ScreenStage performance: hybridity, perception and enstrangement

This Practice as Research (PaR) proposes to articulate creative strategies within a hybrid intermedial form, known as ScreenStage Performance (SSP), integrating stage performance with screening. The strategies aim to disrupt customary perceptual patterns by means of intermedial approaches to composition as narration, invoking an awareness of these perceptions. The research integrates philosophical thinking with the creation and analysis of two ScreenStage performances – The LIFT (2021) and SEASONS (2019, 2022) – and the findings from extensive practice laboratories. The thesis posits the practice of ScreenStage as a subgenre in the intermedial field prevalent in the performing arts. ScreenStage practice attempts to represent the mediation and extension of human action through digital media and the virtual realms by means of conceptual hybridity. The thesis articulates the insights of a practitioner by applying new ways of semiotic thinking about intermediality in terms of composition, action, narration and ‘enstrangement’ (Shklovsky, 1919). SSP is considered and analysed as a system for signification and communication. Using PaR methodology (Midgelow, 2019), the thesis attempts to articulate the epistemological knowledge of SSP from the perspective of the practitioner as an artistic-researcher and the first observer. It addresses a gap in the semiotic discourse of the performing arts posed by a lack of research on both the perspective of the practitioner and the signification strategies embodied by intermedial practices and provides new perspective and terminology for dance analysis. The thesis discusses the composition and physical action through movement notation (Eshkol, 1958-2007) and physical theatre theories (Mirodan 2015, Arendell, 2020). The analysis of the narration strategies yields a unique reconfiguration of the politics of the hybrid text, which stems from the development of distinctive sorts of enstrangement strategies. The theoretical grounding of the thesis provides a particular perspective which negotiates phenomenological perception theories (Noë, 2004; Sobchack, 2016) with semiotics and media theories (Shklovsky, 1919; McLuhan, 1964; Todorov, 1977; Auslander, 2008; Pethő, 2018; Cobley, 2021) in a complementary manner. The three main theories of different fields by Alva Noë, Marshall McLuhan and Viktor Shklovsky, used to base the argument, are consistent in terms of their philosophical attempt to explore human perception as a total phenomenon. Namely, they are all interested in the activation of perception through reflective processes (Noë, 2017: 213), which act against "automatization" (Shklovsky, 2015: 162) and "numbness" (McLuhan, 2001: 6). The PaR develops phenomenological and semiotic discourse as another form of intermediality and provides creative practical and theoretical means of analysis and artmaking for practitioners, researchers, teachers and scholars

Le cas de la « société civile » : Circulation et resignification des notions dans le discours social et sociologique

Cet article prend pour point de départ un dilemme épistémologique qui sous-tend toute théorisation et analyse empirique du social : la réalité existe-t-elle indépendamment des outils conceptuels qui nous permettent de l’observer, de la découper, de la mesurer et de la classifier ? Concrètement, l’auteur se penche sur un exemple particulièrement intéressant à cet égard : la circulation et la resémantisation du syntagme « société civile ». Ce syntagme est extrêmement malléable, mais, au-delà du flou définitionnel et du caractère plus ou moins extensif de son acception, la « société civile » semble correspondre à l’idée de « pure société » : la vie sociale dans son expression simple et naturelle, dépourvue d’enjeux principalement politiques ou économiques. Par une analyse discursive, cet article montre qu’une telle conception de la « société civile » a acquis une place exceptionnelle dans la régulation étatique et non étatique au sein des rapports entre le Nord et le Sud.This article takes as a starting point an epistemological dilemma that underlies every attempt at theorizing or analyzing the social realm: does reality exist independently of the conceptual tools that allow us to observe, organize, measure, and classify it? Concretely, the author examines a particularly interesting example in this regard: the circulation and resemantization of the term “civil society”. This term is highly malleable but, in spite of its various and sometimes vague definitions and its more or less extensive scope, “civil society” seems to fit the idea of “pure society”: social life in its simple and natural expression, untangled from mainly political or economic issues. By means of a discourse analysis, this article shows that such a conception of civil society has acquired an exceptional place in the state and non-state regulation of North-South relations

Fairness in overloaded parallel queues

Maximizing throughput for heterogeneous parallel server queues has received quite a bit of attention from the research community and the stability region for such systems is well understood. However, many real-world systems have periods where they are temporarily overloaded. Under such scenarios, the unstable queues often starve limited resources. This work examines what happens during periods of temporary overload. Specifically, we look at how to fairly distribute stress. We explore the dynamics of the queue workloads under the MaxWeight scheduling policy during long periods of stress and discuss how to tune this policy in order to achieve a target fairness ratio across these workloads

Does the Past Predict the Future? The Case of Delay Announcements in Service Systems

Motivated by the recent interest in making delay announcements in large service systems, such as call centers, we investigate the accuracy of announcing the waiting time of the Last customer to Enter Service (LES). In practice, customers typically respond to delay announcements by either balking or by becoming more or less impatient, and their response alters system performance. We study the accuracy of the LES announcement in single-class multi-server Markovian queueing models with announcement-dependent customer behavior. We show that, interestingly, even in this stylized setting, the LES announcement may not always be accurate. This motivates the need to study its accuracy carefully, and to determine conditions under which it is accurate. Since the direct analysis of the system with customer response is prohibitively difficult, we focus on many-server heavy-traffic analysis instead. We consider the quality-and-efficiency-driven (QED) and the efficiency-driven (ED) many-server heavy-traffic regimes and prove, under both regimes, that the LES prediction is asymptotically accurate if, and only if, asymptotic fluctuations in the queue length process are small as long as some regulatory conditions apply. This result provides an easy check for the accuracy of LES in practice. We supplement our theoretical results with an extensive simulation study to generate practical managerial insights

Convexity Properties and Comparative Statics for M/M/S Queues with Balking and Reneging

We use sample path arguments to derive convexity properties of an M/M/S queue with impatient customers that balk and renege. First, assuming that the balking probability and reneging rate are increasing and concave in the total number of customers in the system (head-count), we prove that the expected head-count is convex decreasing in the capacity (service rate). Second, with linear reneging and balking, we show that the expected lost sales rate is convex decreasing in the capacity. Finally, we employ a sample-path sub-modularity approach to comparative statics. That is, we employ sample path arguments to show how the optimal capacity changes as we vary the parameters of customer demand and impatience. We find that the optimal capacity increases in the demand rate and decreases with the balking probability, but is not monotone in the reneging rate. This means, surprisingly, that failure to account for customersâ reneging may result in over-investment in capacity. Finally, we show that a seemingly minor change in system structure, customer commitment during service, produces qualitatively different convexity properties and comparative statics.Operations Management Working Papers Serie