Initial Gesture Research Articles

Phrase boundaries lacking word prosody: An articulatory investigation of Seoul Korean.

This electromagnetic articulography study explores the kinematic profile of Intonational Phrase boundaries in Seoul Korean. Recent findings suggest that the scope of phrase-final lengthening is conditioned by word- and/or phrase-level prominence. However, evidence comes mainly from head-prominence languages, which conflate positions of word prosody with positions of phrasal prominence. Here, we examine phrase-final lengthening in Seoul Korean, an edge-prominence language with no word prosody, with respect to focus location as an index of phrase-level prominence and Accentual Phrase (AP) length as an index of word demarcation. Results show that phrase-final lengthening extends over the phrase-final syllable. The effect is greater the further away that focus occurs. It also interacts with the domains of AP and prosodic word: lengthening is greater in smaller APs, whereas shortening is observed in the initial gesture of the phrase-final word. Additional analyses of kinematic displacement and peak velocity revealed that Korean phrase-final gestures bear the kinematic profile of IP boundaries concurrently to what is typically considered prominence marking. Based on these results, a gestural coordination account is proposed, in which boundary-related events interact systematically with phrase-level prominence as well as lower prosodic levels, and how this proposal relates to the findings in head-prominence languages is discussed.

Long term outcome of multidisciplinary management of urethro-rectal fistula after urologic surgery

We retrospectively collected the records of patients with URF operated on at the University Hospital of Tours between January 1, 2000 and January 1, 2020. Short-term and long-term results according to management are reported. The study included 20 patients. As an initial gesture, 11 patients underwent bladder catheterization and colostomy, seven underwent bladder catheterization alone, one underwent graciloplasty, and one, a York Mason procedure. The success rate of initial conservative management was only 5% (1/20). As a secondary or tertiary intervention, ten patients underwent a York Mason procedure and nine underwent graciloplasty. At the end of the study period, with a median follow-up of 50 months, 19 had been effectively treated for URF, 16 were able to have colostomy closure with restoration of digestive continuity while four had a permanent stoma. One patient had anal incontinence, 14% had major stress urinary incontinence. Multidisciplinary care remains a cornerstone of the treatment of URF because iterative surgeries may be required, with an overall success rate of up to 95% at the end of follow-up.

SequenceSense: A Tool for Designing Usable Foot-Based Gestures Using a Sequence-Based Gesture Recognizer

Foot-based gestures enable people to interact with mobile and wearable devices when their hands are unavailable for interaction. For the foot gestures to be truly usable, the gestures should be recognizable by the system without being confused by daily activities and still be easy to perform. However, designing such gestures often requires multiple iterations of gesture design, model training, and evaluation. In this paper, we present SequenceSense, a tool developed to help designers efficiently design a usable gesture set using inertial sensors, which eliminates the need for multiple data collection studies to evaluate the gestures’ usability through gesture modification by sequencing atomic actions and instant false positive analysis, and instead requires only the initial gesture sample collection. Unlike gesture recognizers using complete gestures to train a model, SequenceSense segments gesture into a sequence of atomic actions. For example, a foot tap to the right may have (1) lift the foot, (2) move the foot to the right, and (3) land the foot. SequenceSense also compares the gesture sequence with the sequence database created from the daily activities to identify possible conflicts. This allows gesture designers to build easily usable foot-based gestures without the need for recollecting and evaluating gestures. We validated SequenceSense’s efficacy in designing usable gestures with low false positives through a user study with nine gesture designers.

Time Decay: Assets, Authoritarianism, and Anxiety about the Future

This article identifies a basic formula in the Freudo-Marxist take on twentieth-century authoritarianism. This is the incommensurability of inherited past development with the pace and demands of industrial social life, damming up a tremendous excess that seeks reactionary outlet. Authoritarianism, here, breeds in the contradiction between the symptoms of the Oedipal drama and the commodity form. The implicit “repressive hypothesis” for sexuality and developmentalist teleology make this theorization of authoritarian formations untenable today. This article, however, identifies moments of promise in this literature, and turns to materials available to these thinkers—specifically interwar psychoanalytic theory on anxiety and economic theory on capital assets—to develop the rudiments of a different psycho-social theory of authoritarianism. I conclude by considering the specific and novel implications of financialization as an initial gesture towards bringing this forward to the present. If twentieth-century authoritarianism was a crisis of authority, today we witness authority’s decay.

Stories and Politics of Hispanism

Stories and Politics of Hispanism Alberto Medina KEYWORDS Hispanism, Hispanic Institute, Institito de las Españas, Federico de Onís In 1915, just one year before Federico de Onís arrived in New York after accepting an appointment as professor at Columbia University with the mission to build a program for the teaching of Spanish language and culture—and five years before he founded the Instituto de las Españas—he was writing some of the first film criticism in Spain. He had accepted an offer by his friend Ortega y Gasset to publish periodically about the new medium in España, his new weekly magazine. It was a short commitment, soon interrupted by his move overseas. Onís was not so much interested in the present of film as in its future, what it could become. Even if the new medium was still only an initial gesture, an insinuation of something to come, its mass appeal was already evident. Its extraordinary capacity to bring together, in the same room, before the same film, people from every race, class, or cultural origin, speaking many different languages, made clear that it could only be considered a "new instrument for humanity" of extraordinary potential (Onís et al. 68). Once in the US, Onís would have the opportunity to experience first-hand the cultural and social processes that he had witnessed in film and to put them to good use. The decades-long promotion of Spanish culture in the US and Latin America that he started in 1916 required a deep knowledge of the same processes of modernity that he had admired so much in the movie industry. Years later, after he had settled in New York, Juan Ramón Jiménez referred to him as a "Charlot Latino" (Ruiz-Manjón 15). Like the most famous actor in the world, Onís had the extraordinary capacity to be always identical to himself and yet always a successful character. The same perception was common among the many cultural visitors from Spain and Latin America whom Onís hosted through his Instituto de las Españas, which would later become the Hispanic Institute. For Moreno Villa or Concha Espina, among others, he was a constant performance of himself, systematically stressing his Spanishness both in his voice and his dress. He was not only the main cultural ambassador of Spain in the US, he was also "el más insigne modelo de nuestra raza" (Espina 142). It was, of course, a very deliberate strategy that the film critic had the chance to learn from the screen. It was also a necessary way to make tradition modern, marketable, and popular. When he had to defend the relevance of his work in the [End Page 1] US before a Spanish audience and perhaps particularly against the strong criticism from his beloved mentor Unamuno, he chose a very Spanish icon: he was a Don Quixote in America. Far from weakening his national identity and dissolving it in the American melting pot, the contact with the US had allowed him to go deeper into an "españolismo radical" that opened every door to him (Onís, "El español" 266). His adventures in the New World allowed him to get closer to that "modelo de nuestra raza" that Concha Espina would see in him. That model was not so much a return as a projection: "Ya antes de salir de España sentía la atracción de la América española como razón última del ser histórico de España" (España en América 9). For Onís, the success of both his character and his cultural mission was not about any kind of mutual assimilation but rather a radical affirmation of difference, a fight for visibility that could only be achieved through a successful performance. And so the timeless Don Quixote knew how to display the abilities of the modern Charlot. Onís was very conscious of the danger at the core of the success of the Spanish language in the US: if it was possible thanks to a popular demand driven by commercial ties with Latin America, the enemies of...

El collage: herramienta conceptual y compositiva del diseño arquitectónico de Richard Meier

El collage es una técnica común en el arte moderno y contemporáneo, incluso en la creación de cine. El collage combina motivos pictóricos y fragmentos de origines desconectados dentro de una entidad sintética que otorga nuevos roles a esas partes. En el diseño arquitectónico esta técnica genera nuevas narrativas, diálogos, y yuxtaposiciones que ayudan a la capacidad de imaginar el espacio. El proceso de creación de collages utilizado por el arquitecto Richard Meier es de gran importancia en la concepción general y diseño arquitectónico de todos sus proyectos. Cada collage cuenta una historia mediante unos principios organizativos, un manejo del espacio basado en figuras geométricas, retículas, proporciones que deben ser precisamente estudiadas y calculadas. La maravillosa estética, forma y organización espacial de los proyectos de Meier radican en la abstracción de una idea en una serie de collages. El recorrido por el análisis de los collages de Richard Meier, nos permite concluir que, en el proceso de creación de Meier, el collage, existe como gesto inicial arquitectónico; no existe improvisación en las ideas que lo generan y no es solo un elemento primario de comunicación sino de creación.

Feasibility of Wrist-Worn, Real-Time Hand, and Surface Gesture Recognition via sEMG and IMU Sensing

While most wearable gesture recognition approaches focus on the forearm or fingers, the wrist may be a more suitable location for practical use. We present the design and validation of a real-time gesture recognition wristband based on surface electromyography and inertial measurement unit sensing fusion, which can recognize 8 air gestures and 4 surface gestures with 2 distinct force levels. Ten healthy subjects performed an initial gesture recognition experiment, followed by a second experiment 1 h later and a third experiment 1 day later. Classification accuracies for the initial experiment were 92.6% and 88.8% for air and surface gestures, respectively, and there were no changes in accuracy results during testing 1 h. and 1 day later ( $p$ $>$ 0.05). These results demonstrate the feasibility of wrist-based gesture recognition paving the way for potential future integration in to a smart watch or other wrist-worn wearable for intuitive human computer interaction.

La maqueta: herramienta esencial en el proceso de diseño de Richard meier

El proceso de creación de maquetas utilizado por el arquitecto Richard Meier es de gran importancia en la concepción general y diseño arquitectónico de todos sus proyectos. Cada maqueta cuenta una historia mediante unos principios organizativos, un manejo del espacio interior basado en figuras geométricas, retículas, proporciones que deben ser precisamente estudiadas y calculadas mediante maquetas y pruebas para poder tener en cuenta cosas intangibles como la luz. La maravillosa estética y forma de los proyectos de Meier radican en la materialización de una idea abstracta en un sin número de maquetas. El recorrido por el análisis de las maquetas de Richard Meier, nos permite concluir que el proceso de maquetación de Meier existe como gesto inicial junto al dibujo en el proceso de diseño arquitectónico; no existe improvisación en las ideas que lo generan y la maqueta no es solo un elemento primario de comunicación sino de creación.

Statues Also Die

“African thinking,” “African thought,” and “African philosophy.” These phrases are often used indiscriminately to refer to intellectual activities in and/or about Africa. This large field, which sits at the crossroads between analytic philosophy, continental thought, political philosophy and even linguistics is apparently limitless in its ability to submit the object “Africa” to a multiplicity of disciplinary approaches. This absence of limits has far-reaching historical origins. Indeed it needs to be understood as a legacy of the period leading to African independence and to the context in which African philosophy emerged not so much as a discipline as a point of departure to think colonial strictures and the constraints of colonial modes of thinking. That the first (self-appointed) exponents of African philosophy were Westerners speaks volumes. Placide Tempels but also some of his predecessors such as Paul Radin (Primitive Man as Philosopher, 1927) and Vernon Brelsford (Primitive Philosophy, 1935) were the first scholars to envisage this extension of philosophy into the realm of the African “primitive.” The material explored in this article – Statues Also Die (Marker, Resnais, and Cloquet), Bantu Philosophy (Tempels), The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa (Cheikh Anta Diop), and It For Others (Duncan Campbell) - resonates with this initial gesture but also with the ambition on part of African philosophers such as VY Mudimbe to challenge the limits of a discipline shaped by late colonialism and then subsequently recaptured by ethnophilosophers. Statues Also Die is thus used here as a text to appraise the limitations of African philosophy at an early stage. The term “stage,” however, is purely arbitrary and the work of African philosophers has since the 1950s often been absorbed by an effort to retrieve African philosophizing practices before, or away from, the colonial matrix. This activity has gained momentum and has been characterized by an ambition to excavate and identify figures and traditions that had hitherto remained unacknowledged: from Ptah-hotep in ancient Egypt (Obenga 1973, 1990) and North-African Church fathers such as Saint Augustine, Tertullian and Arnobius of Sicca (Mudimbe and Nkashama 1977), to “falsafa”-practising Islamic thinkers (Diagne 2008; Jeppie and Diagne 2008), from the Ethiopian tradition of Zera Yacob and Walda Heywat (Sumner 1976), to Anton-Wilhelm Arno, the Germany-trained but Ghana-born Enlightenment philosopher (Hountondji [1983] 1996).

The Fetish of Finance: Metatheoretical Reflections on Understandings of the 2008 Crisis

AbstractMany critiques of neoliberal capitalism after the 2008 crisis have relied on unreflexive concepts and positivistic frameworks, yielding selective, one-sided understandings of the key role of finance. These reductionist interpretations, which conceptualize “finance” either as a hegemonic group of strategic actors or as a prominent sector in neoliberal markets, may be critically evaluated in the light of Marx’s theory of fetish forms. The category of fetishism raises an important metatheoretical question about the conditions of possibility for the tacit, widespread acceptance of reified notions of speculative finance in accounts of the 2008 crisis. As an initial gesture toward identifying these conditions, I outline a social-epochal argument about the ways in which the general financialization of society since the 1970s has ultimately rendered (late) capitalism more adequate to what Marx called its “most superficial fetish.” Understanding capitalism in these conditions calls for a greater degree of ...

Shaw and Bertrand Russell versus Gilbert Murray on Britain's Entry into World War I

Shaw and Bertrand Russell versus Gilbert Murray on Britain's Entry into World War I

Creating the Norm: The African-American Literary Tradition

Abstract This paper starts from the premise that norm, in the sense of a prescriptive tradition based on a set of standards deriving from past practices and regulating future ones, is the result of an initial creative gesture; in other words, first there was creativity and creativity became the norm. Based on this premise, the paper looks at some of the earliest African-American pieces of writing to trace the itinerary from creativity to norm, thus witnessing the birth of the African-American literary tradition. To this end, the paper analyses the first published Black narrative and identifies the trope of the talking book as illustrating that original gesture which, by creatively incorporating the norm, marks the beginning of a new tradition. Then the paper follows subsequent early Black narratives and identifies the creative transgression of the norm illustrated by the Middle Passage as the process by which the new norm is established.

Communicative intentions in wild chimpanzees: persistence and elaboration in gestural signalling

We examine evidence for communicative intent during conspecific interactions in wild chimpanzees (Budongo Forest, Uganda), focusing on persistence in gestural communication. Previous research indicates that great apes have large gestural repertoires and produce gestural communication in a flexible and intentional manner, including the production of gesture sequences. Although there is a lack of consensus on the form and function of sequences, there is some evidence that sequences are produced when signallers fail to receive any response from a recipient. Here, we provide first systematic evidence for communicative persistence in wild chimpanzees. Rather than examining only the presence or absence of a response, we used the most commonly observed response to assign meanings to gestures and examined sequence production in relation to response congruency. Chimpanzees ceased communication if successful, but persevered when unsuccessful. Chimpanzees repeated gestures when a response partially matched their goal but substituted the original gesture when a response was incongruent. Persistence was also mediated by recipient intent to respond, with more sequences produced within competitive than affiliative contexts. Gestures within sequences were homogenous in semantic meaning and signallers continued until the response matched the assigned meaning of the initial gesture. Gestural sequence production was not primarily affective; gesture intensity (in terms of modality) did not increase within sequences. Chimpanzee gestural sequences emerged to achieve specific outcomes; given variability in recipient behaviour following initial gestures, signallers were flexible in their persistence towards these goals.

A DEXTEROUS AND SELF-ADAPTIVE HUMANOID ROBOT HAND: GCUA HAND

Gesture-changeable under-actuated (GCUA) function is put forward to make traditional under-actuated hands feel easy to grasp different objects and do simple operations dexterously, simultaneously, this function can lower control difficulties of robotic hands. Based on GCUA function, a GCUA hand based on pulley-belt mechanism is designed in detail and manufactured. The Hand can grasp different objects self-adaptively and change its initial gesture dexterously before touching objects. The hand has 5 fingers and 15 DOFs, each finger utilizes screw-nut transmission, flexible drawstring constraint and belt-pulley under-actuated mechanism to realize GCUA function. The analyses on grasping static forces and grasping stabilities are given. The analyses and experimental results show that GCUA function is very nice and valid. The hands with GCUA function can meet the requirements of grasping and operating with lower control and cost, which is the middle road between traditional under-actuated hands and dexterous hands.

The Production of Subjectivity: From Transindividuality To The Commons

The current conjuncture is marked by a fundamental impasse in terms of how to engage the question of politics. This is in part due to the fact that the various figures through which one engages with politics--the citizen, worker, or militant--have become exhausted of their meaning; the citizen has been replaced by the interest group, the worker by the investor in his or her own human capital, and the militant by the terrorist. As Alain Badiou writes: This political subject has gone under various names. He used to be referred to as a 'citizen,' certainly not in the sense of the elector or town councillor, but in the sense of the Jacobin of 1793. He used to be called 'professional revolutionary'. He used to be called 'grassroots militant'. We seem to be living in a time when his name is suspended, a time when we must find a new name for him. (1) Rather than work in the direction that Badiou supposes, finding a new name for the political subject, I would like to focus in this essay on the 'production of subjectivity'. The 'production of subjectivity', the way in which human beings are constituted as subjects, through structures of language and power; to adopt such a concept is often seen as tantamount to a denial of political agency altogether, to the assertion that everything is an effect of power, that agency and action cannot exist. What I would like to propose is that far from being a theoretical dead end for politics the production of subjectivity is the condition for its renewal. It is only by examining the way in which subjectivity is produced that it is possible to understand how subjectivity might be produced otherwise, ultimately transforming itself, turning a passive condition into an active process. The connection between production and politics that lies at the root of the Marxist project remains as valid as ever, but production needs to be understood in the broadest sense, not just work, the efforts on the factory floor, but the myriad ways in which actions, habits, and language produce effects, including effects on subjectivity, ways of perceiving, understanding, and relating to the world. As a philosophical perspective, or line of inquiry, 'the production of subjectivity' is fundamentally disorientating, primarily because it forces us to treat something that, in liberal individualistic society, is generally considered to be originary, the subject or individual, as produced, the cause and origin of actions as an effect of prior productions. The perspective cuts through the established binaries of philosophical thought, mingling effects with causes, material conditions with interior states, and objects with subjects. As an initial gesture of orientation I propose that the production of subjectivity can at least be provisionally defined along two axes that it cuts across: that of base and superstructure and that of structure and subject. Rather than understand the work of Marx through the oft-cited figure of base and superstructure, in which the production of things and the reproduction of subjectivity are each given their place and degree of effectivity according to a hierarchical structure, it is perhaps more interesting to view his work through the intersection of a mode of production and a mode of subjection. This assertion gets its textual support through the multiple places where Marx addresses the prehistory of capitalism, the breakdown of feudalism and previous modes of production. It is not enough for capitalism to constitute itself economically, to exploit the flows of wealth and labour, but it must constitute itself subjectively as well, develop the desires and habits necessary for it to perpetuate itself. (2) As Marx writes: 'The advance of capitalist production develops a working class which by education [Erziehung], tradition, and habit [Gewohneit] looks upon the requirements of that mode of production as self evident natural laws'. (3) Thus the production of subjectivity demands that two facets of social reality, that of the constitution of ideas and desires and that of the production of things, must be thought of not as hierarchically structured with respect to each other, but fully immanent, taking place at the same time, and within the same sites. …

Atopoi of the Modern: Revisiting the Place of the Indian Residential School

Atopoi of the Modern: Revisiting the Place of the Indian Residential School Geoffrey Carr (bio) On 11 June 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal apology to the Indigenous peoples of Canada for the federal government’s imposition of the Indian Residential School (irs) system. This long-awaited gesture of contrition was proffered in the wake of a multibillion dollar reparation package and the inception of a five-year Truth and Reconciliation Commission (trc). Increasingly, governments across the globe are partaking in the politics of regret, and as a consequence more scrutiny has fallen on the form and content of what are now called symbolic reparations: offering public apologies; expunging offensive names attached to institutions, buildings, and streets; constructing commemorative museums; and commissioning memorials. One of the more persistent critiques of such symbolic reparations is the way in which they sublimate and compartmentalize the pain of mass social trauma.1 This tendency appears in postapology sound bites circulating in [End Page 109] the Canadian media, encouraging the nation to “turn the page on this painful history.” In this way, the official politics of regret in Canada produces a disquieting sense that the teleological ends of the democratic nation-state may yet be realized. This official narrative suggests that although founded on colonial violence, the nation is at last moving to its logical conclusion—a fair, open, and tolerant society. To date, however, most talk of reconciliation, from church and state, has shied away from the more burning questions raised by the spectre of the schools: how to prosecute offenders, determine if crimes against humanity have occurred, or reassess how this history impacts the legitimacy of Canadian sovereignty. This general silence stands in sharp contrast to the objections raised by critics, many of them Indigenous, who ask these same difficult questions. In this way, the narrative structure of “turning the page” threatens to foreclose an unflinching struggle with our colonial past and present. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Architectural plan: St Eugene Indian Residential School, 1911, Allan Keefer, architect. Façade elevation. © Indian and Northern Affairs. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2009). Source: Library and Archives Canada / Indian and Northern Affairs / RG22M 77803 / 111 Item 1067. In this article, I will attempt to complicate such facile reconciliatory narratives by examining the design and construction of Indian Residential Schools to outline this architecture’s function in the application of the so-called civilizing process and in the disruption of the political, social, and cultural life of Canada’s Indigenous populations. My analysis focuses in particular on the historical and present-day operation of St Eugene, the once–Indian Residential School now luxury resort, located in Cranbrook, British Columbia (figures 1 and 2).2 I contend that the study of the [End Page 110] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Architectural plan: St Eugene Indian Residential School, 1911, Allan Keefer, architect. Ground floor. © Indian and Northern Affairs. Reproduced with the permission of the Minister of Public Works and Government Services Canada (2009). Source: Library and Archives Canada / Indian and Northern Affairs / RG22M 77803 / 111 Item 1069. building’s design, siting, and program, the policies guiding its operation, as well as the present repurposing of this institution, reveal much about the governmental rationality that informed the construction of a second generation of residential schools—focussed on segregating the unassimilable—and much about the profoundly complicated reconciliation process now underway in Canada as well.3 Dakota historian Waziyatawin has suggested that “no one will be committed to righting the wrongs if they cannot recognize and name those wrongs” (194). I contend that part of this recognition and naming requires a rethinking of the specific material and spatial operation of this architecture, to understand the particular and localized means of enacting policy. I argue further that thinking through the buildings of the residential school system, a project toward [End Page 111] which this paper only makes an initial gesture, comprises an important part of the truth telling process and, by default, any effectual expression of contrition. To date there have been no scholarly studies of the design, siting, scale...

Maskenfreiheit and Schumann's Napoleon-Ballad

One of the best known compositions from Robert Schumann's "song year" of 1840 is the ballad "Die beiden Grenadiere," op. 49, no. 1, to a poem by Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). Any work about Napoleon, in any genre, was inevitably politically charged, both at the time Heine wrote his poem (perhaps in 1821, after hearing the news of the former emperor's death on 5 May 1821) and the date of its most famous musical setting (at the beginning of the decade when Germany was edging towards revolutionary outbreak). What impelled this 21st-century investigation of the song was curiosity about its confusing initial gesture in the piano, a tonic six-four chord as an anacrusis, leading to unharmonized tonic pitches on the downbeat of measure 1. Speculation about Schumann's intention led to an investigation of both men's attitudes towards Napoleon, especially the aftermath of his downfall. That Heine venerated Napoleon (who emancipated the Jews) cannot be doubted, but Heine, given to paradox and contradiction, was no hagiographer. His poem is as much literary as it is political, with its borrowings from Des Knaben Wunderhorn and Herder's translation of the Scottish ballad "Edward." The First Empire, like all empires, is not merely historical fact but a confabulation of poetic legends. Heine's underlying concern, I would argue, was not Bonapartism per se but rising German nationalism of the sort he found ominous and that Schumann, to some as yet ill-defined degree, supported. But composer and poet both associated Napoleon with the ideals of the French Revolution in the days before it and the emperor succumbed to what is darkest in human nature. In my opinion, Schumann understood Heine's delineation of nationalistic fanaticism and found apt musical gestures for that understanding. Here, I trace the composer's lifelong sense of identification with Napoleon and the compositional decisions that tell of a political point of view in "Die beiden Grenadiere."

Authority is an Attribute … Revisited

As we drove down the Red Squirrel Road to attend the conference that gave rise to this issue, the foliage was lush. I hadn't been down this road for a long time. I had expected everything to be the same, but it was different. A knot formed in my stomach. This puzzled me. I stretched to see traces of the former clear-cuts. Occasionally, I detected a barren area about 20 feet in. On an earlier trip, I had photographed a collection of three-year-old pines planted in gravel not too far from the road. Those pines struggled to attach themselves to the rock. I still have the photographs; but the pines are gone, and poplars have grown in. famous Red Squirrel Road....Certainly the events of the Red Squirrel Road blockades and the Bear Island land claim had extended the direction of my art work. blending of my art and my activism became my means of support for the Red Squirrel Road blockades. During the blockades, the local and provincial governments negotiated to ensure the manifestation was a peaceful one. It appeared that strategies used by the empowered had significantly changed since my involvement with civil disobedience in the 1960s and 1970s. But, was this the case or, rather, had the violence of authority been hidden behind a charade of negotiation, as in Chief Justice McEachern's ruling on the Gitksan/Wet'suweten land claim in British Columbia? And perhaps here, with the irregular prosecution of demonstrators on the Red Squirrel Road blockades? I wanted to know more, how and why. As in the past, I am able to research my questions and experiences by means of making art.The original exhibition, Authority is an Attribute [Part 1], investigated the dynamics of power versus authority relationships. It failed, however, to scrutinize the complexities and complicities of this theme beyond the expressive, knee-jerk polarities of victim and exploiter. collaboration was an opportunity to develop these concepts more thoroughly, at the same time as bringing their cause to the gallery-going public. Authority is an Attribute ... Part II, explored the concept of authority as it extends into power relations and gamesmanship-like strategies. To represent this visually, I designed the installation to provoke tension between three major components: Cautioned Homes and Gardens, The Game Players and Authority is an Attribute of Power Relations. work went through many stages before it arrived at this form, however, and became a collaboration with the Teme-Augama Anishnabai.My initial gesture was simple, and perhaps naive. I photographed models (my urban friends) dressed as they would appear for work. They were directed to look at the camera through a large pair of binoculars. It was important for them to look benign in every way, as I wanted them to represent an ordinary range of the general public. binoculars would re-position the reading of the commonplace to include connotations of desire and scrutiny. These images were printed life-sized and placed along the logging road to be photographed. I also photographed them in the forests and the clear- cuts. As I trundled though dense bush with an armament of photographic equipment and armloads of stand-up photos, my friends from Bear Island alternated between laughing at the city chick and using those life-sized figures to act out their frustration with the Ontario government. As I watched and listened, I began to hear the stories not printed in the Globe and Mail or in the literature from the Temagami Wilderness Society.These animated sessions with friends and the cut-out photo-figures was where the collaboration really began to extend beyond the agit- prop gesture into the newer forms of documentary photography. I knew that the Temagami issue was not just a clash between logging and conservation. Yet at the time that was the perception of the Toronto public, stripped of its braided historical relationship to aboriginal rights, forestry policies and tourism. …

Breasts, couples, children and othercliches: Visual/verbal imagery in surrealist drama

In the first moments of Les Mystères de l'amour (1924), his only play labelled “drame surrealiste,” Roger Vltrac uses visual imagery to initiate a radical shift from conventional staging. The play opens with a Prologue in which the protagonist is seen “tracing sinuous lines in the mud with a stick.” He is, he tells a policeman, “finishing off [the] hair” of a female portrait painted on the wall of a house. According to the stage directions, “He leaves, tracing a sinuous line. The curtain slowly falls” (p. 229)(1). In this brief Prologue the protagonist by his tracing both adds to (and partially relocates) the set and leads the audience's gaze away from the stage. Appropriately,, the play's first tableau begins in “A box overhanging the stage. The proscenium lights are out. The house lights, a chandelier above the audience, are lighted” (p. 230), and the action, a parody of courtship rituals, takes place In the box, with occasional shouts Into and from the audience. Thus Vltrac transcends the two- dimensional limitations of set design and controls the audience: Initially directing its attention from the conventional locus of action and then destroying the traditional boundaries between actor and audience. The protagonist's initial gesture, reinforcing the visual aspects of theatre, ultimately undermines our basic assumptions about the genre.

Laryngeal adjustments in Japanese voiceless sound production

As part of a series of investigations on the production of sequence of unvoiced sounds in different languages, the current experiment was conducted using the combined techniques of photo-electric glottography, fiberoptic filming and laryngeal electromyography. Particular attention was paid to devoiced vowel production in various voiceless consonantal environments including geminates. The data show that the glottal opening gesture during a voiceless sequence containing a devoiced vowel is characterized by a monomodal pattern, unless the vowel occurs between a voiceless fricative and a geminated one, such as /siQs/, where a bimodal pattern may occur. The movement results also suggest that the velocity and size of the glottal opening gesture vary according to the nature of the adjacent voiceless obstruents. The speed of the opening phase is slow when a stop precedes the vowel, and fast when a fricative precedes it. The peak glottal opening attained during the devoiced vowel is larger when a fricative either precedes or follows than when the vowel is surrounded on both sides by single or geminated stops. Furthermore, it is revealed that the peak velocity of the initial opening gesture occurs at almost the same time in relation to the voicing offset of the preceding vowel, regardless of the properties of the surrounding voiceless obstruents and, thus, irrespective of variations in the magnitude of velocity and opening size.