Institutionalised Fine Art Research as Stigmatised Knowledge

Looking back to the Arts and Humanities Research Board’s (AHRB) September 2003 Response to Consultation entitled 'The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) and Research in the Creative and Performing Arts' and looking forward to the 2008 RAE audit itself, this essay is concerned with some aspects of the contentious discourse which surrounds research by creative artwork, specifically, in the following sections: i) the fundaments of the antagonism between those who believe fine art practice to be research in itself and those audit managers who do not; ii) the potentially perilous status for fine art research within the institution as a result of that antagonism; and iii) the objectifying pressure of imputed institutional need prescribed by audit managers which sustains the antagonism

Artistic Intensity: Redescribing Redundant Dualism

This essay is intent on encouraging you to think less about there being a clear and plausible distinction between theory and practice and to think more about the holistic world-constituting properties of what I posit as 'artistic intensity'. The erosion of implausible distinction in favour of a distinctive holism I want you to see and apply to your understanding of and engagement with both the art academy context and to the actuality of art, if you will

Really: towards a photorealist ontology of facticity

The overall aim of this investigation is to present a more detailed reading and analysis of 1970s American Photorealism than has been offered by historians and theorists to date. To this end, the thesis reveals and develops the ontological significance of the complex of `mundane facts' which comprises Photorealist painting: a layered complex of facts which I summarise throughout the thesis as the `facticity' of the Photorealist artwork.In order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of Photorealism on an ontological level, the thesis attends to the four layers which make up all Photorealist paintings, namely: i) the copied photographic `facts' which comprise the final painting; ii) the plastic `facts' of the paintings and the methods of their construction; iii) the `matter -of- fact', quotidian subject matter; and iv) the `(f)act' of beholding the paintings. This analysis is founded on a critical discussion of the three seemingly conflicting art theory components inherent in Photorealist painting: the `artless', `objective' photograph; the mechanistic Minimalist construction; and the Pop iconography.By contending with the peculiar theoretical tensions within the layers of mundane facts, this thesis demonstrates a deeper reading of these seemingly superficial paintings of photographs, and argues for Photorealism to be regarded as a form of painting which brilliantly, and critically, conjoins `the Real' & `the Minimal', the photographic & the handmade: deliberate paradoxes which reveal as much about present visual ontologies as they do the debates and frictions between the pictorial and the non -representational which surrounded their making. At this level the investigation is ultimately concerned with the extended meanings of that artwork which gives again, in meticulous, painstaking detail, the quotidian world in which it and the viewer are situated

Computational methods for finding long simple cycles in complex networks

© 2017 Elsevier B.V. Detection of long simple cycles in real-world complex networks finds many applications in layout algorithms, information flow modelling, as well as in bioinformatics. In this paper, we propose two computational methods for finding long cycles in real-world networks. The first method is an exact approach based on our own integer linear programming formulation of the problem and a data mining pipeline. This pipeline ensures that the problem is solved as a sequence of integer linear programs. The second method is a multi-start local search heuristic, which combines an initial construction of a long cycle using depth-first search with four different perturbation operators. Our experimental results are presented for social network samples, graphs studied in the network science field, graphs from DIMACS series, and protein-protein interaction networks. These results show that our formulation leads to a significantly more efficient exact approach to solve the problem than a previous formulation. For 14 out of 22 networks, we have found the optimal solutions. The potential of heuristics in this problem is also demonstrated, especially in the context of large-scale problem instances

Accessing and Decoding Communities of Cultural Capital

Ours is a discussion paper which addresses, chiefly, the conference themes of: ‘equity & social justice’ and ‘theory & methods’. The paper is based on long-standing professional expertise in the area of Widening Participation (WP) in Art, Design and Architecture (ADA) in Higher Education and on research interest in the traditions and conventions, both bureaucratic and linguistic, which serve the infrastructure of formal education in ADA. The first part of the paper argues for a strategic approach to WP agendas within ADA to be informed by 1) the theory and methods of Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002), specifically his work on the ‘aristocracy of culture’ and the operations of ‘cultural capital’ and 2) the recent work of James Elkins (b.1955) on the conventions of contemporary art education, in particular his application of Stanley Fish’s concept of ‘interpretive communities’ to ADA. The emergent strategy is one which recognises that socio-economic class remains the predominant obstacle to achieving credible diversity of student background in creative education at HE level. As Bourdieu makes clear, the non-acquisition of the codes and behaviours of operative cultural capital creates an acute and erroneous sense of incompleteness on the part of a reflexive working class applicant to art school who inwardly registers his/her perceived difference in capital inheritance. Elkins is right, we argue, to draw our attention to the explicit and implicit sharing of bureaucratic and evaluative vocabularies within the art academy: he usefully demonstrates the ways in which such vocabularies reinforce a complacent sense of liberal tolerance while cementing interpretive positions in ADA familiar to those with an appropriate level of cultural and educational wherewithal. For the second part of our presentation we will introduce to delegates GSA’s Prato Project: an international exchange programme between GSA and Monash University. This unique project sees Scottish students from lower socio-economic backgrounds join Australian liberal arts students in Tuscany. An intensive project, it has a twofold impact – on both ‘non-acquisition’ and ‘decoding vocabularies’, following Bourdieu and Elkins – by helping to familiarise less culturally privileged students with world renowned examples of renaissance culture, and by offering them a discursive environment in which to share and decode cultural preconceptions, build confidence, and help them identify as genuine participants in local, national and international culture. Often lacking confidence in, and alienated from, the dominant culture that pervades UK art schools, the following quote is a typical example of the project’s impact: ‘I thought I was prepared for what was going to happen on the trip. I don’t think I knew exactly how much it would have contributed to the person I am today. It changed many things about me such as my confidence, independence and my hunger for learning. Since the trip I have been to Prague, Berlin, Barcelona and Riga. This is all because I now have the confidence to travel’. In sum, our paper recommends that socio-economic class, and the ‘coding’ confidence issues which ensue, be kept in the foreground when addressing equity of participation in HE ADA. For open discussion we wish to hear of colleagues’ efforts in these areas, and share good practice, with the Prato Project as touchstone, to further test the insight and potential for institutional change which these theories and methods present

Broad-band X-ray/gamma-ray spectra and binary parameters of GX 339-4 and their astrophysical implications

We present X-ray/gamma-ray spectra of the binary GX 339-4 observed in the hard state simultaneously by Ginga and CGRO OSSE during an outburst in 1991 September. The Ginga spectra are well represented by a power law with a photon spectral index of 1.75 and a moderately-strong Compton reflection component with a fluorescent Fe K alpha line. The OSSE data require a sharp high-energy cutoff in the power-law spectrum. The broad-band spectra are very well modelled by repeated Compton scattering in a thermal plasma with tau=1 and kT=50 keV. We also find the distance to the system to be > 3 kpc, ruling out earlier determinations of 1.3 kpc. Using this limit, the observed reddening and the orbital period, we find the allowed range of the mass of the primary is consistent with it being a black hole. The data are inconsistent with models of either homogenous or patchy coronae above the surface of an accretion disc. Rather, they are consistent with the presence of a hot inner hot disc accreting at a rate close to the maximum set by advection and surrounded by a cold outer disc. The seed photons for Comptonization are supplied by the outer cold disc and/or cold clouds within the hot disc. Pair production is negligible if electrons are thermal. The hot disc model, which scaled parameters are independent of the black-hole mass, is supported by the similarity of the spectrum of GX 339-4 to those of other black-hole binaries and Seyfert 1s. On the other hand, their spectra in the soft gamma-ray regime are significantly harder than those of weakly-magnetized neutron stars. Based on this difference, we propose that the presence of broad-band spectra corresponding to thermal Comptonization with kT of 50 keV or more represents a black-hole signature.Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, accepted to MNRA

What's New is What's Old: Use of Bode's Integral Theorem (circa 1945) to Provide Insight for 21st Century Spacecraft Attitude Control System Design Tuning

This paper revisits the Bode integral theorem, first described in 1945 for feedback amplifier design, in the context of modern satellite Attitude Control System (ACS) design tasks. Use of Bode's Integral clarifies in an elegant way the connection between open-loop stability margins and closed-loop bandwidth. More importantly it shows that there is a very strong tradeoff between disturbance rejection below the satellite controller design bandwidth, and disturbance amplification in the 'penalty region' just above the design bandwidth. This information has been successfully used to re-tune the control designs for several NASA science-mission satellites. The Appendix of this paper contains a complete summary of the relevant integral conservation theorems for stable, unstable, and non-minimum- phase plants