The arts of action

The theory and culture of the arts has largely focused on the arts of objects, and neglected the arts of action – the “process arts”. In the process arts, artists create artifacts to engender activity in their audience, for the sake of the audience’s aesthetic appreciation of their own activity. This includes appreciating their own deliberations, choices, reactions, and movements. The process arts include games, urban planning, improvised social dance, cooking, and social food rituals. In the traditional object arts, the central aesthetic properties occur in the artistic artifact itself. It is the painting that is beautiful; the novel that is dramatic. In the process arts, the aesthetic properties occur in the activity of the appreciator. It is the game player’s own decisions that are elegant, the rock climber’s own movement that is graceful, and the tango dancers’ rapport that is beautiful. The artifact’s role is to call forth and shape that activity, guiding it along aesthetic lines. I offer a theory of the process arts. Crucially, we must distinguish between the designed artifact and the prescribed focus of aesthetic appreciation. In the object arts, these are one and the same. The designed artifact is the painting, which is also the prescribed focus of appreciation. In the process arts, they are different. The designed artifact is the game, but the appreciator is prescribed to appreciate their own activity in playing the game. Next, I address the complex question of who the artist really is in a piece of process art — the designer or the active appreciator? Finally, I diagnose the lowly status of the process arts

Measurements of trackways as a method for assessing locomotion in dairy cows

The aim of this study was to assess whether locomotion parameters obtained by measurements of cow trackways are reliable and sufficiently sensitive to describe locomotion in non-lame and lame dairy cows on different floors. Thirty-two non-lame cows were used to study the reliability of the trackway measurements. The cows were tested twice over three weeks and measurements from four consecutive strides were used during each test session. To study the effect of different floors on locomotion, 25 non-lame cows and eleven cows with different lameness degrees were tested on five different surfaces: solid and slatted concrete, both with and without 20 mm thick elastic rubber mats, and wet, compacted sand. The reliability of the measurements varied from moderate to low, with measurements relating to inter-limb coordination being most inconsistent. The slippery slatted concrete floor caused restricted locomotion in so far as the strides were significantly shorter here than on all the other floors. Use of yielding rubber mats resulted in a locomotion more similar to that on the sand path. Lameness had an effect on shortening strides and steps, but in most cases the animals’ reaction to different floorings was similar in lame and healthy cows. Step asymmetry due to lameness was decreased when cows walked on the soft surfaces. It was concluded that a trackway measurement system is a suitable method to use in field locomotion studies and that the system is useful in identifying differences in kinematics on different floor types. Since there is a relatively high inconsistency in cow walking it is beneficial to use measurements of several strides to obtain a representative gait pattern

Comparison of lower body segment alignment of elite level hockey players to age-matched non-hockey players

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2015Lower body overuse and insidious onset injuries are thought to have an underlying biomechanical component which may be predisposing to injury. The purpose of this study was to compare lower body biomechanical characteristics for elite hockey players to matched controls. I hypothesize that elite hockey players have a greater degree of anterior pelvic tilt, greater varus knee angle, a higher foot arch and feet held in parallel more during gait than a matched non-skating population. Measures were taken of elite level, college aged, male hockey players and compared to cross country runners (ten subjects in each group) who served as controls for trunk angle, pelvic tilt angle, knee alignment, (varus/valgus angle), foot angle, arch index (arch height), hip, center of range of motion, hip external rotation, hip internal rotation, hip total range of motion (ROM), knee transverse plane ROM, and step width. The results obtained support the hypothesis for anterior pelvic tilt and foot angle during gait. Although knee angle was in the expected varus direction it was not significant and no differences were observed in the foot arch between the groups. All other measurements not directly related to the hypothesis were not significantly different with the exception of mean step width. The obtained results are important as recent literature describes a lower body posture of medial collapse into "dynamic valgus" as being predisposing to injury. Results show, on the spectrum from lower body varus to lower body valgus, hockey players are on the varus side of the spectrum in all attributes except arch height, which was similar in both populations. Since lower body alignment is thought to be coupled, this inconsistency appears contrary to the "medial collapse into dynamic valgus" model and may explain why foot orthotics and athletic shoes used as an injury intervention often fail

Northern Lights Ceilidh:playful digital interventions in a Scottish tradition

Northern Lights Ceilidh (NLC) was a one-off event which added a modern twist to traditional Scottish dancing, music and performance and added a digital infusion of technology mediated interactions to proceedings. The event marked the end of an international games competition hosted in Dundee each year, Dare to be Digital (DtbD) inviting the participants in the games competition and the general public to attend. In total 208 people attended NLC, 75 of whom were participants in DtbD.It is not possible to determine how many of the participants were external to Abertay University. However, 50% of respondents to a survey relating to NLC1 (the survey was completed by 12% of the total attendees) cited they found out about the event through sources external to Dare to be Digital which could suggest that there were attendees who had no link to Dare to be Digital and Abertay University.The Ceilidh was part funded by the year of Homecoming Scotland, and thus sought to weave historical Scottish traditions with new traditions in Scotland (i.e. weaving ceilidh, poetry and dance with new forms of design including 3D printed jewellery and interactive technology). NLC was held in a high-tech marquee in Dundee City Square on the 8th of August 2014. The marquee had been used for four days as the site of the DtbD games showcase and was transformed into a dance hall for the event.NLC aimed to, through digital mediation, provide participants with agency commonly associated with digital media. Participants were able to contribute to the creation of a digital aesthetic which was layered upon the physical ceilidh experience through projection and real-time manipulation of live video feeds. The participants could alter and manipulate their movement to change what happened on screen, co-creating not only the dance elements of the ceilidh but also the digital spectacle.The ceilidh was designed Lynn Parker, and Clare Brennan. Ryan Locke provided imagery which was used as the setting for digital animation production by Lynn Parker. A jeweller, Elizabeth Armour, was commissioned to create custom jewellery for the event, a 3D printed brooch and two digital artists, Stuart MacBean and Yana Hristova were commissioned to create an animated ‘peep’ board with which attendees were encouraged to take photographs. During the event itself, the band Whiskey Kiss called the dances and provided the music whilst a performer recited poetry to open the event. Quartic Llama, an interactive media company were commissioned to create a digital app to promote the event, titled Lightstream (Quartic Llama, 2014).Lynn Parker led the design of interactive media interventions into the event, the creation of animation sequences and live visuals during the event, developed branding for the event, carried out client facing work with Quartic Llama and collaborated with her colleagues in the facilitation and organisation of the event.Northern Lights Ceilidh as practice-led-research work offers insight into design approaches to support and facilitate social interaction. The social nature of the ceilidh event provides a template for community creation and the layering of digital intervention provides a basis from which the mediation of interaction through both human and technology mediated play can be evaluated.The addition of a digital layer to the ceilidh setting provides an extra level of participation in the event, where the participants can not only make the event come to life through participating in the dances but also in their manipulation of their movement to shape the digital visualisations on screen. The experience of the participants of both the ceilidh setting and of digital mediation provides valuable underpinning for the evaluation of these factors through practice-led-research

Microoptomechanical pumps assembled and driven by holographic optical vortex arrays

Beams of light with helical wavefronts can be focused into ring-like optical traps known as optical vortices. The orbital angular momentum carried by photons in helical modes can be transferred to trapped mesoscopic objects and thereby coupled to a surrounding fluid. We demonstrate that arrays of optical vortices created with the holographic optical tweezer technique can assemble colloidal spheres into dynamically reconfigurable microoptomechanical pumps assembled by optical gradient forces and actuated by photon orbital angular momentum.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, submitted to Optics Expres

Performance Analysis of XOR-Based Routing Protocols in Vehicular ad hoc Networks

This book is part of a series exploring the dynamic universe of the Internet in the 21st century. Collected here are papers discussing a wide range of topics and issues impacting and relating to the Internet such as: internet traffic conditioning methods applied to wireless networks; design knowledge management and sharing using XML; FGPA-Based video streaming; internet traffic modeling and an analysis of XOR-based flat routing protocols. (Imprint: Nova Press