Project sigma: the temporality of activism

This chapter focuses on sigma, a network of cultural practitioners that was active roughly between 1963–1965. This highly ambitious project involved a network of writers, artists, scientists and psychiatrists, including William Burroughs, Jeff Nuttall and R.D. Laing. Its successes were modest: the most tangible outcome of the project was the sigma portfolio, an expanding, self-published collection of texts (Trocchi, 1964), ‘part manifesto, part manual’ for art activism (Wark, 2011 : 126). Its initiator and convener was Alexander Trocchi, the Scottish novelist, poet, Situationist and drug addict. The intention of the text is to present a close reading of sigma essays to explore the unfolding of an art activist logic within the programmatic texts of the portfolio

Path Integral Quantization of the Symplectic Leaves of the SU(2)* Poisson-Lie Group

The Feynman path integral is used to quantize the symplectic leaves of the Poisson-Lie group SU(2)*. In this way we obtain the unitary representations of U_q(su(2)). This is achieved by finding explicit Darboux coordinates and then using a phase space path integral. I discuss the *-structure of SU(2)* and give a detailed description of its leaves using various parametrizations and also compare the results with the path integral quantization of spin.Comment: 24 pages, LaTeX, no figures, full postscript available from http://phyweb.lbl.gov/theorygroup/papers/40890.p

A Variational Formulation of Symplectic Noncommutative Mechanics

The standard lore in noncommutative physics is the use of first order variational description of a dynamical system to probe the space noncommutativity and its consequences in the dynamics in phase space. As the ultimate goal is to understand the inherent space noncommutativity we propose a variational principle for noncommutative dynamical systems in configuration space, based on results of our previous work [14]. We hope that this variational formulation in configuration space can be of help to elucidate the definition of some global and dynamical properties of classical and quantum noncommutative space.Comment: 17 pages, Latex. Accepted for publication in IJGMM

Numerical Approximation of the Transport Equation: Comparison of Five Positive Definite Algorithms

IIASA's Regional Acidification INformation and Simulation (RAINS) model will be used to develop and assess international control strategies to reduce emissions of acidifying pollutants. These strategies will involve the expenditure of large sum of money; it is important, therefore, to assess the effect of uncertainties in the model on its results. An important component of the RAINS model is its atmospheric transport component; this paper reports the results of examining several algorithms for solution of the atmospheric transport equation. It also represents a joint effort between IIASA scientists and those in the Institute of Meteorology and Water Management in Warsaw and Central Institute for Meteorology and Geodynamics in Vienna