Love Letters – Wearing Stories Told: A performance-technology provocation for interactive storytelling

This article focuses upon artistic modalities for the dissemination of personal and intimate memories to examine the relationship between technology, performance and audience. Drawing upon theoretical frameworks from social science and performance studies, sound art and computer science, the discussion is contextualised by combining three different perspectives. In doing so, the article concentrates on the authors’ collaborative and ongoing performance project Love Letters. The piece invited the participating audiences to write letters that capture platonic, familial or lustful emotion; share other audiences’ letters and interact with the performer’s costume by attaching the letters to her dress in addition to documenting names, memories, and streams of consciousness to the costume and onto the performer’s body. Love Letters was recently augmented with creative technologies and redeveloped as an interactive sound installation that’s both content and curation is user-generative. Through contextualising the performance project, this article investigates the different types of interfaces used in the performance (considering both their cultural and biological significance): body, skin and dress, which have been used to communicate written narrative. Viewing the project from a ubiquitous computing standpoint, we focus on the role of technology in such a setting. However, the primary importance is not the technology in itself but the pervasive effect it has on the storytelling process. Through our case study we propose how pervasive technology can support reminiscing and facilitate a sustainability in performative settings such as storytelling practices, while not drawing attention away from the performative and storytelling aspects of the piece

Documenting Performance : The Context and Processes of Digital Curation and Archiving

"Performance in the digital age has undergone a radical shift in which a once ephemeral art form can now be relived, replayed and repeated. Until now, much scholarship has been devoted to the nature of live performance in the digital age; Documenting Performance is the first book to provide a collection of key writings about the process of documenting performance, focused not on questions of liveness or the artistic qualities of documents, but rather on the professional approaches to recovering, preserving and disseminating knowledge of live performance." -- Editor's website

Frequency of COL4A3/COL4A4 Mutations amongst Families Segregating Glomerular Microscopic Hematuria and Evidence for Activation of the Unfolded Protein Response. Focal and Segmental Glomerulosclerosis Is a Frequent Development during Ageing

Familial glomerular hematuria(s) comprise a genetically heterogeneous group of conditions which include Alport Syndrome (AS) and thin basement membrane nephropathy (TBMN). Here we investigated 57 Greek-Cypriot families presenting glomerular microscopic hematuria (GMH), with or without proteinuria or chronic kidney function decline, but excluded classical AS. We specifically searched the COL4A3/A4 genes and identified 8 heterozygous mutations in 16 families (28,1%). Eight non-related families featured the founder mutation COL4A3-p.(G1334E). Renal biopsies from 8 patients showed TBMN and focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS). Ten patients (11.5%) reached end-stage kidney disease (ESKD) at ages ranging from 37-69-yo (mean 50,1-yo). Next generation sequencing of the patients who progressed to ESKD failed to reveal a second mutation in any of the COL4A3/A4/A5 genes, supporting that true heterozygosity for COL4A3/A4 mutations predisposes to CRF/ESKD. Although this could be viewed as a milder and late-onset form of autosomal dominant AS, we had no evidence of ultrastructural features or extrarenal manifestations that would justify this diagnosis. Functional studies in cultured podocytes transfected with wild type or mutant COL4A3 chains showed retention of mutant collagens and differential activation of the unfolded protein response (UPR) cascade. This signifies the potential role of the UPR cascade in modulating the final phenotype in patients with collagen IV nephropathies