Spatial palindromes/palindromic spaces: spatial devices in Vitruvius, Mallarmé, Polieri, Perec and Libeskind

This thesis explores non-linear geometric texts and narratives in literature and architecture and the experience of space that is facilitated by them. The research focuses on the palindrome because it is a non-linear mathematical/geometrical device that is found both in literature and architecture. In language, the palindrome is expressed in the geometrical arrangement of words, letters or concepts in the text or the narrative; and, in architecture, as mirrored symmetries or palindromic proportions, measurements and distributions of elements in drawings and buildings. The primary aim of the thesis is to explore the spatial qualities of palindromes, and the experience of those qualities not only in text but also in architecture. This dissertation thus consists of two parts: the first examines Spatial Palindromes in terms of the spatial structures of selected texts and considers their relation to architecture; and the second examines Palindromic Spaces in terms of the spatial experiences created by and through palindromes in text and architecture. The first part, Spatial Palindromes, constructs an original history of the spatial qualities of palindromes by looking at the theory guiding the use of non-linear devices in texts and architecture. This history moves from the use of palindromes in the work of classical figures and scholars (Orpheus, Pythagoras and Vitruvius), to the Medieval and Renaissance practice of mnemonics (Frances Yates, Mary Carruthers), to early twentieth-century structural linguistics (Ferdinand de Saussure) and the group OuLiPo (Raymond Queneau, Franyois Le Lionnais) and, finally, to late twentieth-century post-structural linguistics (Jean Baudrillard.) The thesis argues that palindromes create spatial experiences both in texts and architecture. For this reason the second part, Palindromic Spaces, studies the nature of spatial experience in the fictions and designs of Stephane Mallarme, Jacques Polieri, Georges Perec, and Daniel Libeskind. According to Baudrillard the poetic space, hidden or revealed by the anagram and palindrome, is where the solid structure of language is "exterminated." This act of extermination, or the poetic space that palindrome reveals in language, opens up perception, memory and recollection to a spatial experience "that incorporates the recession of outcomes ad infinitum;" a self-generated, self-consumed or self-reflective conception of history and space that this thesis aims to explore in architecture

Utter monster: How my performing voice creates queer space and generates alternative gender narratives

This practice-led research investigates how the performing voice can create queer space and generate alternative gender narratives. Through works of art that apply methods including vocal masks, alter egos, collage, storytelling and monstering, it aims to show how vocal performance can unsettle fixed and binary formulations of gender and facilitate fluid and polyvalent ones. To that end, this report presents three key bodies of practice: (i) performed alter egos, (ii) vocal sound works and (iii) video. Brian Kane’s model of vocal analysis – which cross-sections Topos (site), Logos (meaning), Echos (sound) and Techne (technology) – is used to consider how vocal performance can upset the norms embedded in vocalising and establish new sets of relations. My research challenges Lacan’s definition of the voice as the unobtainable objet petit a, a theory endorsed by Mladen Dolar in A Voice and Nothing More, and instead builds upon the voice as a relational bridge between active parties incorporating Miriama Young’s understanding of the voice as a technology. Autopoiesis figures as a performative feedback loop in which listening figures as a vital component, following theories of Quantum Listening and Deep Listening as theorised by Pauline Oliveros. Adriana Caverero, Michael Chion, Mladen Dolar, Erika Fischer-Lichte, Brian Kane, Jacques Lacan and Miriama Young provide theories on the voice to which the works of art created in the course of my research respond. I extrapolate Floya Anthias’ concept of Translocational Positionality as a means of analysing the fluid nature of intersectional gender identities. The artworks apply feminist queer theories – Xenofeminism (Helen Hester), Shadow Feminism (Jack Halberstam) and Glitch Feminism (Legacy Russell) – to the task of undermining binary gender narratives and constructing vi space for the production of alternatives. The ideas of Sara Ahmed, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Audre Lorde are among those used to analyse and evaluate the works of art, while performances by Laurie Anderson, Leigh Bowery, Samuel Beckett, Lydia Lunch, Paul McCarthy, Adrian Piper and Marianna Simnett provide context for the relation between voice and gender

Involute Analysis: Virtual Discourse, Memory Systems and Archive in the Involutes of Thomas De Quincey

Thomas De Quincey’s involutes inform metaphysical thought on memory and language, particularly concerning multiplicity and the virtual, repetition and difference. When co-opting the mathematic and mechanic involute in Suspiria de Profundis, De Quincey generates an interdisciplinary matrix for the semiotics underpinning his philosophy of language and theory of memory and experience. Involutes entangle and reproduce. De Quincey’s involute exposes the concrete and actual through which all experience accesses the abstract or virtual. The materiality of their informatics and technics provides a literary model and theoretical precursor to a combination of archive and systems theory. The textuality of involute system(s)—both De Quincey\u27s mind and narrative—accommodates the intersections: archive recognizes proliferating layers of re-inscription or a system of discursivity and systems observes the self-regulation of processes and signals/messages in communication. De Quincey\u27s involutes, as a method, transform memory and experience into involute texts: texts invested in the form and layered reading processes of fragmenting and sedimenting data within the strata of memory storage, actively sorted, re-fragmented, reiterated

Self and Other in the Renaissance: Laonikos Chalkokondyles and Late Byzantine Intellectuals

The capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman armies of Mehmed II in 1453 was a cataclysmic event that reverberated throughout Renaissance Europe. This event intensified the exodus of Byzantines to Italy and beyond and they brought along with them the heritage of Greek antiquity. Laonikos Chalkokondyles contributed to the Renaissance with his detailed application of Herodotos to the fifteenth century, Apodeixis Historion, and made sense of the rise of the Ottomans with the lens of ancient history. The Apodeixis was printed in Latin, French, and Greek and was widely successful. The historian restored Herodotean categories of ethnicity, political rule, language, and geography to make sense of contemporary events and peoples. This was a thorough study of ancient historiography and Laonikos thus parted ways with previous Byzantine historians. I refer to Laonikos' method as "revolutionary classicizing", to describe the ways in which he abandoned the ideal of lawful imperium and restored the model of oriental tyranny when he described the nascent Ottoman state. What appears to be emulation of the ancient classics was radical revival of political concepts such as city-states as ethnic units, freedom defined as independence from foreign rule, law-giving as fundamental aspect of Hellenic tradition which did not encompass the Christian period. Laonikos has often been studied in the context of proto-nationalist historiography as he had composed a universal history, wherein he had related extensive information on various ethnic and political units in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. However, such proto-nationalist application does not fully capture Laonikos’ classicizing interests. Laonikos referred to his contemporaries as Hellenes, not because he was a nationalist who defined political identity only by recourse to language and common history. Rather, Laonikos believed that Hellenic identity, both referring to paganism as well as ethnicity, was relevant and not bankrupt. Importantly, we introduce manuscripts that have not yet been utilized to argue that Hellenism as paganism was living reality for Laonikos, his Platonist teacher Plethon, and their circle of intellectuals in the fifteenth century

A Shared Global Heritage. Architectural History, Conservation, and Preservation

A series of studies on fascinating cases in architectural history, the essays in this collection reveal the complexity of the current issues in the field, draw attention to the value of architectural heritage and the risks it faces, and suggest possible interpretations as well as alternative methods in the preservation, conservation, reconstruction, and use of architectural heritage. Each essayist has been in residence at Columbia's Italian Academy with a fellowship supported by the Sidney J. Weinberg Jr. Foundation. Edited by B. Faedda Authors: S. Al-Qaisi, P. Aykac, S. Crane, G. de Felice, D. La Monica, F. Marcorin, C. Ruggero, A. Zunic

Semantic parsing for named entities

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, February 2004.Includes bibliographical references (p. 123-129).People's names, dates, locations, organizations, and various numeric expressions, collectively called Named Entities, are used to convey specific meanings to humans in the same way that identifiers and constants convey meaning to a computer language interpreter. Natural Language Question Answering can benefit from understanding the meaning of these expressions because answers in a text are often phrased differently from questions and from each other. For example, "9/11" might mean the same as "September 11th" and "Mayor Rudy Giuliani" might be the same person as "Rudolph Giuliani". Sepia, the system presented here, uses a lexicon of lambda expressions and a mildly context-sensitive parser to create a data structure for each named entity. The parser and grammar design are inspired by Combinatory Categorial Grammar. The data structures are designed to capture semantic dependencies using common syntactic forms. Sepia differs from other natural language parsers in that it does not use a pipeline architecture. As yet there is no statistical component in the architecture. To evaluate Sepia, I use examples tp illustrate its qualitative differences from other named entity systems, I measure component performance on Automatic Content Extraction (ACE) competition held-out training data. and I assess end-to-end performance in the Infolab's TREC-12 Question Answering competition entry. Sepia will compete in the ACE Entity Detection and Tracking track at the end of September.by Gregory A. Marton.S.M

Narratives of Kingship in Eurasian Empires, 1300-1800

An exploration of the constructions of authority in Eurasian empires in fictional texts of various genres, showing remarkable parallels, and the fluidity of literary material as a repository of cultural/political values. Readership: Scholars and students in the fields of history and literature of Eurasian empires, comparative literature, world literature, ideologies of power and authority

Rumi, the Poet of Universal Love: The Politics of Rumi\u27s Appropriation in the West

RUMI, THE POET OF UNIVERSAL LOVE: THE POLITICS OF RUMI’S APPROPRIATION IN THE WEST This project—taking the polyvalence of Rumi as a religious figure and the discursive nature of Western approach to Sufism as its premises—interrogates the ways in which Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273), a thirteenth-century Sufi poet/scholar, has been appropriated in the West. In the valorization of Rumi, the engagement of distinct discourses that emerged out of complex histories stand out. This study, accordingly, seeks to contextualize the ways in which Sufism, as well as Rumi’s works and thoughts, are being read and discussed in relation to discourses on Islam, religion, and spirituality so as to explore the “politics of representation” that is embedded in those refractions. The dissertation analyzes the representations of Sufis, Sufism, and consequentially Rumi in a wide variety of texts, from pre-modern proto-ethnographic works to contemporary translations and novels, so as to trace the construction and engagement of discourses that engender the most significant readings of Rumi. The representation of Rumi’s “Muslimhood” constitutes the focus of analysis. For several decades, and due to a variety of reasons that are discussed in this study, Rumi was imagined merely as an incidental Muslim in the West, where the spiritual currents of the second half of the twentieth century cast him as a New Age guru with romantic sensibilities. It was only in the early twenty-first century, with the events of 9/11 and the consequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Rumi’s Muslim identity has come to be acknowledged on a popular level. The dissertation interrogates the discursive course of the assessment of Rumi as an extra-Islamic figure and the contemporary re-evaluation as an Islamic one, and thereby sheds light on the post-9/11 discourses on Islam in the West, within which Rumi in particular has been cast as an ideal(ized) representative of “good Muslims.” It is argued that that Rumi’s “ideality” is largely an effect of the New Age reading of Rumi, which underlines, among other things, the compatibility of Rumi’s spirituality with Western values

6.3 Subterfuge

Rampike Vol. 6 / No. 3 (Subterfuge issue): John Berndt, Philippe Sollers, John Stickney, Kathy Acker, Western Cell Division, Frank Moorehouse, Pierre Joris, Jake Berry, Ronald Sukenick, Ann Noel, Dennis Oppenheim, George Bowering, Michael Heckert, Sheila Davies, Balint Szombathy, Harry Polkinhorn, Richard Martel, Joanna Gunderson, Dennis Cooley, Alain-Martin Richard, William A. Reid, Stan Rogal, W. Pope L., Annette Mangaard, Karen MacCormack, James Sallis, R. Bartkowech, Misha, Dominique Robert, Fortner Anderson, Lisa Teasley, Richard Gessner, Ken Gangemi, Thomas Baer, Mark Leyner, Marina LaPalma, D.G. Tenenbaum, Louis Lapointe, bill bissett, Geza Perneczky, Guy R. Beining, Gil Aufray, Waldemar B. Schwauss, Robert Morgan, Opal L. Nations, Ralph La Charity, Derek Pell, Christof Migone, Heidi Arnold, E.J. Cullen, Saul Yurkievich, LeRoy Gorman, Miekal And, John Oughton, Rich Gold, Andrea O’Reilly, Paul Dutton, Jim Francis. Cover Art: Ulrich Tarlatt