Pause.Fervour: Reflections on a Pandemic

Initiated by the COVID-19 crisis, Pause. Fervour. Reflections on a Pandemic is a collaborative effort by the Harun Farocki Institut, Journal of Visual Culture, and all the project’s contributors. At the beginning of the first wave, an invitation/call for participation was sent out to artists, designers, editors, collaborations and collectives, activists, educators, curators, filmmakers, administrators, culture workers, and scholars of Anthropology, Architecture, Critical Legal Theory, Art History, Museology, Critical Race Theory, Design and Urban Studies, Environmental Studies, Philosophy, and Visual Cultures. The call was sent to Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Board, and a wide selection of previous contributors and members of its extended communities, describing the task as follows: ‘The SARS-Cov-2 crisis is, will be, and will have been so many things – a disastrous event of unknown scale, an individual and collective tragedy, a historical turning point, a huge biopolitical experiment, and so much more. At the same time, attempts to act responsibly, caringly, solidarily in the face of this global catastrophe are overwhelming. The planetary dimension of the crisis seems to put everything into question, likewise affecting the knowledge production, visual practice, critical theory, political organizing, scholarly enterprises, research communities to which we are committed (and which are experiencing existential and epistemological shockwave after shockwave on a daily basis). There is a lot of spontaneous, ad hoc opinion-making and premature commentary around, as to be expected. However, the ethics and politics of artistic and theoretical practice to be pursued in this situation should oblige us to stay cautious and to intervene with care in the discussion.’ As one of JVC’s editors put it in our informal conversations: ‘We are not looking for sensationalism, but rather, moments of reflection that: make connections between what’s happening now and the larger intellectual contexts that our readership shares; to offer small ways to be reflective and to draw on tools we have and things we know instead of just feeling numb and overwhelmed; help serve as intellectual community for one another while we are isolated; support the work of being thoughtful and trying to find/make meaning…which is always a collective endeavour, even if we are forced to be apart.’ As we were forced to be apart, joining forces in this collective endeavour made this a project in mutual aid. The 48 contributions secured are arranged here into four sections on: the pandemical logic of very late capitalism; lockdown life; biopolitics and governmentality; and new ways of caring. Equal part powerful and moving, angry and heartbreaking, righteous and desperate, hopeless and demanding of a better future, together this polyphony posits if not an actual antidote then certainly abundant curative reflections to the disease and ways we might navigate this on going crisis. Contributors: Danah Abdulla; Elisa Adami; Alexandra Délano Alphonso; Edinson Arroyo; Art Catalyst with Gary Zhezi Zhang and Valeria Graziano, Marcell Mars, and Tomislav Medak (Pirate Care); Oreet Asheery; Nika Autor; Daniel A. Barber; Jordan Baseman; Dave Beech; Sara Blaylock; Katarzyna Bojarska; Kimberly Juanita Brown; Eray Çayli; Teresa Cisneros; Tom Corby; David Dibosa; Death Class; Ruth Ewan; Alessandra Ferrini; Janine Francois; Lina Hakim; Juliet Jacques; Kelene Hazan; Dean Kenning; Margareta Kern; Lana Lin and H. Lan Thao Lam; Yve Lomax; Laura U. Marks; Shannon Mattern; Jordan McKenzie; Joel McKim; Vladimir Milandinović and Stephanie Young; Philip Miller and Maros Martins; Hana Noorali and Lynton Talbot; Bahar Noorizadeh; The Partisan Social Club; Andreas Philippouloulos-Mihalopoulos; Pil and Galia Kollektiv; Plastique Fantastique; Amit S. Rai; John Paul Recco; Vanessa Schwartz; Jelena Stojković; Jon Thomson and Alison Craighead; Atej Tutta and Valeria Cozarini; Isobel Wohl; and Andrea Luka Zimmerman. Pause. Fervour. Reflections on a Pandemic is co-published by the Harun Farocki Institut and Journal of Visual Culture, designed by Simon Pavič, and edited by Manca Bajec, Tom Holert, and Marquard Smith

Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator

Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator is a co-authored book that identifies where we’re at and where we might be going vis-à-vis the idea of research in the art school, higher education, museums and galleries, and the creative and cultural industries more generally. By way of this book, the authors want to ask why and how specific modes of practice (artistic practice, curating, and practices of pedagogy) operate, and what particular kinds of knowledges artistic research, the curatorial, and the educator generate and disseminate. Concerned for ‘practice’ in our knowledge-based polis, where knowledge – which includes practice as knowledge – is institutionalized and instrumentalized, at the same time we’re interested in the potentialities of how ‘[practice] might be comprehended and described as a specific mode of generating and disseminating knowledge’, and ‘the particular kind of knowledge that can be produced within the artistic realm by… practitioners… who operate in its various places and spaces’, as contributor Tom Holert puts it so eloquently. Throughout Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator we foreground, celebrate, and question the idea of research, and especially as it relates to the figure of the practitioner, curator, and educator as researcher (as well as to practice, curating, and educating themselves as research and as praxis). As such, the book is hopefully useful for PhD students in art schools internationally, and those working across the Arts and Humanities in institutions of higher education, as well as additional publics engaged critically with the arts and culture. Contributors: Dr Žygimantas Augustinas (artist and Associate Professor, Vilnius Academy of Arts); Professor Tom Corby (artist, and Associate Dean [Research], Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London); Dr Tom Holert (artist, critic, and co-founder of the Harun Farocki Institut, Berlin); Dr Lolita Jablonskienė (Senior Curator, National Gallery of Art, Lithuania); Dr Vytautas Michelkevičius (curator, and Associate Professor, Vilnius Academy of Arts); Dr Ieva Pleikienė (Pro-Rector of Studies, Vilnius Academy of Arts); Dr Emily Pringle (Head of Research, Tate); and Dr Marquard Smith (Professor of Artistic Research, Vilnius Academy of Arts, and Programme Leader, MA Museums & Galleries in Education, UCL, London). This book is the third in a Series of collaborations between Vilnius Academy of Arts, Lithuania, and the National Gallery of Art, Lithuania. The titles of the four books in the Series are (1) Research: Practitioner | Curator | Educator (2) Decolonising: the Museum, the Curriculum, and the Mind (3) Do The Right Thing, and (4) What If? The Future of History in Post-Truth Times

Loving work: drawing attention to pleasure and pain in the body of the cultural worker

In this article, we present our current research into the body and mind at work, with a particular focus on experiences and implications of enjoyment and love of work within the culture sector. This research is developed through the project Manual Labours that explores the historical conditioning between the body and mind in the so-called immaterial labour conditions. The project aims to identify positive and negative affective labour and the role that physical relationships to work can have in helping conceptualise current working conditions. The enjoyment of work leads to complex differentiations between work and life. This article explores the implications of exploitative labour conditions as self-employed or salaried passionate workers are internalising and developing a sense of ‘un-alienated’ ownership over their wage labour

Mutations in GABRB3

Objective: To examine the role of mutations in GABRB3 encoding the b3 subunit of the GABAA receptor in individual patients with epilepsy with regard to causality, the spectrum of genetic variants, their pathophysiology, and associated phenotypes. Methods: We performed massive parallel sequencing of GABRB3 in 416 patients with a range of epileptic encephalopathies and childhood-onset epilepsies and recruited additional patients with epilepsy with GABRB3 mutations from other research and diagnostic programs. Results: We identified 22 patients with heterozygous mutations in GABRB3, including 3 probands frommultiplex families. The phenotypic spectrum of the mutation carriers ranged from simple febrile seizures, genetic epilepsies with febrile seizures plus, and epilepsy withmyoclonic-atonic seizures to West syndrome and other types of severe, early-onset epileptic encephalopathies. Electrophysiologic analysis of 7 mutations in Xenopus laevis oocytes, using coexpression of wild-type or mutant beta(3), together with alpha(5) and gamma(2s) subunits and an automated 2-microelectrode voltage-clamp system, revealed reduced GABA-induced current amplitudes or GABA sensitivity for 5 of 7 mutations. Conclusions: Our results indicate that GABRB3 mutations are associated with a broad phenotypic spectrum of epilepsies and that reduced receptor function causing GABAergic disinhibition represents the relevant disease mechanism

Comparative genome analysis and genome-guided physiological analysis of Roseobacter litoralis

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p><it>Roseobacter litoralis </it>OCh149, the type species of the genus, and <it>Roseobacter denitrificans </it>OCh114 were the first described organisms of the <it>Roseobacter </it>clade, an ecologically important group of marine bacteria. Both species were isolated from seaweed and are able to perform aerobic anoxygenic photosynthesis.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>The genome of <it>R. litoralis </it>OCh149 contains one circular chromosome of 4,505,211 bp and three plasmids of 93,578 bp (pRLO149_94), 83,129 bp (pRLO149_83) and 63,532 bp (pRLO149_63). Of the 4537 genes predicted for <it>R. litoralis</it>, 1122 (24.7%) are not present in the genome of <it>R. denitrificans</it>. Many of the unique genes of <it>R. litoralis </it>are located in genomic islands and on plasmids. On pRLO149_83 several potential heavy metal resistance genes are encoded which are not present in the genome of <it>R. denitrificans</it>. The comparison of the heavy metal tolerance of the two organisms showed an increased zinc tolerance of <it>R. litoralis</it>. In contrast to <it>R. denitrificans</it>, the photosynthesis genes of <it>R. litoralis </it>are plasmid encoded. The activity of the photosynthetic apparatus was confirmed by respiration rate measurements, indicating a growth-phase dependent response to light. Comparative genomics with other members of the <it>Roseobacter </it>clade revealed several genomic regions that were only conserved in the two <it>Roseobacter </it>species. One of those regions encodes a variety of genes that might play a role in host association of the organisms. The catabolism of different carbon and nitrogen sources was predicted from the genome and combined with experimental data. In several cases, e.g. the degradation of some algal osmolytes and sugars, the genome-derived predictions of the metabolic pathways in <it>R. litoralis </it>differed from the phenotype.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The genomic differences between the two <it>Roseobacter </it>species are mainly due to lateral gene transfer and genomic rearrangements. Plasmid pRLO149_83 contains predominantly recently acquired genetic material whereas pRLO149_94 was probably translocated from the chromosome. Plasmid pRLO149_63 and one plasmid of <it>R. denitrifcans </it>(pTB2) seem to have a common ancestor and are important for cell envelope biosynthesis. Several new mechanisms of substrate degradation were indicated from the combination of experimental and genomic data. The photosynthetic activity of <it>R. litoralis </it>is probably regulated by nutrient availability.</p

On the dynamics of the adenylate energy system: homeorhesis vs homeostasis.

Biochemical energy is the fundamental element that maintains both the adequate turnover of the biomolecular structures and the functional metabolic viability of unicellular organisms. The levels of ATP, ADP and AMP reflect roughly the energetic status of the cell, and a precise ratio relating them was proposed by Atkinson as the adenylate energy charge (AEC). Under growth-phase conditions, cells maintain the AEC within narrow physiological values, despite extremely large fluctuations in the adenine nucleotides concentration. Intensive experimental studies have shown that these AEC values are preserved in a wide variety of organisms, both eukaryotes and prokaryotes. Here, to understand some of the functional elements involved in the cellular energy status, we present a computational model conformed by some key essential parts of the adenylate energy system. Specifically, we have considered (I) the main synthesis process of ATP from ADP, (II) the main catalyzed phosphotransfer reaction for interconversion of ATP, ADP and AMP, (III) the enzymatic hydrolysis of ATP yielding ADP, and (IV) the enzymatic hydrolysis of ATP providing AMP. This leads to a dynamic metabolic model (with the form of a delayed differential system) in which the enzymatic rate equations and all the physiological kinetic parameters have been explicitly considered and experimentally tested in vitro. Our central hypothesis is that cells are characterized by changing energy dynamics (homeorhesis). The results show that the AEC presents stable transitions between steady states and periodic oscillations and, in agreement with experimental data these oscillations range within the narrow AEC window. Furthermore, the model shows sustained oscillations in the Gibbs free energy and in the total nucleotide pool. The present study provides a step forward towards the understanding of the fundamental principles and quantitative laws governing the adenylate energy system, which is a fundamental element for unveiling the dynamics of cellular life

Jugendkörper im Netz: erziehungswissenschaftliche Perspektiven auf Jugendliche und ihre fotografischen Selbstdarstellungen in digitalen sozialen Netzwerken

Der Beitrag fokussiert aus einer erziehungswissenschaftlichen Perspektive, wie Jugendliche sich mit den gegenwärtigen gesellschaftlichen Anforderungen an die Gestaltung von Körper und Selbst auseinandersetzen. Es wird der These nachgegangen, dass es sich hierbei um (jugendliche) (Selbst–)Bildungsprozesse handelt. Im Beitrag werden Konzepte der Subjektivierung, des Körpers und des Leibes fruchtbar gemacht, um unterschiedliche Spannungsfelder jugendlicher Selbstdarstellungsarbeit, Auseinandersetzungen mit Gesellschaft und Körperbildern und darin eingelagerte (Selbst-)Bildungspotenziale herauszuarbeiten. Mithin setzt der Beitrag einen Kontrapunkt zu weit verbreiteter Kritik jugendlicher Selbstdarstellungen in digitalen sozialen Netzwerken, die deren gesellschaftliche Bedingtheit und die diffizilen Bewältigungsleistungen weitestgehend ignoriert