Here we are, let’s go: Dartington College of Arts, 14 June 1997, Studio 11, 6.30 pm. A revision of Lone Twin’s On Everest

This article borrows the structure and content of a performance text (Lone Twin's On Everest) and, through the intervention of a parallel discursive text, seeks to explore how the performance, developed on Dartington's Performance Writing BA (Hons) in 1997, functions as a response to, and a reflection of, the pedagogic environment encouraged by Dartington in the late 1990s. The article focuses on how textual and contextual practices were facilitated at Dartington, how ideas of writing, performance and performativity were shared and taught on Performance Writing and how Dartington?s interdisciplinary approach to pedagogy finds an expression in Lone Twin's continuing collaborative practice

Stumping and Stunts: Walking in Circles in the “Go-As-You-Please” Race

New York City, 1884: 14 contestants set out to walk round and round a track for six days in the “go-as-you-please” race, taking as little rest as possible. What does this durational act tell us about a type of performance just beginning to be named in New York slang as a “stunt”? Anticipating early-20th-century dance marathons and later durational performance art, the race enacted and troubled circulation, revealing fault lines of valorization: between work and leisure, work and life, and sporting and theatrical performance

ANTI Contemporary Art Festival 2014 - 2016

Participation, dialogue and exchange: ANTI works with innovative artists on projects that explore and explode urban space. ANTI began life in 2002. Since then we’ve produce 15 editions of ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival and have established a year-round programme of artist residencies and cultural projects and events. In 2014 we established the ANTI Festival International Prize for Live Art, one Finland’s richest cultural prizes. Held annually in Kuopio, Finland, the city hosts the festival, projects by artists from around the world inhabit the spaces of public life – homes, shops, city squares, business, forests, lakes – and directly engage communities and audiences in the making and showing of their work. The festival is free to attend. We’ve presented and commissioned some of the world’s most exciting artists from USA, Australia, Mexico, Japan and Europe along with leading artists from Finland, Sweden, Norway and Iceland. We’re proud to support an ever-growing generation of emerging artists, often presenting artists internationally for the first time. Artistic Directors: Johanna Tuukkanen, Gregg Whelan ANTI Festival Manager: Elisa Itkone

Soft band X/K luminosity ratios for gas-poor early-type galaxies

We aim to place upper limits on the combined X-ray emission from the population of steady nuclear-burning white dwarfs in galaxies. In the framework of the single-degenerate scenario these systems are believed to be likely progenitors of Type Ia supernovae. From the Chandra archive, we selected normal early-type galaxies with the point source detection sensitivity better than 10^37 erg/s to minimize the contribution of unresolved low-mass X-ray binaries. The galaxies, contaminated by emission from ionized ISM, were identified based on the analysis of radial surface brightness profiles and energy spectra. The sample was complemented by the bulge of M31 and the data for the solar neighborhood. To cover a broad range of ages, we also included NGC3377 and NGC3585. Our final sample includes eight gas-poor galaxies for which we determine L_X/L_K ratios in the 0.3-0.7 keV energy band. In computing the L_X we included both unresolved emission and soft resolved sources with the color temperature of kT_bb <= 200 eV. We find that the X/K luminosity ratios are in the range of (1.7-3.2) x 10^27 erg/s/L_K,sun. The data show no obvious trends with mass, age, or metallicity of the host galaxy, although a weak anti-correlation with the Galactic NH appears to exist. It is much flatter than predicted for a blackbody emission spectrum with temperature of ~50-75 eV, suggesting that sources with such soft spectra contribute significantly less than a half to the observed X/K ratios. However, the correlation of the X/K ratios with NH has a significant scatter and in the strict statistical sense cannot be adequately described by a superposition of a power law and a blackbody components with reasonable parameters, thus precluding quantitative constraints on the contribution from soft sources. (abbr.)Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, 4 tables, accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Candidate chemoreceptor subfamilies differentially expressed in the chemosensory organs of the mollusc Aplysia

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Marine molluscs, as is the case with most aquatic animals, rely heavily on olfactory cues for survival. In the mollusc <it>Aplysia californica</it>, mate-attraction is mediated by a blend of water-borne protein pheromones that are detected by sensory structures called rhinophores. The expression of G protein and phospholipase C signaling molecules in this organ is consistent with chemosensory detection being via a G-protein-coupled signaling mechanism.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we show that novel multi-transmembrane proteins with similarity to rhodopsin G-protein coupled receptors are expressed in sensory epithelia microdissected from the <it>Aplysia </it>rhinophore. Analysis of the <it>A. californica </it>genome reveals that these are part of larger multigene families that possess features found in metazoan chemosensory receptor families (that is, these families chiefly consist of single exon genes that are clustered in the genome). Phylogenetic analyses show that the novel <it>Aplysia </it>G-protein coupled receptor-like proteins represent three distinct monophyletic subfamilies. Representatives of each subfamily are restricted to or differentially expressed in the rhinophore and oral tentacles, suggesting that they encode functional chemoreceptors and that these olfactory organs sense different chemicals. Those expressed in rhinophores may sense water-borne pheromones. Secondary signaling component proteins Gα_q, Gα_i, and Gα_oare also expressed in the rhinophore sensory epithelium.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The novel rhodopsin G-protein coupled receptor-like gene subfamilies identified here do not have closely related identifiable orthologs in other metazoans, suggesting that they arose by a lineage-specific expansion as has been observed in chemosensory receptor families in other bilaterians. These candidate chemosensory receptors are expressed and often restricted to rhinophores and oral tentacles, lending support to the notion that water-borne chemical detection in <it>Aplysia </it>involves species- or lineage-specific families of chemosensory receptors.</p

Running Through A Field: Performance and Humanness

Endurance running hypothesis asks a fundamental question of performance practice, because it asks us to reconsider the very nature of the human body. In evolutionary terms running produces humanness, it is the body’s first performance. Long before arts disciplines and practices, there was running – the act accomplished by human bodies which produced human culture. There are many readings of performance practice that put the body center stage, and that see the field as a body-based enquiry into a number of cultural phenomena. Admittedly, this is a broad definition for a broad practice but it perhaps does passing justice to the field’s interest in bodies doing something in front of, or with, other bodies. So how does the body-based discipline of contemporary performance practice react when the body has been rediscovered and reimagined as one defined by running and endurance? The question, as I see it, is not whether running can be discussed in terms of being ‘art’ (of course it can) but rather what are the possibilities of using endurance running as a mode and site of performance-based research? The dancing body, a cultural phenomena that has engendered multiple modes of enquiry – training, the rigours of ‘technique’, discursive mappings of its social and political agency, etc., – is a known site of performance research: the running body is unknown. Imagine if our only experience of dance was as a mode of exercise, and if Zumba, the current fitness craze, was our only practiced choreography – this is generally where we are with running. As Benjamin Cheever has it: ‘Running is like breathing, men and women have always done it… And like breathing, running is not always noticed’ (Cheever 2007: 236). So, how to notice running? How to engage with a difficult practice

Stage Flight - Runner's World article

Performance artists are increasingly making running their muse. 'Artists are beginning to exploit sport's ability to produce meaningful narratives from pure physical action' says Gregg Whelan, who holds an Arts and Humanities Research Council Fellowship to explore the cultural agency of running and its relationship to endurance and participation. He takes us on a whistle-stop tour of 'running as art

Weather and Imagination, 2016 ANTI International Seminar

A unique meeting between meteorologists, theatre and culture researchers, artists and writers. In response to the festival’s theme, the 2016 ANTI Seminar presented an equally international collection of contributors from a range of disciplines united by a common interest in the various roles our weather plays in the understanding of ourselves; to what extent is the space of our collective and individual cultural identity shaped by the climate we inhabit, visit or watch from afar? Curator and chair: Gregg Whelan Dr. Carl Lavery (UK) Carl Lavery is Professor of Theatre and Performance, University of Glasgow. Lavery proposes Beckett’s theatre as a place of weather, where, if the sky is something we are always in, as opposed to something we simply gaze at, theatre is always already exposed to the elements. There is no immunity from the weather, no possibility of escaping the sky. Dr. Eimear Dunne (IE/FI) Eimear Dunne is a Senior Research Scientist at the Finnish Meteorological Institute's Atmospheric Research Centre of Eastern Finland. Dunne discusses connections between weather and the human psyche, based on current scientific literature alongside her own experience of living both in Ireland and Finland. Dr. Reetta Karjalainen (FI) Reetta Karjalainen discusses what it means to Sámi culture to live and work creatively in Lapland, Finland’s darkest region. Karjalainen has spent many years working at, and conducting research around, Skábmagovat, an international indigenous people’s film festival held in Inari, Finland. Tomi Paasonen (FI) Tomi Paasonen presents his new, site-spesific dance work, World Cup Bling Troopers in the programme of 2016 Winter ANTI Festival. World Cup Bling Troopers is an animalistic group of creatures dancing through the city of Kuopio and the skiing centre Tahko. Tomi Paasonen is a choreographer, director and multimedia artist currently working in Berlin and Kuopio. paasonen.com Tuija Kokkonen (FI) Tuija Kokkonen is an artist-researcher and the director of Maus&Orlovski performance collective. Since 1996 she has worked on a series of site-specific ‘memo performances’ exploring the relationships between performance and non-human, especially non-human agencies of animals, plants and weather, and the potentiality of performance/art at the age of ecological crises. tuijakokkonen.fi The seminar’s title is in homage to Lucian Boia’s work The Weather and The Imagination

Beings & Things, at Playing-UP The Symposium, Tate Modern

A contribution to the panel Beings & Things, with Lena Simic & Sid Anderson (Institute For The Art and Practice of Dissent At Home), moderated by Professor Heike Roms (Aberystwyth University) made in response to the below questions: What are the different relationships and possibilities between art that is for, with, or about kids? • What can Live Art offer as a tool for promoting cultural agency, as a means to critique power relationships, and as an approach to explore characteristics of childhood as material? • How Live Art can be employed as a strategy for cross generational collaboration, risk and agency? • What we can learn from children’s relationships with Live Art? The Symposium was curated by the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), Tate Early Years and Family Programme and Theatre of Research