Spatial Distance as an Indicator of Semantic Variances in the “Pockets Full of Memories” Installation

Microbial interactions within a natural or engineered consortium of microbes play an important role in the functions of the consortium. Better understanding these interactions is also important for engineering microbial consortia for specific applications. As such, tools that can enable investigating microbial interactions are highly valuable. One aspect of microbial interactions that impacts community formation is how the spatial organization of individual microbes impacts interactions leading to community formation. Here, we report the development of a tool that can manipulate the spatial organization of microorganisms to investigate the role of these interactions in community formation. Our developed microfluidic platform utilizes dielectrophoretic (DEP) force to perform on-demand spatial arrangement of microorganism-encapsulated agarose gel microparticles. To demonstrate this concept, three gel microparticle manipulators composed of three independently controllable DEP electrodes were utilized for the on-demand spatial arrangement of a specific combination of microparticles, each containing Escherichia coli cells expressing red fluorescence protein, green fluorescent protein, or blank content. The spatially arranged microparticles suspended in carrier oil were first trapped in a downstream particle trapping structure to form a defined microparticle array, followed by the application of an electric field to disrupt the carrier oil barrier so that all gel microparticles were within the same aqueous solution while the individual gel microparticles remain intact, thereby maintaining their spatial arrangements. We demonstrated that this method can be utilized to generate various arrays with differing number of "spacer microparticles", which were blank microparticles, between the two different E. coli-containing microparticles, enabling precise control over spatial distances between the two different cell populations. This method paves the way for more easily investigating bacterial interactions, especially those that depend on their spatial arrangement such as where cell-cell communication plays a major role.

This chapter examines the large screens of Piccadilly Circus, London, to extrapolate how digital capitalism produces a depoliticised neoliberal public. From the narrow technological parameters to optimise visibility, to the relentless commercial occupation of these ‘public’ screens, Cubitt demonstrates how the possibility of a political public sphere within the space of Piccadilly Circus is foreclosed by corporations that sell the illusion of control and freedom which they have long since usurped. This is further illustrated by his analysis of a novel artistic installation, performed by Fluxus artist Yoko Ono in 2013, which intervened in the corporate occupation of the Piccadilly Circus screens to foreground the triumph of branding over substance that circumvents the democratic potential of large screens in public spaces.

We introduce a novel framework for nonrigid feature matching among multiple sets in a way that takes into consideration both the feature descriptor and the features spatial arrangement. We learn an embedded representation that combines both the descriptor similarity and the spatial arrangement in a unified Euclidean embedding space. This unified embedding is reached by minimizing an objective function that has two sources of weights; the feature spatial arrangement and the feature descriptor similarity scores across the different sets. The solution can be obtained directly by solving one Eigen-value problem that is linear in the number of features. Therefore, the framework is very efficient and can scale up to handle a large number of features. Experimental evaluation is done using different sets showing outstanding results compared to the state of the art; up to 100% accuracy is achieved in the case of the well known `Hotel' sequence.

Geovisual analysis of VGI for understanding people's behaviour in relation to multifaceted context

Gentianella aspera is a biennial plant of various nutrient-poor grasslands that has become rare in the landscapes outside the Alps of eastern Austria. Using AFLP fingerprinting we investigated: (1) effects of spatial structure on genetic structure in a large vineyard population that is confined to the embankments separating the grapevines; (2) temporal variation in genetic diversity and structure in this population; (3) relationships with other populations in a regional context. On the regional scale, moderate isolation by distance among populations was revealed by a Mantel test. Bayesian analysis of population structure indicated three spatially distinct gene pools and an additional one within the vineyard population. Within this population, spatial autocorrelation analysis revealed a positive correlation between genetic and spatial distance up to 50 m. Patterns found by PCoA were not in line with a priori defined subpopulations and indicated substantial gene flow across embankments. AMOVA revealed low differentiation among both the subpopulations that were found on the linear embankments and among two local groups of these subpopulations. We found, however, striking differences in the among-group variation between the 2 years, i.e., between two local groups within the generations and between those groups among generations. This was due to the highly variable larger group of the younger generation, in which an additional gene pool was identified by Bayesian analysis of population structure. Based on these results we discuss scenarios of local and regional dynamics within and among G. aspera populations.

Large RNA molecules often carry multiple functional domains whose spatial arrangement is an important determinant of their function. Pre-mRNA splicing, furthermore, relies on the spatial proximity of the splice junctions that can be separated by very long introns. Similar effects appear in the processing of RNA virus genomes. Albeit a crude measure, the distribution of spatial distances in thermodynamic equilibrium therefore provides useful information on the overall shape of the molecule can provide insights into the interplay of its functional domains. Spatial distance can be approximated by the graph-distance in RNA secondary structure. We show here that the equilibrium distribution of graph-distances between arbitrary nucleotides can be computed in polynomial time by means of dynamic programming. A naive implementation would yield recursions with a very high time complexity of O(n 11). Although we were able to reduce this to O(n 6) for many practical applications a further reduction seems difficult. We conclude, therefore, that sampling approaches, which are much easier to implement, are also theoretically favorable for most real-life applications, in particular since these primarily concern long-range interactions in very large RNA molecules.

Group-living animals often experience within-group competition for resources like shelter and space, as well as for social status. Because of this conflict, residents may aggressively resist joining attempts by new members. Here, we asked whether different forms of competition mediate this response, specifically competition over 1) shelter, 2) spatial position within groups, and 3) social or sexual roles. We performed experiments on wild groups of Neolamprologus multifasciatus cichlids in Lake Tanganyika, either increasing or decreasing the number of shelters (empty snail shells) within their territories. We predicted that increases in resource abundance would reduce conflict and lower the aggression of residents toward presented conspecifics, while decreases in resources would increase aggression. We explored the effects of social conflict and spatial arrangement by introducing same or opposite sex conspecifics, at greater or lesser distances from resident subterritories. We found that changing the abundance of shells had no detectable effect on the responses of residents to presented conspecifics. Rather, aggression was strongly sex-dependent, with male residents almost exclusively aggressing presented males, and female residents almost exclusively aggressing presented females. For females, this aggression was influenced by the spatial distances between the presented conspecific and the resident female subterritory, with aggression scaling with proximity. In contrast, presentation distance did not influence resident males, which were aggressive to all presented males regardless of location. Overall, our results show that group residents respond to presented conspecifics differently depending on the type of competitive threat these potential joiners pose.

Is a Factory a Museum?* Thomas Elsaesser I read Hito Steyerl's essay "Is a Museum a Factory?" with great interest.1 Not only because she quotes me and announces in the most affable—if nonetheless unmistakable—way her doubts about my remarks, but because she touches on subjects I have been thinking about for some time and that are relevant for a broader audience. The basic argument of "Is a Museum a Factory?" could be summed up as follows: Now, because more and more factories are being converted into museums, it is about time to ask what these two seemingly diametrically opposed institutions have in common that makes it so easy to transition from one to the other. And if that is the case, what consequences does this transition have for (a) the concept of production in art and society, (b) the experience of space and time, (c) the relationship of the masses and the individual, and, finally—here I add my own point—(d) the formatting or programming of the human senses and body? All of this is focused on the question of the fate of the socially committed film and political cinema that once was shown in factories as well and now leads a hybrid and conflicted existence as installation art in museums, exhibitions, and galleries. The areas of tension cannot be discussed in detail here, so let me just try and extend Hito Steyerl's essay to include a further thesis: At one time people did [End Page 42] physical labor in factories and sought to relax with viewing pleasures and feasts for the eyes. Today, "to look is to labor"—whether at a monitor in the office, on a screen or at home, in the cinema, or at the museum. We experience leisure, if at all, playing sports, working in the garden, at the fitness studio, or in other activities and performances even more obsessively oriented around the body; that is, at leisure we are still subjects of the "societies of control" described by Gilles Deleuze and the body-oriented self-maximization that became famous in Michel Foucault's writing as the "care of the self" and "biopolitics." The premises of such an argument are, on the one hand, closely linked and focused—political cinema, installation art—and, on the other hand, very far apart: they refer to our postindustrial societies of crisis and their atomized, fragmented subjectivities, experienced and affirmed only as participants in "multitudes." Hito Steyerl puts her finger on a number of sore points and striking paradoxes. The fact is that several of the most-visited museums are either former factories or power stations, such as Tate Modern in London, or they look like factories, as in the case of the Centre Pompidou in Paris. To put it more generally: in recent decades, more and more factories, warehouses, turbine halls, gasometers, harbors, and large market halls have been converted into museums, exhibition spaces, or artists' studios. If Tate Modern can be said to be the most famous case in Europe, there are countless other examples: the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, near Newcastle (a former grain mill), the Santralistanbul Museum of Contemporary Art in Istanbul (a former power station on the Bosporus), the theater and photography museums on Helsinki's harbor (in a former ship cable factory), or the Centre for Art and Media Technology (ZKM) in Karlsruhe (a former weapons and ammunitions factory). In her essay, Hito Steyerl alludes to Rem Koolhaas's newly designed Contemporary Art Museum in Riga, a coal-fired power plant that was already decommissioned during the Soviet area. On the website of Rem Kohlhaas's firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture, this tendency to transform factories into museums is addressed directly: "It is an open secret that the presentation of art is not the only function of the contemporary Museum. The very success of the institution—a pivotal centre of contemporary society—has accrued additional interests and powers that require their own infrastructure, in addition, but independent from the viewing of art." The infrastructure demanded here includes not only the museum shop, a large cinema, performance spaces, and surrounding greenery but also "educational, media-related and production...

By engaging with network technologies on computers and digital devices, equipped with sensors such as cameras, we are part of the telematic society that can connect with people in real-time near as well as far apart. While digital technology enables us to connect and maintain relationships with other people, we still rely on virtual embodiment to represent our persona in the digital world. There is a range of visual representations that function as a virtual embodiment in the digital world, often a profile image, an avatar or a graphic device are used as a proxy. In this particular practice-based research project, I am exploring how the risks of sharing biometric data can be prevented, by prototyping an abstract virtual embodiment in an art installation. The computational design applied to procedures such as facial recognition driven by artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning can result in intrusive experiences. If the act of being detected or identified by AI becomes intrusive, are there ways we can use abstract virtual embodiments to represent ourselves without being detected? This visual essay is positioning the practice-based research in an art context while documenting the conceptual process of an interactive prototype.

This article retraces the history of telematic performance from early videophone experiments by the Electronic Café in the 1980s, through a series of ambitious digital art installations at museums like the Centre Pompidou. Onto this history, I map a series of netmusic projects I initiated in this period, from ISDN performances at the Sonar Festival to my installation Global String at Ars Electronica. This sets the context for collaborative online performances held during the COVID pandemic with artists like Paul Sermon and the Chicks on Speed. I finish by describing the Hybrid Live project connecting Goldsmiths and Iklectik Art Labs in London with Stanford University’s CCRMA and SFJazz in California. I describe the low latency audio transport used, the importance of audiovisual synchronisation and the computer vision abstractions resulting in a London-New York remote dance performance. By situating current work in these histories, and closely examining the qualities of the network necessary for the transmission of a sense of embodied experience – and therefore trust – we understand that network performance occurs in its own space, one distinct from physical co-presence.

Art installation “Mirror, Mirror” is a result of a creative collaboration between an artist and an engineer. The aim of this project is to transform a person’s image and background in order to prompt them to examine their version of self and the surrounding reality and make them aware of the developments in the field of social robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

As the sun set on April 11, 2018, around 400 people gathered in Indiana University’s Luddy Hall, anticipating a sort of birth. There, in the home of the School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering, all eyes pointed to Amatria , a woven cloud of white Mylar and clear acrylic plastics, wire, glass, laser-cut stainless steel, and electronics hanging from the glass ceiling. Amatria , a new work of “sentient architecture” by Philip Beesley and others in LAS, is at once art installation, architectural prototype, and test bed for artificial intelligence. Image courtesy of Philip Beesley (photographer). This new work of “sentient architecture” by multidisciplinary researcher and artist Philip Beesley of the University of Waterloo and colleagues hung still. Then Beesley reached up. Sensing his movement, Amatria shuddered. Vibrations near Beesley’s hand rippled outward accompanied by bursts of warm light and sounds ranging from otherworldly clinks and bellows to natural gurgles and hisses. Amatria is at once art installation, architectural prototype, and test bed for artificial intelligence. Beesley created the sculpture in collaboration with researchers at Indiana University, as well as electrical engineer Rob Gorbet of the University of Waterloo and other members of Beesley’s Living Architecture Systems group (LAS), which includes an international team of 90 architects, scientists, engineers, and sound artists. The goal of the LAS group is to make buildings come alive, revolutionizing built spaces and our relationships with them. The group aspires to create an architectural structure that is more integrated with the natural world, a metabolism that enables self-renewal, and an artificial intelligence capable of curiosity and even empathy. LAS has exhibited more than 50 installations around the world. But Amatria is unique in that it functions as a permanent test bed in an academic community where it can evolve. As researchers collaborate with the sculpture’s …

Metabolism: The City of the Future . Mori Art Museum, Tokyo. 17 September 2011–15 January 2012. Today we often regard Japan’s Metabolists as young dreamers proffering technologically advanced, audaciously overscaled schemes. A show at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo—the first retrospective dedicated to the group—underscored instead Metabolism’s ideological origins and, more importantly, unearthed a treasure trove of artifacts. The exhibition opened with a single image: a 1953 photograph of Kenzo Tange’s celebrated central structure at Hiroshima’s Peace Park. The Metabolists’ debut was still seven years away, via a booklet distributed at the 1960 World Design Congress in Tokyo that featured four architects—Masato Otaka, Kiyonori Kikutake, Fumihiko Maki, and Kisho Kurokawa—and others from related disciplines: author and editor Noboru Kawazoe, industrial designer Genji Ekuan, and graphic designer Kyoshi Awazu.1 Adjacent Japanese and English wall text used to isolate this image argued that Tange, though not a member of the movement, was its progenitor; the point was then followed by additional photographs of Peace Park interspersed with rarely seen construction and presentation documents from the Tange office, many now held by Harvard’s Frances Loeb Library. A public housing complex designed by Masato Otaka, built on an adjacent plot, was served up subsequently on the same wall. The Mori exhibition thus presented its first Metabolist with a subtlety that was untypical of the movement itself, via a grouping of residential towers overshadowed by Tange’s masterwork—an unappreciated complex not completed until the 1970s, designed by the only Metabolist architect who was more interested in Japan’s proletariat and never established an international reputation. The opposite wall of this opening gallery offered a historical preamble to the exhibition: on a panel some 45 feet long, a timeline tracked Japan’s population and economic growth from 1905 through 1960. Set against the data were computer animations, reproductions of photographs, and recently built models related to a period long ignored in polite circles: …

Laurel Nakadate is a master storyteller. The New York photographer and video artist, who grew up in rural Iowa, is in continual search of what is over (he next horizon. She has tossed used underwear out of a moving train, danced to Britney Spears in the middle of a desolate desert landscape, and made herself cry every day for a year. Part diary entry, part sexual expose, her narratives are a clever mix of voyeurism, tragedy, and slapstick in the style of Laurel and Hardy. Nakadate has achieved international fame in art circles since graduating from Yale University with an MFA in Photography in 2001, and her work has been exhibited at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, MoMA PS1 in New York City, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Her accolades extend well beyond the art world: her first feature film, Stay the Same.Never Change (2008), premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, and in 2011 her second feature film. The Wolf Knife (2010), was nominated for an Independent Spirit Award. Her earliest photographs and videos record encounters with strangers, typically middle-aged, overweight, unkempt, and socially awkward men one might expect, to encounter in gas stations or at Walmart, not in a contemporary art rallerv. The scenarios range from silly (pretending lo be a dog and a cat) and absurd (having them sing Happy Birthday to her), to unsettling (a series of men screaming invectives at absent former lovers). The men are a stark contrast to Nakadate, who is physically stunning. It is hard to deny the sexual tensions bubbling just under the surface of her brash humor. Sigmuncl Freud suggested that all humor is a form of aggression; and since society prohibits the direct expression of anger and sexual drive, these desires are sublimated in joke telling. Like dreams, these jokes and slips of the tongue bear the traces of repressed desire. Do we laugh at Nakadate's exploits because we are uncomfortable? Aroused? Or merely perplexed? For her latest project, Three Performances in Search of Tennessee (2011), Nakadate teamed up with actor James Franco for a rcinterpretation of Tennessee Williams's 1944 play The Class Menagerie. The live performance opened with Franco and Nakadate sitting pensively on a darkened stage, as two mediums channeled the spirit of Williams, who died in 1983. In the second act, a large screen projected a video of Franco acting a scene from the play while actresses found through a Craigslist ad entered the stage to audition for the role of Laura Wingfield. The casting calls clidirt offer any specifics, and many of the women were dumbfounded to see the real-life Franco directing from the sidelines. But instead of interacting with him, they role-played with the project video by reading lines off the screen in karaoke style. Kakadate and Franco continually commanded the actresses to speak louder, look toward the audience, or show more feeling, as the audience roared with laughter. In the final sequence, several male actors, including the performance artist Ryan McNamara, auditioned for the part of Tom Wingfield by reciting his soliloquy from the close of the play. Partway through The Glass Menagerie, Tom is eager to tell his sister Laura about a magic show where the magician manages to escape from a sealed coffin, an apt metaphor for his own desire to leave behind his abusive mother and dull existence. And, by the play's finale, he is resolved to follow his dream and venture into a world that is lit by lightning. This is the kind of storytelling, one of very simple, very human emotions, in which Nakadate invests her considerable talents. This interview took place at Leslie Tonkonow Artworks + Projects in New York City, in Tanuarv 2012. HARRY WEIL: Let's begin at the beginning. You went to Yale for graduate work in photography, but much of your practice over the past decade seems to be focused on video and film. LAUREL NAKADATE: I guess so. Well, I say that but then I think in the last three, four years I have made two feature films and then did a one-year performance that was photo-based. …

Kinetics of inhibition of sperm β-acrosin activity by suramin