1968–1977–1999 and Beyond: Bifo's Futural Thought

The trajectory of Bifo’s thought and practice contains valuable material not only in relation to cultural studies and contemporary thought but also in relation to political and aesthetic projects seeking alternative futures to those imposed by the contemporary military-economic technostructure

What Was Guerrilla Media

This article examines the highly contested term guerrilla media and charts its development from an element of guerrilla warfare, via examples of ludic and DIY experimentation such as Guerrilla Television and Punk fanzines, to question its relevance to the present. Drawing on research for my book Guerrilla Networks (AUP, 2018), I argue that it is important to trace its origins in the ascendancy of guerrilla warfare in mid 20th century, and how this then mutates into more ludic but still politically charged practices such as those influenced by the Situationist International which would inform movements from Italian Autonomia to media activism more generally. It also examines the more politically ambivalent experience of guerrilla television in the 1970s, which involved a slippage of meaning towards mere DIY entrepreneurialism, as well as the use of media during the punk explosion including records, radio and especially fanzines. It concludes that while guerrilla media could be considered a debased and almost meaningless term in the present, its more ludic instantiations still offer resources for political movements in the present

Audiovision and Gesamtkunstwerk: The Aesthetics of First and Second Generation Industrial Music Video

Michel Chion has famously and provocatively referred to film as a sound art (Chion 2009), developing his earlier reading of cinema in the synaesthetic audiovisual terms of Audio-Vision (Chion 1994). Similarly, it is possible to argue that industrial music from its beginnings with groups like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, SPK and others was an audiovisual art-form, as much as a musical one, and never simply a generic sonic style. The visual aspects of industrial music were not necessarily limited to film and video and included such things as the development of logos and other design features on record sleeves and as concert backdrops, as well as specific uses of photography and other visual arts. These visual elements were often deployed via strategies of anonymity and ambiguity, generating meanings out of a deliberate and playful constitutive vagueness. However, whenever it was technically feasible to do so, industrial groups made use of both film and video technologies, and in terms of the latter were pioneers in the combination of music and video, before and outside of its commercial codification. This chapter examines this field of audiovisual activity as a form of audiovisuology that goes well beyond the promotion and iillustration of popular music

Towards an Archaeology of Media Ecologies: ‘Media Ecology’, Political Subjectivation and Free Radios

In this article the emergent paradigm of media ecologies is distinguished from the ‘actually existing’ media ecology emerging out of the work of McLuhan, Postman and the media ecology association. The appearance of Fuller’s book was understandably unsettling for members of the latter and certainly marks at least a profound rupture in the media ecological paradigm if not a total break

Impossible cartographies: approaching Raúl Ruiz’s cinema

Raúl Ruiz (1931-2011), while considered one of the world’s most significant filmmakers by several film critics, is yet to be the subject of any thorough academic engagement with his work in English. My book Impossible Cartographies sets out on this task by mapping, as fully as possible, Ruiz’s cinematic trajectory across more than five decades of prolific work ranging from his earliest work in Chile to high budget ‘European’ costume dramas culminating in the recent Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). It does this by treating Ruiz’s work, with its surrealist, magic realist, popular cultural and neo-Baroque sources, as a type of ‘impossible’ cinematic cartography, mapping real, imaginary and virtual spaces, and crossing between different cultural contexts, aesthetic strategies, and technical media. In argues that across the different phases of Ruiz’s work identified, there are key continuities such as the invention of singular cinematic images and the interrogation of their possible and impossible combinations. This article will present some of the key themes of Ruiz’s cinema and use ideas of virtual cartography, tableaux vivants and the neo-baroque to illuminate a range of Ruiz’s films from the Hypothesis of the Stolen Painting (1978) to Mysteries of Lisbon, his last major project

Shock-induced consolidation and spallation of Cu nanopowders

A useful synthesis technique, shock synthesis of bulk nanomaterials from nanopowders, is explored here with molecular dynamics simulations. We choose nanoporous Cu (∼11 nm in grain size and 6% porosity) as a representative system, and perform consolidation and spallation simulations. The spallation simulations characterize the consolidated nanopowders in terms of spall strength and damage mechanisms. The impactor is full density Cu, and the impact velocity (u_i) ranges from 0.2 to 2 km s^(−1). We present detailed analysis of consolidation and spallation processes, including atomic-level structure and wave propagation features. The critical values of u_i are identified for the onset plasticity at the contact points (0.2 km s^(−1)) and complete void collapse (0.5 km s^(−1)). Void collapse involves dislocations, lattice rotation, shearing/friction, heating, and microkinetic energy. Plasticity initiated at the contact points and its propagation play a key role in void collapse at low u_i, while the pronounced, grain-wise deformation may contribute as well at high u_i. The grain structure gives rise to nonplanar shock response at nanometer scales. Bulk nanomaterials from ultrafine nanopowders (∼10 nm) can be synthesized with shock waves. For spallation, grain boundary (GB) or GB triple junction damage prevails, while we also observe intragranular voids as a result of GB plasticity

David Bowie, brinquedos adultos e outras dimensões estranhas do universo de Twin Peaks

The article is based fundamentally on the authors' participation in the International Conference “I’ll See You Again in 25 Years: The return of Twin Peaks and generations of cult TV”, held on 21 and 22 May 2015, at the School of Arts and Media, at the University of Salford in England. Starting from there, it makes an irregular discussion of issues and working angles around the television series launched in 1990, a work by David Lynch and Mark Frost. Some issues gain particular attention: 1) the relations of the series to the album Outside (1995) by David Bowie; 2) the population of adult toys related to the series, as derivative products, driven by fans in their most playful exercises of affection and remembrance. Despite the article’s intentionally adopted tone of an “academic report”, it can evoke rich theoretical questions in a field of objects that are in a complex upgrade process and have to be subsequently treated according to more regular methodological procedures, seeking further theoretical and epistemological clarifications

Signature Characters for A_2 and B_2

The signatures of the inner product matrices on a Lie algebra's highest weight representation are encoded in the representation's signature character. We show that the signature characters of a finite-dimensional Lie algebra's highest weight representations obey simple difference equations that have a unique solution once appropriate boundary conditions are imposed. We use these results to derive the signature characters of all $A_2$ and $B_2$ highest weight representations. Our results extend, and explain, signature patterns analogous to those observed by Friedan, Qiu and Shenker in the Virasoro algebra's representation theory.Comment: 22 p