646 research outputs found
The Ballistic Flight of an Automatic Duck
This article analyses Jacques de Vaucanson's automatic duck and its successive appearances in Thomas Pynchon's work (both Mason & Dixon and, by extension, Gravity's Rainbow) to discuss the correlations between (self-) evolving technologies and space age gadgets. The Cold War serves, therefore, as the frame of reference for this article, which is further preoccupied with the geographical positions that automatons or prototype cyborgs occupy: the last part of the essay analyses Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project, where mechanical hens stand at the entrance to dreamworlds. Automatic fowl guard, and usher into being, new technologised worlds
The insectile informe: H. P. Lovecraft and the deliquescence of form
This article investigates the phonic materiality of sound, specifically of buzzing voices, in H. P. Lovecraft’s 1930 short story “The Whisperer in the Darkness.” The insectile is configured as a trope for the “outside” and as a formless entity, the latter rendered as an enfleshed voice. I am concerned with the interplay between form and formlessness, particularly as it pertains to sound, and the production of form, that is, how form and, conversely, formlessness are determined as political categories, not ontological givens. I use this approach, a focus on the valorization of form, to argue against recent scholarship, notably Graham Harman’s Weird Realism (2012), claiming Lovecraft as a writer offering a deconstruction of “man” through perspectives other than human, when the latter remains absolutely understood according to what Sylvia Wynter calls the “coloniality of Being.
The politics of a smile
In this article, I explore the smile as regulatory mechanism installed in the face to organise a subject's responses to neo-imperial/biopolitical capitalist governmentality. I begin by situating my reading with respect to Sara Ahmed's and Lauren Berlant's work on affective labour before turning to German philosopher Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) in order to consider the smile as theory of sovereignty. I propose that these two meanings or deployments of the smile – as (1) act that demonstrates forced enslavement to capitalist culture and (2) as articulation of the sovereign self/state – converge in their joint purpose, which is the elimination of sociality and solidarity. My article thereby contributes to recent scholarship on the face, in particular its function in affective/service labour, which it supplements by drawing on Plessner's work: at stake is not only the worker's subjection to capital but also to a regime obsessed with securing borders
The Insectile and the Deconstruction of the Non/Human
The book is driven by a central dynamic between form and formlessness, further staging an investigation of the phenomenon of fascination using Lacanian psychoanalysis, suggesting that the psychodrama of subject formation plays itself out ..
The ventriloquist in periphery: Impact of eccentricity-related reliability on audio-visual localization
The relative reliability of separate sensory estimates influences the way they are merged into a unified percept. We investigated how eccentricity-related changes in reliability of auditory and visual stimuli influence their integration across the entire frontal space. First, we surprisingly found that despite a strong decrease in auditory and visual unisensory localization abilities in periphery, the redundancy gain resulting from the congruent presentation of audio-visual targets was not affected by stimuli eccentricity. This result therefore contrasts with the common prediction that a reduction in sensory reliability necessarily induces an enhanced integrative gain. Second, we demonstrate that the visual capture of sounds observed with spatially incongruent audio-visual targets (ventriloquist effect) steadily decreases with eccentricity, paralleling a lowering of the relative reliability of unimodal visual over unimodal auditory stimuli in periphery. Moreover, at all eccentricities, the ventriloquist effect positively correlated with a weighted combination of the spatial resolution obtained in unisensory conditions. These findings support and extend the view that the localization of audio-visual stimuli relies on an optimal combination of auditory and visual information according to their respective spatial reliability. All together, these results evidence that the external spatial coordinates of multisensory events relative to an observer's body (e.g., eyes' or head's position) influence how this information is merged, and therefore determine the perceptual outcome
Fermi-surface transformation across the pseudogap critical point of the cuprate superconductor LaNdSrCuO
The electrical resistivity and Hall coefficient R of the
tetragonal single-layer cuprate Nd-LSCO were measured in magnetic fields up to
T, large enough to access the normal state at , for closely
spaced dopings across the pseudogap critical point at .
Below , both coefficients exhibit an upturn at low temperature, which
gets more pronounced with decreasing . Taken together, these upturns show
that the normal-state carrier density at drops upon entering the
pseudogap phase. Quantitatively, it goes from at to at . By contrast, the mobility does not change appreciably, as
revealed by the magneto-resistance. The transition has a width in doping and
some internal structure, whereby R responds more slowly than to the
opening of the pseudogap. We attribute this difference to a Fermi surface that
supports both hole-like and electron-like carriers in the interval , with compensating contributions to R. Our data are in excellent
agreement with recent high-field data on YBCO and LSCO. The quantitative
consistency across three different cuprates shows that a drop in carrier
density from to is a universal signature of the pseudogap
transition at . We discuss the implication of these findings for the
nature of the pseudogap phase.Comment: 11 pages, 12 figure
Pseudogap phase of cuprate superconductors confined by Fermi surface topology
The properties of cuprate high-temperature superconductors are largely shaped
by competing phases whose nature is often a mystery. Chiefly among them is the
pseudogap phase, which sets in at a doping that is material-dependent.
What determines is currently an open question. Here we show that the
pseudogap cannot open on an electron-like Fermi surface, and can only exist
below the doping at which the large Fermi surface goes from hole-like
to electron-like, so that . We derive this result from
high-magnetic-field transport measurements in
LaNdSrCuO under pressure, which reveal a large and
unexpected shift of with pressure, driven by a corresponding shift in
. This necessary condition for pseudogap formation, imposed by details
of the Fermi surface, is a strong constraint for theories of the pseudogap
phase. Our finding that can be tuned with a modest pressure opens a new
route for experimental studies of the pseudogap.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 7 supplemental figure
Large scale fire test on tunnel segment: Real boundary conditions in order to evaluate spalling sensitivity and fire resistance
The objective of the present study was to reproduce the real state of stress in a tunnel segment in order to evaluate the spalling sensivity. Numerical tools have been used to predict the restrained axial forces which may appear due to the thermal expansion. A new experimental set up has been designed to withstand these forces. Thus the choice of a protected self-resistant slab to reproduce the surroundings has been done to test the loaded precast tunnel segment which withstood a two hour modified hydrocarbon fire with only limited amount of spalling
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