What is a Viola?

A viola is a string instrument similar to a violin but larger in size, producing a deeper sound to compliment the arrangement. Two curled holes, allowing some light inside the hallowed body, just delicate enough to float, perched under the chin of its commander. [excerpt

What is a Real Document, Anyway?

Documents, those materials that are reproducible and ostensibly ‘non-live’, are ubiquitous in the everyday to the degree that the experiencing and recording of life has become a tangled process. What follows the other – the act or its record? The many projects and writings that have emerged in recent years concerning the role documentation practices play in performance processes has resulted in a vital critique of how the live medium is not antithetical to but is indeed imbricated with archivalism. The Real time live performances unfold in can be understood as a temporal manifold that exists in records, the animate bodies of the performers, and in the memories of the audience. Documentation is now a fundamental part of our contemporary experience, leading some commentators to claim that “we are all archivists now”. If this is true then what dramaturgies can be constructed to embrace this aspect of the Real? What would a performance based on the practices and principles of archiving look like? In this paper I will consider the potential documents generated from performance have for engendering spectators to participate in a networked dialogue that stretches beyond any one event. I posit that such a practice would present a challenge to the authority of mediated events deemed of historical significance (however this judgement is determined) by placing documentation practices within a fictive framework, thereby demonstrating the level of artifice that is present in our perception of Reality

Just What IS a Watershed?

OVERVIEW: The student will observe the elements of a local watershed and begin to develop an appreciation for the need to protect watersheds as valuable resources. The student will observe the interdependence of a variety of factors on a watershed. These factors include local geology, the ecology of the watershed, and the effect of man’s influence.Environmental Science Institut

What is it like to have a body?

Few questions in psychology are as fundamental or as elusive as the sense of one’s own body. Despite widespread recognition of the link between body and self, psychology has only recently developed methods for the scientific study of bodily awareness. Experimental manipulations of embodiment in healthy volunteers have allowed important advances in knowledge. Synchronous multisensory inputs from different modalities play a fundamental role in producing ‘body ownership’, the feeling that my body is ‘mine’. Indeed, appropriate multisensory stimulation can induce ownership over external objects, virtual avatars, and even other people’s bodies. We argue that bodily experience is not monolithic, but has measurable internal structure and components that can be identified psychometrically and psychophysically, suggesting the apparent phenomenal unity of self-consciousness may be illusory. We further review evidence that the sense of one’s own body is highly plastic, with representations of body structure and size particularly prone to multisensory influences

What is a Robot?

A robot is a mechanical hand and arm, controlled by a computer. It is nothing more than another type of machine. Its ancestry combines two different, but related, technologies: mechanisation and control. The history of the computer has been essential to both. The history of mechanisation began with Oliver Evans' automated mill (1784), continued with Joseph Jacquard's loom (1801), and reached a high state of perfection at the end of the nineteenth century with Steward Babbitt's designs for a motorised crane which had a mechanical gripper to remove ingots from furnaces (1892). In the 1820s the technology of mechanisation cross-fertilised with the emerging science of information and control technology when the English mathematician, Charles Babbage, sometimes known as 'the father of the computer', developed an automatic calculator which he called his 'Difference Engine' (1823). Joseph Jacquard's loom proved to be the plateau from which all subsequent innovations in mechanisation and control took off. His invention was software, the novel idea that you could program a weaver's loom with punched cards that carried a coded 'model' of the patterns being woven. The Jacquard loom appeared in 1801, the last and most significant of a series of innovations in silk weaving which came out of Lyons from the early nineteenth century. It was so successful that by 1812 there were more than 11,000 in France alone. The punched card was a breakthrough in information technology: a Jacquard loom could carry as much as three megabytes of information on perforated paper. This technique of information storage became one of the fundamental components of the automatic memory calculators which gave birth to computers

What is an advert? : a sociological perspective on marketing media

This paper draws on a conceptual vocabulary developed in science and technology studies to advance a sociological theory of objects in marketing. Analysing a single advertising medium, it shows that marketing objects can exist simultaneously in multiple forms as physical artefacts, political decisions, legal entities and economic values. Armed with this understanding, the paper explores the ability of actors to manipulate these realities in their favour and investigates how it is possible to turn public space on a city street into an advertising object. Using John Law's notion of fractional objects, the paper proposes an analytic framework to open up new objects for critical intervention and reflection

The Problem of Nonhuman Phenomenology or, What is it Like to Be a Kinect?

A description of the epistemological problems opened by new materialist ontologies, explored through a phenomenological discussion of the Microsoft Kinect and Teoma Naccarato, John MacCallum, and Adrian Freed's performance piece, X (2013)

What Is It Good For? Towards A Millian Utility Model for Ethical Terrorism Coverage

Journalism, the “first draft of history” (i.e. Barth, 1943, p. 667), often drafts a history of tragedy and violence – “the oldest kinds of stories” (Coté & Simpson, 2000, p. 3). Throughout history, war and storytelling are intractably linked: “Because of the far-reaching effects of war, we want to know as much about it as possible. For that … we turn to media” (Copeland, 2005, p. xvii). However, because war “has no equivalent in a settled, civil society ” (Walzer, 1977, p. 127), historians and journalists alike perennially struggle to find a framework suitable for investigating and reporting it. In much of the ongoing public discourse surrounding war – as well as its coverage –arguments on both issues often resonate with the philosophy of utilitarianism. More than 150 years after its publication, John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism continues to exert a perennial influence in philosophical musings on both war and journalism. Utilitarian arguments appear especially in discussions of just war theory (JWT), a consequentialist tradition that demands that wars must be justifiable in why they start, how they are fought, and how they end. Most recently, William H. Shaw (2011) synthesized disparate elements of debate into what he called a new utilitarian war principle (U WP) for considering recourse to war. Increasingly, war coverage focuses more on the experience of those fighting and less on why and how they fight. In 2004, The New York Times published an unprecedented apology for failing to do enough of the latter in its coverage leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq the previous year. Reviewing Mill’s Utilitarianism, and building on recent Millian scholarship, this paper reacts to this confessed failure by proposing a more utilitarian model for how journalists might more comprehensively cover the wars we wage – especially when terror is a tactic, and the media itself risks complicity in amplifying the effect of the action

What is a prisoner of war for?

This article presents a conceptual map of the purposes served by continuing custody of prisoners of war and captured non-combatants. Morally legitimate and non-controversial purposes include preventing prisoners of war from rejoining their comrades-in-arms, preventing both prisoners of war and captured non-combatants from giving material support to combatants still in the field, facilitating orderly release and repatriation at the end of hostilities, and the prosecution for war crimes. Morally illegitimate purposes include punishment, exploitation as conscript labour, recruitment or conscription as combatants, exploitation for intelligence, display as proof of victory, and ideological indoctrination. Analysis of historical cases illustrating each purpose reveal that continuing custody is often motivated by multiple purposes, both legitimate and illegitimate. What explains adoption of multiple and illegitimate purposes for continuing custody? Prisoners are available for legitimate and illegitimate purposes because neither elites nor masses within the captor state typically view prisoners as members of the moral community.1 Continuing custody does not alter the perceived status of the captured as aliens who cannot be intuitively invested with expectations of reciprocity. This suggests both ending custody as soon as legitimate purposes are served and bringing the captured within the moral community while in continuing captivity. Scientia Militaria: South African Journal of Military Studies Vol. 36 (2) 2008: pp. 19-3