Artykuły w czasopismach na temat „Oil-treated fibrous air filters”

In this work, oil-treated pleated fibrous air filters were developed, characterized, and evaluated for motorcycle engine intake application. The effect of pleat geometry on the filtration performance was examined. Pleat pitch and pleat height were found to play important roles in determining the filtration efficiency, pressure drop, and dust holding capacity. A pleated fibrous filter prepared with optimum levels of pleat pitch and pleat height showed the best filtration performance. The treatment to the pleated filter by viscous oil yielded remarkably higher dust holding capacity and filtration efficiency, both at cleaned and clogged conditions. A statistical analysis revealed that the weight of oil played a significant role in deciding the filtration performance. The oil-treated pleated filter was installed in a commercial air intake system and its filtration performance was assessed. The filter element displayed a significant delay in evolution of pressure drop during dust loading as compared to the untreated one. However, the difference in filtration efficiency between the oil-treated and untreated filter elements was not found to be too high. Nevertheless, both of them met the standard filtration performance as per the best practices followed by the automotive industry. Overall, the oil treatment to cellulosic filters was found to be highly advantageous for motorcycle application. Practical implications of such air filter system were discussed in terms of service life, fuel consumption, and CO2 emission during filter life time.

Microbial growth onto HVAC filters was observed in real conditions with possible degradation of the indoor air quality. The filtration performance of marketed antimicrobial filters containing zinc pyrithione was tested under laboratory conditions and compared to that of similar filters with the same classification, F7 (EN779:2002). The filtration performance of the two tested filters during loading with PM10 particles was quantified in an experimental setup with filter pressure drop measurement and particle counting upstream and downstream of the filters. The microbial growth on the new and loaded filters, both contaminated with a microbial airborne consortium composed of two bacteria (Gram-positive and -negative) and fungi, was quantified by colony-forming units after conditioning the filters for a few days under controlled temperature (25 °C) and humidity (50% or 90% relative humidity). The results reveal that there was no degradation of the filtration performance of the filters treated with the antimicrobial agent. The efficiency of the antimicrobial treatment, i.e., the ability to inhibit the growth of microorganisms during the incubation period, was significant with the new filters regarding the fungal growth, but the results demonstrate that the antimicrobial treatment became inefficient with the loaded filters.

The purpose of this research was to synthesize and form fibroin silk air filter (SF filter) coated and non-coated with titanium dioxide. For use in indoor air pollution treatment. The main air pollutant to be treated is PM2.5. However, VOC removal also investigaed in this study. The synthesis involved degumming process using 0.5 wt % Na2CO3 at 90°C for 60 minutes. Titanium dioxide (TiO2) used in the study was a catalyst Tipaque brand (code A-220 (Anatase)). Results from studying on physical property by scanning electron microscope found that silk fibre was an ununiformly arrangement structure. SF filter coated with TiO2 showed that TiO2 distributed uniformly on the filter. The silk fibroin filters were brought to analyze for the energy band gap in order to find the energy value that the catalyst was needed to stimuate reaction in the photocatalytic process. It was found that TiO2 1-7.5 %(w/v) catalyst coated on the silk fibroin filters had the highest value of light absorption at 390 nanometers, which agreed with the value of energy level in the band gap period of 3.18 eV.The results from efficiency studies of SF filters in the treatment of indoor air pollution (generated from incense fume of 0-2 micron in size) indicated that the best treatment efficiency was 99.76%. In which SF filter non-coated with TiO2 was used, and initial PM2.5 concentration was 5 mg/m3, air flow rate was 3.93 m3/min. Treatment period was 8 hours.

The newly developed non-woven filter media are composed of randomly oriented fibrous fibers from empty fruit bunch fibers. The wet lay-up method was adopted for filter media fabrication. The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of pre-treatment of lignocellulosic fibers on the mechanical properties of fibrous filter media. The study also aims to examine the effect of chitosan application as binder on the tensile strength of fibrous filter media from treated and untreated fibers. The fibers were treated with sodium hydroxide solution, diethyl ether, ethanol and hot water. The pre-treatment enhance the fibrous filter media properties, while filter media from untreated empty fruit bunch fibers showed lower mechanical properties. The changes in mechanical properties followed the order: alkali-treated > diethyl ether > ethanol > hot water > untreated empty fruit bunch fibers.

Petroleum coke (PC) is a coal-like product that is produced during the refinement of crude oil and bituminous sand. Fugitive dust from open storage of PC in urban areas is a potential human health concern. Animal inhalation studies suggest that PC leads to an adverse pulmonary histopathology, including areas of fibrosis and chronic inflammation; however, little is known about its impact on human health. In order to identify biomarkers and cellular pathways that are associated with exposure, we performed two-dimensional liquid chromatography–mass spectrometric analyses on secreted proteins from two human lung culture models. A total of 2795 proteins were identified and relatively quantified from an immortalized cell line and 2406 proteins from primary cultures that were either mock treated or exposed to particulate matter with a diameter of 2.5–10 μm PC or filtered urban air particulates for 16 h. Pathway analysis on secretomes from primary lung cultures indicated that PC exposure suppressed the secretion of proteins involved in the organization of the extracellular matrix and epithelial differentiation. Because these cellular processes could facilitate fibrosis, we performed chronic 12-day exposure studies on three-dimensional human lung cultures consisting of epithelia and stromal fibroblasts. Relative to mock-treated cells, matrix metallopeptidase 9 levels in the conditioned media were lower by 4 days postexposure and remained suppressed for the duration of the experiment. Immunocytochemical staining of collagen III, a marker associated with fibrosis, showed increased accumulation in the epithelial layer and at the air–liquid interface.

The genotoxicity of environmental samples (ambient air, drinking and river waters, purified waste water and oil shale ash) from an oil shale mining and processing area was studied by using the Ames Salmonella/microsome assay. Salmonella typhimurium strains TA98 and YG1021 were used, with and without metabolic activation with rat liver homogenate S9. The water samples were treated with amberlite adsorbent XAD-2 for concentrating non-polar compounds. The air samples were collected on glass fibre filters by using a high volume air sampler, and extracted with dichloromethane by using a Soxhlet apparatus. The air samples were mutagenic in both strains, both with and without S9-mix. The air mutagenicity data were compared with data from similar tests on cigarette smoke condensate as a positive control. Based on the fact that the average 8-hour respiratory volume at occupational activities is between 10m3 and 20m3, the load of airborne mutagenicity at the cokery plant during one week was estimated to be equal to the mutagenicity produced by the mainstream smoke of one cigarette. The drinking and river water samples were tested with both strains, but no dose-related increases in water counts per plate were noted. The oil shale ash sample showed no mutagenic activity, but showed cytotoxicity at the higher doses tested.

Currently, due to the global pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, new procedures and devices for effective disinfection of indoor air are of obvious interest. Various studies demonstrated quite broad ranges of the efficiency of essential oils in the control of biological aerosols. This project reports the results of investigation of the antimicrobial activity of essential oils natural for Australia (tea tree oil, eucalyptus oil and lemon myrtle) distributed by newly developed VaxiPod device for various scenarios, including bacterial, viral and fungal inactivation on various surfaces and in aerosol form. It was found that the device was capable of operating continuously over 24-h periods, providing sufficient aerosol concentration to efficiently inactivate microorganisms both on the surface and in airborne form. Twenty-four to forty-eight hours were required to achieve inactivation above 90% of most of the tested microbes on solid surfaces (stainless steel discs and agar plates), whilst similar efficiency of inactivation on fibrous filter surface as well as in aerosol form was achieved over 30–60 min of the process run. The results look very promising for further development of bioaerosol inactivating procedures and technologies for air quality control applications.

Exploration and production of oil and gas are two operations that have the ability to damage and polluted the environment. The most significant waste created by these operations is produced water. Since the produced water includes toxic pollutants in both organic and inorganic compounds, produced water from oil and gas extraction cannot be discharged directly into the environment. Uncontrolled discharge can cause damage to the environment, including the loss of marine and plant life. Until being discharged into the environment, the produced water must be treated to meet the quality requirements. This article reviewed the sources, characteristics, and extent of pollution caused by oil and gas producing water, as well as different technologies for treating or disposing it. Physical (absorption, membrane filtration etc.), chemical (oxidation and sedimentation) and biological processes can all be used to treat the produced water (activated sludge, biological air filters etc.) Because no single technology can satisfy the acceptable effluent properties, two or more treatment systems can be used in a sequential process.

Air-dried, shell-free cysts of brine shrimp occasionally are used in aquaculture as a food substitute for live nauplii hatched from shelled cysts. Imbibed embryos of shell-free cysts are surrounded by an embryonic cuticle 1 (ECl) composed of an outer and inner cuticular membrane with a fibrous layer in between. Such imbibed embryos, when never air dried but used immediately or dehydrated and stored in a hypertonic salt solution, retain high viability. Although the hatching stages of shelled cysts have been documented with scanning electron microscopy (SEM), no SEM study has examined the hatching of nauplii from cysts without shells, which was the purpose of the present study.Great Salt Lake shelled cysts (Sanders Brine Shrimp Company, Ogden, Utah, U.S.A.) were treated with a mixture of bleach and sodium hydroxide to dissolve their shells. After washing in tap water, the shellfree cysts were placed in a Petri dish on a filter paper that had been saturated with a salt solution consisting of 28 g NaCl plus 6 g of NaHCO3 / liter, for 15 hr at 28° C in a lighted incubator.

Abstract The association between ambient airborne fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure and respiratory diseases has been investigated in epidemiological studies. To explore the potential mechanism of PM2.5-induced pulmonary fibrosis, 60 mice were divided into 3 groups to expose to different levels of PM2.5 for 8 and 16 weeks: filtered air, unfiltered air, and concentrated PM2.5 air, respectively. BEAS-2B cells were treated with 0, 25, 50, and 100 μg/ml PM2.5 for 24 h. The biomarkers of pulmonary fibrosis, epithelial-mesenchymal transition, N6-methyladenosine (m6A) modification, and metabolism of mRNAs were detected to characterize the effect of PM2.5 exposure. The results illustrated that PM2.5 exposure induced pathological alteration and pulmonary fibrosis in mice. The expression of E-cadherin was decreased whereas vimentin and N-cadherin expression were increased in a dose- and time-dependent manner after PM2.5 exposure. Mechanistically, PM2.5 exposure increased the levels of METTL3-mediated m6A modification of CDH1 mRNA. As a target gene of miR-494-3p, YTHDF2 was upregulated by miR-494-3p down-regulation and then recognized m6A-modified CDH1 mRNA to inhibit the E-cad expression, consequently induced the EMT progression after PM2.5 exposure. Our study indicated that PM2.5 exposure triggered EMT progression to promote the pulmonary fibrosis via miR-494-3p/YTHDF2 recognized and METTL3 mediated m6A modification.

We report a case of morning glory disc anomaly in a young patient with tractional retinal detachment successfully repaired with complex pars plana vitrectomy, membrane peel, laser, and oil tamponade. A 19-year-old female with a history of right morning glory disc anomaly associated with PAX6 gene mutation presented with floaters, photopsia, central scotoma, and visual acuity (VA) of 1/200. A complex macula-involving tractional retinal detachment centered around the optic nerve with a morning glory disc anomaly. Retinal detachment was treated with 25-gauge pars plana vitrectomy with difficult separation of the posterior hyaloid. Fibrous preretinal membranes were peeled, a temporal relaxing retinotomy was required, subretinal fluid was drained through a superonasal retinotomy during air-fluid exchange, endolaser was applied, and tamponade was achieved with 1,000-centistoke silicone oil. The retina remained attached at 1-year follow-up, with VA count fingers throughout. Morning glory disc is a rare congenital anomaly associated with PAX6 gene mutation that most often occurs unilaterally. It is rarely associated with tractional retinal detachment. Optimization of visual outcome is imperative despite a poor visual prognosis.

Oil palm is a major agricultural product in Malaysia and it covers approximately 5 million hectares of land. Palm tree biomass is a by-product of oil palm cultivation. Biomass is a complex structure composed of cellulose, hemicelluloses and lignin. Cellulose, which gives the mechanical properties to the natural fiber, is organized in micro-fibrils enclosed by the other two main components: hemicellulose and lignin. Cellulose microfibrils can be found as intertwined microfibrils in the cell wall (220 μm in diameter and 100 40,000 nm in length). Cellulose microfibrils are in turn exist in cellulose nanofibers having diameter of 550 nm and length several millimeters conformed by nanocrystalline domains and amorphous regions. Nanocellulose, which is a degradation product of cellulose, has recently come to public attention because of its great mechanical properties combined with low molecular weight, renewability and biodegradability. Another advantage of nanofibrillar cellulose is that their production does not interfere with the food chain, therefore, they can be considered as socially sustainable raw materials. However, before the nanocellulose can be fully utilized to fabricate smart and environmentally friendly new high-tech products. Most common applications of nanocellulose are for polymer composite, bioplastics, films, foams, gels, cosmetics, dimensionally stable thickener and emulsion, implant material, biodegradable tissue scaffold, suture, drug delivery vehicle, filter paper, speaker membrane, battery membrane, concrete, drilling muds & enhanced oil recovery, water treatment, etc. Several methods have been proposed for the extraction/preparations of nanocellulose which involve extensive chemical and mechanical treatments which are not environmentally friendly. This paper reviewed various methods along with their limitations for the controlled structure synthesis of functionalized nanocellulose from palm tree biomass. The green catalytic approaches are schematically outlined.

Inhaled ultrafine particles of TiO2 (TiO2-D, 20 nm particle size) lead to a greater pulmonary inflammatory response than larger pigment-grade particles (TiO2-F, 250 nm). Male Fisher 344 rats were exposed for 6 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 3 months to 1) filtered air (control); 2) TiO2-F, 22.3 mg/m3; 3) TiO2-D, 23.5 mg/m3; or 4) crystalline SiO2, a positive control particle (∼ 800 nm particle size, 1.3 mg/m3). Groups of 3-4 animals were sacrificed at 6 and 12 months following the completion of exposure. Pulmonary effects of exposure were evaluated using standard hematoxylin and eosin–stain sections, histochemical stains for collagen, and immunohistochemical assays for cell turnover. Six months after animals were exposed to SiO2, they had moderate focal interstitial fibrosis and moderately severe focal alveolitis. Animals exposed to TiO2-D had slightly less fibrosis. The least fibrosis was seen in the TiO2-F group. At 1 year after exposure, fibrosis was still present but decreased in the SiO2 group. The amount of interstitial fibrosis in the TiO2-D– and TiO2-F–treated animals had largely returned to untreated control levels, although an increased number of alveolar macrophages persisted, usually with retained particles. There was discordance between bromodeoxyuridine and proliferating cell nuclear antigen indices, most probably due to cytokine elaboration in the areas of inflammation, which may have altered the expression of proliferating cell nuclear antigens. There was no detectable fibroblast labeling at the 6-month observation and only very low levels at 12 months. Thus, although initially irritant, TiO2-induced lesions regressed during a 1-year period following cessation of exposure.

Introduction. A high level of barrier and protective properties, resistance to moisture penetration (water, steam) and air resistance are the main requirements for packaging paper for food products. Problem. Polyvinyl alcohol-based polymer coatings are widely used for packaging paper; however, such coatings tend to have poor water resistance due to the hydrophilic and water-soluble nature of polyvinyl alcohol. Polyamide-epichlorohydrin resins are used to provide mois­ture resistance of the paper, and glycerol is used for the elasticity of the coating. At the same time, the complex effect of these components in the mixture for surface treatment of paper on the quality of the products has not been sufficiently investigated. Methods. Compositions based on aqueous solutions of polyvinyl alcohol brand 7/18 of the highest grade, polyamideamineepichlorhydrin EKA WS 325 and glycerol brand PK-94 were used to obtain a moisture-resistant, waterproof and fat-proof packaging material. Polyacryla­mide in the amount of 0.25 wt. % was used as a func­tional additive, a viscosity regulator of the com­position, and water was used as a solvent. Model compositions with different ratios of the main components in accordance with the central com­posite rotatable plan of the experiment were app­lied to the tests according to the methods adopted in the pulp and paper industry. STAT-SENS software was used for mathematical processing of the experimental results. A multi-criteria opti­mization method was used to find the optimal range of parameters of the hydrooleophobic composition. Results. The 15 model compositions have been developed. The influencing factors were the content of the polyvinyl alcohol, polyami­deamineepichlorhydrin, glycerol. The quality indi­cators of the treated paper-base were selected as the response functions of mathematical models: oil permeability, air permeability, destructive force, moisture resistance, surface absorption. Conclusions. The developed composition is optimal and makes it possible not to exceed its consumption during application to fibrous mate­rial, in particular paper. The composition pene­trates the thickness of the paper to an optimal depth evenly over the entire surface of the paper, which makes it possible to provide the paper with uniform barrier properties, mechanical strength and wet-strength along the plane of the canvas. In addition, glycerol gives elasticity to the resulting coating and prevents it from cra­cking during repeated bending.

Introduction: Previous animal studies have shown that long exposures to particulate matter (PM) and diesel exhaust particles (DEP) promote atherosclerosis. Air pollutants are also reported to cause nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), liver fibrosis and insulin resistance in animals exposed to PM<2.5 μm. We hypothesized that even brief exposures to air pollutants may alter metabolic pathways that could be responsible for vascular and liver diseases. Methods: ApoE null mice were briefly exposed to diesel exhaust (DE) or filtered air (FA) to assess liver content of lipids, lipid and carbohydrate metabolism. Illumina microarrays and metabolomic analysis were performed in liver tissue. Transcriptomic data was analyzed using the Illumina Beadstudio software. Gluconeogenesis and glycogenolysis were evaluated in HepG2 cells after treatment with diesel exhaust particles (DEP). Gene expression was determined by qPCR. Results: DE exposures led to a significant increase in both liver triglyceride (Mean ± SEM, FA: 0.16 ± 0.01 vs DE: 0.22 ± 0.02 mg/mg protein, n=7, p=0.02) and cholesterol (FA: 15.53 ± 1.53 vs DE: 23.26 ± 2.16 μg/mg protein, n=5, p=0.02) content in ApoE null mice. Microarray analysis depicted a dysregulation of 477 genes, and metabolomic analysis identified 70 metabolites significantly upregulated in the DE group while 48 metabolites were downregulated. Interestingly, metabolites in the citric acid cycle demonstrated significant changes after DE exposure likely due to mitochondrial dysfunction. Key driver analysis revealed Pck1 as a key driver gene. In-vitro experiments in HepG2 cells treated with DEP exhibited a significant upregulation in PCK1 mRNA expression (DEP: 7.31 ± 0.2 vs control: 1.07 ± 0.07, n=3, p<0.01). Although treatment with DEP substantially depleted glycogen content as seen by periodic acid-schiff stain in cells, it significantly enhanced gluconeogenesis (DEP: 23.3 ± 1.2 vs control: 5.5 ± 0.6 μg/ml/mg protein, n=5, p<0.001), effects that were inhibited in the presence of a metabolic inhibitor of PCK1: 3-Mercaptopicolinic acid (3-MPA) (DEP: 23.28 ± 1.18 vs DEP + 3-MPA: 16.04 ± 1.16 μg/ml/mg protein, n=5, p=0.002) indicating that DEP-induced glucose production was due to increased gluconeogenesis. Conclusion: Exposure to diesel exhaust leads to multiple alterations in carbohydrate and lipid metabolism including increased glycogenolysis, gluconeogenesis and PCK1 upregulation.

Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge is a herb plant used as a traditional Chinese medicine to cure cardiovascular disease. In December 2018, a root rot disease was observed on S. miltiorrhiza in four surveyed counties (Song, Yuzhou, Fangcheng, and Mianchi) in Henan province in China. The disease incidence ranged from 15 to 50% in 12 surveyed fields. At the early stage, the diseased plants were wilting with purple leaves. Leaves and branches became withered and fibrous roots became brown and rotted. The main roots of severely diseased plants also became rotted. The color of the stem surface turned from red to black, and the color of the stem xylem and phloem turned from dark red to brown. Eventually, the roots of diseased plants became completely rotted and the whole plants became dead, but no stink, which is different from Fusarium solani (Mart.) Sacc. (Yuan et al. 2015). Diseased root tissues (5×5×5 mm in size) were cut from diseased plants, surface-sterilized with 1% sodium hypochlorite for 1 min followed by dipping in 75% alcohol for 30 sec, rinsed in sterile distilled water for 3 times, air-dried on a sterilized filter paper in a laminar flow hood, placed on potato dextrose agar (PDA) containing 250 mg/l of streptomycin sulfate, and incubated at 28℃. Five isolates of Fusarium were obtained and purified using the single-spore isolation method. On PDA plates, the colonies were purple in color with formation of white aerial mycelia and reached 50 to 60 mm in diameter after incubation for 5 days. The colonies produced abundant microconidia on the colonies. The microconidia were 4.3 to 12.3 (10.0) × 2.1 to 3.5 (3.1) μm in size (n = 40), hyaline, ovoid or ellipse in shape. The conidiogenous cells were polyphialides. On mung bean media, the isolates formed macroconidia with 3 to 6 septae, fusiform in shape, slightly curved, 21.8 to 32.7 (31.4) × 2.6 to 4.3 (3.4) μm in size (n = 50). The morphological features of the five isolates were consistent with the description for Fusarium proliferatum (Matsush.) Nirenberg ex Gerlach & Nirenberg (Leslie and Summerell 2006). To further define the identity of the five isolates, molecular phylogenetic analysis was performed. The genomic DNA was extracted from all five isolates using the cetyl trimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) method. Five genes [nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, translation elongation factor 1-α (EF1α), β-tubulin gene, partial sequence for calmodulin (PRO), and RNA-dependent DNA polymerase II subunit (RPB2)] in F. proliferatum were amplified using primers pairs ITS1/ITS4, EF1T/2T, β-tubulin 2a/b, PRO1/2, and RPB2F/R, respectively (Glass and Donaldson 1995; Liu et al. 1999; Mulè 2004; O'Donnell et al. 1998; O'Donnell et al., 2010). The sequences (GenBank accession numbers: MT371373, MT371384, MT925651, MT925652, and MT934441, respectively) showed 99.6 to 100% identities to the corresponding DNA sequences in F. proliferatum (GenBank Acc. Nos. MK243486, MN245720, KJ12896, MN245721, and MK144327, respectively). All five isolates were tested for pathogenicity to fulfill the Koch's postulates. The 45-day-old healthy plants of S. miltiorrhiza grown in sterilized soil in pots (20 cm in diameter), one plant in one pot, were inoculated with conidial suspensions (1.0 × 107 cfu/ml) by pouring 10 ml conidial suspensions around the stem base in one pot. For each isolate, four plants were inoculated. Four plants were treated with sterilized water in the same volume as a control. The tested plants were placed in a growth room at 25°C (RH > 60%) with a 12 h photoperiod of fluorescent light. The pathogenicity assay was repeated for three times. The similar wilt symptoms were observed on the roots in the inoculated plants 30 days after inoculation but were not observed in the control plants. F. proliferatum was re-isolated from the infected roots, and its identity was confirmed by PCR with the primers described above. To our knowledge, this is the first report of F. proliferatum casing root rot disease on S. miltiorrhiza in China.

“Communicating deep feeling in linear solid blocks of print felt arcane, a method beyond me” — Audre Lorde in an interview with Adrienne Rich (Lorde 87) How do you disclose? In writing, in spoken words, in movements, in sounds, in the quiet energetic vibration and its trace in discourse? Is disclosure a narrative account of a self, or a poetic fragment, sent into the world outside the sanction of a story or another recognisable form (see fig. 1)?These are the questions that guide my exploration in this essay. I meditate on them from the vantage point of my own self-narrative, as a community performance practitioner and writer, a poet whose artistry, in many ways, relies on the willingness of others to disclose, to open themselves, and yet who feels ambivalent about narrative disclosures. What I share with you, reader, are my thoughts on what some may call compassion fatigue, on boredom, on burn-out, on the inability to be moved by someone’s hard-won right to story her life, to tell his narrative, to disclose her pain. I find it ironic that for as long as I can remember, my attention has often wandered when someone tells me their story—how this cancer was diagnosed, what the doctors did, how she coped, how she garnered support, how she survived, how that person died, how she lived. The story of how addiction took over her life, how she craved, how she hated, how someone sponsored her, listened to her, how she is making amends, how she copes, how she gets on with her life. The story of being born this way, being prodded this way, being paraded in front of doctors just like this, being operated on, being photographed, being inappropriately touched, being neglected, being forgotten, being unloved, being lonely. Listening to these accounts, my attention does wander, even though this is the heart blood of my chosen life—these are the people whose company I seek, with whom I feel comfortable, with whom I make art, with whom I make a life, to whom I disclose my own stories. But somehow, when we rehearse these stories in each others’s company (for rehearsal, polishing, is how I think of storytelling), I drift. In this performance-as-research essay about disclosure, I want to draw attention to what does draw my attention in community art situations, what halts my drift, and allows me to find connection beyond a story that is unique and so special to this individual, but which I feel I have heard so many times. What grabs me, again and again, lies beyond the words, beyond the “I did this… and that… and they did this… and that,” beyond the story of hardship and injury, recovery and overcoming. My moment of connection tends to happen in the warmth of this hand in mine. It occurs in the material connection that seems to well up between these gray eyes and my own deep gaze. I can feel the skin change its electric tonus as I am listening to the uncoiling account. There’s a timbre in the voice that I follow, even as I lose the words. In the moment of verbal disclosure, physical intimacy changes the time and space of encounter. And I know that the people I sit with are well aware of this—it is not lost on them that my attention isn’t wholly focused on the story they are telling, that I will have forgotten core details when next we work together. But they are also aware, I believe, of those moments of energetic connect that happen through, beyond and underneath the narrative disclosure. There is a physical opening occurring here, right now, when I tell this account to you, when you sit by my side and I confess that I can’t always keep the stories of my current community participants straight, that I forget names all the time, that I do not really wish to put together a show with lots of testimony, that I’d rather have single power words floating in space.Figure 1. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performer: Neil Marcus.”water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. Orientation towards the Frame: A Poetics of VibrationThis essay speaks about how I witness the uncapturable in performance, how the limits of sharing fuel my performance practice. I also look at the artistic processes of community performance projects, and point out traces of this other attention, this poetics of vibration. One of the frames through which I construct this essay is a focus on the formal in practice: on an attention to the shapes of narratives, and on the ways that formal experimentation can open up spaces beyond and beneath the narratives that can sound so familiar. An attention to the formal in community practice is often confused with an elitist drive towards quality, towards a modern or post-modern play with forms that stands somehow in opposition to how “ordinary people” construct their lives. But there are other ways to think about “the formal,” ways to question the naturalness with which stories are told, poems are written, the ease of an “I”, the separation between self and those others (who hurt, or love, or persecute, or free), the embedment of the experience of thought in institutions of thinking. Elizabeth St. Pierre frames her own struggle with burn-out, falling silent, and the need to just keep going even if the ethical issues involved in continuing her research overwhelm her. She charts out her thinking in reference to Michel Foucault’s comments on how to transgress into a realm of knowing that stretches a self, allows it “get free of oneself.”Getting free of oneself involves an attempt to understand the ‘structures of intelligibility’ (Britzman, 1995, p. 156) that limit thought. Foucault (1984/1985) explaining the urgency of such labor, says, ‘There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and reflecting at all’ (p. 8). (St. Pierre 204)Can we think outside the structure of story, outside the habits of thought that make us sense and position ourselves in time and space, in power and knowledge? Is there a way to change the frame, into a different format, to “change our mind”? And even if there is not, if the structures of legibility always contain what we can think, there might be riches in that borderland, the bordercountry towards the intelligible, the places where difference presses close in an uncontained, unstoried way. To think differently, to get free of oneself: all these concerns resonate deeply with me, and with the ways that I wish to engage in community art practice. Like St. Pierre, I try to embrace Deleuzian, post-structuralist approaches to story and self:The collective assemblage is always like the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice. […] To write is perhaps to bring this assemblage of the unconscious to the light of day, to select the whispering voices, to gather the tribes and secret idioms from which I extract something I call myself (moi). I is an order word. (Deleuze and Guattari 84).“I” wish to perform and to write at the moment when the chorus of the voices that make up my “I” press against my skin, from the inside and the outside, query the notion of ‘skin’ as barrier. But can “I” stay in that vibrational moment? This essay will not be an exercise in quotation marks, but it is an essay of many I’s, and—imagine you see this essay performed—I invite the vibration of the hand gestures that mark small breaches in the air next to my head as I speak.Like St. Pierre, I get thrown off those particular theory horses again and again. But curiosity drives me on, and it is a curiosity nourished not by the absence of (language) connection, by isolation, but by the fullness of those movements of touch and density I described above. That materiality of the tearful eye gaze, the electricity of those fine skin hairs, the voice shivering me: these are not essentialist connections that somehow reveal or disclose a person to me, but these matters make the boundaries of “me” and “person” vibrate. Disclose here becomes the density of living itself, the flowing, non-essential process of shaping lives together. Deleuze and Guattari (1987) have called this bordering “deterritorialization,” always already bound to the reterritorialisation that allows the naming of the experience. Breath-touch on the limits of territories.This is not a shift from verbal to a privileging of non-verbal communication, finding richness and truth in one and less in the other. Non-verbal communication can be just as conventional as spoken language. When someone’s hand reaches out to touch someone who is upset, that gesture can feel ingrained and predictable, and the chain of caretaking that is initiated by the gesture can even hinder the flow of disclosure the crying or upset person might be engaged in. Likewise, I believe the common form of the circle, one I use in nearly every community session I lead, does not really create more community than another format would engender. The repetition of the circle just has something very comforting, it can allow all participants to drop into a certain kind of ease that is different from the everyday, but the rules of that ease are not open—circles territorialise as much as they de-territorialise: here is an inside, here an outside. There is nothing inherently radical in them. But circles might create a radical shift in communication situations when they break open other encrusted forms—an orientation to a leader, a group versus individual arrangement, or the singularity of islands out in space. Circles brings lots of multiples into contact, they “gather the tribes.” What provisional I’s we extract from them in each instance is our ethical challenge.Bodily Fantasies on the Limit: BurningEven deeply felt inner experiences do not escape the generic, and there is lift available in the vibration between the shared fantasy and the personal fantasy. I lead an artists’ collective, The Olimpias, and in 2008/2009, we created Burning, a workshop and performance series that investigated cell imagery, cancer imagery, environmental sensitivity and healing journeys through ritual-based happenings infused with poetry, dramatic scenes, Butoh and Contact Improvisation dances, and live drawing (see: http://www.olimpias.org/).Performance sites included the Subterranean Arthouse, Berkeley, July and October 2009, the Earth Matters on Stage Festival, Eugene, Oregon, May 2009, and Fort Worden, Port Townsend, Washington State, August 2009. Participants for each installation varied, but always included a good percentage of disabled artists.(see fig. 2).Figure 2. Image: Linda Townsend. Performers: Participants in the Burning project. “Burning Action on the Beach”. Burning. 2009. In the last part of these evening-long performance happenings, we use meditation techniques to shift the space and time of participants. We invite people to lie down or otherwise become comfortable (or to observe in quiet). I then begin to lead the part of the evening that most closely dovetails with my personal research exploration. With a slow and reaching voice, I ask people to breathe, to become aware of the movement of breath through their bodies, and of the hollows filled by the luxuriating breath. Once participants are deeply relaxed, I take them on journeys which activate bodily fantasies. I ask them to breathe in colored lights (and leave the specific nature of the colors to them). I invite participants to become cell bodies—heart cells, liver cells, skin cells—and to explore the properties and sensations of these cell environments, through both internal and external movement. “What is the surface, what is deep inside, what does the granular space of the cell feel like? How does the cell membrane move?” When deeply involved in these explorations, I move through the room and give people individual encounters by whispering to them, one by one—letting them respond bodily to the idea that their cell encounters alchemical elements like gold and silver, lead or mercury, or other deeply culturally laden substances like oil or blood. When I am finished with my individual instruction to each participant, all around me, people are moving gently, undulating, contracting and expanding, their eyes closed and their face full of concentration and openness. Some have dropped out of the meditation and are sitting quietly against a wall, observing what is going on around them. Some move more than others, some whisper quietly to themselves.When people are back in spoken-language-time, in sitting-upright-time, we all talk about the experiences, and about the cultural body knowledges, half-forgotten healing practices, that seem to emerge like Jungian archetypes in these movement journeys. During the meditative/slow movement sequence, some long-standing Olimpias performers in the room had imagined themselves as cancer cells, and gently moved with the physical imagery this brought to them. In my meditation invitations during the participatory performance, I do not invite community participants to move as cancer cells—it seems to me to require a more careful approach, a longer developmental period, to enter this darkly signified state, even though Olimpias performers do by no means all move tragically, darkly, or despairing when entering “cancer movement.” In workshops in the weeks leading up to the participatory performances, Olimpias collaborators entered these experiences of cell movement, different organ parts, and cancerous movement many times, and had time to debrief and reflect on their experiences.After the immersion exercise of cell movement, we ask people how it felt like to lie and move in a space that also held cancer cells, and if they noticed different movement patterns, different imaginaries of cell movement, around them, and how that felt. This leads to rich discussions, testimonies of poetic embodiment, snippets of disclosures, glimpses of personal stories, but the echo of embodiment seems to keep the full, long stories at bay, and outside of the immediacy of our sharing. As I look around myself while listening, I see some hands intertwined, some gentle touches, as people rock in the memory of their meditations.nowyour light shines very brightlybut I want youto knowyour darkness alsorichand beyond fear (Lorde 87)My research aim with these movement meditation sequences is not to find essential truths about human bodily imagination, but to explore the limits of somatic experience and cultural expression, to make artful life experiential and to hence create new tools for living in the chemically saturated world we all inhabit.I need to add here that these are my personal aims for Burning—all associated artists have their own journey, their own reasons for being involved, and there is no necessary consensus—just a shared interest in transformation, the cultural images of disease, disability and addiction, the effects of invasion and touch in our lives, and how embodied poetry can help us live. (see fig. 3). For example, a number of collaborators worked together in the participatory Burning performances at the Subterranean Arthouse, a small Butoh performance space in Berkeley, located in an old shop, complete with an open membrane into the urban space—a shop-window and glass door. Lots of things happen with and through us during these evenings, not just my movement meditations.One of my colleagues, Sadie Wilcox, sets up live drawing scenarios, sketching the space between people. Another artist, Harold Burns, engages participants in contact dance, and invites a crossing of boundaries in and through presence. Neil Marcus invites people to move with him, gently, and blindfolded, and to feel his spastic embodiment and his facility with tender touch. Amber diPietra’s poem about cell movement and the journeys from one to another sounds out in the space, set to music by Mindy Dillard. What I am writing about here is my personal account of the actions I engage in, one facet of these evenings—choreographing participants’ inner experiences.Figure 3. Image: Keira Heu-Jwyn Chang. Performers: Artists in the Burning project. “water burns sun”. Burning. 2009. My desires echo Lorde’s poem: “I want you”—there’s a sensual desire in me when I set up these movement meditation scenes, a delight in an erotic language and voice touch that is not predicated on sexual contact, but on intimacy, and on the borderlines, the membranes of the ear and the skin; ‘to know’—I continue to be intrigued and obsessed, as an artist and as a critic, by the way people envision what goes on inside them, and find agency, poetic lift, in mobilising these knowledges, in reaching from the images of bodies to the life of bodies in the world. ‘your darkness also’—not just the bright light, no, but also the fears and the strengths that hide in the blood and muscle, in the living pulsing shadow of the heart muscle pumping away, in the dark purple lobe of the liver wrapping itself around my middle and purifying, detoxifying, sifting, whatever sweeps through this body.These meditative slow practices can destabilise people. Some report that they experience something quite real, quite deep, and that there is transformation to be gained in these dream journeys. But the framing within which the Burning workshops take place question immediately the “authentic” of this experiential disclosure. The shared, the cultural, the heritage and hidden knowledge of being encultured quickly complicate any essence. This is where the element of formal enframing enters into the immediacy of experience, and into the narration of a stable, autonomous “I.” Our deepest cellular experience, the sounds and movements we listen to when we are deeply relaxed, are still cultured, are still shared, come to us in genres and stable image complexes.This form of presentation also questions practices of self-disclosure that participate in trauma narratives through what Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman has called “impression management” (208). Goffman researched the ways we play ourselves as roles in specific contexts, how we manage acts of disclosure and knowledge, how we deal with stigma and stereotype. Impression management refers to the ways people present themselves to others, using conscious or unconscious techniques to shape their image. In Goffman’s framing of these acts of self-presentation, performance and dramaturgical choices are foregrounded: impression management is an interactive, dynamic process. Disclosure becomes a semiotic act, not a “natural,” unfiltered display of an “authentic” self, but a complex engagement with choices. The naming and claiming of bodily trauma can be part of the repertoire of self-representation, a (stock-)narrative that enables recognition and hence communication. The full traumatic narrative arc (injury, reaction, overcoming) can here be a way to manage the discomfort of others, to navigate potential stigma.In Burning, by-passing verbal self-disclosure and the recitation of experience, by encountering ourselves in dialogue with our insides and with foreign elements in this experiential way, there is less space for people to speak managed, filtered personal truths. I find that these truths tend to either close down communication if raw and direct, or become told as a story in its complete, polished arc. Either form leaves little space for dialogue. After each journey through bodies, cells, through liver and heart, breath and membrane, audience members need to unfold for themselves what they felt, and how that felt, and how that relates to the stories of cancer, environmental toxins and invasion that they know.It is not fair. We should be able to have dialogues about “I am poisoned, I live with environmental sensitivities, and they constrict my life,” “I survived cancer,” “I have multiple sclerosis,” “I am autistic,” “I am addicted to certain substances,” “I am injured by certain substances.” But tragedy tugs at these stories, puts their narrators into the realm of the inviolate, as a community quickly feel sorry for these persons, or else feels attacked by them, in particular if one does not know how to help. Yes, we know this story: we can manage her identity for her, and his social role can click into fixity. The cultural weight of these narratives hinders flow, become heavily stigmatised. Many contemporary writers on the subjects of cancer and personhood recognise the (not always negative) aspects of this stigma, and mobilise them in their narratives. As Marisa Acocella Marchetto in the Cancer-Vixen: A True Story puts it: ‘Play the cancer card!’ (107). The cancer card appears in this graphic novel memoir in the form of a full-page spoof advertisement, and the card is presented as a way to get out of unwanted social obligations. The cancer card is perfectly designed to create the communal cringe and the hasty retreat. If you have cancer, you are beyond the pale, and ordinary rules of behavior do no longer apply. People who experience these life-changing transformational diagnoses often know very well how isolating it can be to name one’s personal story, and many are very careful about how they manage disclosure, and know that if they choose to disclose, they have to manage other people’s discomfort. In Burning, stories of injury and hurt swing in the room with us, all of these stories are mentioned in our performance program, but none of them are specifically given individual voice in our performance (although some participants chose to come out in the sharing circle at the end of the event). No one owns the diagnoses, the identity of “survivor,” and the presence of these disease complexes are instead dispersed, performatively enacted and brought in experiential contact with all members of our temporary group. When you leave our round, you most likely still do not know who has multiple sclerosis, who has substance addiction issues, who is sensitive to environmental toxins.Communication demands territorialisation, and formal experimentation alone, unanchored in lived experience, easily alienates. So how can disclosure and the storytelling self find some lift, and yet some connection, too? How can the Burning cell imaginary become both deep, emotionally rich and formal, pointing to its constructed nature? That’s the question that each of the Olimpias’ community performance experiments begins with.How to Host a Past Collective: Setting Up a CirclePreceding Burning, one of our recent performance investigations was the Anarcha Project. In this multi-year, multi-site project, we revisited gynecological experiments performed on slave women in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1840s, by J. Marion Sims, the “father of American gynecology.” We did so not to revictimise historical women as suffering ciphers, or stand helpless at the site of historical injury. Instead, we used art-based methods to investigate the heritage of slavery medicine in contemporary health care inequalities and women’s health care. As part of the project, thousands of participants in multiple residencies across the U.S. shared their stories with the project leaders—myself, Aimee Meredith Cox, Carrie Sandahl, Anita Gonzalez and Tiye Giraud. We collected about two hundred of these fragments in the Anarcha Anti-Archive, a website that tries, frustratingly, to undo the logic of the ordered archive (Cox et al. n.p).The project closed in 2008, but I still give presentations with the material we generated. But what formal methods can I select, ethically and responsibly, to present the multivocal nature of the Anarcha Project, given that it is now just me in the conference room, given that the point of the project was the intersection of multiple stories, not the fetishisation of individual ones? In a number of recent presentations, I used a circle exercise to engage in fragmented, shrouded disclosure, to keep privacies safe, and to find material contact with one another. In these Anarcha rounds, we all take words into our mouths, and try to stay conscious to the nature of this act—taking something into our mouth, rather than acting out words, normalising them into spoken language. Take this into your mouth—transgression, sacrament, ritual, entrainment, from one body to another.So before an Anarcha presentation, I print out random pages from our Anarcha Anti-Archive. A number of the links in the website pull up material through chance procedures (a process implemented by Olimpias collaborator Jay Steichmann, who is interested in digital literacies). So whenever you click that particular link, you get to a different page in the anti-archive, and you can not retrace your step, or mark you place in an unfolding narrative. What comes up are poems, story fragments, images, all sent in in response to cyber Anarcha prompts. We sent these prompts during residencies to long-distance participants who could not physically be with us, and many people, from Wales to Malaysia, sent in responses. I pull up a good number of these pages, combined with some of the pages written by the core collaborators of our project. In the sharing that follows, I do not speak about the heart of the project, but I mark that I leave things unsaid. Here is what I do not say in the moment of the presentation—those medical experiments were gynecological operations without anesthesia, executed to close vaginal fistula that were leaking piss and shit, executed without anesthesia not because it was not available, but because the doctor did not believe that black women felt pain. I can write this down, here, in this essay, as you can now stop for a minute if you need to collect yourself, as you listen to what this narrative does to your inside. You might feel a clench deep down in your torso, like many of us did, a kinesthetic empathy that translates itself across text, time and space, and which became a core choreographic element in our Anarcha poetics.I do not speak about the medical facts directly in a face-to-face presentation where there is no place to hide, no place to turn away. Instead, I point to a secret at the heart of the Anarcha Project, and explain where all the medical and historical data can be found (in the Anarcha Project essay, “Remembering Anarcha,” in the on-line performance studies journal Liminalities site, free and accessible to all without subscription, now frequently used in bioethics education (see: http://www.liminalities.net/4-2). The people in the round, then, have only a vague sense of what the project is about, and I explain why this formal frame appears instead of open disclosure. I ask their permission to proceed. They either give it to me, or else our circle becomes something else, and we speak about performance practices and formal means of speaking about trauma instead.Having marked the space as one in which we agree on a specific framework or rule, having set up a space apart, we begin. One by one, raw and without preamble, people in the circle read what they have been given. The meaning of what they are reading only comes to them as they are reading—they have had little time to familiarise themselves with the words beforehand. Someone reads a poem about being held as a baby by one’s mother, being accepted, even through the writer’s body is so different. Someone reads about the persistence of shame. Someone reads about how incontinence is so often the borderline for independent living in contemporary cultures—up to here, freedom; past this point, at the point of leakage, the nursing home. Someone reads about her mother’s upset about digging up that awful past again. Someone reads about fibroid tumors in African-American women. Someone reads about the Venus Hottentott. Someone begins to cry (most recently at a Feminisms and Rhetorics conference), crying softly, and there is no knowing about why, but there is companionship, and quiet contemplation, and it is ok. These presentations start with low-key chatting, setting up the circle, and end the same way—once we have made our way around, once our fragments are read out, we just sit and talk, no “presentation-mode” emerges, and no one gets up into high drama. We’ve all taken strange things into our mouths, talked of piss and shit and blood and race and oppression and love and survival. Did we get free of ourselves, of the inevitability of narrative, in the attention to articulation, elocution, the performance of words, even if just for a moment? Did we taste the words on our tongues, material physical traces of a different form of embodiment? Container/ConclusionThe poet Anne Carson attended one of our Anarcha presentations, and her comments to us that evening helped to frame our subsequent work for me—she called our work creating a container, a vessel for experience, without sharing the specifics of that experience. I have since explored this image further, thought about amphorae as commemorative vases, thought of earth and clay as materials, thought of the illustrations on ancient vessels, on pattern and form, flow and movement. The vessel as matter: deterritorialising and reterritorialising, familiar and strange, shaping into form, and shaped out of formlessness, fired in the light and baked in the earth’s darkness, hardened only to crumble and crack again with the ages, returning to dust. These disclosures are in time and space—they are not narratives that create an archive or a body of knowledge. They breathe, and vibrate, and press against skin. What can be contained, what leaks, what finds its way through the membrane?These disclosures are traces of life, and I can touch them. I never get bored by them. Come and sit by my side, and we share in this river flow border vessel cell life.ReferencesBritzman, Deborah P. "Is There a Queer Pedagogy? Or, Stop Reading Straight." 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