2,753 research outputs found
Ambivalent pasts: colonial history and the theatricalities of ethnographic display
In the twenty-first century, museums holding ethnographic collections have come under scrutiny for their implication in colonial history, and many have started to address this problematic legacy, often in conscious attempts to move beyond the colonial as “post-ethnographic” spaces and forums for intercultural dialogue. This essay uses a contemporary artwork, Peggy Buth’s installation “The Warrior as Multiple, “exhibited at the Frankfurt Museum of World Cultures in 2014, as a starting point to develop a taxonomy of dominant curatorial strategies at work in ethnographic museums today: self-reflexive contextualization, inversion or reversal, indigenous curation, visible storage, and the turn to live performance—all of which are used to address colonial history. Approaching these strategies from the perspective of theatre and performance studies, the essay analyzes their “theatricalities” of display—the “doing” of ethnographic objects, as well as the “spectacularity” of dioramic settings—through a series of case studies, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut, and the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. It argues that despite their critical potential, these strategies run the danger of being complicit in a working through (in the Freudian sense of the term) of colonial history, which might ultimately “liberate” ethnographic museums from their problematic legacy. Instead, the essay proposes an insistence on ambivalence, understood as the simultaneous co-existence of at least two conflicting meanings, in order to resist such an erasure
Statistical Analysis of Structural Transitions in Small Systems
We discuss general thermodynamic properties of molecular structure formation
processes like protein folding by means of simplified, coarse-grained models.
The conformational transitions accompanying these processes exhibit
similarities to thermodynamic phase transitions, but also significant
differences as the systems that we investigate here are very small. The
usefulness of a microcanonical statistical analysis of these transitions in
comparison with a canonical interpretation is emphasized. The results are
obtained by employing sophisticated generalized-ensemble Markov-chain Monte
Carlo methodologies.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Recent
Developments in Computer Simulation Studies in Condensed Matter Physics, Feb
23-27, 2009, Athens, Georgia, US
Not out of context: Eric Magassa's 'The Lost' series
The article analyses a series of contemporary photographs by Swedish multi-disciplinary artist Eric Magassa and places them within the larger context of postcolonial practice. Focusing on Magassa's use of masks and the relationship, in his photographs, between sitter and environment, it argues that the political value of his work is to disrupt colonial legacies of Modernist thinking
Contact-Density Analysis of Lattice Polymer Adsorption Transitions
By means of contact-density chain-growth simulations, we investigate a simple
lattice model of a flexible polymer interacting with an attractive substrate.
The contact density is a function of the numbers of monomer-substrate and
monomer-monomer contacts. These contact numbers represent natural order
parameters and allow for a comprising statistical study of the conformational
space accessible to the polymer in dependence of external parameters such as
the attraction strength of the substrate and the temperature. Since the contact
density is independent of the energy scales associated to the interactions, its
logarithm is an unbiased measure for the entropy of the conformational space.
By setting explicit energy scales, the thus defined, highly general
microcontact entropy can easily be related to the microcanonical entropy of the
corresponding hybrid polymer-substrate system.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of the 23nd Workshop on Recent
Developments in Computer Simulation Studies in Condensed Matter Physics, Feb
22-26, 2010, Athens, Georgia, US
Wanna Play? Dries Verhoeven and the Limits of Non-Professional Performance
In October 2014, Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer (HAU)—one of Germany’s most influential performance venues, programming and often co-producing work by artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Jérôme Bel, Meg Stuart and Gob Squad—opened its new season with a festival called Treffpunkte (meeting points).1 Conceptually, the month-long festival was located at the intersection of some of the major trends in contemporary Western theatre and performance, particularly the interest ‘in curating intimacy in public’ (Walsh 2014: 57; Read 2008), the renegotiation of theatre’s place in the public sphere (Balme 2014; Haedicke 2013) and the relation of socially engaged performance, in the broadest sense, to late global capitalism (Jackson 2011; Harvie 2013). Its explicit aim was to explore, through the means of performance, ‘the status of the private in the public sphere’ (den Status des Privaten in der öffentlichen Sphäre) and to find out whether ‘intimacy’ (Intimität)—equated with an authentic ‘communication between people’ (Kommunikation zwischen Menschen)—was still possible ‘in an age where the public space has been entirely pervaded by market conformity’ (im Zeitalter der totalen Durchdringung des öffentlichen Raumes durch das Marktförmige) (Vanackere 2014: 2).
Conformational phase diagram for polymers adsorbed at ultrathin nanowires
We study the conformational behavior of a polymer adsorbed at an attractive
nanostring and construct the complete structural phase diagram in dependence of
the binding strength and effective thickness of the string. For this purpose,
Monte Carlo optimization techniques are employed to identify lowest-energy
structures for a coarse-grained hybrid polymer-wire model. Among the
representative conformations in the different phases are, for example, compact
droplets attached to the string and also nanotube-like monolayer films wrapping
the string in a very ordered way. We here systematically analyze low-energy
shapes and structural order parameters to elucidate the transitions between the
structural phases
Conformational Transitions of Non-Grafted Polymers Near an Adsorbing Substrate
We have performed multicanonical chain-growth simulations of a polymer
interacting with an adsorbing surface. The polymer, which is not explicitly
anchored at the surface, experiences a hierarchy of phase transitions between
conformations binding and non-binding with the substrate. We discuss the phase
diagram in the temperature-solubility plane and highlight the transition
``path'' through the free-energy landscape.Comment: 4 pages, revtex.cls, 10 postscript figures, author information under
http://www.physik.uni-leipzig.de/index.php?id=2
Adsorption Phenomena at Organic-Inorganic Interfaces
The qualitative solvent- and temperature-dependent conformational behavior of
a peptide in the proximity of solid substrates with different adsorption
properties is investigated by means of a simple lattice model. The resulting
pseudophase diagrams exhibit a complex structure, which can be understood by
analysing the minima of the free-energy landscape in dependence of appropriate
system parameters.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur
Chain-Growth Simulations of Lattice-Peptide Adsorption to Attractive Substrates
Based on a newly developed contact-density chain-growth algorithm, we have
simulated a nongrafted peptide in the vicinity of different attractive
substrates. We analyzed the specificity of the peptide adsorption by focussing
on the conformational transitions the peptide experiences in the
binding/unbinding processes. In a single simulation run, we obtained the
contact density, i.e., the distribution of intrinsic monomer-monomer contacts
and monomer-substrate nearest-neighbor contacts. This allows a systematic
reweighting to all values of external control parameters such as temperature
and solvent quality after the simulation. The main result is the complete
solubility-temperature pseudo-phase diagram which is based on the corresponding
specific-heat profile. We find a surprisingly rich structure of pseudo-phases
that can roughly be classified into compact and expanded conformations in both
regimes, adsorption and desorption. Furthermore, underlying subphases were
identified, which, in particular, appear noticeably in the compact
pseudo-phases.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure
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