The political dimension of dance : Mouffe’s theory of agonism and choreography

In order to support this argument, I will first turn to the quasi-transcendental philosophical trajectory developed by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, before then turning to examine post-foundational politico-philosophical thought, which emphasises the indispensable moment of exclusion in the construction of any social practice, and the dimension of the impossibility of absolute foundation or grounding. This is of particular relevance to Mouffe’s agonistic model of democratic politics which proposes the disarticulation and transformation of dominant socio-political discourses around we/they relations. For Mouffe, democratic politics begins by acknowledging—rather than suppressing—antagonistic relations within the practice of hegemony. Insight into Mouffe’s political theory provides the basis for grasping the political dimension of art and, moreover, will permit an understanding of it in terms of counter-hegemonic struggle. In the final section, I envisage dance practice from these philosophical and political standpoints with the aim of defining choreography in relation to the sphere of contestation such that it may be understood to contribute to the transformation of democracy and society as a whole. In this regard, what I will be calling agonistic encounters and agonistic objectifications in dance performances will be the articulation of partial and contesting systems of relations allowing different realities to be materialised in the same space

Fast Manipulability Maximization Using Continuous-Time Trajectory Optimization

A significant challenge in manipulation motion planning is to ensure agility in the face of unpredictable changes during task execution. This requires the identification and possible modification of suitable joint-space trajectories, since the joint velocities required to achieve a specific endeffector motion vary with manipulator configuration. For a given manipulator configuration, the joint space-to-task space velocity mapping is characterized by a quantity known as the manipulability index. In contrast to previous control-based approaches, we examine the maximization of manipulability during planning as a way of achieving adaptable and safe joint space-to-task space motion mappings in various scenarios. By representing the manipulator trajectory as a continuous-time Gaussian process (GP), we are able to leverage recent advances in trajectory optimization to maximize the manipulability index during trajectory generation. Moreover, the sparsity of our chosen representation reduces the typically large computational cost associated with maximizing manipulability when additional constraints exist. Results from simulation studies and experiments with a real manipulator demonstrate increases in manipulability, while maintaining smooth trajectories with more dexterous (and therefore more agile) arm configurations.Comment: In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS'19), Macau, China, Nov. 4-8, 201

Toric algebra of hypergraphs

The edges of any hypergraph parametrize a monomial algebra called the edge subring of the hypergraph. We study presentation ideals of these edge subrings, and describe their generators in terms of balanced walks on hypergraphs. Our results generalize those for the defining ideals of edge subrings of graphs, which are well-known in the commutative algebra community, and popular in the algebraic statistics community. One of the motivations for studying toric ideals of hypergraphs comes from algebraic statistics, where generators of the toric ideal give a basis for random walks on fibers of the statistical model specified by the hypergraph. Further, understanding the structure of the generators gives insight into the model geometry.Comment: Section 3 is new: it explains connections to log-linear models in algebraic statistics and to combinatorial discrepancy. Section 6 (open problems) has been moderately revise

Combinatorial degree bound for toric ideals of hypergraphs

Associated to any hypergraph is a toric ideal encoding the algebraic relations among its edges. We study these ideals and the combinatorics of their minimal generators, and derive general degree bounds for both uniform and non-uniform hypergraphs in terms of balanced hypergraph bicolorings, separators, and splitting sets. In turn, this provides complexity bounds for algebraic statistical models associated to hypergraphs. As two main applications, we recover a well-known complexity result for Markov bases of arbitrary 3-way tables, and we show that the defining ideal of the tangential variety is generated by quadratics and cubics in cumulant coordinates.Comment: Revised, improved, reorganized. We recommend viewing figures in colo