthcare, housing, income, and fairness in the criminal justice system to conceive what AI reparations can fairly look like. AI can create a fantasy world, realizing goods we previously thought impossible. However, if AI does not close these national gaps, it no longer has foreseeable or practical social utility value compared to its foreseeable and actual grave social harm. The hypothetical promises of AI’s beneficial use as an equality machine without the requisite action and commitment to address the inequality it already causes now is fantastic propaganda masquerading as merit for a Silicon Valley that has yet to diversify its own ranks or undo the harm it is already causing. Care must be taken that fanciful imagining yields to practical realities that, in many cases, AI no longer has foreseeable practical social utility when compared to the harm it poses to democracy, privacy, equality, personhood and global warming. Until we can accept as a nation that the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 and the Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 are not up to the task for breaking up tech companies; until we can acknowledge DOJ and FTC regulators are constrained from using their power because of a framework of permissibility implicit in the “consumer welfare standard” of antitrust law; until a conservative judiciary inclined to defer to that paradigm ceases its enabling of big tech, then workers, students, and all natural persons will continue to be harmed by big tech’s anticompetitive and inhumane activity. Accordingly, AI should be vigorously subject to anti-trust monopolistic protections and corporate, contractual, and tort liability explored herein, such as strict liability or a new AI prima facie tort that can pierce the corporate and technological veil of algorithmic proprietary secrecy in the interest of justice. And when appropriate, AI implementation should be phased out for a later time when we have better command and control of how to eliminate its harmful impacts that will only exacerbate existing inequities. Fourth Amendment jurisprudence of a totalitarian tenor—greatly helped by Terry v. Ohio—has opened the door to expansive police power through AI’s air superiority and proliferation of surveillance in communities of color. This development is further exacerbated by AI companies’ protectionist actions. AI rests in a protectionist ecology including, inter alia, the notion of black boxes, deep neural network learning, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and partnerships with law enforcement that provide cover under the auspices of police immunity. These developments should discourage a “safe harbor” protecting tech companies from liability unless and until there is a concomitant safe harbor for Blacks and people of color to be free of the impact of harmful algorithmic spell casting. As a society, we should endeavor to protect the sovereign soul’s choice to decide which actions it will implicitly endorse with its own biometric property. Because we do not morally consent to give the right to use our biometrics to accuse, harass, or harm another in a line up, arrest, or worse, these concerns should be seen as the lawful exercise of our right to remain a conscientious objector under the First Amendment. Our biometrics should not bear false witness against our neighbors in violation of our First Amendment right to the free exercise of religious belief, sincerely held convictions, and conscientious objections thereto. Accordingly, this Article suggests a number of policy recommendations for legislative interventions that have informed the work of the author as a Commissioner on the Massachusetts Commission on Facial Recognition Technology, which has now become the framework for the recently proposed federal legislation—The Facial Recognition Technology Act of 2022. It further explores what AI reparations might fairly look like, and the collective social movements of resistance that are needed to bring about its fruition. It imagines a collective ecology of self-determination to counteract the expansive scope of AI’s protectionism, surveillance, and discrimination. This movement of self-determination seeks: (1) Black, Brown, and race-justice-conscious progressives to have majority participatory governance over all harmful tech applied disproportionately to those of us already facing both social death and contingent violence in our society by resorting to means of legislation, judicial activism, entrepreneurial influential pressure, algorithmic enforced injunctions, and community organization; (2) a prevailing reparations mindset infused in coding, staffing, governance, and antitrust accountability within all industry sectors of AI product development and services; (3) the establishment of our own counter AI tech, as well as tech, law, and social enrichment educational academies, technological knowledge exchange programs, victim compensation funds, and the establishment of our own ISPs, CDNs, cloud services, domain registrars, and social media platforms provided on our own terms to facilitate positive social change in our communities; and (4) personal daily divestment from AI companies’ ubiquitous technologies, to the extent practicable to avoid their hypnotic and addictive effects and to deny further profits to dehumanizing AI tech practices. AI requires a more just imagination. In this way, we can continue to define ourselves for ourselves and submit to an inside-out, heart-centered mindfulness perspective that informs our coding work and advocacy. Recognizing we are engaged in a battle of the mind and soul of AI, the nation, and ourselves is all the more imperative since we know that algorithms are not just programmed—they program us and the world in which we live. The need for public education, the cornerstone institution for creating an informed civil society, is now greater than ever, but it too is insidiously infected by algorithms as the digital codification of the old Jim Crow laws, promoting the same racial profiling, segregative tracking, and stigma labeling many public school students like myself had to overcome. For those of us who stand successful in defiance of these predictive algorithms, we stand simultaneously as the living embodiment of the promise inherent in all of us and the endemic fallacies of erroneous predictive code. A need thus arises for a counter-disruptive narrative in which our victory as survivors over coded inequity disrupts the false psychological narrative of technological objectivity and promise for equality

Reports to the President

A compilation of annual reports for the 1999-2000 academic year, including a report from the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as reports from the academic and administrative units of the Institute. The reports outline the year's goals, accomplishments, honors and awards, and future plans

The social life of Indian generic pharmaceuticals in Johannesburg

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg.This dissertation attempts to document the social life of Indian generic pharmaceuticals within the broader material culture of pharmaceuticals in Johannesburg. Foregrounding the question of value created in circulation, the study explores how conduits of generic pharmaceutical flow are saturated with the global politics of humanitarianism, locally embedded profitmaking efforts by businesspersons based on risk, cultural moorings of pharmaceutical relations, and historical specificities of locations in which pharmaceuticals have been mobilized for consumption. The central method is the ethnography of circulation. By documenting the ‘moral claims’ of Indian pharma capital as manifested in the public culture of pharmaceutical business, the discussion places the intersectionality of moral and material transactions at the centrestage of pharmaceutical sales and the creation of valueMT201

Architecture for a New Age: Imperial Ottoman Mosques in Eighteenth-Century Istanbul

The eighteenth century saw the Ottoman capital Istanbul undergo some of its most significant physical changes. Restored as the seat of government in 1703 after the court had spent fifty years in Edirne, the city became the site of lavish architectural patronage intended to reinscribe the sultans' presence. This campaign culminated in the years 1740-1800 with two distinct but related developments: the revival of the imperial mosque as a building type, and the creation of a new architectural style--the so-called Ottoman Baroque--informed by Western models. Though these shifts have typically been viewed within a well-established decline paradigm branding the material decadent and derivative, this study demonstrates that the eighteenth-century mosques were powerful symbols of sultanic authority designed to reassert and redefine the empire's standing on a changing world stage.History of Art and Architectur

BGSU 1981-1982-1983 Undergraduate Catalog

Bowling Green State University undergraduate catalog for 1981-1982-1983.https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/catalogs/1020/thumbnail.jp

The Music Sound

A guide for music: compositions, events, forms, genres, groups, history, industry, instruments, language, live music, musicians, songs, musicology, techniques, terminology , theory, music video. Music is a human activity which involves structured and audible sounds, which is used for artistic or aesthetic, entertainment, or ceremonial purposes. The traditional or classical European aspects of music often listed are those elements given primacy in European-influenced classical music: melody, harmony, rhythm, tone color/timbre, and form. A more comprehensive list is given by stating the aspects of sound: pitch, timbre, loudness, and duration. Common terms used to discuss particular pieces include melody, which is a succession of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord, which is a simultaneity of notes heard as some sort of unit; chord progression, which is a succession of chords (simultaneity succession); harmony, which is the relationship between two or more pitches; counterpoint, which is the simultaneity and organization of different melodies; and rhythm, which is the organization of the durational aspects of music