Articles de revues sur le sujet « Description logics with spatial operators »

AbstractA crucial component of a medical concept representation system is the classifier. It requires features that are not sufficiently supported by current logic based formalisms like description logics and conceptual graphs. Those features are, for instance, the representation of partitive and spatial relations and their impact on sUbsumption. This paper introduces graph oriented classification operators for a concept representation language with normal forms. Emphasis is on the separation of generic and partitive relations and on the mutual interdependence of sUbsumption and part-whole. For that purpose operators are given for formal subsumption, formal part-whole, subsumptive part-whole and part-sensitive subsumption. These operators are based on the formal structure of concept descriptions and on explicitly introduced generic and partitive relationships between their constituents.

Abstract Tone mapping is extensively researched to address the issue of displaying high dynamic range (DR) scenes on low DR displays. Even though several tone-mapping operators (TMOs) exist, not all are designed for hard real time. The operator has to be capable of scaling up the spatial resolution without compromising the frame rate. The implementation of a TMO should also be simple enough to embed in low-cost platforms for imaging systems. A computationally efficient, and well accepted, class of TMOs are global ones based on histograms. This work presents a method to implement TMOs that use histograms. This method is suitable for low-cost field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), using simple components such as adders, multipliers, and random access memories, and is particularly suited for a nonlinear CMOS image sensor (CIS) operating continuously in hard real time. The authors develop a fixed-point design, validated in bit-true fashion using Xilinx and Altera tools, from a background algorithm implemented using Matlab. Our generic design uses pipelined circuits and operates with low latency. The use of a hardware description language to model our circuits guarantees portability and modularity. Moreover, the complete TMO is generated from design parameters and a design template. The architecture is robust and scales well from kilopixel to megapixel formats. The circuits achieve 30 frames per second, at high definition resolutions, while occupying only a small fraction of the available logic elements in a low-cost FPGA device.

This paper presents an approach to ontology construction pursued through the induction of concept descriptions expressed in Description Logics. The author surveys the theoretical foundations of the standard representations for formal ontologies in the Semantic Web. After stating the learning problem in this peculiar context, a FOIL-like algorithm is presented that can be applied to learn DL concept descriptions. The algorithm performs a search through a space of candidate concept definitions by means of refinement operators. This process is guided by heuristics that are based on the available examples. The author discusses related theoretical aspects of learning with the inherent incompleteness underlying the semantics of this representation. The experimental evaluation of the system DL-Foil, which implements the learning algorithm, was carried out in two series of sessions on real ontologies from standard repositories for different domains expressed in diverse description logics.

Description Logics (DLs) provide a clear and broadly accepted paradigm for modeling and reasoning about terminological knowledge. However, it has been often noted, that although DLs are well-suited for representing a single, global viewpoint on an application domain, they offer no formal grounding for dealing with knowledge pertaining to multiple heterogeneous viewpoints — a scenario ever more often approached in practical applications, e.g. concerned with reasoning over distributed knowledge sources on the Semantic Web. In this paper, we study a natural extension of DLs, in the style of two-dimensional modal logics, which supports declarative modeling of viewpoints as contexts, in the sense of McCarthy, and their semantic interoperability. The formalism is based on two-dimensional semantics, where one dimension represents a usual object domain and the other a (possibly infinite) domain of viewpoints, addressed by additional modal operators and a metalanguage, on the syntactic level. We systematically introduce a number of expressive fragments of the proposed logic, study their computational complexity and connections to related formalisms.

This paper proposes an operational approach to (1) formalize, in Description Logics (DL), the topological relations between simple regions and (2) automatically check whether a set of relations is consistent. The solution allows for the use of traditional DL reasoners (Pellet, Fact++, etc.) to check the consistency of relations and detect the sources of error. The solution does not require any specific extension of the DL or reasoner. The authors demonstrate how to apply this approach with Protégé and Fact++. Different spatial relations in agricultural and environmental applications are also provided to illustrate the possible uses of our method.

Revising knowledge bases (KBs) in description logics (DLs) in a syntax-independent manner is an important, nontrivial problem for the ontology management and DL communities. Several attempts have been made to adapt classical model-based belief revision and update techniques to DLs, but they are restricted in several ways. In particular, they do not provide operators or algorithms for general DL KB revision. The key difficulty is that, unlike propositional logic, a DL KB may have infinitely many models with complex (and possibly infinite) structures, making it difficult to define and compute revisions in terms of models. In this paper, we study general KBs in a specific DL in the DL-Lite family. We introduce the concept of features for such KBs, develop an alternative semantic characterization of KBs using features (instead of models), define two specific revision operators for KBs, and present the first algorithm for computing best approximations for syntax-independent revisions of KBs.

Sequential reactive systems are computer programs or hardware devices which process the flows of input data or control signals and output the streams of instructions or responses. When designing such systems one needs formal specification languages capable of expressing the relationships between the input and output flows. Previously, we introduced a family of such specification languages based on temporal logics $LTL$, $CTL$ and $CTL^*$ combined with regular languages. A characteristic feature of these new extensions of conventional temporal logics is that temporal operators and basic predicates are parameterized by regular languages. In our early papers, we estimated the expressive power of the new temporal logic $Reg$-$LTL$ and introduced a model checking algorithm for $Reg$-$LTL$, $Reg$-$CTL$, and $Reg$-$CTL^*$. The main issue which still remains unclear is the complexity of decision problems for these logics. In the paper, we give a complete solution to satisfiability checking and model checking problems for $Reg$-$LTL$ and prove that both problems are Pspace-complete. The computational hardness of the problems under consideration is easily proved by reducing to them the intersection emptyness problem for the families of regular languages. The main result of the paper is an algorithm for reducing the satisfiability of checking $Reg$-$LTL$ formulas to the emptiness problem for Buchi automata of relatively small size and a description of a technique that allows one to check the emptiness of the obtained automata within space polynomial of the size of input formulas.

In automotive manufacturing, quality inspection of spot welding demands excessive manual operations. Operators refer to a printed drawing of the testing body, with the inspection points marked on this drawing. Operators have to locate the matching spot on the drawing and the body manually to perform the inspection. Further more, different subsets of spots are inspected on different car bodies with a pre-determined sequence. This paper describes a system that projects visual data onto arbitrary surfaces for providing just-in-time information to a user in-situ within a physical work-cell. This system aims to reduce the inefficiencies and potential mistakes in manual inspection process. This paper discusses how spatial augmented reality and head-mount displays may be combined to display global information visible by all operators as well as personalized information to individuals. Further investigations on applying spatial augmented reality for spot welding inspections are explored, including four types of digital information projected onto the surfaces of car body parts under structured work environments: 1) Location of spot welds; 2) Inspection methods; 3) Operation Description Sheet (ODS) information; 4) Visualization of weld locating methods. Three visualization methods are used to attract operators' attention to locate the position of spot welds efficiently. This paper also proposes a method to project augmentations on objects moving along an assembly line. The proposed system allows operators becoming more effective and efficient in performing proper inspections, by providing them the required information at the required time without the need to refer to paper-based manuals or computer terminals.

AbstractWe propose a logic for reasoning about metric spaces with the induced topologies. It combines the ‘qualitative’ interior and closure operators with ‘quantitative’ operators ‘somewhere in the sphere of radius r’ including or excluding the boundary. We supply the logic with both the intended metric space semantics and a natural relational semantics, and show that the latter (i) provides finite partial representations of (in general) infinite metric models and (ii) reduces the standard ‘ε-definitions’ of closure and interior to simple constraints on relations. These features of the relational semantics suggest a finite axiomatisation of the logic and provide means to prove its EXPTIME-completeness (even if the rational numerical parameters are coded in binary). An extension with metric variables satisfying linear rational (in)equalities is proved to be decidable as well. Our logic can be regarded as a ‘well-behaved’ common denominator of logical systems constructed in temporal, spatial, and similarity-based quantitative and qualitative representation and reasoning. Interpreted on the real line (with its Euclidean metric), it is a natural fragment of decidable temporal logics for specification and verification of real-time systems. On the real plane, it is closely related to quantitative and qualitative formalisms for spatial representation and reasoning, but this time the logic becomes undecidable.

Visual thinking plays an important role in scientific reasoning. Based on the research in automating diverse reasoning tasks about dynamical systems, nonlinear controllers, kinematic mechanisms, and fluid motion, we have identified a style of visual thinking, imagistic reasoning. Imagistic reasoning organizes computations around image-like, analogue representations so that perceptual and symbolic operations can be brought to bear to infer structure and behavior. Programs incorporating imagistic reasoning have been shown to perform at an expert level in domains that defy current analytic or numerical methods. We have developed a computational paradigm, spatial aggregation, to unify the description of a class of imagistic problem solvers. A program written in this paradigm has the following properties. It takes a continuous field and optional objective functions as input, and produces high-level descriptions of structure, behavior, or control actions. It computes a multi-layer of intermediate representations, called spatial aggregates, by forming equivalence classes and adjacency relations. It employs a small set of generic operators such as aggregation, classification, and localization to perform bidirectional mapping between the information-rich field and successively more abstract spatial aggregates. It uses a data structure, the neighborhood graph, as a common interface to modularize computations. To illustrate our theory, we describe the computational structure of three implemented problem solvers -- KAM, MAPS, and HIPAIR --- in terms of the spatial aggregation generic operators by mixing and matching a library of commonly used routines.

The paper studies linear differential operators in derivatives with respect to one variable. Such operators include, in particular, operators defined on infinite prolongations of evolutionary systems of differential equations with one spatial variable. In this case, differential operators in total derivatives with respect to the spatial variable are considered. In parallel, linear differential operators with one independent variable are investigated. The known algorithms for reducing the matrix to a stepwise or diagonal form are generalized to the operator matrices of both types. These generalizations are useful at points, where the functions, into which the matrix components are divided when applying the algorithm, are nonzero.In addition, the integral operator is defined as a multi-valued operator that is the right inverse of the total derivative. Linear operators that involve both the total derivatives and the integral operator are called integro-differential. An invertible operator in the integro-differential sense is an operator for which there exists a two-sided inverse integro-differential operator. A description of scalar differential operators that are invertible in this sense is obtained. An algorithm for checking the invertibility in the integro-differential sense of a differential operator and for constructing the inverse integro-differential operator is formulated.The results of the work can be used to solve linear equations for matrix differential operators arising in the theory of evolutionary systems with one spatial variable. Such operator equations arise when describing systems that are integrable by the inverse scattering method, when calculating recursion operators, higher symmetries, conservation laws and symplectic operators, and also when solving some other problems. The proposed method for solving operator equations is based on reducing the matrices defining the operator equation to a stepwise or diagonal form and solving the resulting scalar operator equations.

TinkerType is a pragmatic framework for compact and modular description of formal systems (type systems, operational semantics, logics, etc.). A family of related systems is broken down into a set of clauses – individual inference rules – and a set of features controlling the inclusion of clauses in particular systems. Simple static checks are used to help maintain consistency of the generated systems. We present TinkerType and its implementation and describe its application to two substantial repositories of typed lambda-calculi. The first repository covers a broad range of typing features, including subtyping, polymorphism, type operators and kinding, computational effects, and dependent types. It describes both declarative and algorithmic aspects of the systems, and can be used with our tool, the TinkerType Assembler, to generate calculi either in the form of typeset collections of inference rules or as executable ML typecheckers. The second repository addresses a smaller collection of systems, and provides modularized proofs of basic safety properties.

Knowledge bases in the form of ontologies are receiving increasing attention as they allow to clearly represent both the available knowledge, which includes the knowledge in itself and the constraints imposed to it by the domain or the users. In particular, Datalog± ontologies are attractive because of their property of decidability and the possibility of dealing with the massive amounts of data in real world environments; however, as it is the case with many other ontological languages, their application in collaborative environments often lead to inconsistency related issues. In this paper we introduce the notion of incoherence regarding Datalog± ontologies, in terms of satisfiability of sets of constraints, and show how under specific conditions incoherence leads to inconsistent Datalog± ontologies. The main contribution of this work is a novel approach to restore both consistency and coherence in Datalog± ontologies. The proposed approach is based on kernel contraction and restoration is performed by the application of incision functions that select formulas to delete. Nevertheless, instead of working over minimal incoherent/inconsistent sets encountered in the ontologies, our operators produce incisions over non-minimal structures called clusters. We present a construction for consolidation operators, along with the properties expected to be satisfied by them. Finally, we establish the relation between the construction and the properties by means of a representation theorem. Although this proposal is presented for Datalog± ontologies consolidation, these operators can be applied to other types of ontological languages, such as Description Logics, making them apt to be used in collaborative environments like the Semantic Web.

The process of self-ordering in the famous Dicke model was studied in the framework of eliminating the boson variables. But the reduced description method enables us to obtain also the picture of electromagnetic field evolution provided field amplitudes and correlation functions are included into the number of reduced description parameters. In the Dicke Hamiltonian structure the interaction term includes the operators of emitter dipole moments or dipole moment density (polarization) since a spatial system is under consideration. Thus operator evolution equations are based on using such operators and their derivatives. The chain of evolution equations for averaged field amplitudes and binary correlation functions are obtained with using the statistical operator calculated in a perturbation theory in quasispin-photon interaction assumed to be small. The problem of chain decoupling does not arise since at any step we have a closed set of equations. The sets should be solved on the basis of material equations for current density and their generalizations for more complicated correlation functions. The way to constructing such equations and estimating the material parameters which are necessary for the numerical modeling of the development of correlations is discussed in the paper.

The article examines monumental memorialization of political violence in the period of communism in Bulgaria. The text reviews contemporary research presenting the topic of transitional justice, formation of victim’s identities and as part of post-communist cultural memory. A research is made of three theoretical approaches to understanding monumental memorialization – through traumatization, contestation or dangerization of memory and the social functions and meanings stemming from them. The analytical part represents a case study from Bulgaria, using ample empirical material – interviews, archive materials and other sources, part of a larger research by the author. Comparative analysis is used for description of national idiosyncrasies which is used as a basis to present their variants, temporal and spatial aspects. Social functions, political uses, interpretations, their use for reconstruction of national past and formation of national identity. A separate part of the text examines the initiators of these memorial signs – social actors, nongovernmental organizations and political parties, on which the degree of institutionalization and politization of this memory depends, as well as their use for far right radicalization. The text tracks the change of memorial landscapes and the major spatial trajectories (logics) of this post-communist topography of terror, as well as the symbolism embodied in it, combining political, traditional and religious meanings.

We define the separation of figure from ground as a visual-attribute-dependent and task-dependent representation of sensory information in higher-level visual processes. A computer model for adaptive segmentation of 2-D visual objects (Dudkin et al, 1995 Proceedings of SPIE 122) was developed in these studies. The description and separation of figure from ground are implemented by spatial frequency filters and feature detectors performing as self-organising mechanisms. The simulation of control processes caused by attention (top - down), and lateral, frequency-selective, and cross-orientation inhibition (bottom - up) determines the adaptive image processing. The first stage is the estimation of input image produced by the analysis of the spatial brightness distribution by algorithms calculating the vector of primary descriptive attributes. These results provide the synthesis of control processes based on several algorithms, each of which transforms descriptive attributes into separate control parameters. The creation of two primary descriptions: ‘sustained’ (contours) and ‘transient’ (fragments with homogeneous intensity), and the selection of feature-detection operators are governed by the complete set of control parameters. The primary descriptions allow formation of the intermediate image description in which similar elements are grouped by identical brightness, colour, spatial position, curvature, and texture according to Gestalt concepts. To divide the image into basic areas and to extract fragments which belong to a putative figure, all these descriptions are combined into the final integrated image representation. The model has been tested on various images.

A realistic description of the formation seen by an acoustic logging tool includes intrinsic attenuation, anisotropy, and spatial variations of the formation properties. These features are included in finite‐difference (FD) modeling of acoustic full waveform multipole logging. Intrinsic attenuation is included using a phenomenological model that allows for many physical causes of attenuation, including viscous fluid flow losses, to be modeled. Furthermore, the attenuation, the corresponding velocity dispersion, and the elasticity can have any type of axisymmetric anisotropy. To increase computational speed and numerical precision, high‐order FD operators that fully exploit vector processing architecture are used. The problem of using these operators near the symmetry axis in cylindrical coordinates is solved using symmetry arguments. Excellent results are obtained when comparing the calculations with the discrete wavenumber method. When correctly implemented, the FD model has the same numerical precision as the discrete wavenumber method but allows more general formations to be analyzed. Incorrect staggering of the high‐order FD scheme gives artifacts equivalent to the inclusion of a thin layer between the fluid and the formation.

Abstract Quantum computing is an inspiring technic on solving complicate problems, which shows the superiority over the classical computing. Contemporarily, the quantum-based algorithms were invented in many purposes on solving those problems. The thing is some of the algorithms were composed with oracles, which can be treated as a black box. It can be worked out/analyzed in theoretical mathematical expressions, but it can never fall in the ground without those actual implementations. Therefore, this paper will illustrate the idea and possible implementations on some quantum algorithm. Among various algorithms, this research will choose those relatively famous quantum algorithms, i.e., Deutsch-Jozsa Algorithm, Shor’s Algorithm, and Grover’s Algorithm. Different algorithms have the different intrinsic logics, which means there is no general description for all solution in this problem, but all of those can achieve the goal according to the same framework. Since those oracles are black boxes that can only be analyzed by its behavior with different cases, and then based on the behaviors and cases, and in IBM quantum platform, one can fill out the oracle by manipulate with different quantum operators. Lastly, the figures of some the possible implementation of those oracles with the three quantum algorithms will be shown in the IBM quantum platform, as well as the histograms of probability distributions that can justify the correctness of the implementations. These results shed light on guiding further exploration of the design and analysis on quantum algorithms.

Quick variability description is an important component for zone management practices. Precision farming requires topping up of only the nutrients that are lacking in the soil to attain the highest yield with the least input. The apparent soil electrical conductivity (ECa) sensor is a useful tool in mapping to identify areas of contrasting soil properties. In nonsaline soils,ECais a substitute measurement for soil texture. It is directly related to both water holding capacity and Cation Exchange Capacity (CEC), which are key ingredients of productivity. This sensor measures theECaacross a field quickly and gives detailed soil features (one-second interval) with few operators. Hence, a dense sampling is possible and therefore a high-resolutionECamap can be produced. This study aims to characterize the variability of soilECawithin a Malaysian paddy field with respect to the spatial and seasonal variability. The study was conducted at Block C, Sawah Sempadan, Selangor, Malaysia, for three continuous seasons. SoilECawas collected after harvesting period. The results showed that deepECavisualized the pattern of the former river routes clearly as continuous lines (about 45 m width) at the northern and central regions of the study area. This exploration has shown different maps with higher contrast as compared to the existing soil series map for the study area. Seasonal variability test showed that theECathat was acquired during rainy season (collected after harvest in December to January) has the highest value as compared to another season.

Action modeling is an important skill for agents that must perform tasks in novel domains. Previous work on action modeling has focused on learning STRIPS operators in discrete, relational domains. There has also been a separate vein of work in continuous function approximation for use in optimal control in robotics. Most real world domains are grounded in continuous dynamics but also exhibit emergent regularities at an abstract relational level of description. These two levels of regularity are often difficult to capture using a single action representation and learning method. In this paper we describe a system that combines discrete and continuous action modeling techniques in the Soar cognitive architecture. Our system accepts a continuous state representation from the environment and derives a relational state on top of it using spatial relations. The dynamics over each representation is learned separately using two simple instance-based algorithms. The predictions from the individual models are then combined in a way that takes advantage of the information captured by each representation. We empirically show that this combined model is more accurate and generalizable than each of the individual models in a spatial navigation domain.

This paper presents an efficient and accurate numerical technique based upon the scaled boundary finite element method for the analysis of two-dimensional, linear, second-order, boundary value problems with the domain completely described by a circular defining curve. The scaled boundary finite element formulation is established in a general framework allowing single-field and multi-field problems, bounded and unbounded bodies, distributed body source, and general boundary conditions to be treated in a unified fashion. The conventional polar coordinates together with a properly selected scaling center are utilized to achieve the exact description of the circular defining curve, exact geometry of the domain, and exact spatial differential operators. The computational performance of the implemented procedure is then fully investigated for various scenarios within the context of geo-mechanics applications. Keywords: exact geometry; geo-mechanics; multi-field problems; SBFEM; scaled boundary coordinates.

A critical problem with existing computer-based geometric modeling is the labor intensive task involved in specifying data input for the description of three-dimensional (3-D) objects. This paper describes a new, 3-D input system aimed at alleviating this problem. It is based on the use of a three-dimensional digitizer for the direct input of spatial coordinates, and an intelligent interactive user interface. The intent of this system is to create a high level, intelligent interface between the designer and a geometric solid modeler which would lighten the designer's burden in performing arduous 3-D geometric description tasks. The user interface is developed around the Knowledge Craft expert system building tool, using the rule-based Carnegie Representation Language OPS5 (CRL-OPS). The system uses schematic networks or frames and production rules to encode knowledge about geometric primitive digitization methods, object feature operators, solid modeler requirements, and input command functions. It also employs a forward-chaining inference strategy to direct the knowledge. This ensures that only a minimal amount of valid data entry is required by the user. However, if excessive data is entered the intelligent interface has the capability to extract the required information. As a result, the solid modeler can automatically create the appropriate object “primitive” or the specific object “feature” upon recognition by the expert system. It will be demonstrated that these capabilities can simplify the 3-D model description process.

In classical, AGM-style belief change, it is assumed that the underlying logic contains classical propositional logic. This is clearly a limiting assumption, particularly in Artificial Intelligence. Consequently there has been recent interest in studying belief change in approaches where the full expressivity of classical propositional logic is not obtained. In this paper we investigate belief contraction in Horn knowledge bases. We point out that the obvious extension to the Horn case, involving Horn remainder sets as a starting point, is problematic. Not only do Horn remainder sets have undesirable properties, but also some desirable Horn contraction functions are not captured by this approach. For Horn belief set contraction, we develop an account in terms of a model-theoretic characterisation involving weak remainder sets. Maxichoice and partial meet Horn contraction is specified, and we show that the problems arising with earlier work are resolved by these approaches. As well, constructions of the specific operators and sets of postulates are provided, and representation results are obtained. We also examine Horn package contraction, or contraction by a set of formulas. Again, we give a construction and postulate set, linking them via a representation result. Last, we investigate the closely-related notion of forgetting in Horn clauses. This work is arguably interesting since Horn clauses have found widespread use in AI; as well, the results given here may potentially be extended to other areas which make use of Horn-like reasoning, such as logic programming, rule-based systems, and description logics. Finally, since Horn reasoning is weaker than classical reasoning, this work sheds light on the foundations of belief change

AbstractThis paper contributes to the growing body of literature that engages with ontological scholarship on fisheries management and governance, and more generally, to debates on environmental governance. It argues that fisheries governance is an ontological challenge that raises questions of culture, equity, legitimacy and inclusion/exclusion, requiring more context-sensitive and politically aware fisheries governance approaches. By engaging with the concept of political ontology, and drawing from empirical research carried out in Ireland’s offshore islands, five ontological assumptions are identified that underpin Irish fisheries governance and management policies and practices and categorised as social-historical, ecological, geographical, technocratic and markets-driven. Articulating and examining these assumptions provide insights into why policy objectives aimed at supporting small-scale fisheries and their communities may, in practice, not be effective when they are operationalised within a governance paradigm designed around the realities of large-scale, full-time, highly mobile and more economically productive operators. Despite the efforts of ontologically disobedient islanders, the enactment of these ontological assumptions into the dominant world of fisheries governance inhibits the emergence of possible worlds that would enact Irish island inshore fisheries through island logics. The paper concludes that the squeeze on Ireland’s island inshore fishers is not simply spatial, it is ontological. A dominant fisheries ontology has been created by the interplay of ontological assumptions. This dominant ontology undermines the State’s critical policy to maintain and manage Irish fisheries as a public resource in order to avoid the concentration of fishing opportunities into the hands of large and powerful fishing interests.

AbstractOver the years, nonmonotonic rules have proven to be a very expressive and useful knowledge representation paradigm. They have recently been used to complement the expressive power of Description Logics (DLs), leading to the study of integrative formal frameworks, generally referred to ashybrid knowledge bases, where both DL axioms and rules can be used to represent knowledge. The need to use these hybrid knowledge bases in dynamic domains has called for the development of update operators, which, given the substantially different way DLs and rules are usually updated, has turned out to be an extremely difficult task. In Slota and Leite (2010b Towards Closed World Reasoning in Dynamic Open Worlds.Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, 26th Int'l. Conference on Logic Programming (ICLP'10) Special Issue10(4–6) (July), 547–564.), a first step towards addressing this problem was taken, and an update operator for hybrid knowledge bases was proposed. Despite its significance—not only for being the first update operator for hybrid knowledge bases in the literature, but also because it has some applications—this operator was defined for a restricted class of problems where only the ABox was allowed to change, which considerably diminished its applicability. Many applications that use hybrid knowledge bases in dynamic scenarios require both DL axioms and rules to be updated. In this paper, motivated by real world applications, we introduce an update operator for a large class of hybrid knowledge bases where both the DL component as well as the rule component are allowed to dynamically change. We introduce splitting sequences and splitting theorem for hybrid knowledge bases, use them to define a modular update semantics, investigate its basic properties, and illustrate its use on a realistic example about cargo imports.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to provide a deeper understanding of the relevance of shore excursions in the distribution of cruise passenger flows; an approach which has been overlooked by many studies on cruise tourism. Specifically, the paper focuses on two destinations: Barcelona, a mature cruise destination suffering from the impact of overcrowding; and Valencia, an emerging cruise destination facing the risk of future (similar) impacts. Design/methodology/approach The method used is multiple-case study with replication logic. First, web content analysis is conducted of shore excursion descriptions of the destinations selected so as to identify the itineraries, as well as the municipalities and the specific tourist attractions included in the tours. Then, word-processing tools are used to create a regional and local data set to arrange the narrative data. Finally, density maps are drawn in order to examine the different visitor flows within the tourist hinterlands from the supply perspective. Findings The results indicate that most shore excursions are concentrated in the port cities. Comparing the two destinations, the paper argues that the redistribution within the cities is not equally balanced. Nevertheless, the results also reveal that the excursions offered by local shore tourism operators (TOs) in both destinations have contributed to the expansion of the cruise tourist hinterland over a wider regional area. Research limitations/implications This paper evaluates the visitor flow distribution from a supply perspective. Hence, future studies should examine the demand dimension in order to gain a deeper understanding of the concentration intensity. Additionally, it would be worth examining not only visitors taking guided tours but also the independent ones (those who visit the destination on their own). Originality/value Despite the growing importance of cruise tourism, research on the role of local shore TOs in this sector is quite limited. One element that deserves more research attention is related to the role of shore excursions in the spatial configuration of the cruise tourist hinterland. Finally, the results obtained could also have significant implications for policy makers developing and promoting effective measures to prevent overcrowding.

The fractional advection-diffusion equations are obtained from a fractional power law for the matter flux. Diffusion processes in special types of porous media which has fractal geometry can be modelled accurately by using these equations. However, the existing nonlocal fractional derivatives seem complicated and also lose some basic properties satisfied by usual derivatives. For these reasons, local fractional calculus has recently been emerged to simplify the complexities of fractional models defined by nonlocal fractional operators. In this work, the conformable, a local, well-behaved and limit-based definition, is used to obtain a local generalized form of advection-diffusion equation. In addition, this study is devoted to give a local generalized description to the combination of diffusive flux governed by Fick?s law and the advection flux associated with the velocity field. As a result, the constitutive conformable advection-diffusion equation can be easily achieved. A Dirichlet problem for conformable advection-diffusion equation is derived by applying fractional Laplace transform with respect to time t and finite sin-Fourier transform with respect to spatial coordinate x. Two illustrative examples are presented to show the behaviours of this new local generalized model. The dependence of the solution on the fractional order of conformable derivative and the changing values of problem parameters are validated using graphics held by MATLcodes.

Abstract. A network of three tall tower measurement stations was set up in 2012 across the United Kingdom to expand measurements made at the long-term background northern hemispheric site, Mace Head, Ireland. Reliable and precise in situ greenhouse gas (GHG) analysis systems were developed and deployed at three sites in the UK with automated instrumentation measuring a suite of GHGs. The UK Deriving Emissions linked to Climate Change (UK DECC) network uses tall (165–230 m) open-lattice telecommunications towers, which provide a convenient platform for boundary layer trace gas sampling. In this paper we describe the automated measurement system and first results from the UK DECC network for CO2, CH4, N2O, SF6, CO and H2. CO2 and CH4 are measured at all of the UK DECC sites by cavity ring-down spectroscopy (CRDS) with multiple inlet heights at two of the three tall tower sites to assess for boundary layer stratification. The short-term precisions (1σ on 1 min means) of CRDS measurements at background mole fractions for January 2012 to September 2015 is < 0.05 µmol mol−1 for CO2 and < 0.3 nmol mol−1 for CH4. Repeatability of standard injections (1σ) is < 0.03 µmol mol−1 for CO2 and < 0.3 nmol mol−1 for CH4 for the same time period. N2O and SF6 are measured at three of the sites, and CO and H2 measurements are made at two of the sites, from a single inlet height using gas chromatography (GC) with an electron capture detector (ECD), flame ionisation detector (FID) or reduction gas analyser (RGA). Repeatability of individual injections (1σ) on GC and RGA instruments between January 2012 and September 2015 for CH4, N2O, SF6, CO and H2 measurements were < 2.8 nmol mol−1, < 0.4 nmol mol−1, < 0.07 pmol mol−1, < 2 nmol mol−1 and < 3 nmol mol−1, respectively. Instrumentation in the network is fully automated and includes sensors for measuring a variety of instrumental parameters such as flow, pressures, and sampling temperatures. Automated alerts are generated and emailed to site operators when instrumental parameters are not within defined set ranges. Automated instrument shutdowns occur for critical errors such as carrier gas flow rate deviations. Results from the network give good spatial and temporal coverage of atmospheric mixing ratios within the UK since early 2012. Results also show that all measured GHGs are increasing in mole fraction over the selected reporting period and, except for SF6, exhibit a seasonal trend. CO2 and CH4 also show strong diurnal cycles, with night-time maxima and daytime minima in mole fractions.

The Brazilian Amazon is part of one of the largest river systems in the world, in which the transport of cargo and passengers is commonplace. However, several accidents still occur to passenger ships, causing fatalities. Transportation occurs commonly in remote regions, where there are transport inequalities, and emergency assistance is hard to find. This can affect sustainability in communities with considerable levels of economic and social vulnerability. More information is needed about accidents involving inland transport in the Amazon, to identify the threats to ships and propose strategies for accident prevention. This paper addresses the main problems that long-distance passenger ships face in the Brazilian Amazon, presenting an integrated framework towards accident prevention. First, the present situation is characterized in terms of ship description, spatial distribution, and regulations that are applicable. Next, possible causes of passenger ship accidents are discussed, including topics of concern that should be considered in the Amazon waterways. Finally, measures to help minimize passenger ship accidents are proposed, and the social relevance is discussed. It was found that accidents in the Amazon are due to a combination of human and environmental factors. Stakeholders should strengthen the technical and legal training of ship operators. The use of new technologies for navigational aid and necessary maintenance of ships is suggested. Marine accident prevention initiatives should consider local conditions, such as environmental preservation, cultural respect, and difficulties related to navigation through the complex riverine system of the Amazon region.

The electronic and muonic hydrogen energy levels are calculated very accurately [M. L. Eides, H. Grotch, and V. Shelyuto, Phys. Rep. 342, 63 (2001)] in Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) by coupling the Dirac Equation four vector c(α, I) current covariantly with the external electromagnetic (EM) field four vector in QED’s Interactive Representation. While QED has been extraordinarily successful computationally, it presents no physical description of the electron, or other charged leptons. The QED-Physical (QED-P) theory presented in this paper is equivalent to QED in that it is based only on the four-current c(α, I) that is the reason that QED is so accurate computationally. However, QED-P describes the electron geometrically through the internal time/coordinate operators derived directly from c(α, I) with no assumptions. QED-P’s internal coordinate operators define an electron Center of Charge (CoC) point vibrating rapidly in space and time in its unique vacuum, creating the current that produces the electron’s magnetic moment and spin, and eliminating the need for “intrinsic” properties. QED-P also cuts off the photon propagator in a natural way so that the electron self-energy is finite and ad hoc renormalization procedures are not necessary. The c α-Non Exclusion Principle states that, if QED accepts c(α, I) as the electron current operator because of the very accurate hydrogen energy levels calculated, then one must also accept the QED-P electron internal spatial and time coordinate operators (ISaTCO) derived directly from c(α, I) without any other assumptions. QED-P shows the electron to be in both spin states simultaneously, and it is the external EM field that forces the electron’s spin state to be measured up or down. QED-P describes the bizarre, and very different, situation illustrated in Fig. 1 when the electron and muon are located “inside” the spatially extended proton with their CoCs orbiting the proton at the speed of light in S energy states of hydrogen, shedding some insight into the proton radius puzzle. The electron only appears to be a point particle with intrinsic properties when observed/measured from the far field. The Dirac‐Maxwell‐Wilson Equations are derived directly from the electron ISaTCO, and its EM fields “look” like they are from a point particle in far field scattering experiments in the same way the electric field from a sphere with evenly distributed charge “e” looks like a point charge with the same charge in the far field (Gauss Law). A physical basis for Quantum Entanglement is derived that can be measured experimentally.

<abstract><p>In this paper, we consider a reaction-diffusion epidemic model with nonlocal diffusion and free boundaries, which generalises the free-boundary epidemic model by Zhao et al. ^{[<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="b1">1</xref>]} by including spatial mobility of the infective host population. We obtain a rather complete description of the long-time dynamics of the model. For the reproduction number $ R_0 $ arising from the corresponding ODE model, we establish its relationship to the spreading-vanishing dichotomy via an associated eigenvalue problem. If $ R_0 \le 1 $, we prove that the epidemic vanishes eventually. On the other hand, if $ R_0 &gt; 1 $, we show that either spreading or vanishing may occur depending on its initial size. In the case of spreading, we make use of recent general results by Du and Ni ^{[<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="b2">2</xref>]} to show that finite speed or accelerated spreading occurs depending on whether a threshold condition is satisfied by the kernel functions in the nonlocal diffusion operators. In particular, the rate of accelerated spreading is determined for a general class of kernel functions. Our results indicate that, with all other factors fixed, the chance of successful spreading of the disease is increased when the mobility of the infective host is decreased, reaching a maximum when such mobility is 0 (which is the situation considered by Zhao et al. ^{[<xref ref-type="bibr" rid="b1">1</xref>]}).</p></abstract>

The QED-Physical (QED-P) theory described in four previous papers [J. H. Wilson, Phys. Essays 28, 1 (2015); 29, 402 (2016); 31, 59 (2018); 34, 17 (2021)] is combined with QED into a single theory in this paper, since both are based on the same Dirac Equation four current c(α,I). QED couples this four-vector with an external electromagnetic (EM) field and uses covariant perturbation theory to produce results that are very accurate computationally [M. L. Eides et al., Phys. Rep. 342, 63 (2001)], except for the electron self-energy, which is infinite. The reason for QED’s accuracy is its Dirac equation velocity operator, cα, with highly unusual properties compared to classical velocity vectors. QED could not produce highly accurate answers without the 4 × 4 complex matrix cα as the electron “velocity operator.” QED-P starts with the same Dirac Equation four current used so successfully in QED, and the discrete internal spatial and time coordinate operators (ISaTCOs) are derived in QED-P to give the electron internal structure a very specific, but highly, nonclassical geometric description with no ad hoc assumptions. The QED/QED-physical (QED-P) unification theorem is stated and proved in Sec. VII. However, one should ask what new physical measurements are predicted by QED-P that are not determined by the very accurate QED? The answer is none yet, due to the very rapid fluctuation of the ISaTCOs with a period of ∼6.4 × 10−22 s. This induced electron field fluctuation is in addition to any vacuum fluctuation that exists without the electron field present. This paper presents a highly speculative, but testable, experiment, in which the ISaTCO rapid fluctuations may be confirmed indirectly as the physical basis of field quantum entanglement (QE). The electron’s ISaTCO produce a digital internal clock that’s locked out of phase with its entangled positron, and they communicate spin states at the phase speed of 2c2/vCoM. The communication of spin state information is instantaneous for vCoM = 0 but “slows down” to 4c at vCoM = 0.5c, still very fast.

Summary Multiscale methods have been developed for accurate and efficient numerical solution of flow problems in large-scale heterogeneous reservoirs. A scalable and extendible Operator-Based Multiscale Method (OBMM) is described here. OBMM is cast as a general algebraic framework. It is natural and convenient to incorporate more physics in OBMM for multiscale computation. In OBMM, two operators are constructed: prolongation and restriction. The prolongation operator is constructed by assembling the multiscale basis functions. The specific form of the restriction operator depends on the coarse-scale discretization formulation (e.g., finitevolume or finite-element). The coarse-scale pressure equation is obtained algebraically by applying the prolongation and restriction operators to the fine-scale flow equations. Solving the coarse-scale equation results in a high-quality coarse-scale pressure. The finescale pressure can be reconstructed by applying the prolongation operator to the coarse-scale pressure. A conservative fine-scale velocity field is then reconstructed to solve the transport (saturation) equation. We describe the OBMM approach for multiscale modeling of compressible multiphase flow. We show that extension from incompressible to compressible flows is straightforward. No special treatment for compressibility is required. The efficiency of multiscale formulations over standard fine-scale methods is retained by OBMM. The accuracy of OBMM is demonstrated using several numerical examples including a challenging depletion problem in a strongly heterogeneous permeability field (SPE 10). Introduction The accuracy of simulating subsurface flow relies strongly on the detailed geologic description of the porous formation. Formation properties such as porosity and permeability typically vary over many scales. As a result, it is not unusual for a detailed geologic description to require 107-108 grid cells. However, this level of resolution is far beyond the computational capability of state-of-the-art reservoir simulators (106 grid cells). Moreover, in many applications, large numbers of reservoir simulations are performed (e.g., history matching, sensitivity analysis and stochastic simulation). Thus, it is necessary to have an efficient and accurate computational method to study these highly detailed models. Multiscale formulations are very promising due to their ability to resolve fine-scale information accurately without direct solution of the global fine-scale equations. Recently, there has been increasing interest in multiscale methods. Hou and Wu (1997) proposed a multiscale finite-element method (MsFEM) that captures the fine-scale information by constructing special basis functions within each element. However, the reconstructed fine-scale velocity is not conservative. Later, Chen and Hou (2003) proposed a conservative mixed finite-element multiscale method. Another multiscale mixed finite element method was presented by Arbogast (2002) and Arbogast and Bryant (2002). Numerical Green functions were used to resolve the fine-scale information, which are then coupled with coarse-scale operators to obtain the global solution. Aarnes (2004) proposed a modified mixed finite-element method, which constructs special basis functions sensitive to the nature of the elliptic problem. Chen et al. (2003) developed a local-global upscaling method by extracting local boundary conditions from a global solution, and then constructing coarse-scale system from local solutions. All these methods considered incompressible flow in heterogeneous porous media where the pressure equation is elliptic. A multiscale finite-volume method (MsFVM) was proposed by Jenny et al. (2003, 2004, 2006) for heterogeneous elliptic problems. They employed two sets of basis functions--dual and primal. The dual basis functions are identical to those of Hou and Wu (1997), while the primal basis functions are obtained by solving local elliptic problems with Neumann boundary conditions calculated from the dual basis functions. Existing multiscale methods (Aarnes 2004; Arbogast 2002; Chen and Hou 2003; Hou and Wu 1997; Jenny et al. 2003) deal with the incompressible flow problem only. However, compressibility will be significant if a gas phase is present. Gas has a large compressibility, which is a strong function of pressure. Therefore, there can be significant spatial compressibility variations in the reservoir, and this is a challenge for multiscale modeling. Very recently, Lunati and Jenny (2006) considered compressible multiphase flow in the framework of MsFVM. They proposed three models to account for the effects of compressibility. Using those models, compressibility effects were represented in the coarse-scale equations and the reconstructed fine-scale fluxes according to the magnitude of compressibility. Motivated to construct a flexible algebraic multiscale framework that can deal with compressible multiphase flow in highly detailed heterogeneous models, we developed an operator-based multiscale method (OBMM). The OBMM algorithm is composed of four steps:constructing the prolongation and restriction operators,assembling and solving the coarse-scale pressure equations,reconstructing the fine-scale pressure and velocity fields, andsolving the fine-scale transport equations. OBMM is a general algebraic multiscale framework for compressible multiphase flow. This algebraic framework can also be extended naturally from structured to unstructured grid. Moreover, the OBMM approach may be used to employ multiscale solution strategies in existing simulators with a relatively small investment.

We derive generalised uncertainty relations (GURs) for orbital angular momentum and spin in the recently proposed smeared-space model of quantum geometry. The model implements a minimum length and a minimum linear momentum and recovers both the generalised uncertainty principle (GUP) and extended uncertainty principle (EUP), previously proposed in the quantum gravity literature, within a single formalism. In this paper, we investigate the consequences of these results for particles with extrinsic and intrinsic angular momentum and obtain generalisations of the canonical so ( 3 ) and su ( 2 ) algebras. We find that, although SO ( 3 ) symmetry is preserved on three-dimensional slices of an enlarged phase space, corresponding to a superposition of background geometries, individual subcomponents of the generalised generators obey nontrivial subalgebras. These give rise to GURs for orbital angular momentum while leaving the canonical commutation relations intact except for a simple rescaling, ħ → ħ + β . The value of the new parameter, β ≃ ħ × 10 − 61 , is determined by the ratio of the dark energy density to the Planck density, and its existence is required by the presence of both minimum length and momentum uncertainties. Here, we assume the former to be of the order of the Planck length and the latter to be of the order of the de Sitter momentum ∼ ħ Λ , where Λ is the cosmological constant, which is consistent with the existence of a finite cosmological horizon. In the smeared-space model, ħ and β are interpreted as the quantisation scales for matter and geometry, respectively, and a quantum state vector is associated with the spatial background. We show that this also gives rise to a rescaled Lie algebra for generalised spin operators, together with associated subalgebras that are analogous to those for orbital angular momentum. Remarkably, consistency of the algebraic structure requires the quantum state associated with a flat background to be fermionic, with spin eigenvalues ± β / 2 . Finally, the modified spin algebra leads to GURs for spin measurements. The potential implications of these results for cosmology and high-energy physics, and for the description of spin and angular momentum in relativistic theories of quantum gravity, including dark energy, are briefly discussed.

AbstractSmall-amplitude perturbations are governed by the linearized Navier–Stokes equations, which are, for a parallel or nearly parallel shear flow, customarily reduced to the Orr–Sommerfeld (O-S) and Squire equations. In this paper, we consider continuous spectra (CS) of the O-S and Squire operators for the Blasius and asymptotic suction boundary layers, and address the issue of whether and when continuous modes can represent free-stream vortical disturbances and their entrainment into the shear layer. For the Blasius boundary layer, we highlight two particular properties of the CS: (i) the eigenfunction of a continuous mode simultaneously consists of two components with wall-normal wavenumbers $\pm {k}_{2} $, a phenomenon which we refer to as ‘entanglement of Fourier components’; and (ii) for low-frequency disturbances the presence of the boundary layer forces the streamwise velocity in the free stream to take a much larger amplitude than those of the transverse velocities. Both features appear to be non-physical, and cast some doubt about the appropriateness of using CS to characterize free-stream vortical disturbances and their entrainment into the boundary layer, a practice that has been adopted in some recent studies of bypass transition. A high-Reynolds-number asymptotic description of continuous modes and entrainment is present, and it shows that the entanglement is a result of neglecting non-parallelism, which has a leading-order effect on the entrainment. When this effect is included, entanglement disappears, and moreover the streamwise velocity is significantly amplified in the edge layer when ${R}^{- 1} \ll \omega \ll 1$, where $R$ is the Reynolds number based on the local boundary-layer thickness. For the asymptotic suction boundary layer, which is an exactly parallel flow, both temporal and spatial CS may be defined mathematically. However, at a finite $R$ neither of them represents the physical process of free-stream vortical disturbances penetrating into the boundary layer. The latter must instead be characterized by a peculiar type of continuous modes whose eigenfunctions increase exponentially with the distance from the wall. In the limit $R\gg 1$, all three types of CS are identical at leading order, and hence can be used to represent free-stream vortical disturbances and their entrainment. Low-frequency disturbances are found to generate a large-amplitude streamwise velocity in the boundary layer, which is reminiscent of longitudinal streaks.

AbstractIn the past few years, significant progress has been made on spatio-temporal cyber-physical systems in achieving spatio-temporal properties on several long-standing tasks. With the broader specification of spatio-temporal properties on various applications, the concerns over their spatio-temporal logics have been raised in public, especially after the widely reported safety-critical systems involving self-driving cars, intelligent transportation system, image processing. In this paper, we present a spatio-temporal specification language, STSL PC, by combining Signal Temporal Logic (STL) with a spatial logic S4 u, to characterize spatio-temporal dynamic behaviors of cyber-physical systems. This language is highly expressive: it allows the description of quantitative signals, by expressing spatio-temporal traces over real valued signals in dense time, and Boolean signals, by constraining values of spatial objects across threshold predicates. STSL PC combines the power of temporal modalities and spatial operators, and enjoys important properties such as finite model property. We provide a Hilbert-style axiomatization for the proposed STSL PC and prove the soundness and completeness by the spatio-temporal extension of maximal consistent set and canonical model. Further, we demonstrate the decidability of STSL PC and analyze the complexity of STSL PC. Besides, we generalize STSL to the evolution of spatial objects over time, called STSL OC, and provide the proof of its axiomatization system and decidability.

Abstract Introduction The paper investigates the relation between spatial justice and recognition. With this respect, it focuses on rhetorics of recognition, namely discourses, narratives and slogans put in place by actors who produce a territorial identity in order to be recognized in their peculiar and different characters. Case description The case-study employed is the Riace model, a worldwide known example of refugees and asylum seekers hosting and welcoming practice in Italy. Fieldnotes, public statements and newspaper articles were used to investigate both narratives through which Riace’s identity was produced and how this identity shaped Riace’s rhetorics of recognition within the context of a conflict between the local administration and the national government. Discussion and evaluation The paper shows how claims for recognition may drive towards negative outputs. Specifically, in the case of Riace, claims for diversity re-affirmed path-dependency and conditions of marginalization as a result of a depersonalised place-based approach and logics of exception. Conclusions Finally, the paper suggests that researchers should avoid considering diversity as a value per se in order to address spatial justice issues. Moreover, it suggests that rhetorics of recognition may help both in case of conflicting rationalities and to formulate situated ethical judgments.

In this paper the full set of stochastic differential equations (SDEs) are presented describing the guiding centre motion of test charged particles in a plasma with an arbitrary inhomogeneous magnetic field, when the drift approximation is applicable. The derivation is based on the Ito formula which is used to determine stochastic differentials of functions of the non-gyro-averaged velocity diffusion in strict correspondence with the general kinetic equations involving Coulomb collision operators. The drift SDEs are obtained by calculating the Ito stochastic integrals within time intervals admitting the gyro-averaging procedure. The proposed SDEs reproduce the well-known Monte Carlo operators for orbital invariants, however additionally accounting for the spatial drift caused by the cross-field diffusion process with a classical diffusion coefficient. All SDE coefficients are explicitly expressed in terms of the Rosenbluth potentials in a gyro-tropic or isotropic background plasma. The SDEs are presented in particular for the case of an axisymmetric toroidal magnetic configuration to describe the spatial two-dimensional poloidal diffusion process providing a detailed description of neoclassical orbital effects.

AbstractFractional calculus is the branch of mathematical analysis that deals with operators interpreted as derivatives and integrals of non-integer order. This mathematical representation is used in the description of non-local behaviors and anomalous complex processes. Fourier’s lawfor the conduction of heat exhibit anomalous behaviors when the order of the derivative is considered as 0 < β,ϒ ≤ 1 for the space-time domain respectively. In this paper we proposed an alternative representation of the fractional Fourier’s law equation, three cases are presented; with fractional spatial derivative, fractional temporal derivative and fractional space-time derivative (both derivatives in simultaneous form). In this analysis we introduce fractional dimensional parameters σ

Abstract The unitary Fermi gas, by virtue of its description as a nonrelativistic conformal field theory, has proven an interesting system by which the quantum properties of CFTs can be held to experimental verification. Here, we examine the structure of conformal dimensions of charge-Q operators in nonrelativistic CFTs, in the large-Q regime, from the non-linear sigma model perspective. We discuss in detail the renormalization of edge divergences using dimensional regularization, elucidating the presence of log(Q) terms in the large-charge expansion. Finally, we use dimensional regularization to compute the universal one-loop Q0 log Q contribution to the ground-state energy in d = 3 spatial dimensions, with the result $$ \Delta {(Q)}_{Q^0}=\frac{1}{3\sqrt{3}}\log (Q)+ $$ Δ Q Q 0 = 1 3 3 log Q + const.

We propose an efficient model for the description of the three-dimensional (3-D) evolution of breaking water waves in the nearshore region. A fundamental property of the model is its intrinsic ability to account for the 3-D dynamics of vorticity and the energy dissipation induced by wave breaking. In particular, the vorticity evolution is achieved through the use of mollified operators, an approach similar in spirit to that adopted in smoothed particle hydrodynamics. Further, since the model is based on depth-semi-averaged equations with a core structure similar to that of nonlinear shallow-water equations, it takes advantage of well-known numerical methods for hyperbolic equations, while permitting computation of local flows. Finally, the model relies on a limited number of tunable parameters and a very simple breaking criterion. All the above aspects allow for a simple and reliable representation of the main features of wave breaking at the time and spatial scales typical of the nearshore wave dynamics. A number of benchmarks are used to explore the properties of the model, which is tuned only once for all cases. Wave height decay rates are well described for both sloshing (thin) and shoaling (thick) spillers, and a good description is also provided of the vorticity field. A final run of an impulsive wave over a submerged breakwater is used to illustrate the representation of the 3-D vorticity dynamics.

Abstract Within the functional renormalization group approach to Background Independent quantum gravity, we explore the scale dependent effective geometry of the de Sitter solution dS4. The investigation employs a novel approach whose essential ingredient is a modified spectral flow of the metric dependent d’Alembertian, or of similar hyperbolic kinetic operators. The corresponding one-parameter family of spectra and eigenfunctions encodes information about the nonperturbative backreaction of the dynamically gravitating vacuum fluctuations on the mean field geometry of the quantum spacetime. Used as a diagnostic tool, the power of the spectral flow method resides in its ability to identify the scale dependent subsets of field modes that supply the degrees of freedom which participate in the effective field theory description of the respective scale. A central result is that the ultraviolet of Quantum Einstein Gravity comprises far less effective degrees of freedom than predicted (incorrectly) by background dependent reasoning. The Lorentzian signature of dS4 is taken into account by selecting a class of renormalization group trajectories which are known to apply to both the Euclidean and a Lorentzian version of the approach. Exploring the quantum spacetime’s spatial geometry carried by physical fields, we find that 3-dimensional space disintegrates into a collection of coherent patches which individually can, but in their entirety cannot be described by one of the effective average actions occurring along the renormalization group trajectory. A natural concept of an entropy is introduced in order to quantify this fragmentation effect. Tentatively applied to the real Universe, surprising analogies to properties of the observed cosmic microwave background are uncovered. Furthermore, a set of distinguished field modes is found which, in principle, has the ability to transport information about the asymptotic fixed point regime from the ultraviolet, across almost the entire “scale history”, to cosmological distances in the observed Universe.

Under the warfare conditions in the east of Ukraine the problem of providing the command with space shooting information is gaining topicality. With respect to the absence of national means for solving these tasks, ordering and purchasing the space shooting information from foreign operators appears the only practical way of gaining the above information. It is noteworthy, that the market of these services is well-developed, this the problem of the reasonable formation of orders for shooting appears topical. The paper suggests a unique method for selecting available foreign space vehicles for the Earth’s remote sensing with the aim of using their target information for the benefit of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The method is based on the advance calculations of the prognosticated coefficients of the temporal and spatial coverage of the Earth’s designated areas by the inspection zone of the space vehicles selected, comparing them with the requirements of the target information ordering customers, as well as on choosing the most appropriate options on this basis. The visibility conditions of the Earth’s designated area by the determined space vehicle at a given calendar date are formalized. Along with it the instrument of logical functions of the geometric visibility is used. Besides, the author suggests the mathematical instruments for the calculating the area of the designated territory of shooting in case of its description by the polygon of arbitrary shape with respect to the excess of this spherical polygon. The author also develops the mathematical model for determining instant shooting area on the spherical Earth by the pyramid coverage zone of the space vehicle under the in roll deviation of the sight axis of the onboard target equipment. The directions for the further research in general, and determining the physical conditions of monitoring the designated shooting areas in particular, are suggested.

Re-Framing Participation in the Architecture Studio Recently, within design literature, significant attention has been given to collaboration across different disciplines (see for instance, Nicolini et al.; Carlile), as well as consideration of the breakdown of traditional disciplinarity and the corresponding involvement of users in co-generation (Sanders and Stappers, “Co-Creation” 11–12) through the development and deployment of structured methods and toolkits (Sanders et al., “Framework”; Sanders and Stappers, “Probes”). Relatively less attention has been paid to the workings of the “communities of practice” (Wenger) operating within the disciplinary domain of architecture. The discourse around concept design in architecture has tended to emphasise individualist approaches driven by personal philosophies, inspirations, imitation of a more experienced designer, and emphasis on latent talent or genius (for instance, Moneo). This can be problematic because without a shared language and methods there are limited opportunities for making meaning to facilitate participation between collaborators in architectural studio settings. It is worth asking then: are there things that “Architecture” might learn from “Design” about the deployment of structured methods, and might this interdisciplinary exchange promote participatory practices in studio-based cultures? We address this question by connecting and building on two important concepts relevant to design methods, meta-design as described in the open design literature (De Mul 36–37), and design frames as described by Schön and formalised by Dorst (‘Core’; Frame; see also Weedon). Through this combination, we propose a theory of participation by making shared meaning in architectural design. We animate our theoretical contribution through a design toolkit we have developed, refined, and applied over several years in typologically focused architectural design studios in Australian university contexts. One important contribution, we argue, is to the area of design theory-building, by taking two previously unrelated concepts from the design methods literature. We draw them together using an example from our own design practices to articulate a new term and concept for making shared meaning in design. The other contribution made is to the translation of this concept into the context of studio-based architectural practice, a setting that has traditionally struggled to accept structured methods. The existence of other form-metaphor design tools available for architecture and the theoretical basis of their development and connection to design literature more broadly has not always been clearly articulated (see for example Di Mari and Yoo; Lewis et al.). The rationale for giving an account of the construction and deployment of our own toolkit is to illustrate its theoretical contribution while providing the basis for future field testing and translation (including by other researchers), noting the established trajectory of this kind of work in the design literature (see, for example, Hoolohan and Browne; Visser et al.; Vaajakallio and Mattelmäki; Sanders and Stappers, “Co-Creation” and ”Probes”). In line with this issue’s thematic and epistemological agenda, we adopt what Cross identifies as “designerly ways of knowing” (223), and is at least partly a reflection on a practice in which we engage with our own disciplines and research interests to propose and deploy design thinking as a kind of critical “reflection-in-action” (Robertson and Simonsen 2). Meta-Framing: Combining Meta-Design and Framing Meta-design is a term used in open design literature to describe approaches aimed toward orchestration of a project in such a way that people are afforded the agency to become effective co-designers, regardless of their pre-existing skills or design-specific knowledge (De Mul 36). According to a meta-design approach, design is conceived of as a shared project of mutual learning instead of an individualistic expression of singular genius. Through the establishment of shared protocols and formats, what Ehn (1) calls “infrastructuring”, individuals with even very limited design experience are provided scaffolds that enable them to participate in a design project. One important way in which meta-design helps “create a pathway through a design space” is through the careful selection and adoption of shared guiding metaphors that provide common meanings between co-designers (De Mul 36). The usefulness of metaphors is also recognised in the context of design frames, the second concept on which we build our theory. Conceptualised as “cognitive shortcuts” for making “sense of complex situations” (Haase and Laursen 21), design frames were first conceived of by Schön (132) as a rational approach to design, one guided by “epistemological norms”. Frames have subsequently been further developed within the design methods literature and are defined as a system of counterfactual design decision-making that uses metaphors to provide a rationale for negotiating ill-structured problems. According to Dorst, frames involve: the creation of a (novel) standpoint from which a problematic situation can be tackled … . Although frames are often paraphrased by a simple metaphor, they are in fact very complex sets of statements that include the specific perception of a problem situation, the (implicit) adoption of certain concepts to describe the situation, a ‘working principle’ that underpins a solution and the key thesis: IF we look at the problem situation from this viewpoint, and adopt the working principle associated with that position, THEN we will create the value we are striving for. (525) Despite Schön choosing to illustrate his original conception of framing through the example of a student’s architectural design project, there has been limited subsequent consideration of framing in architectural studio contexts—an exception being Eissa in 2019. This may be because formalised design methods have tended to be treated with suspicion within architectural culture. For instance, Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language is one such “highly systemised design process” (Dawes and Ostwald 10) that despite its potential to guide participatory design has had an “uneven reception” (Bhatt 716) within architecture itself. One way architecture as a disciplinary domain and as a profession has attempted to engage with design method is through typology, which is one of the few persistent and recurring notions in architectural discourse (Bandini; Grover et al.). As a system of classification, typology categorises “forms and functions as simply and unequivocally as possible” (Oechslin 37). In addition to being used as a classification system, typology has also been positioned as “a process as much as an object”, one with the potential for an “active role in the process of design” (Lathouri 25). Type and typology have been conceptualised as a particular way of projecting architecture’s “disciplinary agency” (Jacoby 936), and this goes some way to explaining their enduring value. A potentially valid criticism of framing is that it can tend toward “design fixation”, when a pre-existing assumption “inadvertently restricts the designers’ imagination” (Crilly). Similarly, typology-as-method—as opposed to a classification tool—has been criticised for being relatively “inflexible” or “reductive” (Shane 2011) and responsible for perpetuating “conservative, static norms” (Jacoby 932) if applied in a rote and non-reflexive way. We deal with these concerns in the discussion of the deployment of our Typekit below. We are drawing here on our experience teaching in the first two years of undergraduate architecture degrees in Australian university settings. As well as being equipped with a diversity of educational, social, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds, students typically have divergent competencies in the domain-specific skills of their discipline and a limited vocabulary for making shared meaning in relation to an architectural proposal. The challenge for studio-based collaborative work in such a context is developing shared understandings and a common language for working on a design project to enable a variety of different design solutions. The brief for a typical studio project will specify a common site, context, and program. Examples we have used include a bathhouse, fire station, archive, civic centre, and lifesaving club. There will then be multiple design solutions proposed by each studio participant. Significantly we are talking about relatively well-structured problems here, typically a specific building program for a specified site and user group. These are quite unlike the open-ended aims of “problem frames” described in the design thinking literature “to handle ill-defined, open-ended, and ambiguous problems that other problem-solving methodologies fail to handle” (Haase and Laursen 21). However, even for well-structured problems, there is still a multitude of possible solutions possible, generated by students working on a particular project brief. This openness reduces the possibility of making shared meaning and thus hinders participation in architectural design. Designing the Typekit The Typekit was developed heuristically out of our experiences teaching together over several years. As part of our own reflective practice, we realised that we had begun to develop a shared language for describing projects including that of students, our own, precedents and canonical works. Often these took the form of a simple formal or functional metaphor such as “the building is a wall”; “the building is an upturned coracle”; or “the building is a cloud”. While these cognitive shortcuts proved useful for our communication there remained the possibility for this language to become esoteric and exclusionary. On the other hand, we recognised the potential for this approach to be shared beyond our immediate “interpretive community” (Fish 485) of two, and we therefore began to develop a meta-design toolkit. Fig. 1: Hybrid page from the Typekit We began by developing a visual catalogue of formal and functional metaphors already present within the panoply of constructed contemporary architectural projects assembled by surveying the popular design media for relevant source material. Fig. 2: Classification of contemporary architectural built work using Typekit metaphors We then used simple line drawings to generate abstract representations of the observed building metaphors adopting isometry to maintain a level of objectivity and a neutral viewing position (Scolari). The drawings themselves were both revelatory and didactic and by applying what Cross calls “designerly ways of knowing” (Cross 223) the toolkit emerged as both design artefact and output of design research. We recognised two fundamentally different kinds of framing metaphors in the set of architectural projects we surveyed, rule-derived and model-derived—terms we are adapting from Choay’s description of “instaurational texts” (8). Rule-derived types describe building forms that navigate the development of a design from a generic to a specific form (Baker 70–71) through a series of discrete “logical operators” (Choay 134). They tend to follow a logic of “begin with x … perform some operation A … perform some operation B … end up with y”. Examples of such operations include add, subtract, scale-translate-rotate, distort and array. Model-derived framing metaphors are different in the way they aim toward an outcome that is an adapted version of an ideal initial form. This involves selecting an existing type and refining it until it suits the required program, site, and context. Examples of the model-derived metaphors we have used include the hedgehog, caterpillar, mountain, cloud, island, and snake as well as architectural Ur-types like the barn, courtyard, tent, treehouse, jetty, and ziggurat. The framing types we included in the Typekit are a combination of rule-derived and model-derived as well as useful hybrids that combined examples from different categories. This classification provides a construct for framing a studio experience while acknowledging that there are other ways of classifying formal types. Fig. 3: Development of isometric drawings of metaphor-frames After we developed a variety of these line drawings, we carried out a synthesis and classification exercise using a version of the KJ method. Like framing, KJ is a technique of abduction developed for dealing objectively with qualitative data without a priori categorisation (Scupin; Kawakita). It has also become an established and widely practiced method within design research (see, for instance, Hanington and Martin 104–5). Themes were developed from the images, and we aimed at balancing a parsimony of typological categories with a saturation of types, that is to capture all observed types/metaphors and to put them in as few buckets as possible. Fig. 4: Synthesis exercise of Typekit metaphors using the KJ method (top); classification detail (bottom) Deploying the Typekit We have successfully deployed the Typekit in architectural design studios at two universities since we started developing it in 2018. As a general process participants adopt a certain metaphor as the starting point of their design. Doing so provides a frame that prefigures other decisions as they move through a concept design process. Once a guiding metaphor is selected, it structures other decision-making by providing a counterfactual logic (Byrne 30). For instance, if a building-as-ramp is chosen as the typology to be deployed this guides a rationale as to where and how it is placed on the site. People should be able to walk on it; it should sit resolutely on the ground and not be floating above it; it should be made of a massive material with windows and doors appearing to be carved out of it; it can have a green occupiable roof; quiet and private spaces should be located at the top away from street noise; active spaces such as a community hall and entry foyer should be located at the bottom of the ramp … and so on. The adoption of the frame of “building-as-ramp” by its very nature is a crucial and critical move in the design process. It is a decision made early in the process that prefigures both “what” and “how” types of questions as the project develops. In the end, the result seems logical even inevitable but there are many other types that could have potentially been explored and these would have posed different kinds of questions and resulted in different kinds of answers during the process. The selection of a guiding metaphor also allows students to engage with historical and contemporary precedents to offer further insights into the development—as well as refinement—of their own projects within that classification. Even given the well-structured nature of the architectural project, precedents provide useful reference points from which to build domain-specific knowledge and benchmarks to measure the differences in approaches still afforded within each typological classification. We believe that our particular meta-framing approach addresses concerns about design fixation and balances mutual learning with opportunities for individual investigation. We position framing less about finding innovative solutions to wicked problems to become more about finding ways for a group of people to reason together through a design problem process by developing and using shared metaphors. Thus our invocation of framing is aligned to what Haase and Laursen term “solution frames” meaning they have an “operational” meaning-making agenda and provide opportunities for developing shared understanding between individuals engaged in a given problem domain (Haase and Laursen 20). By providing a variety of opportunities within an overarching “frame of frames” there are opportunities for parallel design investigation to be undertaken by individual designers. Meta-framing affords opportunities for shared meaning-making and a constructive discourse between different project outcomes. This occurs whether adopting the same type to enable questions including “How is my building-as-snake different from your building-as-snake?”, “Which is the most snake-like?”, or different types (“In what ways is my building-as-ramp different to your building-as-stair?”) By employing everyday visual metaphors, opportunities for “mutual learning between mutual participants” (Robertson and Simonsen 2) are enhanced without the need for substantial domain-specific architectural knowledge at a project’s outset. We argue that the promise of the toolkit and our meta-framing approach more generally is that it actually multiples rather than forecloses opportunities while retaining a shared understanding and language for reasoning through a project domain. This effectively responds to concerns that typology-as-method is a conservative or reductive approach to architectural design. It is important to clarify the role of our toolkit and its relationship to our theory-building agenda. On the basis of the findings accounted for here we do claim to draw specific conclusions about the efficacy of our toolkit. We simply did not collect experimental data relevant to that task. We can, however, use the example of our toolkit to animate, flesh out, and operationalise a model for collaboration in architectural design that may be useful for teaching and practicing architecture in collaborative, team-based contexts. The contribution of this account, therefore, is theoretical. That is, the adaptation of concepts from design literature modified and translated into a new domain to serve new purposes. The Promise of Meta-Framing through Typology Through our work, we have outlined the benefits of adopting formalised design methods in architecture as a way of supporting participation, including using toolkits for scaffolding architectural concept design. Meta-framing has shown itself to be a useful approach to enable participation in architectural design in a number of ways. It provides coherence of an idea and architectural concept. It assists decision-making in any given scenario because a designer can decide which out of a set of choices makes more sense within the “frame” adopted for the project. The question becomes then not “what do I like?” or “what do I want?” but “what makes sense within the project frame?” Finally and perhaps most importantly it brings a common understanding of a project that allows for communication across a team working on the same problem, supporting a variety of different approaches and problem-solving logics a voice. By combining methodologies and toolkits from the design methods literature with architecture’s domain-specific typological classifications we believe we have developed an effective and adaptive model for scaffolding participation and making shared meaning in architecture studio contexts. References Baker, Geoffrey H. Design Strategies in Architecture: An Approach to the Analysis of Form. Taylor and Francis, 2003. Bandini, Micha. “Typology as a Form of Convention.” AA Files 6 (1984): 73–82. Bhatt, Ritu. “Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language: An Alternative Exploration of Space-Making Practices.” Journal of Architecture 15.6 (2010): 711–29. Byrne, Ruth M.J. The Rational Imagination: How People Create Alternatives to Reality. MIT P, 2005. Carlile, Paul R. “Transferring, Translating, and Transforming: An Integrative Framework for Managing Knowledge across Boundaries”. Organization Science 15.5 (2004): 555–68. Choay, Françoise. The Rule and the Model: On the Theory of Architecture and Urbanism. MIT P, 1997 [1980]. Crilly, Nathan. “Methodological Diversity and Theoretical Integration: Research in Design Fixation as an Example of Fixation in Research Design?” Design Studies 65 (2019): 78–106. Cross, Nigel. “Designerly Ways of Knowing”. Design Studies 3.4 (1982): 221–27. Dawes, Michael J., and Michael J. Ostwald. “Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language: Analysing, Mapping and Classifying the Critical Response.” City, Territory and Architecture 4.1 (2017): 1–14. De Mul, Jos. “Redesigning Design”. In Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive, eds. Bas Van Abel, Lucas Evers, Roel Klaassen, and Peter Troxler. BIS Publishers, 2011. 34–39. Di Mari, Anthony, and Nora Yoo. Operative Design. BIS Publishers, 2012. Dorst, Kees. “The Core of ‘Design Thinking’ and Its Application”. Design Studies 32.6 (2011): 521–32. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2011.07.006>. ———. Frame Innovation: Create New Thinking by Design. Design Thinking, Design Theory. MIT P, 2015. Ehn, Pelle. “Participation in Design Things.” In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2008. Bloomington, Indiana, 2008. 92–101 Eissa, Doha. “Concept Generation in the Architectural Design Process: A Suggested Hybrid Model of Vertical and Lateral Thinking Approaches.” Thinking Skills and Creativity 33 (2019). Fish, Stanley E. “Interpreting the ‘Variorum’.” Critical Inquiry 2.3 (1976): 465–85. Grover, Robert, Stephen Emmitt, and Alex Copping. “The Language of Typology.” Arq 23.2 (2019): 149–56. <https://doi.org/10.1017/S1359135519000198>. Haase, Louise Møller, and Linda Nhu Laursen. “Meaning Frames: The Structure of Problem Frames and Solution Frames”. Design Issues 35.3 (2019): 20–34. <https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00547>. Hanington, Bruce, and Bella Martin. Universal Methods of Design: 100 Ways to Research Complex Problems, Develop Innovative Ideas, and Design Effective Solutions. Rockport Publishers, 2012. Hoolohan, Claire, and Alison L Browne. “Design Thinking for Practice-Based Intervention: Co-Producing the Change Points Toolkit to Unlock (Un)Sustainable Practices.” Design Studies 67 (2020): 102–32. Jacoby, Sam. “Typal and Typological Reasoning: A Diagrammatic Practice of Architecture.” Journal of Architecture 20.6 (2015): 938–61. <https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2015.1116104>. Kawakita, Jiro. “The KJ Method and My Dream towards the ‘Heuristic’ Regional Geography.” Japanese Journal of Human Geography 25.5 (1973): 493–522. Lathouri, Marina. “The City as a Project: Types, Typical Objects and Typologies.” Architectural Design 81.1 (2011): 24–31. Lewis, Paul, Marc Tsurumaki, and David J Lewis. Manual of Section. Princeton Architectural P, 2016. Moneo, José Rafael. Theoretical Anxiety and Design Strategies in the Work of Eight Contemporary Architects. MIT P, 2004. Nicolini, Davide, Jeanne Mengis, and Jacky Swan. “Understanding the Role of Objects in Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration”. Organization Science (Providence, R.I.) 23.3 (2012): 612–29. Oechslin, Werner. “Premises for the Resumption of the Discussion of Typology.” Assemblage 1 (1986): 37–53. Panzano, Megan. “Foreword.” In Operative Design: A Catalogue of Spatial Verbs, by Anthony Di Mari and Nora Yoo. Amsterdam: BIS Publishers, 2012. 6–7. Robertson, Toni, and Jesper Simonsen. “Participatory Design: An Introduction”. In Routledge International Handbook of Participatory Design, eds. Toni Robertson and Jesper Simonsen. Taylor and Francis, 2012. 1–18. Sanders, Elizabeth B.-N., Eva Brandt, and Thomas Binder. “A Framework for Organizing the Tools and Techniques of Participatory Design.” Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference. ACM, 2010. 195–98. DOI: 10.1145/1900441.1900476. Sanders, Elizabeth B.-N., and Pieter Jan Stappers. “Co-Creation and the New Landscapes of Design.” Co-Design 4.1 (2008,): 5–18. ———. “Probes, Toolkits and Prototypes: Three Approaches to Making in Codesigning.” CoDesign 10.1 (2014): 5–14. Schön, Donald A. “Problems, Frames and Perspectives on Designing.” Design Studies 5.3 (1984): 132–36. <https://doi.org/10.1016/0142-694X(84)90002-4>. Scolari, Massimo. Oblique Drawing: A History of Anti-Perspective. MIT P, 2012. Scupin, Raymond. “The KJ Method: A Technique for Analyzing Data Derived from Japanese Ethnology.” Human Organization, 1997. 233–37. Shane, David Grahame. "Transcending Type: Designing for Urban Complexity." Architectural Design 81.1 (2011): 128-34. Vaajakallio, Kirsikka, and Tuuli Mattelmäki. “Design Games in Codesign: As a Tool, a Mindset and a Structure.” CoDesign 10.1 (2014): 63–77. <https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2014.881886>. Visser, Froukje Sleeswijk, Pieter Jan Stappers, Remko van der Lugt, and Elizabeth B.N. Sanders. “Contextmapping: Experiences from Practice.” CoDesign 1.2 (2005): 119–49. Weedon, Scott. “The Core of Kees Dorst’s Design Thinking: A Literature Review.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 33.4 (2019): 425–30. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1050651919854077>. Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice : Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Learning in Doing. Cambridge UP, 1988. Yaneva, Albena. The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture. Peter Lang, 2009.

Digital Articulations of the Relational Self Identity continues to be one of the enduring topics in digital media research. This interdisciplinary take on the digital self extends the discussion in my dissertation (Harju) of contemporary articulations of the relational self in the digital context by focusing on potentiality of the evolving self. I adopt a relational approach to being (Gergen Relational) where the self is seen as always already a product of relations, borne out of them as well as dependent on them (Gergen Realities). The self as fluid and processual is reflective of our liquid times (Bauman), of globalisation and digitalisation where we are surrounded by global flows of images, taste and trends (Appadurai).The view of the self as a process underlies future-oriented action, emphasing the becoming of the self. The process of becoming implies the potential of the self that can be narrated into existence. The relational view of the self, perhaps indirectly, also posits the self as a temporal interface between the present and the future, as a site where change unfolds. It is therefore important to critically reflect on the kinds of potentialities we can discover and engage with and the kinds of futures (Berardi) we can construct.Extending Gergen’s conceptualisation of the kinds of relations to include non-human actors (e.g. media technologies) as well socio-cultural and economic forces allows me to explore the conflicting forces shaping the self, for example, the influence the market exerts on self-construction together with the media logics that guide digital self-production practices. Because of the market’s dominant position in today’s imagination, I seek to explore the relational processes of inclusion and exclusion that position individuals relative to as well as in terms of the market as more or less included or excluded subjects (Harju).The digital environment is a unique setting for identity projects as it provides spatial and temporal flexibility, the possibility for curation, consideration and reconstruction. At the same time, it lacks a certain historicity; as Smith and Watson note, the self constructed online lacks narrative beginning and end that in “analog life writing [are] distinguishable by birth or death” (90). While it is tempting therefore to assume that self-construction online is free from all constraints, this is not necessarily so as the self is nevertheless produced within the wider socio-cultural context in which it also needs to “make sense,” these conditions persisting across these modes of being. Self as a relational process inevitably connects what for analytical purposes may be called online and offline social spaces as there is a processual linkage, a relational flow, that connects any online entity to a form outside the digital realm.Media institutions and the process of mediation (Rak Boom!) shape the autobiographical practices (Poletti), and the notion of automedia was introduced as a way to incorporate images, text and technologies as constitutive in autobiographic accounts (Smith and Watson) and help see online life as life instead of mere representation (Rak "Life"). The automedial approach rejects essentialist accounts of the self, assuming rather that the self is called into being and constructed in and by the materiality of the medium, in the process of mediation. This furthermore entails a move beyond the literary in terms of autobiographies toward consideration of the enabling and restricting roles of media technologies in the kinds of selves that can be constructed (Maguire 74).Viewing the self as always already relationally emergent (Gergen Relational) and combining this view with the framework of automedial construction of the self allows us to bring into the examination of the digital self the socio-cultural and economic forces and the diverse discourses meeting at the site of the self. Importantly, the relational approach prioritises relations and therefore the self is constituted in a relational flow in a process of becoming, placing importance on the kinds of relational configurations where the becoming of the self takes place.This paper explores how the digital self is forged under the joint pressures of consumerist logic and media logics in the contemporary society where “being a consumer” is the predominant subjectivity (Firat; Bauman). I draw on sociology of consumption to examine the relational tensions shaping identity construction of marginalised individuals. To empirically illustrate the discussion I draw on a previous study (Harju and Huovinen) on plus-sized fashion blogging and examine fatshion blogging as a form of automedia (see also Rak "Digital" on blogs).Plus-Sized Fashion Bloggers and Market-Mediated IdentityPlus-sized fashion bloggers, “fatshionistas,” actively seek social and cultural inclusion by way of fashion. As a collective activity, plus-sized fashion blogging is more than diary writing (see also Rak Digital) but also more than fashion blogging: the blogs constitute “networked, collective and active consumer resistance,” illuminating “marginalised consumers’ identity work at the intersection of commercial culture and the counter-representations of traditional femininity” (Harju and Huovinen 1603). Blogging resistant or subversive identities into being is thus also a form of activism and political action (Connell). As a form of automedia and autobiographical production, fatshion blogging has as its agenda the construction of alternative subjectivities and carving out a legitimate social space in the “fatosphere,” “a loosely interconnected network of online resources aimed at creating a safe space where individuals can counter fat prejudice, resist misconceptions of fat, engage in communal experiences and promote positive understandings of fat” (Gurrieri and Cherrier 279). Fashion blogs are rich in self-images portraying “fat fashion”: thus, not only fashion as a physical medium and the images representative of such materiality, but also the body acts as a medium.Plus-sized fashion bloggers feel marginalised as women due to body size but they also face rejection in and by the market. Normalised discourses around fashion and the female body as one that is fashioned render fashion blogging an avenue to normativity (Berlant): the symbolic power of taste (Bourdieu) embedded in fashion is harnessed to construct the desired self and to mobilise discourses of acceptable subjectivity. However, it is these very discourses that also construct the “state of being fat” as deviant and stigmatise the larger body as something falling outside the definition of good taste (LeBesco).The description on the Fatshionista! Livejournal page summarizes the agenda that despite the focus on fashion carries political undertones:Welcome, fatshionistas! We are a diverse fat-positive, anti-racist, disabled-friendly, trans-inclusive, queer-flavored, non-gender-specific community, open to everyone. Here we will discuss the ins and outs of fat fashions, seriously and stupidly--but above all--standing tall, and with panache. We fatshionistas are self-accepting despite The Man's Saipan-made boot at our chubby, elegant throats. We are silly, and serious, and want shit to fit.In a previous study (Harju and Huovinen) on the conflicted identity construction of plus-sized fashion bloggers (see also Gurrieri and Cherrier; Limatius) we found the complex performative tactics used in constructing the plus-sized blogger identity both resisted the market as well as embraced it: the bloggers seek similarity via appeals to normativity (see also Coleman and Figueroa) yet underline difference by rejecting the demands of normative ideals.The bloggers’ similarity seeking tactics (Harju and Huovinen) emphasise shared commonalities with the feminine ideals (ultra-femininity, posing and girliness) and on the face of it contribute to reproducing not only the gendered self but also the market-compromised self that endorses a very specific type of femininity. The plus-sized blogger identity, although inherently subversive as it seeks to challenge and expand the repertoire and imagery available to women, nevertheless seeks inclusion by way of the market, the very same that rejected them as “consumers”. This relational tension is negotiated on the blogs, and resistance emerges through articulating difference.Thus, the bloggers’ diversity asserting tactics (Harju and Huovinen) add to the complexity of the identity project and constitute explicit resistance, giving rise to resistant consumer identity. Bodily differences are highlighted (e.g. the bigger body is embraced, skin and body revealed rather than concealed) as the bloggers take control of how they are represented, using media to challenge the market that defines acceptable femininity in ways that ostracises fat women. The contradictory processes at the site of the self give rise to relational tension (Gergen Relational) and blogging offers a site for collective negotiation. For the plus-sized bloggers, to be included means no longer occupying the margins: self-images displaying the fat body contribute to corporeal empowerment (Harju and Huovinen) where flaunting the fat body helps construct the identity of a “fatshionista” blogger liberated from shame and stigma attached to the bigger body:I decided to start this blog after being a regular poster on the Fatshionista LiveJournal community. Finding that community changed my whole outlook on life, I was fat (still am) & unhappy with myself (not so much now). I was amazed to find a place where fat people celebrated their bodies, instead of being ashamed. (Harju and Huovinen 1614).The fatshion blog as a form of automedia is driven by the desire for change in the social circumstances where self-construction can take place, toward the future potential of the self, by diversifying acceptable subject positions and constructing novel identification points for fat women. The means are limited, however, and despite the explicit agenda of promoting body positivity, the collective aspirations are rooted in consumption and realised in the realm of fashion and the market.The question, therefore, is whether resistance outside the market is possible when so much of our social existence is bound up with the market and consumerist logic, or whether the desire for inclusion, manifest in aspirational normativity (Berlant) with the promise of social acceptance linked to normative way of life, necessitates market participation and the adoption of consumer subjectivity? Consumer subjectivity offers normative intelligibility in the various expressions of identity, providing tools for the becoming of an included subject. However, it raises the question of whether resistant identity can occur outside the market and outside the logic of consumption when it seeks social inclusion.Market-compromised identity is a double-edged sword; while participation via the market may help construct a self that is intelligible, market participation also disciplines the subject to take part in a certain way, of becoming a certain type of consuming subject, all the time harnessing the self for the benefit of the market. With no beginning or an end, the digital self is in constant processual flux, responding to conflicting relational input. The market adds to this complexity as “the neoliberal subject is compelled to participate in society as both an enthusiastic consumer and as a self-controlled subject” (Guthman 193).Social Imaginaries as Horizons of Constrained Possibility Identity possibilities are inscribed in the popular imagination, and the concept of social imaginary (Castoriadis; Taylor) provides a useful lens through which to examine articulations of the digital self. Social imaginaries are not unitary constructions and different imaginaries are evoked in different contexts. Likewise, although often shared, they are nevertheless unique to the individual, presenting as a terrain of conceivable action befitting of the individual engaged in the act of imagining.In our socially saturated times relational input is greater than ever (Gergen Relational). Imagining now draws on a wider range of identity possibilities, the ways of imagining the self being reflective of the values of any given time. Both consumption and media infiltrate the social imagination which today is not only compromised by market logic but has become constitutive of a terrain where the parameters for inclusion, change and resistance are limited. Practices of performing desirable femininity normalise a certain way of being and strike a constitutive boundary between what is desirable and what is not. The plus-sized fashion blogging makes visible the lack of diversity in the popular imagination (Harju and Huovinen) while fatshion blogging also reveals what possibilities there are for inclusion (i.e. via consumption and by mobilising normative femininity) and where the boundaries of identity work lie (see also Connell).The fat body is subjected to discipline (Giovanelli and Ostertag; LeBesco) and “becoming fat” is regularly viewed as a lack of control. Not limited to fat subjects, the prevalent discourses of the self emphasise control and responsibility for the self (rather than community), often masquerading as self-approval. The same discourses, however, highlight work on the self (McRobbie) and cultivating the self by various means of self-management or self-tracking (Rettberg). Such self-disciplining carries the implication of the self as somewhat lacking (Skeggs Imagining, Exchange), of being in some way unintelligible (Butler).In plus-sized blogging, the fat body needs to be subjected to fashioning to become intelligible within the dominant discourses in the public sphere. The fatshionista community is a politically oriented movement that rejects the normative demands governing the body, yet regimes of ‘self-improvement’ are evident on the individual blogs displaying the fashioned body, which is befitting of the normative understandings of the female subject as sexualised, as something to be consumed (see also Maguire). Contrary to the discourses of fat female subjects where the dimension of sexuality is largely absent, this is also linked to the problematics related to the visibility of female subjects. The negotiation of relational tension is manifest as negotiation of competing discourses where bloggers adopt the hegemonic visual discourses to subvert the stigmatising discourses that construct the fat female subject as lacking. Utilising media logics (e.g. micro-celebrity) to gain visibility as fat subjects is an important aspect of the fatshionistas’ automedial self-construction.I argue that social imaginaries that feed into identity construction and offer pathways to normalcy cannot be seen simply and only as enabling, but instead they construct horizons of constrained possibility (Harju), thereby imposing limitations to the kind of acceptable identity positions marginalised individuals can seek. Digital productions form chains of symbolic entities and acquire their meaning by being interconnected as well as by being connected to popular social imaginaries. Thus, the narrative construction of the self in the digital production, and the recognition of the self in the becoming, is the very utility of the digital object. This is because through the digital artefact the individual becomes relationally linked to chains of significations (Harju). Through such linkages and subverted discourses, the disenfranchised may become enfranchised.Toward Horizons of Potentiality and PossibilityThe relational self is a process under continual change and thus always becoming. This approach opens up new avenues for exploring the complexities of the digital self that is never ‘just’ a reproduction. Automedia entails both the media about the maker (the subject) and the process of mediating the self (Rak "Life" 161) The relational approach helps overcome the binary distinction in modes of being (online versus offline), instead bringing into focus the relational flow between various articulations of the self in different relational scenarios. Then perhaps the question is not “what kinds of selves become or are borne digital” (Rak Life 177), but what kinds of selves are possible in the first place under the current conditions that include the digital as one mode of being, mediating the becoming, with the digital as one relational space of articulation of the self among many.Where in On Being Online I discussed the constraining effects of market ideology embedded in social imaginaries on how the self can be articulated, Berardi in his book Futurability offers a more optimistic take, noting how the different paths we take result in different possibilities becoming realised, resulting in different social realities in the future. Future is not a linear development from the present; rather, the present harbours the potential for multiple futures. Berardi notes how the “[f]uture is not prescribed but inscribed, so it must be selected and extracted through interpretation” (236). Despite the dominant code - which in our times is consumption (Baudrillard) - hindering the process of interpretation, there is hope in Berardi’s notion of inscribed possibilities for resistance and change, for different ways of being and becoming.This is the space the plus-sized fashion bloggers occupy as they grasp the potentialities in the present and construct new ways of being that unfold as different social realities in the future. In blogging, platform affordances together with other media technologies are intertwined with future-oriented life narration in the construction of the fatshionista identity which involves retrospective interpretation of life experiences as a fat woman as well as self-liberation in the form of conscious rejection of the dominant discourses around fat female subjects.The digital self is able to negotiate such diverse, even conflicting forces in the active shaping of the social reality of its existence. Blogging as automedia can constitute an act of carving out alternative futures not limited to the digital realm. Perhaps when freed from aspirational normativity (Berlant) we are able to recover hope in the inscribed possibilities that might also hide the potential for a transition from a subjectivity enslaved to the market logic (see Firat Violence) to a self actively engaged in changing the social circumstances and the conditions in which subjectivity is construed (see Firat and Dholakia). In the becoming, the digital self occupies a place between the present and the future, enmeshed in various discourses of aspiration, mediated by material practices of consumption and articulated within the limits of current media practices (Harju). A self in the making, it is variably responsive to the multitude of relational forces continually flowing at the site of it.Although the plus-sized bloggers’ identity work can be seen as an attempt to transform or discipline the self into something more intelligible that better fits the existing narratives of the self, they are also adding new narratives to the repertoire. If we adopt the view of self-conception as discourse about the self, that is, “the performance of languages available in the public sphere” (Gergen, Realities 185) whereby the self is made culturally intelligible by way of narration within ongoing relationships, we can see how the existing cultural discourses of the self are not only inclusive, but also alienating and othering. There is a need for identity politics that encourage the production of alternative discourses of the self for more inclusive practices of imagining. Blogging as automedia is not only a way of making visible that which occupies the margins, it also actively contributes to diversifying identification points in the public sphere that are not limited to the digital, but have implications regarding the production of social realities, regardless of the mode in which these are experienced.ReferencesAppadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota P, 1996.Baudrillard, Jean. The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures. Trans. C. Turner. London: Sage, 1998 [1970].Bauman, Zygmunt. “The Self in Consumer Society.” The Hedgehog Review: Critical Refections on Contemporary Culture 1 (1999): 35-40. ———. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity, 2000.———. “Consuming Life.” Journal of Consumer Culture 1 (2001): 9–29.———, and Benedetto Vecchi. Identity: Conversations with Benedetto Vecchi. Cambridge: Polity, 2004.Berlant, Lauren. “Nearly Utopian, Nearly Normal: Post-Fordist Affect in La Promesse and Rosetta.” Public Culture 19 (2007): 273-301.Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge. 1986.Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. 2006 [1990].Castoriadis, Cornelius. “Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary.” Rethinking Imagination: Culture and Creativity. Eds. G. Robinson and J.F. Rundell. Abingdon: Routledge, 1994. 136-154.Coleman, Rebecca, and Mónica Moreno Figueroa. “Past and Future Perfect? Beauty, Affect and Hope.” Journal for Cultural Research 14 (2010): 357-373.Connell, Catherine. “Fashionable Resistance: Queer “Fa(t)shion Blogging as Counterdiscourse.” Women’s Studies Quarterly 41 (2013): 209-224.Firat, Fuat A. “The Consumer in Postmodernity.” NA - Advances in Consumer Research 18 (1991): 70-76. ———. “Violence in/by the Market.” Journal of Marketing Management, 2018.Firat, Fuat A., and Nikhilesh Dholakia. “From Consumer to Construer: Travels in Human Subjectivity.” Journal of Consumer Culture 17 (2016): 504-522.Franco “Bifo” Berardi. Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility. London: Verso, 2017. Gergen, Kenneth J. Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social Construction. Cambridge: Harvard University P. 1994.———. Relational Being: Beyond Self and Community. New York: Oxford University P., 2009.Giovanelli, Dina, and Stephen Ostertag. “Controlling the Body: Media Representations, Body Size, and Self-Discipline.” Fat Studies Reader. Eds. E. Rothblum and S. Solovay. New York: New York University P, 2009. 289-296.Gurrieri, Lauren, and Hélène Cherrier. “Queering Beauty: Fatshionistas in the Fatosphere.” Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal 16 (2013): 276-295.Guthman, Julie. “Neoliberalism and the Constitution of Contemporary Bodies.” Fat Studies Reader. Eds. E. Rothblum and S. Solovay. New York: New York University P, 2009. 187-196.Harju, Anu A., and Annamari Huovinen. ”Fashionably Voluptuous: Normative Femininity and Resistant Performative Tactics in Fatshion Blogs.” Journal of Marketing Management 31 (2015): 1602–1625.Harju, Anu A. On ‘Being’ Online: Insights on Contemporary Articulations of the Relational Self. Dissertation. Helsinki: Aalto University, 2017. <http://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-60-7434-4>.LeBesco, Kathleen. “Revolting Bodies? The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity. U of Massachusetts P, 2004.Limatius, Hanna. “’There Really Is Nothing like Pouring Your Heart Out to a Fellow Fat Chick’: Constructing a Body Positive Blogger Identity in Plus-Size Fashion Blogs.” Token: A Journal of English Linguistics 6 (2017).Maguire, Emma. “Self-Branding, Hotness, and Girlhood in the Video Blogs of Jenna Marbles.” Biography 38.1 (2015): 72-86.McRobbie, Angela. “Post-Feminism and Popular Culture.” Feminist Media Studies 4 (2004): 255-264. Poletti, Anna. “What's Next? Mediation.” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 32 (2017): 263-266.Rak, Julie. “The Digital Queer: Weblogs and Internet Identity.” Biography 28 (2005): 166-182.———. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier UP. 2013.———. “Life Writing versus Automedia: The Sims 3 Game as a Life Lab.” Biography 38 (2015): 155-180.Rettberg, Jill W. “Self-Representation in Social Media.” Sage Handbook of Social Media. Eds. J. Burgess, A. Marwick, and T. Poell, 2017. 5 Feb. 2018 <http://hdl.handle.net/1956/13073>.Skeggs, Beverley. “Exchange, Value and Affect: Bourdieu and ‘the Self’.” The Sociological Review 52 (2004): 75-95.———. “Imagining Personhood Differently: Person Value and Autonomist Working-Class Value Practices.” The Sociological Review 59 (2011): 496-513.Smith, Sidonie, and Julia Watson. “Virtually Me.” Identity Technologies: Constructing the Self Online. Eds. A. Poletti and J. Rak. University of Wisconsin Press, 2014. 70-95.Taylor, Charles. “Modern Social Imaginaries.” Public Culture 14 (2002): 91-124.

Setting the Mood Weirdly, everything feels the same. There’s absolutely no distinction for me between news, work, walking, gaming, Netflix, rock collecting, scrolling, messaging. I don’t know how this happened, but everything has simply blurred together. There’s a dreadful and yet soothing sameness to it, scrolling through images on Instagram, scrolling Netflix, walking the dog, scrolling the news, time scrolling by as I watch face after face appear or disappear on my screen, all saying something, yet saying nothing. Is this the rhythm of crisis in a slow apocalypse? Really, would it be possible for humans to just bore themselves into oblivion? Because in the middle of a pandemic, boredom feels in my body the same as doom ... just another swell that passes, like my chest as it rises and falls with my breath. This opening anecdote comes from combining narratives in two studies we conducted online during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020: a global study, Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking: Autoethnographic Accounts of Lived Experience in Times of Global Trauma; and an Australian project, The Shut-In Worker: Working from Home and Digitally-Enabled Labour Practices. The Shut-In Worker project aimed to investigate the thoughts, beliefs, and experiences of Australian knowledge workers working from home during lockdown. From June to October 2020, we recruited twelve households across two Australian states. While the sample included households with diverse incomes and living arrangements—from metropolitan single person apartment dwellers to regional families in free standing households—the majority were relatively privileged. The households included in this study were predominantly Anglo-Australian and highly educated. Critically, unlike many during COVID-19, these householders had maintained their salaried work. Participating households took part in an initial interview via Zoom or Microsoft Teams during which they took us on workplace tours, showing us where and how the domestic had been requisitioned for salaried labour. Householders subsequently kept digital diaries of their working days ahead of follow up interviews in which we got them to reflect on their past few weeks working from home with reference to the textual and photographic diaries they had shared with us. In contrast to the tight geographic focus of The Shut-In Worker project and its fairly conventional methodology, the Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking project was envisaged as a global project and driven by an experimental participant-led approach. Involving more than 150 people from 26 countries during 2020, the project was grounded in autoethnography practice and critical pedagogy. Over 21 days, we offered self-guided prompts for ourselves and the other participants—a wide range of creative practitioners, scholar activists, and researchers—to explore their own lived experience. Participants with varying degrees of experience with qualitative methods and/or autoethnography started working with the research questions we had posed in our call; some independently, some in collaboration. The autoethnographic lens used in our study encouraged contributors to document their experience from and through their bodies, their situated daily routines, and their relations with embedded, embodied, and ubiquitous digital technologies. The lens enabled deep exploration and evocation of many of the complexities, profound paradoxes, fears, and hopes that characterise the human and machinic entanglements that bring us together and separate the planetary “us” in this moment (Markham et al. 2020). In this essay we draw on anecdotes and narratives from both studies that speak to the “Zoom experience” during COVID-19. That is, we use Zoom as a socio-technical pivot point to think about how the experience of liminality—of being on/off screen and ambiently in between—is operating to shift both our micro practices and macro structures as we experience and struggle within the rupture, “event”, and conjuncture that marks the global pandemic. What we will see is that many of those narratives depict disjointed, blurry, or confusing experiences, atmospheres, and affects. These liminal experiences are entangled in complex ways with the distinctive forms of commercial infrastructure and software that scaffold video conferencing platforms such as Zoom. Part of what is both enabling and troubling about the key proprietary platforms that increasingly host “public” participation and conversation online (and that came to play a dominant role during COVID19) in the context of what Tarleton Gillespie calls “the internet of platforms” is a sense of the hidden logics behind such platforms. The constant sense of potential dis/connection—with home computers becoming ambient portals to external others—also saw a wider experience of boundarylessness evoked by participants. Across our studies there was a sense of a complete breakdown between many pre-existing boundaries (or at least dotted lines) around work, school, play, leisure and fitness, public and media engagement, and home life. At the same time, the vocabulary of confinement and lockdown emerged from the imposition of physical boundaries or distancing between the self and others, between home and the outside world. During the “connected confinement” of COVID-19, study participants commonly expressed an affective sensation of dysphoria, with this new state of in betweenness or disorientation on and off screen, in and out of Zoom meetings, that characterises the COVID-19 experience seen by many as a temporary, unpleasant disruption to sociality as usual. Our contention is that, as disturbing as many of our experiences are and have been during lockdown, there is an important, ethically and politically generative dimension to our global experiences of liminality, and we should hold on to this state of de-normalisation. Much ink has been spilled on the generalised, global experience of videoconferencing during the COVID-19 pandemic. A line of argument within this commentary speaks to the mental challenge and exhaustion—or zoom fatigue as it is now popularly termed—that many have been experiencing in attempting to work, learn, and live collectively via interactive screen technologies. We suggest zoom fatigue stands in for a much larger set of global social challenges—a complex conjuncture of microscopic ruptures, decisions within many critical junctures or turning points, and slow shifts in how we see and make sense of the world around us. If culture is habit writ large, what should we make of the new habits we are building, or the revelations that our prior ways of being in the world might not suit our present planetary needs, and maybe never did? Thus, we counter the current dominant narrative that people, regions, and countries should move on, pivot, or do whatever else it takes to transition to a “new normal”. Instead, drawing on the work of Haraway and others interested in more than human, post-anthropocenic thinking about the future, this essay contends that—on a dying planet facing major global challenges—we need to be embracing liminality and “staying with the trouble” if we are to hope to work together to imagine and create better worlds. This is not necessarily an easy step but we explore liminality and the affective components of Zoom fatigue here to challenge the assumption that stability and certainty is what we now need as a global community. If the comfort experienced by a chosen few in pre-COVID-19 times was bought at the cost of many “others” (human and more than human), how can we use the discomfort of liminality to imagine global futures that have radically transformative possibilities? On Liminality Because liminality is deeply affective and experienced both individually and collectively, it is a difficult feeling or state to put into words, much less generalised terms. It marks the uncanny or unstable experience of existing between. Being in a liminal state is marked by a profound disruption of one’s sense of self, one’s phenomenological being in the world, and in relation to others. Zoom, in and of itself, provokes a liminal experience. As this participant says: Zoom is so disorienting. I mean this literally; in that I cannot find a solid orientation toward other people. What’s worse is that I realize everyone has a different view, so we can’t even be sure of what other people might be seeing on their screen. In a real room this would not be an issue at all. The concept of liminality originally came out of attempts to capture the sense of flux and transition, rather than stasis, that shapes culture and community, exemplified during rites of passage. First developed in the early twentieth century by ethnographer and folklorist Arnold van Gennep, it was later taken up and expanded upon by British anthropologist Victor Turner. Turner, best known for his work on cultural rituals and rites of passage, describes liminality as the sense of “in betweenness” experienced as one moves from one status (say that of a child) to another (formal recognition of adulthood). For Turner, community life and the formation of societies more broadly involves periods of transition, threshold moments in which both structures and anti-structures become apparent. Bringing liminality into the contemporary digital moment, Zizi Papacharissi discusses the concept in collective terms as pertaining to the affective states of networked publics, particularly visible in the development of new social and political formations through wide scale social media responses to the Arab Spring. Liminality in this context describes the “not yet”, a state of “pre-emergence” or “emergence” of unformed potentiality. In this usage, Papacharissi builds on Turner’s description of liminality as “a realm of pure possibility whence novel configurations of ideas and relations may arise” (97). The pandemic has sparked another moment of liminality. Here, we conceptualise liminality as a continuous dialectical process of being pushed and pulled in various directions, which does not necessarily resolve into a stable state or position. Shifting one’s entire lifeworld into and onto computer screens and the micro screens of Zoom, as experienced by many around the world, collapses the usual functioning norms that maintain some degree of distinction between the social, intimate, political, and work spheres of everyday life. But this shift also creates new boundaries and new rules of engagement. As a result, people in our studies often talked about experiencing competing realities about “where” they are, and/or a feeling of being tugged by contradictory or competing forces that, because they cannot be easily resolved, keep us in an unsettled, uncomfortable state of being in the world. Here the dysphoric experiences associated not just with digital liminality but with the broader COVID-19 epidemiological-socio-political conjuncture are illustrated by Sianne Ngai’s work on the politics of affect and “ugly feelings” in the context of capitalism’s relentlessly affirmative culture. Rather than dismissing the vague feelings of unease that, for many of us, go hand in hand with late modern life, Ngai suggests that such generalised and dispersed affective states are important markers of and guides to the big social and cultural problems of our time—the injustices, inequalities, and alienating effects of late capitalism. While critical attention tends to be paid to more powerful emotions such as anger and fear, Ngai argues that softer and more nebulous forms of negative affect—from envy and anxiety to paranoia—can tell us much about the structures, institutions, and practices that frame social action. These enabling and constraining processes occur at different and intersecting levels. At the micro level of the screen interface, jarring experiences can set us to wondering about where we are (on or off screen, in place and space), how we appear to others, and whether or not we should showcase and highlight our “presence”. We have been struck by how people in our studies expressed the sense of being handled or managed by the interfaces of Zoom or Microsoft Teams, which frame people in grid layouts, yet can shift and alter these frames in unanticipated ways. I hate Zoom. Everything about it. Sometimes I see a giant person, shoved to the front of the meeting in “speaker view” to appear larger than anyone else on the screen. People constantly appear and disappear, popping in and out. Sometimes, Zoom just rearranges people seemingly randomly. People commonly experience themselves or others being resized, frozen, or “glitched”, muted, accidentally unmuted, suddenly disconnected, or relegated to the second or third “page” of attendees. Those of us who attend many meetings as a part of work or education may enjoy the anonymity of appearing at a meeting without our faces or bodies, only appearing to others as a nearly blank square or circle, perhaps with a notation of our name and whether or not we are muted. Being on the third page of participants means we are out of sight, for better or worse. For some, being less visible is a choice, even a tactic. For others, it is not a choice, but based on lack of access to a fast or stable Internet connection. The experience and impact of these micro elements of presence within the digital moment differs, depending on where you appear to others in the interface, how much power you have over the shape or flow of the interaction or interface settings, or what your role is. Moving beyond the experience of the interface and turning to the middle range between micro and macro worlds, participants speak of attempting to manage blurred or completely collapsed boundaries between “here” and “there”. Being neither completely at work or school nor completely at home means finding new ways of negotiating the intimate and the formal, the domestic and the public. This delineation is for many not a matter of carving out specific times or spaces for each, but rather a process of shifting back and forth between makeshift boundaries that may be temporal or spatial, depending on various aspects of one’s situation. Many of us most likely could see the traces of this continuous shifting back and forth via what Susan Leigh Star called “boundary objects”. While she may not have intended this concept in such concrete terms, we could see these literally, in the often humorous but significantly disruptive introduction of various domestic actants during school or work, such as pets, children, partners, laundry baskets, beds, distinctive home decor, ambient noise, etc. Other trends highlight the difficulty of maintaining zones of work and school when these overlap with the rest of the physical household. One might place Post-it Notes on the kitchen wall saying “I’m in a Zoom meeting so don’t come into the living room” or blur one’s screen background to obscure one’s domestic location. These are all strategies of maintaining ontological security in an otherwise chaotic process of being both here and there, and neither here nor there. Yet even with these strategies, there is a constant dialectical liminality at play. In none of these examples do participants feel like they are either at home or at work; instead, they are constantly shifting in between, trying to balance, or straddling physical and virtual, public and private, in terms of social “roles” and “locations”. These negotiations highlight the “ongoingness” of and the labour involved in maintaining some semblance of balance within what is inherently an unbalanced dialectical process. Participants talked about and showed in their diaries and pictures developed for the research projects the ways they act through, work with, or sometimes just try to ignore these opposing states. The rise of home-based videoconferencing and associated boundary management practices have also highlighted what has been marginalised or forgotten and conversely, prioritised or valorised in prior sociotechnical assemblages that were simply taken for granted. Take for example the everyday practices of being in a work versus domestic lifeworld; deciding how to handle the labor of cleaning cups and dishes used by the “employees” and “students” in the family throughout the day, the tasks of enforcing school attendance by children attending classes in the family home etc. This increased consciousness—at both a household and more public level—of a previously often invisible and feminised care economy speaks to larger questions raised by the lockdown experience. At the same time as people in our studies were negotiating the glitches of screen presence and the weird boundarylessness of home-leisure-domestic-school-work life, many expressed an awareness of a troubling bigger picture. First, we had just the COVID lockdowns, you know, that time where many of us were seemingly “all together” in this, at home watching Tiger King, putting neighborly messages in our windows, or sharing sourdough recipes on social media. Then Black Lives Matters movements happened. Suddenly attention is shifted to the fact that we’re not all in this together. In Melbourne, people in social housing towers got abruptly locked down without even the chance to go to the store for food first, and yet somehow the wealthy or celebrity types are not under this heavy surveillance; they can just skip the mandatory quarantine. ... We can’t just go on with things as usual ... there are so many considerations now. Narratives like these suggest that while 2020 might have begun with the pandemic, the year raised multiple other issues. As many things have been destabilised, the nature or practice of everyday life is shifting under our feet. Around the world, people are learning how to remain more distanced from each other, and the rhythms of temporal and geographic movement are adapting to an era of the pandemic. Simultaneously, many people talk about an endlessly arriving (but never quite here) moment when things will be back to normal, implying not only that this feeling of uncertainty will fade, but also that the zone of comfort is in what was known and experienced previously, rather than in a state of something radically different. This sentiment is strong despite the general agreement that “we will never [be able to] go back to how it was, but [must] proceed to some ‘new normal’”. Still, as the participant above suggests, the pandemic has also offered a much broader challenge to wider, taken-for-granted social, political, and economic structures that underpin late capitalist nations in particular. The question then becomes: How do we imagine “moving on” from the pandemic, while learning from the disruptive yet critical moment it has offered us as a global community? Learning from Liminality I don’t want us to go back to “normal”, if that means we are just all commuting in our carbon spitting cars to work and back or traveling endlessly and without a care for the planet. COVID has made my life better. Not having to drive an hour each way to work every day—that’s a massive benefit. While it’s been a struggle, the tradeoff is spending more time with loved ones—it’s a better quality of life, we have to rethink the place of work. I can’t believe how much more I’ve been involved in huge discussions about politics and society and the planet. None of this would have been on my radar pre-COVID. What would it mean then to live with as well as learn from the reflexive sense of being and experience associated with the dis-comforts of living on and off screen, a Zoom liminality, if you will? These statements from participants speak precisely to the budding consciousness of new potential ways of being in a post-COVID-19 world. They come from a place of discomfort and represent dialectic tensions that perhaps should not be shrugged off or too easily resolved. Indeed, how might we consider this as the preferred state, rather than being simply a “rite of passage” that implies some pathway toward more stable identities and structured ways of being? The varied concepts of “becoming”, “not quite yet”, “boundary work”, or “staying with the trouble”, elaborated by Karen Barad, Andrew Pickering, Susan Leigh Star, and Donna Haraway respectively, all point to ways of being, acting, and thinking through and with liminality. All these thinkers are linked by their championing of murky and mangled conceptions of experience and more than human relations. Challenging notions of the bounded individual of rational humanism, these post-human scholars offer an often-uncomfortable picture of being in and through multiplicity, of modes of agency born out of a slippage between the one and the many. While, as we noted above, this experience of in betweenness and entanglement is often linked to emotions we perceive as negative, “ugly feelings”, for Barad et al., such liminal moments offer fundamentally productive and experimental modalities that enable possibilities for new configurations of being and doing the social in the anthropocene. Further, liminality as a concept potentially becomes radically progressive when it is seen as both critically appraising the constructed and conventional nature of prior patterns of living and offering a range of reflexive alternatives. People in our studies spoke of the pandemic moment as offering tantalizing glimpses of what kinder, more caring, and egalitarian futures might look like. At the same time, many were also surprised by (and skeptical of) the banality and randomness of the rise of commercial platforms like Zoom as a “choice” for being with others in this current lifeworld, emerging as it did as an ad hoc, quick solution that met the demands of the moment. Zoom fatigue then also suggests a discomfort about somehow being expected to fully incorporate proprietary platforms like Zoom and their algorithmic logics as a core way of living and being in the post-COVID-19 world. In this sense the fact that a specific platform has become a branded eponym for the experience of online public communicative fatigue is telling indeed. The unease around the centrality of video conferencing to everyday life during COVID-19 can in part be seen as a marker of anxieties about the growing role of decentralized, private platforms in “replacing or merging with public infrastructure, [thereby] creating new social effects” (Lee). Further, jokes and off-hand comments by study participants about their messy domestic interiors being publicized via social media or their boss monitoring when they are on and offline speak to larger concerns around surveillance and privacy in online spaces, particularly communicative environments where unregulated private platforms rather than public infrastructures are becoming the default norm. But just as people are both accepting of and troubled by a growing sense of inevitability about Zoom, we also saw them experimenting with a range of other ways of being with others, from online cocktail parties to experimenting with more playful and creative apps and platforms. What these participants have shown us is the need to “stay with the trouble” or remain in this liminal space as long as possible. While we do not have the space to discuss this possibility in this short provocation, Haraway sees this experimental mode of being as involving multiple actants, human and nonhuman, and as constituting important work in terms of speculating and figuring with various “what if” scenarios to generate new possible futures. As Haraway puts it, this process of speculative figuring is one of giving and receiving patterns, dropping threads, and so mostly failing but sometimes finding something that works, something consequential and maybe even beautiful, that wasn’t there before, of relaying connections that matter, of telling stories in hand upon hand, digit upon digit, attachment site upon attachment site, to craft conditions for flourishing in terran worlding. This struggle of course takes us far beyond decisions about Zoom, specifically. This deliberately troubling liminality is a process of recognizing old habits, building new ones, doing the hard work of reconsidering broader social formations in a future that promises more trouble. Governments, institutions, corporate entities, and even social movements like Transition Towns or #BuildBackBetter all seem to be calling for getting out of this liminal zone, whether this is to “bounce back” by returning to hyper-consumerist, wasteful, profit-driven modes of life or the opposite, to “bounce forward” to radically rethink globalization and build intensely localized personal and social formations. Perhaps a third alternative is to embrace this very transitional experience itself and consider whether life on a troubled, perhaps dying planet might require our discomfort, unease, and in-betweenness, including acknowledging and sometimes embracing “glitches” and failures (Nunes). Transitionality, or more broadly liminality, has the potential to enhance our understanding of who and what “we” are, or perhaps more crucially who “we” might become, by encompassing a kind of dialectic in relation to the experiences of others, both intimate and distant. As many critical commentators before us have suggested, this necessarily involves working in conjunction with a rich ecology of planetary agents from First People’s actors and knowledge systems--a range of social agents who already know what it is to be liminal to landscapes and other species--through and with the enabling affordances of digital technologies. This is an important, and exhausting, process of change. And perhaps this trouble is something to hang on to as long as possible, as it preoccupies us with wondering about what is happening in the lines between our faces, the lines of the technologies underpinning our interactions, the taken for granted structures on and off screen that have been visibilized. We are fatigued, not by the time we spend online, although there is that, too, but by the recognition that the world is changing. References Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke UP, 2006. Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale UP 2018. Haraway, Donna J. “SF: Science Fiction, Speculative Fabulation, String Figures, So Far.” Ada New Media 3 (2013). <http://adanewmedia.org/2013/11/issue3-haraway>. Lee, Ashlin. “In the Shadow of Platforms: Challenges and Opportunities for the Shadow of Hierarchy in the Age of Platforms and Datafication.” M/C Journal 24.2 (2021). <http://doi.org/10.5204/mcj.2750>. Markham, Annette N., et al. “Massive and Microscopic Sensemaking during COVID-19 Times.” Qualitative Inquiry Oct. 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800420962477>. Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005. Nunes, Mark. Error, Glitch, Noise and Jam in New Media Cultures. Bloomsbury, 2012. Papacharissi, Zizi. Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics. Oxford UP, 2015. Pickering, Andrew. “The Mangle of Practice: Agency and Emergence in the Sociology of Science.” American Journal of Sociology 99.3 (1993): 559-89. Star, Susan Leigh. “The Structure of Ill-Structured Solutions: Boundary Objects and Heterogeneous Distributed Problem Solving.” Readings in Distributed Artificial Intelligence. Eds. Les Gasser and Michael N. Huhns. Kaufman, 1989. 37-54. Turner, Victor. “Betwixt and Between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” The Forests of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual. Cornell UP, 1967. 93-111. Turner, Victor. “Liminality and Communitas”. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Al<line Publishing, 1969. 94-113, 125-30.

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