Medvedkine

Chris Marker’s portrait of Alexandre Medvedkine in the 1993 film Le tombeau d’Alexandre/The Last Bolshevik is highly instructive of his own relationship to Soviet cinema. Most especially, this difficult or troubled rapport with the antecedents to cinéma vérité in the West (and its protean formal properties, in terms of structure and often satirical-critical commentary) comes forth in the figures he assembles to comment upon Medvedkine’s life work. When Medvedkine’s Scast’e (Le Bonheur/Happiness) (1934) leaked to the West (c.1967), sent like an “SOS” in multiple bottles to various film archives (one by one from deep within the Soviet film world), Marker and SLON received a copy by way of Jacques Ledoux (curator of the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique, in Belgium). The film opened the floodgates of a retrospective survey of Soviet filmmaking repressed and forgotten other than by remote and distant figures (partisans) who somehow survived the Stalinist purges of the 1930s

Agent Intellect and Black Zones

This essay addresses arguments regarding the “place” or “non-place” in which ideas originate and whether they are wholly transcendental, wholly contingent, or a combination of transcendental and contingent. Far from a resuscitation or recitation of Medieval scholastic disputations, the essay seeks to situate these untimely concerns in the context of spent discursive and ideological systems that support capitalist exploitation of the knowledge commons, exploitation only made possible because of a decisive and historically determined reduction of knowledge to fully contingent status as spectral commodity

Not-I/Thou: Agent Intellect and the Immemorial

Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art & Architecture is to be a highly focused exhibition/folio of works by perhaps 12 artists (preferably little-known or obscure), with precise commentaries denoting the discord between the autonomous object (the artwork or architectural object per se) and the larger field of reference (worlds); inference (associative magic), and insurrection (against power and privilege) – or, the Immemorial. Engaging the age-old “theological apparatuses” of the artwork, the folio is intended to upend the current fascination with personality, celebrity, and fashion to reach the timeless horizon of the subject of Art and Architecture as the subject other than the subject of Art and Architecture proper. Word as image, and image as word, is the central paradox given to this discord – an elective, yet universal condition that also makes certain art and architectural works heedlessly existential-metaphysical (and, therefore, “theological”). This paper, as part of the essay “White Paper: Gray Areas and Black Zones,” is a preliminary investigation of the conceptual architecture for the overall, ongoing exhibition/book project

1,000 Holes in the Wall

Co-authored research paper written with José Vela Castillo on the subject of Pablo Román's wall of 1,000 images, Vienna, 2013. “Vienna” or “The Wall” is an ongoing project by architect/artist Pablo Román that, upon its completion, will consist of the round number of 1,000 images taped onto an off-white wall. One of the many walls he has designed/produced in the past months (architectural or otherwise), its elementary condition is at the same time enhanced and diminished by its very presence as wall-cum-images, or as images-out-of-a-wall, eroding its foundational condition to a flickering-tele-techno-pixelated spectral apparatus. Its radically modern and outdated presence reconfigures contemporary reflections on what architecture and what the modern is, indirectly referencing “Fundamentals,” the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale curated by Rem Koolhaas

Adjusting for Quality of Labour and Labour Services in Productivity Measurement

Evaluating the true level of factor inputs (such as labour and capital) is an essential component of estimating an economy’s productive potential. The standard measure of the total economy’s labour input is to aggregate the number of people employed. A related measure of labour inputs is to aggregate the number of hours worked by each person in the economy. Both of these labour measures assume that all workers in the economy are equally productive. This paper is concerned with achieving a more accurate measure of the total labour input in the economy by adjusting standard labour indicators for labour quality.

Measuring Irish Capital

Irish National Income and Expenditure Accounts do not contain information on capital stocks or capital services estimation. Estimates of the national capital stock and the depreciation of its fixed assets are basic macroeconomic aggregates and are integral components for many modelling exercises. This paper presents a detailed asset-level analysis of the stocks and depreciation of Irish fixed assets and the capital formation flows used to derive them. It applies an improved perpetual inventory methodology for calculating depreciation based on best practice employed for the US National Income and Product Accounts (NIPA). The paper shows how the three basic capital variables – the net capital stock, consumption of fixed capital and capital services – are linked through a standard equation for the value of an asset. The paper then presents estimates of the volume of capital services for the Irish economy as well as by asset type. The volume index of capital services (VICS) weights together the growth in the net stock of assets using shares that reflect the relative productivity of the different assets that make up the capital stock i.e. without controlling for the share of housing in the capital stock, total factor productivity will be overestimated for growth accounting purposes.

A Quality Adjusted Measure of Labour Services for Ireland

This paper presents annual indices of labour input adjusted for the age, education and gender distributions of the Irish workforce for the period 1999-2008. Growth in labour services is divided between the increase in hours and improvement in the productive quality of these hours. Improvement in labour quality, as proxied by education, age and gender, has added on average 0.7 percentage points per year to the growth rate in total labour input. Changes in education account for two-thirds of the improvement in labour quality, with gender and age distributions equally sharing the remaining third. Even in the face of declining total employment, growth in labour services remained positive in 2008 due to past investment in human capital. A key application of this quality-adjusted labour series is that a proportion of growth usually attributed to total factor productivity growth can now be accounted for as an improvement in the quality of labour input.

Wage setting and wage flexibility in Ireland - Results from a firm-level survey

This paper investigates the wage-setting behaviour of Irish firms. We place particular emphasis on the use of flexible pay components and examine how these allow firms to deal with shocks requiring a reduction in costs without having to cut base wages. The results presented in this paper are based on a survey of Irish firms undertaken as part of the Wage Dynamics Network (WDN), which is a Euro-system research network. Our main findings are that almost two-thirds of firms applied at least some elements of the national wage agreement in place at the time of the survey (Towards 2016). Wage cuts or freezes were reported by a very small percentage of firms but changes in bonuses and other flexible pay components were relatively common if the firm needed to reduce labour costs. When asked about the relevance of different explanations for avoiding cuts in base wages, worker morale and loss of experienced workers were the main concerns. Regulatory or collective bargaining obstacles to wage cuts were the lowest ranked. JEL Classification: J3, E24, J4Ireland, survey, Wage Negotiations

A Direct Detection of Gas Accretion: The Lyman Limit System in 3C 232

The gas added and removed from galaxies over cosmic time greatly affects their stellar populations and star formation rates. QSO absorption studies in close QSO/galaxy pairs create a unique opportunity to study the physical conditions and kinematics of this gas. Here we present new Hubble Space Telescope (HST) images of the QSO/galaxy pair 3C 232/NGC 3067. The quasar spectrum contains a Lyman-limit absorption system (LLS) due to NGC 3067 at cz = 1421 km/s that is associated with the nearby SAB galaxy NGC 3067. Previous work identifies this absorber as a high-velocity cloud (HVC) in NGC 3067 but the kinematics of the absorbing gas, infalling or outflowing, were uncertain. The HST images presented here establish the orientation of NGC 3067 and so establish that the LLS/HVC is infalling. Using this system as a prototype, we extend these results to higher-z Mg II/LLS to suggest that Mg II/LLSs are a sight line sampling of the so-called "cold mode accretion" (CMA) infalling onto luminous galaxies. But to match the observed Mg II absorber statistics, the CMA must be more highly ionized at higher redshifts. The key observations needed to further the study of low-z LLSs is HST/UV spectroscopy, for which a new instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, has just been installed greatly enhancing our observational capabilities.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, accepted by PAS