Journal articles on the topic 'Nineteen thirty-seven, A.D., in art'

One hundred and seventy-eight loci have been mapped in Triticum tauschii (Coss.) Schmal. (2n = 14, DD) and Triticum aestivum L. em. Thell. (2n = 42, AABBDD). Thirty-five loci were mapped by aneuploid analysis in T. aestivum. One hundred and fifty-two loci, including 143 restriction fragment length polymorphisms (RFLPs), 8 proteins, and 1 leaf rust resistance gene, were mapped in an F2 population (60 plants) of T. tauschii. One hundred and twenty-seven loci were placed in linkage groups belonging to seven D-genome chromosomes of T. tauschii. The source of the probes was a PstI genomic library of T. tauschii, which gave 13% single-low copy clones. Four restriction endonucleases (DraI, EcoRI, EcoRV, HindIII) gave 75% polymorphism between the two parents. Nineteen clones detected multiloci ranging from two to nine in number. Deletions–insertions and point mutations were equally important for generating RFLPs. A hypervariable sequence was identified, which may have potential use in varietal fingerprinting. One marker was found to be linked to a rust-resistance gene. The map will be useful for determining genetic relationships in the Triticeae and for tagging genes of economic importance.Key words: restriction fragment length polymorphism, Triticum aestivum, leaf rust, isozymes, Aegilops squarrosa.

PURPOSE We treated 49 patients with recurrent or poor-prognosis CNS malignancies with high-dose chemotherapy regimens followed by autologous marrow rescue with or without peripheral-blood stem-cell augmentation to determine the toxicity of and event-free survival after these regimens. PATIENTS AND METHODS Nineteen patients had medulloblastomas, 12 had glial tumors, seven had pineoblastomas, five had ependymomas, three had primitive neuroectodermal tumors, two had germ cell tumors, and one had fibrosarcoma. Thirty-seven received chemotherapy with cyclophosphamide 1.5 g/m2 daily x 4 and melphalan 25 to 60 mg/m2 daily x 3. Nine received busulfan 37.5 mg/m2 every 6 hours x 16 and melphalan 180 mg/m2 (n = 7) or 140 mg/m2 (n = 2). Three received carboplatin 700 mg/m2/d on days -7, -5, and -3 and etoposide 500 mg/m2/d on days -6, -4, and -2. All patients received standard supportive care. RESULTS Eighteen of 49 patients survive event-free 22+ to 55+ months (median, 33+) after transplantation, including nine of 16 treated before recurrence and nine of 33 treated after recurrence. There was one transplant-related death from pulmonary aspergillosis. Of five patients assessable for disease response, one had a partial remission (2 months), one has had stable disease (55+ months), and three showed progression 2, 5, and 8 months after transplantation. CONCLUSION The toxicity of these regimens was tolerable. Certain patients with high-risk CNS malignancies may benefit from such a treatment approach. Subsequent trials should attempt to determine which patients are most likely to benefit from high-dose chemotherapy with autologous stem-cell rescue.

Abstract The aim of this study was to evaluate the indirect/closed maxillary floor elevation technique for the insertion of osseointegrated implants to support fixed prostheses clinically. Thirty-one patients (19 female, 12 male) with a mean age of 62 ± 9 years were selected for this study. All patients needed implants in the posterior maxillary region to support osseointegrated prosthesis. Forty-seven implants were inserted using the indirect/closed sinus floor elevation method, and another 31 implants were placed in the same individuals as intra-individual control. No augmentation material was used along with implantation. The mean bone height before sinus lift was 9.78 ± 1.68 mm (minimum 5.6 mm), and for controls it was 15.62 ± 3.44 mm. The average length of the implants used was 12.00 ± 1.70 mm, whereas for controls it was 13.39 ± 1.60 mm. The patients were recalled for periodic checkups every 6 months, and the radiographic controls were made every 12 months. One control fixture failed after uncovering; 77 implants were loaded, and 5 of them failed (2 controls and 3 of the sinus lift group) between 3 and 59 months following loading. One hundred nineteen months after surgery (112 months following loading), the censored survival rate (Kaplan-Meier) was 93.6% for sinus lift implants and 90.3% for controls. The crestal bone level changes were not significant either before loading or after loading for both sinus lift and control implants. None of the remaining implants showed any signs of mobility or peri-implant disease, and none of the patients exhibited sinus problems during the entire observation period.

This systematic review aims to summarise the results of controlled trials on dietary supplements (DS) usage and inflammation, oxidative stress, antioxidant status, and thyroid parameter improvement in hypothyroidism (HT)/Hashimoto’s thyroiditis (AIT) patients. The study protocol was registered with PROSPERO (no. CRD42022365149). A comprehensive search of the PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science databases resulted in the identification of nineteen randomised controlled trials and three non-randomised studies for the review; three studies examined the effect of supplementation with vitamin D, twelve studies—with selenium, and seven studies—with other DS. Based on very limited evidence, the lack of influence of vitamin D supplementation on inflammatory parameters was found, while no studies have examined oxidative stress and antioxidant status parameters, and only one provided results for a single thyroid parameter after an intervention. Some evidence was found proving that selenium supplementation may decrease inflammation and improve thyroid parameters, but reaching a conclusion about its influence on oxidative stress and antioxidant status is not possible because of the insufficient number of studies. Additionally, due to examining other DS (e.g., multicomponent, Nigella sativa, and genistein) only in single studies, conclusions cannot be drawn. Further long-term, high-quality randomised controlled trials are necessary to better understand the influence of DS on inflammation, oxidative stress, and antioxidant status, as well as their potential to improve thyroid gland function in HT/AIT patients.

Objectives: To evaluate the effect of single dose (75 µg/kg) Anti-D in children with newly diagnosed immune thrombocytopenia in terms of its safety, efficacy and tolerability. Methods: This was a prospective study conducted in Dayanand Medical College and Hospital-a tertiary care hospital over a period of 18 months. In this study, nineteen children with newly diagnosed immune thrombocytopenia (10 males, 9 females) were included. Mean age of the children was 4.7 ± 3.2 years. Anti-D was administered as a single intravenous injection in a dose of 75 µg/kg. Main outcome variables taken were Increase in platelet count, fall in hemoglobin, change in AST, ALT, urea, creatinine, sodium and potassium levels and appearance of any adverse symptom. Results: The response rate to Anti-D was 89.4% (n = 17). Mean increase in platelet count was 125.5 ± 86.2 x 109 /L at 48 h and 257.5 ± 176.4 x 109 /L at day seven. Response at 48 h was seen in 88.2% of the children. Females showed a better response than males (p = 0.05). Anti-D did not have any significant effect on renal or liver function tests and it caused a mean fall of 1.76 ± 1.06 g/dL in hemoglobin. Mild adverse effects developed in 52% children which resolved spontaneously within 12 h. Conclusion: Anti-D shows a good response (89.4%) in children with newly diagnosed ITP with an acceptable safety profile. Adverse effects like fever and chills are common (52%).

Abstract Activated macrophages have been implicated in lung injury and fibrosis induced by the cytotoxic alkylating agent, nitrogen mustard (NM). Accumulating evidence suggests that phenotypic activation of macrophages during initiation, progression, and resolution of inflammatory responses is regulated by groups of miRNAs that act in concert to coordinate cellular activity. Herein, we determined if macrophage activation after NM injury was associated with altered miRNA expression. Male rats were exposed to NM (0.125 mg/kg, i.t.) and PCR array analysis of miRNAs involved in inflammation and fibrosis was performed in alveolar macrophages recovered from bronchoalveolar lavage. Results revealed unique and overlapping miRNA expression profiles in macrophages isolated 1, 3, 7, and 28 d post-NM. Seven miRNAs were upregulated in macrophages throughout the time-course, while three miRNAs were uniquely expressed 1 d post-NM, six at 3 d, six at 7 d, and nineteen at 28 d. Linkage with macrophage RNA-seq data showed differentially expressed miRNAs regulated mRNAs involved in STAT3, IL-6 and iNOS inflammatory signaling pathways at 1 d, and IL-4, PPAR and Sirtuin signaling at 28 d post-NM. Ingenuity Pathway Analysis predicted miR-21-5p, miR-29, miR-26a, miR-34a and let-7a as key regulators of macrophage mobilization, activation, and lipid homeostasis after NM. Collectively, these data show that NM promotes alterations in miRNA expression linked to lung macrophage responses during inflammatory injury and fibrosis. These findings provide clues on pathways regulating macrophage activation and may help identify novel therapeutic targets. This work was supported by NIH grants AR055073, ES004738, HL086621, ES005022, ES030984, and ES007148.

Purpose Our goals were to evaluate the safety of adding rituximab to methotrexate (MTX)-based chemotherapy for primary CNS lymphoma, determine whether additional cycles of induction chemotherapy improve the complete response (CR) rate, and examine effectiveness and toxicity of reduced-dose whole-brain radiotherapy (WBRT) after CR. Patients and Methods Thirty patients (17 women; median age, 57 years; median Karnofsky performance score, 70) were treated with five to seven cycles of induction chemotherapy (rituximab, MTX, procarbazine, and vincristine [R-MPV]) as follows: day 1, rituximab 500 mg/m2; day 2, MTX 3.5 gm/m2 and vincristine 1.4 mg/m2. Procarbazine 100 mg/m2/d was administered for 7 days with odd-numbered cycles. Patients achieving CR received dose-reduced WBRT (23.4 Gy), and all others received standard WBRT (45 Gy). Two cycles of high-dose cytarabine were administered after WBRT. CSF levels of rituximab were assessed in selected patients, and prospective neurocognitive evaluations were performed. Results With a median follow-up of 37 months, 2-year overall and progression-free survival was 67% and 57%, respectively. Forty-four percent of patients achieved a CR after five or fewer cycles, and 78% after seven cycles. The overall response rate was 93%. Nineteen of 21 CR patients received the planned 23.4 Gy WBRT. The most commonly observed grade 3 to 4 toxicities included neutropenia (43%), thrombocytopenia (36%), and leukopenia (23%). No treatment-related neurotoxicity has been observed. Conclusion The addition of rituximab to MPV increased the risk of significant neutropenia requiring routine growth factor support. Additional cycles of R-MPV nearly doubled the CR rate. Reduced-dose WBRT was not associated with neurocognitive decline, and disease control to date is excellent.

The digital gaming community appreciates visual style information in digital games as it facilitates information seeking. Nevertheless, learned scholars have discovered that the digital game visual style classification is inconsistent and easily modified, potentially limitingthe information and leading to inaccurate visual terminologies during information discovery. Therefore, this cross-sectional study wasperformed to assess multiple visual style classification terms and their definitions among Malaysian game developers using the closedcard sorting exercise. A total of seven professional game developers participated in an online survey that comprised thirty-five digital game case studies using a card sorting technique. They were asked to classify nineteen visual style classification terms, including psychedelic, text, illusionism, photorealism, televisualism, handicraft, caricature, celshaded, comic book (anime), watercolour, Lego, minimalism, pixel art, silhouette, bright, dark, maplike, colourful, and black and white. The Fleiss’ kappa intercoder reliability assessment was performed to measure the coders’ agreement on visual style classification, followed by the think-aloud protocol descriptive analysis to gather assessment insights into the visual style descriptions. The intercoder reliability test achieved a significantly moderate agreement based on the results. The professional game developers agreed on eighteen visual stylesand rejected the bright visual style classification due to its overlapping description with the colourful visual style. The definition of ten visual style classifications was improved from the existing Video Game Metadata Schema (VGMS) description, contributing to the digital game’s coherence and consistency. This improvement will enhance visual style classification information for machine-learning-based recommendation systems for digital game distribution platforms and digital archiving.

e16017 Background: We have completed accrual of 63 patients (pts) to our study combining lenalidomide (L), with bevacizumab (B), docetaxel (D), and prednisone (P) (ART-P) in mCRPC. Due to the lack of improved survival and the increased toxicity of anti-angiogenic docetaxel combinations in the MAINSAIL and CALGB 90401 trials, we attempted to compare and contrast our studies with these failed phase III trials. Methods: Among the first 52 pts on ART-P, 3 received L 15 mg daily, 3 received 20 mg daily, and the others received 25 mg daily for 14 days of every 21−day cycle (C). We then enrolled 11 pts at L 15 mg. All pts received D 75 mg/m2 and B 15 mg/kg on day 1 with P 10 mg and enoxaparin daily. Pegfilgrastim was given on day 2. Patients on CALGB 90401 received D 75 mg/m2 and B 15 mg/kg on day 1, with P 10 mg. On MAINSAIL, pts received D 75 mg/m2, L 25 mg daily for 14 days of every 21−day cycle with daily P. Patients on CALGB 90401 and MAINSAIL did not receive enoxaparin or pegfilgrastim prophylactically. Results: The median number of Cs on ART-P is 18 (1-52). Median PFS is 19.1 months. Twenty-seven pts had a PR, and one pt with measurable disease had a CR. Two patients (3%) had deep vein thromboses. Of 1,334 Cs given, 14 cycles were complicated by febrile neutropenia (FN) (1%). There were no treatment related deaths. In comparison, median number of Cs in MAINSAIL L+DP arm was 6, with a PFS of 45 weeks and an OS of 77 weeks. Thirty-four pts (6.5%) developed pulmonary emboli and there were 2 deaths due to toxicity in the experimental arm. Nearly 12% of Cs were complicated by FN. In the experimental arm of CALGB 90401 trial, median OS was 22.6 months with median PFS of 9.9 months. The median number of Cs were 8 and 19 pts developed thrombosis/emboli (3.6%). In addition, 37 patients developed FN and treatment related deaths were reported at 4%. Conclusions: The use of supportive care allowed longer treatment duration with the ART-P combination as compared to D+L (MAINSAIL) and D+B (CALGB 90401), potentiating a longer PFS, RR and possibly OS with an improved safety profile. This data demonstrates the potential importance of supportive measures and is hypothesis generating for future combination studies. Clinical trial information: NCT00942578.

PURPOSE: To determine the efficacy and tolerance of single-agent docetaxel and granulocyte colony-stimulating factor in patients with advanced pancreatic cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Thirty-three chemotherapy-naive patients (median age, 65 years) with histologically confirmed pancreatic cancer were treated, after appropriate premedication, with docetaxel (100 mg/m2) and granulocyte colony-stimulating factor (150 μg/m2/d subcutaneously days 2 through 10) every 3 weeks. World Health Organization performance status was 0 to 1 in 28 patients (85%) and 2 in 5 patients (15%). Twenty-nine patients had stage III and IV disease. RESULTS: One complete response (3%) and one partial response (3%) were observed for an overall response rate of 6% (95% confidence interval, 2.1% to 14.2%). Nineteen patients (58%) had stable disease and 12 (36%) had progressive disease. The duration of the two objective responses was 10 and 28 weeks, and the median time to tumor progression was 20 weeks. The median overall survival was 36 weeks. The actuarial 1-year survival was 36.4%. The performance status improved in seven of 21 assessable patients (24%) and pain improved in 14 of 21 (67%) assessable patients; five patients (29%) experienced weight gain during treatment. Disease-related asthenia, anorexia, vomiting, and diarrhea improved in 29%, 15%, 67%, and 47% of the assessable patients, respectively. Serum concentrations of CA 19-9 were decreased by more than 50% in seven patients (35%). Grade 3 and 4 neutropenia occurred in four patients (12%) and eight patients (24%), respectively, with two episodes of febrile neutropenia. There were no treatment-related deaths. Grade 3/4 asthenia occurred in three patients. CONCLUSION: Although docetaxel has a marginal objective activity in pancreatic cancer, it seems to have an important effect on tumor growth control, conferring a clinical benefit.

This study evaluated the efficacy of a combination of artemether and diminazene aceturate therapy in experimental Trypanosoma brucei infection in rats. Thirty five male albino rats used for the study were randomly assigned to seven groups of five rats each as follows: Group A- infected and treated with diminazene aceturate (DA) at 7.0 mg/kg body weight (bw), intramuscular (IM) once on day 7 post-infection (pi); Group B – infected and treated with artemether (ART) at 3.2 mg/kg bw IM on day 7pi and 1.6mg/kg bw IM on days 8,9,10 and 11pi; Groups C,D and E, – infected and treated with DA at 7.0 mg/kg bw IM, 3.5 mg/kg bw IM, and 1.75 mg/kg bw IM respectively, once on day 7pi and ART at 3.2 mg/kg bw IM on day 7pi plus 1.6mg/kg bw on days 8,9,10 and 11pi; Group F –infected, untreated and Group G – uninfected, untreated. Onset of parasitaemia (OP), level of parasitaemia (LOP), clearance of parasites post treatment, mortality post infection, relapse of parasitaemia post clearance, rectal temperature, and body weight, were determined at specified intervals during the 70-day experimental period. Results showed that there were no significant (p>0.05) variations in the OP and LOP between the infected groups. Trypanosomes were cleared from the blood of rats in group A, C, D, and E after treatment. All the rats in groups B and F were dead by day 14pi. The infection relapsed in groups C and E. It was concluded that a combination of DA (3.5mg/kg bw once) and ART (3.2 mg/kg bw on day 1 of treatment and 1.6 mg/kg bw for 4 consecutive days) exhibited efficacy comparable to the standard dose of DA at 7mg/kg in the treatment of trypanosome brucei in rats and could thus possibly constitute an effective treatment regimen to reduce the dose of DA and avoid toxicity.

Abstract Abstract 2384 Introduction: Allogeneic haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) has been used to treat malignant hematological diseases. For patients who do not have a matched sibling donor or a matched unrelated donor (MUD) for transplantation, an eligible HLA-haploidentical donor can be identified rapidly in nearly all cases. However, HLA-haploidentical BMT has been associated with significant risks of complication, such as graft rejection and severe GVHD and infection. Materials and Methods: Thirty eight consecutive patients with malignant hematological diseases received HLA-haploidentical stem cell transplant from April 2008 to June 2010. Eligible patients were 9– 48 years of age with acute myeloid leukemia (n=10),acute lymphocytic leukemia (n=17), myelodysplastic syndrome(n=5), chronic myeloid leukemia (n=4), non Hodgkin lymphoma (n=2). Transplantation conditioning consisted of Ara-C (4 g/m2/d, i.v.) on day -10 and -9, Bu (9.6mg/kg i.v. in 12 doses) on day -8, -7 and -6, Cy (1.8 g/m2/d, i.v.) on day -5 and -4, Me-CCNU (250 mg/kg, i.v.) on day -3, and ATG (2.5 mg/kg/d i.v.) on day -5 to -2. The prophylaxis of aGVHD consisted of cyclosporine A (CsA), mycophenolate mofetil (MMF), and short-term methotrexate. Donors were primed with rhG-CSF (7.5 mg/kg per day) injected subcutaneous (s.c.). Bone marrow cells and peripheral blood stem cells(PBSC) were harvested in nineteen donors, and only PBSC were harvested in the other 19 donors. Results: Primary engraftment was achieved in all patients. All the patients achieved complete donor chimerism in the peripheral blood before day +28. Seven patients (18.4%) had grade I aGVHD, ten (26.3%) had grade II aGVHD, four(10.5%) had grade III aGVHD and four (10.5%) had grade IV aGVHD. II-IV aGVHD occurred in nine patients treated with bone marrow cells and PBSCs, the same number patients suffered from II-IV aGVHD treated with only PBSCs. Transplant related mortality within 100 days after transplantation was 15.8%. At a median follow-up of 10 months (range 2–28months), the overall survival was 68.4%. Conclusion: Haploidentical stem cell transplantation is relatively safe and efficient for the patients who have no HLA matched donors.The results require to confirm and show that G-BM combined with PBSC or G-PBSC from haploidentical family donors have equal effect. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Immunosuppressive therapy (IST) based on antithymoglobin (ATG) and cyclosporin (CsA) is the first-line treatment for severe aplastic anemia (SAA) patients who are unfit for transplantation,and the overall response rate (ORR) is about 70%.The utility of eltrombopag (EPAG),a TPO receptor agonist, achieved robust hematologic response in refractory and treatment-naïve SAA patients in clinical trials and some other studies. However, only a few data came from Asia countries where higher incidence of AA has been reported. A retrospective study on the use of EPAG in AA was conducted in mainland China. Aplastic anemia (transfusion dependent non-severe, severe, and very severe) patients who started eltrombopag before Feb 2019 and continued for at least 3 months either as first-line treatment or as rescue treatment, were enrolled. The maximum daily dosage of EPAG used continuously for at least 2 weeks is defined as the stable dosage. Response criteria were referred to that used in previous reports (Townsley DM, NEJM 2017; BCSH, BJH 2016). Fifty-six patients from eleven centers were enrolled in this study, including 26 males and 30 females at the median age of 39 (7-80) years. All patients were transfusion-dependent by the time of EPAG administration, and there were 14 VSAA, 24 SAA and 18 transfusion dependent non-severe aplastic anemia (TD-NSAA). Nineteen treatment-naïve patients received EPAG and IST (ATG+CsA, n=10; CsA/CsA+androgen, n=9) as first-line treatment. Thirty-seven patients were refractory to IST. Eltrombopag was administered at a median dose of 75 (25-150) mg per day for 7 (3-31) month. The median follow-up time was 9 (3-40) months. The overall response rate in patients receiving EPAG as first-line therapy was 78.9% (15/19), and most patients achieved complete response (CR) (10/15). Among the 10 patients receiving ATG+CsA, 6 patients achieved hematologic response (HR) at 3 months post-treatment, including 3 CR. Six patients were diagnosed as VSAA and three achieved HR. For the 9 patients treated with CsA/CsA+androgen, 8 achieved HR (88.9%) and 4 were CR (44.4%) at 3 months. By last follow-up, the cumulative HR rate was 70% in ATG+CsA group and 89% in CsA/CsA+ androgen group. Among the 14 responders, 11 patients receiving EPAG at a stable dosage ≤75mg/d and achieved HR at 3 months. The overall response rate in IST-refractory patients was 46% (17/37), with trilineage response in 27% patients at 3 months. For the 18 ATG+CsA refractory SAA patients,trilineage HR occurred in 4 patients (22.2%, 4/18), bi-lineage HR in one patient and single lineage HR in one patient. Thus, the total HR was 33.3% (6/18) at 3 months and increased to 44% (8/18) by last follow-up. Among the 19 CsA/CsA+ androgen refractory patients, 6 (31.5%, 6/19) achieved trilineage HR, one achieved bi-lineage HR and 4 achieved single lineage response. Total HR rate was 57.9% (11/19) at 3 months after EPAG initiation and 68% (13/19) by last follow-up, including 9 patients with trilineage HR. Among 17 responders, 13 received a stable EPAG dose of≤75mg/d. Most patients tolerated EPAG well. Adverse events occurred in 29 patients (52%) and most were mild to moderate, including gastrointestinal symptom (n=15, e.g. abdominal pain, nausea), impaired liver function (n=5), skin changes (n=7, e.g. skin pruritus and rash) and musculoskeletal pain (n=6), and venous thrombus (n=2). Eltrombopag dosage was reduced in 2 patients due to severe digestive symptoms at 100 mg/d and discontinued in one patient who suffered from upper limb venous thrombus. In conclusion, EPAG is effective and safe in treating Chinese AA patients at a daily dose of 75mg and less. The real-world result of EPAG in Chinese patients is similar to those reported in Western countries. Disclosures No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.

Abstract Abstract 3094 Poster Board III-31 Clofarabine (Clo) has demonstrated single agent activity in acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) and acute myeloid leukemia. Therefore, efforts have been undertaken to combine Clo with other antileukemic agents. Clo and cytarabine (Cy) target two different sites in DNA, have synergistic activity in vivo, and have non-overlapping toxicities, making this combination potentially promising for the treatment of relapsed/ refractory ALL. The maximum tolerated dose of this combination has been previously determined. The goals of this study were to: (1) evaluate the complete remission rate with and without complete count recovery (CR and CRi) of patients with relapsed/ refractory ALL treated with Clo/Cy; (2) to assess expression of connective tissue growth factor (CTGF) and nucleoside transporters in patients. Methods Patients were treated at SWOG institutions from February 2007 through July 2008. Clo was supplied by Genzyme. This protocol was reviewed and approved through each institution's review board. Eligibility criteria included: age ≥ 16 years, relapsed or refractory ALL (excluding Burkitts or mixed lineage leukemia), Zubrod performance status 0-2. CTGF expression was analyzed by triplicate RT-PCR on pre-treatment samples. Expression of the nucleoside transporters (hENT1, hCNT3, dCK) was analyzed by immunohistochemistry. All patients received treatment with Clo 40 mg/m2/d and Cy 1 g/m2/d on Days 1-5. Response was assessed between Days 28-35. Patients with a partial remission (a 50% decrease in marrow blast percentage) could receive re-induction therapy. CR was defined as < 5% marrow blasts, neutrophils > 1,000/μL, platelets ≥ 100,000/μL, and no evidence of extramedullary disease. CRi was defined the same as CR but the platelet count could be < 100,000/μL. Patients with a CR could receive one cycle of consolidation therapy. Patients were to be accrued in 2 stages. In the first stage, 20 patients were to be registered. If at least 2 CR/ CRis were observed, an additional 15 patients were to be accrued (87% power to conclude that an agent with a response rate of 30% warrants further study). Results The study met criteria to proceed to the second stage. Thirty-seven patients were enrolled. One patient is excluded from the analysis because treatment was not started due to high liver function tests after registration. Of the 36 evaluable patients, the median age was 41 years (range: 20-68), median WBC 5200/μL (range 900-93,700), and 23 patients (64%) were male. The median time from initial diagnosis to registration was 14 months (range 1-52 months). Nineteen patients (53%) were in first relapse, 7 (19%) in subsequent relapse, 1 (3%) with an unknown number of relapses, and 9 (25%) refractory. Two patients had received prior allogeneic BMT. Thirty-two patients have died, with 10 deaths occurring during protocol treatment and 7 of these deaths attributable to treatment [infection (3), pleural effusion (1) DIC (1), hypotension/ renal failure/ cardiac arrhythmia (1), multiorgan failure (1)]. Three patients received re-induction, and 1 patient received consolidation therapy. The CR/CRi rate was 17% (95% CI 6-33%), and median overall survival 3 months. At least 8 patients proceeded to BMT after completing protocol therapy. The number of patients accrued to this study was relatively small and the CR rate was low. Therefore, it is unlikely that any statistical differences in CR rate would be found, with respect to expression of various biologic correlates. However, there was a trend for patients with higher expression of CTGF having an inferior OS (p=0.13). In addition, although 70% of patients had high levels of hENT1 expression, only 33% and 44% of patients respectively had high levels of hCNT3 and dCK, which could serve as a mechanism of resistance to nucleoside analog therapy. Conclusion The CR/CRi rate in this study was modest. This regimen does not exhibit sufficient activity to warrant further testing unless it was significantly altered. However, this was a heavily pre-treated, poor risk population of patients. Of interest, low expression of nucleoside transporters and high expression of CTGF may predict response and OS. Larger prospective studies will be needed to confirm this. Therapies directly targeting these latter pathways or working independently of these pathways may help improve the prognosis of patients if these results are confirmed. Disclosures Advani: Genzyme: Honoraria, Research Funding. Off Label Use: The combination of clofarabine/ cytarabine is investigational. Radich:Novartis: Research Funding. Lancet:Genzyme: Consultancy. Stuart:Genzyme: Research Funding.

Peter Harman and Simon Mitton (eds.), Cambridge Scientific Minds and David Millar, Ian Millar, John Millar and Margaret Millar, The Cambridge Dictionary of Scientists. By Maria Yamalidou 466Maria Michela Sassi, The Science of Man in Ancient Greece. By Laurence M. V. Totelin 467H. L. L. Busard, Johannes de Tinemue's Redaction of Euclid's Elements, the So-called Adelard III Version. Volume I: Introduction, Sigla and Descriptions of the Manuscripts, Editorial Remarks, Euclides, Elementa. Volume II: Conspectus Siglorum, Apparatus Criticus, Addenda. By Jackie Stedall 468Gerhard W. Kramer, The Firework Book: Gunpowder in Medieval Germany. By Simon Werrett 469Robert Crocker (ed.), Religion, Reason and Nature in Early Modern Europe. By Scott Mandelbrote 470Rienk Vermij, The Calvinist Copernicans: The Reception of the New Astronomy in the Dutch Republic, 1575–1750. By Owen Gingerich 471Rina Knoeff, Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738): Calvinist Chemist and Physician. By Georgette Ironside 472J. Christiaan Boudri, What was Mechanical about Mechanics: The Concept of Force between Metaphysics and Mechanics from Newton to Lagrange. By Niccolò Guicciardini 473Ken Alder, The Measure of All Things: The Seven-Year Odyssey that Transformed the World. By Graeme Gooday 474Berit Pedersen (ed.), A Guide to the Archives of the Royal Entomological Society. By J. F. M. Clark 476Richard Yeo, Science in the Public Sphere: Natural Knowledge in British Culture 1800–1860. By Leigh D. Bregman 477Louise Purbrick (ed.), The Great Exhibition of 1851: New Interdisciplinary Essays. By Nick Fisher 478Hermione Hobhouse, The Crystal Palace and the Great Exhibition: Art, Science and Productive Industry. A History of the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851. By Sophie Forgan 479Michael Worboys, Spreading Germs: Disease Theories and Medical Practice in Britain, 1865–1900. By Kenneth F. Kiple 480Greta Jones, ‘Captain of All these Men of Death’: The History of Tuberculosis in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Ireland. By Juliana Adelman 481Christopher Herbert, Victorian Relativity: Radical Thought and Scientific Discovery. By Hazel Hutchison 482Paul Ziche (ed.), Monismus um 1900: Wissenschaftskultur und Weltanschauung. By Peter Zigman 484Maggie Mort, Building the Trident Network: A Study of the Enrollment of People, Knowledge, and Machines. By Sean Johnston 485A. M. Moulin and A. Cambrosio (eds.), Singular Selves: Historical Issues and Contemporary Debates in Immunology/Dialogues entre soi: Questions historiques et débats contemporains en immunologie. By Pauline M. H. Mazumdar 486Ioan James, Remarkable Mathematicians: From Euler to von Neutmann. By Claire Jones 487Joseph W. Dauben and Christoph J. Scriba (eds.), Writing the History of Mathematics: Its Historical Development. By Adrian Rice 488Jill Ker Conway, Kenneth Keniston and Leo Marx (eds.), Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Humanistic Studies of the Environment. By Leigh Clayton 490Steven Weinberg, Facing Up: Science and Its Cultural Adversaries. By Steven French 491

Abstract Background: InO is a humanized anti-CD22 antibody conjugated to calicheamicin. CD22 is expressed on the majority of cells derived from patients (pts) with B-cell ALL. An initial study suggested InO efficacy and tolerability in ALL (Kantarjian, et al. Cancer. 2013;119(15):2728-36). Aims: This ongoing study was preceded by phase 1 dose-escalation and expansion cohorts to select the recommended phase 2 dose (RP2D), determined as 1.8 mg/m2/cycle (0.8 mg/m2 on day 1 and 0.5 mg/m2 on days 8 and 15) as an initial starting dose followed by a dose reduction to 1.6 mg/m2/cycle upon achievement of complete response (CR) or CR without absolute neutrophil count (ANC) or platelet recovery (CRi). One dose-limiting toxicity (elevated lipase) was reported at this starting dose; however, dose delays and reductions were subsequently required in 5 patients for AEs (mostly owing to increased aspartate aminotransferase [AST]). Here we report the results of the phase 2 portion of the study which further evaluates the safety and efficacy of this regimen in patients with CD22+ relapsed/refractory ALL in the second and later salvage settings. Methods: Pts aged ≥18 y with CD22+ ALL in second or later salvage and no known central nervous system disease were enrolled. InO was administered in 28-d cycles up to 6 cycles. Adverse event (AE) severity was assessed per Common Terminology Criteria for Adverse Events (CTCAE) v3. CR was defined as <5% bone marrow blasts without peripheral blasts, ANC ≥1,000/µL, platelets >100,000/µL and no extramedullary disease. Blood samples were collected for pharmacokinetic analyses. Results: We report data for 35 pts: median age was 34 y (range, 20–79y); 77% were men; 6 (17%) pts were in salvage 5 or greater; 15 (43%) pts had prior allogeneic stem cell transplant (SCT). CD22 was expressed on a median of 99% blasts (range, 78%–100%); median peripheral blast count was 317.6/µL (range, 0–41,099/µL) and 28 (80%) pts presented with ≥50% bone marrow blasts. Aberrant baseline cytogenetics were reported in 27 (77%) pts including 9 (26%) with Ph+, 9 (26%) with complex cytogenetics (5 aberrations) and 9 (26%) with other aberrations. Three pts had normal cytogenetics at baseline and 5 had insufficient yield/unknown. Median follow-up in surviving pts was 4.4 (range, 0.7–11) months. Thirty-four pts discontinued InO: 17 owing to progressive disease (PD)/relapse or resistant disease; 7 proceeded to SCT (1 relapsed before SCT); 5 owing to AEs (grade [gr] 4 respiratory failure, gr 2 ascites in the setting of global deterioration, gr 2 increased alkaline phosphatase, gr 2 elevated AST and gr 2 increased transaminases); 2 died due to PD; 1 completed 6 cycles of InO and proceeded to maintenance therapy; 1 refused further treatment and 1 proceeded to DLI. InO-related gr ≥3 AEs (≥10% of pts) were thrombocytopenia (31%), neutropenia (26%) and febrile neutropenia (20%). Other gr ≥3 hepatic AEs included increased ALT/ increased transaminases (6%). Venoocclusive disease/sinusoidal obstruction syndrome occurred in 3 pts during the follow-up period: 2 (salvage 2 and 5) post-SCT and 1 (salvage 4) after the start of subsequent therapy. Prestudy SCT was not reported for these 3 pts. Nineteen deaths were reported: leukemia (n=14), hepatic failure/SOS (n=1), pneumonia (n=1), septic shock and graft versus host disease (n=1), subdural hematoma (n=1), and leukemia/liver failure (n=1). The remission rate (CR+CRi) was 65.7% (95% CI, 47.8, 80.9); 18/23 (78%) patients with CR/CRi achieved MRD negativity. Overall, the median time to remission and MRD negativity was 25 d (range, 15–86 d) and 25.5 d (range, 21–80 d), respectively. Six (67%) Ph+ pts and all 13 pts (100%) without peripheral blood blasts at baseline achieved CR/CRi. The median overall survival for the study population was 7.4 months (95% CI, 4.3–9.9). Summary/Conclusion: InO had a tolerable safety profile primarily characterized by hematologic, gastrointestinal and hepatic AEs. Single-agent InO demonstrated encouraging clinical activity in this multiply relapsed/refractory population. Further exploration in CD22+ ALL is ongoing. Table 1 Median (range) InO cycles initiated, n 3 (1–6) CR + CRi rate, n (%) [95% CI] 23 (65.7) [47.8, 80.9] CR 11 (31.4) CRi 12 (34.3) MRD negative rate in pts with CR/CRi, n (%) 18 (78.2) CR (n=11) 8 (73) CRi (n=12) 10 (83) OS (95% CI) at 12 mo, % 26 (10, 50) Median (95% CI) OS, mo 7.4 (4.3, 9.9) Disclosures Advani: Pfizer Inc: Research Funding. Kantarjian:Pfizer Inc: Research Funding. DeAngelo:Pfizer Inc: Advisory Board Other. Ananthakrishnan:Pfizer Inc: Employment. Liau:Pfizer Inc.: Employment. Vandendries:Pfizer Inc.: Employment. Stock:Amgen: Consultancy; Sigma Tau: Consultancy; Jazz: Consultancy; Seattle Genetics: Consultancy; UpToDate: Honoraria; American Board of Internal Medicine: Honoraria.

SCIENCE, RELIGION, AND THE PROTESTANT TRADITION: Retracing the Origins of Conflict by James C. Ungureanu. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2019. x + 358 pages. Hardcover; $50.00. ISBN: 9780822945819. *Mythical understandings about historical intersections of Christianity and science have a long history, and persist in our own day. Two American writers are usually cited as the architects of the mythology of inevitable warfare between science and religion: John William Draper (1811-1882) and Andrew Dickson White (1832-1919). Draper was a medical doctor, chemist, and historian. White was an academic (like Draper), a professional historian, and first president of the nonsectarian Cornell University. Ungureanu's objective is to show how Draper and White have been (mis)interpreted and (mis)used by secular critics of Christianity, liberal theists, and historians alike. *Ungureanu opens by critiquing conflict historians as misreading White and Draper. The conflict narrative emerged from arguments within Protestantism from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, and, as taken up by Draper and White, was intended not to annihilate religion but to reconcile religion with science. Consequently, the two were not the anti-religious originators of science-versus-religion historiography. Rather, the "warfare thesis" began among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant historians and theologians attacking both Roman Catholics and each other. By the early nineteenth century, the purpose of conflict polemics was not to crush religion in the name of science but to clear intellectual space for preserving a "purified" and "rational" religion reconciled to science. Widespread beliefs held by liberal Protestant men of science included "progressive" development or evolution in history and nature as found, for example, in books by Lamarck in France and Robert Chambers in Britain. For Draper, English chemist and Unitarian minister Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was a model of faith without the burden of orthodoxy. *So conflict rhetoric arose not, as we've been taught before, in post-Darwinian controversies, but in contending narratives within generations of earlier Protestant reformers who substituted personal judgment for ecclesial authority. Victorian scientific naturalists and popularizers often rejected Christian theological beliefs in the name of a "natural" undogmatic "religion" (which could slip into varieties of Unitarianism, deism, agnosticism, or pantheism). In effect, the conflict was not between science and religion, but between orthodox Christian faith and progressive or heterodox Christian faith--a conflict between how each saw the relationship between Christian faith and science. Draper, White, and their allies still saw themselves as theists, even Protestant Christians, though as liberal theists calling for a "New Reformation." Given past and present anti-Christian interpretations of these conflict historians with actual religious aims, this is ironic to say the least. *Ungureanu's thesis shouldn't be surprising. In the Introduction to his History of the Warfare, White had written: "My conviction is that Science, though it has evidently conquered Dogmatic Theology based on biblical texts and ancient modes of thought, will go hand in hand with Religion … [i.e.] 'a Power in the universe, not ourselves, which makes for righteousness' [quoting without attribution Matthew Arnold, who had actually written of an 'eternal power']." *As science advanced, so would religion: "the love of God and of our neighbor will steadily grow stronger and stronger" throughout the world. After praising Micah and the Epistle of James, White looked forward "above all" to the growing practice of "the precepts and ideals of the blessed Founder of Christianity himself" (vol. 1, p. xii). Ungureanu quotes White that the "most mistaken of all mistaken ideas" is the "conviction that religion and science are enemies" (p. 71). *This echoed both Draper's belief that "true" religion was consistent with science, and T. H. Huxley's 1859 lecture in which he affirmed that the so-called "antagonism of science and religion" was the "most mischievous" of "miserable superstitions." Indeed, Huxley affirmed that, "true science and true religion are twin-sisters" (p. 191). *Chapter 1 locates Draper in his biographical, religious, and intellectual contexts: for example, the common belief in immutable natural laws; the "new" Protestant historiography expressed in the work of such scientists as Charles Lyell and William Whewell; and various species of evolutionism. Comte de Buffon, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, John Herschel, Thomas Dick, Robert Chambers, and Darwin are some of the many writers whose work Draper used. *Chapter 2 examines White's intellectual development including his quest for "pure and undefiled" religion. He studied Merle d'Aubigné's history of the Reformation (White's personal library on the subject ran to thirty thousand items) and German scholars such as Lessing and Schleiermacher who cast doubt on biblical revelation and theological doctrines, in favor of a "true religion" based on "feeling" and an only-human Jesus. As he worked out his history of religion and science, White also absorbed the liberal theologies of William Ellery Channing, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, and Lyman Abbott, among others. *The resulting histories by Draper and White were providential, progressive, and presentist: providential in that God still "governed" (without interfering in) nature and human history; progressive, even teleological, in that faith was being purified while science grew ever closer to Truth; and presentist in that the superior knowledge of the present could judge the inferiority of the past, without considering historical context. *Chapters 3 and 4 situate Draper and White in wider historiographic/polemical Anglo-American contexts, from the sixteenth-century Reformation to the late nineteenth century. Protestant attacks on Roman Catholic moral and theological corruption were adapted to nineteenth-century histories of religion and science, with science as the solvent that cleansed "true religion" of its irrational accretions. Ungureanu reviews other well-known Christian writers, including Edward Hitchcock, Asa Gray, Joseph Le Conte, and Minot Judson Savage, who sought to accommodate their religious beliefs to evolutionary theories and historical-critical approaches to the Bible. *Chapter 5 offers a fascinating portrait of Edward Livingston Youmans--the American editor with prominent publisher D. Appleton and Popular Science Monthly--and his role in promoting the conflict-reconciliation historiography of Draper and White and the scientific naturalism of Huxley, Herbert Spencer, and John Tyndall. *In chapter 6 and "Conclusions," Ungureanu surveys critics of Draper's and White's work, although he neglects some important Roman Catholic responses. He also carefully analyzes the "liberal Protestant" and "progressive" writers who praised and popularized the Draper-White perspectives. Ungureanu is excellent at showing how later writers--atheists, secularists, and freethinkers--not only blurred distinctions between "religion" and "theology" but also appropriated historical conflict narratives as ideological weapons against any form of Christian belief, indeed any form of religion whatsoever. Ultimately, Ungureanu concludes, the conflict-thesis-leading-to-reconciliation narrative failed. The histories of Draper and White were widely, but wrongly, seen as emphatically demonstrating the triumph of science over theology and religious faith, rather than showing the compatibility of science with a refined and redefined Christianity, as was their actual intention. *Draper's History of the Conflict, from the ancients to the moderns, suggested an impressive historical reading program, as did his publication of A History of the Intellectual Development of Europe (rev. ed., 2 vols., 1875 [1863]). But one looks in vain for footnotes and bibliographies to support his controversial claims. White's two-volume study, however, landed with full scholarly apparatus, including copious footnotes documenting his vivid accounts of science conquering theological belief across the centuries. What Ungureanu doesn't discuss is how shoddy White's scholarship could be: he cherrypicked and misread his primary and secondary sources. His citations were not always accurate, and his accounts were sometimes pure fiction. Despite Ungureanu's recovery of German sources behind White's understanding of history and religion, he does not cite Otto Zöckler's Geschichte der Beziehungen zwischen Theologie und Naturwissenschaft (2 vols., 1877-1879), which, as Bernard Ramm noted in The Christian View of Science and Scripture (1954), served as "a corrective" to White's history. *Ungureanu certainly knows, and refers to some of, the primary sources in the large literature of natural theology. I think he underplays the roles of Victorian natural theologies and theologies of nature in reflecting, mediating, criticizing, and rejecting conflict narratives. Ungureanu seems to assume readers' familiarity with the classic warfare historians. He could have provided more flavor and content by reproducing some of Draper's and White's melodramatic and misleading examples of good scientists supposedly conquering bad theologians. (One of my favorite overwrought quotations is from White, vol. 1, p. 70: "Darwin's Origin of Species had come into the theological world like a plough into an ant-hill. Everywhere those thus rudely awakened … swarmed forth angry and confused.") *Ungureanu's is relevant history. Nineteenth-century myth-laden histories of the "warfare between Christianity and science" provide the intellectual framework for influential twenty-first century "scientific" atheists who have built houses on sand, on misunderstandings of the long, complex and continuing relations between faith/practice/theology and the sciences. *This is fine scholarship, dense, detailed, and documented--with thirty-seven pages of endnotes and a select bibliography of fifty pages. It is also well written, with frequent pauses to review arguments and conclusions, and persuasive. Required reading for historians, this work should also interest nonspecialists curious about the complex origins of the infamous conflict thesis, its ideological uses, and the value of the history of religion for historians of science. *Reviewed by Paul Fayter, who taught the history of Victorian science and theology at the University of Toronto and York University, Toronto. He lives in Hamilton, ON.

Introduction: The CLL2-BCG trial is a prospective, open-label, multicenter phase-II study based on the "sequential triple-T" (tailored, targeted, total eradication of CLL) concept proposed earlier [Hallek M., Blood 2013; 122(23): 3723-34]. This concept consists of sequentially applied combinations of targeted agents and aims for achieving undetectable minimal residual disease (MRD). It uses a sequential application of bendamustine (Ben) for debulking, followed by obinutuzumab (Obi) plus idelalisib (Ide) as induction and maintenance therapy for an all-comer population of physically fit and unfit, treatment-naïve (t-n) and relapsed/refractory (r/r) CLL patients (pts) irrespective of high-risk genetic markers. Methods: Pts with an absolute lymphocyte count ≥ 25.000/µl and/or lymph nodes ≥ 5 cm were to receive 2 cycles of Ben as debulking (70 mg/m² d1&2 q28 d), unless contraindicated. In the induction phase Obi 1000 mg was administered on d 1, 8 and 15 of cycle 1 and d1 of cycles 2-6; Ide was added in cycle 2 (150 mg twice daily). In the maintenance phase, daily dosing of Ide was continued and Obi was administered every 3 months until achieving a MRD-negative complete response or for up to 24 months. The primary endpoint was the overall response rate (ORR) at the end of induction therapy, secondary endpoints included MRD assessment, safety and survival. Due to an increased incidence of opportunistic infections in other Ide trials, amendment 2 in March 2016 limited the recruitment to r/r CLL pts with high-risk features such as presence of a deletion 17p/TP53 mutation and/or ineligibility for ibrutinib treatment (refractoriness, intolerance or contraindications). Slow enrolment led to recruitment stop in September 2019. Results: Between May 2015 and September 2019, 48 pts were enrolled. Sixteen pts were t-n and 32 had r/r CLL with a median of 2 prior lines (range: 1-10); most common were BR and FCR, 6 pts each had received ibrutinib and venetoclax containing therapies. Median age was 66 (range 41-83) years, median CIRS score was 2 (0-13). Twenty-three pts (48%) were defined unfit by a CIRS score &gt;6 (7 pts) and/or an impaired renal function with a Creatinine Clearance &lt;70ml/Min (19 pts); 39 pts were male (81%). Nineteen pts (40%) had a del(17p) and/or TP53 mutation; 33 (70%) an unmutated IGHV status and 15 pts (42%) a complex karyotype, 36 pts (80%) had a high or very high CLL-IPI. Thirty-eight patients (79%, 16 t-n and 22r/r) received Ben debulking. However, 8 pts never started the induction phase due to protocol amendment 2. Forty pts (10 t-n, 30 r/r) received induction treatment (FAS [full analysis set]), 33 completed the full 6 cycles (PP [per protocol] collective). Twenty-seven (7 t-n, 20 r/r) continued in a maintenance phase. At the end of induction, 32 of 40 pts (FAS) and 28 of 33 pts with 6 induction cycles (PP) responded (ORR 80% and 85%, respectively); undetectable MRD levels (&lt;10-4) by 4-color flow were achieved in 9 pts (23% and 27%, respectively) [Table 1]. Median progression-free survival was 44 months in t-n and 33 months in r/r CLL pts. Median overall survival was not reached for the t-n and 46 months in r/r pts; nine pts died, seven due to infections (two sepsis, including one in the context of severe enterocolitis, one pneumocystis jirovecii pneumonia and one influenza pneumonia, the other three after disease progression/start of subsequent treatment were considered unrelated to stud treatment), one cardiac arrest and one due to Richter´s transformation. As of June 8th 2020, 603 adverse events (AEs) were reported in the entire cohort; 313 (52%) were related to study drug and 127 (21%) were serious adverse events. 286 (47%) occurred in the induction treatment (see table 1). Of these, 69 (24%) were CTC grade 3 and 18 (6%) CTC grade 4, 4 had a fatal outcome. Most common AEs in the induction were infusion-related reactions, neutropenia, thrombocytopenia, anemia, nasopharyngitis, headache, and fatigue [Table 2]. Summary/Conclusion: Sequential treatment with Ben debulking, followed by Obi and Ide induction and maintenance achieved responses and even undetectable MRD levels in CLL patients with high-risk disease and extensive prior therapy. However, the study also confirmed the known toxicities of Ide. In light of the current, alternative therapeutic options, the BCG regimen reported here should be used with caution, but represents an alternative treatment option if ibrutinib and venetoclax have failed. Disclosures Cramer: Gilead: Other: travel support, Research Funding; F. Hoffmann-LaRoche: Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Acerta: Consultancy, Membership on an entity's Board of Directors or advisory committees, Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Beigene: Research Funding; AbbVie: Honoraria, Other: travel support; Novartis: Consultancy, Research Funding; Janssen-Cilag: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding. Von Tresckow:Celgene: Other: travel grants; AbbVie: Honoraria; Janssen-Cilag: Honoraria, Other: travel grants, Research Funding; F. Hoffmann-LaRoche: Honoraria, Other: travel grants, Research Funding. Fink:AbbVie: Other: travel grants; Janssen: Honoraria; Celgene: Research Funding. Tausch:Janssen-Cilag: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding. Knauf:Janssen-Cilag: Honoraria; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria; AMGEN: Consultancy, Honoraria; BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria; Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria; Mundipharma: Honoraria. Al-Sawaf:BeiGene: Research Funding; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: personal fees, Research Funding; Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: personal fees, Research Funding; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: personal fees; Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: personal fees, Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: personal fees. Langerbeins:AbbVie: Honoraria, Other: travel grants, Research Funding; F. Hoffmann-LaRoche: Honoraria, Other: travel grants, Research Funding; Janssen-Cilag: Honoraria, Other: travel grants, Research Funding; Mundipharma: Honoraria, Other: travel grants, Research Funding. Fischer:F. Hoffmann-La Roche: Honoraria, Other: travel grants; AbbVie: Honoraria. Kreuzer:Hoffmann-La Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Amgen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Janssen-Cilag: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Mundipharma: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding. Ritgen:Gilead: Other: travel grants; BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel grants; F. Hoffman-La Roche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel grants, Research Funding; Pfizer: Consultancy, Honoraria. Kneba:AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; F. Hoffmann-LaRoche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Janssen-Cilag: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Mundipharma: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding. Wendtner:Mundipharma: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Pharmacyclics: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Hoffmann-LaRoche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Genentech: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Janssen-Cilag: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; GlaxoSmithKline: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding. Stilgenbauer:Pharmacyclics: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other, Research Funding; Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other, Research Funding; Mundipharma: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other, Research Funding; Janssen-Cilag: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; GlaxoSmithKline: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Genzyme: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Genentech: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; F. Hoffmann-LaRoche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Boehringer-Ingelheim: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Amgen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding. Eichhorst:Janssen-Cilag: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Novartis: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; ArQule: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; BeiGene: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; AstraZeneca: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; Oxford Biomedica: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; F. Hoffmann-LaRoche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Other: travel support, Research Funding. Hallek:F. Hoffmann-LaRoche: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Gilead: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Mundipharma: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; Celgene: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding; AbbVie: Consultancy, Honoraria, Research Funding.

In the Garden of EdenThe covers of the first three volumes of Kuml show photographs of fine Danish antiquities. Inside the volumes have articles on the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age in Jutland, which is to be expected as Kuml is published by the Jutland Archaeological Society. However, in 1954 the scene is moved to more southern skies. This year, the cover is dominated by a date palm with two huge burial mounds in the background. In side the book one reads no less than six articles on the results from the First Danish Archaeological Bahrain Expedition. P.V. Glob begins with: Bahrain – Island of the Hundred Thousand Burial Mounds, The Flint Sites of the Bahrain Desert, Temples at Barbar and The Ancient Capital of Bahrain, followed by Bibby’s Five among Bahrain’s Hundred Thousand Burial Mounds and The Well of the Bulls. The following years, reports on excavations on Bahrain and later in the sheikhdoms of Qatar, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi are on Kuml’s repertoire.However, it all ends wit h the festschrift to mark Glob’s 60th anniversary, Kuml 1970, which has three articles on Arab archaeology and a single article in 1972. For the past thirty years almost, the journal has not had a single article on Arabia. Why is that? Primarily because the character of the museum’s work in the Arabian Gulf changed completely. The pioneers’ years of large-scale reconnaissance and excavations were succeeded by labourous studies of the excavated material – the necessary work preceding the final publications. Only in Abu Dhabi and Oman, Karen Frifelt carried on the pioneer spirit through the 1970s and 1980s, but she mainly published her results in in ternational, Englishlanguage journals.Consequently, the immediate field reports ended, but the subsequent research into Arab archaeology – carried out at the writing desk and with the collections of finds– still crept into Kuml. From 1973 , the journal contained a list of the publications made by the Jutland Archaeological Society (abbreviated JASP), and here, the Arab monographs begin to make their entry. The first ones are Holger Kapel’s Atlas of the Stone Age Cultures of Qatar from 1967 and Geoffrey Bibby’s survey in eastern Saudi Arabia from 1973. Then comes the Hellenistic excavations on the Failaka island in Kuwait with Hans Erik Mathiesen’s treatise on the terracotta figurines (1982), Lise Hannestad’s work on the ceramics (1983) and Kristian Jeppesen’s presentation of the temple and the fortifications (1989). A similar series on the Bronze Age excavations on Failaka has started with Poul Kjærum’s first volume on the stamp and cylinder seals (1983) and Flemming Højlund’s presentation of the ceramics (1987). The excavations on the island of Umm an-Nar in Abu Dhabi was published by Karen Frifelt in two volumes on the settlement (1991) and the graves (1995), and the ancient capital of Bahrain was analysed by H. Hellmuth Andersen and Flemming Højlund in two volumes on the northern city wall and the Islamic fort (1994) and the central, monumental buildings (1997) respectively.More is on its way! A volume on Islamic finds made on Bahrain has just been made ready for printing, and the Bronze Age temples at the village of Barbar is being worked up. Danish and foreign scholars are preparing other volumes, but the most important results of the expeditions to the Arabian Gulf have by now been published in voluminous series.With this, an era has ended, and Moesgård Museum’s 50th anniversary in 1999 was a welcome opportunity of looking back at the Arabian Gulf effort through the exhibition Glob and the Garden ef Eden. The Danish Bahrain expeditions and to consider what will happen in the future.How then is the relation ship between Moesgård Museum and Bahrain today, twenty-three years after the last expedition – now that most of the old excavations have been published and the two originators of the expeditions, P.V. Glob and Geoffrey Bibby have both died?In Denmark we usually consider Bahrain an exotic country with an exciting past. However, in Bahrain there is a similar fascination of Denmark and of Moesgård Museum. The Bahrain people are wondering why Danish scholars have been interested in their small island for so many years. It was probably not a coincidence when in the 1980s archaeologist and ethnographers from Moesgård Museum were invited to take part in the furnishing of the exhibitions in the new national museum of Bahrain. Today, museum staff from Arab countries consider a trip to Moesgård a near-pilgrimage: our collection of Near East artefacts from all the Gulf countries is unique, and the ethnographic collections are unusual in that they were collected with thorough information on the use, the users and the origin of each item.The Bahrain fascination of Moesgård Museum. was also evident, when the Bahrain minister of education, Abdulaziz Al-Fadl, visited the museum in connection with the opening of the Bahrain exhibition in 1999.Al-Fadl visited the museum’s oriental department, and in the photo and film archive a book with photos taken by Danish members of the expeditions to the Arabian Gulf was handed over to him. Al-Fadl was absorbed by the photos of the Bahrain of his childhood – the 1950s and 1960s – an un spoilt society very different from the modern Bahrain. His enthusiasm was not lessened when he saw a photo of his father standing next to P.V. Glob and Sheikh Salman Al Khalifa taken at the opening of Glob’s first archaeological exhibition in Manama, the capital. At a banquet given by Elisabeth Gerner Nielsen, the Danish minister of culture, on the evening following the opening of the Glob exhibition at Moesgård, Al-Fadl revealed that as a child, he had been on a school trip to the Danish excavations where – on the edge of the excavation – he had his first lesson in Bahrain’s prehistory from a Danish archaeologist (fig. 1).Another example: When attending the opening of an art exhibition at Bahrain’s Art Centre in February 1999, I met an old Bahrain painter, Abdelkarim Al-Orrayed, who turned out to be a good friend of the Danish painter Karl Bovin, who took part in Glob’s expeditions. He told me, how in 1956, Bovin had exhibited his paintings in a school in Manama. He recalled Bovin sitting in his Arabian tunic in a corner of the room, playing a flute, which he had carved in Sheikh Ibrahim’s garden.In a letter, Al-Orrayed states: ”I remember very well the day in 1956, when I met Karl Bovin for the first time. He was drawin g some narrow roads in the residential area where I lived. I followed him closely with my friend Hussain As-Suni – we were twentythree and twenty-one years old respectively. When he had finished, I invited him to my house where I showed him my drawings. He looked at them closely and gave me good advice to follow if I wanted to become a skilful artist – such as focusing on lines, form, light, distance, and shadow. He encouraged me to practice outdoors and to use different models. It was a turning point in our young artists’ lives when Hussein and I decided to follow Bovin’s instructions. We went everywhere – to the teahouses, the markets, the streets, and the countryside – and practised there, but the sea was the most fascinating phenomenon to us. In my book, An Introduction to Modern Art in Bahrain, I wrote about Bovin’s exhibitions in the 1950s and his great influence on me as an artist. Bovin’s talent inspired us greatly in rediscovering the nature and landscape on Bahrain and gave us the feeling that we had much strength to invest in art. Bovin contributed to a new start to us young painters, who had chosen the nature as our main motif.”Abdelkarim Al-Orrayed was the first Bahrain painter to live of his art, and around 1960 he opened a studio from which he sold his paintings. Two of his landscape watercolours are now at Moesgård.These two stories may have revealed that Bahrain and Moesgard Museum have a common history, which both parts value and wish to continue. The mutual fascination is a good foundation to build on and the close bonds and personal acquaintance between by now more generations is a valuable counterbalance to those tendencies that estrange people, cultures, and countries from one another.Already, more joint projects have been initiated: Danish archaeology students are taking part in excavations on Bahrain and elsewhere in the Arabic Gulf; an ethnography student is planning a long stay in a village on Bahrain for the study of parents’ expectations to their children on Bahrain as compared with the conditions in Denmark; P.V. Glob’s book, Al-Bahrain, has been translated into Arabic; Moesgård’s photos and films from the Gulf are to become universally accessible via the Internet; an exhibition on the Danish expeditions is being prepared at the National Museum of Bahrain, and so forth.Two projects are to be described in more detail here: New excavations on Bahrain that are to investigate how fresh water was exploited in the past, and the publication of a book and three CDs, Music in Bahrain, which will make Bahrain’s traditional music accessible not just to the population of Bahrain, but to the whole world.New excavations on BahrainFor millennia, Bahrain was famous for its abundance of fresh water springs, which made a belt of oases across the northern half of the island possible. Natural fertility combined with the favourable situation in the middle of the Arab Gulf made Bahrain a cultural and commercial centre that traded with the cities of Mesopotamia and the IndusValley already in the third millennium BC.Fresh water also played an important part in Bahrain’s ancient religion, as seen from ar chaeological excavations and Mesopotamian cuneiform tablets: A magnificent temple of light limestone was built over a spring, and according to old texts, water was the gods’ gift to Bahrain (Dilmun).Although fresh water had an overwhelming importance to a parched desert island, no studies have been directed towards the original ”taming” of the water on Bahrain. Therefore, Moesgård Museum is now beginning to look into the earliest irrigation techniques on the island and their significance to Bahrain’s development.Near the Bahrain village of Barbar, P.V. Glob in 1954 discovered a rise in the landscape, which was excavated during the following years. It turned out that the mound covered three different temples, built on top of and around each other. The Barbar temple was built of whitish ashlars and must have been an impressive structure. It has also gained a special importance in Near East research, as this is the first and only time that the holy spring chamber, the abzu, where the god Enki lived, has been un earthed (fig. 2).On the western side of the Barbar temple a monumental flight of steps, flank ed on both sides by cult figures, was leading through a portal to an underground chamber with a fresh water spring. In the beautiful ashlar walls of this chamber were three openings, through which water flowed. Only the eastern out flow was investigated, as the outside of an underground stonebuilt aqueduct was found a few metres from the spring chamber.East of the temple another underground aqueduct was followed along a 16-m distance. It was excavated at two points and turned out almost to have the height of a man. The floor was covered with large stones with a carved canal and the ceiling was built of equally large stones (fig. 3).No doubt the spring chamber was a central part of the temple, charge d with great importance. However, the function of the aqueducts is still unknown. It seems obvious that they were to lead the fresh water away from the source chamber, but was this part of a completely ritual arrangement, or was the purpose to transport the water to the gardens to be used for irrigation?To clarify these questions we will try to trace the continuations of the aqueducts using different tracing techniques such as georadar and magnetometer. As the sur roundings of Barbar temple are covered by several metres of shifting sand, the possibilities of following the aqueducts are fine, if necessary even across a great distance, and if they turn out to lead to old gardens, then these may be exposed under the sand.Underground water canals of a similar construction, drawing water from springs or subsoil water, have been used until modern times on Bahrain, and they are still in use in Iran and on the Arabian Peninsula, especially in Oman, where they supply the gardens with water for irrigation. They are called qanats and are usually considered built by the Persians during periods when the Achaemenid or Sassanid kings controlled Arabia (c. 500 BC-c. 600 AD). However, new excavation results from the Oman peninsula indicate that at least some canal systems date from c. 1000 BC. It is therefore of utmost interest if similar sophisticated transportation systems for water on Bahrain may be proven to date from the time of the erection of the Barbar temple, i.e. c. 2000 BC.The finds suggest that around this time Bahrain underwent dramatic changes. From being a thinly inhabited island during most of the 3rd millennium BC, the northern part of the island suddenly had extensive burial grounds, showing a rapid increase in population. At the same time the major settlement on the northern coast was fortified, temples like the one at Barbar were built, and gigantic ”royal mounds” were built in the middle of the island – all pointing at a hierarchic society coming into existence.This fast social development of Dilmun must have parallelled efficiency in the exploitation of fresh water resources for farm ing to supply a growing population with the basic food, and perhaps this explains the aqueducts by Barbar?The planned excavatio ns will be carried out in close cooperation between the National Museum of Bahrain and Aarhus University, and they are supported financially by the Carlsberg Foundation and Bahrain’s Cabinet and Information Ministry.The music of BahrainThe composer Poul Rovsing Olsen (1922-1982) was inspired by Arab and Indian music, and he spent a large part of his life studying traditional music in the countries along the Arabian Gulf. In 1958 and 1962-63 he took part in P.V. Glob’s expeditions to Arabia as a music ethnologist and in the 1970s he organised stays of long duration here (fig. 4).The background for his musical fieldwork was the rapid development, which the oil finds in the Gulf countries had started. The local folk music would clearly disappear with the trades and traditions with which they were connected.” If no one goes pearl fishing anymore, then no one will need the work songs connected to this work. And if no one marries according to tradition with festivity lasting three or sometimes five days, then no one will need the old wedding songs anymore’’.It was thus in the last moment that Rovsing Olsen recorded the pearl fishers’ concerts, the seamen’s shanties, the bedouin war songs, the wedding music, the festival music etc. on his tape recorder. By doing this he saved a unique collection of song and music, which is now stored in the Dansk Folkemindesamling in Copenhagen. It comprises around 150 tapes and more than 700 pieces of music. The instruments are to be found at the Musikhistorisk Museum and Moesgård Museum (fig. 5).During the 1960s and 1970s Rovsing Olsen published a number of smaller studies on music from the Arabian Gulf, which established his name as the greatest connoisseur of music from this area – a reputation, which the twenty years that have passed since his death have not shaken. Rovsing Olsen also published an LP record with pearl fisher music, and with the music ethnologist Jean Jenkins from the Horniman Museum in London he published six LP records, Music in the World of Islam with seven numbers from the Arabian Gulf, and the book Music and Musical Instruments in the World of Islam (London 1976).Shortly before his death, Rovsing Olsen finished a comprehensive manuscript in English, Music in Bahrain, where he summed up nearly twenty-five years of studies into folk music along the Arabian Gulf, with the main emphasis on Bahrain. The manuscript has eleven chapters, and after a short introduction Rovsing Olsen deals with musical instruments, lute music, war and honour songs of the bedouins, festivity dance, working songs and concerts of the pearl fishers, music influenced front Africa, double clarinet and bag pipe music, religious songs and women’s songs. Of these, eighty-four selected pieces of music are reproduced with notes and commented in the text. A large selection of this music will be published on three CDs to go with the book.This work has been anticipated with great expectation by music ethnologists and connoisseurs of Arabic folk music, and in agreement with Rovsing Olsen’s widow, Louise Lerche-Lerchenborg and Dansk Folkemindesamling, Moesgård Museum is presently working on publishing the work.The publication is managed by the Jutland Archaeological Society and Aarhus University Press will manage the distribution. The Carlsberg Foundation and Bahrain’s Cabinet and Information Ministry will cover the editing and printing expenses.The publication of the book and the CDs on the music of Bahrain will be celebrated at a festivity on Bahrain, at the next annual cultural festival, the theme of which will be ”mutual inspiration across cultural borders” with a focus on Rovsing Olsen. In this context, Den Danske Trio Anette Slaato will perform A Dream in Violet, a music piece influenced by Arabic music. On the same occasion singers and musicians will present the traditional pearl fishers’ music from Bahrain. In connection with the concert on Bahrain, a major tour has been planned in cooperation with The Danish Institute in Damascus, where the Danish musicians will also perform in Damascus and Beirut and give ”masterclasses” in chamber music on the local music academies. The concert tour is being organised by Louise Lerche-Lerchenborg, who initiated one of the most important Danish musical events, the Lerchenborg Musical Days,in 1963 and organised them for thirty years.ConclusionPride of concerted effort is not a special Danish national sport. However,the achievements in the Arabian Gulf made by the Danish expeditions from the Århus museum are recognised everywhere. It is only fair to use this jubilee volume for drawing attention to the fact that the journal Kuml and the publications of the Jutland Archaeological Society were the instruments through which the epoch-making investigations in the Gulf were nude public nationally and internationally.Finally, the cooperationon interesting tasks between Moesgård Museum and the countries along the Arabian Gulf will continue. In the future, Kuml will again be reporting on new excavations in the palm shadows and eventually, larger investigation s will no doubt find their way to the society’s comprehensive volumes.Flemming HøjlundMoesgård MuseumTranslated by Annette Lerche Trolle

Newgrange and the white wall Newgrange, 50 km north of Dublin, receives 200,000 visitors annually and is probably the most famous and most visited passage grave in the world (Figs. 1-2). It was constructed around 3400 BC.The fact that the huge mound contained a passage grave was not revealed until 1699. In 1870, a deep ditch was dug all the way around the mound in order to let the kerbstones and their ornamentation be seen more clearly, and a stone wall was built on top of the border stones to prevent the earth of the mound from sliding into the ditch (Fig. 3). In the course of time, the mound was increasingly worn down, and some of the large stones in the chamber and passage became unstable. This was a major problem because of the many visitors. Representatives of the Irish state, which had acquired Newgrange, therefore decided to have the mound renovated, and a committee was established for this purpose. This committee in turn asked Professor Michael J O’Kelly to head an investigation and restoration of the monument. Between 1962 and 1975 O’Kelly and his team spent four years of fieldwork investigating Newgrange. The committee had specified one of the tasks as being to restore the natural sloping surface of the mound. However, the project turned out differently. Once O’Kelly had investigated the structure of the mound and observed, at several points, the layer sequence in the mound-filling that had subsided, he came up with the provocative idea that Newgrange had looked completely different from the common conception of its structure.In 1982, Michael O’Kelly published his investigations and described the context of the restoration in the book “Newgrange. Archaeology, Art and Legend”. The layer sequence of the mound just east of the entrance can be seen in the profile illustrated in Fig. 4. The mound filling mainly consists of loose stones, divided by layers of turf. O’Kelly thought that all the mound’s layers were contemporary. Outside the kerbstone numbered K95 both the subsided earth and a culture layer deposited by a Beaker-settlement around 2300 BC are visible. A “quartz/granite layer” with large amounts of small white quartz pieces was found in a wide belt outside the kerbstones. Outside the kerbstones this layer could be followed across a 105-metre long stretch (i.e. 43% of the mound’s circumference) in a width of 6-7 metres. According to O’Kelly, this layer had originally covered the front of a 3-metre tall retaining wall on top of the kerbstones on both sides of the entrance. However, the wall had been unable to withstand the pressure from the mound and had eventually given way and tipped over. Consequently, Newgrange had had a totally different appearance during the Stone Age: “Stone walls are necessary where the mound is built of loose stones, but a turf wall would be quite adequate and completely effective where the mound is built of turves or soil. It may be, therefore, that the majority of passage-grave mounds had an original drum-like appearance and were not at all the gently sloping rounded mounds which we see in varying states of collapse to-day. Newgrange was such until excavation revealed that it had the revetment wall which has now been restored.”Consequently, O’Kelly had a concrete wall built, which was covered by the quartz (Fig. 5). The passage and the chamber were embedded in concrete. The entrance of the passage grave was completely altered in order to facilitate access for the many visitors. This area of the wall was covered with dark stones (Fig. 6) to underline the fact that this was not the original appearance. Newgrange had again become an impressive monument, and many visitors find it spectacular (Fig. 1). And spectacular it is – almost too spectacular! In 1982, John Michell commented on the newly restored Newgrange: “New Grange [has been] transformed in recent years into an archaeological show-site after undergoing drastic excavations … Only a few years ago New Grange was scientifically dug into, many of its interior and other stones were disturbed, and the reconstructed model, now curiously faced with a layer of ornamental pebble-dash of quartz and boulders to represent someone’s theory of how it originally looked, lets in rain through the roof for the first time in history.” Others have observed that as there was no concrete in the Stone Age, the wall could not have been as vertical as it is now. The Loughcrew-field with its more than 30 passage graves was discovered and investigated during the 1860s by Eugene A. Conwell. Here it suffices to take note of the description of the two largest and best-preserved mounds, Mound L and Mound T, as these two mounds are important for understanding the original layout of Newgrange. “L is forty-five yards in diameter, surrounded by 42 large stones, laid lengthwise on their edges, and varying from six to twelve feet in length, and from four to five feet high. Great quantities of the loose stones which formed the apex of this carn have been removed, of which there are very visible evidences.” (Fig. 7). On Mound T – to which he has given the much more interesting name of “the Tomb of Ollamh Fodhla” after a legendary Irish king – Eugene Conwell writes: “The original shape of this carn still remains comparatively perfect, consisting of a conical mound of loose stones … It is thirty-eight and one-half yards in diameter at the base, having an elevation of twenty-one paces in slant-height from base to summit. A retaining wall, consisting of thirty-seven large flags [kerbstones] laid on edge, and varying in length from six to twelve feet, surrounds the base externally … Inside the retaining wall of large flag stones, as far as was examined, and, apparently, going all round the base of the carn, was piled up a layer, rising from three to four feet in height, and about two feet in thickness, of broken lumps of sparkling native Irish quartz …” (Fig. 8).At Loughcrew T, Eugene Conwell noticed that the white quartz had been arranged like a collar a little up the hillside, just inside the row of kerbstones. Apparently, this was a common feature of many of the mounds at Loughcrew, because the ridge with the many mounds is also called Carnbane, which is Irish for “the white mounds.” When I saw Loughcrew L and T in 1999, I realised that this could have been what Newgrange used to look like. Newgrange had changed a lot in the course of time; it had to contain several phases, just like the Irish passage graves of Baltinglass Hill and Newgrange site K (Fig. 9).Knowth is situated less than 2 kilometres from Newgrange. In a number of ways, the two Neolithic barrows are identical. Professor George Eogan carried out the investigation of Knowth, which began in 1962, the same year that Michael O’Kelly started investigating Newgrange. In Knowth, there are two passage grave chambers, one with a passage towards the west, the other with a passage towards the east. Outside and on either side of the passages’ entrances in front of the chain of kerbstones are large areas sprinkled with what Eogan calls “exotic stones”, such as white quartz. Eogan suggests that these layers may have something to do with the site of the mound: “However, excavation has not produced enough evidence wholly to confirm this theory, and we cannot rule out the likelihood that this spread, or at least its lower part, was a deliberately laid feature.” In addition, he continues: “The spread of exotic stones may also have played a role in the suggested ceremonies. They could have embellished the edge of the mound as a background for the ceremonies … After the ceremonies the stones might have been spread, a ‘cloth’ to protect and emphasize the ceremonial, possibly altar, area; it may be noted that the exotic stones occur on the old ground surface.”Similarly, some Danish dolmens and passage graves have areas of white stones along the mound side and in front of the entrances. In these cases, the stones are white-burnt flint and not quartz. Such a layer was found at the passage grave of Kong Svends Høj (King Svend’s Mound), and it has been interpreted as a sacrificial layer. The white-burnt flint may also have been arranged as a collar a little up the hillside, just as Conwell interpreted the quartz arrangement at Loughcrew T.O’Kelly thought that the quartz had been arranged in a three-metre tall wall on top of the kerbstones at Newgrange. Today, it is difficult to interpret the profile in Fig. 4 in this way, because that would imply that the wall had been pressed outwards all at once in its whole length, like a gate falling forward so that it is stretched flat on the ground with its entire height. If the wall really existed, it would more likely have collapsed gradually, and the fallen granite and quartz would have piled up in a heap just in front of the kerbstones. The quartz and granite would not have ended so far from the edge as they in fact did. The appearance of Dowth, the third Neolithic barrow by the Bend of Boyne, also contradicts O’Kelly’s collapse theory. Although Dowth is taller and so has a steeper hillside than Newgrange and Knowth, its kerbstones were not hidden by fallen stones.Usually, burial mounds consist of two or more phases, and the mounds are extended successively. The Neolithic mounds may also have several phases. It is less well known that dolmens and passage graves may also have more phases. In Denmark it is possible, in broad outline, to distinguish five steps (Fig. 10).If we take another look at the Newgrange profile, we are able to identify several possible phases (Fig. 11). If at the same time we take into consideration that the turf layers may not have been laid by humans but may instead be natural vegetation layers, this would support the idea of a gradual change in Newgrange’s appearance during the prehistoric era. Here, just as in nature, the vegetation side of the turf layers is turned upwards and not downwards, whereas the vegetation side would usually be turned downwards in turf-built mounds. Phase 1: The foot of the mound is marked by a small stone wall, situated 6.5 metres from the present kerbstones. If the kerbstones were present, phase 1 would belong to step C. However, it is more likely that the mound had no kerbstones at this early stage. Just 12 kilometres from Newgrange is the passage grave of Fourknocks I, which was investigated in 1950. It had no kerbstones, but the foot of the mound was marked by a low stone wall (Fig. 12). Moreover, it is possible that Newgrange had an even older phase, because the passage has a peculiar bend half way along its length, which may indicate the original foot of the mound.Phase 2: The distance between the foot of the mound and the kerbstones is reduced to just under 2.5 metres. Step C. Between the mound and the kerbstones was an open area, perhaps a forecourt, which may have been used for cult ceremonies and processions. Such an open area would explain why many of the kerbstones also are ornamented on the inside.Phase 3: If the complete stone layer between turf layers T2-3 and T3-4 is interpreted as one single phase, the kerbstones would have been hidden, and we would be dealing with a step E mound. More likely there are two phases in this layer, so that the surface of phase 3a was in line with the top of the kerbstones, corresponding to a step D mound – the classical passage grave mound such as Loughcrew T and perhaps Knowth. If in fact there were a phase 3a, phase 3b would belong to a step E mound.Phase 4: This phase also belongs to a step E mound. However, the layer may also have been created by material that had slid down from the upper part of the mound.When the mound was enlarged from phase 1 to phase 3a, the passage may have been lengthened by adding the outer three pairs of passage orthostats. This is indicated by the fact that these three stones are taller than the neighbouring stones in the passage, as opposed to the usual case in passage graves, where the heights of the orthostats in the passage decrease towards the outside (Fig. 13). These three pairs of stones also differ in having an unusually large distance between the third and fourth supporting stones on the northern side of the passage – exactly where a pos­sible earlier termination of the passage would have been. The present exit of the light channel in the side of the mound above the entrance was constructed when the passage was extended. The light channel already existed – it was just extended. Passages in other Irish passage graves have been extended – for instance, at Newgrange Site K (Fig. 9), which is situated a mere 100 metres from Newgrange.Whether this theory of several phases at Newgrange is correct could be confirmed or rejected by new C-14 datings. At first it would suffice to have the top layers analysed. They are rather easily accessible. One of the turf layers was previously dated to 300 AD.Around the mound of Newgrange, twelve large stones are situated at a distance of 7 to 17 metres from the mound’s kerbstones (Fig. 1). These stones can be inscribed in a large circle surrounding the mound. O’Kelly thought that such a stone circle would originally have consisted of 35-38 stones at a distance from each other of 7-9 metres. However, it is much more likely that the preserved stones towards the southeast indicate the Stone Age appearance of the large circle. Thus, there may have been 19 stones surrounding the mound (Fig. 14). The non-typical location of stone 2 also has to be taken into consideration.Michael O’Kelly knew that his restoration of Newgrange was not popular with everyone. He used to speak ironically of his opponents by saying that they wished themselves back to the romantic days when cattle were grazing on the mound, and the passage and chamber were lit by candles (Fig. 15). However, his radical and faulty restoration of Newgrange quite needlessly continued the tradition of the early 20th century, when it was popular for restorers to tear down medieval churches and castles and rebuild them largely according to their own taste. At the beginning of his book on Newgrange, Michael O’Kelly quoted one of his predecessors, E.P. Wright, who in 1900 had said: “To be a restorer of ancient monuments one should be sheltered by a triple coat of brass, but even a repairer of such required a coat of mail.”May this small comment on Newgrange help to punch a hole in Michael O’Kelly’s armour and in the hideous white wall of Newgrange!Palle EriksenRingkøbing MuseumTranslated by Annette Lerche Trolle

Purpose: To assess the effects of oral vitamin D supplement therapy on clinical outcomes of intravitreal bevacizumab (IVB) injections in patients with diabetic macular edema (DME). Method: Seventy-one patients with center-involving DME received IVB injections three times monthly. Cases with serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25(OH)D) levels <30 ng/ml were divided into treatment and control groups. The treatment group received 50000 IU of oral vitamin D once a week for eight weeks. One month after the third IVB injection, changes in the best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) and central macular thickness (CMT) were analyzed for each group. Results: Thirty-seven patients had sufficient levels of 25 (OH) D, while 34 patients had insufficient levels. Nineteen cases with deficient levels of 25(OH)D were treated with oral vitamin D, while 15 patients were assigned to the control group. The mean of serum 25(OH)D in patients was 27.9 ng/ml [mean 20.3 ± 5.4 and 17.3 ± 5.4 ng/ml in control and treatment groups, respectively (P = 0.231)]. After three IVB injections, BCVA improved significantly in each group, but the difference between the study groups was not statistically significant. CMT decreased significantly in all the groups. The mean CMT reduction was more prominent in the vitamin D-treated group, but the difference between groups did not reach statistical significance (P = 0.29). Conclusion: In DME patients with vitamin D deficiency, vitamin D supplement therapy had some beneficial effects on CMT reduction following three injections of IVB; nevertheless, these effects were not statistically significant. Definite conclusion needs further prospective studies with a larger sample size.

BackgroundPigmented villonodular synovitis (PVNS) is a rare benign proliferative disease affecting the soft tissue lining the synovial joints and tendons. Its etiology is poorly understood, largely limiting the availability of current therapeutic options. Here, we mapped the synovial gene and protein profiles of patients with PVNS, revealed a link between synovial inflammation and invasion, and elucidated the potential molecular mechanism involved.MethodsThe expression of synovial genes from six control individuals, seven OA patients, and nineteen PVNS patients was analyzed via RNA sequencing. Protein profiles from five control individuals, ten OA patients, and thirty‐two PVNS patients were analyzed using label‐free proteomics. Microarray and RT–PCR analyses and immunohistochemical staining were used to evaluate inflammatory cytokine and target gene expression levels in synovial tissue, epithelial cells, and synovial fibroblasts (FLSs) derived from PVNS tissue. Various signaling pathway inhibitors, siRNAs, and western blots were used for molecular mechanism studies. Transwell migration and invasion assays were subsequently performed.ResultsIn total, 522 differentially expressed proteins were identified in the PVNS tissues. By integrating RNA sequencing and microarray analyses, significant changes in the expression of EMT‐related genes, including TGFBI, N‐cadherin, E‐cadherin, SNAIL, and TWIST, were confirmed in the PVNS tissue compared to the control tissue. In vitro, TGF‐β induced EMT and increased epithelial cell migration and invasion. Moreover, TGF‐β not only promoted interactions between epithelial cells and FLSs but also directly increased the migration and invasion abilities of FLSs by activating the classical Smad2/3 and nonclassical JNK/AKT signaling pathways.ConclusionThis study provides overall protein and gene profiles of PVNS and identifies the crucial role of TGF‐β in synovial invasion pathology. Exploring the related molecular mechanism may also reveal a new strategy or target for PVNS therapy.

ABSTRACTTechnical studies were performed on one hundred and seven Chinese copper-alloy sculptures dating from the fifth to the nineteenth centuries A. D. in the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art. X-radiography, stereomicroscopy and metallography were used to determine various physical features; atomic absorption spectroscopy was used to characterize the metal composition. All sculptures were determined to be cast by the lost wax method, and details were tooled by engraving and chasing. Metallographic examination and microprobe analysis showed that the gilding technique used was mercury gilding. Bronzes from the Northern Wei to the Song dynasty are similar in their physical characteristics and alloy type, leaded tin bronze. Beginning in the Ming dynasty, an increase in the amount of zinc is found, both as an impurity in tin bronzes and as a brass alloy constituent.

AbstractOver the past decade, research using virtual reality and serious game-based instruments for assessing spatial navigation and spatial memory in at-risk and AD populations has risen. We systematically reviewed the literature since 2012 to identify and evaluate the methodological quality and risk of bias in the analyses of the psychometric properties of VRSG-based instruments. The search was conducted primarily in July–December 2022 and updated in November 2023 in eight major databases. The quality of instrument development and study design were analyzed in all studies. Measurement properties were defined and analyzed according to COSMIN guidelines. A total of 1078 unique records were screened, and following selection criteria, thirty-seven studies were analyzed. From these studies, 30 instruments were identified. Construct and criterion validity were the most reported measurement properties, while structural validity and internal consistency evidence were the least reported. Nineteen studies were deemed very good in construct validity, whereas 11 studies reporting diagnostic accuracy were deemed very good in quality. Limitations regarding theoretical framework and research design requirements were found in most of the studies. VRSG-based instruments are valuable additions to the current diagnostic toolkit for AD. Further research is required to establish the psychometric performance and clinical utility of VRSG-based instruments, particularly the instrument development, content validity, and diagnostic accuracy for preclinical AD screening scenarios. This review provides a straightforward synthesis of the state of the art of VRSG-based instruments and suggests future directions for research.

Introduction This article is concerned with the recent rise in popularity of crypto art, the term given to digital artworks whose ownership and provenance are confirmed with a non-fungible token (NFT), making it possible to sell these works within decentralised cryptocurrency art markets. The goal of this analysis is to trace a genealogy of crypto art to Dada, an avant-garde movement that originated in the early twentieth century. My claim is that Dadaism in crypto art appears in its exhausted form that is a result of its revival in the 1950s and 1960s by the Neo Dada that reached the current age through Pop Art. Dada’s anti-art project of rejecting beauty and aesthetics has transformed into commercial success in the Neo Dada Pop Art movement. In turn, Pop Art produced its crypto version that explores not only the question of what art is and is not, but also when art becomes money. In what follows, I will provide a brief overview of NFT art and its three categories that could generally be found within crypto marketplaces: native crypto art, non-digital art, and digital distributed-creativity art. Throughout, I will foreground the presence of Dadaism in these artworks and provide art historical context. NFTs: Brief Overview A major technological component that made NFTs possible was developed in 1991, when cryptographers Stuart Haber and W. Scott Stornetta proposed a method for time-stamping data contained in digital documents shared within a distributed network of users (99). This work laid the foundation for what became known as blockchain and was further implemented in the development of Bitcoin, a digital currency invented by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008. The original non-fungible tokens, Coloured Coins, were created in 2012. By “colouring” or differentiating bitcoins, Coloured Coins were assigned special properties and had a value independent of the underlying Bitcoin, allowing their use as commodity certificates, alternative currencies, and other financial instruments (Assia et al.). In 2014, fuelled by a motivation to protect digital artists from unsanctioned distribution of their work while also enabling digital art sales, media artist Kevin McCoy and tech entrepreneur Anil Dash saw the potential of blockchain to satisfy their goals and developed what became to be known as NFTs. This overnight invention was a result of McCoy and Dash’s participation in the Seven on Seven annual New York City event, a one-day creative collaboration that challenged seven pairs of artists and engineers to “make something” (Rhizome). McCoy and Dash did not patent their invention, nor were they able to popularise it, mentally archiving it as a “footnote in internet history”. Ironically, just a couple of years later NFTs exploded into a billion-dollar market, living up to an ironic name of “monetized graphics” that the pair gave to their invention. Crypto art became an international sensation in March 2021, when a digital artist Mike Winklemann, known as Beeple, sold his digital collage titled Everydays: The First 5000 Days for US$69.3 million, prompting Noah Davis, a curator who assisted with the sale at the Christie’s auction house, to proclaim: “he showed us this collage, and that was my eureka moment when I knew this was going to be extremely important. It was just so monumental and so indicative of what NFTs can do” (Kastrenakes). As a technology, a non-fungible token can create digital scarcity in an otherwise infinitely replicable digital space. Contrary to fungible tokens, which are easily interchangeable due to having an equal value, non-fungible tokens represent unique items for which one cannot find an equivalent. That is why we rely on the fungibility of money to exchange non-fungible unique goods, such as art. Employing non-fungible tokens allows owning and exchanging digital items outside of the context in which they originated. Now, one can prove one’s possession of a digital skin from a videogame, for example, and sell it on digital markets using crypto currency (“Bible”). Behind the technology of NFTs lies the use of a cryptographic hash function, which converts a digital artwork of any file size into a fixed-length hash, called message digest (Dooley 179). It is impossible to revert the process and arrive at the original image, a quality of non-reversibility that makes the hash function a perfect tool for creating a digital representation of an artwork proofed from data tampering. The issued or minted NFT enters a blockchain, a distributed database that too relies on cryptographic properties to guarantee fidelity and security of data stored. Once the NFT becomes a part of the blockchain, its transaction history is permanently recorded and publicly available. Thus, the NFT simultaneously serves as a unique representation of the artwork and a digital proof of ownership. NFTs are traded in digital marketplaces, such as SuperRare, KnownOrigin, OpenSea, and Rarible, which rely on a blockchain to sustain their operations. An analysis of these markets’ inventory can be summarised by the following list of roughly grouped types of artistic works available for purchase: native crypto art, non-digital art, distributed creativity art. Native Crypto Art In this category, I include projects that motivated the creation of NFT protocols. Among these projects are the aforementioned Colored Coins, created in 2012. These were followed by issuing other visual creations native to the crypto-world, such as LarvaLabs’s CryptoPunks, a series of 10,000 algorithmically generated 8-bit-style pixelated digital avatars originally available for free to anyone with an Ethereum blockchain account, gaining a cult status among the collectors when they became rare sought-after items. On 13 February 2022, CryptoPunk #5822 was sold for roughly $24 million in Ethereum, beating the previous record for such an NFT, CryptoPunk #3100, sold for $7.58 million. CryptoPunks laid the foundation for other collectible personal profile projects, such Bored Ape Yacht Club and Cool Cats. One of the ultimate collections of crypto art that demonstrates the exhaustion of original Dada motivations is titled Monas, an NFT project made up of 5,000 programmatically generated versions of a pixelated Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (c. 1503-1506). Each Monas, according to the creators, is “a mix of Art, history, and references from iconic NFTs” (“Monas”). Monas are a potpourri of meme and pop culture, infused with inside jokes and utmost silliness. Monas invariably bring to mind the historic Dadaist gesture of challenging bourgeois tastes through defacing iconic art historical works, such as Marcel Duchamp’s treatment of Mona Lisa in L.H.O.O.Q. In 1919, Duchamp drew a moustache and a goatee on a reproduction of La Joconde, as the French called the painting, and inscribed “L.H.O.O.Q.” that when pronounced sounds like “Elle a chaud au cul”, a vulgar expression indicating sexual arousal of the subject. At the time of its creation, this Dada act was met with the utmost public contempt, as Mona Lisa was considered a sacred work of art and a patron of the arts, an almost religious symbol (Elger and Grosenick 82). Needless to say, the effect of Monas on public consciousness is far from causing disgust and, on the contrary, brings childish joy and giggles. As an NFT artist, Mankind, explains in his YouTube video on personal profile projects: “PFPs are built around what people enjoy. People enjoy memes, people enjoy status, people enjoy being a part of something bigger than themselves, the basic primary desire to mix digital with social and belong to a community”. Somehow, “being bigger than themselves” has come to involve collecting defaced images of Mona Lisa. Turning our attention to historical analysis will help trace this transformation of the Dada insult into a collectible NFT object. Dada and Its Legacy in Crypto Art Dada was founded in 1916 in Zurich, by Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, and other artists who fled their homelands during the First World War (Hapgood and Rittner 63). One of Dada’s primary aspirations was to challenge the dominance of reason that brought about the tragedy of the First World War through attacking the postulates of culture this form of reason produced. Already in 1921, such artists as André Breton, Louis Aragon, and Max Ernst were becoming exhausted by Dada’s nihilist tendencies and rejection of all programmes for the arts, except for the one that called for the total freedom of expression. The movement was pronounced dead about May 1921, leaving no sense of regret since, in the words of Breton, “its omnipotence and its tyranny had made it intolerable” (205). An important event associated with Dada’s revival and the birth of the Neo Dada movement was the publication of The Dada Painters and Poets in 1951. This volume, the first collection of Dada writings in English and the most comprehensive anthology in any language, was introduced to the young artists at the New School by John Cage, who revived Tristan Tzara’s concept that “life is far more interesting” than art (Hapgood and Rittner 64). The 1950s were marked by a renewed interest in Dadaism that can also be evidenced in galleries and museums organising numerous exhibitions on the movement, such as Dada 1916 –1923 curated by Marcel Duchamp at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1953. By the end of the decade, such artists as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg began exploring materials and techniques that can be attributed to Dadaism, which prompted the title of Neo Dada to describe this thematic return (Hapgood and Rittner 64). Among the artistic approaches that Neo Dada borrowed from Dada are Duchampian readymades that question the status of the art object, Kurt Schwitters’s collage technique of incorporating often banal scraps and pieces of the everyday, and the use of chance operations as a compositional device (Hapgood and Rittner 63–64). These approaches comprise the toolbox of crypto artists as well. Monas, CryptoPunks, and Bored Ape Yacht Club are digital collages made of scraps of pop culture and the everyday Internet life assembled into compositional configurations through chance operation made possible by the application of algorithmic generation of the images in each series. Art historian Helen Molesworth sees the strategies of montage, the readymade, and chance not only as “mechanisms for making art objects” but also as “abdications of traditional forms of artistic labor” (178). Molesworth argues that Duchamp’s invention of the readymade “substituted the act of (artistic) production with consumption” and “profoundly questioned the role, stability, nature, and necessity of the artist’s labor” (179). Together with questioning the need for artistic labour, Neo Dadaists inherited what an American art historian Jack D. Flam terms the “anything goes” attitude: Dada’s liberating destruction of rules and derision of art historical canon allowed anything and everything to be considered art (xii). The “anything goes” approach can also be traced to the contemporary crypto artists, such as Beeple, whose Everydays: The First 5000 Days was a result of assembling into a collage the first 5,000 of his daily training sketches created while teaching himself new digital tools (Kastrenakes). When asked whether he genuinely liked any of his images, Beeple explained that most digital art was created by teams of people working over the course of days or even weeks. When he “is pooping something out in 45 minutes”, it “is probably not gonna look that great comparatively” (Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg). At the core of Dada was a spirit of absurdism that drove an attack on the social, political, artistic, and philosophical norms, constituting a radical movement against the Establishment (Flam xii). In Dada Art and Anti-Art, Hans Richter’s personal historical account of the Dada movement, the artist describes the basic principle of Dada as guided by a motivation “to outrage public opinion” (66). Richter’s writings also point out a desensitisation towards Dada provocations that the public experienced as a result of Dada’s repetitive assaults, demanding an invention of new methods to disgrace the public taste. Richter recounts: our exhibitions were not enough. Not everyone in Zurich came to look at our pictures, attending our meetings, read our poems and manifestos. The devising and raising of public hell was an essential function of any Dada movement, whether its goal was pro-art, non-art or anti-art. And the public (like insects or bacteria) had developed immunity to one of kind poison, we had to think of another. (66) Richter’s account paints a cultural environment in which new artistic provocations mutate into accepted norms in a quick succession, forming a public body that is immune to anti-art “poisons”. In the foreword to Dada Painters and Poets, Flam outlines a trajectory of acceptance and subjugation of the Dadaist spirit by the subsequent revival of the movement’s core values in the Neo Dada of the 1950s and 1960s. When Dadaism was rediscovered by the writers and artists in the 1950s, the Dada spirit characterised by absurdist irony, self-parody, and deadpan realism was becoming a part of everyday life, as if art entered life and transformed it in its own image. The Neo Dada artists, such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Claes Oldenburg, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol, existed in a culturally pluralistic space where the project of a rejection of the Establishment was quickly absorbed into the mainstream, mutating into the high culture it was supposedly criticising and bringing commercial success of which the original Dada artists would have been deeply ashamed (Flam xiii). Raoul Hausmann states: “Dada fell like a raindrop from heaven. The Neo-Dadaists have learnt to imitate the fall, but not the raindrop” (as quoted in Craft 129). With a similar sentiment, Richard Huelsenbeck writes: “Neo-Dada has turned the weapons used by Dada, and later by Surrealism, into popular ploughshares with which to till the fertile soil of sensation-hungry galleries eager for business” (as quoted in Craft 130). Marcel Duchamp, the forefather of the avant-garde, comments on the loss of Dada’s original intent: this Neo-Dada, which they call New Realism, Pop Art, Assemblage, etc., is an easy way out, and lives on what Dada did. When I discovered ready-mades I thought to discourage aesthetics. In Neo-Dada they have taken my ready-mades and found aesthetic beauty in them. I threw the bottle-rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty. (Flam xiii) In Neo Dada, the original anti-art impulse of Dadaism was converted into its opposite, becoming an artistic stance and a form of aesthetics. Flam notes that these gradual transformations resulted in the shifts in public consciousness, which it was becoming more difficult to insult. Artists, among them Roy Lichtenstein, complained that it was becoming impossible to make anything despicable: even a dirty rug could be admired (Flam xiii). The audience lost their ability to understand when they were being mocked, attacked, or challenged. Writing in 1981, Flam proclaimed that “Dada spirit has become an inescapable condition of modern life” (xiv). I contend that the current crypto art thrives on the Dada spirit of absurdism, irony, and self-parody and continues to question the border between art and non-art, while fully subscribing to the “anything goes” approach. In the current iteration of Dada in the crypto world, the original subversive narrative can be mostly found in the liberating rhetoric promoted by the proponents of the decentralised economic system. While Neo Dada understood the futility of shocking the public and questioning their tastes, crypto art is ignorant of the original Dada as a form of outrage, a revolutionary movement ignited by a social passion. In crypto art, the ambiguous relationship that Pop Art, one of the Neo Dada movements, had with commercial success is transformed into the content of the artworks. As Tristan Tzara laconically explained, the Dada project was to “assassinate beauty” and with it all the infrastructure of the art market (as quoted in Danto 39). Ironically, crypto artists, the descendants of Dada, erected the monument to Value artificially created through scarcity made possible by blockchain technology in place of the denigrated Venus demolished by the Dadaists. After all, it is the astronomical prices for crypto art that are lauded the most. If in the pre-NFT age, artistic works were evaluated based on their creative merit that included considering the prominence of the artist within art historical canon, current crypto art is evaluated based on its rareness, to which the titles of the crypto art markets SuperRare and Rarible unambiguously refer (Finucane 28–29). In crypto art, the anti-art and anti-commercialism of Dada has fully transformed into its opposite. Another evidence for considering crypto art to be a descendant of Dada is the NFT artists’ concern for the question of what art is and is not, brought to the table by the original Dada artists. This concern is expressed in the manifesto-like mission statement of the first Museum of Crypto Art: at its core, the Museum of Crypto Art (M○C△) challenges, creates conflict, provokes. M○C△ puts forward a broad representation of perspectives meant to upend our sense of who we are. It poses two questions: “what is art?” and “who decides?” We aim to resolve these questions through a multi-stakeholder decentralized platform of art curation and exhibition. (The Museum of Crypto Art) In the past, the question regarding the definition of art was overtaken by the proponent of the institutional approach to art definition, George Dickie, who besides excluding aesthetics from playing a part in differentiating art from non-art famously pronounced that an artwork created by a monkey is art if it is displayed in an art institution, and non-art if it is displayed elsewhere (Dickie 256). This development might explain why decentralisation of the art market achieved through the use of blockchain technology still relies on the endorsing of the art being sold by the widely acclaimed art auction houses: with their stamp of approval, the work is christened as legitimate art, resulting in astronomical sales. Non-Digital Art It is not surprising that an NFT marketplace is an inviting arena for the investigation of questions of commercialisation tackled in the works of Neo Dada Pop artists, who made their names in the traditional art world. This brings us to a discussion of the second type of artworks found in NFT marketplaces: non-digital art sold as NFT and created by trained visual artists, such as Damien Hirst. In his recent NFT project titled Currency, Hirst explores “the boundaries of art and currency—when art changes and becomes a currency, and when currency becomes art” (“The Currency”). The project consists of 10,000 artworks on A4 paper covered in small, coloured dots, a continuation of the so-called “spot-paintings” series that Hirst and his assistants have been producing since the 1980s. Each artwork is painted on a hand-made paper that bears the watermark of the artist’s bust, adorned with a microdot that serves as a unique identification, and is made to look very similar to the others—visual devices used to highlight the ambiguous state of these artworks that simultaneously function as Hirst-issued currency. For Hirst, this project is an experiment: after the purchase of NFTs, buyers are given an opportunity to exchange the NFT for the original art, safely stored in a UK vault; the unexchanged artworks will be burned. Is art going to fully transform into currency? Will you save it? In Hirst’s project, the transformation of physical art into crypto value becomes the ultimate act of Dada nihilism, except for one big difference: if Dada wanted to destroy art as a way to invent it anew, Hirst destroys art to affirm its death and dissolution in currency. In an ironic gesture, the gif NFT artist Nino Arteiro, as if in agreement with Hirst, attempts to sell his work titled Art Is Not Synonymous of Profit, which contains a crudely written text “ART ≠ PROFIT!” for 0.13 Ether or US$350. Buying this art will negate its own statement and affirm its analogy with money. Distributed-Creativity Art When browsing through crypto art advertised in the crypto markets, one inevitably encounters works that stand out in their emphasis on aesthetic and formal qualities. More often than not, these works are created with the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI). To a viewer bombarded with creations unconcerned with the concept of beauty, these AI works may serve as a sensory aesthetic refuge. Among the most prominent artists working in this realm is Refik Anadol, whose Synthetic Dreams series at a first glance may appear as carefully composed works of a landscape painter. However, at a closer look nodal connections between points in rendered space provide a hint at the use of algorithmic processes. These attractive landscapes are quantum AI data paintings created from a data set consisting of 200 million raw images of landscapes from around the world, with each image having been computed with a unique quantum bit string (“Synthetic Dreams”). Upon further contemplation, Anadol’s work begins to remind of the sublime Romantic landscapes, revamped through the application of AI that turned fascination with nature’s unboundedness into awe in the face of the unfathomable amounts of data used in creation of Anadol’s works. These creations can be seen as a reaction against the crypto art I call exhausted Dada, or a marketing approach that targets a different audience. In either case, Anadol revives aesthetic concern and aligns himself with the history of sublimity in art that dates back to the writings of Longinus, becoming of prime importance in the nineteenth-century Romantic painting, and finding new expressions in what is considered the technological sublime, which, according to David E. Nye. concentrates “on the triumph of machines… over space and time” (as quoted in Butler et al. 8). In relation to his Nature Dreams project, Anadol writes: “the exhibition’s eponymous, sublime AI Data Sculpture, Nature Dreams utilizes over 300 million publicly available photographs of nature collected between 2018- 2021 at Refik Anadol Studio” (“Machine Hallucinations Nature Dreams”). From this short description it is evident that Anadol’s primary focus is on the sublimity of large sets of data. There is an issue with that approach: since experiencing the sublime involves loss of rational thinking (Longinus 1.4), these artworks cease the viewer’s ability to interrogate cultural adaptation of AI technology and stay within the realm of decorative ornamentations, demanding an intervention akin to that brought about by the historical avant-garde. Conclusions I hope that this brief analysis demonstrates the mechanisms by which the strains of Dada entered the vocabulary of crypto artists. It is probably also noticeable that I equate the nihilist project of the exhausted Dada found in such works as Hirst’s Cryptocurrency with a dead end similar to so many other dead ends in art history—one only needs to remember that the death of painting was announced a myriad of times, and yet it is still alive. Each announcement of its death was followed by its radiant return. It could be that using art as a visual package for monetary value, a death statement to art’s capacity to affect human lives, will ignite artists to affirm art’s power to challenge, inspire, and enrich. References Assia, Yoni et al. “Colored Coins Whitepaper.” 2012-13. <https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AnkP_cVZTCMLIzw4DvsW6M8Q2JC0lIzrTLuoWu2z1BE/edit>. Breton, André. “Three Dada Manifestoes, before 1924.” The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, Ed. Robert Motherwell, Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1989. 197–206. Butler, Rebecca P., and Benjamin J. Butler. “Examples of the American Technological Sublime.” TechTrends 57.1 (2013): 9–10. Craft, Catherine Anne. Constellations of Past and Present: (Neo-) Dada, the Avant- Garde, and the New York Art World, 1951-1965. 1996. PhD dissertation. University of Texas at Austin. Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg, Kasia. “Creativity Is Hustle: Make Something Every Day.” The Atlantic, 7 Oct. 2011. 12 July 2021 <https://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2011/10/creativity-is-hustle-make-something-every-day/246377/#slide15>. Danto, Arthur Coleman. The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art. Chicago, Ill: Open Court, 2006. Dash, Anil. “NFTs Weren’t Supposed to End like This.” The Atlantic, 2 Apr. 2021. 16 Apr. 2022 <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/nfts-werent-supposed-end-like/618488/>. Dickie, George. “Defining Art.” American Philosophical Quarterly 6.3 (1969): 253–256. Dooley, John F. History of Cryptography and Cryptanalysis: Codes, Ciphers, and Their Algorithms. Cham: Springer, 2018. Elder, R. Bruce. Dada, Surrealism, and the Cinematic Effect. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier UP, 2015. Elger, Dietmar, and Uta Grosenick. Dadaism. Köln: Taschen, 2004. Flam, Jack. “Foreword”. The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology. Ed. Robert Motherwell. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 1989. xi–xiv. Finucane, B.P. Creating with Blockchain Technology: The ‘Provably Rare’ Possibilities of Crypto Art. 2018. Master’s thesis. University of British Columbia. Haber, Stuart, and W. Scott Stornetta. “How to Time-Stamp a Digital Document.” Journal of Cryptology 3.2 (1991): 99–111. Hapgood, Susan, and Jennifer Rittner. “Neo-Dada: Redefining Art, 1958-1962.” Performing Arts Journal 17.1 (1995): 63–70. Kastrenakes, Jacob. “Beeple Sold an NFT for $69 million: Through a First-of-Its-Kind Auction at Christie’s.” The Verge, 11 Mar. 2021. 14 July 2021 <https://www.theverge.com/2021/3/11/22325054/beeple-christies-nft-sale-cost-everydays-69-million>. Longinus. On the Sublime. Lewiston/Queenston: Edwin Mellen, 1987. Mankind, “What Are PFP NFTs”. YouTube. 2 Feb. 2022 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drh_fAV4XNM>. “Machine Hallucinations.” Refik Anadol. 20 Jan. 2022 <https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucination/>. “Machine Hallucinations Nature Dreams.” Refik Anadol. 18 Apr. 2022 <https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucinations-nature-dreams/>. Molesworth, Helen. “From Dada to Neo-Dada and Back Again.” October 105 (2003): 177–181. “Monas”. OpenSea. 17 Feb. 2022 <https://opensea.io/collection/monas>. Museum of Crypto Art. 23 Jan. 2022 <https://museumofcryptoart.com/>. Nakamoto, Satoshi. “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” 2008. <https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf>. Richter, Hans. Dada: Art and Anti-Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2016. 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By the time you read this, it will be wrong. Things seemed to be moving so fast in these first days after airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the Pennsylvania earth. Each certainty is as carelessly dropped as it was once carelessly assumed. The sounds of lower Manhattan that used to serve as white noise for residents—sirens, screeches, screams—are no longer signs without a referent. Instead, they make folks stare and stop, hurry and hustle, wondering whether the noises we know so well are in fact, this time, coefficients of a new reality. At the time of writing, the events themselves are also signs without referents—there has been no direct claim of responsibility, and little proof offered by accusers since the 11th. But it has been assumed that there is a link to US foreign policy, its military and economic presence in the Arab world, and opposition to it that seeks revenge. In the intervening weeks the US media and the war planners have supplied their own narrow frameworks, making New York’s “ground zero” into the starting point for a new escalation of global violence. We want to write here about the combination of sources and sensations that came that day, and the jumble of knowledges and emotions that filled our minds. Working late the night before, Toby was awoken in the morning by one of the planes right overhead. That happens sometimes. I have long expected a crash when I’ve heard the roar of jet engines so close—but I didn’t this time. Often when that sound hits me, I get up and go for a run down by the water, just near Wall Street. Something kept me back that day. Instead, I headed for my laptop. Because I cannot rely on local media to tell me very much about the role of the US in world affairs, I was reading the British newspaper The Guardian on-line when it flashed a two-line report about the planes. I looked up at the calendar above my desk to see whether it was April 1st. Truly. Then I got off-line and turned on the TV to watch CNN. That second, the phone rang. My quasi-ex-girlfriend I’m still in love with called from the mid-West. She was due to leave that day for the Bay Area. Was I alright? We spoke for a bit. She said my cell phone was out, and indeed it was for the remainder of the day. As I hung up from her, my friend Ana rang, tearful and concerned. Her husband, Patrick, had left an hour before for work in New Jersey, and it seemed like a dangerous separation. All separations were potentially fatal that day. You wanted to know where everyone was, every minute. She told me she had been trying to contact Palestinian friends who worked and attended school near the event—their ethnic, religious, and national backgrounds made for real poignancy, as we both thought of the prejudice they would (probably) face, regardless of the eventual who/what/when/where/how of these events. We agreed to meet at Bruno’s, a bakery on La Guardia Place. For some reason I really took my time, though, before getting to Ana. I shampooed and shaved under the shower. This was a horror, and I needed to look my best, even as men and women were losing and risking their lives. I can only interpret what I did as an attempt to impose normalcy and control on the situation, on my environment. When I finally made it down there, she’d located our friends. They were safe. We stood in the street and watched the Towers. Horrified by the sight of human beings tumbling to their deaths, we turned to buy a tea/coffee—again some ludicrous normalization—but were drawn back by chilling screams from the street. Racing outside, we saw the second Tower collapse, and clutched at each other. People were streaming towards us from further downtown. We decided to be with our Palestinian friends in their apartment. When we arrived, we learnt that Mark had been four minutes away from the WTC when the first plane hit. I tried to call my daughter in London and my father in Canberra, but to no avail. I rang the mid-West, and asked my maybe-former novia to call England and Australia to report in on me. Our friend Jenine got through to relatives on the West Bank. Israeli tanks had commenced a bombardment there, right after the planes had struck New York. Family members spoke to her from under the kitchen table, where they were taking refuge from the shelling of their house. Then we gave ourselves over to television, like so many others around the world, even though these events were happening only a mile away. We wanted to hear official word, but there was just a huge absence—Bush was busy learning to read in Florida, then leading from the front in Louisiana and Nebraska. As the day wore on, we split up and regrouped, meeting folks. One guy was in the subway when smoke filled the car. Noone could breathe properly, people were screaming, and his only thought was for his dog DeNiro back in Brooklyn. From the panic of the train, he managed to call his mom on a cell to ask her to feed “DeNiro” that night, because it looked like he wouldn’t get home. A pregnant woman feared for her unborn as she fled the blasts, pushing the stroller with her baby in it as she did so. Away from these heart-rending tales from strangers, there was the fear: good grief, what horrible price would the US Government extract for this, and who would be the overt and covert agents and targets of that suffering? What blood-lust would this generate? What would be the pattern of retaliation and counter-retaliation? What would become of civil rights and cultural inclusiveness? So a jumble of emotions came forward, I assume in all of us. Anger was not there for me, just intense sorrow, shock, and fear, and the desire for intimacy. Network television appeared to offer me that, but in an ultimately unsatisfactory way. For I think I saw the end-result of reality TV that day. I have since decided to call this ‘emotionalization’—network TV’s tendency to substitute analysis of US politics and economics with a stress on feelings. Of course, powerful emotions have been engaged by this horror, and there is value in addressing that fact and letting out the pain. I certainly needed to do so. But on that day and subsequent ones, I looked to the networks, traditional sources of current-affairs knowledge, for just that—informed, multi-perspectival journalism that would allow me to make sense of my feelings, and come to a just and reasoned decision about how the US should respond. I waited in vain. No such commentary came forward. Just a lot of asinine inquiries from reporters that were identical to those they pose to basketballers after a game: Question—‘How do you feel now?’ Answer—‘God was with me today.’ For the networks were insistent on asking everyone in sight how they felt about the end of las torres gemelas. In this case, we heard the feelings of survivors, firefighters, viewers, media mavens, Republican and Democrat hacks, and vacuous Beltway state-of-the-nation pundits. But learning of the military-political economy, global inequality, and ideologies and organizations that made for our grief and loss—for that, there was no space. TV had forgotten how to do it. My principal feeling soon became one of frustration. So I headed back to where I began the day—The Guardian web site, where I was given insightful analysis of the messy factors of history, religion, economics, and politics that had created this situation. As I dealt with the tragedy of folks whose lives had been so cruelly lost, I pondered what it would take for this to stop. Or whether this was just the beginning. I knew one thing—the answers wouldn’t come from mainstream US television, no matter how full of feelings it was. And that made Toby anxious. And afraid. He still is. And so the dreams come. In one, I am suddenly furloughed from my job with an orchestra, as audience numbers tumble. I make my evening-wear way to my locker along with the other players, emptying it of bubble gum and instrument. The next night, I see a gigantic, fifty-feet high wave heading for the city beach where I’ve come to swim. Somehow I am sheltered behind a huge wall, as all the people around me die. Dripping, I turn to find myself in a media-stereotype “crack house” of the early ’90s—desperate-looking black men, endless doorways, sudden police arrival, and my earnest search for a passport that will explain away my presence. I awake in horror, to the realization that the passport was already open and stamped—racialization at work for Toby, every day and in every way, as a white man in New York City. Ana’s husband, Patrick, was at work ten miles from Manhattan when “it” happened. In the hallway, I overheard some talk about two planes crashing, but went to teach anyway in my usual morning stupor. This was just the usual chatter of disaster junkies. I didn’t hear the words, “World Trade Center” until ten thirty, at the end of the class at the college I teach at in New Jersey, across the Hudson river. A friend and colleague walked in and told me the news of the attack, to which I replied “You must be fucking joking.” He was a little offended. Students were milling haphazardly on the campus in the late summer weather, some looking panicked like me. My first thought was of some general failure of the air-traffic control system. There must be planes falling out of the sky all over the country. Then the height of the towers: how far towards our apartment in Greenwich Village would the towers fall? Neither of us worked in the financial district a mile downtown, but was Ana safe? Where on the college campus could I see what was happening? I recognized the same physical sensation I had felt the morning after Hurricane Andrew in Miami seeing at a distance the wreckage of our shattered apartment across a suburban golf course strewn with debris and flattened power lines. Now I was trapped in the suburbs again at an unbridgeable distance from my wife and friends who were witnessing the attacks first hand. Were they safe? What on earth was going on? This feeling of being cut off, my path to the familiar places of home blocked, remained for weeks my dominant experience of the disaster. In my office, phone calls to the city didn’t work. There were six voice-mail messages from my teenaged brother Alex in small-town England giving a running commentary on the attack and its aftermath that he was witnessing live on television while I dutifully taught my writing class. “Hello, Patrick, where are you? Oh my god, another plane just hit the towers. Where are you?” The web was choked: no access to newspapers online. Email worked, but no one was wasting time writing. My office window looked out over a soccer field to the still woodlands of western New Jersey: behind me to the east the disaster must be unfolding. Finally I found a website with a live stream from ABC television, which I watched flickering and stilted on the tiny screen. It had all already happened: both towers already collapsed, the Pentagon attacked, another plane shot down over Pennsylvania, unconfirmed reports said, there were other hijacked aircraft still out there unaccounted for. Manhattan was sealed off. George Washington Bridge, Lincoln and Holland tunnels, all the bridges and tunnels from New Jersey I used to mock shut down. Police actions sealed off the highways into “the city.” The city I liked to think of as the capital of the world was cut off completely from the outside, suddenly vulnerable and under siege. There was no way to get home. The phone rang abruptly and Alex, three thousand miles away, told me he had spoken to Ana earlier and she was safe. After a dozen tries, I managed to get through and spoke to her, learning that she and Toby had seen people jumping and then the second tower fall. Other friends had been even closer. Everyone was safe, we thought. I sat for another couple of hours in my office uselessly. The news was incoherent, stories contradictory, loops of the planes hitting the towers only just ready for recycling. The attacks were already being transformed into “the World Trade Center Disaster,” not yet the ahistorical singularity of the emergency “nine one one.” Stranded, I had to spend the night in New Jersey at my boss’s house, reminded again of the boundless generosity of Americans to relative strangers. In an effort to protect his young son from the as yet unfiltered images saturating cable and Internet, my friend’s TV set was turned off and we did our best to reassure. We listened surreptitiously to news bulletins on AM radio, hoping that the roads would open. Walking the dog with my friend’s wife and son we crossed a park on the ridge on which Upper Montclair sits. Ten miles away a huge column of smoke was rising from lower Manhattan, where the stunning absence of the towers was clearly visible. The summer evening was unnervingly still. We kicked a soccer ball around on the front lawn and a woman walked distracted by, shocked and pale up the tree-lined suburban street, suffering her own wordless trauma. I remembered that though most of my students were ordinary working people, Montclair is a well-off dormitory for the financial sector and high rises of Wall Street and Midtown. For the time being, this was a white-collar disaster. I slept a short night in my friend’s house, waking to hope I had dreamed it all, and took the commuter train in with shell-shocked bankers and corporate types. All men, all looking nervously across the river toward glimpses of the Manhattan skyline as the train neared Hoboken. “I can’t believe they’re making us go in,” one guy had repeated on the station platform. He had watched the attacks from his office in Midtown, “The whole thing.” Inside the train we all sat in silence. Up from the PATH train station on 9th street I came onto a carless 6th Avenue. At 14th street barricades now sealed off downtown from the rest of the world. I walked down the middle of the avenue to a newspaper stand; the Indian proprietor shrugged “No deliveries below 14th.” I had not realized that the closer to the disaster you came, the less information would be available. Except, I assumed, for the evidence of my senses. But at 8 am the Village was eerily still, few people about, nothing in the sky, including the twin towers. I walked to Houston Street, which was full of trucks and police vehicles. Tractor trailers sat carrying concrete barriers. Below Houston, each street into Soho was barricaded and manned by huddles of cops. I had walked effortlessly up into the “lockdown,” but this was the “frozen zone.” There was no going further south towards the towers. I walked the few blocks home, found my wife sleeping, and climbed into bed, still in my clothes from the day before. “Your heart is racing,” she said. I realized that I hadn’t known if I would get back, and now I never wanted to leave again; it was still only eight thirty am. Lying there, I felt the terrible wonder of a distant bystander for the first-hand witness. Ana’s face couldn’t tell me what she had seen. I felt I needed to know more, to see and understand. Even though I knew the effort was useless: I could never bridge that gap that had trapped me ten miles away, my back turned to the unfolding disaster. The television was useless: we don’t have cable, and the mast on top of the North Tower, which Ana had watched fall, had relayed all the network channels. I knew I had to go down and see the wreckage. Later I would realize how lucky I had been not to suffer from “disaster envy.” Unbelievably, in retrospect, I commuted into work the second day after the attack, dogged by the same unnerving sensation that I would not get back—to the wounded, humbled former center of the world. My students were uneasy, all talked out. I was a novelty, a New Yorker living in the Village a mile from the towers, but I was forty-eight hours late. Out of place in both places. I felt torn up, but not angry. Back in the city at night, people were eating and drinking with a vengeance, the air filled with acrid sicklysweet smoke from the burning wreckage. Eyes stang and nose ran with a bitter acrid taste. Who knows what we’re breathing in, we joked nervously. A friend’s wife had fallen out with him for refusing to wear a protective mask in the house. He shrugged a wordlessly reassuring smile. What could any of us do? I walked with Ana down to the top of West Broadway from where the towers had commanded the skyline over SoHo; downtown dense smoke blocked the view to the disaster. A crowd of onlookers pushed up against the barricades all day, some weeping, others gawping. A tall guy was filming the grieving faces with a video camera, which was somehow the worst thing of all, the first sign of the disaster tourism that was already mushrooming downtown. Across the street an Asian artist sat painting the street scene in streaky black and white; he had scrubbed out two white columns where the towers would have been. “That’s the first thing I’ve seen that’s made me feel any better,” Ana said. We thanked him, but he shrugged blankly, still in shock I supposed. On the Friday, the clampdown. I watched the Mayor and Police Chief hold a press conference in which they angrily told the stream of volunteers to “ground zero” that they weren’t needed. “We can handle this ourselves. We thank you. But we don’t need your help,” Commissioner Kerik said. After the free-for-all of the first couple of days, with its amazing spontaneities and common gestures of goodwill, the clampdown was going into effect. I decided to go down to Canal Street and see if it was true that no one was welcome anymore. So many paths through the city were blocked now. “Lock down, frozen zone, war zone, the site, combat zone, ground zero, state troopers, secured perimeter, national guard, humvees, family center”: a disturbing new vocabulary that seemed to stamp the logic of Giuliani’s sanitized and over-policed Manhattan onto the wounded hulk of the city. The Mayor had been magnificent in the heat of the crisis; Churchillian, many were saying—and indeed, Giuliani quickly appeared on the cover of Cigar Afficionado, complete with wing collar and the misquotation from Kipling, “Captain Courageous.” Churchill had not believed in peacetime politics either, and he never got over losing his empire. Now the regime of command and control over New York’s citizens and its economy was being stabilized and reimposed. The sealed-off, disfigured, and newly militarized spaces of the New York through which I have always loved to wander at all hours seemed to have been put beyond reach for the duration. And, in the new post-“9/11” post-history, the duration could last forever. The violence of the attacks seemed to have elicited a heavy-handed official reaction that sought to contain and constrict the best qualities of New York. I felt more anger at the clampdown than I did at the demolition of the towers. I knew this was unreasonable, but I feared the reaction, the spread of the racial harassment and racial profiling that I had already heard of from my students in New Jersey. This militarizing of the urban landscape seemed to negate the sprawling, freewheeling, boundless largesse and tolerance on which New York had complacently claimed a monopoly. For many the towers stood for that as well, not just as the monumental outposts of global finance that had been attacked. Could the American flag mean something different? For a few days, perhaps—on the helmets of firemen and construction workers. But not for long. On the Saturday, I found an unmanned barricade way east along Canal Street and rode my bike past throngs of Chinatown residents, by the Federal jail block where prisoners from the first World Trade Center bombing were still being held. I headed south and west towards Tribeca; below the barricades in the frozen zone, you could roam freely, the cops and soldiers assuming you belonged there. I felt uneasy, doubting my own motives for being there, feeling the blood drain from my head in the same numbing shock I’d felt every time I headed downtown towards the site. I looped towards Greenwich Avenue, passing an abandoned bank full of emergency supplies and boxes of protective masks. Crushed cars still smeared with pulverized concrete and encrusted with paperwork strewn by the blast sat on the street near the disabled telephone exchange. On one side of the avenue stood a horde of onlookers, on the other television crews, all looking two blocks south towards a colossal pile of twisted and smoking steel, seven stories high. We were told to stay off the street by long-suffering national guardsmen and women with southern accents, kids. Nothing happening, just the aftermath. The TV crews were interviewing worn-out, dust-covered volunteers and firemen who sat quietly leaning against the railings of a park filled with scraps of paper. Out on the West Side highway, a high-tech truck was offering free cellular phone calls. The six lanes by the river were full of construction machinery and military vehicles. Ambulances rolled slowly uptown, bodies inside? I locked my bike redundantly to a lamppost and crossed under the hostile gaze of plainclothes police to another media encampment. On the path by the river, two camera crews were complaining bitterly in the heat. “After five days of this I’ve had enough.” They weren’t talking about the trauma, bodies, or the wreckage, but censorship. “Any blue light special gets to roll right down there, but they see your press pass and it’s get outta here. I’ve had enough.” I fronted out the surly cops and ducked under the tape onto the path, walking onto a Pier on which we’d spent many lazy afternoons watching the river at sunset. Dust everywhere, police boats docked and waiting, a crane ominously dredging mud into a barge. I walked back past the camera operators onto the highway and walked up to an interview in process. Perfectly composed, a fire chief and his crew from some small town in upstate New York were politely declining to give details about what they’d seen at “ground zero.” The men’s faces were dust streaked, their eyes slightly dazed with the shock of a horror previously unimaginable to most Americans. They were here to help the best they could, now they’d done as much as anyone could. “It’s time for us to go home.” The chief was eloquent, almost rehearsed in his precision. It was like a Magnum press photo. But he was refusing to cooperate with the media’s obsessive emotionalism. I walked down the highway, joining construction workers, volunteers, police, and firemen in their hundreds at Chambers Street. No one paid me any attention; it was absurd. I joined several other watchers on the stairs by Stuyvesant High School, which was now the headquarters for the recovery crews. Just two or three blocks away, the huge jagged teeth of the towers’ beautiful tracery lurched out onto the highway above huge mounds of debris. The TV images of the shattered scene made sense as I placed them into what was left of a familiar Sunday afternoon geography of bike rides and walks by the river, picnics in the park lying on the grass and gazing up at the infinite solidity of the towers. Demolished. It was breathtaking. If “they” could do that, they could do anything. Across the street at tables military policeman were checking credentials of the milling volunteers and issuing the pink and orange tags that gave access to ground zero. Without warning, there was a sudden stampede running full pelt up from the disaster site, men and women in fatigues, burly construction workers, firemen in bunker gear. I ran a few yards then stopped. Other people milled around idly, ignoring the panic, smoking and talking in low voices. It was a mainly white, blue-collar scene. All these men wearing flags and carrying crowbars and flashlights. In their company, the intolerance and rage I associated with flags and construction sites was nowhere to be seen. They were dealing with a torn and twisted otherness that dwarfed machismo or bigotry. I talked to a moustachioed, pony-tailed construction worker who’d hitched a ride from the mid-west to “come and help out.” He was staying at the Y, he said, it was kind of rough. “Have you been down there?” he asked, pointing towards the wreckage. “You’re British, you weren’t in World War Two were you?” I replied in the negative. “It’s worse ’n that. I went down last night and you can’t imagine it. You don’t want to see it if you don’t have to.” Did I know any welcoming ladies? he asked. The Y was kind of tough. When I saw TV images of President Bush speaking to the recovery crews and steelworkers at “ground zero” a couple of days later, shouting through a bullhorn to chants of “USA, USA” I knew nothing had changed. New York’s suffering was subject to a second hijacking by the brokers of national unity. New York had never been America, and now its terrible human loss and its great humanity were redesignated in the name of the nation, of the coming war. The signs without a referent were being forcibly appropriated, locked into an impoverished patriotic framework, interpreted for “us” by a compliant media and an opportunistic regime eager to reign in civil liberties, to unloose its war machine and tighten its grip on the Muslim world. That day, drawn to the river again, I had watched F18 fighter jets flying patterns over Manhattan as Bush’s helicopters came in across the river. Otherwise empty of air traffic, “our” skies were being torn up by the military jets: it was somehow the worst sight yet, worse than the wreckage or the bands of disaster tourists on Canal Street, a sign of further violence yet to come. There was a carrier out there beyond New York harbor, there to protect us: the bruising, blustering city once open to all comers. That felt worst of all. In the intervening weeks, we have seen other, more unstable ways of interpreting the signs of September 11 and its aftermath. Many have circulated on the Internet, past the blockages and blockades placed on urban spaces and intellectual life. Karl-Heinz Stockhausen’s work was banished (at least temporarily) from the canon of avant-garde electronic music when he described the attack on las torres gemelas as akin to a work of art. If Jacques Derrida had described it as an act of deconstruction (turning technological modernity literally in on itself), or Jean Baudrillard had announced that the event was so thick with mediation it had not truly taken place, something similar would have happened to them (and still may). This is because, as Don DeLillo so eloquently put it in implicit reaction to the plaintive cry “Why do they hate us?”: “it is the power of American culture to penetrate every wall, home, life and mind”—whether via military action or cultural iconography. All these positions are correct, however grisly and annoying they may be. What GK Chesterton called the “flints and tiles” of nineteenth-century European urban existence were rent asunder like so many victims of high-altitude US bombing raids. As a First-World disaster, it became knowable as the first-ever US “ground zero” such precisely through the high premium immediately set on the lives of Manhattan residents and the rarefied discussion of how to commemorate the high-altitude towers. When, a few weeks later, an American Airlines plane crashed on take-off from Queens, that borough was left open to all comers. Manhattan was locked down, flown over by “friendly” bombers. In stark contrast to the open if desperate faces on the street of 11 September, people went about their business with heads bowed even lower than is customary. Contradictory deconstructions and valuations of Manhattan lives mean that September 11 will live in infamy and hyper-knowability. The vengeful United States government and population continue on their way. Local residents must ponder insurance claims, real-estate values, children’s terrors, and their own roles in something beyond their ken. New York had been forced beyond being the center of the financial world. It had become a military target, a place that was receiving as well as dispatching the slings and arrows of global fortune. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.1 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php>. Chicago Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby, "A Day That Will Live In … ?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 1 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Deer, Patrick and Miller, Toby. (2002) A Day That Will Live In … ?. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(1). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0203/adaythat.php> ([your date of access]).

Introduction There has been a long history of contact between Indigenous and Chinese people in Australia. This is clearly evident within contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities through the significant presence of individuals with Chinese ancestry. Early Indigenous-Chinese contact, however, was not sanctioned by White authorities: such contact was seen to contest White dominion and counter government anti-miscegenation policy. Through incorporating the voices of contemporary descendants of Indigenous-Chinese unions, this paper demonstrates how White authorities resorted to removal legislation to reassert their position within normative racial discourse. Contact "In these perilous times (1996), when race in Australia has suddenly become a respectable topic and there flows forth a plethora of words on and about Aborigines and Asians - the most visible, it seems, of the minorities in this land - it is perhaps pertinent to remember that, once, the two came together during those times when being descended from the Indigenous peoples of Australia was seen as a liability." (Mudrooroo 259) Contact between Indigenous and Chinese people in Australia has a history that dates back at least 150 years. Early Chinese immigration during the mid to late nineteenth century centred around regional Australia, away from areas highly populated by White colonists (Loh 3). Such regions had significant Indigenous populations, and the absence of White dominance allowed relatively frequent and free association between Indigenous people and the exclusively male Chinese immigrant (Anderson and Mitchell 32-33; Choi 13; Giese 39,46; Jack et al. 52; Keen 175; May 89; Trigger 216). Widespread hostility toward Chinese-White intercultural relationships and marriages throughout Australian society further facilitated more intimate Indigenous-Chinese relationships (May 209). Across Australia, the Indigenous and the Chinese communities suffered the common indignities of segregation from and rejection by White society. Members of both communities endured the regular embarrassment of a White Australian’s objections "to sitting amongst Chinese and aborigines watching manners which are certainly not attractive" (May 140). Newspapers of the time frequently scandalised "the many evils which were rampant among aboriginals and Chinese" ("Relief of Aboriginals" 5). The two cultures were drawn together by their common experience of marginalisation from White society: "The Chinese and the Aboriginals sort of come together You’ve only got to look at, read the history of Chinese and Aboriginal people, how they was, well, genocide too and they sort of come to live together as a people He [Chinese neighbour] didn’t know that we had Chinese in us or anything, he just treated us as, as any normal human being. It’s just that the White people didn’t like us that’s all, so he was sort of struggling through the same sort of thing." "It wasn’t, wasn’t strange to have a name like [Chinese family name]. But to be required to get passes because we were Aboriginal, we were treated as Aborigines I guess. In those early days it was like, in those developing towns, you found on the margins of those communities the Aboriginal community, the Chinese community." In general, relations between the Chinese and Indigenous communities were relatively harmonious with mutual tolerance commonplace, although isolated incidences of violence have been recorded (Anderson and Mitchell 27,36; Evans et al. 257-58; Fisher 88; Giese 25,39,48; Hornadge 21-22; Jones 59; May 209; Reynolds 41; Rolls, Sojourners: Flowers and the Wild Sea 97,194,205,289-90,487; Rolls, Citizens: Flowers and the Wild Sea 34-35,87,100,106-08,188,426). In North Queensland, Aborigines with Chinese language skills even served as translators for the Chinese in their dealings with White Australians (Anderson and Mitchell 31-32). Tensions between Indigenous and Chinese people, it seems, were of less consequence than those between Indigenous and White Australians, who at the time were actively engaged in state-sponsored cultural genocide (Tatz 49-50). Indigenous-Chinese contact led to an evolving social experience that entailed economic security and mutual benefit, including marriage and companionship, the exchange of commodities, opium and alcohol sales, and Indigenous labour for Chinese employers: "Everything was just chaos, messed up, and so I think, on Nana’s side, I can understand Nana, why she done it, because he probably had a future for her – Chinese – he just had a future for her. She knew that her family would be fed and back them days you only worried about a feed and a bed and how to survive. So I think it was a survival thing for her, because the Aboriginal nation was just chaotic and they just messed it right up, they took everybody away." "I know stories from old men from Thursday Island, actually, who used to come through Darwin in the merchant, merchant navy The Chinese and the Murris used to knock around together They’d get a chicken or something from the cargo, you know, and go offer that as a bribe to some of the Aunties to sniff around the daughters The young fellas would sniff around all the daughters, you know, so there was, you know, a very close-knit community, intermarriages all over the place." In Queensland, contact between Indigenous and Chinese people was especially widespread across the northern regions of the state, where there was a demand for rural labour, the allure of the gold rush, maritime trade, agricultural endeavours, and a steady stream of folk from the nearby Northern Territory. Chinese residents outnumbered White Australians by as much as seven to one during the late nineteenth century, as a large concentration of predominantly Chinese men was created in a region remote from the southern administrative centre and seat of government in Brisbane (Jones 56,59,69,72; Ling 19,21-22; Long 29). Challenge White dominion, however, was threatened by the growing alliances between Indigene and Chinese migrant. Indigenous-Chinese contact challenged the settler-colonised binary that had underpinned racial discourse to date, and White authorites sought to counter this threat through legislation. In Queensland, the "Aboriginals Protection and Restriction of the Sale of Opium Act 1897" rendered it illegal for Chinese men to cohabit with Aboriginal women, and forbade the employment of Indigenous people by Chinese (Evans et al. 310-11; May 293). Ganter (18) states that in the northern Burketown region, the association of resident Aborigines with local Chinese gardeners "was often a sufficient expression of immorality to warrant removal" to Mornington Island mission for the Aborigines involved. The 1897 Act had conferred regional ‘Protectors’ with peremptory powers over the lives of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders living in their jurisdiction (Blake, "A dumping ground" 1). The Protector had the authority to forcibly remove any Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person if he deemed it to be in his or her, or the local Indigenous or non-Indigenous community’s, best interest (Blake, "A dumping ground" 51, "Deported" 52-55, Guthrie 7). This authority constituted an arbitrary and absolute mechanism of control over the lives of Queensland Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders: "the threat of removal...was a salutary reminder of the necessity to respect the codes of behaviour and norms of the dominant white society the technique par excellence for maintaining and extending European hegemony" (Blake, "A dumping ground" 68, 83). The behavioural ‘codes’ and ‘norms’ of White society precluded Aboriginal contact with the Chinese; a separation constantly enforced with recourse to the act. Up to 1929, Queensland State Government removal records regularly cite reasons such as "in the habit of frequenting Chinese dens", "acting as spies for Chinese", "living an immoral life harboured by a Chinaman", "hang round Chinese farms and gardens", "frequents Chinese habitations", "frequenting Chinese quarters for opium and prostitution", and "assisting blacks to obtain drugs from Chinese" to vindicate a removal order (Queensland State Archives A/64785, A/69523). A gamut of vices, ranging from espionage, immorality, and substance abuse to drug trafficking, thus became the official pretence for separation of the subjugated groups. Anti-miscegenationist sentiment, too, saw the removal of Chinese-Aboriginal children (Ganter 13; May 210). In 1901 the Queensland Police Commissioner held that in regard to cohabitation between Chinese and Aborigines, "offspring resulting from such intercourse are by no means a desirable addition to the population" (May 210). Fear and Loss White dominion was to ultimately reassert its position at the hub of normative racial discourse, with little space available for Indigenous reflection on Chinese connections: "Dad never spoke about nothing We’re all born with all this long hair and Asian look about us, all of us in the family, and we’re trying to figure where it came from. We all look at each other and think there’s got to be some thing there I don’t know why he never spoke of it or told us about it. I couldn’t question that either, ‘cause I did ask my Grandmother but I suppose you’re to be seen and not heard in some things I probably’ll have questions on my lips for the rest of my life until I find out." "We didn’t sort of consciously grow up hearing a lot about anything Chinese, really. It’s just that we all sort of had some aspect of the look like really dark blue-black hair, slanty eyes and a couple of the family are very sort of small The stories were always censored and you only got little bits and pieces Like him being Chinese, well, I think that also you just didn’t mention We didn’t grow up hearing a lot about anything Chinese." Removal brought about disconnection and loss: "I’m only just finding it lately, the things that I didn’t know about, you know. Even me [Chinese] Granddad, I didn’t know his name until this year, really! [The mission staff] told ’em forget about your tribe, your language, everything. Think about Jesus." The historical backdrop presented above, in concert with the voices of contemporary descendants of Indigenous and Chinese unions, demonstrate how White authorities employed removal legislation to counter the challenge presented by Indigenous-Chinese contacts. For the members of these communities, who had come together under a climate of shared subjugation, this reassertion of White dominion came at great cost.

This article investigates the prosthesis of identity through the process of branding. It examines cross-cultural manifestations of this phenomena from sixth millennium BCE Syria to twelfth century Japan and Britain. From the Neolithic Era, humanity has sort to extend their identities using pictorial signs that were characteristically simple. Designed to be distinctive and instantly recognisable, the totemic symbols served to signal the origin of the bearer. Subsequently, the development of branding coincided with periods of increased in mobility both in respect to geography and social strata. This includes fifth millennium Mesopotamia, nineteenth century Britain, and America during the 1920s.There are fewer articles of greater influence on contemporary culture than A Theory of Human Motivation written by Abraham Maslow in 1943. Nearly seventy-five years later, his theories about the societal need for “belongingness” and “esteem” remain a mainstay of advertising campaigns (Maslow). Although the principles are used to sell a broad range of products from shampoo to breakfast cereal they are epitomised by apparel. This is with refence to garments and accessories bearing corporation logos. Whereas other purchased items, imbued with abstract products, are intended for personal consumption the public display of these symbols may be interpreted as a form of signalling. The intention of the wearers is to literally seek the fulfilment of the aforementioned social needs. This article investigates the use of brands as prosthesis.Coats and Crests: Identity Garnered on Garments in the Middle Ages and the Muromachi PeriodA logo, at its most basic, is a pictorial sign. In his essay, The Visual Language, Ernest Gombrich described the principle as reducing images to “distinctive features” (Gombrich 46). They represent a “simplification of code,” the meaning of which we are conditioned to recognise (Gombrich 46). Logos may also be interpreted as a manifestation of totemism. According to anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, the principle exists in all civilisations and reflects an effort to evoke the power of nature (71-127). Totemism is also a method of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166).This principle, in a form garnered on garments, is manifested in Mon Kiri. The practice of cutting out family crests evolved into a form of corporate branding in Japan during the Meiji Period (1868-1912) (Christensen 14). During the Muromachi period (1336-1573) the crests provided an integral means of identification on the battlefield (Christensen 13). The adorning of crests on armour was also exercised in Europe during the twelfth century, when the faces of knights were similarly obscured by helmets (Family Crests of Japan 8). Both Mon Kiri and “Coat[s] of Arms” utilised totemic symbols (Family Crests of Japan 8; Elven 14; Christensen 13). The mon for the imperial family (figs. 1 & 2) during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia flowers (Goin’ Japaneque). “Coat[s] of Arms” in Britain featured a menagerie of animals including lions (fig. 3), horses and eagles (Elven).The prothesis of identity through garnering symbols on the battlefield provided “safety” through demonstrating “belongingness”. This constituted a conflation of two separate “needs” in the “hierarchy of prepotency” propositioned by Maslow. Fig. 1. The mon symbolising the Imperial Family during the Muromachi Period featured chrysanthemum and paulownia. "Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>.Fig. 2. An example of the crest being utilised on a garment can be found in this portrait of samurai Oda Nobunaga. "Japan's 12 Most Famous Samurai." All About Japan. 27 Aug. 2018. 27 July 2019 <https://allabout-japan.com/en/article/5818/>.Fig. 3. A detail from the “Index of Subjects of Crests.” Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. Henry Washbourne, 1847.The Pursuit of Prestige: Prosthetic Pedigree from the Late Georgian to the Victorian Eras In 1817, the seal engraver to Prince Regent, Alexander Deuchar, described the function of family crests in British Crests: Containing The Crest and Mottos of The Families of Great Britain and Ireland; Together with Those of The Principal Cities and Heraldic Terms as follows: The first approach to civilization is the distinction of ranks. So necessary is this to the welfare and existence of society, that, without it, anarchy and confusion must prevail… In an early stage, heraldic emblems were characteristic of the bearer… Certain ordinances were made, regulating the mode of bearing arms, and who were entitled to bear them. (i-v)The partitioning of social classes in Britain had deteriorated by the time this compendium was published, with displays of “conspicuous consumption” displacing “heraldic emblems” as a primary method of status signalling (Deuchar 2; Han et al. 18). A consumerism born of newfound affluence, and the desire to signify this wealth through luxury goods, was as integral to the Industrial Revolution as technological development. In Rebels against the Future, published in 1996, Kirkpatrick Sale described the phenomenon:A substantial part of the new population, though still a distinct minority, was made modestly affluent, in some places quite wealthy, by privatization of of the countryside and the industrialization of the cities, and by the sorts of commercial and other services that this called forth. The new money stimulated the consumer demand… that allowed a market economy of a scope not known before. (40)This also reflected improvements in the provision of “health, food [and] education” (Maslow; Snow 25-28). With their “physiological needs” accommodated, this ”substantial part” of the population were able to prioritised their “esteem needs” including the pursuit for prestige (Sale 40; Maslow).In Britain during the Middle Ages laws “specified in minute detail” what each class was permitted to wear (Han et al. 15). A groom, for example, was not able to wear clothing that exceeded two marks in value (Han et al. 15). In a distinct departure during the Industrial Era, it was common for the “middling and lower classes” to “ape” the “fashionable vices of their superiors” (Sale 41). Although mon-like labels that were “simplified so as to be conspicuous and instantly recognisable” emerged in Europe during the nineteenth century their application on garments remained discrete up until the early twentieth century (Christensen 13-14; Moore and Reid 24). During the 1920s, the French companies Hermes and Coco Chanel were amongst the clothing manufacturers to pioneer this principle (Chaney; Icon).During the 1860s, Lincolnshire-born Charles Frederick Worth affixed gold stamped labels to the insides of his garments (Polan et al. 9; Press). Operating from Paris, the innovation was consistent with the introduction of trademark laws in France in 1857 (Lopes et al.). He would become known as the “Father of Haute Couture”, creating dresses for royalty and celebrities including Empress Eugene from Constantinople, French actress Sarah Bernhardt and Australian Opera Singer Nellie Melba (Lopes et al.; Krick). The clothing labels proved and ineffective deterrent to counterfeit, and by the 1890s the House of Worth implemented other measures to authenticate their products (Press). The legitimisation of the origin of a product is, arguably, the primary function of branding. This principle is also applicable to subjects. The prothesis of brands, as totemic symbols, assisted consumers to relocate themselves within a new system of population distribution (Levi-Strauss 166). It was one born of commerce as opposed to heraldry.Selling of Self: Conferring Identity from the Neolithic to Modern ErasIn his 1817 compendium on family crests, Deuchar elaborated on heraldry by writing:Ignoble birth was considered as a stain almost indelible… Illustrious parentage, on the other hand, constituted the very basis of honour: it communicated peculiar rights and privileges, to which the meaner born man might not aspire. (v-vi)The Twinings Logo (fig. 4) has remained unchanged since the design was commissioned by the grandson of the company founder Richard Twining in 1787 (Twining). In addition to reflecting the heritage of the family-owned company, the brand indicated the origin of the tea. This became pertinent during the nineteenth century. Plantations began to operate from Assam to Ceylon (Jones 267-269). Amidst the rampant diversification of tea sources in the Victorian era, concerns about the “unhygienic practices” of Chinese producers were proliferated (Wengrow 11). Subsequently, the brand also offered consumers assurance in quality. Fig. 4. The Twinings Logo reproduced from "History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>.The term ‘brand’, adapted from the Norse “brandr”, was introduced into the English language during the sixteenth century (Starcevic 179). At its most literal, it translates as to “burn down” (Starcevic 179). Using hot elements to singe markings onto animals been recorded as early as 2700 BCE in Egypt (Starcevic 182). However, archaeologists concur that the modern principle of branding predates this practice. The implementation of carved seals or stamps to make indelible impressions of handcrafted objects dates back to Prehistoric Mesopotamia (Starcevic 183; Wengrow 13). Similar traditions developed during the Bronze Age in both China and the Indus Valley (Starcevic 185). In all three civilisations branding facilitated both commerce and aspects of Totemism. In the sixth millennium BCE in “Prehistoric” Mesopotamia, referred to as the Halaf period, stone seals were carved to emulate organic form such as animal teeth (Wengrow 13-14). They were used to safeguard objects by “confer[ring] part of the bearer’s personality” (Wengrow 14). They were concurrently applied to secure the contents of vessels containing “exotic goods” used in transactions (Wengrow 15). Worn as amulets (figs. 5 & 6) the seals, and the symbols they produced, were a physical extension of their owners (Wengrow 14).Fig. 5. Recreation of stamp seal amulets from Neolithic Mesopotamia during the sixth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49.1 (2008): 14.Fig. 6. “Lot 25Y: Rare Syrian Steatite Amulet – Fertility God 5000 BCE.” The Salesroom. 27 July 2019 <https://www.the-saleroom.com/en-gb/auction-catalogues/artemis-gallery-ancient-art/catalogue-id-srartem10006/lot-a850d229-a303-4bae-b68c-a6130005c48a>. Fig. 7. Recreation of stamp seal designs from Mesopotamia from the late fifth to fourth millennium BCE. Wengrow, David. "Prehistories of Commodity Branding." Current Anthropology 49. 1 (2008): 16.In the following millennia, the seals would increase exponentially in application and aesthetic complexity (fig. 7) to support the development of household cum cottage industries (Wengrow 15). In addition to handcrafts, sealed vessels would transport consumables such as wine, aromatic oils and animal fats (Wengrow 18). The illustrations on the seals included depictions of rituals undertaken by human figures and/or allegories using animals. It can be ascertained that the transition in the Victorian Era from heraldry to commerce, from family to corporation, had precedence. By extension, consumers were able to participate in this process of value attribution using brands as signifiers. The principle remained prevalent during the modern and post-modern eras and can be respectively interpreted using structuralist and post-structuralist theory.Totemism to Simulacrum: The Evolution of Advertising from the Modern to Post-Modern Eras In 2011, Lisa Chaney wrote of the inception of the Coco Chanel logo (fig. 8) in her biography Chanel: An Intimate Life: A crucial element in the signature design of the Chanel No.5 bottle is the small black ‘C’ within a black circle set as the seal at the neck. On the top of the lid are two more ‘C’s, intertwined back to back… from at least 1924, the No5 bottles sported the unmistakable logo… these two ‘C’s referred to Gabrielle, – in other words Coco Chanel herself, and would become the logo for the House of Chanel. Chaney continued by describing Chanel’s fascination of totemic symbols as expressed through her use of tarot cards. She also “surrounded herself with objects ripe with meaning” such as representations of wheat and lions in reference prosperity and to her zodiac symbol ‘Leo’ respectively. Fig. 8. No5 Chanel Perfume, released in 1924, featured a seal-like logo attached to the bottle neck. “No5.” Chanel. 25 July 2019 <https://www.chanel.com/us/fragrance/p/120450/n5-parfum-grand-extrait/>.Fig. 9. This illustration of the bottle by Georges Goursat was published in a women’s magazine circa 1920s. “1921 Chanel No5.” Inside Chanel. 26 July 2019 <http://inside.chanel.com/en/timeline/1921_no5>; “La 4éme Fête de l’Histoire Samedi 16 et dimache 17 juin.” Ville de Perigueux. Musée d’art et d’archéologie du Périgord. 28 Mar. 2018. 26 July 2019 <https://www.perigueux-maap.fr/category/archives/page/5/>. This product was considered the “financial basis” of the Chanel “empire” which emerged during the second and third decades of the twentieth century (Tikkanen). Chanel is credited for revolutionising Haute Couture by introducing chic modern designs that emphasised “simplicity and comfort.” This was as opposed to the corseted highly embellished fashion that characterised the Victorian Era (Tikkanen). The lavish designs released by the House of Worth were, in and of themselves, “conspicuous” displays of “consumption” (Veblen 17). In contrast, the prestige and status associated with the “poor girl” look introduced by Chanel was invested in the story of the designer (Tikkanen). A primary example is her marinière or sailor’s blouse with a Breton stripe that epitomised her ascension from café singer to couturier (Tikkanen; Burstein 8). This signifier might have gone unobserved by less discerning consumers of fashion if it were not for branding. Not unlike the Prehistoric Mesopotamians, this iteration of branding is a process which “confer[s]” the “personality” of the designer into the garment (Wengrow 13 -14). The wearer of the garment is, in turn, is imbued by extension. Advertisers in the post-structuralist era embraced Levi-Strauss’s structuralist anthropological theories (Williamson 50). This is with particular reference to “bricolage” or the “preconditioning” of totemic symbols (Williamson 173; Pool 50). Subsequently, advertising creatives cum “bricoleur” employed his principles to imbue the brands with symbolic power. This symbolic capital was, arguably, transferable to the product and, ultimately, to its consumer (Williamson 173).Post-structuralist and semiotician Jean Baudrillard “exhaustively” critiqued brands and the advertising, or simulacrum, that embellished them between the late 1960s and early 1980s (Wengrow 10-11). In Simulacra and Simulation he wrote,it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum. (6)The symbolic power of the Chanel brand resonates in the ‘profound reality’ of her story. It is efficiently ‘denatured’ through becoming simplified, conspicuous and instantly recognisable. It is, as a logo, physically juxtaposed as simulacra onto apparel. This simulacrum, in turn, effects the ‘profound reality’ of the consumer. In 1899, economist Thorstein Veblen wrote in The Theory of the Leisure Class:Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods it the means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure… costly entertainments, such as potlatch or the ball, are peculiarly adapted to serve this end… he consumes vicariously for his host at the same time that he is witness to the consumption… he is also made to witness his host’s facility in etiquette. (47)Therefore, according to Veblen, it was the witnessing of “wasteful” consumption that “confers status” as opposed the primary conspicuous act (Han et al. 18). Despite television being in its experimental infancy advertising was at “the height of its powers” during the 1920s (Clark et al. 18; Hill 30). Post-World War I consumers, in America, experienced an unaccustomed level of prosperity and were unsuspecting of the motives of the newly formed advertising agencies (Clark et al. 18). Subsequently, the ‘witnessing’ of consumption could be constructed across a plethora of media from the newly emerged commercial radio to billboards (Hill viii–25). The resulting ‘status’ was ‘conferred’ onto brand logos. Women’s magazines, with a legacy dating back to 1828, were a primary locus (Hill 10).Belonging in a Post-Structuralist WorldIt is significant to note that, in a post-structuralist world, consumers do not exclusively seek upward mobility in their selection of brands. The establishment of counter-culture icon Levi-Strauss and Co. was concurrent to the emergence of both The House of Worth and Coco Chanel. The Bavarian-born Levi Strauss commenced selling apparel in San Francisco in 1853 (Levi’s). Two decades later, in partnership with Nevada born tailor Jacob Davis, he patented the “riveted-for-strength” workwear using blue denim (Levi’s). Although the ontology of ‘jeans’ is contested, references to “Jene Fustyan” date back the sixteenth century (Snyder 139). It involved the combining cotton, wool and linen to create “vestments” for Geonese sailors (Snyder 138). The Two Horse Logo (fig. 10), depicting them unable to pull apart a pair of jeans to symbolise strength, has been in continuous use by Levi Strauss & Co. company since its design in 1886 (Levi’s). Fig. 10. The Two Horse Logo by Levi Strauss & Co. has been in continuous use since 1886. Staff Unzipped. "Two Horses. One Message." Heritage. Levi Strauss & Co. 1 July 2011. 25 July 2019 <https://www.levistrauss.com/2011/07/01/two-horses-many-versions-one-message/>.The “rugged wear” would become the favoured apparel amongst miners at American Gold Rush (Muthu 6). Subsequently, between the 1930s – 1960s Hollywood films cultivated jeans as a symbol of “defiance” from Stage Coach staring John Wayne in 1939 to Rebel without A Cause staring James Dean in 1955 (Muthu 6; Edgar). Consequently, during the 1960s college students protesting in America (fig. 11) against the draft chose the attire to symbolise their solidarity with the working class (Hedarty). Notwithstanding a 1990s fashion revision of denim into a diversity of garments ranging from jackets to skirts, jeans have remained a wardrobe mainstay for the past half century (Hedarty; Muthu 10). Fig. 11. Although the brand label is not visible, jeans as initially introduced to the American Goldfields in the nineteenth century by Levi Strauss & Co. were cultivated as a symbol of defiance from the 1930s – 1960s. It documents an anti-war protest that occurred at the Pentagon in 1967. Cox, Savannah. "The Anti-Vietnam War Movement." ATI. 14 Dec. 2016. 16 July 2019 <https://allthatsinteresting.com/vietnam-war-protests#7>.In 2003, the journal Science published an article “Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion” (Eisenberger et al.). The cross-institutional study demonstrated that the neurological reaction to rejection is indistinguishable to physical pain. Whereas during the 1940s Maslow classified the desire for “belonging” as secondary to “physiological needs,” early twenty-first century psychologists would suggest “[social] acceptance is a mechanism for survival” (Weir 50). In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard wrote: Today abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal… (1)In the intervening thirty-eight years since this document was published the artifice of our interactions has increased exponentially. In order to locate ‘belongness’ in this hyperreality, the identities of the seekers require a level of encoding. Brands, as signifiers, provide a vehicle.Whereas in Prehistoric Mesopotamia carved seals, worn as amulets, were used to extend the identity of a person, in post-digital China WeChat QR codes (fig. 12), stored in mobile phones, are used to facilitate transactions from exchanging contact details to commerce. Like other totems, they provide access to information such as locations, preferences, beliefs, marital status and financial circumstances. These individualised brands are the most recent incarnation of a technology that has developed over the past eight thousand years. The intermediary iteration, emblems affixed to garments, has remained prevalent since the twelfth century. Their continued salience is due to their visibility and, subsequent, accessibility as signifiers. Fig. 12. It may be posited that Wechat QR codes are a form individualised branding. Like other totems, they store information pertaining to the owner’s location, beliefs, preferences, marital status and financial circumstances. “Join Wechat groups using QR code on 2019.” Techwebsites. 26 July 2019 <https://techwebsites.net/join-wechat-group-qr-code/>.Fig. 13. Brands function effectively as signifiers is due to the international distribution of multinational corporations. This is the shopfront of Chanel in Dubai, which offers customers apparel bearing consistent insignia as the Parisian outlet at on Rue Cambon. Customers of Chanel can signify to each other with the confidence that their products will be recognised. “Chanel.” The Dubai Mall. 26 July 2019 <https://thedubaimall.com/en/shop/chanel>.Navigating a post-structuralist world of increasing mobility necessitates a rudimental understanding of these symbols. Whereas in the nineteenth century status was conveyed through consumption and witnessing consumption, from the twentieth century onwards the garnering of brands made this transaction immediate (Veblen 47; Han et al. 18). The bricolage of the brands is constructed by bricoleurs working in any number of contemporary creative fields such as advertising, filmmaking or song writing. They provide a system by which individuals can convey and recognise identities at prima facie. They enable the prosthesis of identity.ReferencesBaudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. United States: University of Michigan Press, 1994.Burstein, Jessica. Cold Modernism: Literature, Fashion, Art. United States: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012.Chaney, Lisa. Chanel: An Intimate Life. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2011.Christensen, J.A. Cut-Art: An Introduction to Chung-Hua and Kiri-E. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1989. Clark, Eddie M., Timothy C. Brock, David E. Stewart, David W. Stewart. Attention, Attitude, and Affect in Response to Advertising. United Kingdom: Taylor & Francis Group, 1994.Deuchar, Alexander. British Crests: Containing the Crests and Mottos of the Families of Great Britain and Ireland Together with Those of the Principal Cities – Primary So. London: Kirkwood & Sons, 1817.Ebert, Robert. “Great Movie: Stage Coach.” Robert Ebert.com. 1 Aug. 2011. 10 Mar. 2019 <https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-stagecoach-1939>.Elven, John Peter. The Book of Family Crests: Comprising Nearly Every Family Bearing, Properly Blazoned and Explained, Accompanied by Upwards of Four Thousand Engravings. London: Henry Washbourne, 1847.Eisenberger, Naomi I., Matthew D. Lieberman, and Kipling D. Williams. "Does Rejection Hurt? An Fmri Study of Social Exclusion." Science 302.5643 (2003): 290-92.Family Crests of Japan. California: Stone Bridge Press, 2007.Gombrich, Ernst. "The Visual Image: Its Place in Communication." Scientific American 272 (1972): 82-96.Hedarty, Stephanie. "How Jeans Conquered the World." BBC World Service. 28 Feb. 2012. 26 July 2019 <https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-17101768>. Han, Young Jee, Joseph C. Nunes, and Xavier Drèze. "Signaling Status with Luxury Goods: The Role of Brand Prominence." Journal of Marketing 74.4 (2010): 15-30.Hill, Daniel Delis. Advertising to the American Woman, 1900-1999. United States of Ame: Ohio State University Press, 2002."History of Twinings." Twinings. 24 July 2019 <https://www.twinings.co.uk/about-twinings/history-of-twinings>. icon-icon: Telling You More about Icons. 18 Dec. 2016. 26 July 2019 <http://www.icon-icon.com/en/hermes-logo-the-horse-drawn-carriage/>. Jones, Geoffrey. Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2002.Kamon (Japanese Family Crests): Ancient Key to Samurai Culture." Goin' Japaneque! 15 Nov. 2015. 27 July 2019 <http://goinjapanesque.com/05983/>. Krick, Jessa. "Charles Frederick Worth (1825-1895) and the House of Worth." Heilburnn Timeline of Art History. The Met. Oct. 2004. 23 July 2019 <https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/wrth/hd_wrth.htm>. Levi’s. "About Levis Strauss & Co." 25 July 2019 <https://www.levis.com.au/about-us.html>. Lévi-Strauss, Claude. Totemism. London: Penguin, 1969.Lopes, Teresa de Silva, and Paul Duguid. Trademarks, Brands, and Competitiveness. Abingdon: Routledge, 2010.Maslow, Abraham. "A Theory of Human Motivation." British Journal of Psychiatry 208.4 (1942): 313-13.Moore, Karl, and Susan Reid. "The Birth of Brand: 4000 Years of Branding History." Business History 4.4 (2008).Muthu, Subramanian Senthikannan. Sustainability in Denim. Cambridge Woodhead Publishing, 2017.Polan, Brenda, and Roger Tredre. The Great Fashion Designers. Oxford: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.Pool, Roger C. Introduction. Totemism. New ed. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.Press, Claire. Wardrobe Crisis: How We Went from Sunday Best to Fast Fashion. Melbourne: Schwartz Publishing, 2016.Sale, K. Rebels against the Future: The Luddites and Their War on the Industrial Revolution: Lessons for the Computer Age. Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1996.Snow, C.P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959. Snyder, Rachel Louise. Fugitive Denim: A Moving Story of People and Pants in the Borderless World of Global Trade. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008.Starcevic, Sladjana. "The Origin and Historical Development of Branding and Advertising in the Old Civilizations of Africa, Asia and Europe." Marketing 46.3 (2015): 179-96.Tikkanen, Amy. "Coco Chanel." Encyclopaedia Britannica. 19 Apr. 2019. 25 July 2019 <https://www.britannica.com/biography/Coco-Chanel>.Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the Evolution of Institutions. London: Macmillan, 1975.Weir, Kirsten. "The Pain of Social Rejection." American Psychological Association 43.4 (2012): 50.Williamson, Judith. Decoding Advertisements: Ideology and Meaning in Advertising. Ideas in Progress. London: Boyars, 1978.

This paper provides embedded, reflective practice-based insight arising from my experience collaborating to produce online and print-on-demand editions of a magazine showcasing the photography of members of haphazart! Contemporary Abstracts group (hereafter referred to as haphazart!). The group’s online visual, textual and activity-based practices via the photo sharing social networking site Flickr are portrayed as achieving cohesive visual identity. Stylistic analysis of pictures in support of this claim is not attempted. Rather negotiation, that Elliot has previously described in M/C Journal as innate in collaboration, is identified as the unifying factor. However, the collaborators’ adherence to Flickr’s communication platform proves problematic in the editorial context. Some technical incoherence with possible broader cultural implications is encountered during the process of repurposing images from screen to print. A Scan of Relevant Literature The photographic gaze perceives and captures objects which seem to ‘carry within them ready-made’ a work of art. But the reminiscences of the gaze are only made possible by knowing and associating with groups that define a tradition. The list of valorised subjects is not actually defined with reference to a culture, but rather by familiarity with a limited group. (Chamboredon 144) As part of the array of socio-cultural practices afforded by Web 2.0 interoperability, sites of produsage (Bruns) are foci for studies originating in many disciplines. Flickr provides a rich source of data that researchers interested in the interface between the technological and the social find useful to analyse. Access to the Flickr application programming interface enables quantitative researchers to observe a variety of means by which information is propagated, disseminated and shared. Some findings from this kind of research confirm the intuitive. For example, Negoecsu et al. find that “a large percentage of users engage in sharing with groups and that they do so significantly” ("Analyzing Flickr Groups" 425). They suggest that Flickr’s Groups feature appears to “naturally bring together two key aspects of social media: content and relations.” They also find evidence for what they call hyper-groups, which are “communities consisting of groups of Flickr groups” ("Flickr Hypergroups" 813). Two separate findings from another research team appear to contradict each other. On one hand, describing what they call “social cascades,” Cha et al. claim that “content in the form of ideas, products, and messages spreads across social networks like a virus” ("Characterising Social Cascades"). Yet in 2009 they claim that homocity and reciprocity ensure that “popularity of pictures is localised” ("Measurement-Driven Analysis"). Mislove et al. reflect that the affordances of Flickr influence the growth patterns they observe. There is optimism shared by some empiricists that through collation and analysis of Flickr tag data, the matching of perceptual structures of images and image annotation techniques will yield ontology-based taxonomy useful in automatic image annotation and ultimately, the Semantic Web endeavour (Kennedy et al.; Su et al.; Xu et al.). Qualitative researchers using ethnographic interview techniques also find Flickr a valuable resource. In concluding that the photo sharing hobby is for many a “serious leisure” activity, Cox et al. propose that “Flickr is not just a neutral information system but also value laden and has a role within a wider cultural order.” They also suggest that “there is genuinely greater scope for individual creativity, releasing the individual to explore their own identity in a way not possible with a camera club.” Davies claims that “online spaces provide an arena where collaboration over meanings can be transformative, impacting on how individuals locate themselves within local and global contexts” (550). She says that through shared ways of describing and commenting on images, Flickrites develop a common criticality in their endeavour to understand images, each other and their world (554).From a psychologist’s perspective, Suler observes that “interpersonal relationships rarely form and develop by images alone” ("Image, Word, Action" 559). He says that Flickr participants communicate in three dimensions: textual (which he calls “verbal”), visual, and via the interpersonal actions that the site affords, such as Favourites. This latter observation can surely be supplemented by including the various games that groups configure within the constraints of the discussion forums. These often include submissions to a theme and voting to select a winning image. Suler describes the place in Flickr where one finds identity as one’s “cyberpsychological niche” (556). However, many participants subscribe to multiple groups—45.6% of Flickrites who share images share them with more than 20 groups (Negoescu et al., "Analyzing Flickr Groups" 420). Is this a reflection of the existence of the hyper-groups they describe (2009) or, of the ranging that people do in search of a niche? It is also probable that some people explore more than a singular identity or visual style. Harrison and Bartell suggest that there are more interesting questions than why users create media products or what motivates them to do so: the more interesting questions center on understanding what users will choose to do ultimately with [Web2.0] capabilities [...] in what terms to define the success of their efforts, and what impact the opportunity for individual and collaborative expression will have on the evolution of communicative forms and character. (167) This paper addresseses such questions. It arises from a participatory observational context which differs from that of the research described above. It is intended that a different perspective about online group-based participation within the Flickr social networking matrix will avail. However, it will be seen that the themes cited in this introductory review prove pertinent. Context As a university teacher of a range of subjects in the digital media field, from contemporary photomedia to social media to collaborative multimedia practice, it is entirely appropriate that I embed myself in projects that engage, challenge and provide me with relevant first-hand experience. As an academic I also undertake and publish research. As a practicing new media artist I exhibit publically on a regular basis and consider myself semi-professional with respect to this activity. While there are common elements to both approaches to research, this paper is written more from the point of view of ‘reflective practice’ (Holmes, "Reconciling Experimentum") rather than ‘embedded ethnography’ (Pink). It is necessarily and unapologetically reflexive. Abstract Photography Hyper-Group A search of all Flickr groups using the query “abstract” is currently likely to return around 14,700 results. However, only in around thirty of them does the group name, its stated rules and, the stream of images that flow through the pool arguably reflect a sense of collective concept and aesthetic that is coherently abstract. This loose complex of groups comprises a hyper-group. Members of these groups often have co-memberships, reciprocal contacts, and regularly post images to a range of groups and comment on others’ posts to be found throughout. Given that one of Flickr’s largest groups, Black and White, currently has around 131,150 members and hosts 2,093,241 items in its pool, these abstract special interest groups are relatively small. The largest, Abstract Photos, has 11,338 members and hosts 89,306 items in its pool. The group that is the focus of this paper, haphazart!, currently has 2,536 members who have submitted 53,309 items. The group pool is more like a constantly flowing river because the most recently added images are foremost. Older images become buried in an archive of pages which cannot be reverse accessed at a rate greater than the seven pages linked from a current view. A member’s presence is most immediate through images posted to a pool. This structural feature of Flickr promotes a desire for currency; a need to post regularly to maintain presence. Negotiating Coherence to the Abstract The self-managing social dynamics in groups has, as Suler proposes to be the case for individuals, three dimensions: visual, textual and action. A group integrates the diverse elements, relationships and values which cumulatively constitute its identity with contributions from members in these dimensions. First impressions of that identity are usually derived from the group home page which consists of principal features: the group name, a selection of twelve most recent posts to the pool, some kind of description, a selection of six of the most recent discussion topics, and a list of rules (if any). In some of these groups, what is considered to constitute an abstract photographic image is described on the group home page. In some it is left to be contested and becomes the topic of ongoing forum debates. In others the specific issue is not discussed—the images are left to speak for themselves. Administrators of some groups require that images are vetted for acceptance. In haphazart! particular administrators dutifully delete from the pool on a regular basis any images that they deem not to comply with the group ethic. Whether reasons are given or not is left to the individual prosecutor. Mostly offending images just disappear from the group pool without trace. These are some of the ways that the coherence of a group’s visual identity is established and maintained. Two groups out of the abstract photography hyper-group are noteworthy in that their discussion forums are particularly active. A discussion is just the start of a new thread and may have any number of posts under it. At time of writing Abstract Photos has 195 discussions and haphazart! — the most talkative by this measure—has 333. Haphazart! invites submissions of images to regularly changing themes. There is always lively and idiosyncratic banter in the forum over the selection of a theme. To be submitted an image needs to be identified by a specific theme tag as announced on the group home page. The tag can be added by the photographer themselves or by anyone else who deems the image appropriate to the theme. An exhibition process ensues. Participant curators search all Flickr items according to the theme tag and select from the outcome images they deem to most appropriately and abstractly address the theme. Copies of the images together with comments by the curators are posted to a dedicated discussion board. Other members may also provide responses. This activity forms an ongoing record that may serve as a public indicator of the aesthetic that underlies the group’s identity. In Abstract Photos there is an ongoing discussion forum where one can submit an image and request that the moderators rule as to whether or not the image is ‘abstract’. The same group has ongoing discussions labelled “Hall of Appropriate” where worthy images are reposted and celebrated and, “Hall of Inappropriate” where images posted to the group pool have been removed and relegated because abstraction has been “so far stretched from its definition that it now resides in a parallel universe” (Askin). Reasons are mostly courteously provided. In haphazart! a relatively small core of around twelve group members regularly contribute to the group discussion board. A curious aspect of this communication is that even though participants present visually with a ‘buddy icon’ and most with a screen name not their real name, it is usual practice to address each other in discussions by their real Christian names, even when this is not evident in a member’s profile. This seems to indicate a common desire for authenticity. The makeup of the core varies from time to time depending on other activities in a member’s life. Although one or two may be professionally or semi-professionally engaged as photographers or artists or academics, most of these people would likely consider themselves to be “serious amateurs” (Cox). They are internationally dispersed with bias to the US, UK, Europe and Australia. English is the common language though not the natural tongue of some. The age range is approximately 35 to 65 and the gender mix 50/50. The group is three years old. Where Do We Go to from Here? In early January 2009 the haphazart! core was sparked into a frenzy of discussion by a post from a member headed “Where do we go to from here?” A proposal was mooted to produce a ‘book’ featuring images and texts representative of the group. Within three days a new public group with invited membership dedicated to the idea had been established. A smaller working party then retreated to a private Flickr group. Four months later Issue One of haphazart! magazine was available in print-on-demand and online formats. Following however is a brief critically reflective review of some of the collaborative curatorial, editorial and production processes for Issue Two which commenced in early June 2009. Most of the team had also been involved with Issue One. I was the only newcomer and replaced the person who had undertaken the design for Issue One. I was not provided access to the prior private editorial ruminations but apparently the collaborative curatorial and editorial decision-making practices the group had previously established persisted, and these took place entirely within the discussion forums of a new dedicated private Flickr group. Over a five-month period there were 1066 posts in 54 discussions concerning matters such as: change of format from the previous; selection of themes, artists and images; conduct of and editing of interviews; authoring of texts; copyright and reproduction. The idiom of those communications can be described as: discursive, sporadic, idiosyncratic, resourceful, collegial, cooperative, emphatic, earnest and purposeful. The selection process could not be said to follow anything close to a shared manifesto, or articulation of style. It was established that there would be two primary themes: the square format and contributors’ use of colour. Selection progressed by way of visual presentation and counter presentation until some kind of consensus was reached often involving informal votes of preference. Stretching the Limits of the Flickr Social Tools The magazine editorial collaborators continue to use the facilities with which they are familiar from regular Flickr group participation. However, the strict vertically linear format of the Flickr discussion format is particularly unsuited to lengthy, complex, asynchronous, multithreaded discussion. For this purpose it causes unnecessary strain, fatigue and confusion. Where images are included, the forums have set and maximum display sizes and are not flexibly configured into matrixes. Images cannot readily be communally changed or moved about like texts in a wiki. Likewise, the Flickrmail facility is of limited use for specialist editorial processes. Attachments cannot be added. This opinion expressed by a collaborator in the initial, open discussion for Issue One prevailed among Issue Two participants: do we want the members to go to another site to observe what is going on with the magazine? if that’s ok, then using google groups or something like that might make sense; if we want others to observe (and learn from) the process - we may want to do it here [in Flickr]. (Valentine) The opinion appears socially constructive; but because the final editorial process and production processes took place in a separate private forum, ultimately the suggested learning between one issue and the next did not take place. During Issue Two development the reluctance to try other online collaboration tools for the selection processes requiring visual comparative evaluation of images and trials of sequencing adhered. A number of ingenious methods of working within Flickr were devised and deployed and, in my opinion, proved frustratingly impractical and inefficient. The digital layout, design, collation and formatting of images and texts, all took place on my personal computer using professional software tools. Difficulties arose in progressively sharing this work for the purposes of review, appraisal and proofing. Eventually I ignored protests and insisted the team review demonstrations I had converted for sharing in Google Documents. But, with only one exception, I could not tempt collaborators to try commenting or editing in that environment. For example, instead of moving the sequence of images dynamically themselves, or even typing suggestions directly into Google Documents, they would post responses in Flickr. To Share and to Hold From the first imaginings of Issue One the need to have as an outcome something in one’s hands was expressed and this objective is apparently shared by all in the haphazart! core as an ongoing imperative. Various printing options have been nominated, discussed and evaluated. In the end one print-on-demand provider was selected on the basis of recommendation. The ethos of haphazart! is clearly not profit-making and conflicts with that of the printing organisation. Presumably to maintain an incentive to purchase the print copy online preview is restricted to the first 15 pages. To satisfy the co-requisite to make available the full 120 pages for free online viewing a second host that specialises in online presentation of publications is also utilised. In this way haphazart! members satisfy their common desires for sharing selected visual content and ideas with an online special interest audience and, for a physical object of art to relish—with all the connotations of preciousness, fetish, talisman, trophy, and bookish notions of haptic pleasure and visual treasure. The irony of publishing a frozen chunk of the ever-flowing Flickriver, whose temporally changing nature is arguably one of its most interesting qualities, is not a consideration. Most of them profess to be simply satisfying their own desire for self expression and would eschew any critical judgement as to whether this anarchic and discursive mode of operation results in a coherent statement about contemporary photographic abstraction. However there remains a distinct possibility that a number of core haphazart!ists aspire to transcend: popular taste; the discernment encouraged in camera clubs; and, the rhetoric of those involved professionally (Bourdieu et al.); and seek to engage with the “awareness of illegitimacy and the difficulties implied by the constitution of photography as an artistic medium” (Chamboredon 130). Incoherence: A Technical Note My personal experience of photography ranges from the filmic to the digital (Holmes, "Bridging Adelaide"). For a number of years I specialised in facsimile graphic reproduction of artwork. In those days I became aware that films were ‘blind’ to the psychophysical affect of some few particular paint pigments. They just could not be reproduced. Even so, as I handled the dozens of images contributed to haphazart!2, converting them from the pixellated place where Flickr exists to the resolution and gamut of the ink based colour space of books, I was surprised at the number of hue values that exist in the former that do not translate into the latter. In some cases the affect is subtle so that judicious tweaking of colour levels or local colour adjustment will satisfy discerning comparison between the screenic original and the ‘soft proof’ that simulates the printed outcome. In other cases a conversion simply does not compute. I am moved to contemplate, along with Harrison and Bartell (op. cit.) just how much of the experience of media in the shared digital space is incomparably new? Acknowledgement Acting on the advice of researchers experienced in cyberethnography (Bruckman; Suler, "Ethics") I have obtained the consent of co-collaborators to comment freely on proceedings that took place in a private forum. They have been given the opportunity to review and suggest changes to the account. References Askin, Dean (aka: dnskct). “Hall of Inappropriate.” Abstract Photos/Discuss/Hall of Inappropriate, 2010. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.flickr.com/groups/abstractphotos/discuss/72157623148695254/>. Bourdieu, Pierre, Luc Boltanski, Robert Castel, Jean-Claude Chamboredeon, and Dominique Schnapper. Photography: A Middle-Brow Art. 1965. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990. Bruckman, Amy. Studying the Amateur Artist: A Perspective on Disguising Data Collected in Human Subjects Research on the Internet. 2002. 12 Jan. 2010 ‹http://www.nyu.edu/projects/nissenbaum/ethics_bru_full.html>. Bruns, Axel. “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production.” Proceedings: Cultural Attitudes towards Communication and Technology 2006. Perth: Murdoch U, 2006. 275–84. ———, and Mark Bahnisch. Social Media: Tools for User-Generated Content. 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The article presents the preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research (geological and geospatial studies, archaeological excavations, salt production experiments, and ethnographic survey) carried out during 2016-2019, in the site and hybrid saltscape of Băile Figa, well known for its remarkable environmental, ancient and current salt exploitation evidence. Besides, the article aims to evaluate the contribution of the recent research to a better understanding of the environmental context of the site and ancient salt production technology in the Inner Carpathian region. Also, it focuses on the hybrid character of the site and its potential to the transdisciplinary and holistic study. Environmental context. The site is rich in environmental, archaeological and ethnographic evidence. It is positioned in the salt-rich area of the Someșul Mare Basin at the northern edge of the Transylvanian Plain (Fig. 1/2; 2/1). The site is part of the landscape that was and is strongly affected by the dynamics of a salt diapir (Fig. 2/2) and deposits of salt mud, brine and halo-biotic factors, as well as by the intense human activity. Excavation. The excavation was carried out in Trench S.XV (16 m x 14 m), located in the central-southern sector of the site. The trench cut through the stream-bed and steep and high banks of the salt stream that crosses the site from south to north (Fig. 4; 5, 10). Its profile sections show four major stratigraphic units: a blackish topsoil, yellow clay mixed with gravel, salty mud, and the rock salt massif. The excavation was conducted in the mud layer, in the central sector of the trench, and in the clay-and-gravel layer found in its lateral sectors. In the area of ca. 60 square meters of the central sector, the excavation has reached the rock salt massif (Fig. 7-11). The excavation in the trench has uncovered rich evidence for Late Bronze Age salt production: seven interconnected features and around one hundred artifacts. The vast majority of the finds have been uncovered in the mud layer. The uncovered features included five timber structures surviving in the salt mud layer, as well as a ditch and a pit dug in the rock salt massif. Feature 1-XV-2013 (Fig. 12; 14/1) is a structure that includes a cone-shaped wattle-lined pit surrounded by a roundish wattle-made fence. The pit cuts through the mud up to the rock salt massif. Its rock salt bottom was sectioned by a ditch, 0.4-0.5 m wide and over 0.9 m deep. It seems that first, by rather extensive digging, the soil and mud were removed down to the salt massif. Then, a ditch, about 5 m long, 0.4 m wide and over 0.9 m deep (see below), was dug in the rock, from east to west. After that, a cone-shaped outer framework made of wattle (D maximal: 1.2 m, D minimal: 0.4 m, H: 1.8 m) was placed over the ditch, narrow end down. After that, the empty space around the framework was filled with mud. Then the pit was surrounded by a roundish wattle fence. A 1.6 m long massive rope made of three twisted threads (Clematis vitalba) has been found in the ditch (Fig. 41). Four samples taken from the wattle framework have produced five dates which fall between 2821±24 and 2778±26 BP. Feature 2-XV-2013 (Fig. 13) was uncovered in the northern part of the trench, on the right side of the stream, between feature 1-XV-2013 (see above) and the north edge of the trench. It was a rectilinear fence, 3.6 m long, built of vertical planks, split troughs, and channelled pieces, pushed into the mud down to the rock salt massif. Three fragments of the troughs from the fence were dendrochronologically dated to the period between 996 and 980 BC. Feature 1-XV-2015 (Fig. 14) was uncovered in the central-southern part of the trench. It was a corridor, 2.5 m long and 1 m wide, oriented E – W, made of two parallel rectilinear alignments of massive upright poles driven into the mud. One of its poles was at the same time part of the fence of the Feature 1-XV-2013. The corridor, on the base of three samples, has been radiocarbon-dated between 2870±32 and 2718±30 BP. Feature 1-XV-2018 (Fig. 15-17) was partially uncovered in the north-west part of the trench, about 3.5 m west of the stream. It is a 5 m long fence, oriented S – N, made of vertical planks, stakes (Fig. 17/2), and a split trough (Fig. 17/1), stuck into the mud, and four horizontal planks linking them to each other (Fig.17/2). Not dated. Feature 2-XV-2018 (Fig. 18; 19/1) was partially uncovered in the western part of the trench, in the rock salt massif. It is a roundish pit (over 2.5 x 1.8 m) with irregular edges, ca. 1.7 m deep below the salt massif surface. Not dated. Feature 3-XV-2018 (Fig. 19; 20) was uncovered in the central part of the trench. It was a ditch dug in the salt massif, 0.4 to 0.8 m wide, over 0.9 m deep, and about 4 m long. It cuts through the bottom of feature 1-XV-2013 (Fig. 12/2) and links it to the feature 2-XV-2018. Not dated. Feature 4-XV-2018 (Fig. 19/1; 20-22) was uncovered in the south-east corner of the trench, covering about 4 x 4 m, and consisted of a cluster of parallel beams laying on the salt massif, and a few vertical poles. The feature continues eastwards and southwards beyond the sides of the trench. On the base of three samples, it was radiocarbon-dated between 2856±31 and 2817±30 BP. Artifacts. We found some 100 artifacts in Trench S.XV during the excavation seasons, between 2016 and 2019. Most of them were made of wood, 1 of hemp (?), and 3 of stone (basalt). The wooden artifacts include 31 component pieces and fragments of trough bodies (Fig. 24-27), 17 channelled pieces (Fig. 28-30), 2 shovels (Fig. 33), 12 paddles (Fig. 31; 32), 4 mallets (Fig. 34/2,3), an L-shaped haft for a socketedaxe (Fig. 34/1), 2 pans (Fig. 35), a bowl (Fig. 36), fragments of 2 ladders (Fig. 37), 3 knife-shaped tools (Fig. 38/2,3), 11 rods with pointed end (Fig. 38/4), 4 loops made of twisted twigs (Fig. 40), a massive rope made of three twisted threads (Clematis vitalba) (Fig. 41), and 5 wedges. One of the artifacts found was made of plant material, possibly hemp: a small twisted cord (it may come from a peg inserted in the trough hole). Stone (basalt) artifacts include 2 mining hammers (mining tools) with engraved grooves aimed to fix the bindings (Fig. 44/1,3), an ovoid-shaped object with many percussion marks at its thicker end (Fig. 44/2). The chronology of the finds. In 2018 4 samples (wattle) from the Feature 1-XV-2013 were dated at Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art / Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. In 2019 some of the timber features (1-XV-2015 and 4-XV-2018) and wooden artifacts (the ladder, the troughs nos. 4 and 5 and some others) were radiocarbon dated by “Horia Hulubei” National Institute for Research and Development in Physics and Nuclear Engineering. Most of the dates fall between 1000 – 900 cal BC. Just one date (a wooden bowl) falls between ca. 1419-1262 cal BC (Tabels 1, 2, 3). The structures and most of the artifacts uncovered in S.XV date to ca. XI-IX centuries cal BC and seem to have been part of a complex production system aimed at brine and rock salt processing. Differential distribution of finds across the site. The research has revealed differential distribution of finds across the site. Thus, the evidence dating to ca. 2300 – 2000 cal BC (a pit dug in the rock massif and pottery), 1600 – 1400 cal BC (a wattle-built structure and wooden troughs), and 400 – 180 cal BC (timber-lined shaft, a wooden ladder and pottery) is mainly concentrated in the southern sector of the site. In exchange, the finds dating to ca. 1400 – 1100 cal BC have mainly been uncovered in the south-central part of the site (timber structures) and northern part of the site (pottery). The evidence dating to about 1050 – 850 cal BC covers two distinct areas: the south-central and northern sectors of the site. While about thirty fragmented troughs have been found in the south-central sector, no one object of this kind has been found in the northern sector. There are also differences concerning the timber structures between these sectors of the site. These strongly suggest that in XI – IX centuries cal BC, at least two different and complementary production areas were active in the site. Salt production experiments. The experiments on salt production, using faithful replicas of Late Bronze Age artifacts uncovered in trenches S.I and S.XV – troughs, channelled pieces, mallets, wedges, stone mining hammers, etc. – aimed to obtain from the different source material – rock salt massif, brine, and mud – various forms of salt: lumps of rock salt, fine salt, and highly concentrated and pure brine. The experiments showed the technical validity of several techniques. The most effective were as follows: 1. Detaching lumps of rock salt from the massif. By means of jets of fresh water directed with the troughs (along the twisted cords fitted in the perforations of the sticks that went through the pegs which were fixed in the holes at the base of the trough) depressions were simultaneously created in the rock salt at ten to twenty spots, 10 to 15 cm apart and 7 to 12 cm deep. This process took few hours (Fig. 45/1). It was noticed that each hole generated one to three cracks in the salt massif, around 1 m long and 5 to 10 cm deep. The holes and cracks allowed the insertion of wooden wedges. By hitting them with heavy wooden mallets, the wedges were pushed down to ca. 20 cm deep. Finally, using hooked sticks, many blocks of rock salt could be detached from the massif. The larger blocks were easily broken by stone hammers (mining tools). 2. Producing small pieces of salt and fine salt from the rock salt massif. The first stages of the process were identical to the previously described. After the holes and cracks were created, the rock salt mass was beaten with stone hammers (mining tools) along the cracks and holes, so that small pieces of salt, as well as wet and soft fine salt, were easily separated from the mass. Thus, about 50 kilograms of fine salt were collected in 30 minutes during the experiment (Fig. 45/2). 3. Boiling brine in the troughs with hot stones and drawing off the brine. Stones heated as much as possible in a fire were immersed in the brine with which the trough was filled, thus bringing it to the boil (Fig. 46). The boiling continued until the salt begun to crystallize. After that, the trough, full of highly concentrated brine, was left motionless for several hours. The insoluble impurities of the brine sedimented according to their specific weight: the lightest of them floated to the top, while the heaviest (metals and minerals) settled on the bottom. Above the sediment lying on the bottom of the trough and under that at the top remained a rather thick layer of fairly clean brine. During the experiments, the lower sediment has never reached 3 cm in thickness. The wider tops of the plugs that were inserted into the holes found at the bottom of the trough, were at least 3 cm high. Because of this, the upper edges of the plugs remained above the sediment on the bottom of the trough. We then slightly raised the long sticks that were tightly inserted into the axial holes of the plugs, which in turn tightly closed the holes in the trough’s bottom. The sticks were fixed and maintained in a slightly raised position by a kind of pliers – half split twigs – set transversely over the trough opening. In this way, the brine was allowed to drain easily into channelled pieces set under the trough. The brine then flowed through the channelled pieces to the next trough(s). The process could be repeated in the next trough(s) until the salt makers would get a fairly clean and highly concentrated brine. Ethnographic survey. Băile Figa and its surroundings are places where the evidence for ethnographic research, of what is commonly called ‘the traditional salt civilization’, can still be found. In every ancient salt production archaeological site known in Romania, without any exception, the current folk salt exploitation is still in progress. The latter offers to these sites a valuable research potential, almost unique in Europe, for the ethnoarchaeological research. The ethnographic survey has attested a number of aspects of the present-day folk ways of exploiting brine, rock salt, salt mud, and halophytic vegetation, as well as other traditional practices and customs related to these resources. Brine folk exploitation. The most exploited saline occurrence at Băile Figa is currently brine. Brine is taken directly from the numerous springs filling the central salty stream valley (Fig. 48/1). Then, it is loaded into plastic drums of 50 to 200 litres and transported by carts to the neighbouring villages (Fig. 48/2). The locals told us that, in the past, the brine was transported in large, cone-shaped barrels, called “bote mari”, of 60 litres, made of softwood boards connected to each other with circles of hazel twigs (Fig. 49/5), in smaller containers, of approx. 20 litres, called “barbânțe” (Fig. 49/3), as well as in smaller containers hollowed out of tree trunks and called “bote” (Fig. 49/2). The most remote localities, to which the brine from Băile Figa is transported, are situated at a distance of 11 km. But most people that currently get brine from Băile Figa live within a maximum perimeter of 6 km. Brine is mainly used for preserving meat, bacon (especially around the winter holidays), and vegetables. Sometimes the brine is used for health care purposes, mainly against colds, rheumatic pains, skin diseases or circulatory deficiencies, either on the spot or at home. In the 1960s and 1970s, the locals built two brine ponds and used them for health cure baths. Rock salt folk exploitation. According to some elderly locals, until 1989, the rock salt was periodically extracted at Băile Figa, by manual or mechanized digging of vertical pits. It was mainly used to supplement the feed of domestic animals in the individual households, sheepfolds (Fig. 50) and collective farms or state agricultural enterprises. Sometimes, the locals crushed and grinded salt lumps. In some households in the village of Figa, we have identified and documented some primitive millstones used in salt grinding (Fig. 49/1). Ground salt is added to animal feed and very rarely in human food, people being sure that this kind of salt can harm their health. Sapropelic mud folk exploitation. The ethnographic surveys have documented the traditional exploitation of sapropelic mud at Băile Figa. It is found only in some limited spots of the salt stream valley. The spots with small deposits of sapropelic mud are known only by “connoisseurs” who, among the clues, are guided by a specific smell. The sapropelic mud is used for health care purposes, especially for the treatment of rheumatic diseases. The mud is applied, either on most of the body or only on the parts affected by pain. Sometimes, the mud is applied to animal wounds, for disinfection and drying. Mud-based treatments are done both on-site and at home. Shepherding. Until the building, during 2007 – 2011, of the leisure resort, Băile Figa was the favourite place for grazing for the local domestic animals (sheep, cows, buffaloes, and horses). The animals, according to the information delivered by the shepherds, loved salt grass and brine (Fig. 49/2). Shepherds tried to prevent the animals from drinking brine from the springs because their fondness of the salty taste made them to drink it in unhealthy quantities, so that they could “swell” and die. Beekeeping. In the northern sector of the salt stream valley, at the surface of the soil, in the summer of 2018, a primitive beehive made of a hollowed-out oak trunk was discovered (Fig. 48/4). So far, as we can know, it is a unique find of this sort in a saline context.

Lincolnshire, England. The crowd cheer when the ball breaks loose. From one end of the field to the other, the players chase, their snouts hovering just above the grass. It’s not a case of four legs being better, rather a novel way to attract customers to the Woodside Wildlife and Falconry Park. During the matches, volunteers are drawn from the crowd to hold goal posts at either end of the run the pigs usually race on. With five pigs playing, two teams of two and a referee, and a ball designed to leak feed as it rolls (Stevenson) the ten-minute competition is fraught with tension. While the pig’s contributions to “the beautiful game” (Fish and Pele 7) have not always been so obvious, it could be argued that specific parts of the animal have had a significant impact on a sport which, despite calls to fall into line with much of the rest of the world, people in Australia (and the US) are more likely to call soccer. The Football Precursors to the modern football were constructed around an inflated pig’s bladder (Price, Jones and Harland). Animal hide, usually from a cow, was stitched around the bladder to offer some degree of stability, but the bladder’s irregular and uneven form made for unpredictable movement in flight. This added some excitement and affected how ball games such as the often violent, calico matches in Florence, were played. In the early 1970s, the world’s oldest ball was discovered during a renovation in Stirling Castle, Scotland. The ball has a pig’s bladder inside its hand-stitched, deer-hide outer. It was found in the ceiling above the bed in, what was then Mary Queens of Scots’ bedroom. It has since been dated to the 1540s (McGinnes). Neglected and left in storage until the late 1990s, the ball found pride of place in an exhibition in the Smiths Art Gallery and Museum, Stirling, and only gained worldwide recognition (as we will see later) in 2006. Despite confirmed interest in a number of sports, there is no evidence to support Mary’s involvement with football (Springer). The deer-hide ball may have been placed to gather and trap untoward spirits attempting to enter the monarch’s sleep, or simply left by accident and forgotten (McGinnes in Springer). Mary, though, was not so fortunate. She was confined and forgotten, but only until she was put to death in 1587. The Executioner having gripped her hair to hold his prize aloft, realised too late it was a wig and Mary’s head bounced and rolled across the floor. Football Development The pig’s bladder was the central component in the construction of the football for the next three hundred years. However, the issue of the ball’s movement (the bounce and roll), the bladder’s propensity to burst when kicked, and an unfortunate wife’s end, conspired to push the pig from the ball before the close of the nineteenth-century. The game of football began to take its shape in 1848, when JC Thring and a few colleagues devised the Cambridge Rules. This compromised set of guidelines was developed from those used across the different ‘ball’ games played at England’s elite schools. The game involved far more kicking, and the pig’s bladders, prone to bursting under such conditions, soon became impractical. Charles Goodyear’s invention of vulcanisation in 1836 and the death of prestigious rugby and football maker Richard Lindon’s wife in 1870 facilitated the replacement of the animal bladder with a rubber-based alternative. Tragically, Mr Lindon’s chief inflator died as a result of blowing up too many infected pig’s bladders (Hawkesley). Before it closed earlier this year (Rhoads), the US Soccer Hall of Fame displayed a rubber football made in 1863 under the misleading claim that it was the oldest known football. By the late 1800s, professional, predominantly Scottish play-makers had transformed the game from its ‘kick-and-run’ origins into what is now called ‘the passing game’ (Sanders). Football, thanks in no small part to Scottish factory workers (Kay), quickly spread through Europe and consequently the rest of the world. National competitions emerged through the growing need for organisation, and the pig-free mass production of balls began in earnest. Mitre and Thomlinson’s of Glasgow were two of the first to make and sell their much rounder balls. With heavy leather panels sewn together and wrapped around a thick rubber inner, these balls were more likely to retain shape—a claim the pig’s bladder equivalent could not legitimately make. The rubber-bladdered balls bounced more too. Their weight and external stitching made them more painful to header, but also more than useful for kicking and particularly for passing from one player to another. The ball’s relatively quick advancement can thereafter be linked to the growth and success of the World Cup Finals tournament. Before the pig re-enters the fray, it is important to glance, however briefly, at the ball’s development through the international game. World Cup Footballs Pre-tournament favourites, Spain, won the 2010 FIFA World Cup, playing with “an undistorted, perfectly spherical ball” (Ghosh par. 7), the “roundest” ever designed (FIFA par.1). Their victory may speak to notions of predictability in the ball, the tournament and the most lucrative levels of professional endeavour, but this notion is not a new one to football. The ball’s construction has had an influence on the way the game has been played since the days of Mary Queen of Scots. The first World Cup Final, in 1930, featured two heavy, leather, twelve-panelled footballs—not dissimilar to those being produced in Glasgow decades earlier. The players and officials of Uruguay and Argentina could not agree, so they played the first half with an Argentine ball. At half-time, Argentina led by two goals to one. In the second half, Uruguay scored three unanswered goals with their own ball (FIFA). The next Final was won by Italy, the home nation in 1934. Orsi, Italy’s adopted star, poked a wildly swerving shot beyond the outstretched Czech keeper. The next day Orsi, obligated to prove his goal was not luck or miracle, attempted to repeat the feat before an audience of gathered photographers. He failed. More than twenty times. The spin on his shot may have been due to the, not uncommon occurrence, of the ball being knocked out of shape during the match (FIFA). By 1954, the Federation Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) had sought to regulate ball size and structure and, in 1958, rigorously tested balls equal to the demands of world-class competition. The 1950s also marked the innovation of the swerving free kick. The technique, developed in the warm, dry conditions of the South American game, would not become popular elsewhere until ball technology improved. The heavy hand-stitched orb, like its early counterparts, was prone to water absorption, which increased the weight and made it less responsive, particularly for those playing during European winters (Bray). The 1970 World Cup in Mexico saw football progress even further. Pele, arguably the game’s greatest player, found his feet, and his national side, Brazil, cemented their international football prominence when they won the Jules Rimet trophy for the third time. Their innovative and stylish use of the football in curling passes and bending free kicks quickly spread to other teams. The same World Cup saw Adidas, the German sports goods manufacturer, enter into a long-standing partnership with FIFA. Following the competition, they sold an estimated six hundred thousand match and replica tournament footballs (FIFA). The ball, the ‘Telstar’, with its black and white hexagonal panels, became an icon of the modern era as the game itself gained something close to global popularity for the first time in its history. Over the next forty years, the ball became incrementally technologically superior. It became synthetic, water-resistant, and consistent in terms of rebound and flight characteristics. It was constructed to be stronger and more resistant to shape distortion. Internal layers of polyutherane and Syntactic Foam made it lighter, capable of greater velocity and more responsive to touch (FIFA). Adidas spent three years researching and developing the 2006 World Cup ball, the ‘Teamgeist’. Fourteen panels made it rounder and more precise, offering a lower bounce, and making it more difficult to curl due to its accuracy in flight. At the same time, audiences began to see less of players like Roberto Carlos (Brazil and Real Madrid CF) and David Beckham (Manchester United, LA Galaxy and England), who regularly scored goals that challenged the laws of physics (Gill). While Adidas announced the 2006 release of the world’s best performing ball in Berlin, the world’s oldest was on its way to the Museum fur Volkerkunde in Hamburg for the duration of the 2006 FIFA World Cup. The Mary Queen of Scot’s ball took centre spot in an exhibit which also featured a pie stand—though not pork pies—from Hibernian Football Club (Strang). In terms of publicity and raising awareness of the Scots’ role in the game’s historical development, the installation was an unrivalled success for the Scottish Football Museum (McBrearty). It did, however, very little for the pig. Heads, not Tails In 2002, the pig or rather the head of a pig, bounced and rolled back into football’s limelight. For five years Luis Figo, Portugal’s most capped international player, led FC Barcelona to domestic and European success. In 2000, he had been lured to bitter rivals Real Madrid CF for a then-world record fee of around £37 million (Nash). On his return to the Catalan Camp Nou, wearing the shimmering white of Real Madrid CF, he was showered with beer cans, lighters, bottles and golf balls. Among the objects thrown, a suckling pig’s head chimed a psychological nod to the spear with two sharp ends in William Golding’s story. Play was suspended for sixteen minutes while police tried to quell the commotion (Lowe). In 2009, another pig’s head made its way into football for different reasons. Tightly held in the greasy fingers of an Orlando Pirates fan, it was described as a symbol of the ‘roasting’ his team would give the Kaiser Chiefs. After the game, he and his friend planned to eat their mascot and celebrate victory over their team’s most reviled competitors (Edwards). The game ended in a nil-all draw. Prior to the 2010 FIFA World Cup, it was not uncommon for a range of objects that European fans might find bizarre, to be allowed into South African league matches. They signified luck and good feeling, and in some cases even witchcraft. Cabbages, known locally for their medicinal qualities, were very common—common enough for both sets of fans to take them (Edwards). FIFA, an organisation which has more members than the United Nations (McGregor), impressed their values on the South African Government. The VuVuZela was fine to take to games; indeed, it became a cultural artefact. Very little else would be accepted. Armed with their economy-altering engine, the world’s most watched tournament has a tendency to get what it wants. And the crowd respond accordingly. Incidentally, the ‘Jabulani’—the ball developed for the 2010 tournament—is the most consistent football ever designed. In an exhaustive series of tests, engineers at Loughborough University, England, learned, among other things, the added golf ball-like grooves on its surface made the ball’s flight more symmetrical and more controlled. The Jabulani is more reliable or, if you will, more predictable than any predecessor (Ghosh). Spanish Ham Through support from their Governing body, the Real Federación Española de Fútbol, Spain have built a national side with experience, and an unparalleled number of talented individuals, around the core of the current FC Barcelona club side. Their strength as a team is founded on the bond between those playing on a weekly basis at the Catalan club. Their style has allowed them to create and maintain momentum on the international stage. Victorious in the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship and undefeated in their run through the qualifying stages into the World Cup Finals in South Africa, they were tournament favourites before a Jabulani was rolled into touch. As Tim Parks noted in his New York Review of Books article, “The Shame of the World Cup”, “the Spanish were superior to an extent one rarely sees in the final stages of a major competition” (2010 par. 15). They have a “remarkable ability to control, hold and hide the ball under intense pressure,” and play “a passing game of great subtlety [ ... to] patiently wear down an opposing team” (Parks par. 16). Spain won the tournament having scored fewer goals per game than any previous winner. Perhaps, as Parks suggests, they scored as often as they needed to. They found the net eight times in their seven matches (Fletcher). This was the first time that Spain had won the prestigious trophy, and the first time a European country has won the tournament on a different continent. In this, they have broken the stranglehold of superpowers like Germany, Italy and Brazil. The Spanish brand of passing football is the new benchmark. Beautiful to watch, it has grace, flow and high entertainment value, but seems to lack something of an organic nature: that is, it lacks the chance for things to go wrong. An element of robotic aptitude has crept in. This occurred on a lesser scale across the 2010 FIFA World Cup finals, but it is possible to argue that teams and players, regardless of nation, have become interchangeable, that the world’s best players and the way they play have become identikits, formulas to be followed and manipulated by master tacticians. There was a great deal of concern in early rounds about boring matches. The world’s media focused on an octopus that successfully chose the winner of each of Germany’s matches and the winner of the final. Perhaps, in shaping the ‘most’ perfect ball and the ‘most’ perfect football, the World Cup has become the most predictable of tournaments. In Conclusion The origins of the ball, Orsi’s unrepeatable winner and the swerving free kick, popular for the best part of fifty years, are worth remembering. These issues ask the powers of football to turn back before the game is smothered by the hunt for faultlessness. The unpredictability of the ball goes hand in hand with the game. Its flaws underline its beauty. Football has so much more transformative power than lucrative evolutionary accretion. While the pig’s head was an ugly statement in European football, it is a symbol of hope in its South African counterpart. Either way its removal is a reminder of Golding’s message and the threat of homogeneity; a nod to the absence of the irregular in the modern era. Removing the curve from the free kick echoes the removal of the pig’s bladder from the ball. The fun is in the imperfection. Where will the game go when it becomes indefectible? Where does it go from here? Can there really be any validity in claiming yet another ‘roundest ball ever’? Chip technology will be introduced. The ball’s future replacements will be tracked by satellite and digitally-fed, reassured referees will determine the outcome of difficult decisions. Victory for the passing game underlines the notion that despite technological advancement, the game has changed very little since those pioneering Scotsmen took to the field. Shouldn’t we leave things the way they were? Like the pigs at Woodside Wildlife and Falconry Park, the level of improvement seems determined by the level of incentive. The pigs, at least, are playing to feed themselves. Acknowledgments The author thanks editors, Donna Lee Brien and Adele Wessell, and the two blind peer reviewers, for their constructive feedback and reflective insights. The remaining mistakes are his own. References “Adidas unveils Golden Ball for 2006 FIFA World Cup Final” Adidas. 18 Apr. 2006. 23 Aug. 2010 . Bray, Ken. “The science behind the swerve.” BBC News 5 Jun. 2006. 19 Aug. 2010 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5048238.stm>. Edwards, Piers. “Cabbage and Roasted Pig.” BBC Fast Track Soweto, BBC News 3 Nov. 2009. 23 Aug. 2010 . FIFA. “The Footballs during the FIFA World Cup™” FIFA.com. 18 Aug. 2010 .20 Fish, Robert L., and Pele. My Life and the Beautiful Game. New York: Bantam Dell, 1977. Fletcher, Paul. “Match report on 2010 FIFA World Cup Final between Spain and Netherlands”. BBC News—Sports 12 Jul. 2010 . Ghosh, Pallab. “Engineers defend World Cup football amid criticism.” BBC News—Science and Environment 4 Jun. 2010. 19 Aug. 2010 . Gill, Victoria. “Roberto Carlos wonder goal ‘no fluke’, say physicists.” BBC News—Science and Environment 2 Sep. 2010 . Hawkesley, Simon. Richard Lindon 22 Aug. 2010 . “History of Football” FIFA.com. Classic Football. 20 Aug. 2010 . Kay, Billy. The Scottish World: A Journey into the Scottish Diaspora. London: Mainstream, 2008. Lowe, Sid. “Peace for Figo? And pigs might fly ...” The Guardian (London). 25 Nov. 2002. 20 Aug. 2010 . “Mary, Queen of Scots (r.1542-1567)”. The Official Website of the British Monarchy. 20 Jul. 2010 . McBrearty, Richard. Personal Interview. 12 Jul. 2010. McGinnes, Michael. Smiths Art Gallery and Museum. Visited 14 Jul. 2010 . McGregor, Karen. “FIFA—Building a transnational football community. University World News 13 Jun. 2010. 19 Jul. 2010 . Nash, Elizabeth. “Figo defects to Real Madrid for record £36.2m." The Independent (London) 25 Jul. 2000. 20 Aug. 2010 . “Oldest football to take cup trip” 25 Apr. 2006. 20 Jul. 2010 . Parks, Tim. “The Shame of the World Cup”. New York Review of Books 19 Aug. 2010. 23 Aug. 2010 < http://nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/aug/19/shame-world-cup/>. “Pig football scores a hit at centre.” BBC News 4 Aug. 2009. August 20 2010 . Price, D. S., Jones, R. Harland, A. R. “Computational modelling of manually stitched footballs.” Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part L. Journal of Materials: Design & Applications 220 (2006): 259-268. Rhoads, Christopher. “Forget That Trip You Had Planned to the National Soccer Hall of Fame.” Wall Street Journal 26 Jun. 2010. 22 Sep. 2010 . “Roberto Carlos Impossible Goal”. News coverage posted on You Tube, 27 May 2007. 23 Aug. 2010 . Sanders, Richard. Beastly Fury. London: Bantam, 2009. “Soccer to become football in Australia”. Sydney Morning Herald 17 Dec. 2004. 21 Aug. 2010 . Springer, Will. “World’s oldest football – fit for a Queen.” The Scotsman. 13 Mar. 2006. 19 Aug. 2010 < http://heritage.scotsman.com/willspringer/Worlds-oldest-football-fit.2758469.jp >. Stevenson, R. “Pigs Play Football at Wildlife Centre”. Lincolnshire Echo 3 Aug. 2009. 20 Aug. 2010 . Strang, Kenny. Personal Interview. 12 Jul. 2010. “The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots February 8, 1857”. Tudor History 21 Jul. 2010 http://tudorhistory.org/primary/exmary.html>. “The History of the FA.” The FA. 20 Jul. 2010 “World’s Oldest Ball”. World Cup South Africa 2010 Blog. 22 Jul. 2010 . “World’s Oldest Soccer Ball by Charles Goodyear”. 18 Mar. 2010. 20 Jul. 2010 .

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. 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Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.