Experimental Feminisms

Panellists, the artists and writers Julia Calver, Heather Phillipson and Isabel Waidner, reflect on their experimental practices, exploring questions such as: What is the relation between experimenting with form and experimenting with feminism? How does experimentation allow us to rethink the materiality of writing, as well as the relationship between bodies, words, images and things? Each practitioner speaks about and reads examples of their work. The panel was devised by Sara Ahmed and Helena Reckitt as part of the Feminist Writing Conference, Centre for Feminist Research, Goldsmiths, University of London, and was followed by a conversation moderated by Reckitt

Hot Lines

On the occasion of Heather Phiillipson's 'Annotation's residency at The Drawing Room, Helena Reckitt chaired an evening of readings, presentations and discussions. Joining Heather Phillipson were invited friends: Helen Cammock, artist; Karen Di Franco, archivist and curator; and Helen Nisbet, Curatorial Fellow, Cubitt. Contributors considered intersections of drawn and written lines – the potential convergences for visual and poetic practices in attempting to, as Kathy Acker said, ‘mine the hot stuff’

Forum for drawing presentation, Heather Phillipson: 'formal incidents'

Heather Phillipson presented new video performance works which formed part of her final exhibition as LCF Artist in Residence

k-foldability of words

We extend results regarding a combinatorial model introduced by Black et al.(2017) which generalizes the folding of the RNA molecule in biology. Consider a word on alphabet {A 1 ,A¯ 1 ,…,A m ,A¯ m } in which A¯ i is called the complement of A i . A word w is foldable if can be wrapped around a rooted plane tree T, starting at the root and working counterclockwise such that one letter labels each half edge and the two letters labeling the same edge are complements. The tree T is called w-valid. We define a bijection between edge-colored plane trees and words folded onto trees. This bijection is used to characterize and enumerate words for which there is only one valid tree. We follow up with a characterization of words for which there exist exactly two valid trees. In addition, we examine the set R(n,m) consisting of all integers k for which there exists a word with the alphabet {A 1 ,A¯ 1 ,…,A m ,A¯ m } of length 2n with exactly k valid trees. Black, Drellich, and Tymoczko showed that for the nth Catalan number C n , {C n ,C n−1 }⊂R(n,1) but k⁄∈R(n,1) for C n−1 <k<C n . We describe a superset of R(n,1) in terms of the Catalan numbers by which we establish more missing intervals. We also prove R(n,1) contains all non-negative integers less than n+1

Genotypic variation and mixtures of Lyme Borrelia in Ixodes ticks from North America and Europe.

Lyme disease, caused by various species of Borrelia, is transmitted by Ixodes ticks in North America and Europe. Studies have shown the genotype of Borrelia burgdorferi sensu stricto (s.s.) or the species of B. burgdorferi sensu lato (s.l.) affects the ability of the bacteria to cause local or disseminated infection in humans.We used a multilocus PCR electrospray mass spectrometry assay to determine the species and genotype Borrelia from ticks collected in New York, Connecticut, Indiana, Southern Germany, and California and characterized isolates from parts of the United States and Europe. These analyses identified 53 distinct genotypes of B. burgdorferi sensu stricto with higher resolution than ospC typing. Genotypes of other members of the B. burgdorferi sensu lato complex were also identified and genotyped including B. afzelii, B. garinii, B. lusitaniae, B. spielmanii, and B. valaisiana. While each site in North America had genotypes unique to that location, we found genotypes shared between individual regions and two genotypes found across the United States. Significant B. burgdorferi s.s. genotypic diversity was observed between North America and Europe: only 6.6% of US genotypes (3 of 45) were found in Europe and 27% of the European genotypes (3 of 11) were observed in the US. Interestingly, 39% of adult Ixodes scapularis ticks from North America were infected with more than one genotype of B. burgdorferi s.s. and 22.2% of Ixodes ricinus ticks from Germany were infected with more than one genotype of B. burgdorferi s.l.The presence of multiple Borrelia genotypes in ticks increases the probability that a person will be infected with more than one genotype of B. burgdorferi, potentially increasing the risks of disseminated Lyme disease. Our study indicates that the genotypic diversity of Borrelia in ticks in both North America and Europe is higher then previously reported and can have potential clinical consequences