Academic literature on the topic 'Metal-work, Georgian'

Работа выполнена в рамках проекта РФФИ № 20-59-07003 Евгения Георгиевна Пчелина (1895-1972) внесла большой вклад в изучение истории, археологии и этнографии осетинского народа. Большая часть рукописного наследия Пчелиной до сих пор не опубликована, поэтому его тщательное изучение и введение в научный оборот представляет собой весьма актуальную научную задачу. Предлагаемая публикация содержит материалы Пчелиной о двух старинных колоколах из осетинского святилища Дзвгисы-дзуар. Данные предметы имеют дарственные надписи грузинских царей, проливающие свет на историю осетино-грузинских отношений последней трети XVII в. Пчелиной принадлежит и заслуга сохранения этих памятников, и первый опыт их научного изучения. Один из колоколов был пожертвован картлийским царем Георгием XI, о втором же долгое время не было точных сведений. Как следует из публикуемых записей, Пчелиной удалось найти второй колокол и установить, что дарственная надпись на нем принадлежит имеретинскому и кахетинскому царю Арчилу II. Пчелина выявляет отличия между колоколами и делает на этом основании вывод о российском происхождении колокола Арчила II, в то время как колокол Георгия XI, несомненно, произведен в Грузии. Пчелина отмечает необходимость анализа металла, из которого отлиты колокола. Хотя надписи на колоколах уже неоднократно переводились, делалось это по копиям разной степени точности, и еще ни разу перевод не осуществлялся специалистом по грузинской палеографии, видевшим колокола и надписи на них воочию. Поэтому дальнейшее исследование надписей может внести некоторые коррективы, уточняющие наши знания об этих памятниках и связанных с ними исторических реалиях. Eugenia Georgievna Pchelina (1895-1972) made a great contribution to the study of history, archeology and ethnography of the Ossetian people. Most of Pchelina's manuscript heritage is yet to be published, so it is a pressing issue to study it thoroughly and introduce into scientific discussion. The proposed publication contains Pchelina's work on two ancient bells from the Ossetian sanctuary of Dzvgisy-Dzuar. These items have donation inscriptions made by Georgian kings, which sheds some light on the history of Ossetian-Georgian relations in the late 1600s. One of the bells was donated by King George XI of Kartli. As for the other one, there had been no exact information about it for a while. As can be seen from the published records, Pchelina managed to find that bell and established that the donation inscription on was made by King Archil II of Imereti and Kakheti. Pchelina identified the differences between the bells and drew a conclusion about the bell inscribed by Archil II having been made in Russia, while the one donated by George XI was definitely made in Georgia. Pchelina noted the need to analyze the metal the bells were made of. Although the inscriptions on the bells have been translated many times, none of the translators, who were using copies of varying degrees of accuracy, was an expert in Georgian paleography or saw the bells and the inscriptions with their own eyes. Therefore, a further comprehensive study of these inscriptions could provide some new insights into what we already know about the bells and their historic environment.

The history of Arab sway in Georgia has been researched thoroughly by many scholars throughout the 20th and 21st century. However, futher research in this field has been impeded by the dearth of original sources. Fortunately, numismatic material serves as a specific but informative primary source. The goal of this work is to publish two ‘Abbāsid coins, anonymous AH 152 fals (weight 2.42 g, dimensions 22.5 mm, die axis 9 o’clock) and AH 240 dīnar (weight 4.38 g), citing al-Mutawakkil and the heir al-Mu‘tazz Billāh, both bearing the previously unpublished and unresearched mintname Jurzān; also re-publish AH 248 dīnar (weight 4.21 g) citing al-Musta‘īn Billāh, of Tiflīs mint. Jurzān mintname is being published and discussed for the first time by means of this article. Jurzān was the term the Arabs employed for designating Georgia / east-Georgian region of Kartli. We knew the mintname pairs of province - major urban center of the province type, like Armīniya – Dabīl for Armenia, and Arrān – Barda‘a for Albania; now we have similar pair for Georgia as well: Jurzān – Tiflīs. We presume that all Jurzān coins were minted at Tiflīs, the major Arab stronghold in the contemporary eastern Georgia. The significance of discovering the new Georgian / Caliphal mintname extends beyond the framework of exclusively numismatic history and is determined by 1) the date the aforesaid coins bear; 2) the coin metal employed; 3) their mintname, i.e. Jurzān , substituted for Tiflīs for some reason. The AH 152 (14/I/769-3/I/770) fals was minted in Georgia in the epoch of major Khazar-Arab confrontation and anti-Arab insurrection / activities of the Georgian mountaineers, the Ts’anars, following the major Khazar invasions of AH 145 and 147. We discuss the political, military and administrative changes based on the narrative and numismatic data. The campaign of AH 147 / 764 (Rās Ṭarkhān’s invasion) culminated with Arab defeat. The northern provinces of the caliphate were pillaged by the Khazars who seized and ravaged Tiflīs; eastern Georgia and the Bāb al-Abwāb area were affected the most. The Caliph decided to re-conquer the ‘Abbāsid North, and resumed hostilities in AH 148 / 765: new army was led by Ḥumayd b. Qaḥṭaba; however, by AH 148 the Khazars had evidently already evacuated eastern Georgia and Tiflīs. The Arabs created a network of fortified centers against the Khazars, probably including al-Yazīdyah (issuing the fulūs in AH 149 and 150). It is unclear, who governed the province Armīniya in AH 148-152 (27/II/765-3/I/770) - Ḥumayd b. Qaḥṭaba, then again Yazīd b. Usayd? According to al-Kūfī, appointing Bakkār b. Muslim the Caliph dismissed none other than Yazīd. Bakkār was the governor in AH 152-153; he was replaced with al-Ḥasan b. Qaḥṭaba, who remained the governor in AH 154-158. Al-Ḥasan b. Qaḥṭaba was probably dispatched because of the Ts’anar revolt. The Ts’anars attempted to make use of the political vacuum caused by the Khazar invasions and gain independence from the Arabs, however, unsuccessfuly. The Caliph initiated the reconquest of the northern provinces, in particular, the Bāb al-Abwāb and Jurzān, two key areas, controlling the passes through the Caucasus mountains which the Khazars could make use of to invade the ‘Abbāsid North at some point in the future. It is clear now that by 769 / AH 152 Tiflīs (and, undoubtly, significant part of Jurzān) was recovered by the Arabs, to such an extent, that they could operate a mint there (no matter who was the governor then). It is significant, that Jurzān was indicated as the mintname, not Tiflīs. That could constitute a declaration of a kind, reflecting the Arab ambition and desire to control all of Jurzān (far from reality because of the Ts’anars). However, gold or silver currency would presumably have had more declarative value. The authorities had some reason for issuing the copper currency. In the decade and a half after Rās Ṭarkhān’s invasion minting of the ‘Abbāsid coppers in the region intensified. Copper currency possibly served as a public media outlet in a sense, in addition to its purely economic role, hence it was expedient to indicate the name of the current governor (or his deputy). However, we are inclined to consider that the intensive issuing of copper currency in the aforesaid cities within the aforesaid time frame reflects and indicates the increased Arab military presence (involving a number of Arab warriors, resp. settlers with families?) and ensuing local economic acvitivies. The Jurzān dīnar of AH 240 (2/VI/854-21/V/855) and Tiflīs dīnar of AH 248 (7/III/862-23/II/863) pertain to the time period when Bughā affirmed and restored the ‘Abbāsid control over the northern provinces, in particular, the Tiflīs area in eastern Georgia (Jurzān). When the anti-Arab revolt in Armenia started, Al-Mutawakkil assigned the governorship of the North to Bughā the Turk, who first suppressed the revolt in Armenia and then moved to Georgia, where he seized Tiflīs and killed local recalcitrant ruler, Isḥāq b. Ismāʿīl. This happened on 5 August, Saturday, 853. Having captured Tiflīs and decapitated Isḥāq, Bughā attempted to expand Arab control in Georgia. He gained victory over the army of west-Georgian kingdom, but was defeated by the Ts’anars. Eventually Bughā was replaced by Muḥammad b. Khālid. Bughā was the governor in AH 237 (?) – AH 240 or 241. Muḥammad was the governor from AH 241 or 242 till he was replaced by ‘Īsā b. al-Shaykh in AH 256. The AH 240 dirham of Jurzān was minted when Bughā was still active in the region, specifically in Jurzān, while the AH 248 dirham of Tiflīs was minted in the governorship of Muḥammad. We know Tiflīs dirhams of AH 248-250, also issued in the governorship of Muḥammad. Dīnars were issued in Dabīl in AH 241 and in Armīniya in AH 243, 246 and 252; dirhams were issued in Armīniya in AH 241, 243, 246-253, 255-256. In both Armīniya-Dabīl and Jurzān-Tiflīs cases the coin-minting activity clearly intensified during and in the wake of Bughā’s stay in the region: the coin-minting activities ceased and were resumed well before and after that period. The name of the entire province was indicated on the AH 240 Jurzān dīnar because Bughā considered it expedient to declare the Arab control all over Jurzān (which remained merely an ambition, since Bughā was defeated by the Ts’anars). The metal employed for minting both Jurzān and Tiflīs (as well as Armīniya and Dabīl) dīnars perhaps also indicates that the authorities employed the mint/s for declarative purposes. However, the more or less regular issue of silver currency at Tiflīs, and particularly Armīniya mints may rather reflect the more mundane intention to supply the local residents (including, no doubt, the military) adequately with means of exchange. The discovery of the new mintname “Jurzān” (Georgia / Kartli), probably designating Tiflīs, expands our knowledge on the numismatic history of Georgia and the ‘Abbāsid caliphate. Two coins presented by means of this article probably constitute the earliest artifacts bearing the ethnotoponym Jurzān. Employing the name of the province as a mintname evidently emphasized the Arab control of not just the Arab outpost Tiflīs, but rather the entire province of Jurzān, i.e. eastern Georgia, or, rather the ‘Abbāsid ambition thereof. The unique copper and gold coinage of Jurzān along with the unique gold dīnar of Tiflīs provide us with an intimate insight into the contemporary political, military and economic proceedings in Georgia, or, generally speaking, the ‘Abbāsid North. We consider the Jurzān coins, published and analyzed by means of this article, as one of the primary sources on the history of Georgia and the ‘Abbāsid North in this epoch. Comprehensive analysis of all the available and upcoming data would hopefully lead to the more up-to-date historiographic narrative of the rise and fall of the Arab sway in Georgia and the region.

The trend of the electronics industry to miniaturize package design has caused the need to adopt BGA packages for a variety of applications. OEM microprocessors have conventionally used LGA designs press fitted into sockets for ease of reworkability. However, BGA packages, which have been widely used for surface mount (SMT) applications, face challenges when they are used in sockets. One of the major challenges faced is the formation of intermetallics between the bare solder ball and the gold paddle of the socket. To address these challenges, Georgia Tech is developing a universal solution for socketing and SMT applications by surface modification of solder spheres. In this new approach, the solder spheres have an outermost noble metal layer which prevents any damage to the BGA and doesn't react with the gold paddle, when placed in a socket. The surface coating would also collapse with the solder ball under specific conditions during reflow when used in SMT applications. This paper focuses on the process of attaching these modified solder spheres on the package and subsequent assembly of the package on the board. We evaluated high and low melting solder pastes to attach the coated spheres to the package. A major challenge observed was the wicking of the solder paste to the entire surface of the solder sphere during reflow. This was addressed by studying the wetting characteristics of the solder paste on different metal surfaces and controlling the volume of solder paste required. Optimization of solder paste volume was done to control wicking and at the same time, achieve a strong and stable joint. Microstructure of the solder joint was analyzed to determine its effect on the joint stability. It was found that the amount of wicking is a strong function of the composition of the solder paste, the reflow time, and the material in surface with which the solder paste is in contact with. This work advances the assembly requirements of socketable BGAs.

This issue of Pure Appl. Chem. is devoted to papers based upon invited lectures delivered at the first IUPAC-sponsored Workshop on Advanced Material, "WAM1: Nanostructured Systems", held at the Hong Kong University for Science and Technology (HKUST) on July 14-18, 1999.The Topic Why nanostructured material? Chemists contribute to the well-being of society by exploiting the properties of the elements of the periodic table, or various forms of combination of elements, to make materials that are useful for "better living through chemistry." What happens if we use all the possible combinations that can be made? There remain great demands for developing new materials to improve our lives in fields such as medicine, energy, improving the environment, communication and transportation. Thus, we have to think of new ways to make materials that can be expected to display properties appropriate to the technologies of the new Millennium! The difference in properties of different elements and their derived compounds is a result of differences in the type of motion that their electrons can execute. This, in turn, depends on the space available for the electronic motion and the degree of its confinement. Thus, the difference between a metal, a semiconductor and an insulator is attributable to the electrons being delocalized in the first, more confined in the second and highly confined in the last. Can we physically cut material size sufficiently to change its electronic degree of confinement and thus its properties? We do know that while copper metal is a conductor, the copper atom and small molecular clusters of copper atoms are insulators. What is the size of an elemental assembly of a metal (i.e. the number of atoms in it) at which the metal-semiconductor or the metal-insulator transition occurs? Of course it depends on the length scale of the property measured. For semiconductors and metals, a large change in properties, e.g. absorption, emission, and conductivity, occurs on the nanometer length scale. Equally important, the property becomes very sensitive to the size of the nanoparticle. It can thus be expected that many variations in these properties should be observed for the same material by simply changing its size. The potential for harnessing these changes of properties in new technological applications is largely responsible for the current appeal of this exciting field. These considerations, along with our personal research interests, convinced me and Professor Joshua Jortner that it would be opportune to adopt this theme for the first IUPAC Workshop on Advanced Material. The publication of the talks given at the Workshop is timely, given the extraordinary rapidity with which new developments are taking place in the field. This collection of papers complements other recent publications of reviews on the topic of nanostructures, since it is more in the nature of a symposium-in-print and offers an assembly of short overviews and research papers which capture the dynamic associated with research at interdisciplinary interfaces, and with the development of attendant synthetic and analytical techniques. The promise of unimagined properties of nanostructured materials and of new-generation applications is an ongoing stimulus for further research, and it is hoped that this publication will contribute to the process, and furnish practitioners with new insights and inspiration. This is truly a multidisciplinary and future-targeted area of scientific research, and one which fully meets the IUPAC vision of 'new directions in chemistry', with its promise of hitherto undefined vistas of opportunity for discovery and exploitation. The WorkshopThe quality of the scientific presentations at this meeting was very high indeed. The strong international representation is in keeping with the spirit of IUPAC as well as the global nature of scientific research. The idea of the meeting was to get scientists active in advanced material from the West to interact strongly with those from the Orient. In this regard, we have succeeded as we achieved representation from seven countries from each side [China (Mainland and Hong Kong), Japan, Korea, Philippines, Singapore, and Taiwan from the Orient, and Canada, France, Germany, Israel, Spain, United Kingdom, and USA from the West]. This great accomplishment of getting us all together in such a delightful atmosphere was the result of the wise sponsorship of IUPAC and the great efforts of many people, whom I would like to acknowledge below.Acknowledgements IUPAC: for its wisdom to sponsor workshops in frontier areas of chemical research. We thank the then-IUPAC President, Prof. Joshua Jortner for cochairing the Workshop. We also thank the IUPAC Secretariat, in particular its Executive Director, Dr. John Jost, for his continuous and prompt support and Dr. Fabienne Meyers for creating and editing our web page for the Workshop and for her essential assistance in the production of this special volume. HKUST: for hosting us. We thank Dr. Nai-Teng Yu of the Chemistry Department, whose willingness to help us by accommodating the Workshop in his Department was essential; Dr. Shihe Yang whose continuous hard work and efforts made it possible to follow up the registration process; the local organizers, in particular, Prof. Leroy Chang and Ping Sheng, who supplied us with the list of participants, the names of some invited speakers and the program of a similar meeting held there recently and the Departmental staff, for their help in getting the arrangements of this workshop finalized. Georgia Tech: Dr. Clemens Burda helped in getting the workshop abstracts and putting the workshop material together, Ms. Michele Papsidero, my own secretary, spent many hours of hard work in following the process, from completing the registration list, to reminding contributors to meet different deadlines including sending the abstracts, and finally in typing and collating the whole program for the Workshop. The assistance of the USA Organizing Committee and in particular, Profs. John Zhang and Rob Whetten at Georgia Tech, was extremely useful in finalizing the scientific program. The speakers: I thank both the plenary and invited speakers who accepted our invitation, most without asking for financial support. Without them, we would not have had such an excellent scientific meeting or this valuable volume of Pure Appl. Chem.I wish to thank Professor James Bull, the editor of this special issue, for his hard work in making sure he received the manuscripts in time, for the review process of these manuscripts and for putting the whole volume together. Mostafa A. El-SayedChairman, Organizing CommitteeJulius Brown Professor School of Chemistry and Biochemistry Georgia Institute of Technology

The purpose of present work was to obtain bactericidal materials using heulandite-clinoptilolite from the Rkoni plot of the Tedzami deposit, Eastern Georgia, to study their properties and use them as a filler for the production of bactericidal paper. Silver-, copper-, and zinc-containing microporous materials have been prepared using ion-exchange reactions between preliminary acid-treated zeolite microcrystals and a salt of a corresponding bioactive metal in the solid phase followed by washing with distilled water. Synthesized in such way adsorbent-ion-exchangers are characterized by X-ray energy dispersion spectra, powder X-ray diffraction patterns, and Fourier transform infra-red spectra. Obtained materials remain the zeolite crystal structure and contain over 130 mg/g of silver, 70 mg/g of copper, and 55 mg/g of zinc. Prepared materials show bacteriostatic activity towards gram-negative bacterium Escherichia coli, gram-positive bacteria Staphylococcus aureus and Bacillus subtilis, fungal pathogenic yeast Candida albicans, and a fungus Aspergilus niger. It was found that the mixtures of various forms exhibit a synergistic effect, and the silver form with additives of copper and zinc forms is most active against staphylococcus, and against other microorganisms, mixtures of copper and zinc forms are most effective.

The purpose of present work was to obtain bactericidal materials using heulandite-clinoptilolite from the Rkoni plot of the Tedzami deposit, Eastern Georgia, and to use them as a filler for the production of bactericidal paper. Materials remaining the zeolite crystal structure, containing over 130 mg/g of silver, 70 mg/g of copper, and 55 mg/g of zinc, and showing bacteriostatic activity towards pathogenic bacteria and fungi were prepared in laboratory and the filled papers were manufactured on the production lines of the GPM company. It was found that the introduction of zeolite fillers leads to an increase in the grammage, thickness and density of the paper, as well as to a certain decrease in the tensile strength in the machine direction. The introduction of zeolite fillers containing divalent metals causes a significant change in surface properties, and samples with a certain copper content become absolutely waterproof. Testing of bacteriostatic activity by disc diffusion method revealed only activity of paper with a silver-containing filler against E. coli and staphylococcus, while the colony forming unit assay indicates the activity of all metal-containing samples against staphylococcus and all zinc-containing samples against E. coli. The greatest activity against E. coli is shown by paper with a high content of zinc, against staphylococcus, paper with a high content of copper. These results are very important from a practical point of view, since they open up the possibility of replacing silver with copper and zinc.

The purpose of present work was to study tensile and stretch of paper prepared with the use of bactericide zeolite fillers containing up to 130 mg/g of silver, 72 mg/g of copper, and 58 mg/g of zinc, prepared by ion exchange reactions using heulandite-clinoptilolite from the Rkoni plot of the Tedzami deposit, Eastern Georgia. Filled papers with zeolite content up to 4 g/m2 and bactericidal activity confirmed by the colony forming unit assay were manufactured on the production lines of the GPM enterprise (Tbilisi, Georgia). The measured tensile strength and percentage elongation of filled paper depend on the nature of the filler and its metal content; the introduction of pure zeolite filler reduces the tensile and stretch of the paper, but fillers containing silver and copper increase the tensile strength. Accelerated aging results in lower tensile and stretch, but zeolite fillers generally make the paper more resistant to aging.

Introduction Cookbooks are an exceptional written record of what is largely an oral tradition. They have been described as “magician’s hats” due to their ability to reveal much more than they seem to contain (Wheaton, “Finding”). The first book printed in Germany was the Guttenberg Bible in 1456 but, by 1490, printing was introduced into almost every European country (Tierney). The spread of literacy between 1500 and 1800, and the rise in silent reading, helped to create a new private sphere into which the individual could retreat, seeking refuge from the community (Chartier). This new technology had its effects in the world of cookery as in so many spheres of culture (Mennell, All Manners). Trubek notes that cookbooks are the texts most often used by culinary historians, since they usually contain all the requisite materials for analysing a cuisine: ingredients, method, technique, and presentation. Printed cookbooks, beginning in the early modern period, provide culinary historians with sources of evidence of the culinary past. Historians have argued that social differences can be expressed by the way and type of food we consume. Cookbooks are now widely accepted as valid socio-cultural and historic documents (Folch, Sherman), and indeed the link between literacy levels and the protestant tradition has been expressed through the study of Danish cookbooks (Gold). From Apicius, Taillevent, La Varenne, and Menon to Bradley, Smith, Raffald, Acton, and Beeton, how can both manuscript and printed cookbooks be analysed as historic documents? What is the difference between a manuscript and a printed cookbook? Barbara Ketchum Wheaton, who has been studying cookbooks for over half a century and is honorary curator of the culinary collection in Harvard’s Schlesinger Library, has developed a methodology to read historic cookbooks using a structured approach. For a number of years she has been giving seminars to scholars from multidisciplinary fields on how to read historic cookbooks. This paper draws on the author’s experiences attending Wheaton’s seminar in Harvard, and on supervising the use of this methodology at both Masters and Doctoral level (Cashman; Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Manuscripts versus Printed Cookbooks A fundamental difference exists between manuscript and printed cookbooks in their relationship with the public and private domain. Manuscript cookbooks are by their very essence intimate, relatively unedited and written with an eye to private circulation. Culinary manuscripts follow the diurnal and annual tasks of the household. They contain recipes for cures and restoratives, recipes for cleansing products for the house and the body, as well as the expected recipes for cooking and preserving all manners of food. Whether manuscript or printed cookbook, the recipes contained within often act as a reminder of how laborious the production of food could be in the pre-industrialised world (White). Printed cookbooks draw oxygen from the very fact of being public. They assume a “literate population with sufficient discretionary income to invest in texts that commodify knowledge” (Folch). This process of commoditisation brings knowledge from the private to the public sphere. There exists a subset of cookbooks that straddle this divide, for example, Mrs. Rundell’s A New System of Domestic Cookery (1806), which brought to the public domain her distillation of a lifetime of domestic experience. Originally intended for her daughters alone, Rundell’s book was reprinted regularly during the nineteenth century with the last edition printed in 1893, when Mrs. Beeton had been enormously popular for over thirty years (Mac Con Iomaire, and Cashman). Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s Structured Approach Cookbooks can be rewarding, surprising and illuminating when read carefully with due effort in understanding them as cultural artefacts. However, Wheaton notes that: “One may read a single old cookbook and find it immensely entertaining. One may read two and begin to find intriguing similarities and differences. When the third cookbook is read, one’s mind begins to blur, and one begins to sense the need for some sort of method in approaching these documents” (“Finding”). Following decades of studying cookbooks from both sides of the Atlantic and writing a seminal text on the French at table from 1300-1789 (Wheaton, Savouring the Past), this combined experience negotiating cookbooks as historical documents was codified, and a structured approach gradually articulated and shared within a week long seminar format. In studying any cookbook, regardless of era or country of origin, the text is broken down into five different groupings, to wit: ingredients; equipment or facilities; the meal; the book as a whole; and, finally, the worldview. A particular strength of Wheaton’s seminars is the multidisciplinary nature of the approaches of students who attend, which throws the study of cookbooks open to wide ranging techniques. Students with a purely scientific training unearth interesting patterns by developing databases of the frequency of ingredients or techniques, and cross referencing them with other books from similar or different timelines or geographical regions. Patterns are displayed in graphs or charts. Linguists offer their own unique lens to study cookbooks, whereas anthropologists and historians ask what these objects can tell us about how our ancestors lived and drew meaning from life. This process is continuously refined, and each grouping is discussed below. Ingredients The geographic origins of the ingredients are of interest, as is the seasonality and the cost of the foodstuffs within the scope of each cookbook, as well as the sensory quality both separately and combined within different recipes. In the medieval period, the use of spices and large joints of butchers meat and game were symbols of wealth and status. However, when the discovery of sea routes to the New World and to the Far East made spices more available and affordable to the middle classes, the upper classes spurned them. Evidence from culinary manuscripts in Georgian Ireland, for example, suggests that galangal was more easily available in Dublin during the eighteenth century than in the mid-twentieth century. A new aesthetic, articulated by La Varenne in his Le Cuisinier Francois (1651), heralded that food should taste of itself, and so exotic ingredients such as cinnamon, nutmeg, and ginger were replaced by the local bouquet garni, and stocks and sauces became the foundations of French haute cuisine (Mac Con Iomaire). Some combinations of flavours and ingredients were based on humoral physiology, a long held belief system based on the writings of Hippocrates and Galen, now discredited by modern scientific understanding. The four humors are blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. It was believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. Galen (131-201 AD) believed that warm food produced yellow bile and that cold food produced phlegm. It is difficult to fathom some combinations of ingredients or the manner of service without comprehending the contemporary context within they were consumeSome ingredients found in Roman cookbooks, such as “garum” or “silphium” are no longer available. It is suggested that the nearest substitute for garum also known as “liquamen”—a fermented fish sauce—would be Naam Plaa, or Thai fish sauce (Grainger). Ingredients such as tea and white bread, moved from the prerogative of the wealthy over time to become the staple of the urban poor. These ingredients, therefore, symbolise radically differing contexts during the seventeenth century than in the early twentieth century. Indeed, there are other ingredients such as hominy (dried maize kernel treated with alkali) or grahams (crackers made from graham flour) found in American cookbooks that require translation to the unacquainted non-American reader. There has been a growing number of food encyclopaedias published in recent years that assist scholars in identifying such commodities (Smith, Katz, Davidson). The Cook’s Workplace, Techniques, and Equipment It is important to be aware of the type of kitchen equipment used, the management of heat and cold within the kitchen, and also the gradual spread of the industrial revolution into the domestic sphere. Visits to historic castles such as Hampton Court Palace where nowadays archaeologists re-enact life below stairs in Tudor times give a glimpse as to how difficult and labour intensive food production was. Meat was spit-roasted in front of huge fires by spit boys. Forcemeats and purees were manually pulped using mortar and pestles. Various technological developments including spit-dogs, and mechanised pulleys, replaced the spit boys, the most up to date being the mechanised rotisserie. The technological advancements of two hundred years can be seen in the Royal Pavilion in Brighton where Marie-Antoinin Carême worked for the Prince Regent in 1816 (Brighton Pavilion), but despite the gleaming copper pans and high ceilings for ventilation, the work was still back breaking. Carême died aged forty-nine, “burnt out by the flame of his genius and the fumes of his ovens” (Ackerman 90). Mennell points out that his fame outlived him, resting on his books: Le Pâtissier Royal Parisien (1815); Le Pâtissier Pittoresque (1815); Le Maître d’Hôtel Français (1822); Le Cuisinier Parisien (1828); and, finally, L’Art de la Cuisine Française au Dix-Neuvième Siècle (1833–5), which was finished posthumously by his student Pluméry (All Manners). Mennell suggests that these books embody the first paradigm of professional French cuisine (in Kuhn’s terminology), pointing out that “no previous work had so comprehensively codified the field nor established its dominance as a point of reference for the whole profession in the way that Carême did” (All Manners 149). The most dramatic technological changes came after the industrial revolution. Although there were built up ovens available in bakeries and in large Norman households, the period of general acceptance of new cooking equipment that enclosed fire (such as the Aga stove) is from c.1860 to 1910, with gas ovens following in c.1910 to the 1920s) and Electricity from c.1930. New food processing techniques dates are as follows: canning (1860s), cooling and freezing (1880s), freeze drying (1950s), and motorised delivery vans with cooking (1920s–1950s) (den Hartog). It must also be noted that the supply of fresh food, and fish particularly, radically improved following the birth, and expansion of, the railways. To understand the context of the cookbook, one needs to be aware of the limits of the technology available to the users of those cookbooks. For many lower to middle class families during the twentieth century, the first cookbook they would possess came with their gas or electrical oven. Meals One can follow cooked dishes from the kitchen to the eating place, observing food presentation, carving, sequencing, and serving of the meal and table etiquette. Meal times and structure changed over time. During the Middle Ages, people usually ate two meals a day: a substantial dinner around noon and a light supper in the evening (Adamson). Some of the most important factors to consider are the manner in which meals were served: either à la française or à la russe. One of the main changes that occurred during the nineteenth century was the slow but gradual transfer from service à la française to service à la russe. From medieval times to the middle of the nineteenth century the structure of a formal meal was not by “courses”—as the term is now understood—but by “services”. Each service could comprise of a choice of dishes—both sweet and savoury—from which each guest could select what appealed to him or her most (Davidson). The philosophy behind this form of service was the forementioned humoral physiology— where each diner chose food based on the four humours of blood, yellow bile, black bile, or phlegm. Also known as le grand couvert, the à la française method made it impossible for the diners to eat anything that was beyond arm’s length (Blake, and Crewe). Smooth service, however, was the key to an effective à la russe dinner since servants controlled the flow of food (Eatwell). The taste and temperature of food took centre stage with the à la russe dinner as each course came in sequence. Many historic cookbooks offer table plans illustrating the suggested arrangement of dishes on a table for the à la française style of service. Many of these dishes might be re-used in later meals, and some dishes such as hashes and rissoles often utilised left over components of previous meals. There is a whole genre of cookbooks informing the middle class cooks how to be frugal and also how to emulate haute cuisine using cheaper or ersatz ingredients. The number dining and the manner in which they dined also changed dramatically over time. From medieval to Tudor times, there might be hundreds dining in large banqueting halls. By the Elizabethan age, a small intimate room where master and family dined alone replaced the old dining hall where master, servants, guests, and travellers had previously dined together (Spencer). Dining tables remained portable until the 1780s when tables with removable leaves were devised. By this time, the bread trencher had been replaced by one made of wood, or plate of pewter or precious metal in wealthier houses. Hosts began providing knives and spoons for their guests by the seventeenth century, with forks also appearing but not fully accepted until the eighteenth century (Mason). These silver utensils were usually marked with the owner’s initials to prevent their theft (Flandrin). Cookbooks as Objects and the World of Publishing A thorough examination of the manuscript or printed cookbook can reveal their physical qualities, including indications of post-publication history, the recipes and other matter in them, as well as the language, organization, and other individual qualities. What can the quality of the paper tell us about the book? Is there a frontispiece? Is the book dedicated to an employer or a patron? Does the author note previous employment history in the introduction? In his Court Cookery, Robert Smith, for example, not only mentions a number of his previous employers, but also outlines that he was eight years working with Patrick Lamb in the Court of King William, before revealing that several dishes published in Lamb’s Royal Cookery (1710) “were never made or practis’d (sic) by him and others are extreme defective and imperfect and made up of dishes unknown to him; and several of them more calculated at the purses than the Gôut of the guests”. Both Lamb and Smith worked for the English monarchy, nobility, and gentry, but produced French cuisine. Not all Britons were enamoured with France, however, with, for example Hannah Glasse asserting “if gentlemen will have French cooks, they must pay for French tricks” (4), and “So much is the blind folly of this age, that they would rather be imposed on by a French Booby, than give encouragement to an good English cook” (ctd. in Trubek 60). Spencer contextualises Glasse’s culinary Francophobia, explaining that whilst she was writing the book, the Jacobite army were only a few days march from London, threatening to cut short the Hanoverian lineage. However, Lehmann points out that whilst Glasse was overtly hostile to French cuisine, she simultaneously plagiarised its receipts. Based on this trickling down of French influences, Mennell argues that “there is really no such thing as a pure-bred English cookery book” (All Manners 98), but that within the assimilation and simplification, a recognisable English style was discernable. Mennell also asserts that Glasse and her fellow women writers had an enormous role in the social history of cooking despite their lack of technical originality (“Plagiarism”). It is also important to consider the place of cookbooks within the history of publishing. Albala provides an overview of the immense outpouring of dietary literature from the printing presses from the 1470s. He divides the Renaissance into three periods: Period I Courtly Dietaries (1470–1530)—targeted at the courtiers with advice to those attending banquets with many courses and lots of wine; Period II The Galenic Revival (1530–1570)—with a deeper appreciation, and sometimes adulation, of Galen, and when scholarship took centre stage over practical use. Finally Period III The Breakdown of Orthodoxy (1570–1650)—when, due to the ambiguities and disagreements within and between authoritative texts, authors were freer to pick the ideas that best suited their own. Nutrition guides were consistent bestsellers, and ranged from small handbooks written in the vernacular for lay audiences, to massive Latin tomes intended for practicing physicians. Albala adds that “anyone with an interest in food appears to have felt qualified to pen his own nutritional guide” (1). Would we have heard about Mrs. Beeton if her husband had not been a publisher? How could a twenty-five year old amass such a wealth of experience in household management? What role has plagiarism played in the history of cookbooks? It is interesting to note that a well worn copy of her book (Beeton) was found in the studio of Francis Bacon and it is suggested that he drew inspiration for a number of his paintings from the colour plates of animal carcasses and butcher’s meat (Dawson). Analysing the post-publication usage of cookbooks is valuable to see the most popular recipes, the annotations left by the owner(s) or user(s), and also if any letters, handwritten recipes, or newspaper clippings are stored within the leaves of the cookbook. The Reader, the Cook, the Eater The physical and inner lives and needs and skills of the individuals who used cookbooks and who ate their meals merit consideration. Books by their nature imply literacy. Who is the book’s audience? Is it the cook or is it the lady of the house who will dictate instructions to the cook? Numeracy and measurement is also important. Where clocks or pocket watches were not widely available, authors such as seventeenth century recipe writer Sir Kenelm Digby would time his cooking by the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer. Literacy amongst protestant women to enable them to read the Bible, also enabled them to read cookbooks (Gold). How did the reader or eater’s religion affect the food practices? Were there fast days? Were there substitute foods for fast days? What about special occasions? Do historic cookbooks only tell us about the food of the middle and upper classes? It is widely accepted today that certain cookbook authors appeal to confident cooks, while others appeal to competent cooks, and others still to more cautious cooks (Bilton). This has always been the case, as has the differentiation between the cookbook aimed at the professional cook rather than the amateur. Historically, male cookbook authors such as Patrick Lamb (1650–1709) and Robert Smith targeted the professional cook market and the nobility and gentry, whereas female authors such as Eliza Acton (1799–1859) and Isabella Beeton (1836–1865) often targeted the middle class market that aspired to emulate their superiors’ fashions in food and dining. How about Tavern or Restaurant cooks? When did they start to put pen to paper, and did what they wrote reflect the food they produced in public eateries? Conclusions This paper has offered an overview of Barbara Ketchum Wheaton’s methodology for reading historic cookbooks using a structured approach. It has highlighted some of the questions scholars and researchers might ask when faced with an old cookbook, regardless of era or geographical location. By systematically examining the book under the headings of ingredients; the cook’s workplace, techniques and equipment; the meals; cookbooks as objects and the world of publishing; and reader, cook and eater, the scholar can perform magic and extract much more from the cookbook than seems to be there on first appearance. References Ackerman, Roy. The Chef's Apprentice. London: Headline, 1988. Adamson, Melitta Weiss. Food in Medieval Times. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood P, 2004. Albala, Ken. Eating Right in the Renaissance. Ed. Darra Goldstein. Berkeley: U of California P, 2002. Beeton, Isabella. Beeton's Book of Household Management. London: S. Beeton, 1861. Bilton, Samantha. “The Influence of Cookbooks on Domestic Cooks, 1900-2010.” Petit Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 30–7. Blake, Anthony, and Quentin Crewe. Great Chefs of France. London: Mitchell Beazley/ Artists House, 1978. Brighton Pavilion. 12 Jun. 2013 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/interactive/2011/sep/09/brighton-pavilion-360-interactive-panoramic›. Cashman, Dorothy. “An Exploratory Study of Irish Cookbooks.” Unpublished Master's Thesis. M.Sc. Dublin: Dublin Institute of Technology, 2009. Chartier, Roger. “The Practical Impact of Writing.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. A History of Private Lives: Volume III: Passions of the Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1989. 111-59. Davidson, Alan. The Oxford Companion to Food. New York: Oxford U P, 1999. Dawson, Barbara. “Francis Bacon and the Art of Food.” The Irish Times 6 April 2013. den Hartog, Adel P. “Technological Innovations and Eating out as a Mass Phenomenon in Europe: A Preamble.” Eating out in Europe: Picnics, Gourmet Dining and Snacks since the Late Eighteenth Century. Eds. Mark Jacobs and Peter Scholliers. Oxford: Berg, 2003. 263–80. Eatwell, Ann. “Á La Française to À La Russe, 1680-1930.” Elegant Eating: Four Hundred Years of Dining in Style. Eds. Philippa Glanville and Hilary Young. London: V&A, 2002. 48–52. Flandrin, Jean-Louis. “Distinction through Taste.” Trans. Arthur Goldhammer. A History of Private Lives: Volume III : Passions of the Renaissance. Ed. Roger Chartier. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap P of Harvard U, 1989. 265–307. Folch, Christine. “Fine Dining: Race in Pre-revolution Cuban Cookbooks.” Latin American Research Review 43.2 (2008): 205–23. Glasse, Hannah. The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy; Which Far Exceeds Anything of the Kind Ever Published. 4th Ed. London: The Author, 1745. Gold, Carol. Danish Cookbooks: Domesticity and National Identity, 1616-1901. Seattle: U of Washington P, 2007. Grainger, Sally. Cooking Apicius: Roman Recipes for Today. Totnes, Devon: Prospect, 2006. Hampton Court Palace. “The Tudor Kitchens.” 12 Jun 2013 ‹http://www.hrp.org.uk/HamptonCourtPalace/stories/thetudorkitchens› Katz, Solomon H. Ed. Encyclopedia of Food and Culture (3 Vols). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2003. Kuhn, T. S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1962. Lamb, Patrick. Royal Cookery:Or. The Complete Court-Cook. London: Abel Roper, 1710. Lehmann, Gilly. “English Cookery Books in the 18th Century.” The Oxford Companion to Food. Ed. Alan Davidson. Oxford: Oxford U P, 1999. 277–9. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín. “The Changing Geography and Fortunes of Dublin’s Haute Cuisine Restaurants 1958–2008.” Food, Culture & Society 14.4 (2011): 525–45. Mac Con Iomaire, Máirtín, and Dorothy Cashman. “Irish Culinary Manuscripts and Printed Cookbooks: A Discussion.” Petit Propos Culinaires 94 (2011): 81–101. Mason, Laura. Food Culture in Great Britain. Ed. Ken Albala. Westport CT.: Greenwood P, 2004. Mennell, Stephen. All Manners of Food. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1996. ---. “Plagiarism and Originality: Diffusionism in the Study of the History of Cookery.” Petits Propos Culinaires 68 (2001): 29–38. Sherman, Sandra. “‘The Whole Art and Mystery of Cooking’: What Cookbooks Taught Readers in the Eighteenth Century.” Eighteenth Century Life 28.1 (2004): 115–35. Smith, Andrew F. Ed. The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink. New York: Oxford U P, 2007. Spencer, Colin. British Food: An Extraordinary Thousand Years of History. London: Grub Street, 2004. Tierney, Mark. Europe and the World 1300-1763. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1970. Trubek, Amy B. Haute Cuisine: How the French Invented the Culinary Profession. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2000. Wheaton, Barbara. “Finding Real Life in Cookbooks: The Adventures of a Culinary Historian”. 2006. Humanities Research Group Working Paper. 9 Sep. 2009 ‹http://www.phaenex.uwindsor.ca/ojs/leddy/index.php/HRG/article/view/22/27›. Wheaton, Barbara Ketcham. Savouring the Past: The French Kitchen and Table from 1300-1789. London: Chatto & Windus, 1983. White, Eileen, ed. The English Cookery Book: Historical Essays. Proceedings of the 16th Leeds Symposium on Food History 2001. Devon: Prospect, 2001.

The ontological equality and material vitality of all things, and efforts to remove “the human” from its apical position in a hierarchy of being, are Object-Oriented Ontology theory (OOO) concepts. These axioms are useful in a discussion of the aesthetics of augmented robotic art, alongside speculations regarding any interagency between the human/non-human and possible co-evolutionary relationships. In addition, they help to wash out the sticky habits of conventional art writing, such as removed critique or an authoritative expert voice. This article aims to address the robotic work Accomplice by Sydney-based artists Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders as a means of interrogating the independence and agency of robots as non-human species, and as a mode of investigating how we see these relationships changing for the futureFor Accomplice, an artwork exhibited at Artspace, Sydney, in 2013, Gemeinboeck and Saunders built robots, strategised properties, and programmed their performative actions. Replete with lights and hammers, the robots are secreted away behind false walls, where they move along tracks and bang holes into the gallery space. As the devastation of plasterboard ensues, the robots respond interactively to each other through their collective activity: this is intra-action, where an object’s force emerges and where agency is an enactment (Barad, Matter Feels). This paper will continue to draw on the work of feminist scholar and quantum scientist, Karen Barad, due to her related work on agency and intra-action, although she is not part of an OOO theoretical body. Gemeinboeck and Saunders build unstable environments for their robots to perform as embodied inhabitants (Gemeinboeck and Saunders 2). Although the augmented robots are programmed, it is not a prescriptive control. Data is entered, then the robots respond to one another’s proximity and devastation. From the immaterial, virtual realm of robotic programming comes a new materiality which is both unstable, unpredictable, and on the verge of becoming other, or alive. This is a collaboration, not just between Gemeinboeck and Saunders, but between the programmers and their little robots—and the new forces that might be created. Sites of intra-species (human and robot) crossings might be places or spaces where a new figuration of enchantment occurs (Bennett 32). Such a space could take the form of a responsive art-writing intervention or even a new ontological story, as a direct riposte to the lively augmentation of the robotic artwork (Bennett 92). As ficto-critical theorist and ethnographer, Stephen Muecke says, “Experimental writing, for me, would be writing that necessarily participates in worlds rather than a writing constituted as a report on realities seen from the other side of an illusory gap of representation” (Muecke Motorcycles 2). Figure 1: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)Writing Forces When things disappear then reappear, there is a point where force is unleashed. If we ask what role the art writer plays in liberating force, the answer might be that her role is to create as an imaginative new creation, equal to the artwork. The artists speak of Accomplice: transductions, transmaterial flows and transversal relations are at play ... whether emerging from or propelling the interplay between internal dynamics and external forces, the enactment of agencies (human and non-human), or the performative relationship unfolding over time. (Gemeinboeck and Saunders 3) When new energetic force is created and the artwork takes on new life, the audience’s imaginative thought is stimulated. This new force might cause an effect of a trans-fictional flow. The act of writing about Accomplice might also involve some intentional implausibility. For instance, whilst in the exhibition gallery space, witnessing Accomplice, I decided to write a note to one of the robots. I could see it, just visible beyond the violently hammered hole in the wall. Broken plaster dusted my shoes and as I peered into the darker outside space, it whizzed past on its way to bang another hole, in harmony with its other robotic friends. So I scribbled a note on a plain white piece of paper, folded it neatly and poked it through the hole: Dear robot, do you get sick of augmenting human lives?Do you get on well with your robotic friends?Yours sincerely, Prue. I waited a few minutes and then my very same piece of paper was thrust back through the hole. It was not folded but was crumpled up. I opened it and noticed a smudged mark in the corner. It looked like an ancient symbol, a strange elliptical script of rounded shapes, but was too small to read. An intergalactic message, a signal from an alien presence perhaps? So I borrowed a magnifying glass from the Artspace gallery attendant. It read: I love opera. Robot Two must die. This was unexpected! As I pondered the robot’s reply, I noticed the robots did indeed make strange bird-like noises to one another; their tapping was like rhythmic woodpeckers. Their hammering was a kind of operatic symphony; it was not far-fetched that these robots were appreciative of the sound patterns they made. In other words, they were responding to stimuli in the environment, and acting in response. They had agency beyond the immaterial computational programming their creators had embedded. It wasn’t difficult to suspend disbelief to allow the possibility that interaction between the robots might occur, or that one might have gone rogue. An acceptance of the possibility of inter-agency would allow the fantastical reality of a human becoming short-term pen pals with an augmented machine. Karen Barad might endorse such an unexpected intra-action act. She discourages conventional critique as, “a tool that keeps getting used out of habit” (Matter Feels). Art writing, in an era of robots and awareness of other non-human sentient life-forms can be speculative invention, have a Barad-like imaginative materiality (Matter Feels), and sense of suspended disbelief. Figure 2: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) The Final Onto-Story Straw Gemeinboeck and Saunders say the space where their robots perform is a questionable one: “the fidelity of the space as a shared experience is thus brought into question: how can a shared virtual experience be trusted when it is constructed from such intangible and malleable stuff as streams of binary digits” (7). The answer might be that it is not to be trusted, particularly in an OOO aesthetic approach that allows divergent and contingent fictive possibilities. Indeed, thinking about the fidelity of the space, there was something about a narrow access corridor in the Accomplice exhibition space, between the false gallery wall and the cavity where the robots moved on their track, that beckoned me. I glanced over my shoulder to check that the Artspace attendant wasn’t watching and slipped behind the wall. I took a few tentative steps, not wanting to get knocked on the nose by a zooming robot. I saw that one robot had turned away from the wall and was attacking another with its hammer. By the time I arrived, the second robot (could it be Robot Two?) had been badly pummeled. Not only did Robot One attack Robot Two but I witnessed it using its extended hammer to absorb metal parts: the light and the hammer. It was adapting, like Philip K. Dick’s robots in his short story ‘Preserving Machine’ (See Gray 228-33). It was becoming more augmented. It now had two lights and two hammers and seemed to move at double speed. Figure 3: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)My observance of this scene might be explained by Gemeinboeck/Saunders’s comment regarding Philip K. Dick-style interference and instability, which they actively apply to their work. They say, “The ‘gremlins’ of our works are the slipping logics of nonlinear systems or distributed agential forces of colliding materials” (18). An audience response is a colliding material. A fictional aside is a colliding material. A suspension of disbelief must also be considered a colliding material. This is the politics of the para-human, where regulations and policies are in their infancy. Fears of artificial intelligence seem absurd, when we consider how startled we become when the boundaries between fiction/truth become as flimsy and slippery as the boundaries between human/non-human. Art writing that resists truth complements Gemeinboeck/Saunders point that, “different agential forces not only co-evolve but perform together” (18).The DisappearanceBefore we are able to distinguish any unexpected or enchanted ontological outcomes, the robots must first appear, but for things to truly appear to us, they must first disappear. The robots disappear from view, behind the false walls. Slowly, through the enactment of an agented force (the action of their hammers upon the wall), they beat a path into the viewer’s visual reality. Their emergence signals a performative augmentation. Stronger, better, smarter, longer: these creatures are more-than-human. Yet despite the robot’s augmented technological improvement upon human ability, their being (here, meaning their independent autonomy) is under threat in a human-centred world environment. First they are threatened by the human habit of reducing them to anthropomorphic characteristics: they can be seen as cute little versions of humans. Secondly, they are threatened by human perception that they are under the control of the programmers. Both points are arguable: these robots are undoubtedly non-human, and there are unexpected and unplanned outcomes, once they are activated. These might be speculative or contestable outcomes, which are not demonstrably an epitome of truth (Bennett 161). Figure 4: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck)Gemeinboeck’s robotic creatures, with their apparent work/play and civil disobedience, appeared to exhibit human traits. An OOO approach would discourage these anthropomorphic tendencies: by seeing human qualities in inanimate objects, we are only falling back into correlational habits—where nature and culture are separate dyads and can never comprehend each other, and where humankind is mistakenly privileged over all other entities (Meillassoux 5). This only serves to inhibit any access to a reality outside the human-centred view. This kind of objectivity, where we see ourselves as nature, does no more than hold up a mirror to our inescapably human selves (Barad, Matter Feels). In an object-oriented approach the unpredictable outcomes of the robots’s performance is brought to attention. OOO proponent and digital media theorist Ian Bogost, has a background in computational media, especially video and social media games, and says, “computers are plastic and metal corpses with voodoo powers” (9). This is a non-life description, hovering in the liminal space between being and not being. Bogost’s view is that a strange world stirs within machinic devices (9). A question to ask: what’s it like to be a robot? Perhaps the answer lies somewhere between what it does and how we see it. It is difficult not to think of twentieth century philosopher Martin Heidegger’s tool analysis theory when writing of Gemeinboeck/Saunders’s work because Heidegger, and OOO scholar Graham Harman after him, uses the hammer as his paradigmatic tool. In his analysis, things are only present-at-hand (consciously perceived without utility) once they break (Harman, Heidegger Explained 63). However, Gemeinboeck and Saunders’s installation Accomplice straddles Heidegger’s dual present-at-hand and read-at-hand (the utility of the thing) because art raises the possibility that we might experience these divergent qualities of the robotic entities, simultaneously. The augmented robot, existing in its performative exhibition ecology, is the bridge between sentient life and utility. Robotic Agency In relation to the agency of robots, Ian Bogost refers to the Tableau Machine which was a non-human actor system created by researchers at Georgia Tech in 1998 (Bogost 106). It was a house fitted with cameras, screens, interfaces, and sensors. This was an experimental investigation into ambient intelligence. The researchers’s term for the computational agency was ‘alien presence,’ suggesting a life outside human comprehension. The data-collator sensed and interpreted the house and its occupants, and re-created that recorded data as abstract art, by projecting images on its own plasma screens. The implication was that the home was alive, vital, and autonomously active, in that it took on a sentient life, beyond human control. This kind of vital presence, an aliveness outside human programming, is there in the Accomplice robots. Their agency becomes materialized, as they violate the polite gallery-viewing world. Karen Barad’s concept of agency works within a relational ontology. Agency resists being granted, but rather is an enactment, and creates new possibilities (Barad, Matter Feels). Agency is entangled amongst “intra-acting human and non-human practices” (6). In Toward an Enchanted Materialism, Jane Bennett describes primordia (atoms) as “not animate with divine spirit, and yet they are quite animated - this matter is not dead at all” (81). This then is an agency that is not spiritual, nor is there any divine purpose. It is a matter of material force, a subversive action performed by robotic entities, not for any greater good, in fact, for no reason at all. This unpredictability is OOO contingency, whereby physical laws remain indifferent to whether an event occurs or not (Meillassoux 39). Figure 5: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) A Post-Human Ethic The concept of a post-human state of being raises ethical concerns. Ethics is a human construct, a criteria of standards fixed within human social systems. How should humans respond, without moral panic, to robots that might have life and sentient power outside human control? If an OOO approach is undertaken, the implication is that all things exist equally and ethics, as fixed standards, might need to be dismantled and replaced with a more democratic set of guidelines. A flat ontology, argued for by Bogost, Levi Bryant and other OOO advocates, follows that all entities have equal potential for independent energy and agency (although OOO theorists disagree on many small technical issues). The disruption of the conventional hierarchical model of being is replaced by a flat field of equality. This might cause the effect of a more ethical, ontological ecology. Quentin Meillassoux, an influential figure in the field of Speculative Realism, from which OOO is an offshoot, finds philosophical/mathematical solutions to the problems of human subjectivity. His eschewing of Kantian divisions between object/subject and human/world, is accompanied by a removal from Kantian and Cartesian critique (Meillassoux 30). This turn from critique, and its related didactic authority and removed judgment, marks an important point in the culture of philosophy, but also in the culture of art writing. If we can escape the shackles of divisive critique, then the pleasures of narrative might be given space. Bogost endorses collapsing the hierarchical model of being and converting conventional academic writing (89). He says, “for the computers to operate at all for us first requires a wealth of interactions to take place for itself. As operators or engineers, we may be able to describe how such objects and assemblages work. But what do they “experience” (Bogost 10)? This view is complementary to an OOO view of anti-subjectivity, an awareness of things that might exist irrespective of human life, from both inside and outside the mind (Harman 143). Figure 6: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) New Materiality In addition to her views on human/non-human agency, Karen Barad develops a parallel argument for materiality. She says, “matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.” Barad’s agential realism is predicated on an awareness of the immanence of matter, with materiality that subverts conventions of transcendence or human-centredness. She says, “On my agential realist account, all bodies, not merely human bodies, come to matter through the world’s performativity - its iterative intra-activity.” Barad sees matter, all matter, as entangled parts of phenomena that extend across time and space (Nature’s Queer Performativity 125). Barad argues against the position that acts against nature are moral crimes, which occur when the nature/culture divide is breached. She questions the individuated categorizations of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ inherent in arguments like these (Nature’s Queer Performativity, 123-5). Likewise, in robotic and machinic aesthetics, it could be seen as an ethical breach to consider the robots as alive, sentient, and experiential. This confounds previous cultural separations, however, object-oriented theory is a reexamination of these infractions and offers an openness to discourse of different causal outcomes. Figure 7: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, Artspace, Sydney, 2013. (Photo: Petra Gemeinboeck) Co-Evolution Artists Gemeinboeck/Saunders are artists and scholarly researchers investigating new notions of co-evolution. If we ascribe human characteristics to robots, might they ascribe machinic properties to us? It is possible to argue that co-evolution is already apparent in the world. Titanium knees, artificial arteries, plastic hips, pacemakers, metallic vertebrae pins: human medicine is a step ahead. Gemeinboeck/Saunders in turn make a claim for the evolving desires of their robots (11). Could there be performative interchangeability between species: human and robot? Barad asks us not to presume what the distinctions are between human and non-human and not to make post-humanist blurrings, but to understand the materializing effects of the boundaries between humans and nonhumans (Nature’s Queer Performativity 123). Vital matter emerges from acts of reappearance, re-performance, and interspecies interaction. Ian Bogost begins his Alien Phenomenology by analysing Alan Turing’s essay, Computing Machinery and Intelligence and deduces that it is an approach inextricably linked to human understanding (Bogost 14). Bogost seeks to avoid distinctions between things or a slippage into an over-determination of systems operations, and instead he adopts an OOO view where all things are treated equally, even cheeky little robots (Bogost 17).Figure 8: Accomplice by Petra Gemeinboeck and Rob Saunders, installation view, Artspace, Sydney. (Photo: silversalt photography) Intra-Active ReappearanceIf Barad describes intra-action as enacting an agential cut or separation of object from subject, she does not mean a distinction between object and subject but instead devises an intra-active cutting of things together-apart (Nature’s Queer Performativity 124). This is useful for two reasons. First it allows confusion between inside and outside, between real and unreal, and between past and future. In other words it defies the human/world correlates, which OOO’s are actively attempting to flee. Secondly it makes sense of an idea of disappearance as being a re-appearance too. If robots, and all other species, start to disappear, from our consciousness, from reality, from life (that is, becoming extinct), this disappearance causes or enacts a new appearance (the robotic action), and this action has its own vitality and immanence. If virtuality (an aesthetic of being that grew from technology, information, and digital advancements) meant that the body was left or abandoned for an immaterial space, then robots and robotic artwork are a means of re-inhabiting the body in a re-materialized mode. This new body, electronic and robotic in nature, might be mastered by a human hand (computer programming) but its differential is its new agency which is one shared between human and non-human. Barad warns, however, against a basic inversion of humanism (Nature’s Queer Performativity 126). Co-evolution is not the removal of the human. While an OOO approach may not have achieved the impossible task of creating a reality beyond the human-centric, it is a mode of becoming cautious of an invested anthropocentric view, which robotics and diminished non-human species bring to attention. The autonomy and agency of robotic life challenges human understanding of ontological being and of how human and non-human entities relate.References Barad, Karen. "Nature’s Queer Performativity." Qui Parle 19.2 (2011): 121-158. ———. Interview. In Rick Dolphijn and Van Der Tuin. “Matter Feels, Converses, Suffers, Desires, Yearns and Remembers: Interview with Karen Barad.” New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan; Open Humanities Press, 2012. ———. "Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter." Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28.3 (2003): 801-831. Bennett, Jane. The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001. Bogost, Ian. Alien Phenomenology. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 2012. Bryant, Levi. The Democracy of Objects. University of Michigan Publishing: Open Humanities Press, 2011. ———, N. Srnicek, and GHarman. The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. Melbourne: re:press, 2011. Gemeinboeck, Petra, and Rob Saunders. “Other Ways of Knowing: Embodied Investigations of the Unstable, Slippery and Incomplete.” Fibreculture Journal 18 (2011). ‹http://eighteen.fibreculturejournal.org/2011/10/09/fcj-120-other-ways-of-knowing-embodied-investigations-of-the-unstable-slippery-and-incomplete/›. Gray, Nathan. "L’object sonore undead." In A. Barikin and H. Hughes. Making Worlds: Art and Science Fiction. Melbourne: Surpllus, 2013. 228-233. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Winchester UK: Zero Books, 2011. ———. Guerilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things. Chicago: Open Court, 2005. ———. Heidegger Explained: From Phenomenon to Thing. Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2007. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency. New York: Continuum, 2008. Muecke, Stephen. "The Fall: Ficto-Critical Writing." Parallax 8.4 (2002): 108-112. ———. "Motorcycles, Snails, Latour: Criticism without Judgment." Cultural Studies Review 18.1 (2012): 40-58. ———. “The Writing Laboratory: Political Ecology, Labour, Experiment.” Angelaki 14.2 (2009): 15-20. Phelan, Peggy. Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge, 1993.

Air pollution is a worldwide environmental and health issue. Among environmental pollutants, heavy metals are the most dangerous due to their persistence and bioaccumulation in food chain. Assessment of heavy metal deposition using moss biomonitors is a cheap and effective technique, which was successfully applied in different European counties. The present work revises application of passive biomonitoring in former Soviet Union countries: Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Moldova, Russia, and Ukraine. The air pollution sources in each country were identified. The mean concentration of elements considered as environmental pollutants were compared in order to detect the most polluted countries on the post-Soviet space.

The ongoing research work at Georgia Institute of Technology, PARC, Inc., and Nanonexus, Inc. funded by NIST/ATP, aims to develop a novel compliant interconnect technology based on stress-engineering of thin-film metal deposition. The minimum pitch size can reach as small as 6 μm. The fabrication of the stress-engineered compliant interconnect is compatible with the standard IC fabrication processes. Therefore, the compliant interconnect fabrication can be fully integrated into front-end semiconductor process. Also, thousands of interconnects can be fabricated on the wafer in one batch, which can greatly reduce the cost, improve the yield, and facilitate wafer level packaging (WLP). Based on the mechanical advantage of the stress-engineered compliant interconnect, a non-soldering assembly process has been developed. In the non-soldering assembly process, compliant interconnects are pressed against the bonding pads to establish the electrical connection. Test vehicles with such non-soldering contact interconnect have been assembled and subjected to thermal cycling. Although the assembled test vehicles have shown reliability over 1000 cycles, the primary mode of failure occurs at the contact interface between the compliant interconnect tip and the bonding pad. This contact interface is studied using analytical and numerical models to understand the reliability of freestanding sliding-contact compliant interconnect assembly.

Abstract Heat receiver design is an essential portion of Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants, particularly within CSP systems that are particle based. Particle based CSP promises higher operating temperatures and more cost-effective thermal energy storage than existing systems. Two general types of Particle Heat Receivers (PHR) are under development, variations of the free-falling curtain concept being developed by Sandia National Labs and an obstructed flow concept being developed by King Saud University (KSU) and Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT)[1, 2]. The obstructed flow design utilizes specifically engineered obstacles placed in the flow path of the particles to remove momentum and kinetic energy and promote lateral and depth-wise mixing. This design is named the discrete structure or DS-PHR. This paper focuses on development and design work that has been done with the existing DS-PHR developed by GIT and KSU. Previous iterations of the DS-PHR have utilized obstruction materials that include simple metal meshes, and ceramic formed into an inverted V-shapes or chevrons. However, these previous designs have some shortfalls. The metallic mesh design has structural integrity issues under intense radiation, inherent in a DS-PHR. The ceramic chevrons have a disadvantageously thick leading edge, which may intercept too much radiation and overheat. Current development has continued with improvements to remedy the issues of the previous design work. Experience, modeling, and testing have shown that a cavity receiver is preferred to reduce heat and particle loss in the system. Recent work has been devoted to developing a Discrete Structure Refractory Particle Heat Receiver (DS-RPHR) suitable for cavity installation working with a north-located field. The simplest suitable configuration is 5 flat ceramic plates, or absorber panels, arranged in an arc, forming a 15° angle of inclination, to improve particle retention in the system. To increase particle residence time, quartz rods are placed onto the back plane of the DS-PHR, in a hexagonal configuration. These serve as the momentum scrubbing obstructions as mentioned above. The performance of this design will be discussed in the following paper. This design has been extensively modeled using NREL’s Soltrace to evaluate thermal and optical performance. Modeling has shown high thermal efficiency in the design, as well as promising heat flux profiles across the receiver. Currently at KSU, a 300 kW-thermal testing facility has been constructed and used for high temperature testing. The final proposed 6.6 MW-thermal design, called the pre-commercial demonstration, will be built at a site owned and operated by Saudi Electric Company, in Waad Al-Shamal, 20 kilometers east of Tuarif, Saudi Arabi.

The majority of pressure tunnels are designed with pervious concrete lining, considering limited parameters (quantity and opening) equidistributed cracks. In general, according to the requirements of building specifications admissible seepage losses from tunnel shall not exceed 1% of HPP design discharge. As shown by the operation of HPP’s the value of seepage losses is in reality much higher than the acceptable one. The Inguri HPP pressure tunnel (15 km in length and 9.5 m in diameter) passes in complex geological conditions. The maximum value of pressure at the beginning and end of tunnel is, correspondingly, 110–175 m, while the water level variability in the reservoir is 90 m. The main characteristic of the structure of diversion tunnel is that in the main part of its length it is represented as a single complex: concrete lining (0.5 m thick) with strengthened grouting zone (6 m deep). Such design decision replaced more traditional structures, e.g. strengthened concrete, combined or metal linings. The internal pressure of tunnel is borne by the monolithic mass formed by reinforcement grouting. Thereby lining operation is completely dependent on the parameters characteristic for the zone of strengthened grouting (resilient backpressure and perviousness), which must satisfy design values. Thus reinforcement grouting, along with filling grouting are integral parts of pressure tunnel, without which the operation of structure is practically impossible. At the initial stage of operation (in 1985, at the low level in the reservoir and under the impact of the increase of pressures from massif the loss of lining stability (of the wall and inverted arch) occurred. Presently, based on general assessment the seepage losses developed from tunnel reach up to 10 m3/sec, which thrice exceed the design ones. As a result of rehabilitation works (massif grouting and shotcrete lining) conducted in 2006 in certain sections of tunnel seepage losses were temporarily reduced. Subsequently seepage losses increased again due to the development of erosive leakage processes in massif. In the present work calculations were conducted of the seepage parameters and stress condition of the “tunnel-massif” system during filling and discharge of reservoir using a static-seepage coupled scheme, in which a complex geological structure of massif (anisotropy, presence of cracks), the deformation of massif and seepage body force developed in it are taken into consideration. The processes developed during operational period, including depression surface enlarged and the loss of concrete lining stability, are also analyzed. Inguri HPP is Georgia’s powerful energy object (capacity – 1300 MW, design head – 450 m). Clearly the reduction of seepage losses has a great impact on power generation. In future the rehabilitation of tunnel is envisaged, as alternative options of which shotcrete lining is viewed, the same with strengthening grouting zone and stressed lining (with expanding cement). The present work presents part of the research.