Memory Thread Research Articles

Threads of memory: Reviving the ornament of a dead child at the Neolithic village of Ba`ja (Jordan).

In 2018, a well-constructed cist-type grave was discovered at Ba`ja, a Neolithic village (7,400-6,800 BCE) in Southern Jordan. Underneath multiple grave layers, an 8-year-old child was buried in a fetal position. Over 2,500 beads were found on the chest and neck, along with a double perforated stone pendant and a delicately engraved mother-of-pearl ring discovered among the concentration of beads. The first was found behind the neck, and the second on the chest. The meticulous documentation of the bead distribution indicated that the assemblage was a composite ornament that had gradually collapsed, partly due to the burying position. Our aim was to challenge time degradation and to reimagine the initial composition in order to best explore the significance of this symbolic category of material culture, not as mere group of beads, but as an ornamental creation with further aesthetic, artisanal and socioeconomic implications. The reconstruction results exceeded our expectations as it revealed an imposing multi-row necklace of complex structure and attractive design. Through multiple lines of evidence, we suggest that the necklace was created at Ba`ja, although significant parts of beads were made from exotic shells and stones, including fossil amber, an unprecedented material never attested before for this period. The retrieval of such an ornament from life and its attribution to a young dead child highlights the significant social status of this individual. Beyond the symbolic functions related to identity, the necklace is believed to have played a key role in performing the inhumation rituals, understood as a public event gathering families, relatives, and people from other villages. In this sense, the necklace is not seen as belonging completely to the realm of death but rather to the world of the living, materializing a collective memory and shared moments of emotions and social cohesion.

Dinh Q Lê, Photographing the Thread of Memory

Dinh Q Lê, Photographing the Thread of Memory

The Narrative Space: John Hejduk’s Angelic Architecture

Pragmatist modern architecture tends to dissociate mind and body and has been unable to dialogue with the human soul, but architectural educator John Hejduk challenged such an understanding of buildings as autonomous objects and strove for the soul of architecture, which had a direct connection to good humanity. This paper analyzes how Hejduk explored the design concept of “narrative space” to reflect on the predicament of meaninglessness in the built environment, implementing it through design to re-bridge human perceptual and emotional connection to the lost spiritual and cosmic world. The analysis focuses on his poems, experimental drawings, and the symbolism of angels to interpret the hermeneutic depth of historical meaning in his architecture and to define humanity as a poetical dwelling between heaven and earth. The paper discloses how Hejduk used the dialogue between poetical narrative and architectural geometrical form, the symbol of angels as divine messengers, the act of sketching as narrative composition, and the legacy of his architectural pedagogy to reinvent architecture as a more thoughtful design process toward the beauty of humanity. This paper demonstrates that Hejduk’s architectural approach generated a poetical resistance against Cartesian principles of modern architecture and established an expressive and critical design language, interweaving the multiple theoretical threads of memory, history, trauma, and poetical emotion into the production of marvelous space that can tell stories and inspire our passion for spiritual architecture.

Communication for Real-Time Music Systems: An Overview of O2

Abstract Message passing between processes and across networks offers a powerful method to integrate and coordinate various music programs, facilitating software reuse, modularity, and parallel processing. Networking can integrate components that use different languages and hardware. In this article we describe O2, a flexible protocol for communication ranging from the thread level up to the level of global networks. Messages in O2 are similar to those of Open Sound Control, but O2 offers many additional features, including discovery, clock synchronization, a reliable message delivery option, and routing based on services rather than specific network addresses. A bridge mechanism extends the reach of O2 to web browsers, shared memory threads, and small microcontrollers. The design, implementation, and applications of O2 are described.

FÉLIX GUATTARI AND THE HIGHWAYS OF MEMORY

One of the last major works of “French Theory,” Félix Guattari’s notoriously dense 1989 Schizoanalytic Cartographies (SC) has only recently been made available to English-speaking audiences by Andrew Goffey’s 2013 translation. This sudden displacement of Guattari’s treatise into the present day provides the ideal opportunity for its place within Guattari’s thought, and also within the wider field of post-humanist critical discourse that has developed since its publication, to be reconsidered. I contend that the thread of memory – the storing, recalling, and forgetting of memory-data – serves as both a privileged means of navigating this text’s hyper-complexity and of articulating its critical utility. SC offers itself as a framework for thinking through the subject-in-production’s complex imbrication in the “age of planetary computerization,” one in which there is always a revolving door between the “data” of subjectivity and the “memory” of technical machines.

Writing Ourselves into Time: Stories of Indo-Trinidadian Women

ABSTRACT Three generations of Indo-Trinidadian women are the major subjects in the stories that emerge as the researcher/writer situates herself as an Indo-Caribbean Canadian. A traditionally patriarchal culture has previously rendered women as minor characters within the literature of the region. The writer gains new perspective after leaving a home country that has been characterised by colonisation. This work explores threads of memory in retrieving stories that are at risk of disappearing over time. Customs that characterised life for earlier generations of Indo-Trinidadian women show up as interesting details, giving insight into the resilience of people who had limited circumstances in rural Trinidad. As the generations progress, and as there is more urban exposure, identity is complicated by the dominant Trinidadian Creole culture. The stories offer glimpses into lives where traditional Indian culture morphs into a unique Indo-Trinidadian one. The three women embrace assimilation into a larger Trinidadian culture, but in varying degrees. For the researcher, learning to write about Indo-Trinidadian women’s experiences is as important as the stories that are written. Through interviews, questioning, authoethnography, memory work, and storytelling, events are reconstructed from snippets of inherited fragments of experiences.

Which story to tell?

Which story to tell? Richard Carr Christos Tsiolkas. 7½. Sydney: Allen and Unwin Press, 2021. 344 pp. A $32.99. ISBN: 9781761065330 Federico Fellini's 8½ (1963) centers on a filmmaker suffering from director's block who goes into retreat in a hotel [End Page 296] seeking to overcome this personal and artistic impasse. Christos Tsiolkas gives a nod of homage to the late director in his latest novel, 7½. Like the Italian master, the narrator—Christos, a novelist—enters into a two-week retreat in a rented seaside house, intent on making headway on at least one of the writing projects bedeviling him. "It is treacherous being a writer," the narrator avers after sketching the floor plan of the house and environs (4), laying out for his readers the current relationship between himself and his profession. "I have come here to write a book," the narrator states (4), and though he struggles to name what kind of book it will be—a novel? a play? a screenplay?—he is firm about its focus: "I do know this. … All of those matters—politics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality, the future—all of them now bore me" (4). These early sections of 7½ introduce us to Christos at this stage of his life—successful, nearing sixty, his body conceding some defeat to the predations of old age—as he sets up his routine and presents us with a current manifesto: "I am writing at a time when the novel is unbearably timid" (33). Christos follows memory threads back to childhood and adolescence—to Stavros, a man sharing the Tsiolkas household in his childhood, defined, for the young Christos, by the alluring reek of his sweat; to his cousin Manolis, or Mani, growing up a peasant in Greece, who encourages "the chubby young boy from Melbourne" (36) to scale a cliff with him and his friends; to his surprising interruption of two men in sexual congress alongside a urinal. Such memories, in fact, are a source or set of sources for one of his book ideas: "I want to re-create a world that has disappeared through the sensual experiences of a child" (38). It is another idea, however, that has most captured the narrator's imagination. Another memory thread leads us back to the 1990s, when Christos watched gay porn on a VHS tape featuring a white actor identified as Paul Carrigan cavorting with a Black actor. Something electric in that viewing experience has stayed with Christos as he shares a history he has invented for Paul over time and a likely story line for his new work. Paul will now be a retired actor from the porn industry, an American married to a retired fellow performer named Jenna. They now live in her native Australia and are blessed with an adolescent son, Neal. In the developing draft, Paul receives an offer from an American viewer of his videos, an elderly man who, for $180,000, requests that Paul fly to California to spend three nights with him. Of course, there will be sex but "nothing sordid or disgusting" (48). Enticed by the sum, Paul and Jenna decide that he will return to California, where he will accede to the gentleman's request in return for the sum. While there, Paul will also encounter old friends from the industry and the suppressed temptations of his old life. 7½ unravels in multiple ways. The narrator guides us through his daily regimen of swims and walks and details his breakfast and dinner menus. Though striving to block himself from the outside world, he calls or is called by Simon, his enduring life partner-lover, and he visits Andrea, a lifelong friend with whom he quarrels over the nature of his creative gifts. Telling her that he no longer sees himself as rebel or reformer but as one who loves the world, Christos is humiliated by her dismissal of his current vision: "You can't write about beauty. … You don't have that talent. … You're shit at metaphor" (81). And as he sits at his desk, the narrator delves further into memories—of his immigrant family come to Melbourne in search of the...

Threads of memory: the historical novel in Suriname as a writing of resistance

This article aims to analyze The free negress Elisabeth: prisoner of color (2004), a historical novel from Suriname (country that is part of the Guiana region) written by Cynthia McLeod. The focus given to the research intends to problematize the way the place of speech acts in the construction of the fiction, highlighting historically silenced voices. In addition, the study of the place of speech of black women during the Dutch colonization in Suriname aims to contribute to the debate on racial and gender inequality that underlies colonial societies and remains to today. For the discussions, this research will be based on the reflections of Akotirene (2019), Morrison (2019) and hooks (2015), among others.

Energy-efficient fairness-aware memory access scheduling

In a chip multiprocessor (CMP) major resource that is being shared among multiple cores is main memory as it is responsible for storing data structures needed for execution of a program. Diverse threads running simultaneously on same chip may compete with each other for resources. Because of interference among threads, each thread can experience extremely different memory system performance. If interference among threads is not controlled, then one thread can experience extreme slowdown while another is unfairly prioritised. By efficiently reordering concurrent memory requests, power consumption and thread fairness can be improved. This work proposes a memory access scheduler, energy-efficient fairness-aware (EEFA) memory access scheduling that provides thread fairness, exploits bank level parallelism by pre-issuing issuable read commands during drain-write mode. Also, proposed scheduler prioritises row buffer hit requests. The authors show that EEFA memory access scheduling significantly reduces unfairness among threads and energy consumption in DRAM memory system while also improving performance.

The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives by Selby Wynn Schwartz

Reviewed by: The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives by Selby Wynn Schwartz Harry Hoke The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and Their Afterlives. By Selby Wynn Schwartz. University of Michigan Press, 2019. Cloth $80.00, Paper $34.95. 300 pages. 22 illustrations. Selby Wynn Schwartz's The Bodies of Others takes an expansive view of drag dance on the concert stage, weaving together dance studies, gender theory, and historiography to ask how four decades of drag dancers performed as other selves. Schwartz mobilizes dance studies to show how longstanding theories of gender acts and choreographies, such as those of Susan Leigh Foster and Judith Butler, work in praxis, extending scholarship from performance and nightlife studies to the concert stage. Schwartz shows how gesture, costume, and other external transformations build a critical internal practice of inviting another into one's body, transforming ossified concert dance techniques in exciting, gender-busting ways. The result of this transformation, she argues, is a performance that goes beyond mimicry, parody, or inspiration to create a novel synthesis of the self/other. Schwartz analyzes not only individual dances, but also the ways that drag performances have afterlives in restagings, company members, and future artists. Thus, Schwartz's central claim is that drag dance builds a living, queer archive in which dancers invite others into their bodies, then inspire this practice in future artists, creating threads of memory [End Page 166] and re-enlivening the ghosts of past performers in a different cultural context. The introduction draws on theories of drag and gender performance like Marlon Bailey's notion of "working the body" and Trajal Harrell's "fictional archiving" to sketch drag dance as a process of revivifying past performances. Each of the subsequent five chapters begins with one central performance (most are from the 1980s), and then traces its afterlives across the next four decades. Schwartz explores how drag dances shift with changing notions of gay rights and queer politics, and asks what narratives are inscribed on and by gender-bending performances as they echo cross-temporally. While the five chapters end without a conclusion, Schwartz emphasizes that the choreographic lineages she explores continue to manipulate gestural codes today, rendering them visible alongside the ghosts of dancers past. Across the chapters, Schwartz brings theories of gendered acts out of the quotidian and into the stylized world of concert dance. Chapter 1 focuses on Mark Morris's 1989 performance of Dido and Aeneas to argue that Morris's gestural vocabulary in dual roles of the Queen and the Sorceress builds rigid choreographic gender constraints with no room for improvisation. Such inscription places the Queen on an inescapable narrative toward death. Schwartz argues that as the performance is restaged with new performers, the signs become more malleable and collective, opening the door to a more utopian vision of queer politics. In later productions, the ensemble takes precedent over the solo, and both female/male solo dancers create new combinations of female masculinity and male femininity to break such fatalistic narratives. Chapter 2 centers Richard Move's performances ofMartha @, in which he danced in drag as Martha Graham. Rather than replicating Graham's choreography, which changed as her body aged, Schwartz argues that Move created the internal space to channel Graham in his vastly taller, differently proportioned body. Schwartz goes on to introduce Move's company member Catherine Cabeen, who originally danced deeply gendered feminine roles for Martha Graham before performing both masculine and feminine movements to channel the experience for Move. Schwartz uses dance studies to bring gestural repertoires into moments of staged choreography, arguing that this kind of living archive preserves Graham's legacy as a dancer more deeply than straight dance lineages, which preserve the gendered choreography at the expense of Graham's ephemeral essence. Schwartz continues to show how dance brings theories of the body into praxis in chapter 3, which takes the work of Japanese Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno as its starting point. Schwartz argues that in channeling Spanish dancer La Argentina in Admiring La Argentina (1977), Ohno uses the process of drag to invite the dancer into his body. Through drag, Ohno looks to transcend boundaries of time and...

The Threads of Memory

An exhibition entitled Tejer con el hilo de la memoria: puntadas de dignidad en medio de la guerra (Knitting the Threads of Memory: Stitches of Dignity, Surrounded by War) toured Mexico over the course of three months and presented work by a collective of Colombian knitters, all women who had survived experiences of armed conflict. Through knitting they have both recounted their stories and denounced the injustices and violence they have suffered. The show was presented to knitters’ groups in Mexico City and the states of Chiapas and Guerrero; there were concurrent knitting and memory workshops as well as an audiovisual presentation. El hilo de la memoria is a documentary that follows the show’s Mexico tour in a reflection on the links that are woven between collective creation, creativity and the transformative potential of the reality inside spaces we share for knitting and storytelling.

A real-time spike sorting method based on the embedded GPU.

Microelectrode arrays with hundreds of channels have been widely used to acquire neuron population signals in neuroscience studies. Online spike sorting is becoming one of the most important challenges for high-throughput neural signal acquisition systems. Graphic processing unit (GPU) with high parallel computing capability might provide an alternative solution for increasing real-time computational demands on spike sorting. This study reported a method of real-time spike sorting through computing unified device architecture (CUDA) which was implemented on an embedded GPU (NVIDIA JETSON Tegra K1, TK1). The sorting approach is based on the principal component analysis (PCA) and K-means. By analyzing the parallelism of each process, the method was further optimized in the thread memory model of GPU. Our results showed that the GPU-based classifier on TK1 is 37.92 times faster than the MATLAB-based classifier on PC while their accuracies were the same with each other. The high-performance computing features of embedded GPU demonstrated in our studies suggested that the embedded GPU provide a promising platform for the real-time neural signal processing.

TRACING BACK TRAUMA

Although there are many, mostly male, contemporary writers in Brazil whose narratives of urban violence and social inequality implicitly reflect the impact and legacy of slavery on contemporary society, it is interesting that this shameful period, and shockingly brutal events which seem to prove wrong the myths of gentle colonization and harmonious racial democracy, should be chosen as subject matter by four women writers. While very different novels, Adriana Lisboa’s Os Fios da Memória [The Threads of Memory] (1999), Conceição Evaristo's Ponciá Vicêncio (2003), Ana Maria Gonçalves's Um Defeito de Cor [A Defect in Colour] (2006) and Tatiana Salem Levy's Paraíso [Paradise] (2014) all deal frankly with the horrors of slavery and its aftermaths from the point of view of the most vulnerable member of colonial society: the enslaved African woman. This article analyses the ways in which these writers claim justice for their characters and remind readers that those excluded from official histories had names, faces and voices.

JORGE EDUARDO CRUZ ROMERO: LOS CAMINOS DE LA VOCACIÓN PEDAGÓGICA

It is not easy to unravel the threads of memory because, like history and pedagogical activity in the SENA, they are surrounded by concepts and strategies used throughout 60 years of training in the country and by characters who have intervened in its conception, design, and practice. The task involves recovering the institutional history’s experiences, based on the voices of each actor and the mission that has been entrusted to the entity. In this occasion, a conversation with Jorge Eduardo Cruz Romero is developed, considered by a good part of the educational community of SENA as a pedagogue of exemplary trajectory and as an active part of a group of professionals who have worked for the consolidation of the pedagogical proposal in this institution.

Antiguidade é posto: a Aldeia de Imbuí, conflitos e memórias (séculos XIX e XXI)

The conflicts concerning the areas belonging to the Federal Government of Brazil in the region known as Forte do Imbui beach, located in Jurujuba, Rio de Janeiro, are the object of this article. We intend to discuss the unfolding of the justice process about the area, considered a national security zone, as well as analyze the production of “truths” about the region and the memory threads which legitimize the occupation by ancient inhabitants of the region, nowadays facing an accelerated process of eviction. For that purpose, the text revisits the confrontations about the area and presents the main elements to justify the inclusion of the Aldeia, constituted in the 19th century, in the scope of traditional community denomination. Keywords: Imbui village, history and memory, land conflict, traditional community.

Memoria ed echi di emigrazione nella narrativa popolare italiana

In questo articolo si analizzano le tracce che l’emigrazione dall’Italia tra Otto e Novecento ha lasciato nei racconti popolari presenti in varie raccolte folkloriche e letterarie, mostrando come la distinzione in uso tra i diversi generi dell’oralità (fiaba, aneddoto, storia di vita, ecc.) non permetta a volte di percepire la creatività di narratori e narratrici orali, che nelle loro storie intessono i fili della realtà, del ricordo e del desiderio nella trama di tipi narrativi del patrimonio tradizionale e folklorico, facendo fronte in molti casi a situazioni traumatiche o dolorose per il singolo e/o per la comunità.

Pest Hunters

In these days, with a bit of guilty delay, I read a beautiful book "Spillover" that tells in a pleasant way the problem of zoonoses, that is the passage of animal microorganisms to humans, with all the consequent epidemics such as AIDS or Ebola, one of the most recent nightmares of our society. An important part of the work is the narration of these pathologies through personal stories and the stories of researchers. Since as a young man in a short time between the eighties and nineties of the last century, along with a handful of "Enthusiasts", I managed to systematize the clinical aspects of a parasitosis then unknown, blastocystosis, I decided to tell the thread of memory and publications this story. With what moral? That in an era of hyper-technological medicine, increasingly limited to a few shrines, with intelligence you can also in the Italian province, at the margins of our world, do a good research and change the "fate" of an "anonymous" parasite, Blastocystis precisely. This is a story perhaps not as exciting as those told in "Spillover", but that has its own dignity and deserves to be read and known.

Lost in abstraction: Monotonicity in multi-threaded programs

Monotonicity in concurrent systems stipulates that, in any global state, system actions remain executable when new processes are added to the state. This concept is both natural and useful: if every thread's memory is finite, monotonicity often guarantees the decidability of safety properties even when the number of running threads is unknown. In this paper, we show that finite-data thread abstractions for model checking can be at odds with monotonicity: predicate-abstracting monotone software can result in non-monotone Boolean programs — the monotonicity is lost in the abstraction. As a result, pertinent well-established safety checking algorithms for infinite-state systems become inapplicable. We demonstrate how monotonicity in the abstraction can be restored, without affecting safety properties. This improves earlier approaches of enforcing monotonicity via overapproximations. We implemented our solution in the unbounded-thread model checker monabs and applied it to numerous concurrent programs and algorithms, whose predicate abstractions are often fundamentally beyond existing tools.

Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor by Douglas Kammen

Reviewed by: Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor by Douglas Kammen David Webster (bio) Douglas Kammen. Three Centuries of Conflict in East Timor. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2015. 240 pp. Travelers to the town of Maubara tend to be weekend visitors from Dili, the capital of Timor-Leste (East Timor), or foreigners in search of dive sites. Even if they wander into the old Dutch fort, few visitors know much about the days when Maubara was a strong Timorese kingdom, about its historic alliance with the Netherlands, or about the violence that runs like a blooded thread through Maubara’s history under Portuguese, Japanese, Indonesian, and Timorese governments. Douglas Kammen, whose previous work addresses mass violence in East Timor during the Indonesian occupation (1975–99), picks up the thread of violence in this book and traces if back through three hundred years with a micro-history of the kingdom (and, subsequently, a sub-district) of Maubara, for much of its history “a very small place in a remote colony at the furthest edge of a vagabond empire” (119). His story of Maubara and its leading families, at the same time, has larger ambitions, aiming at learning lessons about mass violence in general and at stitching together evidence from colonial archives and from local memory. The historic kingdom, of course, is not the same as today’s seaside village, with its beach café, marketplace, and local NGO selling handicrafts and cold drinks from the courtyard of the old fort. The kingdom’s centers lay higher up Mount Maubara, with authority often dispersed among different settlements and families. Kammen examines the longue durée in a limited locale. “Stranger kings” established a kingdom in Maubara that is there in the archival records, but almost entirely absent from local memory. Kammen reconstructs this early history based on archival records, without oral history to help him. (Despite hundreds of interviews on which Kammen relied, discussed later, the people in Maubara simply didn’t talk about this aspect of the past.) Local memory does recall the coming of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) to Maubara and the kingdom’s alliance with the Dutch, though in hazy fashion. Again, Kammen’s careful reconstruction of the surprising alliance between Maubara and the VOC (whose empire eventually became the Dutch East Indies) relies on archival documentation. The VOC and the ruling houses of Maubara were allied from the 1750s to the 1850s. This century of mutual benefit saw VOC rulers in Kupang, West Timor, extend their influence into the central part of the island, advancing their contest with the Portuguese who claimed the alliance or allegiance of most of this area. Maubara became “the centerpiece of VOC expansion into north-central Timor” (47) while benefiting from the VOC alliance by seemingly strengthening itself relative to neighboring kingdoms. Kammen’s account reveals Maubara as an autonomous actor in wider regional currents, not a mere pawn in a battle between colonial powers. It was only in 1859 that Portuguese control started to arrive in Maubara, which local [End Page 151] rulers resisted because they did not want to surrender access to overseas trading networks or ties (represented in the symbolic realm through gifts of Dutch flags and other items) with the VOC in Kupang. To Kammen, the symbolic realm matters more. People in Maubara know that the imposing seaside fort is a colonial construction. Its physicality should serve as a reminder of the Dutch presence and of the days of Maubara’s glory. Yet Kammen’s interviews show local memory dwelling more on division between lineages and on origin stories than on past greatness; on individuals, not on statecraft. The motives of Maubara’s rulers cannot be made visible in colonial archives or in oral history, and Kammen thus follows the thread of local memory, seeking meaning and finding continuities. From a colonial viewpoint, the story of Maubara coming under Portuguese rule is typical. European power increased in pace with economic change. Portugal’s desire for ever-greater coffee production transformed Maubara’s local economy and social structure as it became a major center of coffee production. Some individuals in Maubara opposed increasing colonial political control, while...

Parallel Branch-and-Bound in multi-core multi-CPU multi-GPU heterogeneous environments

We investigate the design of parallel B&B in large scale heterogeneous compute environments where processing units can be composed of a mixture of multiple shared memory cores, multiple distributed CPUs and multiple GPUs devices. We describe two approaches addressing the critical issue of how to map B&B workload with the different levels of parallelism exposed by the target compute platform. We also contribute a throughout large scale experimental study which allows us to derive a comprehensive and fair analysis of the proposed approaches under different system configurations using up to 16 GPUs and up to 512 distributed cores. Our results shed more light on the main challenges one has to face when tackling B&B algorithms while describing efficient techniques to address them. In particular, we are able to obtain linear speed-ups at moderate scales where adaptive load balancing among the heterogeneous compute resources is shown to have a significant impact on performance. At the largest scales, intra-node parallelism and hybrid decentralized load balancing is shown to have a crucial importance in order to alleviate locking issues among shared memory threads and to scale the distributed resources while optimizing communication costs and minimizing idle times.