Complex Moment Research Articles

The Game of Meaning: Collage, Montage, and Parody in Kurt Schwitters' Merz

The Game of Meaning:Collage, Montage, and Parody in Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Patrizia McBride (bio) When the Anglo-American artists known as "neo-dada" rediscovered the work of Kurt Schwitters in the late 1950s, they thought they had found a model for robust artistic intervention that promised a way out of the strictures of Abstract Expressionism. Artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Allan Kaprow saw in Schwitters's collages of recycled refuse a model for critiquing the self-perpetuating cycle of consumerism and waste in capitalist societies. However, their interpretation of Schwitters's practices was based on a misreading of sorts, since Schwitters's use of trash in his collages had never been intended as an anti-capitalist critique of social relations in its day. Quite to the contrary. It had originally served to sustain a formalist aesthetics predicated on the autonomy of art from politics. Indeed, Schwitters's flaunted disinterest for politics with regard to Germany's aborted revolution and the turmoil of the early Weimar period had earned him the contempt of militant Dadaists like George Grosz and Richard Huelsenbeck, who curtly denied his request for admission to the Berlin Club Dada.1 While critics have fully acknowledged Schwitters's path-breaking exploration of collage and assemblage, his productive blending of visual and verbal art forms, and his contributions to typography and advertising, they have also often concluded that his formalist understanding of art, revolving around the distinctive theory of montage he labeled Merz, was indebted to a nostalgic quest for order and harmony. According to this assessment, Schwitters conceived of art as a site of transcendence that promised the harmony and structure sorely missing in Weimar Germany. Yet Schwitters's putative desire for order and [End Page 249] transcendence is difficult to reconcile with the exuberant transgression of boundaries—of the canvas, of the text, of different media and codes—that his montage practices relentlessly stage. Indeed, his art vigorously engages the messiness and incoherence of everyday experience rather than enacting its sublimation.2 This apparent contradiction raises the question of what kind of intervention is made possible by an artistic practice informed by abstraction, understood as a denial of figural representation or traditional narrative, and the combinatory principle of montage. In reconstructing the discourse on art and literature that unfolds in Schwitters's fictional and theoretical writings, I will show that his concept of montage embodies an understanding of reality as a universe of manipulable signs.3 By severing the link to representation, Schwitters fashioned art into an emancipatory realm for playing with the practices that make up ordinary signification, in a way that exposes their changeable and malleable nature. It is notable that the very aspects that made Schwitters appear marginal within prevalent accounts of Dadaism, namely, his emphasis on the specificity of artistic practice, his concern with reconceptualizing the art object, and his lack of iconoclastic rage even in his most radical experiments, have become central themes in recent endeavors to reevaluate Dada as a substantive, complex moment in the trajectory of the historical avant-garde.4 This article contributes to this reassessment by outlining the constructive intervention made by Schwitters's theory and practice of abstract montage. While it is true that Schwitters's hermetic practices refrained from commenting on the volatile mix of political retrenchments and socio-economic changes in Weimar Germany, they nevertheless modeled a type of emancipatory engagement with contemporary experience, albeit one that is qualitatively different from the political activism advocated by Grosz and Huelsenbeck in the early 1920s. This lies in conceptualizing art as a distinctive, cognitive medium that optimistically embraces the situatedness of ordinary practices of meaning-production, which it presents as open to subversive manipulation. Schwitters's aesthetic practice and reflection turn on his program of Merz, a theory of abstract montage that supplied him with both an analytic framework and a brand label for his diverse artistic pursuits.5 His first comprehensive articulation of the concept is found in an essay from 1920 that sketches his position with regard to the politicization of the German avant-garde following the establishment of the Berlin Club Dada in 1918.6 Schwitters's unstated aim in this text...

Coactivation levels induced by trunk muscles under isometric complex moment loading conditions

This study investigated the coactivation levels induced by trunk muscles when isometric-complex moments were loaded. Complex moments were defined as the combination of two (two axial complex moments) or three (three axial complex moments) orthogonal uni-axial moments: flexion/extension ( X -axis: - 40 , - 20 , + 20 , + 40 N m ), lateral bending right ( Y -axis: + 20 , + 40 N m ), and twisting clockwise/counter-clockwise ( Z -axis: - 40 , - 20 , + 20 , + 40 N m ). Thirty-two two axial complex moments and 32 three axial complex moments were applied to 12 male subjects via a chest harness in a standing posture. During the tasks, electromyography (EMG) signals from 10 trunk muscles were collected and muscle forces were predicted by using an EMG assisted model. Antagonistic muscles were identified by the inner-dot product definition and antagonist coactivation was assessed using two coactivation measures: the sum of antagonist forces and the antagonistic moment. In both the two and three axial moments loading conditions, two main effects (direction and magnitude) were found to be statistically significant ( p < 0.01 ) . Among two axial complex moments, ‘extension + twisting’ induced high coactivation of more than 45% of the total muscle forces. The antagonistic moments were high (about 43% of the external moment) in the combination of ‘extension + twisting’ and ‘lateral bending right + twisting’. When three axial complex moments were applied, ‘extension + lateral bending right + twisting counter-clockwise’ induced high coactivation of about 349 N (about 50% of the total muscle force), and the magnitude of the antagonistic moment was 21.9 N m (about 41% of the external moment).

On the complex moment problem

AbstractThe article is devoted to the solution of the infinite‐dimensional variant of the complex moment problem, and to the uniqueness of the solution. The main approach is illustrated for the best explanation on the one‐dimensional case. (© 2007 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH &amp; Co. KGaA, Weinheim)

HYPONORMAL WEIGHTED SHIFT OPERATORS AND TRUNCATED COMPLEX MOMENT PROBLEMS

In this paper, we present some recent developments on hyponormal operator theory and truncated Curto-Fialkow and Embry complex moment problems.

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid (review)

Reviewed by: Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid Teresa Barnes Bozzoli, Belinda . 2004. Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press. 326 pp. $28.95 (paper). Theatres of Struggle recounts the events and significance of the six-month-long urban rebellion in Alexandra, one of the most famous townships of Johannesburg, South Africa. Alex, as it is popularly known, is a tiny place of much significance in South African history for many reasons, not least because it was home to one of the deepest and most overtly revolutionary of the urban conflicts of the 1980s, conflicts that contributed greatly to transforming apartheid's discomfort into its death throes. Bozzoli is much taken by the metaphor of performance in explaining the rebellion, which was started by a violent "rupture" of the social fabric known as the Six-Day War, in February 1986. Battlefields and their surrounds are often, of course, known as theaters; but Bozzoli takes the meaning literally and uses the extended metaphor of theater, actors, scripts, audiences to give structure to a complex moment. Theatres of Struggle introduces the reader to Alexandra's history; the political trials and economic tribulations of the late apartheid state; the substance and structures of the rebellion, its participants, and leaders (most of all, the neighborhood activists known as comrades); its generational and ideological conflicts; its physical course and impact; and finally, how it was remembered in the Truth Commission hearings in the 1990s. This is a long reach of intricately detailed historical sociology. As South Africans move far enough away from the agonies of the 1980s to be able to begin to reexamine the era, there is no doubt that Bozzoli's portrait of urban spaces, social groups, and dynamics will prove a fruitful stimulus to further research and debate. One forgets how deft Bozzoli's writing can be, masterfully blending sure phrase with complex conceptual constructions. The book's inner structure allows the explication of different forces and personae of the rebellion to walk onto a stage, like a play within a play. Bozzoli has a freer rein to "play" with her scenes, language, and so forth. The hourly saga of the violence and drama of the Six-Day War is wonderful historical stuff. This book often reads like a brilliant soliloquy: swaths of pages dramatically roll by, again, like a novel or a play. The presentation amounts to a tour de force, in which Bozzoli relies heavily on her insight and powers of historical synthesis. This is an important book—because of its strengths, as noted above, but also because of what its weaknesses reveal about the difficulties of South African social science. A new problem is that Bozzoli's use of the concept of performance to explain the rebellion suggests that there was an artifice to what was (as of course she portrays) six months of grim, incredibly taxing (although sometimes exhilarating) struggles over life, death, and morality. We see how Alex residents fought each other along a host of social cleavages, and how they redefined the local meanings of power and [End Page 116] authority through fighting the police, the army, and other apartheid governance structures. The idea of performance holds within it a duality, a prior identity that is preserved, watching and perhaps judging itself. Elements of agency and spontaneity seem to be removed from Bozzoli's characters and scenes by the use of this concept. Bozzoli's treatment of white liberalism in Alexandra is an older problematic angle. Before the period that she terms "racial modernism" was enforced by the apartheid state, she argues that "welfare paternalism" and white liberals made aspects of township life more bearable and orderly. A discussion of the role of white liberalism in black South Africa must take on board the Black Consciousness argument that liberalism, because it propagated the idea of white efficacy, was in fact an obstacle in the path of black advancement. Bozzoli does not have to agree with this idea, but she should acknowledge it. The political-historical crosscurrents of Soweto were only on the other side of Johannesburg in 1986, for example, not on the other side of the world...

Space and contact networks: capturing the locality of disease transmission

While an arbitrary level of complexity may be included in simulations of spatial epidemics, computational intensity and analytical intractability mean that such models often lack transparency into the determinants of epidemiological dynamics. Although numerous approaches attempt to resolve this complexity-tractability trade-off, moment closure methods arguably offer the most promising and robust frameworks for capturing the role of the locality of contact processes on global disease dynamics. While a close analogy may be made between full stochastic spatial transmission models and dynamic network models, we consider here the special case where the dynamics of the network topology change on time-scales much longer than the epidemiological processes imposed on them; in such cases, the use of static network models are justified. We show that in such cases, static network models may provide excellent approximations to the underlying spatial contact process through an appropriate choice of the effective neighbourhood size. We also demonstrate the robustness of this mapping by examining the equivalence of deterministic approximations to the full spatial and network models derived under third-order moment closure assumptions. For systems where deviation from homogeneous mixing is limited, we show that pair equations developed for network models are at least as good an approximation to the underlying stochastic spatial model as more complex spatial moment equations, with both classes of approximation becoming less accurate only for highly localized kernels.

A connection between the moment problem and the subnormal completion problem

In this note we give a connection between the truncated complex moment problem and the subnormal completion problem for the unilateral weighted shifts.

Ullemar’s formula for the moment map, II

We prove the complex analogue of Ullemar’s formula for the Jacobian of the complex moment mapping. This formula was previously established in the real case.

Reconstruction of orientations of a moving protein domain from paramagnetic data

We study the inverse problem of determining the position of the moving C-terminal domain in a metalloprotein from measurements of its mean paramagnetic tensor . The latter can be represented as a finite sum involving the corresponding magnetic susceptibility tensor χ and a finite number of rotations. We obtain an optimal estimate for the maximum probability that the C-terminal domain can assume a given orientation, and we show that only three rotations are required in the representation of , and that in general two are not enough. We also investigate the situation in which a compatible pair of mean paramagnetic tensors is obtained. Under a mild assumption on the corresponding magnetic susceptibility tensors, justified on physical grounds, we again obtain an optimal estimate for the maximum probability that the C-terminal domain can assume a given orientation. Moreover, we prove that only ten rotations are required in the representation of the compatible pair of mean paramagnetic tensors, and that in general three are not enough. The theoretical investigation is concluded by a study of the coaxial case, when all rotations are assumed to have a common axis. Results are obtained via an interesting connection with another inverse problem, the quadratic complex moment problem. Finally, we describe an application to experimental NMR data.

Recognition of the blurred image by complex moment invariants

An important class of radiometric degradations we are faced with often in practice is image blurring. In this paper, special attention is paid to the recognition of the blurred image by complex moment invariant. Some important rules of complex moments for the blurred image are presented and proofed. Based on these rules, a useful subset of complex moment invariants is introduced, that are not affected by the blur, rotation, scale, and translation of the images. Another conclusion is that these complex moment invariants, which are not effected by image blurring, can all be expressed by a set of sub-polynomials, which are invariant to blurring. The graphs of these invariants under the effect of both blurring and image resolution are presented. The experiments have shown that these invariants can be successfully used in recognition of the blurred images.

Hong Sangsoo's Lines of Inquiry, Communication, Defense, and Escape

Abstract This article looks at the first four films of contemporary Korean filmmaker Hong Sangsoo. It seeks in particular to explore Hong's use of “lines” as geographical and behavioral figures that chart the contemporary landscape of South Korea at a complex moment in its history. The lines that traverse Hong's world produce a cinema of tangled webs and knotted relations.

A New Class of Shift-Invariant Operators

This letter proposes a class of operators with a shift invariance property. These operators are derived from two-dimensional (2-D) complex moment invariants based on the observation that there is a duality between rotation invariance and shift invariance. A general form of the shift invariants belonging to this class is presented, which shows that polyspectral invariants such as the power spectrum and the bispectrum are members of the class. Methods for computing shift invariants for one-dimensional (1-D) and 2-D signals are also presented. The examples given in the paper suggest that the higher order operators can preserve the original signal waveform better than autocorrelation.

The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South

With essays by Tony Badger, David L. Chappell, Elizabeth Jacoway, Richard H. King, Ralph E. Luker, Charles Marsh, Keith D. Miller, Linda Reed, and Lauren F. Winner In the 1950s and 1960s the American South was in upheaval. Brilliant thinkers and writers joined on-the-ground activists to challenge segregation and the South's long established Jim Crow society. The men and women who opposed them waged a war of words in favor of the status quo. The essays in The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South examine the interplay of thought and action in a complex and turbulent moment in American history. Written by scholars in history, English, and religious studies, these essays explore ideas about religion, freedom, race, liberalism, and conservatism. When people challenged authority, or defended it, what ideas did they uphold? What were their moral and intellectual standards? What language did they use, and what sources did they cite? What issues did they feel needed explaining, what issues did they take for granted, and what issues did they avoid? Leading scholars investigate the wide range of conceptions, interpretations, and responses to the whirlwind of change. Some of the essays concentrate on intellectuals who were systematic thinkers who published their work to be studied, analyzed, and used. Four essays center on the ideas of Martin Luther King, Jr., surely the most influential southern intellectual in the 1950s and 1960s. Other essays analyze the thoughts of people, such as civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer and segregationist politician Jim Johnson, who never saw themselves as intellectuals. The civil rights movement set the agenda for thought and action in the 1950s and 1960s. The Role of Ideas in the Civil Rights South begins by examining ideas prominent in the movement. It then studies the ideas of white moderates in the South, white conservatives, and African Americans who did not join the movement. Particular emphases include the relationship between theology and political life, the national and international contexts of southern thought, and the variety of southern intellectual interests. Ted Ownby is a professor of history and southern studies at the University of Mississippi. His books include American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty, and Culture, 1830-1998 (1999) and Subduing Satan: Religion, Recreation, and Manhood in the Rural South, 1865-1920 (1990).

Ullemar's formula for the jacobian of the complex moment mapping

The complex moment sequence μ ( P ) is assigned to a univalent polynomial P ( z ) by the Cauchy transform of the domain , where is the unit disk. We establish the representation of the Jacobian in terms of roots of the derivative . Combining this result with the special decomposition for the Hurwitz determinants, we prove a formula for , which was previously conjectured by Ullemar. As a consequence, we show that the boundary of the class of all locally univalent polynomials in is contained in the union of three irreducible algebraic surfaces.

Leishmanial infection: analysis of its first steps. A review

The first steps in leishmaniasis are critical in determining the evolution of the disease. Major advances have recently been done in understanding this crucial moment. Fundamental research in parasite-vector interaction, parasite biology, insect saliva, and vertebrate host response have shed new light and uncovered a most fascinating and complex moment in leishmaniasis. We review here some of these aspects and we try to connect them in a logical framework.

Embry truncated complex moment problem

Let T be a cyclic subnormal operator on a Hilbert space H with cyclic vector x 0 and let γ ij :=( T * i T j x 0, x 0), for any i,j∈ N∪{0} . The Bram–Halmos’ characterization for subnormality of T involved a moment matrix M( n). In a parallel approach, we construct a moment matrix E( n) corresponding to Embry’s characterization for subnormality of T. We discuss the relationship between M( n) and E( n) via the full moment problem. Next, given a collection of complex numbers γ≡{ γ ij } (0⩽ i+ j⩽2 n, | i− j|⩽ n) with γ 00>0 and γ ji= γ ̄ ij , we consider the truncated complex moment problem for γ; this entails finding a positive Borel measure μ supported in the complex plane C such that γ ij=∫ z ̄ iz j dμ(z) . We show that this moment problem can be solved when E( n)⩾0 and E( n) admits a flat extension E( n+ k), where k=1 when n is odd and k=2 when n is even.

The Professionalization of the Woman Artist in Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

Critics of Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) have frequently noted the artistic endeavors of the novel's heroine, Helen Graham, yet they have not fully considered the historical and narratological ramifications of Helen's career as a painter. This essay argues that Helen's artworks cannot be considered as mere background to the novel or as simply symbolic reflections of the heroine's (or the author's) emotions. Instead, we must see the scenes of painting in Tenant as indicators of the novel's radical view of women's role as creative producers during a particularly complex moment in art history, one in which early-nineteenth-century female amateurism began its gradual transition from amateur "accomplished" woman to the professional female artist—a historical transition that, as is suggested in readings of various nineteenth-century novels, is in its earliest stages at precisely the moment of the writing and publication of Tenant. At the narrative level, the novel's many scenes of painting provide its readers with detailed, if oblique, guidelines for interpretation; the novel is formally and ideologically impacted by the presence of its painter-heroine. Most particularly, such a reevaluation of the role of painting in the novel resolves a central critical debate over the novel's problematic narrative structure.

The mote in God’s eye: 9/11, then and now

This article considers the narrativization of September 11th 2001 in relation to personal experience and history, political rhetoric and public commemoration. Starting from the visual and textual documentation of the day’s events and the competing interpretations of its meaning and significance, the author examines the role of the image in defining the place of New York in cultural memory, something of the history of the Twin Towers, and the media representations of their implosion. In this, the author argues that ‘dust’ became the dominant visual trope, casting a cloud - both actual and symbolic - over our capacity to comprehend this complex and traumatic moment in history. The article concludes with a discussion of the issue of 9/11’s memorialization.

Two variable subnormal completion problem

Given m > 0 and a finite collection of pairs of positive numbers C = {(α 1 (k),α 2 (k))}‖k‖≤m (‖k‖:= k 1 + k 2 ). The two variable subnormal completion problem is to find necessary and sufficient conditions to guarantee the existence of a two variable subnormal weighted shift whose initial weighted are given by C. Curto and Fialkow solved this problem in the case m = 1, using the solution of truncated complex moment problem. This paper obtained the representing measure in detail.

A duality proof of Tchakaloff's theorem

Tchakaloff's theorem establishes the existence of a quadrature rule of prescribed degree relative to a positive, compactly supported measure that is absolutely continuous with respect to Lebesgue measure on Rd. Subsequent extensions were obtained by Mysovskikh and by Putinar. We provide new proofs and partial extensions of these results, based on duality techniques utilized by Stochel. We also obtain new uniqueness criteria in the Truncated Complex Moment Problem.