Data Loam: The Future of Knowledge Systems

This was a two year collaborative research project funded by the Austrian Research Science Foundation [FWF-PEEK]. Data Loam was designed as a multi-faceted arts-based approach to one of the more intractable and urgent problems facing our contemporary digital environment today: the massive proliferation of data, and with it, a particularly nuanced set of complexities confronting our national libraries, universities, research labs as well non-academic cultural institutions and industry-oriented environments. The urgency of the problem circled around three areas: archiving (what to archive and how), accessibility (how to ensure that knowledges systems would remain, intrinsically, ‘open’ in the face of ever-increasing data) and experimental (enabling creativity, intelligence, curiosity, diversity and risk to remain as fundamental to our way of life). In so doing, Data Loam rejected the entrenched paradigm of indexicality as the only method capable of articulating the ‘how’, ‘what’, ‘where’ and ‘when’ of our contemporary world as the 'internet of things'. This meant rejecting also the entrenched Cold War 'binaric systematizing that tended to promote apocalyptic narratives of technology pitting ‘man’ against ‘machine’, and in so doing, taking as given the end of freedom, rule of law, governance and indeed humanity itself. Instead, Data Loam took as its starting point precisely the unruly materiality of information, with its the massive proliferation, messy logics, oddly cathected derivatives of circulation and exchange, navigational gaming, multi-dimensional visualities, crypto-economies, block-chain equivalences, and complexly sutured arenas of cultural difference. Rather than trying to compartmentalise, frame, cut-down, or force into silos or pockets of information, Data Loam foreground this exponential explosion of Big Data. It did so, first and foremost, by putting art-based research and practice at its core, emphasising the logics of sense, planes of immanence, feedback loops, multi-dimensionality, entanglement, and diffraction. Data Loam was able to reach its main goal: the articulation of how data becomes self-organised and can produce a kind of open self-governance that relies of the mass proliferation of information. On a practical level, this included developing an algorithm that could enable a new lexicographical search and tag organising system. Perhaps most significantly, »Data Loam« answered the question of ‘how’ correlations ‘matter’; that is to say, how correlations generate matter, and in so doing enable heterogeneous and local dimensionalities that ‘in-form’ aesthetic-ethical-political ecosystems. The project was linked with teaching /studio work with the MA students at the University of Applied Arts and the PHD students at the RCA (Entanglement Research Group). It was connected with RIAT (Vienna) and was rolled out in various exhibitions in Berlin, Vienna, Singapore, New Zealand and London. National libraries included: The British Library, the Austrian National Library, The German Federal Archive, the Humboldt University (Institute for Library and information Science), and Tisch School of Arts (NYU)

The Aetiology of Pneumonia Associated with Measles in Bantu Children

Antemortem and postmortem lung puncture aspiration was performed in Bantu children with pneumonia associated with measles. The superinfecting organisms were commonly Staphylococcus pyogenes, but from one-third of the patients Gramnegative organisms were cultured. These organisms were rarely sensitive to ampicillin or streptomycin. Antibiotic therapy should be tailored accordingly.S. Afr. Med. J., 45, 1402 (1971

Public art, commemoration, and history in postwar Europe

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2009.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 343-364).The performative monument, as I term an emergent genre of interactive public actions, rests on a new notion of agency in public space, in which political responsibility is performed by historically aware individuals in acts of commemoration. This dissertation argues that public performance art starting in the 1960s provided a crucial impulse for new forms of commemoration in 1980s Europe and beyond. I claim that performance, a supposed antipode to the monument in its ephemerality and dematerialization, did not neutralize the monumental but reinvented it as a new practice: one that involved the audience explicitly through conventional transactions, best understood through the speech-act theory of J. L. Austin (who coined the term "performative" in the 1950s). To specify the correlation between performance and monumental public space, I draw attention to the empirical shift from performance to monument production in the work of postwar Central and Eastern European artists, and to the theoretical continuity that makes this shift possible. Monumental architecture played a role in the early performances of Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, Jochen Gerz (all German), Valie Export, Peter Weibel, and Giinter Brus (Austrians), Marina Abramovid and Braco Dimitrijevid (from former Yugoslavia), among others. These artists brought a performative component to the memorial culture of the 1980s and '90s, mediating between history and the individual in ways sketched by the ephemeral events of '60s and '70s performance.(cont.) I examine these interconnections in the passage from confrontation to commemoration through a variety of heterogeneous but related documents: photographs and eyewitness accounts of early performance; interviews and press accounts that evolved their own logic and myths over the years separate from the events; plans and drawings of unrealized monuments, and that most complicated and characteristic form of 'performative documentation,' photographs modified through drawing, painting, or collage techniques to involve their viewers in a collaborative re-imagining of the role of commemoration in public space.by Mechtild Widrich.Ph.D

Robots as Companions: What can we Learn from Servants and Companions in Literature, Theater, and Film?

Many researchers are working on developing robots into adequate partners, be it at the working place, be it at home or in leisure activities, or enabling elder persons to lead a self-determined, independent life. While quite some progress has been made in e.g. speech or emotion understanding, processing and expressing, the relations between humans and robots are usually only short-term. In order to build long-term, i.e. social relations, qualities like empathy, trust building, dependability, non-patronizing, and others will be required. But these are just terms and as such no adequate starting points to “program” these capacities even more how to avoid the problems and pitfalls in interactions between humans and robots. However, a rich source for doing this is available, unused until now for this purpose: artistic productions, namely literature, theater plays, not to forget operas, and films with their multitude of examples. Poets, writers, dramatists, screen-writers, etc. have studied for centuries the facets of interactions between persons, their dynamics, and the related snags. And since we wish for human-robot relations as master-servant relations - the human obviously being the master - the study of these relations will be prominent. A procedure is proposed, with four consecutive steps, namely Selection, Analysis, Categorization, and Integration. Only if we succeed in developing robots which are seen as servants we will be successful in supporting and helping humans through robots