Статті в журналах з теми "Notional removal element"

Knowing that the workers of the ant Myrmica sabuleti can distinguish different numbers of elements and have a basic notion of zero, we here examine if they can add two numbers of identical elements seen simultaneously. As soon as after three training days, the ants could respond significantly more to the sum of 1 + 1, 2 + 1, 3 + 1, and 3 + 2 elements than to the two initial numbers of elements seen during training and to the wrong sums 3, 4, 5 and 6 respectively. Their ability in giving the correct response seemed to somewhat decrease with increasing numbers to add. Twenty-four hours after the removal of the initial numbers presented during training, the ants no longer responded essentially to the correct sum of these numbers.

The connectivity of a graph [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], is the minimum number of vertices whose removal disconnects [Formula: see text], and the value of [Formula: see text] can be determined using Menger’s theorem. It has long been one of the most important factors that characterize both graph reliability and fault tolerability. Two extensions to the classic notion of connectivity were introduced recently: structure connectivity and substructure connectivity. Let [Formula: see text] be isomorphic to any connected subgraph of [Formula: see text]. The [Formula: see text]-structure connectivity of [Formula: see text], denoted by [Formula: see text], is the cardinality of a minimum set [Formula: see text] of connected subgraphs in [Formula: see text] such that every element of [Formula: see text] is isomorphic to [Formula: see text], and the removal of [Formula: see text] disconnects [Formula: see text]. The [Formula: see text]-substructure connectivity of [Formula: see text], denoted by [Formula: see text], is the cardinality of a minimum set [Formula: see text] of connected subgraphs in [Formula: see text] whose removal disconnects [Formula: see text] and every element of [Formula: see text] is isomorphic to a connected subgraph of [Formula: see text]. The family of hypercube-like networks includes many well-defined network architectures, such as hypercubes, crossed cubes, twisted cubes, and so on. In this paper, both the structure and substructure connectivity of hypercube-like networks are studied with respect to the [Formula: see text]-star [Formula: see text] structure, [Formula: see text], and the [Formula: see text]-cycle [Formula: see text] structure. Moreover, we consider the relationships between these parameters and other concepts.

AbstractThe burial found at Patapatane Cave in the highlands of Arica, northern Chile, yielded an incomplete skeleton of a 20-to-23-year-old female, dating to the end of the Middle Archaic period at 5910 ± 90 B.P. The site is located in a semiarid environment on the eastern side of Sierra de Huaylillas at 3800 m. in the hinterland of Arica, northern Chile. We argue that the missing bones, position of the cranium, and breakage of some elements resulted from both postdepositional human intervention and taphonomic processes. The body was laid to rest in a supine position and after it became skeletonized hunters revisited the inhumation and removed some bone elements. However, the other bones present in situ were not displaced and remained in proper anatomical position, with the exception of the cranium, which was placed vertically on top of the cervical vertebrae. The observed breakage of vertebrae, long bones, and skull seems to have been the result of taphonomic, nonanthropogenic, postburial actions. In reporting on the Patapatane burial, Archaic period funerary patterns from western South America are reviewed to support the notion that early hunters and gatherers systematically manipulated their dead through perimortem and postmortem alterations. These included several processes: (1) processes of body reduction and transformation by removal of body sections or removal of bone elements, cremation, and human remains discarded in domestic middens; and (2) processes of artificial preservation of the dead that included roasting, salting, and artificial mummification. In addition, we recognize the simultaneous existence of intact primary burial and that other skeletons were possibly altered accidentally by postdepositional natural or cultural agents.

Continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) is a modality by which critically ill and hemodynamically unstable patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) can receive hemodialysis. Documentation for CRRT includes many crucial elements and contributes significantly towards the achievement of treatment goals. One of these is ultrafiltrate (UF) removal calculation, which is imperative to addressing fluid volume overload and reducing mortality. Our large academic medical center implemented a new electronic health record (EHR) that revamped CRRT documentation and was rife with opportunities for improvement. A hospital-wide survey sent to ICU staff revealed that most nurses felt they did not receive adequate CRRT documentation education, specifically tailored towards the new EHR. Review of the literature supported the notion that improvements in documentation could be made through enhanced educational offerings. The CRRT nursing curriculum was redesigned to place more emphasis on teaching the purpose and correct implementation of documenting in our EHR. The results of the educational intervention were increased confidence in CRRT documentation as well as improved competency.

We study defeasible knowledge bases with conditional preferences (DKB). A DKB consists of a set of undisputed facts and a rule-based system that contains different types of rules: strict, defeasible, and preference. A major challenge in defining the semantics of DKB lies in determining how conditional preferences interact with the attack relations represented by rebuts and undercuts, between arguments. We introduce the notions of preference attack relations as sets of attacks between preference arguments and the rebuts or undercuts among arguments as well as of preference attack relation assignments which map knowledge bases to preference attack relations. We present five rational properties (referred to as regular properties), the inconsistency-resolving, effective rebuts, context-independence, attack monotonicity and link-orientation properties generalizing the properties of the same names for the case of unconditional preferences. Preference attack relation assignment are defined as regular if they satisfy all regular properties. We show that the set of regular assignments forms a complete lower semilattice whose least element is referred to as the canonical preference attack relation assignment. Canonical attack relation assignment represents the semantics of preferences in defeasible knowledge bases as intuitively, it could be viewed as being uniquely identified by the regular properties together with the principle of minimal removal of undesired attacks. We also present the normal preference attack relation assignment as an approximation of the canonical attack relation assignment.

Sacrolemmal vesicles were isolated from trout ventricles with a yield of 0.51 mg protein/g wet wt of a fraction enriched approximately 15-fold over the crude homogenate as estimated by K(+)-stimulated p-nitrophenylphosphatase (K(+)-pNPPase) activity. Although the K(+)-pNPPase specific activity compared favorably with that of the rat heart, there were some striking differences in the sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and specific phospholipid content (mumol/mg protein) of the sacrolemmal fractions between the two species. Two major sarcolemmal Ca2(+)-transport proteins were investigated, the Na(+)-Ca2+ exchanger and the dihydropyridine (DHP) receptor, a component of the voltage-dependent L-type Ca2+ channel. From the initial rates of Na(+)-dependent Ca2+ uptake, it was determined that the exchanger has an apparent Km for Ca2+ of 14 +/- 1 microM and a maximum velocity of 7.7 +/- 1.1 nmol.mg protein-1.s-1 at 21 degrees C. Experiments using the DHP ligand [3H] (+) PN 200-110 to characterize the equilibrium binding to the DHP receptor in the sarcolemmal fraction yielded a Kd of 0.08 nM and maximum binding sites of 3.06 +/- 0.49 pmol/mg protein. Given the smaller dimensions of the trout myocyte and the resultant higher sarcolemmal surface to cytosolic volume compared with the mammalian myocyte, these in vitro findings are consistent with the notion that Ca2+ transport across sarcolemma is a quantitatively important contributor of Ca2+ delivery to and removal from the contractile element.

Classification processes (separation, division, sorting) take an important place in food industry where they are used, in particular, for selection of some fractions of grain raw materials (wheat, barley, rye, corn, sunflower, groats) by form, sizes, density or aerodynamic properties of particles of the material or for removal from grain of pollution particles (soil, sand, stones, metallic shaving). The separation processes are quite wide spread in other branches of economy (in chemical, processing, machine building, building, agricultural, metallurgy enterprises), so a task of improvement of classification processes and equipment for their realization is enough actual. Different installations for mechanical classification with unbalanced, hydraulic pulse, pneumatic, electromagnetic, centrifugal drive have reliable design, provide quite stable and effective working process. By our notion, the main working parameters of the mechanical classification of grain raw materials, that determine its efficiency (productivity, specific energy outlay, quality of phase separation) are the maximal speed of movement of the material particles relatively sieve surface and a maximal effort created by the executive element of the installation in the middle of the processed material. Known differential equations of movement and energy balances for determination of these working parameters are complex and unsuitable for elaboration of the engineering method of design calculation of corresponding equipment. So, there are algebraic dependencies for definition of the main working parameters of the mechanical classification under using of basic drives types presented in the article. On the basis of these dependencies, a simple computer program can be compiled to obtain and analyze graphic diagrams that allow to determine the most efficient drive option.

This article revisits the cutting-edge ‘capture or kill’ debate in the field of IHL, offering a fresh outlook that reconstrues the notion of ‘human enhancement of soldiers’ from a normative standpoint. After sketching the debate and inquiring into its root causes, the article analyses the interplay between military necessity and humanity, in order to endow the latter with its own content drawing on the notions of military honour and human dignity. Finally, it presents a proposal for the moral education of soldiers during military training. Cet article revisite le débat moderne du « capturer ou tuer » dans le domaine du droit international humanitaire. Il propose une vision nouvelle qui réinterprète d’un point de vue normatif la notion d’amélioration des capacités humaines à des fins militaires. Après avoir initié le débat et recherché son origine, l’auteur analyse l’interaction entre nécessité militaire et humanité, afin de doter cette dernière de son propre contenu, en se basant sur les notions d’honneur militaire et de dignité humaine. Enfin, l’auteur formule une proposition d’éducation morale des militaires au cours de leur entraînement. In dit artikel wordt het toonaangevende debat over “gevangennemen of doden” op het gebied van het IHR herbekeken en wordt aan de hand van een nieuw perspectief het begrip 'mensverbetering van soldaten' geherinterpreteerd vanuit een normatief standpunt. Na het debat kort te hebben beschreven en de diepere oorzaken ervan te hebben onderzocht, analyseert het artikel de wisselwerking tussen militaire noodzaak en menselijkheid, om aan dit laatste begrip een eigen inhoud te geven die gebaseerd is op de begrippen militaire eer en menselijke waardigheid. Ten slotte wordt een voorstel gedaan voor de morele opvoeding van soldaten tijdens de militaire opleiding. El artículo aborda una vez más el afilado debate en torno a “captura o mata” en el ámbito del DIH, ofreciendo una visión renovada que vuelve a construir el concepto de “Realce Humano de los Soldados” desde una nueva perspectiva normativa. Tras examinar los presupuestos del debate e indagar sobre sus causas remotas, el artículo analiza la interacción entre necesidad militar y humanidad, con la finalidad de profundizar en esto último partiendo de la base de los conceptos de honor militar y dignidad humana. Por último, se presenta una propuesta a seguir en la educación moral de los soldados durante el periodo de formación. Questo articolo rivisita l’innovativo dibattito sul tema della ‘Cattura o Uccisione’ nel diritto internazionale umanitario, offrendo una nuova prospettiva che ricostruisce il concetto della ‘valorizzazione umana dei soldati’ da un punto di vista normativo. Dopo aver delineato il dibattito e indagato le sue cause alla radice, l’articolo analizza l’interazione tra necessità militare e umanità, al fine di dotare quest’ultima di elementi propri, attingendo alle nozioni di onore militare e dignità umana. Infine, presenta una proposta per l’educazione morale dei soldati durante l’addestramento militare. Dieser Artikel nimmt die brandaktuelle „gefangen nehmen oder töten“-Debatte im Bereich des humanitären Völkerrechts erneut unter die Lupe und bietet eine neue Perspektive, die den Begriff „Verbesserung der menschlichen Fähigkeiten für Militärzwecke“ aus normativem Standpunkt rekonstruiert. Nach einer Skizzierung der Debatte und einer Untersuchung ihrer Ursachen analysiert der Artikel das Zusammenspiel zwischen militärischer Notwendigkeit und Menschlichkeit, um letzterer einen eigenen Inhalt zu geben, der sich auf die Begriffe militärische Ehre und Menschenwürde stützt. Schließlich legt er einen Vorschlag zur moralischen Erziehung der Soldaten während der militärischen Ausbildung vor.

ABSTRACT Identification of allelic variability at the two major loci (Sd and Rsp) that interact to cause sperm dysfunction in Segregation distorter (SD) males of D. melanogaster has been hampered by the difficulty in separating the elements recombinationally. In addition, small differences in the strength of Sd alleles or sensitivities of Rsp alleles to Sd are difficult to measure against background genetic or environmental variation. Viability effects of the markers used to score progeny classes may also introduce a bias. Removal of Sd and E(SD) from their second chromosome location to create a Dp(2;Y)Sd E(SD) chromosome eliminates these problems, since any combination of Rsp alleles can be easily tested without resorting to recombinational techniques. Further, since these pairs of Rsp alleles are compared in their response to Dp Sd E(SD) in the same individual males, background variation and viability effects can be easily removed to allow finescale resolution of Rsp differences. Tests of all possible pairwise combination of six laboratory chromosomes in this way revealed at least three and possibly four different Rsp allelic classes. In addition, the hierarchical nature of the tests further allowed for determination of the presence of linked suppressors or enhancers of Sd activity. A sample of 11 second chromosomes selected from a group recently isolated from a natural population was also unambiguously ordered as to Rsp allelic status using this approach. The resultant pattern was similar to that obtained for the laboratory chromosomes, except for the not unexpected observation that the natural population apparently harbored more drive suppressors. The pattern of results obtained from these pairwise combinations of Rsp alleles supports the notion that there are no dominance interactions within the group, but that each responds more or less independently to Sd in giving sperm dysfunction.

This article examines the new phenomenon of “citizens’ groups” in contemporary Mumbai, India, whose activities are directed at making the city's public spaces more orderly. Recent scholarship on Mumbai's efforts to become a “global” city has pointed to the removal of poor populations as an instance of neoliberal governmentality as espoused by the Indian state following the “liberalization” of the economy in the early 1990s. However, in this case, it is these civil society organizations, not the state—whose functionaries in fact benefit from a certain element of unruliness on the streets—who are the agents of increased control over populations and of the rationalization of urban space. This article, based on fieldwork–based research, argues that the way in which citizens’ groups exclude poor populations from the city is more complex than a straightforward deployment of neoliberalism, and is imbricated with transnational political economic arrangements in uneven and often inconsistent ways. in particular, this article explores how civic activists in these organizations envision their role in the city, and how their activism attempts to reconfigure the nature of citizenship. for instance, civic activists consider themselves to be the stewards of the city's streets and sidewalks, and wage their battles against what they consider unruly hawkers, a corrupt state, and a complacent middle–class public. Moreover, civic activists render street hawkers’ political claims illegitimate by speaking on behalf of the abstract “citizen”of Mumbai, thus implying that hawkers’ unions speak only on behalf of the vested interests of a single population. in this way, they mobilize a normative notion of civil society in order to exclude the vast segment of city residents who either sell or buy goods on the street. in doing so, the civic activists transform the discourse and practice of politics in the city, so that, ironically, while on one hand using the rhetoric of citizen participation, they in fact undermine the radically heterogeneous forms of democratic political participation the city offers.

Metaphors move—and displace—people. This paper starts from this premise, focusing on how elites have deployed metaphors of water and waste to form a rhetorical consensus around the displacement of non-elite citizens in ancient Roman contexts, with reference to similar discourses in the contemporary Global North and Brazil. The notion of ‘domestic displacement’—the forced movement of citizens within their own sovereign territory—elucidates how these metaphors were used by elite citizens, such as Cicero, to mark out non-elite citizens for removal from the city of Rome through colonisation programmes. In the elite discourse of the late Republican and early Augustan periods, physical proximity to and figurative equation with the refuse of the city repeatedly signals the low social and legal status of potential colonists, while a corresponding metaphor of ‘draining’ expresses the elite desire to displace these groups to colonial sites. The material outcome of these metaphors emerges in the non-elite demographic texture of Julius Caesar’s colonists, many of whom were drawn from the plebs urbana and freedmen. An elite rationale, detectable in the writings of Cicero, Livy, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, and others, underpins the notion of Roman colonisation as a mechanism of displacement. On this view, the colony served to alleviate the founding city—Rome—of its surplus population, politically volatile elements, and socially marginalised citizens, and in so doing, populate the margins of its empire too. Romulus’ asylum, read anew as an Alban colony, serves as one prototype for this model of colonisation and offers a contrast to recent readings that have deployed the asylum as an ethical example for contemporary immigration and asylum seeker policy. The invocation of Romulus’ asylum in 19th century debates about the Australian penal colonies further illustrates the dangers of appropriating the asylum towards an ethics of virtue. At its core, this paper drills down into the question of Roman colonists’ volition, considering the evidence for their voluntary and involuntary movement to a colonial site and challenging the current understanding of this movement as a straightforward, series of voluntary ‘mass migrations’. In recognising the agency wielded by non-elite citizens as prospective colonists, this paper contends that Roman colonisation, when understood as a form of domestic displacement, opens up another avenue for coming to grips with the dynamics of ‘popular’ politics in the Republican period.

Abstract. The decoupling of behaviour observed between Nd isotopic composition (Nd IC, also referred as εNd) and Nd concentration has led to the notion of a "Nd paradox". While εNd behaves in a quasi-conservative way in the open ocean, leading to its broad use as a water-mass tracer, Nd concentration displays vertical profiles that increase with depth together with a deep water enrichment along the global thermohaline circulation, non-conservative behaviour typical of nutrients affected by scavenging in surface waters and remineralisation at depth. In addition, recent studies suggested that the only way to reconcile both concentration and Nd IC oceanic budgets, is to invoke a "Boundary Exchange" process (BE, defined as the co-occurrence of transfer of elements from the margin to the sea with removal of elements from the sea by Boundary Scavenging) as a source-sink term. However, these studies did not simulates the real input/output fluxes of Nd to the ocean, and therefore did prevent from crucial information to apprehend the "Nd paradox". In this study, we investigate this paradox on a global scale using for the first time a fully prognostic coupled dynamical/biogeochemical model and an explicit representation of the sources and sinks to simulate the Nd oceanic cycle. Sources considered are dissolved river fluxes, atmospheric dusts and margin sediment re-dissolution. Sinks are scavenging by settling particles. This model satisfyingly simulate the global Nd oceanic cycle, and produces realistic distribution of Nd concentration and isotopic composition, though a slight overestimation of Nd concentrations in the deep Pacific Ocean, likely revealing an underestimation of the particle fields by the biogeochemical model. Our results underlines that 1) vertical cycling (scavenging/remineralisation) is absolutely necessary to satisfyingly simulate both concentration and εNd, and 2) BE is the dominant Nd source to the ocean. The estimated BE flux (1.1×1010 g(Nd)/yr) is much higher than both dissolved river discharge (2.6×108 g(Nd)/yr) and atmospheric inputs (1.0×108 g(Nd)/yr) that play negligible role in the water column but are necessary to reconcile Nd IC in surface and subsurface. This leads to a recalculated residence time of Nd in the ocean of 360 yrs. The BE flux requires the dissolution of only 3 to 5% of the annually flux of material weathered on the continent and deposited via the solid river discharge on the continental margin.

Abstract. The decoupled behaviour observed between Nd isotopic composition (Nd IC, also referred as εNd) and Nd concentration cycles has led to the notion of a "Nd paradox". While εNd behaves in a quasi-conservative way in the open ocean, leading to its broad use as a water-mass tracer, Nd concentration displays vertical profiles that increase with depth, together with a deep-water enrichment along the global thermohaline circulation. This non-conservative behaviour is typical of nutrients affected by scavenging in surface waters and remineralisation at depth. In addition, recent studies suggest the only way to reconcile both concentration and Nd IC oceanic budgets, is to invoke a "Boundary Exchange" process (BE, defined as the co-occurrence of transfer of elements from the margin to the sea with removal of elements from the sea by Boundary Scavenging) as a source-sink term. However, these studies do not simulate the input/output fluxes of Nd to the ocean, and therefore prevents from crucial information that limits our understanding of Nd decoupling. To investigate this paradox on a global scale, this study uses for the first time a fully prognostic coupled dynamical/biogeochemical model with an explicit representation of Nd sources and sinks to simulate the Nd oceanic cycle. Sources considered include dissolved river fluxes, atmospheric dusts and margin sediment re-dissolution. Sinks are scavenging by settling particles. This model simulates the global features of the Nd oceanic cycle well, and produces a realistic distribution of Nd concentration (correct order of magnitude, increase with depth and along the conveyor belt, 65% of the simulated values fit in the ±10 pmol/kg envelop when compared to the data) and isotopic composition (inter-basin gradient, characterization of the main water-masses, more than 70% of the simulated values fit in the ±3 εNd envelop when compared to the data), though a slight overestimation of Nd concentrations in the deep Pacific Ocean may reveal an underestimation of the particle fields by the biogeochemical model. Our results indicate 1) vertical cycling (scavenging/remineralisation) is absolutely necessary to simulate both concentration and εNd, and 2) BE is the dominant Nd source to the ocean. The estimated BE flux (1.1×1010 g(Nd)/yr) is much higher than both dissolved river discharge (2.6×108 g(Nd)/yr) and atmospheric inputs (1.0×108 g(Nd)/yr) that both play negligible role in the water column but are necessary to reconcile Nd IC in surface and subsurface waters. This leads to a new calculated residence time of 360 yrs for Nd in the ocean. The BE flux requires the dissolution of 3 to 5% of the annual flux of continental weathering deposited via the solid river discharge to the continental margin.

AbstractAction theory may be regarded as a theoretical foundation of AI, because it provides in a logically coherent way the principles of performing actions by agents. But, more importantly, action theory offers a formal ontology mainly based on set-theoretic constructs. This ontology isolates various types of actions as structured entities: atomic, sequential, compound, ordered, situational actions etc., and it is a solid and non-removable foundation of any rational activity. The paper is mainly concerned with a bunch of issues centered around the notion of performability of actions. It seems that the problem of performability of actions, though of basic importance for purely practical applications, has not been investigated in the literature in a systematic way thus far. This work, being a companion to the book as reported (Czelakowski in Freedom and enforcement in action. Elements of formal action theory, Springer 2015), elaborates the theory of performability of actions based on relational models and formal constructs borrowed from formal lingusistics. The discussion of performability of actions is encapsulated in the form of a strict logical system "Equation missing". This system is semantically defined in terms of its intended models in which the role of actions of various types (atomic, sequential and compound ones) is accentuated. Since due to the nature of compound actions the system "Equation missing" is not finitary, other semantic variants of "Equation missing" are defined. The focus in on the system "Equation missing" of performability of finite compound actions. An adequate axiom system for "Equation missing" is defined. The strong completeness theorem is the central result. The role of the canonical model in the proof of the completeness theorem is highlighted. The relationship between performability of actions and dynamic logic is also discussed.

In a quest to establish the principles behind various migration currents, a great body of research has shown that there is keen interest in the differentials in socio-economic conditions between the places of origin of migrants and their destinations, with special focus laid on wage rates, employment opportunities and availability of information. Although useful in explaining some of the elements involved in the migration process, this conventional approach based on the functional analysis of ‘push’ and ‘pull’ factors often fails to give adequate attention to the peculiar historical contexts in which individual migration events have occurred. Recent advances in research into the inter-parochial migration of the labouring poor in rural England under the laws of settlement have clearly illustrated how inappropriate the conventional approach can be. From surviving settlement material such as examinations, certificates and removal orders, historians have successfully identified distinctive features of pauper migration and of the settlement material from the migration has been traced. (For those unfamiliar with the laws of settlement, some basic terms are explained in the Appendix.)First of all, the settlement material is not, strictly speaking, direct evidence of actual migration. Examinations may have been used just for information-gathering purposes, and removal orders could be issued to cajole the immigrants' parish of settlement into producing certificates or agreeing to non-resident relief. What the settlement documents show is, therefore, not so much actual mobility as inter-parochial tensions over the cost of employment and poor relief. Secondly, those who moved to other parishes under the laws of settlement hardly achieved equality with the native parishioners. Many parishes had strict village regulations giving priority to the parishioners in the allocation of work in the harvest fields, in the chances of partaking in gleaning, in access to local charity and in the exercise of various common rights. Thirdly, these migrants were particularly vulnerable to changes in the social and economic conditions of the parishes in which they resided. The parishes of residence were inclined to force non-parishioners to return to their parishes of settlement when there was no further need of their labour or when they became less useful due to decrepitude, injury or other circumstances. Migration through the process of the laws of settlement was not permanent in many cases, and return migration was usually forced rather than voluntary. Finally, it was not uncommon for a conflict of interests to develop between pauper migrants, parish officers and magistrates. Over such issues as employment, poor-relief expenditure and the social cohesiveness of local communities, they often had different interests as waged labourers and peasant workers, as tenant farmers and other ratepayers and as landowners, respectively.These features highlight the point that the functional explanation, which rests on the notion of the autonomy of the parishes of origin and destination as decision-making units, can be seriously misleading. A more important issue is whether the framework of pauper settlement hindered ‘free’ labour circulation and, if so, to what extent, in what way and in whose interest it did so. These are crucial questions for understanding not only the structure of the English labour market but also the political contours of rural society between different classes, and for further evaluating the overall role of the laws of settlement for the industrial and urban growth of the time. Focusing on the critical period 1751–1834, this article seeks to answer the questions through a careful reconsideration of the Oxfordshire settlement material.

This paper deals with numerical analyses of laminated composite plate and shell structures using a new four-node quadrilateral flat shell element, namely SQ4C, based on the first-order shear deformation theory (FSDT) and a combined strain strategy. The main notion of the combined strain strategy is based on the combination of the membrane strain and shear strain related to tying points as well as bending strain with respect to cell-based smoothed finite element method. Many desirable characteristics and the enforcement of the SQ4C element are verified and proved through various numerical examples in static, frequency and buckling analyses of laminated composite plate and shell structures. Numerical results and comparison with other reference solutions suggest that the present element is accuracy, efficiency and removal of shear and membrane locking.

Determining user preferences for data elements requisite to identifying print format serial titles in OPACs/WebPACs assumes an even greater priority when extrapolated to electronic serials where notions of seriality and periodicity cease to have the same meaning as in a physical object-oriented venue. This study utilized focus group methodology to define more user-centred bibliographic. . .

Abstract Background Selective gene silencing is key to development. It is generally accepted that H3K27me3-enriched heterochromatin maintains transcriptional repression established during early development and regulates cell fate. Conversely, H3K9me3-enriched heterochromatin prevents differentiation but constitutes protection against transposable elements. We exploited the fungus Podospora anserina, a valuable alternative to higher eukaryote models, to question the biological relevance and functional interplay of these two distinct heterochromatin conformations. Results We established genome-wide patterns of H3K27me3 and H3K9me3 modifications, and found these marks mutually exclusive within gene-rich regions but not within repeats. We generated the corresponding histone methyltransferase null mutants and showed an interdependence of H3K9me3 and H3K27me3 marks. Indeed, removal of the PaKmt6 EZH2-like enzyme resulted not only in loss of H3K27me3 but also in significant H3K9me3 reduction. Similarly, removal of PaKmt1 SU(VAR)3–9-like enzyme caused loss of H3K9me3 and substantial decrease of H3K27me3. Removal of the H3K9me binding protein PaHP1 provided further support to the notion that each type of heterochromatin requires the presence of the other. We also established that P. anserina developmental programs require H3K27me3-mediated silencing, since loss of the PaKmt6 EZH2-like enzyme caused severe defects in most aspects of the life cycle including growth, differentiation processes and sexual reproduction, whereas loss of the PaKmt1 SU(VAR)3–9-like enzyme resulted only in marginal defects, similar to loss of PaHP1. Conclusions Our findings support a conserved function of the PRC2 complex in fungal development. However, we uncovered an intriguing evolutionary fluidity in the repressive histone deposition machinery, which challenges canonical definitions of constitutive and facultative heterochromatin.

IntroductionThe Sydney Opera House is Australia’s, if not the world’s, most recognisable building. It is universally recognised as an architectural icon and as a masterpiece of the built environment, which has captured the imagination of many (Commonwealth of Australia 4). The construction of the Sydney Opera House, between 1959 and 1973, utilised many ground-breaking methods and materials which, together, pushed the boundaries of technical possibilities to the limits of human knowledge at the time (Commonwealth of Australia 36, 45). Typical investigations into the Sydney Opera House focus on its architects, the materials, construction, or the events that occur on its stages. The role of the illumination, in the perception and understanding of Australia’s most famous performing arts centre, is an under-investigated aspect of its construction and its use today (Dwyer Backstage Biography 1; Dwyer “Utzon’s Use” 131).This article examines the illumination of the Sydney Opera House from the perspective of light as a construction material, another element that is used to ‘build’ the structure on Bennelong Point. This article examines the illumination from an historical view as Jørn Utzon’s (1918-2008) concepts for the building, including the lighting design intentions, were not all realised as he did not complete the project. The task of finishing this structure was allocated to the architectural cooperative of Hall, Todd & Littlemore who replaced Utzon in 1966. The Danish-born Utzon was appointed in January 1957 having won an international competition, from a field of over 230 entries, to design a national opera house for Sydney. He quickly began the task of resolving his design, transforming the roughly-sketched concepts presented in his competition entry, into detailed drawings that articulated how the opera house would be realised. The iteration of these concepts can be most succinctly identified in Utzon’s formal design reports to the Opera House Committee which are often referred to based on the colour of their cover design. The first report, the ‘red book’ was issued in 1958 with further developments of the architectural and services designs outlined in the ‘yellow book’ which followed in 1962. The last of the original architects’ publications was the Utzon Design Principles (2002) which was created as part of the reengagement process—between the Government of New South Wales and the Sydney Opera House with the original architect—that commenced in 1999.As with many modern buildings (such as Eero Saarinen’s TWA Flight Center, Richard Meier’s Jubilee Church or Adrian D. Smith’ Burj Khalifa), concrete was selected to form the basic structural element of the Sydney Opera House. Working with the, now internationally-renowned, engineering firm Ove Arup and Partners, Utzon designed some of the most significant shapes and finishes that have become synonymous with the site. The concrete elements range from basic blade walls with lustrous finishes to the complex, shape-changing beams that rise from under the monumental stairs and climb to terminate in the southern foyers. Thus, demonstrating the use of concrete as both a structural element and a high quality architectural finish. Another product used throughout the Sydney Opera House is granite. As a hardwearing stone, it is used in a crushed form as part of the precast panels that line the walls and internal flooring and as setts on the forecourt. As with the concrete the use of the same material inside and out blurs the distinction between interior and exterior. The forecourt forms a wide-open plaza before the building rises like a headland as it meets the harbour. The final, and most recognisable element is that of the shell (or roof) tiles. After many years of research Utzon settled on a simple mix of gloss and matt tiles of approximately 120mm square that, carefully arranged, produced a chevron shaped ‘lid’ and results in an effect likened to snow and ice (Commonwealth of Australia 51).These construction elements would all remain invisible if not illuminated by light, natural or artificial. This paper posits that the illumination reinforces the architecture of the structure and extends the architectural and experiential narratives of the Sydney Opera House across time and space. That, light is—like concrete, granite and tiles—a critical component of the Opera House’s build.Building a Narrative with LightIn creating the Sydney Opera House, Utzon set about harnessing natural and artificial illumination that are intrinsic parts of the human condition. Light shapes every facet of our lives from defining working and leisure hours to providing the mechanism for high speed communications and is, therefore, an obvious choice to reinforce the structure of the building and to link the built environment with the natural world that enveloped his creation. Light was to play a major role in the narrative of the Sydney Opera House starting from a patron’s approach to the site.Utzon’s staged approach to a performance at the Sydney Opera House is well documented, from the opening passages of the Descriptive Narrative (Utzon 1-2) to the Lighting Master Plan (Steensen Varming). The role of artificial light in the preparation of the audience extends beyond the simple visibility necessary to navigate the site. Light provides a linking element that guides an audience member along their ‘journey’ through several phases of transformation from the physicality of the city on the forecourt to “another world–a make believe atmosphere, which will exclude all outside impressions and allow the patrons to be absorbed into the theatre mood, which the actors and the producers wish to create” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2) in the theatres. Utzon conceived of light as part of the storytelling process, expressing the building’s narrative in a way that allows illumination is to be so much more than signposts to points of activity such as cloaking areas, theatre entries and the like. The lighting was intended to delineate various stages on the ‘journey’ noted above, to reinforce the transition from one world to another such that the combination of light and architecture would provide a series of successive stimuli that would build until the crescendo of the performance itself. This supports the transition of the visitor from the world of the everyday into the narrative of the Sydney Opera House and a world of make believe. Yet, in providing a narrative between these two ‘worlds’ the lighting becomes an anchor—or an element held in suspension – a mediator in the tension between the city at the beginning of the ‘journey’ and the ‘other world’ of the performance at the end. There is a balance to be maintained between illuminating the Sydney Opera House so that it remains prominent in its harbour location, easily read as a distinct sculptural structure on the peninsular separate from, but still an essential part of, the city that lies beyond Circular Quay to the south. Utzon alludes to the challenges of crafting the illumination so that it meets these requirements, noting that the illumination of the broardwalks “must be compatible with the lighting on the approach roads” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 68) while maintaining that “the floodlit building will be the first and last impression for [… an audience] to receive” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1). These lighting requirements are also tempered by the desire that the “night time [...] view will be all lights and reflections, [that] stretch all along the harbour for many miles” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1) reinforcing the use of light as an anchor that provides both a point of reference and serves as a mediator of the Sydney Opera House’s place within the city.The narrative of the materials and elements that are combined to give the final, physical form its striking sensory presence is also told through light, in particular colour. Or, perhaps more precisely in an illumination sense, the accurate reproduction of colour and by extension accurate presentation of the construction materials used in the creation of the Sydney Opera House. Expression of the ‘truth’ in the materials he used was important for Utzon and the faithful representation of details such as the fine grains in timber and the smooth concrete finishes required careful lighting to enhance these features. When extended to the human occupants of the Sydney Opera House, there is a short, yet very descriptive instruction: the lighting is to give “life to the skin and hair on the human form in much the same way as the light from candles” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Thus, the narrative of the materials and their quality was as important as the final structure and those who would occupy it. It is the role of light to build upon the story of the materials to contribute to the overall narrative of the Sydney Opera House.Building an Experience through IlluminationUtzon envisaged that light would do much more than provide illumination or tell the narrative of the materials he had selected – light was also to build a unique architectural experience for a patron. The experience of light was to be subtle; the architecture was to retain a position of centre stage, reinforced by, rather than ever replaced by, the illumination. In this way, concealed lighting was proposed which would be “designed in close collaboration with the acoustical engineers as they will become an integral part of overall acoustic design” and “installed in carefully selected places based on knowledge gleaned from experimental work” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Through concealing the light source, the architecture did not become cluttered or over powered by a dazzling array of fixtures and fittings that detracted from the audience’s experiences. For instance, to illuminate the monumental steps, Utzon proposed that the fittings would be recessed into the handrails, while the bar and lounge areas would be lit from discreet fittings installed within the plywood ceiling panels (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 16) to create an experience of light that was unified across the site. In addition to the aesthetical improvements gained from the removal of the light sources from the field of view, unwanted glare is also reduced reinforcing the ‘whole’ of the architectural experience.During the time that Utzon was conceptualising the illumination of the Sydney Opera House, the Major Hall (what is now known as the Concert Hall) was envisaged as what might be considered as a modern multipurpose venue, one that could accommodate among other activities: symphonic concerts; opera; ballet and dance; choral concerts; pageants and mass meetings (NSW Department of Local Government 24). The Concert Hall was the terminus for the ‘journey’—where the actors and audience find themselves in the same space, the ‘other world’—“a make believe atmosphere, which will exclude all outside impressions and allow the patrons to be absorbed into the theatre mood, which the actors and the producers wish to create” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2). This other world was to sumptuously explode with rich colours “which uplift you in that festive mood, away from daily life, that you expect when you go to the theatre, a play, an opera or a concert” (Utzon Utzon Design Principles 34). These highly decorated and colourful finishes contrast with the white shells further highlighting the ‘journey’ that has taken place. Utzon proposed to use the illumination to reinforce this distance and provide the link between the natural colours of the raw materials used outside the theatre and highly decorated colours of the performance spaces.The lighting treatment of the theatres extended into the foyers and their public amenities to ensure that the lighting design contributed to the overall enhancement of a patron’s visit and delivered the experience of the ‘journey’ that was envisaged by Utzon (Dwyer “Utzon’s Use” 130-32). This standardised approach was in concert with Utzon’s architectural philosophy where repetitive systems of construction elements were utilised, for instance, in the construction of the shells. Utzon clearly articulated this approach in The Descriptive Narrative, noting that “standard light fittings will be chosen […] to suit each location” (67), however the standardisation would not compromise other considerations of the space such as the acoustical performance, with Utzon noting that the “fittings for auditoria and rehearsal rooms must be of necessity, designed in close collaboration with the acoustical engineers as they will become an integral part of over acoustic design” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). Another parallel between the architectural development of the Sydney Opera House and Utzon’s approach to the lighting concepts was, uncommon at the time, his preference for prototyping and experimentation with lighting effects and various fittings (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 67). A sharp contrast to the usual practices of the day which relied upon more straightforward procurement processes with generic rather than tailored solutions. Peter Hall, of Hall, Todd & Littlemore, discussed the typical method of lighting design which was prevalent during the construction of the Sydney Opera House, as a method which “amounted to the electrical engineers laying out on a plan sufficient off-the-shelf light fittings to achieve the desired illumination levels […] the resulting effects were dull even if brightly lit” (Hall 180). Thus, Utzon’s careful approach to ensure that light and architecture were in harmony as “nothing is introduced into the scheme, before it has been carefully investigated and has proved to be the right solution to the problem” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 2) was highly innovative for its time.The use of light to provide an experience was not necessarily new, for example RSL Clubs, theme parks and department stores all used light to attract attention to their products and services, however the scale and proposed execution of these concepts was pioneering for Australia in the 1950s and 1960s. Utzon’s concepts provided a highly experiential unified design to provide the patron with a unique architectural experience built through the careful use of light.Building the Scenery with LightArchitecture might be considered set design on a grand scale (for example see Raban, Rasmuseen and Read). Both architects and set designers are concerned with the relationship between the creative designs and the viewers and both set up opportunities for interactions between people (as actors or users) and structure. However, without light, the scene remains literally, in the dark, isolated from its surroundings and unperceetable to an audience.Utzon was acutely aware of the relationship between the Sydney Opera House and the city in which it stands. The positioning of the structure on the site is no accident and the interplay between the ‘sails’ and the sun is perhaps the most recognised lighting feature of the Sydney Opera House. By varying the angle of the shells, the reflections and the effects of the sunlight are constantly varying depending on the viewer’s position and focus. More importantly, these subtle variations in the light enhance the sculptural effect of the direct illumination and help create the effect of “matt snow and shining ice” (Commonwealth of Australia 51): the ‘shimmer of life’ so desired by Utzon as the sunlight strikes the ceramic tiles. This ‘shimmer’ is not the only natural lighting effect. The use of the different angles ensures variation in the light, clouds and resulting shadows to heighten interest and create an ever-changing scene that plays out on the shells as the sun moves across the sky, as Utzon notes, “something new goes on all the time and it is so important–this interplay is so important that together with the sun, the light and the clouds, it makes it a living thing” (Utzon Sydney Opera House 49). This scene is enhanced by the changing quality of the sunlight; the shells appear to be deep amber at first light their shadows long and faint before becoming shorter and stronger as the sun moves towards its midday position with the colour changing slowly to ‘pure’ white before the shadows change sides, the process reverses and they again disappear under the cover of darkness. Although the scene replays daily, the relative location of the sun and changing weather patterns ensure infinite variation in the effect.This changing scene, on a grand scale, with light as the central character is just as important as the theatrical performances taking place indoors on the stages. With a mobile audience, the detailing of the visual scene that is the structure becomes more important. The Sydney Opera House competes for attention with shipping movements in the harbour, the adjacent bridge with the ant-like procession of climbers and the activities of the city to the south. Utzon foresaw this noting that the “position on a peninsular, which is overlooked from all angles makes it important to maintain an all-round elevation. There can be no backsides to the building and nothing can be hidden from the view” (Utzon Descriptive Narrative 1). The use of natural light to enhance the sculptural form and reinforce isolation of the structure on the peninsular, centre stage on the harbour is therefore not a coincidence. Utzon has deliberately harnessed the natural light to ensure that the Sydney Opera House is just as vibrant a performer as its surroundings. In this way, Utzon has used light to anchor the Sydney Opera House both in the city it serves and for the performances it houses.It is not just the natural light that is used as such an anchor point. Utzon planned for artificial lighting of the sails and surrounding site to ensure that after dark the ‘shimmer’ of the white tiles would be maintained with an equivalent, if manufactured, effect. For Utzon, the sculptural qualities of structure were important and should be clearly ‘read’ at night, even against a dark harbour on one side and the brighter city on the other. Through the use of artificial lighting, Utzon set the scene on Bennelong Point with the structure clearly centred in the set that is the Sydney skyline. This reinforced the notion that a journey into the Sydney Opera House was something special, a transition from the everyday to the ‘other’ world.ConclusionFor Utzon light was just as essential as concrete and other building materials for the design of the Sydney Opera House. The traditional bright lights of the stage had no place in the architectural illumination, replaced instead by a much more subtle, understated use of light, and indeed its absence. Utzon planned for the lighting to envelope an audience but not to smother them. Unfortunately, he was unable to complete his project and in 1968 J.M. Waldram was eventually appointed to complete the lighting design. Waldram’s lighting solutions—many of which are still in place today—borrowed or significantly drew upon Utzon’s original illumination concepts, thus demonstrating their strength and timeless qualities. In this way light builds on the story of the structure, reinforcing the architecture of the building and extending the narratives of the construction elements used to build the Sydney Opera House.AcknowledgementsThe author acknowledges the assistance of Rachel Franks for her input on an early draft of this article and thanks the blind peer reviewers for their generous feedback and suggestions, of course any remain errors or omissions are my own. ReferencesCommonwealth of Australia. Sydney Opera House Nomination by the Government of Australia for Inscription on the World Heritage List. Canberra: Commonwealth of Australia, 2006.Cleaver, Jack. Surface and Textured Finishes for Concrete and Their Impact upon the Environment. Sydney: Steel Reinforcement Institute of Australia, 2005.Dwyer, Simon. A Backstage Biography of the Sydney Opera House. Proceedings of the 7th Annual Conference of the Popular Culture Association of Australia and New Zealand (PopCAANZ) 2016: 1-10.———. “Utzon’s Use of Light to Influence the Audience’s Perception of the Sydney Opera House”. Inhabiting the Meta Visual: Contemporary Performance Themes. Eds. Helene Gee Markstein and Arthur Maria Steijn. Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary P, 2016.Hall, Peter. Sydney Opera House: The Design Approach to the Building with Recommendations on Its Conservation. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 1990.NSW Department of Local Government. An International Competition for a National Opera House at Bennelong Point Sydney, New South Wales, Australia: Conditions and Program (“The ‘Brown’ Book”). Sydney: NSW Government Printer, 1957.Raban, Jonathan. Soft City. London: Picador, 2008.Rasmuseen, Steen. Experiencing Architecture. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology P, 1964.Read, Gary. “Theater of Public Space: Architectural Experimentation in the Théâtre de l'Espace (Theater of Space), Paris 1937.” Journal of Architectural Education 58.4 (2005): 53-62.Steensen Varming. Lighting Master Plan. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 2007.Utzon, Jørn. Sydney Opera House: The Descriptive Narrative. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 1965.———. The Sydney Opera House. Zodiac, 1965. 48-93.———. Untitled. (The ‘Red’ Book). Unpublished, 1958.———. Untitled. (The ‘Yellow’ Book). Unpublished, 1962.———. Utzon Design Principles. Sydney: Sydney Opera House Trust, 2002.

Drawing on my recent experience of working in collaboration with the artist-led project, Open City, I want to explore the potential of an active and resistant - rather than passive and acquiescent – form of stillness that can be activated strategically within a performance-based practice. The article examines how stillness and other forms of non-productive or non-teleological activity might contribute towards the production of a radically dissenting – yet affirmative – model of contemporary subjectivity. It will investigate how the performance of stillness within an artistic practice could offer a pragmatic model through which to approach certain philosophical concepts in relation to the construction of subjectivity, by proposing a practical application of the various ideas explored therein. Stillness is often presented as antithetical to the velocity, mobility, speed and supposed freedom proposed by new technologies and the various accelerated modes by which we are encouraged to engage with the world. In one sense, stillness and slowness have been deemed outmoded or anachronistic forms of temporality, as fastness and efficiency have become the privileged terms. Alternatively, stillness has been reclaimed as part of a resistant – or at least reactive – “counter-culture” for challenging the enforced and increased pace at which we are required to perform. The intent, however, is not to focus on the transcendent possibilities – or even nostalgic dimension – of stillness, where it could be seen as a form of escape from the accelerated temporalities of contemporary capitalism, a move towards a slower, more spiritual or meditative existence by the removal of or self-imposed isolation from contemporary societal pressures. Instead, this article attempts to explore the potential within those forms of stillness specifically produced in and by contemporary capitalism, by reflecting on how they might be (re)inhabited – or appropriated through an artistic practice – as sites of critical action. The article will suggest ways in which habitually resented, oppressive or otherwise tedious forms of stillness, inaction or immobility can be turned into active or resistant strategies for producing the self differently to dominant ideological expectations or pressures. With reference to selected theoretical ideas primarily within the writing of Gilles Deleuze – especially in relation to Spinoza’s Ethics – I want to explore how the collective performance of stillness in the public realm produces an affect that both reveals and disrupts habitual patterns of behaviour. Stillness presents a break or pause in the flow of events, illuminating temporal gaps and fissures in which alternative or unexpected possibilities – for life – might be encountered and encouraged. The act of collective stillness can be understood as a mode of playful resistance to, or refusal of, societal norms, a wilful and collaborative attempt to break or rupture habitual flows. However, collective stillness also has the capacity to exceed or move beyond resistance by producing germinal conditions for a nascent community of experience no longer bound by existing protocol; a model of “communitas” emerging from the shared act of being still. The focus then, is to reflect on how the gesture of stillness performed within the context of an artistic practice – such as that of Open City – might offer an exemplar for the production of an affirmative form of subjectivity, by arguing how the practice of stillness paradoxically has the potential for increasing an individual’s capacity to act. Open City is an investigation-led artistic project – led by Andrew Brown and Katie Doubleday – that explores how public space is conceptualised and organised by interrogating the ways in which our daily actions and behaviours are conditioned and controlled. Their research activity involves inviting, instructing or working with members of the public to create discreet interventions and performances, which put into question or destabilise habitual patterns or conventions of public behaviour, through the use of invitations, propositions, site-specific actions and performative events. The practical and theoretical research phase of the Open City project was initiated in 2006 in collaboration with artist/performer Simone Kenyon. During this phase of research Open City worked with teachers of the Alexander Technique deconstructing the mechanics of walking, and observed patterns of group behaviour and ‘everyday’ movements in public spaces. This speculative phase of research was expanded upon through a pilot project where the artists worked with members of the public, inviting them to attempt to get lost in the city, to consider codes of conduct through observation and mimicry, to explore behavioural patterns in the public realm as a form of choreography, and to approach the spaces of the city as an amphitheatre or stage upon which to perform. This culminated in a series of public performances and propositional/instructive works as part of the nottdance festival in Nottingham (2007) where audiences were invited to participate in choreographed events, creating a number of fleeting and partially visible performances throughout the city. Members of the public were issued specific time-based invitations for collective and individual actions such as ‘Day or night – take a walk in which you notice and deliberately avoid CCTV cameras’ or ‘On the high street during rush hour … suddenly and without warning, stop and remain still for five minutes … then carry on walking as before.’ Image 1: Open City, documentation of publicly-sited postcards. As part of this phase of activity, I was invited by Open City to produce a piece of writing in response to their work – to be serialised over a number of publicly distributed postcards – which would attempt to critically contextualise the various issues and concerns emerging from the investigation-led research that the project had been developing in the public realm. The postcards included an instruction written by Open City on one side, and my serialised text on the other. I have since worked more collaboratively with Open City on new research investigating how the different temporalities within the public realm might be harnessed or activated creatively; how movement and mobility affect the way in which place and locality are encountered or understood. My involvement with the project has specifically been in exploring the use of text-based elements, instructions and propositions and has included further publicly-sited postcard texts and the development of sound-based works using iPod technology to create synchronised actions. In 2008, I successfully secured Arts Council of England funding for a practice-based research trip to Japan with Open City in which we initiated our specific investigations around stillness, slowness, obstruction, and blockage. During this phase of research we became interested in how speed and slowness can be utilised within a performance practice to create points of anchor and location within the urban environment, or in order to affect a psychological shift in the way that space is encountered and understood. Image 2: Open City, research investigations, Japan, 2008.On one level, Open City can be located within a tradition of publicly-sited performance practices. This genealogy of politically – and more often playfully – resistant actions, interventions and models of spatial occupation or navigation can be traced back to the ludic practice of Surrealist errance or aimless wandering into and through the Situationists’ deployment of the dérive and conceptualisation of “psychogeography” during the 1950s and 60s. In its focus on collective action and inhabitation of the everyday as a site of practice, Open City is also part of a trajectory of artistic activity – epitomised perhaps by Allan Kaprow’s Happenings – intent on blurring the line between art and life, or in drawing attention to those aspects of reality marginalised by dominant discourses and ideologies. Performed as part of an artistic practice, non-habitual or even habitually discouraged actions such as aimless wandering, standing still, even the (non)event of 'doing nothing' operate as subtle methods through which to protest against increasingly legislated conditions of existence, by proposing alternative modes of behaviour or suggesting flexibility therein. Artistic practice can be seen as a site of investigation for questioning and dismantling the dominant order – or “major” language – through acts of minor rebellion that – whilst predominantly impotent or ineffective – might still remind us that we have some agency and do not always need to wholly and passively acquiesce. Life itself becomes the material for a work of art, and it is through such an encounter that we might be encouraged to conceive other possibilities for life. Through art, life is rendered plastic and capable of being actively shaped or made into something different to how it might habitually be. However the notion of ‘life as a work of art’ is not exclusive to artistic practice. Various theorists and philosophers – including Nietzsche, Foucault, Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari – have advocated the necessity of viewing life as a kind of project or mode of invention, suggesting ways in which one’s “style of life” or way of existing might be produced or constructed differently. They urge us to consider how we might actively and consciously attend to the full possibilities of life in order to become more human, by increasing our “affective capacity,” that is, our capacity to affect and be affected in affirming or “augmentative terms” (Deleuze, Spinoza and Us 124). In one sense, Spinoza’s Ethics offers a pragmatic model – or guide to living – through which to attempt to increase one’s potential capacity for being, by maximising the possibility of augmentative experiences or joyful encounters. Here, Spinoza formulates a plan or model through which one might attempt to move from the “inadequate” realm of signs and effects – the first order of knowledge in which the body is simply subject to external forces and random encounters of which it remains ignorant – towards a second order of knowledge. Here, the individual body is able to construct concepts of causes or “common notions” with other “bodies in agreement.” The “common notions” of the second order are produced at the point where the individual is able to rise above the condition of simply experiencing effects and signs in order to form agreements or joyful encounters with other bodies. These harmonious synchronicities with other bodies harness life-affirming affects whilst repelling those that threaten to absorb or deplete power. It is only through the construction of “concepts” – an understanding of causality – that it is possible to move from the realm of inadequate ideas towards the production of “adequate ideas from which true actions ensue” (Deleuze, Spinoza and the Three Ethics 143). According to Spinoza’s Ethics, the challenge is to attempt to move from a state in which existence is passively experienced – or suffered blindly – as a series of effects upon the body, towards understanding – and working harmoniously with – the causes themselves. In his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics, Gilles Deleuze suggests that this shift occurs through consciously selecting those affects that offer the possibilities of augmentation (an increase in power through joy) rather than diminution (the decrease of power through sadness). Whilst Spinoza appears to denounce affects as simply inadequate ideas that should be avoided, Deleuze argues that there are certain life-affirming or joyful affects that can be seen as the “dark precursors” of the notions (The Three Ethics 144). According to Deleuze, whilst such “signs of augmentation remain passions and the ideas that they presuppose remain inadequate,” they alone have the capacity to enable the individual to increase in power, for the “selection” of affect is in itself the “condition of leaving the first kind of knowledge, and for attaining the concept” (The Three Ethics 144). For Deleuze-Spinoza, the production of subjectivity is a form of endeavour or “passional struggle,” whereby the individual attempts to increase his or her capacity for turning affects or signs into common notions or concepts (The Three Ethics 145). Deleuze argues that the “common notions are an Art, the art of Ethics itself: organising good encounters, composing actual relations, forming powers, experimenting” (Spinoza and Us 119). This is then a life-long project or practice – the making of life into a work of art – focused on increasing one’s potential to affect and be affected by signs that increase power, whilst simultaneously reducing or minimising one’s threshold of affectivity towards those which diminish or reduce it. I am interested in the role that the artist or artist collective could have in the production of this Spinozist model of subjectivity; how they might function as an intermediary or catalyst, creating conditions or events in which augmentative affects – such as those made possible through a dynamic or active form of stillness – are increased and their energies harnessed. Here perhaps, the affective potential of an art practice is in itself the “dark precursor” of common notions, drawing together bodies in agreement by calling into being an audience or community of experience. On one level, the artist performs an analogous role to Spinoza’s “scholia” – the intermittent sequence of polemical notations “inserted into the demonstrative chain” of propositions – within the Ethics, which according to Deleuze:Operate in the shadows, trying to distinguish between what prevents us from reaching our common notions and what, on the contrary, allows us to do so, what diminishes and what augments our power, the sad signs of our servitude and the joyous signs of our liberations (The Three Ethics 146).Certainly the project, Open City, attempts to draw attention to the habitually endured –or suffered – signs and affects of contemporary experience; striving to remedy the sad affects of capitalism through the production of playful, disruptive or even joyful interventions, events and encounters between bodies in agreement. The disempowering experience or affect of being controlled – blocked, stopped or restricted – by societal or moral codes and civic laws, is replaced by a minor logic of ambiguous, arbitrary and optional rules. Such rules foreground experimentation and request an ethical rather than obedient engagement that in turn serves to liberate the individual from habitual passivity. Open City attempts to reveal – and then resist or refuse – the hidden rules that determine how to operate or perform within contemporary capitalism, the coded orders on how to behave, move and interact. It exposes such insidious legislation as constructs whose logic has been put in place or brought into effect over time, and which in turn might be revoked, dislocated or challenged. For Open City, the performance of stillness can be used as a gesture through which to break from or rupture the orchestrated and controlled flow of capitalist behaviours and its sad affects. Image 3: Open City, documentation of performance, Nottingham, 2008. Random acts of stillness produce moments of friction within the smooth, regulated flows of contemporary capitalism; singularised or inconsistent glitches or jolts that call to attention its unnoticed rhythms and temporal speeds, by becoming its counter-point or by appropriating its “language” for “strange and minor uses” (Deleuze and Guattari 17). Dawdling or meandering reveals the fierceness of the city’s unspoken bylaws, whilst the societal pressure towards speed and efficiency is thwarted by moments of deliberate non-production, inaction and the act of doing nothing. In one example of collective action – at noon on a shopping street – around fifty pedestrians, suddenly and without warning, stop still in their tracks and remain like this for five minutes before resuming their daily activity. In another, a group of individuals draw to a standstill and slowly sway from side to side; their stillness becomes a device for affecting a block or obstacle that limits or modifies others’ behaviour, creating an infinitely imaginable ricochet of further breaks and amendments to routine journeys and directional flows. Open City often mimics or misuses familiar behavioural patterns witnessed in the public realm, inhabiting their language or codes in a way that playfully transforms their use or proposes elasticity or flexibility therein. Habitual or routine actions are isolated and disinvested of their function or purpose, or become repeated until all sense of teleological imperative is wholly evacuated or rendered absurd. For example, a lone person stops still and holds their hand out to check for rain. Over and over, the same action is repeated but by different individuals; the authenticity of the original gesture shattered and separated from any causal motivation by the reverberations of its uncanny echo. Such performed actions remove or distance the response or reaction from its originary stimulus or excitation, creating an affective gap between – a no longer known or present – cause and its effect. This however, is not to return action back to realm of Spinoza’s first order of knowledge – where the body only experiences effects and remains ignorance of their cause – but rather an attempt to create a gap or space of “hesitancy” in which a form of creativity might emerge. Within the act of stillness, habitually imperceptible rhythms and speeds become visible. By being still it is possible to witness or attend to the presence of different or heterogeneous temporal “refrains” or durations operating beneath and within the surface appearance of capitalism’s homogeneous flow.Open City attempts to recuperate the creative potential within those moments of stillness generated through the accelerated technologies of contemporary capitalism: the situational ennui endured whilst waiting or queuing; the moments of collective and synchronised impasse controlled by technologies such as traffic lights and pedestrian crossings, and even – though perhaps more abstractly – the nebulous experience of paralysis and impotency induced by fear, anxiety and uncertainty. Performances attempt to neutralise these various diminutive affects by re-inhabiting or re-framing them; ‘turning’ their stillness towards a form of memorial, protest or social gathering, or alternatively rendering it seemingly empty, unreadable or absurd. This emptiness can also be understood as a form of disinterestedness that refuses to react to immediate stimulus – or lack of – and rather remains open to other possibilities of existence or inhabitation. Stillness is curiously equivocal, an “ambiguous or fluctuating sign” that has the capacity to “affect us with joy and sadness at the same time” (Deleuze The Three Ethics 140). The external appearance of stillness is ultimately blank, its “event” able to affect a “vectorial passage” of contradictory directions, towards an “increase or decrease, growth or decline, joy or sadness” (Deleuze, The Three Ethics 140). Open City attempts to transform the – potentially – diminutive affects of stillness into “augmentative powers” by occupying the stillness of contemporary capitalism as a disguise or camouflage for producing invisible performances that hijack a familiar language in order to misuse its terms. More recently Open City have adapted or occupied the moments of stillness made possible or enabled by everyday technologies: the inconsistent rhythm patterns of stopping, pausing or circling about on the spot exhibited by someone absorbed in a mobile-phone call, text messaging or changing a track on their MP3 player. Here, certain technologies allow, legitimate or even give permission for the disruption of the flow of movement within the city, or are used as a device through which to explore and exploit the potential of collective synchronised action through the use of recorded instructions.Image 4: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008).The alienating and atomising affects of such personal technologies – which are habitually used and isolate the individual from their immediate surroundings and from others around them – are transformed into tools for producing collective action. In one sense, Open City’s performances operate as a form of “minor art” as outlined by Deleuze and Guattari, where a major language – the dominant order of capitalism and control – is neutralised or deterritorialised before being “appropriated for strange and minor uses” (17). For Deleuze and Guattari a minor practice is always political and collective, signalling the “movement from the individual to a ‘collective multiplicity’” where there is no longer an individual subject as such but “only collective assemblages of enunciation”(18). The minor always operates within the terms of the major but functions as a destabilising agent where it attempts – according to Simon O’Sullivan – to “stammer and stutter the commodity form, disassembling those already existing forms of capital and indeed moving beyond the latter’s very logic” (73). However, as with all acts of deterritorialisation there is always the potential that they will in turn become reterritorialised; assimilated or absorbed back into the language of the “major”. This can be seen, for example, in the way that the proposed radical potential of the flash-mob phenomenon has been swiftly recuperated through the language of the corporate publicity campaigns of high-profile companies – specifically telecommunication multi-nationals - for whom the terms ‘community’ and ‘collectivity’ are developed as Unique Selling Points for further capitalist gain.By contrast, the intent of Open City is to create an event that operates not only as a visible rupture, but which also has the capacity to transform or radicalise the subjectivities of those involved beyond the duration of the event itself. Open City encourage the movement from the individual to a “collective multiplicity,” through performances that produce synchronised action where individuals become temporally united by a rule or instruction that they are collectively adhering to. Publicly distributed postcards have been used to invite or instruct as-yet-unknown publics to participate in collective action, setting the terms for the possibility of imagined or future assemblies. Or more recently, recorded spoken word instructions listened to using MP3 player technology have been used to harmonise the speeds, stillness and slowness of individual bodies to produce the possibility of a new collective rhythm or “refrain” (Guattari, Subjectivities). For example, within the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008) a group of individuals were led on a guided walk in which they engaged with a series of spoken instructions listened to using MP3 player technology. The instructions invited a number of discreet performances culminating in a collective moment of stillness that was at once a public spectacle and a space of self-contained or private reflection. Image 5: Open City, public performance from the Dislocate festival (Yokohama, Japan, 2008). Once still, the individuals listened to a further spoken text which interrogated how the act of ‘being still’ might shift in meaning moving from or between different positions. For example, stillness can be experienced as a controlling or restrictive mode of enforced waiting, as an act of resistant refusal or protest, or alternatively as a model of quiet contemplation or idle daydreaming. For Spinoza, a body is defined by its speeds and slowness – by the relationship between motion and rest – and by its capacity to affect and be affected. In attempting to synchronise the speeds and affectivity of individuals through group action, Open City create the conditions for the production of Spinoza’s “common notions” – or second kind of knowledge – through the organisation of a collective or shared understanding of causality by bodies in agreement. Acts of collective stillness also function in an analogous manner to the transitional or liminal phase within ritual performance by producing the possibility of “communitas,” the transient experience of togetherness or even of collective subjectivity. In From Ritual to Theatre, The Human Seriousness of Play, anthropologist Victor Turner identifies a form of “existential or spontaneous communitas” – an acute experience of community – experienced by individuals immersed in the "no longer/not yet" liminal space of a given ritualistic process, in which “the past is momentarily negated, suspended or abrogated, and the future has not yet begun, an instant of pure potentiality when everything, as it were, trembles in the balance” (44). Stillness is presented as pure disinterestedness, a non-teleological event enabling nothing but the possibility of a community of experience to come into being.Within Open City then, the gesture of stillness recurs as a device or “event-encounter” for simultaneously producing a break or hiatus in an already existing formulation of experience, at the same time as creating a gap or space of possibility in which to imagine or affirm an alternative mode of being. Referring to the Deleuzian notion of encounter, O’Sullivan reflects on the dual presence of rupture and affirmation within the moment of encounter itself whereby “our typical ways of being in the world are challenged, our systems of knowledge disrupted” (Sullivan,xxiv). He argues that the encounter:Operates as a rupture in our habitual modes of being and thus in our habitual subjectivities. It produces a cut, a crack. However … the rupturing encounter also contains a moment of affirmation, the affirmation of a new world, in fact a way of seeing and thinking this world differently (Sullivan, xxv).Open City attempts to create the conditions for these dual possibilities – of rupture and affirmation – through the production of joyful encounters between bodies within the event of performed stillness. Stillness operates as a double gesture where it creates a stop or block – a break with the already existing or with the events of the past – and also a moment of pause, the liminal space of projection; a future-oriented or preparatory zone of pure potentiality. Stillness thus offers the simultaneous possibility of termination and of a new beginning, within which it becomes possible to move from a paradigm of resistance – to the present conditions of existence – towards one of augmentative refusal or proposal that invites reflection on a still future-possible way of life. Poised at a point of anticipation or as a prophetic mode of waiting, stillness offers the promise of as-yet-undecided possibilities where options for future action or existence remain momentarily open, not yet known. Collective stillness thus always has a quality of “futurity” by creating the transitional conditions of communitas or the possibility of a community emerging outside or beyond the temporal frame of capitalism: a community that is still in waiting. ReferencesBergson, Henri. Matter and Memory. Trans. N. M. Paul and W. S Palmer. New York: Zone Books, 1991.De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari.“What Is a Minor Literature.” Kafka toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986.Deleuze, Gilles. “Spinoza and the Three ‘Ethics’.” Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans D. W. Smith and M. A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998.———. “Life as a Work of Art.” Negotiations: 1972-1990. New York: Columbia U P, 1995.———. “Spinoza and Us.” Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. R. Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988. Guattari, Felix. “Subjectivities: For Better and for Worse.” The Guattari Reader. Ed. G. Genosko. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1996.Foucault, Michel. “An Aesthetics of Existence.” Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Ed. L. Kritzman. London: Routledge, 1990.O’Sullivan, Simon. Art Encounters Deleuze and Guattari. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.Spinoza, Benedict. Ethics. Trans. A Boyle. London: Everyman, 1989. Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: PAJ Publications, 1982.

The question of colour in architecture offers many potential points of entry. Taking an historical standpoint, one could discuss the use of bright colour in ancient Greek and Roman architecture, the importance of brilliantly coloured mosaic and stained glass to sacred architecture in the Byzantine and medieval periods, and the primacy of colour in non-Western architectural traditions both ancient and modern. It would be possible to trace prohibitions against the use of applied colour, derived from late 18th century notions of architectural morality—ideals demanding authenticity, honesty and directness in the expression of structure, function and materials. This puritan strand could be pursued into the modern movement, to its quasi-pathological attachment to whiteness.1 It would also be possible to note a trend which ran counter to dominant modernist attitudes to colour, in the eclectic 'neon historicism' of so-called 'post-modernist' architecture. But while it would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the history of colour in architecture in passing, it has been well addressed elsewhere, and is in any case outside the scope of this paper.2 What is significant is that this history is marked throughout by many of the same, largely unspoken, prohibitions against colour that can be traced across other cultural realms—that which David Batchelor has described as a history of 'chromophobia'. As Batchelor writes; 'Chromophobia manifests itself in the many and varied attempts to purge colour from culture, to diminish its significance, to deny its complexity…. [T]his purging of colour is usually accomplished in one of two ways. In the first, colour is made out to be the property of some 'foreign' body—usually the feminine, the oriental, the primitive, the infantile, the vulgar, the queer or the pathological. In the second, colour is relegated to the realm of the superficial, the supplementary, the inessential or the cosmetic. In one, colour is regarded as alien and therefore dangerous; in the other it is perceived merely as a secondary quantity of experience, and thus unworthy or serious consideration.'3 Numerous examples of the attempt to 'purge' colour can be identified throughout the history of architecture in the modern period. The mode of chromophobia particular to architecture may be summarised thus: colour in architecture has been associated with illusion and frivolity, and thus with decoration—it has been seen as being excess or supplementary to 'real' architecture.4 Discussions of colour in architecture can never be completely distinguished from discussions of ornament, or of materials and materiality. Colour is not necessarily a problem in itself—it is acceptable, for instance, when it is inherent to the material or to its weathering process, as in the bright green of copper verdigris. It is the application of colour, in the form of paint or stain, that raises questions of authenticity. The importance of surface and colour have been consistently made subordinate to architectural form; and the idea that colour is acceptable in interiors but not exteriors is merely the expression of another hierarchy, linking and demoting the trivial, contingent, feminised interior in favour of universal, masculinized, heroic external form. In the modern period, a work of 'serious' Architecture (as opposed to vernacular, commercial, or 'popular' architecture) has most often either been white, or coloured in the subdued palette afforded by the inherent characteristics of 'natural' materials.5 This is nowhere more true than in institutional architecture generally, and museum architecture in particular. Museums and their stake in the neutral monochrome The museum as an institution has traditionally functioned as a symbol of the establishment and its authority, a symbolic role often expressed in conventionally monumental architecture. This monumentality has, in turn, been reinforced by prestigious materials: much of the dignity and status of institutional architecture is taken from materials valued for their expense, rarity, or durability.6 Museum buildings are required to last, and thus they must not only use enduring materials, but materials which demonstrate their durability by being self-finishing in their natural, apparently neutral, state. The very idea that 'natural' materials are also somehow 'neutral' opens onto another, more ideological investment that the museum has in avoiding colour. Museums have long held a stake in the idea of an objective stance, and maintained the pretence of an unmediated presentation of historical fact. The notion of the museum as 'white cube' embodies all of this—the idea of the white cube, with its aformal form and achromatic colour, signifies purity and transcendence. Just as the whiteness of modern architecture was a continuation of the hygienic whiteness of doctor's coat, bathroom tiles, and hospital walls, the whiteness of the museum signifies clinical objectivity.7 It also, perhaps more significantly, stands for the ideal of the tabula rasa, the clean slate upon which the documentary evidence of art, history, or any other metanarrative could be methodically examined and arranged. For the museum, abandoning the neutrality of its public presentation may also mean a symbolic abandonment of objectivity. It would mean, if not a surrender to partiality, at least the admission of partiality—and the renunciation of universal whiteness for the specificities of colour. In the modern period, applied colour can never be neutral, but is read as mask, disguise, or stain. In the postmodern period, the discourse of the 'new museology' has challenged and discredited many of the ideological complicities of the idea of the museum as 'white box', linked as they are with a suspiciously absolutist rhetoric of abstract purity. Museums have increasingly begun to render explicit their role in the re-presentation of history, and to work at recontextualising ideas and artefacts. But even if a critical and self-reflexive stance is now more common in museological practice, it has taken much longer to begin to inform museum architecture. It would be a very courageous museum indeed that was willing to cash in all of the chips of its cultural authority, of which prestigious monumental architecture is a particularly powerful source. Most museums are still, if not white, at least respectably neutral, inside and out. But not so the National Museum of Australia (NMA). This museum, in its polychromatic formal complexity, could hardly be further from a 'white cube' museum. The National Museum of Australia: flirting with the flippant The NMA is housed in a loud and gregarious building. From its controversial strategy of literally appropriating elements from other canonical modernist works, through the coded messages of the Braille patterns on its surface, to the device of the extruded string and red 'knot' which passes through and around the building's form, it is relentless in its challenge to conventional institutional architecture. This is nowhere more true than in its colouration—there is hardly a neutral tone in sight. For that matter, there is hardly a 'natural' material in sight either—the majority of the building is constructed from pre-formed aluminium panelling in grey, yellow, red and khaki, crossed in places by sweeping calligraphic symbols.8 The dramatic aerial loop at the museum's entry is white and bright orange. There are walls of black dimpled pre-formed concrete, blue painted poles (get it?), a 'Mexican wave' of multicoloured steel sheets, and of course the richly cacophonous Garden of Australia Dreams. There are also some deliberate plays on colour symbolism—Le Corbusier's gleaming white modernist classic, the Villa Savoye, is reversed and reconstituted in black, corrugated steel. The fact that this forms part of the Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies is a hint of the building's clear, even dangerously frank, employment of colour symbolism. Given the architects previous work, we can safely assume that in this case, as elsewhere in the building, the choice of colours is calculated for maximum rhetorical effect. But I am less concerned here with the specific ploys of the architects than with the ways in which the building's reception has been conditioned by its employment of colour, specifically the ways in which it has been construed as populist. The NMA has polarised the architectural community in Australia. While much of the comment directed at the building has centred around its contravention of standards of taste and propriety in civic architecture, I would argue that this is only the symptom of a deeper reaction against its apparent frivolity, as signified most strongly by its colour. This is exemplified in a critique of the building by Stephen Frith, a respected Canberra academic. Concluding a polemical review in the Canberra Times, Frith asks: But why such tongue-lashings and breast-beatings over what has quickly established itself as a happy theme park to mediocrity? Surely its condoning of the ruthless kitsch of petty capitalism in its imagery and finishes provides for some spectre of merit? The problem becomes one of the civic domain in which architecture and its rhetoric is interpreted. For a supposedly public work, the museum is an intensely private building, privately encoded with in-jokes, and in the end hugely un-funny... The confection of cheap cladding and plasterboard is a spurious sideshow of magpie borrowings passing themselves off as cultural reference...9 Everything in this passage decries what Frith reads as the NMA's verisimilitude of popularity - the reference to theme-parks, sideshows, commercialism - a confection constructed with poor quality materials and finishes, which nevertheless flirts 'pretentiously' with the canon of modern architecture. To Frith the building reads not as a cheap and cheerful reflection of the Australian vernacular, but as a demeaning attempt to raise a laugh from the elite at the expense of the uncomprehending masses. His complaint is thus two-fold—that the building has insufficient gravitas, and that this is compounded rather than redeemed by the fact that it is not truly popular at all, but rather 'intensely private'. There is an important distinction to be made here, then, between 'populism' and 'popularity'. Populism has the negative connotation of deliberately seeking popular acceptance at the cost of quality, intellectual rigour, or formal aesthetic value. 'Popularity' still retains its more neutral modern sense, either of actual public involvement, or of things that are socially recognised as popular. In architecture, populism is already hedged about with prohibitions springing from the idea that a deliberately populist architecture is somehow fraudulent. A piece of serious, civic, monumental architecture should neither set out expressly to be popular, nor to look like it is, so the logic goes: if a work of high architecture happens to gain popular acclaim, then that is a happy accident. But there are significant reasons why such popularity must be seen to be incidental to other, more lofty concerns. Given that colour is seen to be 'popular', a highly coloured building is thus assumed to be 'lowering' itself in order to appeal to popular taste. Old systems of thought endure, and both museums and architecture are each subject to an unspoken hierarchy that still sees 'populism', if not actual popularity, as inferior. Conclusions: colour as the sign of a critical engagement But there is another possible reading of the NMA's apparent populism. I would argue that the building in fact presents and problematises the question of popularity in formal architectural terms. This leads to a proposition: that there is a 'look' of populism that exists independently of any intended or actual popularity, or even a connection with popular culture. I would argue that the NMA opens an elaborate play on this 'look' of the popular, and that it does so by manipulating certain key aesthetic devices: literal and figurative elements, visual jokes, non-orthogonal forms, and most significantly, bright and mixed colour. Such devices carry a weight of expectation and association, they cause a building to be read or socially recognised as being populist, largely as a result of pre-existing dichotomies between 'high' and 'low' art. In this conception the NMA, turning the modernist prohibition on its head, uses colour as the deliberately frivolous disguise of a profoundly serious intent. Rather than concealing the absence of meaning, it conceals an overabundance of meaning—a despairing accumulation of piled up allegories, codes and fragments. It is thus deeply ironic that the NMA has been read as a light, flippant, and populist confection, since I would argue that it could hardly be further from being those things. Rather than taking the usual path, of seeking cultural authority through allusion to traditional monumental architecture, the NMA makes perverse references to the seemingly trivial, commercial, and populist. The reasons why the architects might want the building to be (mis)read in this way are complex. But by renouncing the aesthetic trappings of a serious institution, the NMA reveals the very superficiality of such trappings. Furthermore, by renouncing the 'look of authority' in favour of colour, frivolity, and apparent populism, it introduces a note of doubt. Could the building, and thus the institution - a national museum, remember, charged with representing the nation and placed in the national capital - really be as flippant as it seems? Or is there some more subtle game afoot, a subversive questioning of accepted notions of Australian national history and national identity? I would argue that this is so. In the NMA, then, colour is the sign of a critical engagement. It positions the building itself as a discourse or discussion, not only of architectural colour as conferring inferiority and flippancy, but of a lack of colour as conferring authority and legitimacy. Of course, it is precisely because of architecture's history of chromophobia that colour can itself become a tool for subversiveness, provide an invitation to alternative readings, and collapse unspoken hierarchies. In this respect, the colour in and of the NMA provides an emblem of that which has long been marginalised in architecture, and in culture more generally. Notes 1. Mark Wigley writes that the primacy of whiteness in high modernist architecture (particularly the work of Le Corbusier) lies partly in the removal of decoration. '[The] erasure of decoration is portrayed [by Le Corbusier] as the necessary gesture of a civilized society. Indeed, civilization is defined as the elimination of the 'superfluous' in favour of the 'essential' and the paradigm of inessential surplus is decoration. Its removal liberates a new visual order. Echoing an argument at least as old as Western philosophy, Le Corbusier describes civilization as a gradual passage from the sensual to the intellectual, from the tactile to the visual. Decoration's 'caresses of the senses' are progressively abandoned in favour of the visual harmony of proportion.' Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, pp. 2-3 2. See for example John Gage's superb and authoritative history of the use and meaning of colour, Colour and Meaning: Art, Science and Symbolism, Thames and Hudson, London, 1999. For a survey of the use of colour in architecture, see Tom Porter, Architectural Colour: A Design Guide to Using Colour on Buildings, Whitney Library of Design, New York, 1982, or the more recent Architectural Design Profile number 120: Colour in Architecture, AD, vol. 66, no 3/4, March/April 1996. These are only a few examples of the available literature. 3. David Batchelor, Chromophobia, Reaktion Books, London, 2000, pp. 22-23. 4. The notable exception to this - the architecture of schools is emblematic in itself: colour is appealing to children, so the logic would go, because they have undeveloped, 'primitive' tastes. 5. William Braham has perceptively examined the allure of 'natural' materials and colours in the modern period. He writes that 'the natural can only be understood as a somewhat flexible category of finishes, not by a single principle of use, manufacture, or appearance. The fact that a family of paint colours neutrals, ochres, and other earth colours fit within the definition of natural is only partly explained by their original manufacture with naturally occurring mineral compounds. Though they are opaque surface coatings, they resemble the tones produced in natural materials by weathering.' He goes on to say that the 'natural/neutral palette' is characterised by 'the difficult pursuit of authenticity', and this question goes indeed to the heart of the issue of colour in architecture. William W. Braham, 'A Wall of Books: The Gender of Natural Colours in Modern Architecture', JAE Journal of Architectural Education, vol. 53. No.1, September 1999, p. 10. 6. But perhaps more important than actual durability in institutional architecture is the appearance of durability, and this appearance is undermined by protective treatments like paint, whether coloured or not. Materials which are seen as flimsy or fragile may as well be coloured, so the logic goes, since they require constant re-painting anyway, and since it fits their low status. 7. Mark Wigley, White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1995, p. 5. 8. Aluminium panelling is a new technology and a new material one that was unknown in the high modernist period but which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous today. The fact that aluminium panelling is coloured during the manufacturing process opens a new and interesting question: is this colour inherent, or is it simply applied earlier in the building process? Is it, in other words, an 'honest' or a 'dishonest' colour? Given that aluminium does have its own colour, and that it can be lacquered or anodised to retain that colour, it seems that the aluminium panelling of the NMA have been received as 'dishonest'. 9. Frith, 'A monument to lost opportunity', The Canberra Times, 20 March 2001 Citation reference for this article MLA Style Stead, Naomi. "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5.3 (2002). [your date of access] < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php>. Chicago Style Stead, Naomi, "White cubes and red knots" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5, no. 3 (2002), < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]). APA Style Stead, Naomi. (2002) White cubes and red knots. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 5(3). < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0207/whitecubes.php> ([your date of access]).

IntroductionWith the proliferation of remixed (audio-visual) texts such as fan music videos, slash video, mash-ups and digital stories utilising existing and new visual and audio material on sites such as YouTube, questions are opened as to the efficacy of current forms of media textual analysis. Remixed texts have been positioned as a new and transformative form of art that, despite industry copyright concerns, do not compete with existing texts but makes use of them as ‘found material’ in order to produce an ostensibly intertextual experience (Lessig). Intertexts include pastiche, parody and/or allusion to extant texts and, at the same time, acknowledge that no text is purely original but is built on its ostensible or tacit relationality with a broad range of other texts—relationalities which may be activated in reading or be coded into the text. Remixes are often the work of fan audiences who seek to engage in a participatory manner—a particular reading position that shifts into the act of writing—with texts, television, film and music of which one is a member of an avid audience or a community audience that engage with each other through collaborative production of new texts based on old. The remix is a substantial outcome of such readerly, writerly and collaborative engagement whereby meanings drawn intertextually from the original text are re-produced, expanded upon, critiqued or re-framed through several different activities which may include: re-ordering existing audio-visual material in a way which, according to Constance Penley, was once done by Star Trek fans using magnetic tape and two video recorders to produce new narratives and interpretative frames by cutting and suturing material in an order different from that broadcast (Penley);presenting new meanings to texts, stories or narratives by taking visual material either in short cuts or long scenes and layering over popular music audio tracks, which is commonly done by television fans, such as fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the early 2000s, who produce new meanings or re-emphasise old ones around relationships by bringing together (sometimes cheesy) songs with televised footage (Cover, More Than a Watcher). In both cases, the texts are both new and old—they are a remix of existing material, but the act of remixing produces new frames for the activations of meanings or new narratives, that sit between the interactive and the intertextual. The fact that these forms can be traced back to pre-digital technologies of the 1970s (in the case of Penley’s Star Trek fan videos) or the pre-YouTube and Web 2.0 participatory sharing (in the case of Cover’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan videos, distributed through newslists, email and private website) indicates the deep-seated cultural desire or demand for participatory engagement and co-creative forms of encountering texts (Cover, Interactivity). In light of this new form of participatory communication experience, there has emerged a methodological gap requiring new frameworks for researching and analysing the remix text as a text, and within the context of its interactivity, intertextuality, layering and the ways in which these together reconfigure existing narratives and produce new narrative. This paper outlines some approaches used in teaching students about contemporary interactive and convergent digital texts by undertaking practical textual analyses of sample remix audio-video texts. I will discuss some of the more important theoretical issues concerning the analysis of remix texts, with particular attention to notions of interactivity, intertextuality and layering. I will then outline some practical steps for undertaking this kind of analysis in the classroom. By understanding the remix text through a metaphor of layering (drawn from Photoshopping and digital manipulation terminology), a method for ‘remix analysis’ can be put forward that presents innovative ways of engaging with textuality and narrative. Such analyses incorporate narrative sourcing, identification of user-generated content, sequencing, digital manipulation, framing and audio/visual juxtaposition as starting points for reading the remix text. Remix analyses, in this framework, optimise a reflective engagement with contemporary issues of copyright and intellectual property, textual genealogy, intertextuality, co-creative production and emergent forms of interactivity. Interactivity and Intertextuality For Lawrence Lessig, remix is a form of creativity that puts in question the separation between reader and writer. It emphasises instead the participatory form in which read-write creativity (or co-creativity) becomes the normative standard of high-level engagement with extant texts through both selection and arrangement (56). Remix culture, for Lessig, makes use of digital technologies that have been developed for other purposes and practices and delivers forms of collage, complexity, and co-creativity directed towards a broader audience. The role played by YouTube as a sharing site which makes available the massive number of remixed texts is testament to the form’s significance as an interactive, intertextual creation or co-creation. As Burgess and Green have argued, consumer co-creation is fundamental to YouTube’s mission and role in the distribution of texts (4-5). It is more than a peripheral site for re-distribution of either existing texts or private video-logs but, today, operates as a mainstream component in a broader media matrix. In this matrix, the experience of textual audiencehood is re-coded as participatory engagement with prior texts, in order both to reflect on those texts and to produce new ones in a co-creative capacity. This is not to suggest that YouTube is not complicit in copyright regimes that actively seek to restrict participatory and co-creative artistic practice in favour of older models of textual ownership and control over distribution (Cover, Audience Inter/Active). Its digital capacity to police remixed texts that have been marked by corporate copyright holders as unavailable for further use or manipulation has been a substantial development on the side of traditional copyright in the push-pull struggle between free co-creativity and limiting regimes (Cover, Interactivity), although this does not altogether stem the production of the remix as a substantial experience of artistic practice and of user participatory engagement with media matrices. Central to understanding and analysing the remix as a text in its own right is the fact that it is interactive, a point which leads to the assertion that analytic tools suited to traditional, non-interactive texts are not always going to be adequate to the task of unpacking and drawing out thematic and conceptual material from a remix’s narrative. Although interactivity has been difficult to define, the form of interactivity in which we see the remix is that which involves an element of co-creativity between the author of a source text and the user of the text who interacts with the source to transform it into something new. Spiro Kiousis has argued that while definitions of interactivity are amorphous, there is value in the concept “as long as we all accept that the term implies some degree of receiver feedback and is usually linked to new technologies” (357). For Lelia Green, however, interactivity implies the capacity of a communication medium to have its products altered by the actions of a user or audience (xx). In the case of the latter, interactivity covers not only the sorts of texts in which audience or user engagement is required as a built-in part of the process, such as in digital games, but those texts, forms, mediums and experiences in which existing texts are manipulated, revised, re-used or brought together, such as in the remix. Drawing on Bordewijk and van Kaam, Sally McMillan delineated the concept of interactivity into a typology of four intersecting levels or uses: Allocution, in which interactive engagement is minimal, and is set within the context of a single, central broadcaster and multiple receivers on the periphery (273). This would ordinarily include most traditional mass media forms such as television and the selection of channels.Consultation, which occurs in the use of a database, such as a website, where a user actively searches for pre-provided information but does not seek to alter that information (273). Access here does not alter the content, source, narrative or information that has been requested. Drawing information from Wikipedia without the intent of editing information may alter the metadata or framework through providing the site with tracking information, but in this case the textuality of the text as accessed is not transformed through this level of interactivity.Registration, which does record access patterns and accumulates information from the periphery in a central registry which alters the information, significance or context of the material (273). McMillan’s early Web 1.0 example of registrational interactivity was the internet ‘cookie’, which tracks and customises content of internet sites visited by the user. However, as a category of interactivity in which the narrative or form of the text itself is altered in its reading or use, it might also be said to include the electronic game as well as forms of communications engagement which access a source text, manipulate, customise or re-form it using commonly-available or sophisticated software, and re-distribute it through digital means. Here, the narrative is knowingly acted upon in ways which alter it for other uses. Conversational, which occurs when individuals interact directly with each other, usually in real-time in ways which mimic face-to-face engagement without physical presence at a locale (273). An online written chat using a relay platform provided by a social networking site that does not record the text is an example; likewise using a video skype account is also conversational interactivity. While McMillan’s ‘registrational’ definition of interactivity, as the one which gives greater capacity to an audience to change, alter and manipulate a text or a textual narrative, allows considerable redefinition of the traditional author-text-audience relationship, none of the four-scale definitions adequately allow for the ways in which remix texts are at once interactive, intertextual, intermedial and built through participatory re-layering and re-organising of a broader corpus of material in ways typically not invited by the original texts or their original distributional mediums—hence the concerns around copyright and distributional control (Cover, Audience Inter/Active). As an outcome of registrational interactivity, the remix presents itself not merely in terms of how the relationship is structured in the context of new digital media, but also shifts how the audience has been conceived historically in terms of its ability to control the text and its internal structure and coherence. In light of both new developments in interactivity with the text as found in the increasing popularity of new media forms such as electronic gaming, and the ‘backlash’ development of new technologies, software and legal methods that actively seek to prevent alteration and re-distribution of texts, the historical and contemporary conception of the author-text-audience affinity can be characterised as a tactical war of contention for control over the text. This is a struggle set across a number of different contexts, media forms, sites and author/audience capacities but is embodied in the legal, cultural and economic skirmishes over the form and use of remix texts. More significantly, however, the remix is an interactivity that is conscious of the intertextuality that produces the various juxtapositions to create new narratives. All texts are intertextual, and the concept of intertextuality takes into account the network of other, similar texts to which any new text contributes and by which it is influenced. This similarity can be produced by several factors, including genre, allusion, trace, pastiche and aesthetics. Intertextuality can include the fact that a text is related to and permeated by the discourse of its sources (Bignell 92), but in all cases it shapes the meanings, significations and potential readings of a text in a way attuned to the polysemy of contemporary cultural production. In the context of interactivity, however, it is through co-creative engagement that intertextuality of both the source and the new text are drawn out as a deliberate act of creation. Layering As an interactive and deliberately intertextual text, the remix or mash-up is best understood as layered intermedia, that is, as a narrative comprised of—or fused between—moving image and sound, audio which includes dialogue, effects, incidental and narrative-related music. In that context, no individual component of the text can be understood or analysed away from the elements into which it has been remixed. New meanings emerge in intermedia remixes not simply because originary or new intertextualities are produced by user-creators relying on existing sources, but because those sources themselves no longer operate with the same set of meanings and significations, allowing the productive activation of new meanings (Bennett). While it is important to pay attention to the fact that the narrative of a remix text works only through the reconfiguration of the intermedia of audio and visual in order to create a new text with subsequent new potential meanings, the analysis must pay attention to the various forms of layering that constitute all audio-visual texts. For Lessig, such layering is a digital form of collage (70). However it is also the means by which, on the one hand, new intertextualities are developed through juxtaposition of different sources in order to give them all new significations and to activate new meanings and, on the other hand, to draw attention to the existing potential intertextuality of the sources and the polysemy of meaning. Understanding layering of texts involves understanding a text in a three-dimensional capacity. This is where some basic awareness of digital image manipulation through application software such as Photoshop and Gimp can be instructive in providing frameworks through which to understand contemporary digital media forms and analyse the ways in which they, as potential, productively activate sets or ranges of meanings. Such digital manipulation programs require the user to think about, say, an image as being built upon and manipulated across different layers, whereby a core image is ‘drawn out’ into its third dimension through adding, shifting, changing, re-figuring and re-framing—layer over layer. The core remains, but is radically altered by what occurs at the different layers. Likewise, the remix is produced through interacting with a number of different source texts together within a conceptual framework that is three-dimension and operates across layers. These include the two primary layers of the visual and the audio—for remixes are typically audio-visual—but also through interacting with a range of intertextual meanings that, likewise, can be understood in three-dimensional layers across the temporality of an audio-visual moving text. Method of Analysis A simple typology for analysing remix texts—focusing particularly on fan videos on YouTube, including same-sexualised fan fiction known as slash and those texts which re-order television and film material juxtaposed against popular music tracks—emerged from a first-year undergraduate digital media cultures course I taught at The University of Adelaide in 2010. With a broad range of meanings, views, interpretations and engagements emerging in large-group teaching, we workshopped possible scenarios with the aim of establishing some steps that can be used to consider the place of the remix in the context of its narrative interactivity and intertextual groundings. A typological method for analysis is not necessarily the most sophisticated way in which to draw out narrative threads and strands from a remix text and, indeed, there may be value in exploring remixed texts from other perspectives such as the YouTube-enabled participatory reflectiveness that emerges from community and commentary perspectives. However, to understand the narrative elements that emerge from a remix there is also great value in beginning with an unstitching of its constituent components in order to understand the interactive, intertextual, intermedial formation of the remix through its structuration and selectivity and assembling of extant texts. To best describe a typology for analysing the remix as a text and an interactive intertext, we might use an example. Let us say, hypothetically, a YouTube remix video of three- minutes-and-fifty-seconds in length that takes various scenes from the television series Arrested Development, perhaps the two characters of adult brothers GOB and Michael Bluth, from across its four years and sets them against a single audio track, Belle & Sebastian’s Seeing Other People. Such an example would not be an uncommon remix, which may be an expression of fandom for Arrested Development or perhaps an expression of critical engagement that actively draws attention to the range of reading positions, formations and potential productive activation of meanings (Bennett) around sibling relationships in the original. That is, by juxtaposing a popular audio track about the awkwardness of romantic relationships against images of the closeness, distance and competitiveness of the two brothers is to give it a ‘slash’ element, thereby presenting a narrative which either implies a pseudo-sexual or romantic component to the brotherly relationship (an activity not uncommon in the production of slash) or makes a critical statement about the way in which the theatrics of touch, familial hugging, looking and seeing or positioning in visual frames is utilised in the series in ways which are open to alternative readings. Now that it is determined such a remix might actively and self-consciously play with the juxtaposition across two layers to create additional meanings, the real work of analysis can be undertaken. This, of course, could include thematic, discursive or narrative analysis of the text alone. However, if one is to work with the notion that a remix is always produced in both interactivity and intertextuality, then a number of steps must be taken at the level of individual layers and, subsequently, together. This aids in understanding the sourcing, collocation, positioning, re-ordering in order to come to a depth of interpretation as to a possible meaning of the remix among the many available in a polysemic cultural product. Step One: Determine the Video Narrative Source. This involves establishing if the remix’s video material is from a singular source (such as a single film or television episode), multiple sources (many films) and, if multiple, if these are from the same genre, with the same actors, same director or different in each case. It also involves ascertaining if there is user-generated visual content such as additional material, animation or captioning. Exploring the possible arrangements of the visual source, while assuming that the audio track remains singular and identifiable, provides opportunities to consider the thematic, genre and story elements and their significations for the resulting new, co-creative narrative of the remix. This step invites the scholar to consider how the remix’s discernible narrative differs from the scholar’s reading of the source video texts, how the visual material signifies without its original audio component (for example, the dialogue in a television episode) and the ways in which the separation of the source visual from audio presents new interpretative frames. Step Two: Understand the Narrative Sequence. Has the video material been cut (pieces extracted and re-joined? Has the temporal order of the video material been re-sequenced. How do these shifts and changes impact on the narrative or story told? In our example here, we might find a series of scenes of two characters hugging or touching, with the narrative elements from the original episode that occur between—that is, that give a context to those hugs—removed. Asking how the removal of that contextual material presents the source clips as a new narrative and a new interactively-derived creation is central to this step. Step Three: Visual Manipulation. What additional visual manipulation features have been added—fade-ins, fade-outs, framing, changes to the speed or playback time of the source video? Accounting for these enables the viewer to position the remix narrative at a point of distance from the source, shifting from derivative to intertextual. Naturally, these must be understood in the context of the earlier steps while foregrounding the interactive form of the remix as a co-created piece that is more than just an intervention into an original text but the utilisation through manipulation of a range of texts to produce a new one. Step Four: Narrative Engagement and Collocation. Here, the scholar must assess the extent to which the audio source has a ‘fit’ with the visual. Thematic and discourse analysis (among others) can be applied to determine the way in which audio track, in addition to the above four steps and manipulations, productively activate new meanings, contexts and frames in the narrative. Importantly, however, this step requires not only asking what the audio does to the video, but the reverse. Using the Arrested Development example, one must ask what the visual material does for the meanings that are denoted within the audio, its musical elements and its lyrics: to what extent does the video source ‘fit’ with or re-position the significance of the audio dialogue and present it with meanings it would not otherwise have in an audio-online context (or, of course, in the context of its use in an ‘authorised’ music video). Together, these four steps present one possible means of ‘coming at’ the interactive and intertextual roots of the remix as a co-creative text. It is not merely to analyse how the source has been used or how the remix allows the sources to be presented or distributed differently, but to understand how new narratives emerge in the context of the various ‘mixings’ that come out of interactive engagement with the text to produce intertextual activation of meanings. Analysing remix texts through this method opens the possibility not only of being able to articulate readings of the text that are built on interactivity and layering, but a critique of the contemporary conditions of textual production. By demonstrating the ways in which a text can be understood to be located not just within intertextuality but within intertextual layers, it is possible to reflect more broadly on all textuality as being produced, disseminated and having its meanings productively activated in the context of ‘degrees’ of layers and ‘degrees’ of of interactivity. References Bennett, T. “Texts, Readers, Reading Formations.” Literature and History 9.2 (1983): 214-227. Bignell, J. Media Semiotics: An Introduction. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. Bordewijk, J.L., and B. van Kaam. “Towards a New Classification of Tele-Information Services.” InterMedia 14.1 (1986): 16-21. Burgess, J., and J. Green. YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. Cover, R. “Interactivity: Reconceiving the Audience in the Struggle for Textual ‘Control’.” Australian Journal of Communication, 31.1 (2004): 107-120. — — —. “Audience Inter/Active: Interactive Media, Narrative Control & Reconceiving Audience History.” New Media & Society 8.1 (2006): 213-232. — — —. “More than a Watcher: Buffy Fans, Amateur Music Videos, Romantic Slash and Intermedia.” Music, Sound and Silence in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Ed. P. Attinello, J. K. Halfyard & V. Knights, London: Ashgate, 2010. 131-148. Green, L. Communication, Technology and Society. St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2002. Jenkins, H. “What Happened before YouTube.” YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. Ed. J. Burgess and J. Green. Cambridge: Polity, 2009. 109-125. Kiousis, S. “Interactivity: A Concept Explication.” New Media & Society 4.3 (2002): 355-383. Lessig, L. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2008. McMillan, S. “A Four-Part Model of Cyber-Interactivity: Some Cyber-Places are More Interactive than Others.” New Media & Society 4.2 (2002): 271-291. Penley, C. Nasa/Trek: Popular Science and Sex in America. London & New York: Verso, 1997.

Introduction The research from which this piece derives explores political remix video (PRV), a genre in which remixers critique dominant discourses and power structures through guerrilla remixing of copyrighted footage (“What Is Political Remix Video?”). Specifically, I examined the works of political video remixer Elisa Kreisinger, whose queer remixes of shows such as Sex and the City and Mad Men received considerable attention between 2010 and the present. As a rhetoric scholar, I am attracted not only to the ways that remix functions discursively but also the ways in which remixers are constrained in their ability to argue, and what recourse they have in these situations of legal and technological constraint. Ultimately, many of these struggles play out on YouTube. This is unsurprising: many studies of YouTube and other user-generated content (UGC) platforms focus on the fact that commercial sites cannot constitute utopian, democratic, or free environments (Hilderbrand; Hess; Van Dijck). However, I find that, contrary to popular belief, YouTube’s commercial interests are not the primary factor limiting remixer agency. Rather, United States copyright law as enacted on YouTube has the most potential to inhibit remixers. This has led to many remixers becoming advocates for fair use, the provision in the Copyright Act of 1976 that allows for limited use of copyrighted content. With this in mind, I decided to delve more deeply into the framing of fair use by remixers and other advocates such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the Center for Social Media. In studying discourses of fair use as they play out in the remix community, I find that the framing of fair use bears a striking similarity to what rhetoric scholars have termed vernacular discourse—a discourse emanating from a small segment of the larger civic community (Ono and Sloop 23). The vernacular is often framed as that which integrates the institutional or mainstream while simultaneously asserting its difference through appropriation and subversion. A video qualifies as fair use if it juxtaposes source material in a new way for the purposes of critique. In turn, a vernacular text asserts its “vernacularity” by taking up parts of pre-existing dominant institutional discourses in a way that resonates with a smaller community. My argument is that this tension between institutional and vernacular gives political remix video a multivalent argument—one that presents itself both in the text of the video itself as well as in the video’s status as a fair use of copyrighted material. Just as fair use represents the assertion of creator agency against unfair copyright law, vernacular discourse represents the assertion of a localised community within a world dominated by institutional discourses. In this way, remixers engage rights holders and other institutions in a pleasurable game of cat and mouse, a struggle to expose the boundaries of draconian copyright law. YouTube’s Commercial InterestsYouTube’s commercial interests operate at a level potentially invisible to the casual user. While users provide YouTube with content, they also provide the site with data—both metadata culled from their navigations of the site (page views, IP addresses) as well as member-provided data (such as real name and e-mail address). YouTube mines this data for a number of purposes—anything from interface optimisation to targeted advertising via Google’s AdSense. Users also perform a certain degree of labour to keep the site running smoothly, such as reporting videos that violate the Terms of Service, giving videos the thumbs up or thumbs down, and reporting spam comments. As such, users involved in YouTube’s participatory culture are also necessarily involved in the site’s commercial interests. While there are legitimate concerns regarding the privacy of personal information, especially after Google introduced policies in 2012 to facilitate a greater flow of information across all of their subsidiaries, it does not seem that this has diminished YouTube’s popularity (“Google: Privacy Policy”).Despite this, some make the argument that users provide the true benefit of UGC platforms like YouTube, yet reap few rewards, creating an exploitative dynamic (Van Dijck, 46). Two assumptions seem to underpin this argument: the first is that users do not desire to help these platforms prosper, the second is that users expect to profit from their efforts on the website. In response to these arguments, it’s worth calling attention to scholars who have used alternative economic models to account for user-platform coexistence. This is something that Henry Jenkins addresses in his recent book Spreadable Media, largely by focusing on assigning alternate sorts of value to user and fan labour—either the cultural worth of the gift, or the satisfaction of a job well done common to pre-industrial craftsmanship (61). However, there are still questions of how to account for participatory spaces in which labours of love coexist with massively profitable products. In service of this point, Jenkins calls up Lessig, who posits that many online networks operate as hybrid economies, which combine commercial and sharing economies. In a commercial economy, profit is the primary consideration, while a sharing economy is composed of participants who are there because they enjoy doing the work without any expectation of compensation (176). The strict separation between the two economies is, in Lessig’s estimation, essential to the hybrid economy’s success. While it would be difficult to incorporate these two economies together once each had been established, platforms like YouTube have always operated under the hybrid principle. YouTube’s users provide the site with its true value (through their uploading of content, provision of metadata, and use of the site), yet users do not come to YouTube with these tasks in mind—they come to YouTube because it provides an easy-to-use platform by which to share amateur creativity, and a community with whom to interact. Additionally, YouTube serves as the primary venue where remixers can achieve visibility and viral status—something Elisa Kreisinger acknowledged in our interviews (2012). However, users who are not concerned with broad visibility as much as with speaking to particular viewers may leave YouTube if they feel that the venue does not suit their content. Some feminist fan vidders, for instance, have withdrawn from YouTube due to what they perceived as a community who didn’t understand their work (Kreisinger, 2012). Additionally, Kreisinger ended up garnering many more views of her Queer Men remix on Vimeo due simply to the fact that the remix’s initial upload was blocked via YouTube’s Content ID feature. By the time Kreisinger had argued her case with YouTube, the Vimeo link had become the first stop for those viewing and sharing the remix, which received 72,000 views to date (“Queer Men”). Fair Use, Copyright, and Content IDThis instance points to the challenge that remixers face when dealing with copyright on YouTube, a site whose processes are not designed to accommodate fair use. Specifically, Title II, Section 512 of the DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, passed in 1998) states that certain websites may qualify as “safe harbours” for copyright infringement if users upload the majority of the content to the site, or if the site is an information location service. These sites are insulated from copyright liability as long as they cooperate to some extent with rights holders. A common objection to Section 512 is that it requires media rights holders to police safe harbours in search of infringing content, rather than placing the onus on the platform provider (Meyers 939). In order to cooperate with Section 512 and rights holders, YouTube initiated the Content ID system in 2007. This system offers rights holders the ability to find and manage their content on the site by creating archives of footage against which user uploads are checked, allowing rights holders to automatically block, track, or monetise uses of their content (it is also worth noting that rights holders can make these responses country-specific) (“How Content ID Works”). At the current time, YouTube has over 15 million reference files against which it checks uploads (“Statistics - YouTube”). Thus, it’s fairly common for uploaded work to get flagged as a violation, especially when that work is a remix of popular institutional footage. If an upload is flagged by the Content ID system, the user can dispute the match, at which point the rights holder has the opportunity to either allow the video through, or to issue a DMCA takedown notice. They can also sue at any point during this process (“A Guide to YouTube Removals”). Content ID matches are relatively easy to dispute and do not generally require legal intervention. However, disputing these automatic takedowns requires users to be aware of their rights to fair use, and requires rights holders to acknowledge a fair use (“YouTube Removals”). This is only compounded by the fact that fair use is not a clearly defined right, but rather a vague provision relying on a balance between four factors: the purpose of the use, character of the work, the amount used, and the effect on the market value of the original (“US Copyright Office–Fair Use”). As Aufderheide and Jaszi observed in 2008, the rejection of videos for Content ID matches combined with the vagaries of fair use has a chilling effect on user-generated content. Rights Holders versus RemixersRights holders’ objections to Section 512 illustrate the ruling power dynamic in current intellectual property disputes: power rests with institutional rights-holding bodies (the RIAA, the MPAA) who assert their dominance over DMCA safe harbours such as YouTube (who must cooperate to stay in business) who, in turn, exert power over remixers (the lowest on the food chain, so to speak). Beyond the observed chilling effect of Content ID, remix on YouTube is shot through with discursive struggle between these rights-holding bodies and remixers attempting to express themselves and reach new communities. However, this has led political video remixers to become especially vocal when arguing for their uses of content. For instance, in the spring of 2009, Elisa Kreisinger curated a show entitled “REMOVED: The Politics of Remix Culture” in which blocked remixes screened alongside the remixers’ correspondence with YouTube. Kreisinger writes that each of these exchanges illustrate the dynamic between rights holders and remixers: “Your video is no longer available because FOX [or another rights-holding body] has chosen to block it (“Remixed/Removed”). Additionally, as Jenkins notes, even Content ID on YouTube is only made available to the largest rights holders—smaller companies must still go through an official DMCA takedown process to report infringement (Spreadable 51). In sum, though recent technological developments may give the appearance of democratising access to content, when it comes to policing UGC, technology has made it easier for the largest rights holders to stifle the creation of content.Additionally, it has been established that rights holders do occasionally use takedowns abusively, and recent court cases—specifically Lenz v. Universal Music Corp.—have established the need for rights holders to assess fair use in order to make a “good faith” assertion that users intend to infringe copyright prior to issuing a takedown notice. However, as Joseph M. Miller notes, the ruling fails to rebalance the burdens and incentives between rights holders and users (1723). This means that while rights holders are supposed to take fair use into account prior to issuing takedowns, there is no process in place that either effectively punishes rights holders who abuse copyright, or allows users to defend themselves without the possibility of massive financial loss (1726). As such, the system currently in place does not disallow or discourage features like Content ID, though cases like Lenz v. Universal indicate a push towards rebalancing the burden of determining fair use. In an effort to turn the tables, many have begun arguing for users’ rights and attempting to parse fair use for the layperson. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), for instance, has espoused an “environmental rhetoric” of fair use, casting intellectual property as a resource for users (Postigo 1020). Additionally, they have created practical guidelines for UGC creators dealing with DMCA takedowns and Content ID matches on YouTube. The Center for Social Media has also produced a number of fair use guides tailored to different use cases, one of which targeted online video producers. All of these efforts have a common goal: to educate content creators about the fair use of copyrighted content, and then to assert their use as fair in opposition to large rights-holding institutions (though they caution users against unfair uses of content or making risky legal moves that could lead to lawsuits). In relation to remix specifically, this means that remixers must differentiate themselves from institutional, commercial content producers, standing up both for the argument contained in their remix as well as their fair use of copyrighted content.In their “Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video,” the Center for Social Media note that an online video qualifies as a fair use if (among other things) it critiques copyrighted material and if it “recombines elements to make a new work that depends for its meaning on (often unlikely) relationships between the elements” (8). These two qualities are also two of the defining qualities of political remix video. For instance, they write that work meets the second criteria if it creates “new meaning by juxtaposition,” noting that in these cases “the recombinant new work has a cultural identity of its own and addresses an audience different from those for which its components were intended” (9). Remixes that use elements of familiar sources in unlikely combinations, such as those made by Elisa Kreisinger, generally seek to reach an audience who are familiar with the source content, but also object to it. Sex and the City, for instance, while it initially seemed willing to take on previously “taboo” topics in its exploration of dating in Manhattan, ended with each of the heterosexual characters paired with an opposite sex partner, and forays from this heteronormative narrative were contained either within in one-off episodes or tokenised gay characters. For this reason, Kreisinger noted that the intended audience for Queer Carrie were the queer and feminist viewers of Sex and the City who felt that the show was overly normative and exclusionary (Kreisinger, Art:21). As a result, the target audience of these remixes is different from the target audience of the source material—though the full nuance of the argument is best understood by those familiar with the source. Thus, the remix affirms the segment of the viewing community who saw only tokenised representations of their identity in the source text, and in so doing offers a critique of the original’s heteronormative focus.Fair Use and the VernacularVernacular discourse, as broadly defined by Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, refers to discourses that “emerge from discussions between members of self-identified smaller communities within the larger civic community.” It operates partially through appropriating dominant discourses in ways better suited to the vernacular community, through practices of pastiche and cultural syncretism (23). In an effort to better describe the intricacies of this type of discourse, Robert Glenn Howard theorised a hybrid “dialectical vernacular” that oscillates between institutional and vernacular discourse. This hybridity arises from the fact that the institutional and the vernacular are fundamentally inseparable, the vernacular establishing its meaning by asserting itself against the institutional (Howard, Toward 331). When put into use online, this notion of a “dialectical vernacular” is particularly interesting as it refers not only to the content of vernacular messages but also to their means of production. Howard notes that discourse embodying the dialectical vernacular is by nature secondary to institutional discourse, that the institutional must be clearly “structurally prior” (Howard, Vernacular 499). With this in mind it is unsurprising that political remix video—which asserts its secondary nature by calling upon pre-existing copyrighted content while simultaneously reaching out to smaller segments of the civic community—would qualify as a vernacular discourse.The notion of an institutional source’s structural prevalence also echoes throughout work on remix, both in practical guides such as the Center for Social Media’s “Best Practices” as well as in more theoretical takes on remix, like Eduardo Navas’ essay “Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats,” in which he writes that:In brief, the remix when extended as a cultural practice is a second mix of something pre-existent; the material that is mixed for a second time must be recognized, otherwise it could be misunderstood as something new, and it would become plagiarism […] Without a history, the remix cannot be Remix. An elegant theoretical concept, this becomes muddier when considered in light of copyright law. If the history of remix is what gives it its meaning—the source text from which it is derived—then it is this same history that makes a fair use remix vulnerable to DMCA takedowns and other forms of discipline on YouTube. However, as per the criteria outlined by the Center for Social Media, it is also from this ironic juxtaposition of institutional sources that the remix object establishes its meaning, and thus its vernacularity. In this sense, the force of a political remix video’s argument is in many ways dependent on its status as an object in peril: vulnerable to the force of a law that has not yet swung in its favor, yet subversive nonetheless.With this in mind, YouTube and other UGC platforms represent a fraught layer of mediation between institutional and vernacular. As a site for the sharing of amateur video, YouTube has the potential to affirm small communities as users share similar videos, follow one particular channel together, or comment on videos posted by people in their networks. However, YouTube’s interface (rife with advertisements, constantly reminding users of its affiliation with Google) and cooperation with rights holders establish it as an institutional space. As such, remixes on the site are already imbued with the characteristic hybridity of the dialectical vernacular. This is especially true when the remixers (as in the case of PRV) have made the conscious choice to advocate for fair use at the same time that they distribute remixes dealing with other themes and resonating with other communities. ConclusionPolitical remix video sits at a fruitful juncture with regard to copyright as well as vernacularity. Like almost all remix, it makes its meaning through juxtaposing sources in a unique way, calling upon viewers to think about familiar texts in a new light. This creation invokes a new audience—a quality that makes it both vernacular and also a fair use of content. Given that PRV is defined by the “guerrilla” use of copyrighted footage, it has the potential to stand as a political statement outside of the thematic content of the remix simply due to the nature of its composition. This gives PRV tremendous potential for multivalent argument, as a video can simultaneously represent a marginalised community while advocating for copyright reform. This is only reinforced by the fact that many political video remixers have become vocal in advocating for fair use, asserting the strength of their community and their common goal.In addition to this argumentative richness, PRV’s relation to fair use and vernacularity exposes the complexity of the remix form: it continually oscillates between institutional affiliations and smaller vernacular communities. However, the hybridity of these remixes produces tension, much of which manifests on YouTube, where videos are easily responded to and challenged by both institutuional and vernacular authorities. In addition, a tension exists in the remix text itself between the source and the new, remixed message. Further research should attend to these areas of tension, while also exploring the tenacity of the remix community and their ability to advocate for themselves while circumventing copyright law.References“About Political Remix Video.” Political Remix Video. 15 Feb. 2012. ‹http://www.politicalremixvideo.com/what-is-political-remix/›.Aufderheide, Patricia, and Peter Jaszi. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2008. Kindle.“Code of Best Practices for Fair Use in Online Video.” The Center For Social Media, 2008. Van Dijck, José. “Users like You? Theorizing Agency in User-Generated Content.” Media Culture Society 31 (2009): 41-58.“A Guide to YouTube Removals,” The Electronic Frontier Foundation, 15 June 2013 ‹https://www.eff.org/issues/intellectual-property/guide-to-YouTube-removals›.Hilderbrand, Lucas. “YouTube: Where Cultural Memory and Copyright Converge.” Film Quarterly 61.1 (2007): 48-57.Howard, Robert Glenn. “The Vernacular Web of Participatory Media.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 25.5 (2008): 490-513.Howard, Robert Glenn. “Toward a Theory of the World Wide Web Vernacular: The Case for Pet Cloning.” Journal of Folklore Research 42.3 (2005): 323-60.“How Content ID Works.” YouTube. 21 June 2013. ‹https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370?hl=en›.Jenkins, Henry, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York: New York U P, 2013. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. New York: New York U P, 2006. Kreisinger, Elisa. Interview with Nick Briz. Art:21. Art:21, 30 June 2011. 21 June 2013.Kreisinger, Elisa. “Queer Video Remix and LGBTQ Online Communities,” Transformative Works and Cultures 9 (2012). 19 June 2013 ‹http://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/395/264›.Kreisinger, Elisa. Pop Culture Pirate. < http://www.popculturepirate.com/ >.Lessig, Lawrence. Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy. New York: Penguin Books, 2008. PDF.Meyers, B.G. “Filtering Systems or Fair Use? A Comparative Analysis of Proposed Regulations for User-Generated Content.” Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal 26.3: 935-56.Miller, Joseph M. “Fair Use through the Lenz of § 512(c) of the DMCA: A Preemptive Defense to a Premature Remedy?” Iowa Law Review 95 (2009-2010): 1697-1729.Navas, Eduardo. “Turbulence: Remixes + Bonus Beats.” New Media Fix 1 Feb. 2007. 10 June 2013 ‹http://newmediafix.net/Turbulence07/Navas_EN.html›.Ono, Kent A., and John M. Sloop. Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration and California’s Proposition 187. Philadelphia: Temple U P, 2002.“Privacy Policy – Policies & Principles.” Google. 19 June 2013 ‹http://www.google.com/policies/privacy/›.Postigo, Hector. “Capturing Fair Use for The YouTube Generation: The Digital Rights Movement, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the User-Centered Framing of Fair Use.” Information, Communication & Society 11.7 (2008): 1008-27.“Statistics – YouTube.” YouTube. 21 June 2013 ‹http://www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html›.“US Copyright Office: Fair Use,” U.S. Copyright Office. 19 June 2013 ‹http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl102.html›.“YouTube Help.” YouTube FAQ. 19 June 2013 ‹http://support.google.com/youtube/?hl=en&topic=2676339&rd=2›.

In March 2002, I was visiting the University of Southern California. One night, as sometimes happens on a vibrant campus, two interesting but very different public lectures were scheduled against one another. The first was by the co-chairman and co-founder of Adobe Systems Inc., Dr. John E. Warnock, talking about books. The second was a lecture by acclaimed video artist Bill Viola. The first event was clearly designed as a networking forum for faculty and entrepreneurs. The general student population was conspicuously absent. Warnock spoke of the future of Adobe, shared stories of his love of books, and in an embodiment of the democratising potential of Adobe software (and no doubt to the horror of archivists in the room) he invited the audience to handle extremely rare copies of early printed works from his personal library. In the lecture theatre where Viola was to speak the atmosphere was different. Students were everywhere; even at the price of ten dollars a head. Viola spoke of time and memory in the information age, of consciousness and existence, to an enraptured audience—and showed his latest work. The juxtaposition of these two events says something about our cultural moment, caught between a paradigm modelled on reverence toward the page, and a still emergent sense of medium, intensity and experimentation. But, the juxtaposition yields more. At one point in Warnock’s speech, in a demonstration of the ultra-high resolution possible in the next generation of Adobe products, he presented a scan of a manuscript, two pages, two columns per page, overflowing with detail. Fig. 1. Dr John E. Warnock at the Annenberg Symposium. Photo courtesy of http://www.annenberg.edu/symposia/annenberg/2002/photos.php Later, in Viola’s presentation, a fragment of a video work, Silent Mountain (2001) splits the screen in two columns, matching Warnock’s text: inside each a human figure struggles with intense emotion, and the challenges of bridging the relational gap. Fig. 2. Images from Bill Viola, Silent Mountain (2001). From Bill Viola, THE PASSIONS. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in Association with The National Gallery, London. Ed. John Walsh. p. 44. Both events are, of course, lectures. And although they are different in style and content, a ‘columnular’ scheme informs and underpins both, as a way of presenting and illustrating the lecture. Here, it is worth thinking about Pierre de la Ramée or Petrus (Peter) Ramus (1515-1572), the 16th century educational reformer who in the words of Frances Yates ‘abolished memory as a part of rhetoric’ (229). Ramus was famous for transforming rhetoric through the introduction of his method or dialectic. For Walter J. Ong, whose discussion of Ramism we are indebted to here, Ramus produced the paradigm of the textbook genre. But it is his method that is more noteworthy for us here, organised through definitions and divisions, the distribution of parts, ‘presented in dichotomized outlines or charts that showed exactly how the material was organised spatially in itself and in the mind’ (Ong, Orality 134-135). Fig. 3. Ramus inspired study of Medicine. Ong, Ramus 301. Ong discusses Ramus in more detail in his book Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. Elsewhere, Sutton, Benjamin, and I have tried to capture the sense of Ong’s argument, which goes something like the following. In Ramus, Ong traces the origins of our modern, diagrammatic understanding of argument and structure to the 16th century, and especially the work of Ramus. Ong’s interest in Ramus is not as a great philosopher, nor a great scholar—indeed Ong sees Ramus’s work as a triumph of mediocrity of sorts. Rather, his was a ‘reformation’ in method and pedagogy. The Ramist dialectic ‘represented a drive toward thinking not only of the universe but of thought itself in terms of spatial models apprehended by sight’ (Ong, Ramus 9). The world becomes thought of ‘as an assemblage of the sort of things which vision apprehends—objects or surfaces’. Ramus’s teachings and doctrines regarding ‘discoursing’ are distinctive for the way they draw on geometrical figures, diagrams or lecture outlines, and the organization of categories through dichotomies. This sets learning up on a visual paradigm of ‘study’ (Ong, Orality 8-9). Ramus introduces a new organization for discourse. Prior to Ramus, the rhetorical tradition maintained and privileged an auditory understanding of the production of content in speech. Central to this practice was deployment of the ‘seats’, ‘images’ and ‘common places’ (loci communes), stock arguments and structures that had accumulated through centuries of use (Ong, Orality 111). These common places were supported by a complex art of memory: techniques that nourished the practice of rhetoric. By contrast, Ramism sought to map the flow and structure of arguments in tables and diagrams. Localised memory, based on dividing and composing, became crucial (Yates 230). For Ramus, content was structured in a set of visible or sight-oriented relations on the page. Ramism transformed the conditions of visualisation. In our present age, where ‘content’ is supposedly ‘king’, an archaeology of content bears thinking about. In it, Ramism would have a prominent place. With Ramus, content could be mapped within a diagrammatic page-based understanding of meaning. A container understanding of content arises. ‘In the post-Gutenberg age where Ramism flourished, the term “content”, as applied to what is “in” literary productions, acquires a status which it had never known before’ (Ong, Ramus 313). ‘In lieu of merely telling the truth, books would now in common estimation “contain” the truth, like boxes’ (313). For Ramus, ‘analysis opened ideas like boxes’ (315). The Ramist move was, as Ong points out, about privileging the visual over the audible. Alongside the rise of the printing press and page-based approaches to the word, the Ramist revolution sought to re-work rhetoric according to a new scheme. Although spatial metaphors had always had a ‘place’ in the arts of memory—other systems were, however, phonetically based—the notion of place changed. Specific figures such as ‘scheme’, ‘plan’, and ‘table’, rose to prominence in the now-textualised imagination. ‘Structure’ became an abstract diagram on the page disconnected from the total performance of the rhetor. This brings us to another key aspect of the Ramist reformation: that alongside a spatialised organisation of thought Ramus re-works style as presentation and embellishment (Brummett 449). A kind of separation of conception and execution is introduced in relation to performance. In Ramus’ separation of reason and rhetoric, arrangement and memory are distinct from style and delivery (Brummett 464). While both dialectic and rhetoric are re-worked by Ramus in light of divisions and definitions (see Ong, Ramus Chs. XI-XII), and dialectic remains a ‘rhetorical instrument’ (Ramus 290), rhetoric becomes a unique site for simplification in the name of classroom practicality. Dialectic circumscribes the space of learning of rhetoric; invention and arrangement (positioning) occur in advance (289). Ong’s work on the technologisation of the word is strongly focused on identifying the impact of literacy on consciousness. What Ong’s work on Ramus shows is that alongside the so-called printing revolution the Ramist reformation enacts an equally if not more powerful transformation of pedagogic space. Any serious consideration of print must not only look at the technologisation of the word, and the shifting patterns of literacy produced alongside it, but also a particular tying together of pedagogy and method that Ong traces back to Ramus. If, as is canvassed in the call for papers of this issue of M/C Journal, ‘the transitions in print culture are uneven and incomplete at this point’, then could it be in part due to the way Ramism endures and is extended in electronic and hypermedia contexts? Powerpoint presentations, outlining tools (Heim 139-141), and the scourge of bullet points, are the most obvious evidence of greater institutionalization of Ramist knowledge architecture. Communication, and the teaching of communication, is now embedded in a Ramist logic of opening up content like a box. Theories of communication draw on so-called ‘models’ that draw on the representation of the communication process through boxes that divide and define. Perhaps in a less obvious way, ‘spatialized processes of thought and communication’ (Ong, Ramus 314) are essential to the logic of flowcharting and tracking new information structures, and even teaching hypertext (see the diagram in Nielsen 7): a link puts the popular notion that hypertext is close to the way we truly think into an interesting perspective. The notion that we are embedded in print culture is not in itself new, even if the forms of our continual reintegration into print culture can be surprising. In the experience of printing, of the act of pressing the ‘Print’ button, we find ourselves re-integrated into page space. A mini-preview of the page re-assures me of an actuality behind the actualizations on the screen, of ink on paper. As I write in my word processing software, the removal of writing from the ‘element of inscription’ (Heim 136) —the frictionless ‘immediacy’ of the flow of text (152) — is conditioned by a representation called the ‘Page Layout’, the dark borders around the page signalling a kind of structures abyss, a no-go zone, a place, beyond ‘Normal’, from which where there is no ‘Return’. At the same time, however, never before has the technological manipulation of the document been so complex, a part of a docuverse that exists in three dimensions. It is a world that is increasingly virtualised by photocopiers that ‘scan to file’ or ‘scan to email’ rather than good old ‘xeroxing’ style copying. Printing gives way to scanning. In a perverse extension of printing (but also residually film and photography), some video software has a function called ‘Print to Video’. That these super-functions of scanning to file or email are disabled on my department photocopier says something about budgets, but also the comfort with which academics inhabit Ramist space. As I stand here printing my lecture plan, the printer stands defiantly separate from the photocopier, resisting its colonizing convergence even though it is dwarfed in size. Meanwhile, the printer demurely dispenses pages, one at a time, face down, in a gesture of discretion or perhaps embarrassment. For in the focus on the pristine page there is a Puritanism surrounding printing: a morality of blemishes, smudges, and stains; of structure, format and order; and a failure to match that immaculate, perfect argument or totality. (Ong suggests that ‘the term “method” was appropriated from the Ramist coffers and used to form the term “methodists” to designate first enthusiastic preachers who made an issue of their adherence to “logic”’ (Ramus 304).) But perhaps this avoidance of multi-functionality is less of a Ludditism than an understanding that the technological assemblage of printing today exists peripherally to the ideality of the Ramist scheme. A change in technological means does not necessarily challenge the visile language that informs our very understanding of our respective ‘fields’, or the ideals of competency embodied in academic performance and expression, or the notions of content we adopt. This is why I would argue some consideration of Ramism and print culture is crucial. Any ‘true’ breaking out of print involves, as I suggest, a challenge to some fundamental principles of pedagogy and method, and the link between the two. And of course, the very prospect of breaking out of print raises the issue of its desirability at a time when these forms of academic performance are culturally valued. On the surface, academic culture has been a strange inheritor of the Ramist legacy, radically furthering its ambitions, but also it would seem strongly tempering it with an investment in orality, and other ideas of performance, that resist submission to the Ramist ideal. Ong is pessimistic here, however. Ramism was after all born as a pedagogic movement, central to the purveying ‘knowledge as a commodity’ (Ong, Ramus 306). Academic discourse remains an odd mixture of ‘dialogue in the give-and-take Socratic form’ and the scheduled lecture (151). The scholastic dispute is at best a ‘manifestation of concern with real dialogue’ (154). As Ong notes, the ideals of dialogue have been difficult to sustain, and the dominant practice leans towards ‘the visile pole with its typical ideals of “clarity”, “precision”, “distinctness”, and “explanation” itself—all best conceivable in terms of some analogy with vision and a spatial field’ (151). Assessing the importance and after-effects of the Ramist reformation today is difficult. Ong describes it an ‘elusive study’ (Ramus 296). Perhaps Viola’s video, with its figures struggling in a column-like organization of space, structured in a kind of dichotomy, can be read as a glimpse of our existence in or under a Ramist scheme (interestingly, from memory, these figures emote in silence, deprived of auditory expression). My own view is that while it is possible to explore learning environments in a range of ways, and thus move beyond the enclosed mode of study of Ramism, Ramism nevertheless comprises an important default architecture of pedagogy that also informs some higher level assumptions about assessment and knowledge of the field. Software training, based on a process of working through or mimicking a linked series of screenshots and commands is a direct inheritor of what Ong calls Ramism’s ‘corpuscular epistemology’, a ‘one to one correspondence between concept, word and referent’ (Ong, Orality 168). My lecture plan, providing an at a glance view of my presentation, is another. The default architecture of the Ramist scheme impacts on our organisation of knowledge, and the place of performance with in it. Perhaps this is another area where Ong’s fascinating account of secondary orality—that orality that comes into being with television and radio—becomes important (Orality 136). Not only does secondary orality enable group-mindedness and communal exchange, it also provides a way to resist the closure of print and the Ramist scheme, adapting knowledge to new environments and story frameworks. Ong’s work in Orality and Literacy could thus usefully be taken up to discuss Ramism. But this raises another issue, which has to do with the relationship between Ong’s two books. In Orality and Literacy, Ong is careful to trace distinctions between oral, chirographic, manuscript, and print culture. In Ramus this progression is not as prominent— partly because Ong is tracking Ramus’ numerous influences in detail —and we find a more clear-cut distinction between the visile and audile worlds. Yates seems to support this observation, suggesting contra Ong that it is not the connection between Ramus and print that is important, but between Ramus and manuscript culture (230). The interconnections but also lack of fit between the two books suggests a range of fascinating questions about the impact of Ramism across different media/technological contexts, beyond print, but also the status of visualisation in both rhetorical and print cultures. References Brummett, Barry. Reading Rhetorical Theory. Fort Worth: Harcourt, 2000. Heim, Michael. Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. Maras, Steven, David Sutton, and with Marion Benjamin. “Multimedia Communication: An Interdisciplinary Approach.” Information Technology, Education and Society 2.1 (2001): 25-49. Nielsen, Jakob. Multimedia and Hypertext: The Internet and Beyond. Boston: AP Professional, 1995. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982. —. Ramus: Method, and the Decay of Dialogue. New York: Octagon, 1974. The Second Annual Walter H. Annenberg Symposium. 20 March 2002. http://www.annenberg.edu/symposia/annenberg/2002/photos.php> USC Annenberg Center of Communication and USC Annenberg School for Communication. 22 March 2005. Viola, Bill. Bill Viola: The Passions. Ed. John Walsh. London: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in Association with The National Gallery, 2003. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Maras, Steven. "Reflections on Adobe Corporation, Bill Viola, and Peter Ramus while Printing Lecture Notes." M/C Journal 8.2 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/05-maras.php>. APA Style Maras, S. (Jun. 2005) "Reflections on Adobe Corporation, Bill Viola, and Peter Ramus while Printing Lecture Notes," M/C Journal, 8(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0506/05-maras.php>.

IntroductionFor Gilles Deleuze, computational processes cannot yield the anomalous, or that which is unprecedented in form and content. He suggests that because computing functions are mechanically standardised, they always share the same ontic character. M. Beatrice Fazi claims that the premises of his critique are flawed. Her monograph Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics presents an integrative reading of thinkers including Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, Kurt Gödel, Alan Turing, and Georg Cantor. From this eclectic basis, Fazi demonstrates that computers differ from humans in their modes of creation, yet still produce qualitative anomaly. This article applies her research to the cultural phenomenon of live-coded music. Live coding artists improvise music by writing audio computer functions which produce sound in real time. I draw from Fazi’s reading of Deleuze and Bergson to investigate the aesthetic mechanisms of live coding. In doing so, I give empirical traction to her argument for the generative properties of computers.Part I: Reconciling the Discrete and the Continuous In his book Difference and Repetition, Deleuze defines “the new” as that which radically differs from the known and familiar (136). Deleuzean novelty bears unpredictable creative potential; as he puts it, the “new” “calls forth forces in thought which are not the forces of recognition” (136). These forces issue from a space of alterity which he describes as a “terra incognita” and a “completely other model” (136). Fazi writes that Deleuze’s conception of novelty informs his aesthetic philosophy. She notes that Deleuze follows the etymological origins of the word “aesthetic”, which lie in the Ancient Greek term aisthēsis, or perception from senses and feelings (Fazi, “Digital Aesthetics” 5). Deleuze observes that senses, feelings, and cognition are interwoven, and suggests that creative processes beget new links between these faculties. In Fazi’s words, Deleuzean aesthetic research “opposes any existential modality that separates life, thought, and sensation” (5). Here, aesthetics does not denote a theory of art and is not concerned with such traditional topics as beauty, taste, and genre. Aesthetics-as-aisthēsis investigates the conditions which make it possible to sense, cognise, and create anomalous phenomena, or that which has no recognisable forebear.Fazi applies Deleuzean aesthetics towards an ontological account of computation. Towards this end, she challenges Deleuze’s precept that computers cannot produce the aesthetic “new”. As she explains, Deleuze denies this ability to computers on the grounds that computation operates on discrete variables, or data which possess a quantitatively finite array of possible values (6). Deleuze understands discreteness as both a quantitative and ontic condition, and implies that computation cannot surpass this originary state. In his view, only continuous phenomena are capable of aisthēsis as the function which yields ontic novelty (5). Moreover, he maintains that continuous entities cannot be represented, interpreted, symbolised, or codified. The codified discreteness of computation is therefore “problematic” within his aesthetic framework “inasmuch it exemplifies yet another development of the representational”. or a repetition of sameness (6). The Deleuzean act of aisthēsis does not compute, repeat, or iterate what has come before. It yields nothing less than absolute difference.Deleuze’s theory of creation as differentiation is prefigured by Bergson’s research on multiplicity, difference and time. Bergson holds that the state of being multiple is ultimately qualitative rather than quantitative, and that multiplicity is constituted by qualitative incommensurability, or difference in kind as opposed to degree (Deleuze, Bergsonism 42). Qualia are multiple when they cannot not withstand equivocation through a common substrate. Henceforth, entities that comprise discrete data, including all products and functions of digital computation, cannot aspire to true multiplicity or difference. In The Creative Mind, Bergson considers the concept of time from this vantage point. As he indicates, time is normally understood as numerable and measurable, especially by mathematicians and scientists (13). He sets out to show that this conception is an illusion, and that time is instead a process by which continuous qualia differentiate and self-actualise as unique instances of pure time, or what he calls “duration as duration”. As he puts it,the measuring of time never deals with duration as duration; what is counted is only a certain number of extremities of intervals, or moments, in short, virtual halts in time. To state that an incident will occur at the end of a certain time t, is simply to say that one will have counted, from now until then, a number t of simultaneities of a certain kind. In between these simultaneities anything you like may happen. (12-13)The in-between space where “anything you like may happen” inspired Deleuze’s notion of ontic continua, or entities whose quantitative limitlessness connects with their infinite aesthetic potentiality. For Bergson, those who believe that time is finite and measurable “cannot succeed in conceiving the radically new and unforeseeable”, a sentiment which also appears to have influenced Deleuze (The Creative Mind 17).The legacy of Bergson and Deleuze is traceable to the present era, where the alleged irreconcilability of the discrete and the continuous fuels debates in digital media studies. Deleuze is not the only thinker to explore this tension: scholars in the traditions of phenomenology, critical theory, and post-Marxism have positioned the continuousness of thought and feeling against the discreteness of computation (Fazi, “Digital Aesthetics” 7). Fazi contributes to this discourse by establishing that the ontic character of computation is not wholly predicated on quantitatively discrete elements. Drawing from Turing’s theory of computability, she claims that computing processes incorporate indeterminable and uncomputable forces in open-ended processes that “determine indeterminacy” (Fazi, Contingent Computation 1). She also marshals philosopher Stamatia Portanova, whose book Moving Without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughtsindicates that discrete and continuous components merge in processes that digitise bodily motion (Portanova 3). In a similar but more expansive maneuver, Fazi declares that the discrete and continuous coalesce in all computational operations. Although Fazi’s work applies to all forms of computing, it casts new light on specific devices, methodologies, and human-computer interfaces. In the next section, I use her reading of Bergsonian elements in Deleuze to explore the contemporary artistic practice of live coding. My reading situates live coding in the context of studies on improvisation and creative indeterminacy.Part II: Live Coding as Contingent Improvisational PracticeThe term “live coding” describes an approach to programming where computer functions immediately render as images and/or sound. Live coding interfaces typically feature two windows: one for writing source code and another which displays code outcomes, for example as graphic visualisations or audio. The practice supports the rapid evaluation, editing, and exhibition of code in progress (“A History of Live Programming”). Although it encompasses many different activities, the phrase “live coding” is most often used in the context of computer music. In live coding performances or “AlgoRaves,” musicians write programs on stage in front of audiences. The programming process might be likened to playing an instrument. Typically, the coding interface is projected on a large screen, allowing audiences to see the musical score as it develops (Magnusson, “Improvising with the Threnoscope” 19). Technologists, scholars, and educators have embraced live coding as both a creative method and an object of study. Because it provides immediate feedback, it is especially useful as a pedagogical aide. Sonic Pi, a user-friendly live coding language, was originally designed to teach programming basics to children. It has since been adopted by professional musicians across the world (Aaron). Despites its conspicuousness in educational and creative settings, scholars have rarely explored live coding in the context of improvisation studies. Programmers Gordan Kreković and Antonio Pošćic claim that this is a notable oversight, as improvisation is its “most distinctive feature”. In their view, live coding is most simply defined as an improvisational method, and its strong emphasis on chance sets it apart from other approaches to computer music (Kreković and Pošćić). My interest with respect to live coding lies in how its improvisational mechanisms blend computational discreteness and continuous “real time”. I do not mean to suggest that live coding is the only implement for improvising music with computers. Any digital instrument can be used to spontaneously play, produce, and record sound. What makes live coding unique is that it merges the act of playing with the process of writing notation: musicians play for audiences in the very moment that they produce a written score. The process fuses the separate functions of performing, playing, seeing, hearing, and writing music in a patently Deleuzean act of aisthēsis. Programmer Thor Magnusson writes that live coding is the “offspring” of two very different creative practices: first, “the formalization and encoding of music”; second, “open work resisting traditional forms of encoding” (“Algorithms as Scores” 21). By “traditional forms of encoding”, Magnusson refers to computer programs which function only insofar as source code files are static and immutable. By contrast, live coding relies on the real-time elaboration of new code. As an improvisational art, the process and product of live-coding does not exist without continuous interventions from external forces.My use of the phrase “real time” evokes Bergson’s concept of “pure time” or “duration as duration”. “Real time” phenomena are understood to occur instantaneously, that is, at no degree of temporal removal from those who produce and experience them. However, Bergson suggests that instantaneity is a myth. By his account, there always exists some degree of removal between events as they occur and as they are perceived, even if this gap is imperceptibly small. Regardless of size, the indelible space in time has important implications for theories of improvisation. For Deleuze and Bergson, each continuous particle of time is a germinal seed for the new. Fazi uses the word “contingent” to describe this ever-present, infinite potentiality (Contingent Computation, 1). Improvisation studies scholar Dan DiPiero claims that the concept of contingency not only qualifies future possibilities, but also describes past events that “could have been otherwise” (2). He explains his reasoning as follows:before the event, the outcome is contingent as in not-yet-known; after the event, the result is contingent as in could-have-been-otherwise. What appears at first blush a frustrating theoretical ambiguity actually points to a useful insight: at any given time in any given process, there is a particular constellation of openings and closures, of possibilities and impossibilities, that constitute a contingent situation. Thus, the contingent does not reference either the open or the already decided but both at once, and always. (2)Deleuze might argue that only continuous phenomena are contingent, and that because they are quantitatively finite, the structures of computational media — including the sound and notation of live coding scores — can never “be otherwise” or contingent as such. Fazi intervenes by indicating the role of quantitative continuousness in all computing functions. Moreover, she aligns her project with emerging theories of computing which “focus less on internal mechanisms and more on external interaction”, or interfaces with continuous, non-computational contexts (“Digital Aesthetics,” 19). She takes computational interactions with external environments, such as human programmers and observers, as “the continuous directionality of composite parts” (19).To this point, it matters that discrete objects always exist in relation to continuous environments, and that discrete objects make up continuous fluxes when mobilised as part of continuous temporal processes. It is for this reason that Portanova uses the medium of dance to explore the entanglement of discreteness and temporal contingency. As with music, the art of dance depends on the continuous unfolding of time. Fazi writes that Portanova’s study of choreography reveals “the unlimited potential that every numerical bit of a program, or every experiential bit of a dance (every gesture and step), has to change and be something else” (Contingent Computation, 39). As with the zeroes and ones of a binary computing system, the footfalls of a dance materialise as discrete parts which inhabit and constitute continuous vectors of time. Per Deleuzean aesthetics-as-aisthēsis, these parts yield new connections between sound, space, cognition, and feeling. DiPiero indicates that in the case of improvised artworks, the ontic nature of these links defies anticipation. In his words, improvisation forces artists and audiences to “think contingency”. “It is not that discrete, isolated entities connect themselves to form something greater”, he explains, “but rather that the distance between the musician as subject and the instrument as object is not clearly defined” (3). So, while live coder and code persist as separate phenomena, the coding/playing/performing process highlights the qualitative indeterminacy of the space between them. Each moment might beget the unrecognisable — and this ineluctable, ever-present surprise is essential to the practice.To be sure, there are elements of predetermination in live coding practices. For example, musicians often save and return to specific functions in the midst of performances. But as Kreković and Pošćić point out all modes of improvisation rely on patterning and standardisation, including analog and non-computational techniques. Here, they cite composer John Cage’s claim that there exists no “true” improvisation because artists “always find themselves in routines” (Kreković and Pošćić). In a slight twist on Cage, Kreković and Pošćić insist that repetition does not make improvisation “untrue”, but rather that it points to an expanded role for indeterminacy in all forms of composition. As they write,[improvisation] can both be viewed as spontaneous composition and, when distilled to its core processes, a part of each compositional approach. Continuous and repeated improvisation can become ingrained, classified, and formalised. Or, if we reverse the flow of information, we can consider composition to be built on top of quiet, non-performative improvisations in the mind of the composer. (Kreković and Pošćić)This commentary echoes Deleuze’s thoughts on creativity and ontic continuity. To paraphrase Kreković and Pošćić, the aisthēsis of sensing, feeling, and thinking yields quiet, non-performative improvisations that play continuously in each individual mind. Fazi’s reading of Deleuze endows computable phenomena with this capacity. She does not endorse a computational theory of cognition that would permit computers to think and feel in the same manner as humans. Instead, she proposes a Deleuzean aesthetic capacity proper to computation. Live coding exemplifies the creative potential of computers as articulated by Fazi in Contingent Computation. Her research has allowed me to indicate live coding as an embodiment of Deleuze and Bergson’s theories of difference and creativity. Importantly, live coding affirms their philosophical premises not in spite of its technologised discreteness — which they would have considered problematic — but because it leverages discreteness in service of the continuous aesthetic act. My essay might also serve as a prototype for studies on digitality which likewise aim to supersede the divide between discrete and continuous media. As I have hopefully demonstrated, Fazi’s framework allows scholars to apprehend all forms of computation with enhanced clarity and openness to new possibilities.Coda: From Aesthetics to PoliticsBy way of a coda, I will reflect on the relevance of Fazi’s work to contemporary political theory. In “Digital Aesthetics”, she makes reference to emerging “oppositions to the mechanization of life” from “post-structuralist, postmodernist and post-Marxist” perspectives (7). One such argument comes from philosopher Bernard Stiegler, whose theory of psychopower conceives “the capture of attention by technological means” as a political mechanism (“Biopower, Psychopower and the Logic of the Scapegoat”). Stiegler is chiefly concerned with the psychic impact of discrete technological devices. As he argues, the habitual use of these instruments advances “a proletarianization of the life of the mind” (For a New Critique of Political Economy 27). For Stiegler, human thought is vulnerable to discretisation processes, which effects the loss of knowledge and quality of life. He considers this process to be a form of political hegemony (34).Philosopher Antoinette Rouvroy proposes a related theory called “algorithmic governmentality” to describe the political effects of algorithmic prediction mechanisms. As she claims, predictive algorithms erode “the excess of the possible on the probable”, or all that cannot be accounted for in advance by statistical probabilities. In her words,all these events that can occur and that we cannot predict, it is the excess of the possible on the probable, that is everything that escapes it, for instance the actuarial reality with which we try precisely to make the world more manageable in reducing it to what is predictable … we have left this idea of the actuarial reality behind for what I would call a “post-actuarial reality” in which it is no longer about calculating probabilities but to account in advance for what escapes probability and thus the excess of the possible on the probable. (8)In the past five years, Stiegler and Rouvroy have collaborated on research into the politics of technological determinacy. The same issue concerned Deleuze almost three decades ago: his 1992 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control” warns that future subjugation will proceed as technological prediction and enclosure. He writes of a dystopian society which features a “numerical language of control … made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it” (5). The society of control reduces individuals to “dividuals”, or homogenised and interchangeable numeric fractions (5). These accounts of political power equate digital discreteness with ontic finitude, and suggest that ubiquitous digital computing threatens individual agency and societal diversity. Stiegler and Deleuze envision a sort of digital reification of human subjectivity; Rouvroy puts forth the idea that algorithmic development will reduce the possibilities inherent in social life to mere statistical likelihoods. While Fazi’s work does not completely discredit these notions, it might instead be used to scrutinise their assumptions. If computation is not ontically finite, then political allegations against it must consider its opposition to human life with greater nuance and rigor.ReferencesAaron, Sam. “Programming as Performance.” Tedx Talks. YouTube, 22 July 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TK1mBqKvIyU&t=333s>.“A History of Live Programming.” Live Prog Blog. 13 Jan. 2013. <liveprogramming.github.io/liveblog/2013/01/a-history-of-live-programming/>.Bergson, Henri. The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Mabelle L. Andison. New York City: Carol Publishing Group, 1992.———. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Trans. F.L. Pogson. Mineola: Dover Publications, 2001.Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York City: Columbia UP, 1994.———. "Postscript on the Societies of Control." October 59 (1992): 3-7.———. Bergsonism. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York City: Zone Books, 1991.DiPiero, Dan. “Improvisation as Contingent Encounter, Or: The Song of My Toothbrush.” Critical Studies in Improvisation / Études Critiques en Improvisation 12.2 (2018). <https://www.criticalimprov.com/index.php/csieci/article/view/4261>.Fazi, M. Beatrice. Contingent Computation: Abstraction, Experience, and Indeterminacy in Computational Aesthetics. London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018.———. “Digital Aesthetics: The Discrete and the Continuous.” Theory, Culture & Society 36.1 (2018): 3-26.Fortune, Stephen. “What on Earth Is Livecoding?” Dazed Digital, 14 May 2013. <https://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/16150/1/what-on-earth-is-livecoding>.Kreković, Gordan, and Antonio Pošćić. “Modalities of Improvisation in Live Coding.” Proceedings of xCoaX 2019, the 7th Conference on Computation, Communication, Aesthetics & X. Fabbrica del Vapore, Milan, Italy, 5 July 2019.Magnusson, Thor. “Algorithms as Scores: Coding Live Music.” Leonardo Music Journal 21 (2011): 19-23. ———. “Improvising with the Threnoscope: Integrating Code, Hardware, GUI, Network, and Graphic Scores.” Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression. Goldsmiths, University of London, London, England, 1 July 2014.Portanova, Stamatia. Moving without a Body: Digital Philosophy and Choreographic Thoughts. Cambridge, MA: The MIT P, 2013.Rouvroy, Antoinette.“The Digital Regime of Truth: From the Algorithmic Governmentality to a New Rule of Law.” Trans. Anaïs Nony and Benoît Dillet. La Deleuziana: Online Journal of Philosophy 3 (2016). <http://www.ladeleuziana.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Rouvroy-Stiegler_eng.pdf>Stiegler, Bernard. For a New Critique of Political Economy. Malden: Polity Press, 2012.———. “Biopower, Psychopower and the Logic of the Scapegoat.” Ars Industrialis (no date given). <www.arsindustrialis.org/node/2924>.

Data are generated and employed for many ends, including governing societies, managing organisations, leveraging profit, and regulating places. In all these cases, data are key inputs into systems that paradoxically are implemented in the name of making societies more secure, safe, competitive, productive, efficient, transparent and accountable, yet do so through processes that monitor, discipline, repress, coerce, and exploit people. (Kitchin, 165) Introduction Provenance refers to the place of origin or earliest known history of a thing. It refers to the custodial history of objects. It is a term that is commonly used in the art-world but also has come into the language of other disciplines such as computer science. It has also been applied in reference to the transactional nature of objects in supply chains and circular economies. In an interview with Scotland’s Institute for Public Policy Research, Adam Greenfield suggests that provenance has a role to play in the “establishment of reliability” given that a “transaction or artifact has a specified provenance, then that assertion can be tested and verified to the satisfaction of all parities” (Lawrence). Recent debates on the unrecognised effects of digital media have convincingly argued that data is fully embroiled within capitalism, but it is necessary to remember that data is more than just a transactable commodity. One challenge in bringing processes of datafication into critical light is how we understand what happens to data from its point of acquisition to the point where it becomes instrumental in the production of outcomes that are of ethical concern. All data gather their meaning through relationality; whether acting as a representation of an exterior world or representing relations between other data points. Data objectifies relations, and despite any higher-order complexities, at its core, data is involved in factualising a relation into a binary. Assumptions like these about data shape reasoning, decision-making and evidence-based practice in private, personal and economic contexts. If processes of datafication are to be better understood, then we need to seek out conceptual frameworks that are adequate to the way that data is used and understood by its users. Deborah Lupton suggests that often we give data “other vital capacities because they are about human life itself, have implications for human life opportunities and livelihoods, [and] can have recursive effects on human lives (shaping action and concepts of embodiment ... selfhood [and subjectivity]) and generate economic value”. But when data are afforded such capacities, the analysis of its politics also calls for us to “consider context” and “making the labour [of datafication] visible” (D’Ignazio and Klein). For Jenny L. Davis, getting beyond simply thinking about what data affords involves bringing to light how continually and dynamically to requests, demands, encourages, discourages, and refuses certain operations and interpretations. It is in this re-orientation of the question from what to how where “practical analytical tool[s]” (Davis) can be found. Davis writes: requests and demands are bids placed by technological objects, on user-subjects. Encourage, discourage and refuse are the ways technologies respond to bids user-subjects place upon them. Allow pertains equally to bids from technological objects and the object’s response to user-subjects. (Davis) Building on Lupton, Davis, and D’Ignazio and Klein, we see three principles that we consider crucial for work on data, darkness and light: data is not simply a technological object that exists within sociotechnical systems without having undergone any priming or processing, so as a consequence the data collecting entity imposes standards and way of imagining data before it comes into contact with user-subjects; data is not neutral and does not possess qualities that make it equivalent to the things that it comes to represent; data is partial, situated, and contingent on technical processes, but the outcomes of its use afford it properties beyond those that are purely informational. This article builds from these principles and traces a framework for investigating the complications arising when data moves from one context to another. We draw from the “data provenance” as it is applied in the computing and informational sciences where it is used to query the location and accuracy of data in databases. In developing “data provenance”, we adapt provenance from an approach that solely focuses on technical infrastructures and material processes that move data from one place to another and turn to sociotechnical, institutional, and discursive forces that bring about data acquisition, sharing, interpretation, and re-use. As data passes through open, opaque, and darkened spaces within sociotechnical systems, we argue that provenance can shed light on gaps and overlaps in technical, legal, ethical, and ideological forms of data governance. Whether data becomes exclusive by moving from light to dark (as has happened with the removal of many pages and links from Facebook around the Australian news revenue-sharing bill), or is publicised by shifting from dark to light (such as the Australian government releasing investigative journalist Andie Fox’s welfare history to the press), or even recontextualised from one dark space to another (as with genetic data shifting from medical to legal contexts, or the theft of personal financial data), there is still a process of transmission here that we can assess and critique through provenance. These different modalities, which guide data acquisition, sharing, interpretation, and re-use, cascade and influence different elements and apparatuses within data-driven sociotechnical systems to different extents depending on context. Attempts to illuminate and make sense of these complex forces, we argue, exposes data-driven practices as inherently political in terms of whose interests they serve. Provenance in Darkness and in Light When processes of data capture, sharing, interpretation, and re-use are obscured, it impacts on the extent to which we might retrospectively examine cases where malpractice in responsible data custodianship and stewardship has occurred, because it makes it difficult to see how things have been rendered real and knowable, changed over time, had causality ascribed to them, and to what degree of confidence a decision has been made based on a given dataset. To borrow from this issue’s concerns, the paradigm of dark spaces covers a range of different kinds of valences on the idea of private, secret, or exclusive contexts. We can parallel it with the idea of ‘light’ spaces, which equally holds a range of different concepts about what is open, public, or accessible. For instance, in the use of social data garnered from online platforms, the practices of academic researchers and analysts working in the private sector often fall within a grey zone when it comes to consent and transparency. Here the binary notion of public and private is complicated by the passage of data from light to dark (and back to light). Writing in a different context, Michael Warner complicates the notion of publicness. He observes that the idea of something being public is in and of itself always sectioned off, divorced from being fully generalisable, and it is “just whatever people in a given context think it is” (11). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that publicness is already shadowed by an idea of state ownership, leaving us in a situation where public and private already both sit on the same side of the propertied/commons divide as if the “only alternative to the private is the public, that is, what is managed and regulated by states and other governmental authorities” (vii). The same can be said about the way data is conceived as a public good or common asset. These ideas of light and dark are useful categorisations for deliberately moving past the tensions that arise when trying to qualify different subspecies of privacy and openness. The problem with specific linguistic dyads of private vs. public, or open vs. closed, and so on, is that they are embedded within legal, moral, technical, economic, or rhetorical distinctions that already involve normative judgements on whether such categories are appropriate or valid. Data may be located in a dark space for legal reasons that fall under the legal domain of ‘private’ or it may be dark because it has been stolen. It may simply be inaccessible, encrypted away behind a lost password on a forgotten external drive. Equally, there are distinctions around lightness that can be glossed – the openness of Open Data (see: theodi.org) is of an entirely separate category to the AACS encryption key, which was illegally but enthusiastically shared across the internet in 2007 to the point where it is now accessible on Wikipedia. The language of light and dark spaces allows us to cut across these distinctions and discuss in deliberately loose terms the degree to which something is accessed, with any normative judgments reserved for the cases themselves. Data provenance, in this sense, can be used as a methodology to critique the way that data is recontextualised from light to dark, dark to light, and even within these distinctions. Data provenance critiques the way that data is presented as if it were “there for the taking”. This also suggests that when data is used for some or another secondary purpose – generally for value creation – some form of closure or darkening is to be expected. Data in the public domain is more than simply a specific informational thing: there is always context, and this contextual specificity, we argue, extends far beyond anything that can be captured in a metadata schema or a licensing model. Even the transfer of data from one open, public, or light context to another will evoke new degrees of openness and luminosity that should not be assumed to be straightforward. And with this a new set of relations between data-user-subjects and stewards emerges. The movement of data between public and private contexts by virtue of the growing amount of personal information that is generated through the traces left behind as people make use of increasingly digitised services going about their everyday lives means that data-motile processes are constantly occurring behind the scenes – in darkness – where it comes into the view, or possession, of third parties without obvious mechanisms of consent, disclosure, or justification. Given that there are “many hands” (D’Iganzio and Klein) involved in making data portable between light and dark spaces, equally there can be diversity in the approaches taken to generate critical literacies of these relations. There are two complexities that we argue are important for considering the ethics of data motility from light to dark, and this differs from the concerns that we might have when we think about other illuminating tactics such as open data publishing, freedom-of-information requests, or when data is anonymously leaked in the public interest. The first is that the terms of ethics must be communicable to individuals and groups whose data literacy may be low, effectively non-existent, or not oriented around the objective of upholding or generating data-luminosity as an element of a wider, more general form of responsible data stewardship. Historically, a productive approach to data literacy has been finding appropriate metaphors from adjacent fields that can help add depth – by way of analogy – to understanding data motility. Here we return to our earlier assertion that data is more than simply a transactable commodity. Consider the notion of “giving” and “taking” in the context of darkness and light. The analogy of giving and taking is deeply embedded into the notion of data acquisition and sharing by virtue of the etymology of the word data itself: in Latin, “things having been given”, whereby in French données, a natural gift, perhaps one that is given to those that attempt capture for the purposes of empiricism – representation in quantitative form is a quality that is given to phenomena being brought into the light. However, in the contemporary parlance of “analytics” data is “taken” in the form of recording, measuring, and tracking. Data is considered to be something valuable enough to give or take because of its capacity to stand in for real things. The empiricist’s preferred method is to take rather than to accept what is given (Kitchin, 2); the data-capitalist’s is to incentivise the act of giving or to take what is already given (or yet to be taken). Because data-motile processes are not simply passive forms of reading what is contained within a dataset, the materiality and subjectivity of data extraction and interpretation is something that should not be ignored. These processes represent the recontextualisation of data from one space to another and are expressed in the landmark case of Cambridge Analytica, where a private research company extracted data from Facebook and used it to engage in psychometric analysis of unknowing users. Data Capture Mechanism Characteristics and Approach to Data Stewardship Historical Information created, recorded, or gathered about people of things directly from the source or a delegate but accessed for secondary purposes. Observational Represents patterns and realities of everyday life, collected by subjects by their own choice and with some degree of discretion over the methods. Third parties access this data through reciprocal arrangement with the subject (e.g., in exchange for providing a digital service such as online shopping, banking, healthcare, or social networking). Purposeful Data gathered with a specific purpose in mind and collected with the objective to manipulate its analysis to achieve certain ends. Integrative Places less emphasis on specific data types but rather looks towards social and cultural factors that afford access to and facilitate the integration and linkage of disparate datasets Table 1: Mechanisms of Data Capture There are ethical challenges associated with data that has been sourced from pre-existing sets or that has been extracted from websites and online platforms through scraping data and then enriching it through cleaning, annotation, de-identification, aggregation, or linking to other data sources (tab. 1). As a way to address this challenge, our suggestion of “data provenance” can be defined as where a data point comes from, how it came into being, and how it became valuable for some or another purpose. In developing this idea, we borrow from both the computational and biological sciences (Buneman et al.) where provenance, as a form of qualitative inquiry into data-motile processes, centres around understanding the origin of a data point as part of a broader almost forensic analysis of quality and error-potential in datasets. Provenance is an evaluation of a priori computational inputs and outputs from the results of database queries and audits. Provenance can also be applied to other contexts where data passes through sociotechnical systems, such as behavioural analytics, targeted advertising, machine learning, and algorithmic decision-making. Conventionally, data provenance is based on understanding where data has come from and why it was collected. Both these questions are concerned with the evaluation of the nature of a data point within the wider context of a database that is itself situated within a larger sociotechnical system where the data is made available for use. In its conventional sense, provenance is a means of ensuring that a data point is maintained as a single source of truth (Buneman, 89), and by way of a reproducible mechanism which allows for its path through a set of technical processes, it affords the assessment of a how reliable a system’s output might be by sheer virtue of the ability for one to retrace the steps from point A to B. “Where” and “why” questions are illuminating because they offer an ends-and-means view of the relation between the origins and ultimate uses of a given data point or set. Provenance is interesting when studying data luminosity because means and ends have much to tell us about the origins and uses of data in ways that gesture towards a more accurate and structured research agenda for data ethics that takes the emphasis away from individual moral patients and reorients it towards practices that occur within information management environments. Provenance offers researchers seeking to study data-driven practices a similar heuristic to a journalist’s line of questioning who, what, when, where, why, and how? This last question of how is something that can be incorporated into conventional models of provenance that make it useful in data ethics. The question of how data comes into being extends questions of power, legality, literacy, permission-seeking, and harm in an entangled way and notes how these factors shape the nature of personal data as it moves between contexts. Forms of provenance accumulate from transaction to transaction, cascading along, as a dataset ‘picks up’ the types of provenance that have led to its creation. This may involve multiple forms of overlapping provenance – methodological and epistemological, legal and illegal – which modulate different elements and apparatuses. Provenance, we argue is an important methodological consideration for workers in the humanities and social sciences. Provenance provides a set of shared questions on which models of transparency, accountability, and trust may be established. It points us towards tactics that might help data-subjects understand privacy in a contextual manner (Nissenbaum) and even establish practices of obfuscation and “informational self-defence” against regimes of datafication (Brunton and Nissenbaum). Here provenance is not just a declaration of what means and ends of data capture, sharing, linkage, and analysis are. We sketch the outlines of a provenance model in table 2 below. Type Metaphorical frame Dark Light What? The epistemological structure of a database determines the accuracy of subsequent decisions. Data must be consistent. What data is asked of a person beyond what is strictly needed for service delivery. Data that is collected for a specific stated purpose with informed consent from the data-subject. How does the decision about what to collect disrupt existing polities and communities? What demands for conformity does the database make of its subjects? Where? The contents of a database is important for making informed decisions. Data must be represented. The parameters of inclusion/exclusion that create unjust risks or costs to people because of their inclusion or exclusion in a dataset. The parameters of inclusion or exclusion that afford individuals representation or acknowledgement by being included or excluded from a dataset. How are populations recruited into a dataset? What divides exist that systematically exclude individuals? Who? Who has access to data, and how privacy is framed is important for the security of data-subjects. Data access is political. Access to the data by parties not disclosed to the data-subject. Who has collected the data and who has or will access it? How is the data made available to those beyond the data subjects? How? Data is created with a purpose and is never neutral. Data is instrumental. How the data is used, to what ends, discursively, practically, instrumentally. Is it a private record, a source of value creation, the subject of extortion or blackmail? How the data was intended to be used at the time that it was collected. Why? Data is created by people who are shaped by ideological factors. Data has potential. The political rationality that shapes data governance with regard to technological innovation. The trade-offs that are made known to individuals when they contribute data into sociotechnical systems over which they have limited control. Table 2: Forms of Data Provenance Conclusion As an illuminating methodology, provenance offers a specific line of questioning practices that take information through darkness and light. The emphasis that it places on a narrative for data assets themselves (asking what when, who, how, and why) offers a mechanism for traceability and has potential for application across contexts and cases that allows us to see data malpractice as something that can be productively generalised and understood as a series of ideologically driven technical events with social and political consequences without being marred by perceptions of exceptionality of individual, localised cases of data harm or data violence. References Brunton, Finn, and Helen Nissenbaum. "Political and Ethical Perspectives on Data Obfuscation." Privacy, Due Process and the Computational Turn: The Philosophy of Law Meets the Philosophy of Technology. Eds. Mireille Hildebrandt and Katja de Vries. New York: Routledge, 2013. 171-195. Buneman, Peter, Sanjeev Khanna, and Wang-Chiew Tan. "Data Provenance: Some Basic Issues." International Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science. Berlin: Springer, 2000. Davis, Jenny L. How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020. D'Ignazio, Catherine, and Lauren F. Klein. Data Feminism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2020. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Commonwealth. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2009. Kitchin, Rob. "Big Data, New Epistemologies and Paradigm Shifts." Big Data & Society 1.1 (2014). Lawrence, Matthew. “Emerging Technology: An Interview with Adam Greenfield. ‘God Forbid That Anyone Stopped to Ask What Harm This Might Do to Us’. Institute for Public Policy Research, 13 Oct. 2017. <https://www.ippr.org/juncture-item/emerging-technology-an-interview-with-adam-greenfield-god-forbid-that-anyone-stopped-to-ask-what-harm-this-might-do-us>. Lupton, Deborah. "Vital Materialism and the Thing-Power of Lively Digital Data." Social Theory, Health and Education. Eds. Deana Leahy, Katie Fitzpatrick, and Jan Wright. London: Routledge, 2018. Nissenbaum, Helen F. Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life. Stanford: Stanford Law Books, 2020. Warner, Michael. "Publics and Counterpublics." Public Culture 14.1 (2002): 49-90.

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

Parity between the sexes, harmony between the religions, balance between the cultural differences: these principles all hinge upon the idealistic concept of all things in our human society being equal. In this issue of M/C Journal the notion of ‘equal’ is reviewed and discussed in terms of both its discourse and its application in real life. Beyond the concept of equal itself, uniting each author’s contribution is acknowledgement of the competing objectives which can promote bias and prejudice. Indeed, it is that prejudice, concomitant to the absence of equal treatment by and for all peoples, which is always of concern for the pursuit of social justice. Although it has been reduced to a brand-name of low calorie sugar substitute in the Australian supermarket and cafe set, the philosophical values and objectives behind the concept of equal underpin some of the most highly prized and esteemed ideals of western liberal democracy and its ideas on justice. To be equal in the modern sense means to be empowered, to enjoy the same entitlements as others and to have the same rights. At the same time, the privileges associated with being equal also come with responsibilities and it these that we continue to struggle with in our supposed enlightened age. The ideals we associate with equal are far from new, since they have informed ideas about citizenship and justice at least from the times of Ancient Greece and perhaps more problematically, the Principate period of the Roman Empire. It was out of the Principate that the notion primus inter pares (‘first among equals’) was implemented under Augustus in an effort to reconcile his role as Emperor within the Republic of Rome. This oxymoron highlights how very early in the history of Western thought inevitable compromises arose between the pursuit of equal treatment and its realisation. After all, Rome is as renowned for its Empire and Senate as it is for the way lions were fed Christians for entertainment. In the modern and postmodern world, the values around the concept of equal have become synonymous with the issue of equality, equal being a kind of applied action that has mobilised and enacted its ideals. With equality we are able to see more clearly the dialectic challenging the thesis of equal, the antitheses of unequal, and inequality. What these antitheses of equal accentuate is that anything to do with equality entails struggle and hard won gains. In culture, as in nature, things are rarely equal from the outset. As Richard Dawkins outlined in The Selfish Gene, “sperms and eggs … contribute equal number of genes, but eggs contribute far more in the way of food reserves … . Female exploitation begins here” (153). Disparities that promote certain advantages and disadvantages seem hard-wired into our chemistry, biology and subsequent natural and cultural environments. So to strive for the values around an ideal of equal means overcoming some major biological and social determinants. In other words, equality is not a pursuit for the uncommitted. Disparity, injustice, disempowerment, subjugations, winners and losers, victors and victims, oppressors and oppressed: these are the polarities that have been the hallmarks of human civilization. Traditionally, societies are slow to recognise contemporary contradictions and discriminations that deny the ideals and values that would otherwise promote a basis of equality. Given the right institutional apparatus, appropriate cultural logic and individual rationales, that which is unequal and unjust is easily absorbed and subscribed to by the most ardent defender of liberty and equality. Yet we do not have to search far afield in either time or geography to find evidence of institutionalised cultural barbarity that was predicated on logics of inequality. In the post-renaissance West, slavery is the most prominent example of a system that was highly rationalised, institutionalised, adhered to, and supported and exploited by none other than the children of the Enlightenment. The man who happened to be the principle author of one of the most renowned and influential documents ever written, the Declaration of Independence (1776), which proclaimed, “all men are created equal”, was Thomas Jefferson. He also owned 200 slaves. In the accompanying Constitution of the United States, twelve other amendments managed to take precedence over the abolition of slavery, meaning America was far from the ‘Land of the Free’ until 1865. Equal treatment of people in the modern world still requires lengthy and arduous battle. Equal rights and equal status continues to only come about after enormous sacrifices followed by relentless and incremental processes of jurisprudence. One of the most protracted struggles for equal standing throughout history and which has accompanied industrial modernity is, of course, that of class struggle. As a mass movement it represents one of the most sustained challenges to the many barriers preventing the distribution of basic universal human rights amongst the global population. Representing an epic movement of colossal proportions, the struggle for class equality, begun in the fiery cauldron of the 19th century and the industrial revolution, continued to define much of the twentieth century and has left a legacy of emancipation perhaps unrivalled on scale by any other movement at any other time in history. Overcoming capitalism’s inherent powers of oppression, the multitude of rights delivered by class struggle to once voiceless and downtrodden masses, including humane working conditions, fair wages and the distribution of wealth based on ideals of equal shares, represent the core of some of its many gains. But if anyone thought the central issues around class struggle and workers rights has been reconciled, particularly in Australia, one need only look back at the 2007 Federal election. The backlash against the Howard Government’s industrial relations legislation, branded ‘Work Choices’, should serve as a potent reminder of what the community deems fair and equitable when it comes to labor relations even amidst new economy rhetoric. Despite the epic scale and the enormous depth and breadth of class struggle across the twentieth century, in the West, the fight began to be overtaken both in profile and energy by the urgencies in equality addressed through the civil rights movement regarding race and feminism. In the 1960s the civil rights and women’s liberation movements pitted their numbers against the great bulwarks of white, male, institutional power that had up until then normalised and naturalised discrimination. Unlike class struggle, these movements rarely pursued outright revolution with its attendant social and political upheavals, and subsequent disappointments and failures. Like class struggle, however, the civil rights and feminist movements come out of a long history of slow and methodical resistance in the face of explicit suppression and willful neglect. These activists have been chipping away patiently at the monolithic racial and sexist hegemony ever since. The enormous achievements and progress made by both movements throughout the 1960s and 1970s represent a series of climaxes that came from a steady progression of resolute determination in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. As the class, feminist and civil rights movements infiltrated the inner workings of Western democracies in the latter half of the twentieth century they promoted equal rights through advocacy and legislative and legal frameworks resulting in a transformation of the system from within. The emancipations delivered through these struggles for equal treatment have now gone on to be the near-universal model upon which contemporary equality is both based and sought in the developed and developing world. As the quest for equal status and treatment continues to advance, feminism and civil rights have since been supplanted as radical social movements by the rise of a new identity politics. Gathering momentum in the 1980s, the demand for equal treatment across all racial, sexual and other lines of identity shifted out of a mass movement mode and into one that reflects the demands coming from a more liberalised yet ultimately atomised society. Today, the legal frameworks that support equal treatment and prevents discrimination based on racial and sexual lines are sought by groups and individuals marginalised by the State and often corporate sector through their identification with specific sexual, religious, physical or intellectual attributes. At the same time that equality and rights are being pursued on these individual levels, there is the growing urgency of displaced peoples. The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) estimate globally there are presently 8.4 million refugees and 23.7 million uprooted domestic civilians (5). Fleeing from war, persecution or natural disasters, refugee numbers are sure to grow in a future de-stabilised by Climate Change, natural resource scarcity and food price inflation. The rights and protections of refugees entitled under international frameworks and United Nations guidelines must be respected and even championed by the foreign States they journey to. Future challenges need to address the present imbalance that promotes unjust and unequal treatment of refugees stemming from recent western initiatives like Fortress Europe, offshore holding sites like Naru and Christmas Island and the entire detention centre framework. The dissemination and continued fight for equal rights amongst individuals across so many boundaries has no real precedent in human history and represents one of the greatest challenges and potential benefits of the new millennium. At the same time Globalisation and Climate Change have rewritten the rule book in terms of what is at stake across human society and now, probably for the first time in humanity’s history, the Earth’s biosphere at large. In an age where equal measures and equal shares comes in the form of an environmental carbon footprint, more than ever we need solutions that address global inequities and can deliver just and sustainable equal outcomes. The choice is a stark one; a universal, sustainable and green future, where less equals more; or an unsustainable one where more is more but where Earth ends up equaling desolate Mars. While we seek a pathway to a sustainable future, developed nations will have to reconcile a period where things are asymmetrical and positively unequal. The developed world has to carry the heavy and expensive burden required to reduce CO2 emissions while making the necessary sacrifices to stop the equation where one Westerner equals five Indians when it comes to the consumption of natural resources. In an effort to assist and maintain the momentum that has been gained in the quest for equal rights and equal treatment for all, this issue of M/C Journal puts the ideal of ‘equal’ up for scrutiny and discussion. Although there are unquestioned basic principles that have gone beyond debate with regards to ideas around equal, problematic currents within the discourses surrounding concepts based on equality, equivalence and the principles that come out of things being equal remain. Critiquing the notion of equal also means identifying areas where seeking certain equivalences are not necessarily in the public interest. Our feature article examines the challenge of finding an equal footing for Australians of different faiths. Following their paper on the right to free speech published recently in the ‘citizen’ issue of M/C Journal, Anne Aly and Lelia Green discuss the equal treatment of religious belief in secular Australia by identifying the disparities that undermine ideals of religious pluralism. In their essay entitled “Less than Equal: Secularism, Religious Pluralism and Privilege”, they identify one of the central problems facing Islamic belief systems is Western secularism’s categorisation of religious belief as private practice. While Christian based faiths have been able to negotiate the bifurcation between public life and private faith, compartmentalising religious beliefs in this manner can run contrary to Islamic practice. The authors discuss how the separation of Church and State aspires to see all religions ignored equally, but support for a moderate Islam that sees it divorced from the public sphere is secularism’s way of constructing a less than equal Islam. Debra Mayrhofer analyses the unequal treatment received by young males in mainstream media representations in her paper entitled “Mad about the Boy”. By examining TV, radio and newspaper coverage of an ‘out-of-control teenage party’ in suburban Melbourne, Mayrhofer discusses the media’s treatment of the 16-year-old boy deemed to be at the centre of it all. Not only do the many reports evidence non-compliance with the media industry’s own code of ethics but Mayrhofer argues they represent examples of blatant exploitation of the boy. As this issue of M/C Journal goes online, news is now circulating about the boy’s forthcoming appearance in the Big Brother house and the release of a cover of the Beastie Boys’ 1986 hit “Fight for Your Right (to Party)” (see News.com.au). Media reportage of this calibre, noticeable for occurring beyond the confines of tabloid outlets, is seen to perpetuate myths associated with teenage males and inciting moral panics around the behaviour and attitudes expressed by adolescent male youth.Ligia Toutant charts the contentious borders between high, low and popular culture in her paper “Can Stage Directors Make Opera and Popular Culture ‘Equal’?” Referring to recent developments in the staging of opera, Toutant discusses the impacts of phenomena like broadcasts and simulcasts of opera and contemporary settings over period settings, as well as the role played by ticket prices and the introduction of stage directors who have been drawn from film and television. Issues of equal access to high and popular culture are explored by Toutant through the paradox that sees directors of popular feature films that can cost around US$72M with ticket prices under US$10 given the task of directing a US$2M opera with ticket prices that can range upward of US$200. Much has been written about newly elected Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations of Aboriginal Australians whereas Opposition Leader Brendan Nelson’s Apology has been somewhat overlooked. Brooke Collins-Gearing redresses this imbalance with her paper entitled “Not All Sorrys Are Created Equal: Some Are More Equal than ‘Others.’” Collins-Gearing responds to Nelson’s speech from the stance of an Indigenous woman and criticises Nelson for ignoring Aboriginal concepts of time and perpetuating the attitudes and discourses that led to the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their families in the first place. Less media related and more science oriented is John Paull’s discussion on the implications behind the concept of ‘Substantial Equivalence’ being applied to genetically modified organisms (GMO) in “Beyond Equal: From Same But Different to the Doctrine of Substantial Equivalence”. Embraced by manufacturers of genetically modified foods, the principle of substantial equivalence is argued by Paull to provide the bioengineering industry with a best of both worlds scenario. On the one hand, being treated the ‘same’ as elements from unmodified foods GMO products escape the rigours of safety testing and labelling that differentiates them from unmodified foods. On the other hand, by also being defined as ‘different’ they enjoy patent protection laws and are free to pursue monopoly rights on specific foods and technologies. It is easy to envisage an environment arising in which the consumer runs the risk of eating untested foodstuffs while the corporations that have ‘invented’ these new life forms effectively prevent competition in the marketplace. This issue of M/C Journal has been a pleasure to compile. We believe the contributions are remarkable for the broad range of issues they cover and for their great timeliness, dealing as they do with recent events that are still fresh, we hope, in the reader’s mind. We also hope you enjoy reading these papers as much as we enjoyed working with their authors and encourage you to click on the ‘Respond to this Article’ function next to each paper’s heading, aware that there is the possibility for your opinions to gain equal footing with those of the contributors if your response is published. References Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1976.News.com.au. “Oh, Brother, So It’s Confirmed – Corey Set for House.” 1 May 2008. 3 May 2008 < http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,26278,23627561-10229,00.html >.UNHCR – The UN Refugee Agency. The World’s Stateless People. 2006. 2 May 2008 < http://www.unhcr.org/basics/BASICS/452611862.pdf >.

Introduction The public sphere includes a range of credible discourses asserting that a proportion of teenagers (“teens”) has an unhealthy dependence upon continuous connection with media devices, and especially smartphones. A review of media discourse (Jaunzems et al.) in Australia, and a critical review of public discourse in Australia and Belgium (Zaman et al.), reveal both positive and negative commentary around screentime. Despite the “emotionally laden, opposing views” expressed in the media, there appears to be a groundswell of concern around young people’s dependence upon digital devices (Zaman et al. 120). Concerns about ‘addiction’ to and dependency on digital media first emerged with the Internet and have been continually represented as technology evolves. One recent example is the 2020 multi-part Massey Lecture series which hooked audiences with the provocative title: “we need to reclaim our lives from our phones” (Deibert). In Sydney, a psychology-based “outpatient addiction treatment centre” offers specialised recovery programs for “Internet addiction”, noting that addicts include school-aged teens, as well as adults (Cabin). Such discourse reflects well-established social anxieties around the disruptive impacts of new technologies upon society (Marvin), while focussing such concern disproportionately upon the lives, priorities, and activities of young people (Tsaliki and Chronaki). While a growing peer-reviewed evidence base suggests some young people have problematic relationships with digital media (e.g. Odgers and Robb; Donald et al.; Gaspard; Tóth-Király et al.; Boer et al.), there are also opposing views (e.g. Vuorre et al.) Ben Light, for instance, highlights the notion of disconnection as a set of practices that include using some platforms and not others, unfriending, and selective anonymity (Light). We argue that this version of disconnection and what we refer to as ‘detox’ are two different practices. Detox, as we use it, is the regular removal of elements of lived experience (such as food consumption) that may be enjoyable but which potentially have negative consequences over time, before (potentially) reintroducing the element or pratice. The aims of a detox include ensuring greater control over the enjoyable experience while, at the same time, reducing exposure to possible harm. There is a lack of specific research that unequivocally asserts young people’s unhealthy dependence upon smartphones. Nonetheless, there appears to be a growing public belief in the efficacy of “the detox” (Beyond Blue) or “unplugging” (Shlain). We argue that a teen’s commitment to regular smartphone abstinence is non-fungible with ‘as and when’ smartphone use. In other words, there is a significant, ineluctable and non-trivial difference between the practice of regularly disconnecting from a smartphone at a certain point of the day, or for a specified period in the week, compared with the same amount of time ‘off’ the device which is a haphazard, as and when, doing something else, type of practice. We posit that recurrent periods of smartphone abstinence, equating to a regular detox, might support more balanced, healthy and empowered smartphone use. Repeated abstinence in this case differs from the notion of the disconnected holiday, where a person might engage in irregular smartphone withdrawal during an annual holiday, for example (Traveltalk; Hoving; Stäheli and Stoltenberg). Such abstinence does have widespread historical and cultural resonance, however, as in the fasting practices of Islam (the month of Ramadan), the Christian season of Lent, and the holy Hindu month of Śravaṇa. Where prolonged periods of fasting are supplemented by weekly or holy-day fasts, they may be reprised with a regularity that brings the practice closer to the scheduled pattern of abstinence that we see as non-fungible with an unstructured as-and-when approach. An extreme example of the long fast and intermittent fast days is offered by the traditional practices of the Greek Orthodox church, whose teachings recommend fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays as well as on religious holy days. With the inclusion of Lent, Greek Orthodox fasting practices can comprise 180 fast days per year: that’s about half of available days. As yet, there is no coherent evidence base supporting the benefits of regular intermittent disconnection. The Australian mental health Website Beyond Blue, which asserts the value of digital detox, cannot find a stronger authority to underpin a practice of withdrawal than “Research from Deloitte’s annual Mobile Consumer Survey report” which indicates that “44 per cent of people in Australia think their phone use is a problem and are trying to reduce how much time they spend on it” (Beyond Blue). Academic literature that addresses these areas by drawing on more than personal experience and anecdote is scarce to non-existent. Insofar as such studies exist over the past decade, from Maushart to Leonowicz-Bukała et al., they are irregular experiments which do not commit to repeated periods of disconnection. This article is a call to investigate the possibly non-fungible benefits of teens’ regularly practicing smartphone disconnection. It argues that there is actual evidence which is yet to be collected. New knowledge in this area may provide a compelling dataset that suggests verifiable benefits for the non-fungible practice of regular smartphone disconnection. We believe that there are teenagers, parents and communities willing to trial appropriate interventions over a significant period of time to establish ‘before’ and ‘after’ case studies. The evidence for these opinions is laid out in the sections that follow. Teens’ Experiences of Media, Smartphone, and Other Cultural Dis/connection In 2018, the Pew Research Center in the US surveyed teens about their experiences of social media, updating elements of an earlier study from 2014-15. They found that almost all (95%) the 743 teens in the study, aged between 13 and 17 when they were surveyed in March-April 2018, had or had access to a smartphone (Anderson and Jiang). A more recent report from 2021 notes that 88% of US teenagers, aged 13-18, have their own smartphone (Common Sense Media 22). What is more, this media use survey indicates that American teens have increased their screen entertainment time from 7 hours, 22 minutes per day in 2019 to 8 hours, 39 minutes per day in 2021 (Common Sense Media 3). Lee argues that, on average, mobile phone users in Australia touch their phones 2,617 times a day. In Sweden, a 2019 study of youth aged 15-24 noted a pervasive concern regarding the logical assumption “that offline time is influenced and adapted when people spend an increasing amount of time online” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 41). These authors critique the overarching theory of young people comprising a homogenous group of ‘digital natives’ by identifying different categories of light, medium, and heavy users of ICT. They say that the “variation in use is large, indicating that responses to ubiquitous ICT access are highly diverse rather than homogenously determined” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 48). The practice or otherwise of regular periods of smartphone disconnection is a further potential differentiator of teens’ digital experiences. Any investigation into these areas of difference should help indicate ways in which teens may or may not achieve comparatively more or less control over their smartphone use. Lee argues that in Australia “teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices have a 71% higher risk factor for suicide”. Twenge and Campbell (311) used “three large surveys of adolescents in two countries (n = 221,096)” to explore differences between ‘light users’ of digital media (<1 hour per day) and ‘heavy users’ (5+ hours per day). They use their data to argue that “heavy users (vs. light) of digital media were 48% to 171% more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts” (Twenge and Campbell 311). Notably, Livingstone among others argues that emotive assertions such as these tend to ignore the nuance of significant bodies of research (Livingstone, about Twenge). Even so, it is plausible that teens’ online activities interpolate both positively and negatively upon their offline activities. The capacity to disconnect, however, to disengage from smartphone use at will, potentially allows a teen more opportunity for individual choice impacting both positive and negative experiences. As boyd argued in 2014: “it’s complicated”. The Pew findings from 2018 indicate that teens’ positive comments about social media use include: 81% “feel more connected to their friends”; 69% “think it helps [them] interact with a more diverse group of people”; and 68% “feel as if they have people who will support them through tough times.” (Anderson and Jiang) The most numerous negative comments address how of all teens: 45% “feel overwhelmed by all the drama there”; 43% “feel pressure to only post content that makes them look good to others”; and 37% “feel pressure to post content that will get a lot of likes and comments.” (Anderson and Jiang) It is notable that these three latter points relate to teens’ vulnerabilities around others’ opinions of themselves and the associated rollercoaster of emotions these opinions may cause. They resonate with Ciarrochi et al.’s argument that different kinds of Internet activity impact different issues of control, with more social forms of digital media associated with young females’ higher “compulsive internet use […] and worse mental health than males” (276). What is not known, because it has never been investigated, is whether any benefits flowing from regular smartphone disconnection might have a gendered dimension. If there is specific value in a capacity to disconnect regularly, separating that experience from haphazard episodes of connection and disconnection, regular disconnection may also enhance the quality of smartphone engagement. Potentially, the power to turn off their smartphone when the going got tough might allow young people to feel greater control over their media use while being less susceptible to the drama and compulsion of digital engagement. As one 17-year-old told the Pew researchers, possibly ruefully, “[teens] would rather go scrolling on their phones instead of doing their homework, and it’s so easy to do so. It’s just a huge distraction” (Anderson and Jiang). Few cultural contexts support teens’ regular and repeated disengagement from smartphones, but Icelandic society, Orthodox Judaism and the comparatively common practice of overnight disconnection from smartphone use may offer helpful indications of possible benefits. Cross-Cultural and Religious Interventions in Smartphone Use Concern around teens’ smartphone use, as described above, is typically applied to young people whose smartphone use constitutes an integral part of everyday life. The untangling of such interconnection would benefit from being both comparative and experimental. Our suggestions follow. Iceland has, in the past, adopted what Karlsson and Broddason term “a paternalistic cultural conservatism” (1). Legislators concerned about the social impacts of television deferred the introduction of Icelandic broadcasting for many years, beyond the time that most other European nations offered television services. Program offerings were expanded in a gradual way after the 1966 beginnings of Iceland’s public television broadcasting. As Karlsson and Broddason note, “initially the transmission hours were limited to only a few hours in the evening, three days a week and a television-free month in July. The number of transmission days was increased to six within a few years, still with a television-free month in July until 1983 and television-free Thursdays until 1987” (6). Interestingly, the nation is still open to social experimentation on a grand scale. In the 1990s, for example, in response to significant substance abuse by Icelandic teens, the country implemented an interventionist whole-of-Iceland public health program: the Icelandic Prevention Model (Kristjansson et al.). Social experimentation on a smaller scale remains part of the Icelandic cultural fabric. More recently, between 2015 and 2019, Iceland ran a successful social experiment whereby 1% of the working population worked a shorter work week for full time pay. The test was deemed successful because “workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being” (Lau and Sigurdardottir). A number of self-governing Icelandic villages operate a particularly inclusive form of consultative local democracy enabling widespread buy-in for social experiments. Two or more such communities are likely to be interested in trialling an intervention study if there is a plausible reason to believe that the intervention may make a positive difference to teens’ (and others’) experiences of smartphone use. Those plausible reasons might be indicated by observational data from other people’s everyday practices. One comparatively common everyday practice which has yet to be systematically investigated from the perspective of evaluating the possible impacts of regular disconnection is that practiced by families who leave connected media outside the bedroom at night-time. These families are in the habit of putting their phones on to charge, usually in a shared space such as a kitchen or lounge room, and not referring to them again until a key point in the morning: when they are dressed, for example, or ready to leave the house. It is plausible to believe that such families might feel they have greater control over smartphone use than a family who didn’t adopt a regular practice of smartphone disconnection. According to social researchers in the Nordic nations, including co-authors Kjartan Ólafsson and Elisabeth Staksrud, it is likely that an Icelandic community will be keen to trial this experience of regular smartphone disconnection for a period of six months or more, if that trial went hand in hand with a rigorous evaluation of impact. Some religious communities offer a less common exemplar for teens’ regular disconnection from their smartphone. Young people in these communities may suspend their smartphone (and other media use) for just over a full day per week to focus on deepening their engagement with family and friends, and to support their spiritual development. Notable among such examples are teenagers who identify as members of the Orthodox Jewish faith. Their religious practices include withdrawing from technological engagement as part of the observance of Shabbat (the Sabbath): at least, that’s the theory. For the past ten years or so in Australia there has been a growing concern over some otherwise-Orthodox Jewish teens’ practice of the “half-Shabbat,” in which an estimated 17-50% of this cohort secretly use digital media for some time during their 25 hours of mandated abstinence. As one teacher from an Orthodox high school argues, “to not have access to the phone, it’s like choking off their air” (Telushikin). Interestingly, many Jewish teens who privately admit practicing half-Shabbat envision themselves as moving towards full observance in adulthood: they can see benefits in a wholehearted commitment to disengagement, even if it’s hard to disengage fully at this point in their lives. Hadlington et al.’s article “I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]” similarly evokes a broader community crisis around children’s dependence on digital media, noting that many children aged 8-12 have a tablet of their own before moving onto smartphone ownership in their teens (Common Sense Media 22). We appreciate that not every society has children and young people who are highly networked and integrated within digital dataflows. Nonetheless, while constant smartphone connectivity might appear to be a ‘first world problem’, preparing teens to be adults with optimal choice over their smartphone use includes identifying and promoting support for conscious disengagement from media as and when a young person wishes. Such a perspective aligns with promoting young people’s rights in digital contexts by interrogating the possible benefits of regularly disconnecting from digital media. Those putative benefits may be indicated by investigating perspectives around smartphone use held by Orthodox Jewish teenagers and comparing them with those held by teens who follow a liberal Jewish faith: liberal Jewish teens use smartphones in ways that resonate with broader community teens. A comparison of these two groups, suggests co-author Lynne Cohen, may indicate differences that can (in part) be attributed to Orthodox Jewish practices of digital disconnection, compared with liberal Jewish practices that don’t include disconnection. If smartphone disconnection has the potential to offer non-fungible benefits, it is incumbent upon researchers to investigate the possible advantages and drawbacks of such practices. That can be done through the comparative investigation of current practice as outlined above, and via an experimental intervention for approximately six months with a second Icelandic/Nordic community. The Potential Value of Investigating the (Non-)Fungibility of Digital Engagement and Digital Inactivity The overarching hypothesis addressed in this article is that a lived experience of regular smartphone disconnection may offer teenagers the opportunity to feel more in control of their personal technologies. Such a perspective aligns with many established media theories. These theories include the domestication of technology and its integration into daily life, helping to explain the struggle teens experience in detaching from digital media once they have become a fundamental element of their routine. Domestication theory asserts that technology moves from novelty to an integral aspect of everyday experience (Berker et al.). Displacement theory asserts that young people whose lives are replete with digital media may have substituted that media use for other activities enjoyed by the generations that grew up before them, while boyd offers an alternative suggestion that digital media add to, rather than displace, teens’ activities in daily contexts. Borrowing inputs from other disciplinary traditions, theories around mindfulness are increasingly robust and evidence-based, asserting that “attentiveness to what is present appears to yield corrective and curative benefits in its own right” (Brown et al. 1). Constant attention to digital media may be a distraction from mindful engagement with the lived environment. A detailed study of the non-fungible character of smartphone disconnection practices might offer an evidence base to support suggestions, such as those proffered by Beyond Blue, that a digital detox benefits mental health, resilience, and sociality. Such information might support initiatives by schools and other organisations central to the lives of teenagers to institute regular digital disconnection regimes, akin to Iceland’s experiments with television-free Thursdays. These innovations could build upon aligned social initiatives such as “no email Fridays” (Horng), which have been trialled in business contexts. Further, studies such as those outlined above could add authority to recommendations for parents, educators, and caregivers such as those recommendations contained in papers on the Common Sense Media site, for example, including Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health (Odgers and Robb) and Device-Free Dinners (Robb). Relevantly, the results from such observational and intervention studies would address the post-COVID era when parents and others will be considering how best to support a generation of children who went online earlier, and more often, than any generation before them. These results might also align with work towards early-stage adoption of the United Nations’ General Comment No. 25 on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment (UNCRC). If so, an investigation into the fungibility or otherwise of digital abstention could contribute to the national and international debate about the rights of young people to make informed decisions around when to connect, and when to disconnect, from engagement via a smartphone. References Anderson, Monica, and Jingjing Jiang. "Teens’ Social Media Habits and Experiences." Pew Research Center 28 Nov. 2018. <https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2018/11/28/teens-social-media-habits-and-experiences/>. Berker, Thomas, Maren Hartmann, and Yves Punie. Domestication of Media and Technology. McGraw-Hill Education, 2005. Beyond Blue. “The Benefits of a Digital Detox: Unplugging from Digital Technology Can Have Tremendous Benefits on Body and Mind.” Beyond Blue, n.d. <https://www.beyondblue.org.au/personal-best/pillar/wellbeing/the-benefits-of-a-digital-detox>. Boer, Maartje, Gonneke W.J.M. Stevens, Catrin Finkenauer, Margaretha E. de Looze, and Regina J.J.M. van den Eijnden. “Social Media Use Intensity, Social Media Use Problems, and Mental Health among Adolescents: Investigating Directionality and Mediating Processes.” Computers in Human Behavior 116 (Mar. 2021): 106645. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2020.106645>. boyd, danah. It’s Complicated : The Social Lives of Networked Teens. Yale University Press, 2014. <http://www.danah.org/books/ItsComplicated.pdf>. Brown, Kirk Warren, J. David Creswell, and Richard M. Ryan. “The Evolution of Mindfulness Science.” Handbook of Mindfulness : Theory, Research, and Practice, eds. Kirk Warren Brown et al. Guilford Press, 2016. Cabin, The. “Internet Addiction Treatment Center.” The Cabin, 2020. <https://www.thecabinsydney.com.au/internet-addiction-treatment/>. Ciarrochi, Joseph, Philip Parker, Baljinder Sahdra, Sarah Marshall, Chris Jackson, Andrew T. Gloster, and Patrick Heaven. “The Development of Compulsive Internet Use and Mental Health: A Four-Year Study of Adolescence.” Developmental Psychology 52.2 (2016): 272. Common Sense Media. "The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens, 2021". <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/8-18-census-integrated-report-final-web_0.pdf>. Deibert, Ron. “Reset: Reclaiming the Internet for Civil Society.” 2020 Massey Lectures. CBC Radio. 7 Feb. 2022 <https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/reset-reclaiming-the-internet-for-civil-society-1.5795345>. Donald, James N., Joseph Ciarrochi, and Baljinder K. Sahdra. "The Consequences of Compulsion: A 4-Year Longitudinal Study of Compulsive Internet Use and Emotion Regulation Difficulties." Emotion (2020). Gaspard, Luke. “Australian High School Students and Their Internet Use: Perceptions of Opportunities versus ‘Problematic Situations.’” Children Australia 45.1 (Mar. 2020): 54–63. <https://doi.org/10.1017/cha.2020.2>. Hadlington, Lee, Hannah White, and Sarah Curtis. "‘I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]’: Children's Experiences of Using Tablet Technology within the Home." Computers in Human Behavior 94 (2019): 19-24. Horng, Eric. “No-E-Mail Fridays Transform Office.” ABC News [US], 4 Aug. 2007. <https://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=2939232&page=1>. Hoving, Kristel. “Digital Detox Tourism: Why Disconnect? : What Are the Motives of Dutch Tourists to Undertake a Digital Detox Holiday?” Undefined, 2017. <https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Digital-Detox-Tourism%3A-Why-disconnect-%3A-What-are-of-Hoving/17503393a5f184ae0a5f9a2ed73cd44a624a9de8>. Jaunzems, Kelly, Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, and Kylie Stevenson. “Very Young Children Online: Media Discourse and Parental Practice.” Digitising Early Childhood. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019, <https://ro.ecu.edu.au/ecuworkspost2013/7550>. Karlsson, Ragnar, and Thorbjörn Broddason. Between the Market and the Public: Content Provision and Scheduling of Public and Private TV in Iceland. Kristjansson, Alfgeir L., Michael J. Mann, Jon Sigfusson, Ingibjorg E. Thorisdottir, John P. Allegrante, and Inga Dora Sigfusdottir. “Development and Guiding Principles of the Icelandic Model for Preventing Adolescent Substance Use.” Health Promotion Practice 21.1 (Jan. 2020): 62–69. <https://doi.org/10.1177/1524839919849032>. Lau, Virginia, and Ragnhildur Sigurdardottir. “The Shorter Work Week Really Worked in Iceland: Here’s How.” Time, 2021. <https://time.com/6106962/shorter-work-week-iceland/>. Lee, James. “16 Smartphone Statistics Australia Should Take Note Of (2021).” Smartphone Statistics Australia, 2022. <https://whatasleep.com.au/blog/smartphone-statistics-australia/>. Leonowicz-Bukała, Iwona, Anna Martens, and Barbara Przywara. "Digital Natives Disconnected. The Qualitative Research on Mediatized Life of Polish and International Students in Rzeszow and Warsaw, Poland." Przegląd Badań Edukacyjnych (Educational Studies Review) 35.2 (2021): 69-96. Light, Ben. Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites. Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Livingstone, Sonia. "iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy–and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood." Journal of Children and Media, 12.1 (2018): 118–123. <https://doi.org/10.1080/17482798.2017.1417091>. Marvin, Carolyn. When Old Technologies Were New : Thinking about Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century. Oxford UP, 1990. Maushart, Susan. The Winter of Our Disconnect: How Three Totally Wired Teenagers (and a Mother Who Slept with Her iPhone) Pulled the Plug on Their Technology and Lived to Tell the Tale. Penguin, 2011. Odgers, Candice L., and Michael Robb. “Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health: Coming of Age in an Increasingly Digital, Uncertain, and Unequal World.” Common Sense Media, 2020. <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/tweens-teens-tech-and-mental-health>. Robb, Michael. “Why Device-Free Dinners Are a Healthy Choice.” Common Sense Media, 4 Aug. 2016. <https://www.commonsensemedia.org/blog/why-device-free-dinners-are-a-healthy-choice>. Shlain, Tiffany. “Tech’s Best Feature: The Off Switch.” Harvard Business Review, 1 Mar. 2013. <https://hbr.org/2013/03/techs-best-feature-the-off-swi>. Stäheli, Urs, and Luise Stoltenberg. “Digital Detox Tourism: Practices of Analogization.” New Media & Society (Jan. 2022). <https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211072808>. Telushikin, Shira. “Modern Orthodox Teens Can’t Put Down Their Phones on Shabbat.” Tablet Magazine, 12 Sep. 2014. <https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/belief/articles/shabbat-phones>. Thulin, Eva, and Bertil Vilhelmson. “More at Home, More Alone? Youth, Digital Media and the Everyday Use of Time and Space.” Geoforum 100 (Mar. 2019): 41–50. <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2019.02.010>. Tóth-Király, István, Alexandre J.S. Morin, Lauri Hietajärvi, and Katariina Salmela‐Aro. “Longitudinal Trajectories, Social and Individual Antecedents, and Outcomes of Problematic Internet Use among Late Adolescents.” Child Development 92.4 (2021): e653–73. <https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13525>. Traveltalk. “The Rise of Digital Detox Holidays and Tech-Free Tourism.” Traveltalk, 2018. <https://www.traveltalkmag.com.au/blog/articles/the-rise-of-digital-detox-holidays-and-tech-free-tourism>. Tsaliki, Liza, and Despina Chronaki. Discourses of Anxiety over Childhood and Youth across Cultures. 1st ed. Springer International Publishing, 2020. <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46436-3>. Twenge, Jean M. iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy – and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood – and What That Means for the Rest of Us. Simon and Schuster, 2017. Twenge, Jean M., and W. Keith Campbell. “Media Use Is Linked to Lower Psychological Well-Being: Evidence from Three Datasets.” The Psychiatric Quarterly 90.2 (2019): 311-331. <https://doi.org/10.1007/s11126-019-09630-7>. UNCRC. "General Comment No. 25 (2021) on Children's Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment." United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner, Committee on the Rights of the Child, 2 Mar. 2021. <https://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/general-comments-and-recommendations/general-comment-no-25-2021-childrens-rights-relation>. Vuorre, Matti, Amy Orben, and Andrew K. Przybylski. “There Is No Evidence That Associations Between Adolescents’ Digital Technology Engagement and Mental Health Problems Have Increased.” Clinical Psychological Science 9.5 (Sep. 2021): 823–35. <https://doi.org/10.1177/2167702621994549>. Zaman, Bieke, Donell Holloway, Lelia Green, Kelly Jaunzems, and Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe. “Opposing Narratives about Children’s Digital Media Use: A Critical Discourse Analysis of Online Public Advice Given to Parents in Australia and Belgium:” Media International Australia (May 2020). <https://doi.org/10.1177/1329878X20916950>.

Introduction The public sphere includes a range of credible discourses asserting that a proportion of teenagers (“teens”) has an unhealthy dependence upon continuous connection with media devices, and especially smartphones. A review of media discourse (Jaunzems et al.) in Australia, and a critical review of public discourse in Australia and Belgium (Zaman et al.), reveal both positive and negative commentary around screentime. Despite the “emotionally laden, opposing views” expressed in the media, there appears to be a groundswell of concern around young people’s dependence upon digital devices (Zaman et al. 120). Concerns about ‘addiction’ to and dependency on digital media first emerged with the Internet and have been continually represented as technology evolves. One recent example is the 2020 multi-part Massey Lecture series which hooked audiences with the provocative title: “we need to reclaim our lives from our phones” (Deibert). In Sydney, a psychology-based “outpatient addiction treatment centre” offers specialised recovery programs for “Internet addiction”, noting that addicts include school-aged teens, as well as adults (Cabin). Such discourse reflects well-established social anxieties around the disruptive impacts of new technologies upon society (Marvin), while focussing such concern disproportionately upon the lives, priorities, and activities of young people (Tsaliki and Chronaki). While a growing peer-reviewed evidence base suggests some young people have problematic relationships with digital media (e.g. Odgers and Robb; Donald et al.; Gaspard; Tóth-Király et al.; Boer et al.), there are also opposing views (e.g. Vuorre et al.) Ben Light, for instance, highlights the notion of disconnection as a set of practices that include using some platforms and not others, unfriending, and selective anonymity (Light). We argue that this version of disconnection and what we refer to as ‘detox’ are two different practices. Detox, as we use it, is the regular removal of elements of lived experience (such as food consumption) that may be enjoyable but which potentially have negative consequences over time, before (potentially) reintroducing the element or pratice. The aims of a detox include ensuring greater control over the enjoyable experience while, at the same time, reducing exposure to possible harm. There is a lack of specific research that unequivocally asserts young people’s unhealthy dependence upon smartphones. Nonetheless, there appears to be a growing public belief in the efficacy of “the detox” (Beyond Blue) or “unplugging” (Shlain). We argue that a teen’s commitment to regular smartphone abstinence is non-fungible with ‘as and when’ smartphone use. In other words, there is a significant, ineluctable and non-trivial difference between the practice of regularly disconnecting from a smartphone at a certain point of the day, or for a specified period in the week, compared with the same amount of time ‘off’ the device which is a haphazard, as and when, doing something else, type of practice. We posit that recurrent periods of smartphone abstinence, equating to a regular detox, might support more balanced, healthy and empowered smartphone use. Repeated abstinence in this case differs from the notion of the disconnected holiday, where a person might engage in irregular smartphone withdrawal during an annual holiday, for example (Traveltalk; Hoving; Stäheli and Stoltenberg). Such abstinence does have widespread historical and cultural resonance, however, as in the fasting practices of Islam (the month of Ramadan), the Christian season of Lent, and the holy Hindu month of Śravaṇa. Where prolonged periods of fasting are supplemented by weekly or holy-day fasts, they may be reprised with a regularity that brings the practice closer to the scheduled pattern of abstinence that we see as non-fungible with an unstructured as-and-when approach. An extreme example of the long fast and intermittent fast days is offered by the traditional practices of the Greek Orthodox church, whose teachings recommend fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays as well as on religious holy days. With the inclusion of Lent, Greek Orthodox fasting practices can comprise 180 fast days per year: that’s about half of available days. As yet, there is no coherent evidence base supporting the benefits of regular intermittent disconnection. The Australian mental health Website Beyond Blue, which asserts the value of digital detox, cannot find a stronger authority to underpin a practice of withdrawal than “Research from Deloitte’s annual Mobile Consumer Survey report” which indicates that “44 per cent of people in Australia think their phone use is a problem and are trying to reduce how much time they spend on it” (Beyond Blue). Academic literature that addresses these areas by drawing on more than personal experience and anecdote is scarce to non-existent. Insofar as such studies exist over the past decade, from Maushart to Leonowicz-Bukała et al., they are irregular experiments which do not commit to repeated periods of disconnection. This article is a call to investigate the possibly non-fungible benefits of teens’ regularly practicing smartphone disconnection. It argues that there is actual evidence which is yet to be collected. New knowledge in this area may provide a compelling dataset that suggests verifiable benefits for the non-fungible practice of regular smartphone disconnection. We believe that there are teenagers, parents and communities willing to trial appropriate interventions over a significant period of time to establish ‘before’ and ‘after’ case studies. The evidence for these opinions is laid out in the sections that follow. Teens’ Experiences of Media, Smartphone, and Other Cultural Dis/connection In 2018, the Pew Research Center in the US surveyed teens about their experiences of social media, updating elements of an earlier study from 2014-15. They found that almost all (95%) the 743 teens in the study, aged between 13 and 17 when they were surveyed in March-April 2018, had or had access to a smartphone (Anderson and Jiang). A more recent report from 2021 notes that 88% of US teenagers, aged 13-18, have their own smartphone (Common Sense Media 22). What is more, this media use survey indicates that American teens have increased their screen entertainment time from 7 hours, 22 minutes per day in 2019 to 8 hours, 39 minutes per day in 2021 (Common Sense Media 3). Lee argues that, on average, mobile phone users in Australia touch their phones 2,617 times a day. In Sweden, a 2019 study of youth aged 15-24 noted a pervasive concern regarding the logical assumption “that offline time is influenced and adapted when people spend an increasing amount of time online” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 41). These authors critique the overarching theory of young people comprising a homogenous group of ‘digital natives’ by identifying different categories of light, medium, and heavy users of ICT. They say that the “variation in use is large, indicating that responses to ubiquitous ICT access are highly diverse rather than homogenously determined” (Thulin and Vilhelmson 48). The practice or otherwise of regular periods of smartphone disconnection is a further potential differentiator of teens’ digital experiences. Any investigation into these areas of difference should help indicate ways in which teens may or may not achieve comparatively more or less control over their smartphone use. Lee argues that in Australia “teens who spend five or more hours per day on their devices have a 71% higher risk factor for suicide”. Twenge and Campbell (311) used “three large surveys of adolescents in two countries (n = 221,096)” to explore differences between ‘light users’ of digital media (<1 hour per day) and ‘heavy users’ (5+ hours per day). They use their data to argue that “heavy users (vs. light) of digital media were 48% to 171% more likely to be unhappy, to be low in well-being, or to have suicide risk factors such as depression, suicidal ideation, or past suicide attempts” (Twenge and Campbell 311). Notably, Livingstone among others argues that emotive assertions such as these tend to ignore the nuance of significant bodies of research (Livingstone, about Twenge). Even so, it is plausible that teens’ online activities interpolate both positively and negatively upon their offline activities. The capacity to disconnect, however, to disengage from smartphone use at will, potentially allows a teen more opportunity for individual choice impacting both positive and negative experiences. As boyd argued in 2014: “it’s complicated”. The Pew findings from 2018 indicate that teens’ positive comments about social media use include: 81% “feel more connected to their friends”; 69% “think it helps [them] interact with a more diverse group of people”; and 68% “feel as if they have people who will support them through tough times.” (Anderson and Jiang) The most numerous negative comments address how of all teens: 45% “feel overwhelmed by all the drama there”; 43% “feel pressure to only post content that makes them look good to others”; and 37% “feel pressure to post content that will get a lot of likes and comments.” (Anderson and Jiang) It is notable that these three latter points relate to teens’ vulnerabilities around others’ opinions of themselves and the associated rollercoaster of emotions these opinions may cause. They resonate with Ciarrochi et al.’s argument that different kinds of Internet activity impact different issues of control, with more social forms of digital media associated with young females’ higher “compulsive internet use […] and worse mental health than males” (276). What is not known, because it has never been investigated, is whether any benefits flowing from regular smartphone disconnection might have a gendered dimension. If there is specific value in a capacity to disconnect regularly, separating that experience from haphazard episodes of connection and disconnection, regular disconnection may also enhance the quality of smartphone engagement. Potentially, the power to turn off their smartphone when the going got tough might allow young people to feel greater control over their media use while being less susceptible to the drama and compulsion of digital engagement. As one 17-year-old told the Pew researchers, possibly ruefully, “[teens] would rather go scrolling on their phones instead of doing their homework, and it’s so easy to do so. It’s just a huge distraction” (Anderson and Jiang). Few cultural contexts support teens’ regular and repeated disengagement from smartphones, but Icelandic society, Orthodox Judaism and the comparatively common practice of overnight disconnection from smartphone use may offer helpful indications of possible benefits. Cross-Cultural and Religious Interventions in Smartphone Use Concern around teens’ smartphone use, as described above, is typically applied to young people whose smartphone use constitutes an integral part of everyday life. The untangling of such interconnection would benefit from being both comparative and experimental. Our suggestions follow. Iceland has, in the past, adopted what Karlsson and Broddason term “a paternalistic cultural conservatism” (1). Legislators concerned about the social impacts of television deferred the introduction of Icelandic broadcasting for many years, beyond the time that most other European nations offered television services. Program offerings were expanded in a gradual way after the 1966 beginnings of Iceland’s public television broadcasting. As Karlsson and Broddason note, “initially the transmission hours were limited to only a few hours in the evening, three days a week and a television-free month in July. The number of transmission days was increased to six within a few years, still with a television-free month in July until 1983 and television-free Thursdays until 1987” (6). Interestingly, the nation is still open to social experimentation on a grand scale. In the 1990s, for example, in response to significant substance abuse by Icelandic teens, the country implemented an interventionist whole-of-Iceland public health program: the Icelandic Prevention Model (Kristjansson et al.). Social experimentation on a smaller scale remains part of the Icelandic cultural fabric. More recently, between 2015 and 2019, Iceland ran a successful social experiment whereby 1% of the working population worked a shorter work week for full time pay. The test was deemed successful because “workers were able to work less, get paid the same, while maintaining productivity and improving personal well-being” (Lau and Sigurdardottir). A number of self-governing Icelandic villages operate a particularly inclusive form of consultative local democracy enabling widespread buy-in for social experiments. Two or more such communities are likely to be interested in trialling an intervention study if there is a plausible reason to believe that the intervention may make a positive difference to teens’ (and others’) experiences of smartphone use. Those plausible reasons might be indicated by observational data from other people’s everyday practices. One comparatively common everyday practice which has yet to be systematically investigated from the perspective of evaluating the possible impacts of regular disconnection is that practiced by families who leave connected media outside the bedroom at night-time. These families are in the habit of putting their phones on to charge, usually in a shared space such as a kitchen or lounge room, and not referring to them again until a key point in the morning: when they are dressed, for example, or ready to leave the house. It is plausible to believe that such families might feel they have greater control over smartphone use than a family who didn’t adopt a regular practice of smartphone disconnection. According to social researchers in the Nordic nations, including co-authors Kjartan Ólafsson and Elisabeth Staksrud, it is likely that an Icelandic community will be keen to trial this experience of regular smartphone disconnection for a period of six months or more, if that trial went hand in hand with a rigorous evaluation of impact. Some religious communities offer a less common exemplar for teens’ regular disconnection from their smartphone. Young people in these communities may suspend their smartphone (and other media use) for just over a full day per week to focus on deepening their engagement with family and friends, and to support their spiritual development. Notable among such examples are teenagers who identify as members of the Orthodox Jewish faith. Their religious practices include withdrawing from technological engagement as part of the observance of Shabbat (the Sabbath): at least, that’s the theory. For the past ten years or so in Australia there has been a growing concern over some otherwise-Orthodox Jewish teens’ practice of the “half-Shabbat,” in which an estimated 17-50% of this cohort secretly use digital media for some time during their 25 hours of mandated abstinence. As one teacher from an Orthodox high school argues, “to not have access to the phone, it’s like choking off their air” (Telushikin). Interestingly, many Jewish teens who privately admit practicing half-Shabbat envision themselves as moving towards full observance in adulthood: they can see benefits in a wholehearted commitment to disengagement, even if it’s hard to disengage fully at this point in their lives. Hadlington et al.’s article “I Cannot Live without My [Tablet]” similarly evokes a broader community crisis around children’s dependence on digital media, noting that many children aged 8-12 have a tablet of their own before moving onto smartphone ownership in their teens (Common Sense Media 22). We appreciate that not every society has children and young people who are highly networked and integrated within digital dataflows. Nonetheless, while constant smartphone connectivity might appear to be a ‘first world problem’, preparing teens to be adults with optimal choice over their smartphone use includes identifying and promoting support for conscious disengagement from media as and when a young person wishes. Such a perspective aligns with promoting young people’s rights in digital contexts by interrogating the possible benefits of regularly disconnecting from digital media. Those putative benefits may be indicated by investigating perspectives around smartphone use held by Orthodox Jewish teenagers and comparing them with those held by teens who follow a liberal Jewish faith: liberal Jewish teens use smartphones in ways that resonate with broader community teens. A comparison of these two groups, suggests co-author Lynne Cohen, may indicate differences that can (in part) be attributed to Orthodox Jewish practices of digital disconnection, compared with liberal Jewish practices that don’t include disconnection. If smartphone disconnection has the potential to offer non-fungible benefits, it is incumbent upon researchers to investigate the possible advantages and drawbacks of such practices. That can be done through the comparative investigation of current practice as outlined above, and via an experimental intervention for approximately six months with a second Icelandic/Nordic community. The Potential Value of Investigating the (Non-)Fungibility of Digital Engagement and Digital Inactivity The overarching hypothesis addressed in this article is that a lived experience of regular smartphone disconnection may offer teenagers the opportunity to feel more in control of their personal technologies. Such a perspective aligns with many established media theories. These theories include the domestication of technology and its integration into daily life, helping to explain the struggle teens experience in detaching from digital media once they have become a fundamental element of their routine. Domestication theory asserts that technology moves from novelty to an integral aspect of everyday experience (Berker et al.). Displacement theory asserts that young people whose lives are replete with digital media may have substituted that media use for other activities enjoyed by the generations that grew up before them, while boyd offers an alternative suggestion that digital media add to, rather than displace, teens’ activities in daily contexts. Borrowing inputs from other disciplinary traditions, theories around mindfulness are increasingly robust and evidence-based, asserting that “attentiveness to what is present appears to yield corrective and curative benefits in its own right” (Brown et al. 1). Constant attention to digital media may be a distraction from mindful engagement with the lived environment. A detailed study of the non-fungible character of smartphone disconnection practices might offer an evidence base to support suggestions, such as those proffered by Beyond Blue, that a digital detox benefits mental health, resilience, and sociality. Such information might support initiatives by schools and other organisations central to the lives of teenagers to institute regular digital disconnection regimes, akin to Iceland’s experiments with television-free Thursdays. These innovations could build upon aligned social initiatives such as “no email Fridays” (Horng), which have been trialled in business contexts. Further, studies such as those outlined above could add authority to recommendations for parents, educators, and caregivers such as those recommendations contained in papers on the Common Sense Media site, for example, including Tweens, Teens, Tech, and Mental Health (Odgers and Robb) and Device-Free Dinners (Robb). Relevantly, the results from such observational and intervention studies would address the post-COVID era when parents and others will be considering how best to support a generation of children who went online earlier, and more often, than any generation before them. These results might also align with work towards early-stage adoption of the United Nations’ General Comment No. 25 on Children’s Rights in Relation to the Digital Environment (UNCRC). 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Introduction It appears that graffiti has begun to clean up its act. Escalating numbers of mature graffiti writers feel the removal of their graffiti has robbed them of a history, and are turning to legal projects in an effort to restore it. Phibs has declared the graffiti underground “limited” and Kano claims its illegal aspect no longer inspires him (Hamilton, 73). A sign of the times was the exhibition Sake of Name: Australian Graffiti Now which opened at the Wharf 2 Theatre in January 2001. The exhibition was commissioned by the Sydney Theatre Company and comprised twenty-two pieces painted by graffiti writers from around Australia. Keen to present a respectable image, writers rejected the original title of Bomb the Wharf, as they felt it focused on the negative aspects of the culture (Andrews, 2). Premier Bob Carr opened the exhibition with the declaration that there is a difference between “graffiti art” and “graffiti vandalism”. The Premier’s stance struck a discordant note with Tony Stevens, a twenty-three-year veteran graffiti cleaner. Described by the Sydney Morning Herald as an “urban art critic by default,” Stevens could see no distinction between graffiti art and vandalism (Leys, 1). Furthermore, he expressed his disappointment that the pieces had “no sense of individuality … it could be graffiti from any American city” (Stevens, 1). As far as Stevens could see, Australian graffiti expressed nothing of its Australian context; it simply mimicked that of America. Sydney Theatre Company director Benedict Andrews responded with a venomous attack on Stevens. Andrews accused the cleaner of being blinded by prejudice (1), and felt that years of cleaning texta tags from railway corridors could not have possibly qualified Stevens as an art critic (3). “The artists in this exhibition are not misfits,” Andrews wrote (2). “They are serious artists in dialogue with their culture and the landscapes in which they live” (2). He went on to hail the strength and diversity of the Australian graffiti scene: “it is a vital and agile international culture and in Australia has evolved in specific ways” (1). The altercation between Stevens and Andrews pointed to one of the debates concerning Australian graffiti: whether it is unique or simply imitative of the American form. Hinged on the assessment of graffiti as vandalism is the view that graffiti is dirty, a disease. Proponents of this view consider graffiti to be an undifferentiated global phenomenon. Others conceive of graffiti as art, and as such argue that it is expressive of local experiences. Graffiti writers maintain that graffiti is expressive of local experiences and they describe it in terms of regional styles and aesthetics. This article maps the transformation of hip hop graffiti as it has been disseminated throughout the world. It registers the distinctiveness of graffiti in Australia and argues that graffiti is not a globally homogenous form, but one which develops in a locally specific manner. Writing and Replicating: Hip Hop Graffiti and Cultural Imperialism Contemporary graffiti subcultures are strongly identified with large American cities. Originating in the black neighbourhood cultures of Philadelphia and New York City in the late 1960s and early 1970s, hip hop graffiti emerged as part of a larger, homegrown, alternative youth culture (“Urban Graffiti”, 77). Before the end of the 1970s, the aesthetic codes and stylised images of hip hop graffiti began to disseminate to major cities across America and throughout the globe. Its transmission was facilitated by: the production and export of films such as Style Wars (Silver and Chalfant, 1983) and Wild Style (Ahearn, 1983); the covers of rap albums; graffiti magazines; art dealers; and style manuals such as Subway Art (Cooper and Chalfant) and Spraycan Art (Chalfant and Prigroff). Graffiti migrated to Australian shores during the early 1980s, gaining influence through the appearance of these seminal works, which are credited by many as having inspired them to pick up a can of spraypaint. During its larval stages, the subcultural codes of graffiti invented by American writers were reiterated in an Australian context. Australian graffiti writers poached the vocabulary and rhetoric invented by their American counterparts. Writers spoke of “getting up”, “getting fame” and their “crew”, classifying their work as “tags”, “pieces”, or “throw ups”. They utilised the same bubble letters, and later, the incomprehensible “wildstyle” originally devised by American writers. It was not long, however, before Australian writers were making their own innovations and developing a unique style. Despite this, there is still widespread conviction in the view that Australian graffiti is a replica of an American cultural form. This view is supported at a theoretical level by the concept of cultural imperialism. It is generally understood, at a basic level, to be the diffusion of a foreign culture at the expense of a local culture. The concept has been usefully clarified by John Tomlinson. Since there are various orders of power involved in allegations of cultural imperialism, Tomlinson attempts to resist some implicit “master narrative” of the term, accounting for cultural imperialism in a multidimensional fashion (20). He outlines five possible versions, which inflect cultural imperialism to mean cultural domination; a discourse of nationality; media imperialism; global capital; and modernity (19-28). The idea that Australian graffiti replicates American graffiti draws particularly on the first two versions—that of cultural imperialism as cultural domination, and the discourse of nationality. Both these approaches focus on the processes involved in cultural imperialism—“the invasion of an indigenous culture by a foreign one” (Tomlinson, 23). Many people I spoke to about graffiti saw it as evidence of foreign, particularly American, domination and influence over Australian culture. They expressed concern that the appearance of graffiti would signal an influx of “American” problems: gang activity, escalating violence and social disorder. Cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality hinges on the concepts of “belonging” and “indigenous culture”. In a conference organised by the Graffiti Program of the Government of Western Australia, Senator Ian Campbell argued that graffiti had no place in Australia. He felt that, “there should be little need for social comment through the vandalism of other’s property. Perhaps in nations where … freedoms are not recognised … but not in Australia” (6). Tomlinson argues that the conceptions of cultural imperialism as both cultural domination and as a discourse of nationality are popular because of their highly ambiguous (and thus accommodating) nature (19, 23). However, both notions are problematic. Tomlinson immediately dismisses the notion of cultural imperialism as cultural domination, arguing that one should aim for specificity. “Imperialism” and “domination” are rather general notions, and as such both have sufficient conceptual breadth and ambiguity to accommodate most uses to which they might be put (19). Cultural imperialism as a discourse of nationality is similarly problematic, relying on the precise definitions of a series of terms—such as belonging, and indigenous culture—which have multiple inflections (24). Cultural imperialism has often been tracked as a process of homogenisation. Conceiving of cultural imperialism as homogenisation is particularly pertinent to the argument for the global homogeneity of graffiti. Cultural homogenisation makes “everywhere seem more or less the same,” assuming a global uniformity which is inherently Western, and in extreme cases, American (6). The implications of “Americanisation” are relevant to the attitudes of Australian graffiti writers. On the Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board—an internet board for Australian graffiti writers—I found evidence of a range of responses to “Americanisation” in Australian graffiti. One of the writers had posted: “you shouldn’t even be doing graff if you are a toy little kid, buying export paint and painting legal walls during the day … f*** all y’all niggaz!” s3 replied, “I do know that modern graffiti originated in America but … token are you American? Why do you want to talk like an American gangsta rapper?” The global currency of graffiti is one in which local originality and distinctiveness are highly prized. It is a source of shame for a writer to “bite”. Many of the writers I spoke to became irate when I suggested that Australian styles “bit” those of America. It seems inconsistent that Australian graffiti writers would reproduce American graffiti, if they do not even tolerate Australian writers using the word “nigga”. Like the argument that Australian graffiti replicates that of America, the concept of cultural imperialism is problematic. By the 1970s the concept was beginning to come apart at the seams, its “artificial coherence” exposed when subjected to a range of applications (Tomlinson, 8). Although the idea of cultural imperialism has been discredited and somewhat abandoned at the level of theory, the concept nonetheless continues to guide attitudes towards graffiti. Jeff Ferrell has argued that the interplay of cultural resources involved in worldwide graffiti directly locates it inside issues of cultural imperialism (“Review of Moscow Graffiti”, paragraph 5). Stylistic and subcultural consistencies are mobilised to substantiate assertions of the operation of cultural imperialism in the global form of graffiti. This serves to render it globally homogeneous. While many graffiti writers would concede that graffiti maintains certain global elements, few would agree that this is indicative of a global homogeneity of form. As part of the hip hop component of their website, Triple J conducted an investigation into graffiti. It found that “the graffiti aesthetic developed in New York has been modified with individual characteristics … and has transformed into a unique Australian style” (“Old Skool”, paragraph 6). Veteran writers Umph, Exit, Phibs and Dmote agree. Perth writer Zenith claims, “we came up with styles from the US back in the day and it has grown into something quite unique” (personal communication). Exit declares, “every city has its own particular style. Graffiti from Australia can easily be distinguished by graffiti artists. Australia has its own particular style” (1). Umph agrees: “to us writers, the differences are obvious” (2). Although some continue to perceive Australian graffiti as replicating that of America, it appears that this is no longer the case. Evidence has emerged that Australian graffiti has evolved into a unique and localised form, which no longer imitates that of America. “Going Over” Cultural Imperialism: Hip Hop Graffiti and Processes of Globalisation The argument that graffiti has developed local inflections has lately garnered increasing support due to new theories of global cultural interaction and exchange. The modern era has been characterised by the increasing circulation of goods, capital, knowledge, information, people, images, ideologies, technologies and practices across national borders and territorial boundaries (Appadurai, 230; Scholte, 10). Academic discussion of these developments has converged in recent years around the concept of “globalisation”. While cultural imperialism describes these movements as the diffusion of a foreign culture at the expense of a local one, globalisation interprets these profound changes as evidence of “a global ecumene of persistent cultural interaction and exchange” (Hannerz, 107). In such a view, the globe is not characterised by domination and homogenisation (as with cultural imperialism), but more in terms of exchange and heterogeneity. Recent studies acknowledge that globalisation is complex and multidimensional (Giddens, 30; Kalb, 1), even a process of paradoxes (Findlay, 30). Globalisation is frequently described in terms of contradictory processes—universalisation vs. particularisation, homogenisation vs. differentiation, integration vs. fragmentation. Another of these dialectical tendencies is that of localisation. Kloos defines localisation as representing “the rise of localised, culturally defined identities … localisation stresses sociocultural specificity, in a limited space” (281). While localisation initially appears to stand in opposition to globalisation, the concepts are actually involved in a dialectical process (Giddens, 64). The relationship between localisation and globalisation has been formulated as follows: “Processes of globalisation trigger identity movements leading to the creation of localised, cultural-specific, identities” (Kloos, 282). The development of localisation is particularly pertinent to this study of graffiti. The concept allows for local diversity and has led to the understanding that global cultural phenomena are involved in a process of exchange. Work around globalisation lends credence to the argument that, as graffiti has disseminated throughout the globe, it has mutated to the specific locale within which it exists. Graffiti has always been locally specific: from the early stages which witnessed writers such as Julio 204, Fran 207 and Joe 136 (the numbers referred to their street), to the more recent practice of suffixing tag names with the name of a writers’ crew and their area code. The tendency to include area codes has been largely abandoned in Australia as the law has responded to graffiti with increasing vigilance, but evolutions in graffiti have pointed towards the development of regionally specific styles which writers have come to recognise. Thus, graffiti cannot be thought of as a globally homogenous form, nor can it be said that Australian graffiti replicates that of America. As hip hop has circulated throughout the globe it has appeared to adopt local inflections, having adapted into something quite locally distinctive. In a sense hip hop has been “translated” to particular circumstances. It is now appropriate to consider Australian hip hop and graffiti as a translation of a global cultural phenomenon. A useful reference in this regard is Yuri Lotman, who designates dialogue as the elementary mechanism of translation (143). He suggests that participants involved in a dialogue alternate between a position of “transmission” and “reception” (144). Hence cultural developments are cyclical, and relationships between units—which may range from genres to national cultures—pass through periods of “transmission” and “reception” (144). Lotman proposes that the relationship between structures follows a pattern: at first, a structure will appear in decline, static, unoriginal. He records these “intermissions” as “pauses in dialogue”, during which the structure absorbs influences from the outside (144). When saturation reaches a certain limit, the structure begins producing its own texts as its “passive state changes to a state of alertness” (145). This is a useful way of comprehending Australian hip hop culture. It appears that the Australian hip hop scene has left behind its period of “reception” and is now witnessing one of “transmission” in which it is producing uniquely Australian flavours and styles. Of the contemporary graffiti I have observed, it appears that Australian writing is truly distinctive. Australian writers may have initially poached the subcultural codes developed by their American counterparts, however Australia has evolved to be truly unique where it counts—in graffiti styles. Distinctive graffiti styles can be witnessed, not only between different continents, but also within geographic locations. American graffiti registers a variety of locally specific forms. New York remains devoted to the letter, while graffiti on the west coast of America is renowned for its gang writing. American lettering styles tend to develop existing styles. New York wildstyle is easily recognised, and differs from letters in the Bay Area and San Francisco, which feature arrows inside the letters. While American graffiti is by and large concerned with letters, Australia has gained some repute for its exploration of characters. Like American writers, Australians employ characters poached from popular culture, but for the most part Australian writers employ characters and figures that they have invented themselves, often poaching elements from a wide variety of sources and utilising a wide variety of styles. Marine imagery, not usually employed in American graffiti, recurs in Australian pieces. Kikinit in the Park, a youth festival held in Fremantle in March 2001, featured a live urban art display by Bugszy Snaps, who combined oceanic and graffiti iconography, fusing sea creatures with spraypaint cans. Phibs also “uses images from the sea a lot” (Hamilton, 73), having grown up at the beach. In spite of this focus on the development of characters and images, Australia has not neglected the letter. While initially Australian graffiti artists imitated the styles developed in America, Australian lettering has evolved into something exceptional. Some writers have continued to employ bubble letters and wildstyle, and Australia has kept up with modifications in wildstyle that has seen it move towards 3D. Australia has cultivated this form of traditional wildstyle, elevating it to new heights. Sometimes it is combined with other styles; other times it appears as controlled wildstyle—set around a framework of some sort. In other instances, Australia has charted new territory with the letter, developing styles that are completely individual. Australian writing also blends a variety of lettering and graphic styles, combining letters and figures in new and exciting ways. Australian graffiti often fuses letters with images. This is relatively rare in American graffiti, which tends to focus on lettering and, on the whole, utilises characters to less effect than Australian graffiti. Conclusion Graffiti is not a globally homogeneous form, but one which has developed in locally specific and distinctive ways. As hip hop graffiti has circulated throughout the globe it has been translated between various sites and developed local inflections. In order to visualise graffiti in this manner, it is necessary to recognise theories of cultural imperialism as guiding the widespread belief that graffiti is a globally homogeneous form. I have refuted this view and the worth of cultural imperialism in directing attitudes towards graffiti, as there is a valid foundation for considering the local distinctiveness of Australian graffiti. By engaging critically with literature around globalisation, I have established a theoretical base for the argument that graffiti is locally specific. Envisaging the global form of hip hop graffiti as translated between various sites and having developed in locally specific ways has exposed the study of graffiti outside of the United States. Current writings on cultural studies and graffiti are dominated by the American academy, taking the United States as its centre. In rectifying this imbalance, I stress the need to recognise the distinctiveness of other cultures and geographic locations, even if they appear to be similar. While writers across Australia argue that their locations produce original styles, few have been willing to expound on how their scene is “fresh”. One writer I spoke with was an exception. Zenith explained that: “the way we are original is that our style has developed for so long, fermented if you will, because of Perth being so damned isolated” (personal communication). He went on to say: “I also happen to feel that we’re losing the originality every second of every day, for a number of reasons … with web sites, videos, magazines, and all this type of graffito affiliated stuff” (personal communication). Hip hop graffiti culture is one in which communication and exchange is of central concern. The circulation of this “graffito affiliated stuff”—websites, graffiti magazines, videos, books—as well as the fact that aerosol artists frequently travel to other cities and countries to write, demonstrates that this is a culture which, although largely identified with America, is also global in reach. This global interaction and exchange is increasingly characterised by a complex relationship which involves imitation and adaptation. Glossary Bite To copy another graffiti writer’s style Crew Organised group of graffiti writers Getting up Successful graffiti endeavour; to graffiti Going over To graffiti over another’s graffiti Piece The most sophisticated kind of graffiti, which includes characters, words and phrases Tag A stylised version of a signature; the most basic form of graffiti Throw up Two-dimensional version of a tag Wildstyle Style of graffiti characterised by interlocking letters and arrows Writer Graffiti artist; one who does graffiti References Andrews, Benedict. “If a Cleaner Can Review Graffiti Art, Then …” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Jan. 2001. 15 August 2001 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/15/features/features8.html>. Appadurai, Arjun. “Globalization and the Research Imagination.” International Social Science Journal 51.2 (1999): 229-38. Campbell, Ian. “The National Perspective.” Dealing with Graffiti. Ed. Graffiti Program, Government of Western Australia: Perth, 1997: 6-7. Chalfant, Henry, and James Prigroff. Spraycan Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1987. Cooper, Martha, and Henry Chalfant. Subway Art. London: Thames & Hudson, 1984. “Exit”. n.d. [1998]. 18 Jul. 2001 http://loud.net.au/projects/digit/garry/exit.htm>. Ferrell, Jeff. “Review of Moscow Graffiti: Language and Subculture.” Social Justice 20.3-4 (1993): 188 (15). ———. “Urban Graffiti: Crime, Control, and Resistance.” Youth and Society 27 (1995-6): 73-87. Findlay, Mark. The Globalization of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999. Giddens, Anthony. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping our Lives. New York: Routledge, 2000. Hamilton, Kate. “Can in Hand.” Rolling Stone 590 (2001): 72-5. Hannerz, Ulf. “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures.” Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity. Ed. Anthony D. King. Houndmills: Macmillan, 1991. 107-28. Kalb, Don. “Localizing Flows: Power, Paths, Institutions, and Networks.” The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Ed. Don Kalb. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000. 1-29. Kloos, Peter. “The Dialectics of Globalization and Localization.” The Ends of Globalization: Bringing Society Back In. Ed. Don Kalb. Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000. 281-97. Leys, Nick. “Graffiti Removalist Gives Art Installation a Spray.” Sydney Morning Herald 9 January 2001. 9 Jan. 2001. http://www.smh.com.au/news/0101/09/national/national15.html>. Lotman, Yuri. The Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1990. “Old Skool.” Triple J. 2001. 18 Jul. 2001 http://www.abc.net.au/triplej/arts/graff/oldskool/default.htm>. s3. “Name & Email Supplied.” Online posting. 9 May 2004. Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board. 20 July 2001 http://network54.com/Forum>. Scholte, Jan Aarte. “Globalisation: Prospects For a Paradigm Shift.” Politics and Globalisation: Knowledge, Ethics and Agency. Ed. Martin Shaw. London: Routledge, 1999. 9-22. Stevens, Tony. “It’s Vandalism, It’s Illegal and It Causes Anguish and Frustration.” Sydney Morning Herald 5 Feb. 2001. 4 Mar. 2001 http://www.smh.com.au/news/0102/05/features/features10.html>. Style Wars. Dir. Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant. 1983. DVD. Passion River, 2005. Token. “F*** You Little Kids!” Online posting. 5 May 2000. Blitzkrieg Bulletin Board. 20 Jul. 2001 http://network54.com/Forum>. Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. London: Pinter Publishers, 1991. Umph. n.d. [1998]. 18 Jul. 2001. http://loud.net.au/projects/digit/garry/umph.htm>. Wild Style. Dir. Charlie Ahearn. 1983. DVD. Rhino Theatrical, 2002. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Lombard, Kara-Jane. "“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/05-lombard.php>. APA Style Lombard, K. (May 2007) "“To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious”: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/05-lombard.php>.

Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash ABSTRACT Medical futility judgments for patients in prolonged disorders of consciousness (PDOC) frequently lead to withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment (LST), which is the leading cause of death for patients with traumatic brain injuries. The field of disorders of consciousness is pervaded by much uncertainty due to limitations on our current diagnostic tools, treatments, and outcome measures. In contrast, futility judgments are made in empirically tenuous confidence in the patient’s inability to survive or recover meaningfully. Despite emerging empirical evidence of PDOC patients’ potential for long-term recovery, an increasing sense of clinical nihilism leads to earlier and more frequent withdrawal of LST. In this paper, I argue against two kinds of futility judgments that may be used to justify the withdrawal of LST for PDOC patients: overly pessimistic predictions about the patient’s likelihood for meaningful recovery and rationing decisions that redirect hospital resources to patients who are more likely to recover. INTRODUCTION Brain injury is one of the leading causes of death and disability among children, young adults, and adults over the age of 75 years in the United States.[1] Yet we remain far from successfully diagnosing and treating brain injury patients who stay in states of prolonged disorders of consciousness. For this paper, the term “prolonged disorders of consciousness” means a vegetative state or a minimally conscious state, characterized by minimal to no signs of awareness up to and potentially exceeding five years.[2] Inadequate outcome measures and lack of empirical data for accurately predicting prolonged disorders of consciousness often force clinicians to assess patients based on their medical experience, knowledge of the medical literature, and clinical intuitions.[3] Futility judgments are clinical judgments made by healthcare providers about their patient’s health that can lead them to discontinue life-sustaining treatment. Dan Brock describes two different types of futility judgments. The first is a “true” futility judgment due to the perceived lack of expected benefit in treating the patient. The second is a hidden rationing decision in which the minor or unlikely benefit of treatment for the patient is not worth the cost in scarce hospital resources.[4] In this paper, I will critique the use of either kind of futility judgments to support the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness. l. Futility Judgments about Likelihood Futility judgments reflect pessimism about the likelihood of a patient’s survival or recovery of consciousness. One of the most common reasons for withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from traumatic brain injury patients is the medical team’s perception of the patient’s poor chance of survival.[5] However, in a field characterized by much uncertainty, it seems imprudent to make futility judgments that project certainty or make the patient’s prospects of recovery or survival seem impossible. The unreliability of current bedside methods to determine consciousness and the inconsistent clinical trajectory of prolonged disorders of consciousness create considerable room for error in making predictions about the patient’s course of recovery. Despite such uncertainty, clinicians often end patients’ lives based on empirically tenuous beliefs regarding the patient’s inability to recover.[6] The grounds for futility judgments are further undermined by emerging data about the likelihood of long-term functional recovery in many patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness. For example, a recent study demonstrated that patients who failed to emerge from traumatic disorders of consciousness within 28 days, the minimum standard timeframe for prolonged disorders of consciousness, could still recover various target behaviors underpinning functional independence after four weeks.[7] The potential for patients to recover beyond this limited timeframe should motivate clinicians to sustain their patients’ lives to better understand the entire course of prolonged disorders of consciousness as it evolves. Even if clinicians remain unconvinced by the empirical evidence, prevailing judgments about futility can lead to increasingly premature withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment for patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness. For example, one multicenter study on level one trauma centers in Canada found that 70 percent of traumatic brain injury deaths were attributable to the withdrawal of life-sustaining treatment, and more than half of them occurred within the first 72 hours of injury.[8] When clinicians use futility to justify decisions to withdraw life-sustaining treatment, they risk ending the lives of individuals who may have survived and recovered. This, in turn, inflates mortality rates for prolonged disorders of consciousness and creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces the notion of very low odds of recovery.[9] Clinicians do not remove life-sustaining treatment without any evidence. But futility is not absolute. For example, suppose it is defined too broadly and includes cases where survival rates are low, but survival is possible. In that case, futility should not justify the removal of life-sustaining treatment. In those cases, other ethical justifications would be necessary. ll. Futility Judgments about Benefit Futility judgments also arise from pessimism about the actual benefit of the potential treatments. Another common reason for withdrawing life-sustaining treatment for traumatic brain injury patients is the clinical team’s belief in a poor long-term prognosis.[10] Based on their experience and data, clinicians who harbor pessimistic thoughts about the prognosis for patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness may inform the family members that the patients would not achieve meaningful recovery. They argue that continuing life-sustaining treatment would bring about no benefit to their wellbeing. However, these beliefs can be predicated on prejudiced perceptions about the quality of life of individuals with disabilities or chronic illnesses, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the disability paradox.[11] The paradox describes the discrepancy between patients with disabilities who report a quality of life much higher than non-disabled individuals would predict their ratings. Therefore, withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from populations with prolonged disorders of consciousness based on unjustified perceptions about what their quality of life might look like perpetuates ableist assumptions about what outcomes are acceptable to them. Some clinicians might respond that if they simply defer to the patient’s perspectives on being kept in a state of prolonged disorders of consciousness, perhaps through prior consultations with the patient or a family member’s knowledge, they can satisfy the patient’s subjective notion of wellbeing. In cases where the patient’s wishes are documented, the clinician’s judgment about the benefits (or lack thereof) of life-sustaining treatment would not matter as much. The decision can be based on the patient’s expressed preferences. However, studies demonstrate that a significant proportion of people who initially rated prolonged disorders of consciousness as a fate “worse than death” also wanted to receive life-sustaining treatment. After a discussion with a researcher about this contradiction, they increased their health rating of prolonged disorders of consciousness.[12] This change demonstrates a psychological discordance between people’s pessimistic perception of prolonged disorders of consciousness versus their preferences for being kept alive despite this perception. Clinicians should conscientiously navigate this discrepancy rather than act upon their initial prejudices against prolonged disorders of consciousness. By being mindful of their ableist biases and their patients, physicians can prevent pessimism from influencing their judgments about the benefits of continuing life-sustaining treatments. Discussions would ensure that patients are well informed when they create health directives or assign proxies for their care. In addition, the patient’s values and advance care decisions should be reassessed over time in conversation with the family, if possible, to ensure that treatment decisions reflect a more accurate and up-to-date understanding of the prognostic outcomes. lll. Hidden Rationing Decisions Some judgments about futility are hidden rationing decisions. “True” futility judgments evaluate the prospective benefit of treating a patient regardless of the resource costs, while rationing decisions evaluate treatments in the context of limited resources for other patients. A physician who determines the futility of continuing life-sustaining treatment might decide that the treatment would not be worth the cost to other patients who are more likely to benefit from the same resources. If healthcare resources ought to be distributed to maximize health utility for the highest number of patients, futility judgments for prolonged disorders of consciousness patients are justified. Life-sustaining treatments would be “wasted” on those patients compared to healthier patients.[13] However, prioritizing treatment for patients with a greater likelihood of survival based on the principle of utility maximization creates a healthcare system that is unwilling to take necessary risks to advance future therapies and build medical knowledge. Medical progress cannot be made if we pursue only treatments for those with the highest chances of survival or recovery. By providing life-sustaining treatment to facilitate the entire clinical course for prolonged disorders of consciousness, we can devote resources to improving the care, rehabilitation, and outcomes for those patients. Therefore, resource allocation is morally justified by its potential to benefit future populations of patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness, even if many individual cases will not result in a successful recovery.[14] Some physicians may respond that their role requires them to make clinical decisions that account for other patients since they must work within the practical reality of limited resources. They might argue that the physician’s duties are not bound to a single patient but to a network of societal constraints that require them to consider elements of distributive justice in their clinical care. Almost every medical decision is performed within the context of contractual obligations to a democratic society that expects a just distribution of healthcare resources.[15] Withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness to direct those resources to other patients may be morally justified and obligatory for physicians to fulfill their societal duties properly. Although the physician’s obligations might extend to such societal duties, simply allocating resources to those most likely to benefit from treatment seems contrary to the principles of justice that undergird democratic society. We protect the most vulnerable members of our community, such as older adults and children, based on a principle of social solidarity that demands respect for all persons regardless of their weaknesses or dependence.[16] Withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from patients with prolonged disorders of consciousness based on beliefs about their lack of deservedness of medical treatment violates the respect we ought to accord them as vulnerable persons in need of social assistance. The principle of non-abandonment should apply. Rationing decisions do not justify “futility” judgments for prolonged disorders of consciousness patients since they contravene principles of social justice and impede medical progress for patient populations with lower rates of recovery. CONCLUSION Futility judgments presume a lack of likely benefit of treatment. They lead to frequent and premature withdrawals of life-sustaining treatment. The prevalence of prognostic uncertainty in the case of prolonged disorders of consciousness should incentivize clinicians to sustain rather than end their patients’ lives. By doing so, they can prevent a self-fulfilling prophecy from inflating mortality rates. Clinicians’ pessimism about the patients’ quality of life can also distort how they communicate the “benefits” of treatment to the patient, and they ought to conscientiously mitigate ableist biases. In addition, hidden rationing decisions disguised as futility judgments can fail to recognize the protections we grant to the most vulnerable members of society. Although physicians should be mindful of their societal obligations for resource allocation, those obligations should not displace their primary duty to their patients. Timothy Quill’s defense of the patient’s right to medical non-abandonment demonstrates “a world of difference between facing an uncertain future alone and facing it with a committed, caring, knowledgeable partner who will not shy away from difficult decisions when the path is unclear.”[17] As such, by advocating for their patients’ rights to life-sustaining treatment and refraining from making hasty futility judgments, clinicians can honor their enduring commitment to each patient’s wellbeing as they navigate the uncertain terrain of prolonged disorders of consciousness together. - [1] “Report to Congress: Traumatic Brain Injury in the United States | Concussion | Traumatic Brain Injury | CDC Injury Center.” 2019. January 31, 2019. https://www.cdc.gov/traumaticbraininjury/pubs/tbi_report_to_congress.html. [2] Foster, Charles. 2019. “It Is Never Lawful or Ethical to Withdraw Life-Sustaining Treatment from Patients with Prolonged Disorders of Consciousness.” Journal of Medical Ethics 45 (4): 265–70. https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2018-105250. [3] Hemphill, J. Claude, and Douglas B. White. 2009. “Clinical Nihilism in Neuro-Emergencies.” Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America 27 (1): 27–viii. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emc.2008.08.009. [4] Brock, Dan. 2021. “Health Care Resource Prioritization and Rationing: Why Is It So Difficult?,” 25. [5] Turgeon, Alexis F., François Lauzier, Jean-François Simard, Damon C. Scales, Karen E.A. Burns, Lynne Moore, David A. Zygun, et al. 2011. “Mortality Associated with Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy for Patients with Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Canadian Multicentre Cohort Study.” CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal 183 (14): 1581–88. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.101786. [6] Schneiderman, Lawrence J. 1990. “Medical Futility: Its Meaning and Ethical Implications.” Annals of Internal Medicine 112 (12): 949. https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-112-12-949. [7] Giacino, Joseph T., Mark Sherer, Andrea Christoforou, Petra Maurer-Karattup, Flora M. Hammond, David Long, and Emilia Bagiella. 2020. “Behavioral Recovery and Early Decision Making in Patients with Prolonged Disturbance in Consciousness after Traumatic Brain Injury.” Journal of Neurotrauma 37 (2): 357–65. https://doi.org/10.1089/neu.2019.6429. [8] Turgeon, Alexis F., François Lauzier, Jean-François Simard, Damon C. Scales, Karen E.A. Burns, Lynne Moore, David A. Zygun, et al. 2011. “Mortality Associated with Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy for Patients with Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Canadian Multicentre Cohort Study.” CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal 183 (14): 1581–88. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.101786. [9] Hemphill, J. Claude, and Douglas B. White. 2009. “Clinical Nihilism in Neuro-Emergencies.” Emergency Medicine Clinics of North America 27 (1): 27–viii. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emc.2008.08.009. [10] Turgeon, Alexis F., François Lauzier, Jean-François Simard, Damon C. Scales, Karen E.A. Burns, Lynne Moore, David A. Zygun, et al. 2011. “Mortality Associated with Withdrawal of Life-Sustaining Therapy for Patients with Severe Traumatic Brain Injury: A Canadian Multicentre Cohort Study.” CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association Journal 183 (14): 1581–88. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.101786. [11] Albrecht, G. L., and P. J. Devlieger. 1999. “The Disability Paradox: High Quality of Life against All Odds.” Social Science & Medicine (1982) 48 (8): 977–88. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0277-9536(98)00411-0. [12] Golan, Ofra G., and Esther-Lee Marcus. 2012. “Should We Provide Life-Sustaining Treatments to Patients with Permanent Loss of Cognitive Capacities?” Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal 3 (3): e0018. https://doi.org/10.5041/RMMJ.10081. [13] Brock, Dan. 2021. “Health Care Resource Prioritization and Rationing: Why Is It So Difficult?25. [14] Giacino, Joseph T., Yelena G. Bodien, David Zuckerman, Jaimie Henderson, Nicholas D. Schiff, and Joseph J. Fins. 2021. “Empiricism and Rights Justify the Allocation of Health Care Resources to Persons with Disorders of Consciousness.” AJOB Neuroscience 12 (2–3): 169–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/21507740.2021.1904055. [15] Misak, Cheryl J., Douglas B. White, and Robert D. Truog. 2014. “Medical Futility.” Chest 146 (6): 1667–72. https://doi.org/10.1378/chest.14-0513. [16] Golan, Ofra G., and Esther-Lee Marcus. 2012. “Should We Provide Life-Sustaining Treatments to Patients with Permanent Loss of Cognitive Capacities?” Rambam Maimonides Medical Journal 3 (3): e0018. https://doi.org/10.5041/RMMJ.10081. [17] Quill, Timothy E., Christine K. Cassel, and Ann Intern Med. 1995. “Nonabandonment: A Central Obligation for Physicians.” Annals of Internal Medicine, 368–74.

Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments. —Marshall McLuhan. What is visible and tangible in things represents our possible action upon them. —Henri Bergson. Introduction: Subjective Maps as ‘Contact Zones’ Maps feature heavily in a variety of media; they appear in textbooks, on television, in print, and on the screens of our handheld devices. The production of cartographic texts is a process that is imbued with power relations and bound up with the production and reproduction of social life (Pinder 405). Mapping involves choices as to what information is and is not included. In their organisation, categorisation, modeling, and representation maps show and they hide. Thus “the idea that a small number of maps or even a single (and singular) map might be sufficient can only apply in a spatialised area of study whose own self-affirmation depends on isolation from its context” (Lefebvre 85–86). These isolations determine the way we interpret the physical, biological, and social worlds. The map can be thought of as a schematic for political systems within a confined set of spatial relations, or as a container for political discourse. Mapping contributes equally to the construction of experiential realities as to the representation of physical space, which also contains the potential to incorporate representations of temporality and rhythm to spatial schemata. Thus maps construct realities as much as they represent them and coproduce space as much as the political identities of people who inhabit them. Maps are active texts and have the ability to promote social change (Pickles 146). It is no wonder, then, that artists, theorists and activists alike readily engage in the conflicted praxis of mapping. This critical engagement “becomes a method to track the past, embody memories, explain the unexplainable” and manifest the latent (Ibarra 66). In this paper I present a short case study of Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies a new media art project that aims to model a citizen driven effort to participate in a critical form of cartography, which challenges dominant representations of the city-space. I present a critical textual analysis of the maps produced in the workshops, the artist statements relating to these works used in the exhibition setting, and statements made by the participants on the project’s blog. This “praxis-logical” approach allows for a focus on the project as a space of aggregation and the communicative processes set in motion within them. In analysing such projects we could (and should) be asking questions about the functions served by the experimental concepts under study—who has put it forward? Who is utilising it and under what circumstances? Where and how has it come into being? How does discourse circulate within it? How do these spaces as sites of emergent forms of resistance within global capitalism challenge traditional social movements? How do they create self-reflexive systems?—as opposed to focusing on ontological and technical aspects of digital mapping (Renzi 73). In de-emphasising the technology of digital cartography and honing in on social relations embedded within the text(s), this study attempts to complement other studies on digital mapping (see Strom) by presenting a case from the field of politically oriented tactical media. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has been selected for analysis, in this exploration of media as “zone.” It goes some way to incorporating subjective narratives into spatial texts. This is a three-step process where participants tapped into spatial subjectivities by data collection or environmental sensing led by personal reflection or ethnographic enquiry, documenting and geo-tagging their findings in the map. Finally they engaged an imaginative or ludic process of synthesising their data in ways not inherent within the traditional conventions of cartography, such as the use of sound and distortion to explicate the intensity of invisible phenomena at various coordinates in the city-space. In what follows I address the “zone” theme by suggesting that if we apply McLuhan’s notion of media as environment together with Henri Bergson’s assertion that visibility and tangibility constitutes the potential for action to digital maps, projects such as Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies constitute a “contact zone.” A type of zone where groups come together at the local level and flows of discourse about art, information communication, media, technology, and environment intersect with local histories and cultures within the cartographic text. A “contact zone,” then, is a site where latent subjectivities are manifested and made potentially politically potent. “Contact zones,” however, need not be spaces for the aggrieved or excluded (Renzi 82), as they may well foster the ongoing cumulative politics of the mundane capable of developing into liminal spaces where dominant orders may be perforated. A “contact zone” is also not limitless and it must be made clear that the breaking of cartographic convention, as is the case with the project under study here, need not be viewed as resistances per se. It could equally represent thresholds for public versus private life, the city-as-text and the city-as-social space, or the zone where representations of space and representational spaces interface (Lefebvre 233), and culture flows between the mediated and ideated (Appadurai 33–36). I argue that a project like Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies demonstrates that maps as urban text form said “contact zones,” where not only are media forms such as image, text, sound, and video are juxtaposed in a singular spatial schematic, but narratives of individual and collective subjectivities (which challenge dominant orders of space and time, and city-rhythm) are contested. Such a “contact zone” in turn may not only act as a resource for citizens in the struggle of urban design reform and a democratisation of the facilities it produces, but may also serve as a heuristic device for researchers of new media spatiotemporalities and their social implications. Critical Cartography and Media Tactility Before presenting this brief illustrative study something needs to be said of the context from which Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies has arisen. Although a number of Web 2.0 applications have come into existence since the introduction of Google Maps and map application program interfaces, which generate a great deal of geo-tagged user generated content aimed at reconceptualising the mapped city-space (see historypin for example), few have exhibited great significance for researchers of media and communications from the perspective of building critical theories relating to political potential in mediated spaces. The expression of power through mapping can be understood from two perspectives. The first—attributed largely to the Frankfurt School—seeks to uncover the potential of a society that is repressed by capitalist co-opting of the cultural realm. This perspective sees maps as a potential challenge to, and means of providing emancipation from, existing power structures. The second, less concerned with dispelling false ideologies, deals with the politics of epistemology (Crampton and Krygier 14). According to Foucault, power was not applied from the top down but manifested laterally in a highly diffused manner (Foucault 117; Crampton and Krygier 14). Foucault’s privileging of the spatial and epistemological aspects of power and resistance complements the Frankfurt School’s resistance to oppression in the local. Together the two perspectives orient power relative to spatial and temporal subjectivities, and thus fit congruently into cartographic conventions. In order to make sense of these practices the post-oppositional character of tactical media maps should be located within an economy of power relations where resistance is never outside of the field of forces but rather is its indispensable element (Renzi 72). Such exercises in critical cartography are strongly informed by the critical politico-aesthetic praxis of political/art collective The Situationist International, whose maps of Paris were inherently political. The Situationist International incorporated appropriated texts into, and manipulated, existing maps to explicate city-rhythms and intensities to construct imaginative and alternate representations of the city. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies adopts a similar approach. The artists’ statement reads: We build our subjective maps by combining different methods: photography, film, and sound recording; […] to explore the visible and invisible […] city; […] we adopt psycho-geographical approaches in exploring territory, defined as the study of the precise effects of the geographical environment, consciously developed or not, acting directly on the emotional behaviour of individuals. The project proposals put forth by workshop participants also draw heavily from the Situationists’s A New Theatre of Operations for Culture. A number of Situationist theories and practices feature in the rationale for the maps created in the Bangalore Subjective Cartographies workshop. For example, the Situationists took as their base a general notion of experimental behaviour and permanent play where rationality was approached on the basis of whether or not something interesting could be created out of it (Wark 12). The dérive is the rapid passage through various ambiences with a playful-constructive awareness of the psychographic contours of a specific section of space-time (Debord). The dérive can be thought of as an exploration of an environment without preconceptions about the contours of its geography, but rather a focus on the reality of inhabiting a place. Détournement involves the re-use of elements from recognised media to create a new work with meaning often opposed to the original. Psycho-geography is taken to be the subjective ambiences of particular spaces and times. The principles of détournement and psycho-geography imply a unitary urbanism, which hints at the potential of achieving in environments what may be achieved in media with détournement. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies carries Situationist praxis forward by attempting to exploit certain properties of information digitalisation to formulate textual representations of unitary urbanism. Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies is demonstrative of a certain media tactility that exists more generally across digital-networked media ecologies and channels this to political ends. This tactility of media is best understood through textual properties awarded by the process and logic of digitalisation described in Lev Manovich’s Language of New Media. These properties are: numerical representation in the form of binary code, which allows for the reification of spatial data in a uniform format that can be stored and retrieved in-silico as opposed to in-situ; manipulation of this code by the use of algorithms, which renders the scales and lines of maps open to alteration; modularity that enables incorporation of other textual objects into the map whilst maintaining each incorporated item’s individual identity; the removal to some degree of human interaction in terms of the translation of environmental data into cartographic form (whilst other properties listed here enable human interaction with the cartographic text), and the nature of digital code allows for changes to accumulate incrementally creating infinite potential for refinements (Manovich 49–63). The Subjective Mapping of Bangalore Bangalore is an interesting site for such a project given the recent and rapid evolution of its media infrastructure. As a “media city,” the first television sets appeared in Bangalore at some point in the early 1980s. The first Internet Service Provider (ISP), which served corporate clients only, commenced operating a decade later and then offered dial-up services to domestic clients in the mid-1990s. At present, however, Bangalore has the largest number of broadband Internet connections in India. With the increasing convergence of computing and telecommunications with traditional forms of media such as film and photography, Bangalore demonstrates well what Scott McQuire terms a media-architecture complex, the core infrastructure for “contact zones” (vii). Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies was a workshop initiated by French artists Benjamin Cadon and Ewen Cardonnet. It was conducted with a number of students at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology in November and December 2009. Using Metamap.fr (an online cartographic tool that makes it possible to add multimedia content such as texts, video, photos, sounds, links, location points, and paths to digital maps) students were asked to, in groups of two or three, collect and consult data on ‘felt’ life in Bangalore using an ethnographic, transverse geographic, thematic, or temporal approach. The objective of the project was to model a citizen driven effort to subvert dominant cartographic representations of the city. In doing so, the project and this paper posits that there is potential for such methods to be adopted to form new literacies of cartographic media and to render the cartographic imaginary politically potent. The participants’ brief outlined two themes. The first was the visible and symbolic city where participants were asked to investigate the influence of the urban environment on the behaviours and sensations of its inhabitants, and to research and collect signifiers of traditional and modern worlds. The invisible city brief asked participants to consider the latent environment and link it to human behaviour—in this case electromagnetic radiation linked to the cities telecommunications and media infrastructure was to be specifically investigated. The Visible and Symbolic City During British rule many Indian cities functioned as dual entities where flow of people and commodities circulated between localised enclaves and the centralised British-built areas. Mirroring this was the dual mode of administration where power was shared between elected Indian legislators and appointed British officials (Hoselitz 432–33). Reflecting on this diarchy leads naturally to questions about the politics of civic services such as the water supply, modes of public communication and instruction, and the nature of the city’s administration, distribution, and manufacturing functions. Workshop participants approached these issues in a variety of ways. In the subjective maps entitled Microbial Streets and Water Use and Reuse, food and water sources of street vendors are traced with the aim to map water supply sources relative to the movements of street vendors operating in the city. Images of the microorganisms are captured using hacked webcams as makeshift microscopes. The data was then converted to audio using Pure Data—a real-time graphical programming environment for the processing audio, video and graphical data. The intention of Microbial Streets is to demonstrate how mapping technologies could be used to investigate the flows of food and water from source to consumer, and uncover some of the latencies involved in things consumed unhesitatingly everyday. Typographical Lens surveys Russell Market, an older part of the city through an exploration of the aesthetic and informational transformation of the city’s shop and street signage. In Ethni City, Avenue Road is mapped from the perspective of local goldsmiths who inhabit the area. Both these maps attempt to study the convergence of the city’s dual function and how the relationship between merchants and their customers has changed during the transition from localised enclaves, catering to the sale of particular types of goods, to the development of shopping precincts, where a variety of goods and services can be sought. Two of the project’s maps take a spatiotemporal-archivist approach to the city. Bangalore 8mm 1940s uses archival Super 8 footage and places digitised copies on the map at the corresponding locations of where they were originally filmed. The film sequences, when combined with satellite or street-view images, allow for the juxtaposition of present day visions of the city with those of the 1940s pre-partition era. Chronicles of Collection focuses on the relationship between people and their possessions from the point of view of the object and its pathways through the city in space and time. Collectors were chosen for this map as the value they placed on the object goes beyond the functional and the monetary, which allowed the resultant maps to access and express spatially the layers of meaning a particular object may take on in differing contexts of place and time in the city-space. The Invisible City In the expression of power through city-spaces, and by extension city-texts, certain circuits and flows are ossified and others rendered latent. Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters writes: however dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project. (252) The artists’ statement puts forward this possible response, an exploration of the latent aesthetics of the city-space: In this sense then, each device that enriches our perception for possible action on the real is worthy of attention. Even if it means the use of subjective methods, that may not be considered ‘evidence’. However, we must admit that any subjective investigation, when used systematically and in parallel with the results of technical measures, could lead to new possibilities of knowledge. Electromagnetic City maps the city’s sources of electromagnetic radiation, primarily from mobile phone towers, but also as a by-product of our everyday use of technologies, televisions, mobile phones, Internet Wi-Fi computer screens, and handheld devices. This map explores issues around how the city’s inhabitants hear, see, feel, and represent things that are a part of our environment but invisible, and asks: are there ways that the intangible can be oriented spatially? The intensity of electromagnetic radiation being emitted from these sources, which are thought to negatively influence the meditation of ancient sadhus (sages) also features in this map. This data was collected by taking electromagnetic flow meters into the suburb of Yelhanka (which is also of interest because it houses the largest milk dairy in the state of Karnataka) in a Situationist-like derive and then incorporated back into Metamap. Signal to Noise looks at the struggle between residents concerned with the placement of mobile phone towers around the city. It does so from the perspectives of people who seek information about their placement concerned about mobile phone signal quality, and others concerned about the proximity of this infrastructure to their homes due to to potential negative health effects. Interview footage was taken (using a mobile phone) and manipulated using Pure Data to distort the visual and audio quality of the footage in proportion to the fidelity of the mobile phone signal in the geographic area where the footage was taken. Conclusion The “contact zone” operating in Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies, and the underlying modes of social enquiry that make it valuable, creates potential for the contestation of new forms of polity that may in turn influence urban administration and result in more representative facilities of, and for, city-spaces and their citizenry. Robert Hassan argues that: This project would mean using tactical media to produce new spaces and temporalities that are explicitly concerned with working against the unsustainable “acceleration of just about everything” that our present neoliberal configuration of the network society has generated, showing that alternatives are possible and workable—in ones job, home life, family life, showing that digital [spaces and] temporality need not mean the unerring or unbending meter of real-time [and real city-space] but that an infinite number of temporalities [and subjectivities of space-time] can exist within the network society to correspond with a diversity of local and contextual cultures, societies and polities. (174) As maps and locative motifs begin to feature more prominently in media, analyses such as the one discussed in this paper may allow for researchers to develop theoretical approaches to studying newer forms of media. References Appadurai, Arjun. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalisation. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. “Bangalore: Subjective Cartographies.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://bengaluru.labomedia.org/page/2/›. Bergson, Henri. Creative Evolution. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1911. Crampton, Jeremy W., and John Krygier. “An Introduction to Critical Cartography.” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geography 4 (2006): 11–13. Chardonnet, Ewen, and Benjamin Cadon. “Semaphore.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://semaphore.blogs.com/semaphore/spectral_investigations_collective/›. Debord, Guy. “Theory of the Dérive.” 25 July 2011 ‹http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/2.derive.htm›. Foucault, Michel. Remarks on Marx. New York: Semitotext[e], 1991.Hassan, Robert. The Chronoscopic Society: Globalization, Time and Knowledge in the Networked Economy. New York: Lang, 2003. “Historypin.” 4 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.historypin.com/›. Hoselitz, Bert F. “A Survey of the Literature on Urbanization in India.” India’s Urban Future Ed. Roy Turner. Berkeley: U of California P, 1961. 425-43. Ibarra, Anna. “Cosmologies of the Self.” Elephant 7 (2011): 66–96. Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. Lovink, Geert. Dark Fibre. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000. “Metamap.fr.” 3 Mar. 2011 ‹http://metamap.fr/›. McLuhan, Marshall, and Quentin Fiore. The Medium Is the Massage. London: Penguin, 1967. McQuire, Scott. The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space. London: Sage, 2008. Pickles, John. A History of Spaces: Cartographic Reason, Mapping and the Geo-Coded World. London: Routledge, 2004. Pinder, David. “Subverting Cartography: The Situationists and Maps of the City.” Environment and Planning A 28 (1996): 405–27. “Pure Data.” 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://puredata.info/›. Renzi, Alessandra. “The Space of Tactical Media” Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. Ed. Megan Boler. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. 71–100. Situationist International. “A New Theatre of Operations for Culture.” 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://www.blueprintmagazine.co.uk/index.php/urbanism/reading-the-situationist-city/›. Strom, Timothy Erik. “Space, Cyberspace and the Interface: The Trouble with Google Maps.” M/C Journal 4.3 (2011). 6 Aug. 2011 ‹http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/viewArticle/370›. Wark, McKenzie. 50 Years of Recuperation of the Situationist International, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2008. Williams, Raymond. Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review. London: New Left, 1979.

We (I, Robert Lawrence and, in a rare display of unity, all my online avatars and agents)hereby render and proclaim thisMANIFESTO OF PIECES AND BITS IN SERVICE OF CONTRADICTIONAL AESTHETICSWe start with the simple premise that art has the job of telling us who we are, and that through the modern age doing this job while KEEPING UP with accelerating cultural change has necessitated the invention of something we might call the avant-garde. Along the way there has been an on-again-off-again affair between said avant-garde and technology. We are now in a new phase of the new and the technology under consideration is the Internet.The recent hyperventilating about the term postInternet reflects the artworld’s overdue recognition of the effect of the Internet on the culture at large, and on art as a cultural practice, a market, and a historical process.I propose that we cannot fully understand what the Internet is doing to us through a consideration of what happens on the screen, nor by considering what happens in the physical space we occupy either before or behind the screen. Rather we must critically and creatively fathom the flow of cultural practice between and across these realms. This requires Hybrid art combining both physical and Internet forms.I do not mean to imply that single discipline-based art cannot communicate complexity, but I believe that Internet culture introduces complexities that can only be approached through hybrid practices. And this is especially critical for an art that, in doing the job of “telling us who we are”, wants to address the contradictory ways we now form and promote, or conceal and revise, our multiple identities through online social media profiles inconsistent with our fleshly selves.We need a different way of talking about identity. A history of identity:In the ancient world, individual identity as we understand it did not exist.The renaissance invented the individual.Modernism prioritized and alienated him (sic).Post-Modernism fragmented him/her.The Internet hyper-circulates and amplifies all these modalities, exploding the possibilities of identity.While reducing us to demographic market targets, the Web facilitates mass indulgence in perversely individual interests. The now common act of creating an “online profile” is a regular reiteration of the simple fact that identity is an open-ended hypothesis. We can now live double, or extravagantly multiple, virtual lives. The “me meme” is a ceaseless morph. This is a profound change in how identity was understood just a decade ago. Other historical transformations of identity happened over centuries. This latest and most radical change has occurred in the click of a mouse. Selfhood is now imbued with new complexity, fluidity and amplified contradictions.To fully understand what is actually happening to us, we need an art that engages the variant contracts of the physical and the virtual. We need a Hybrid art that addresses variant temporal and spatial modes of the physical and virtual. We need an art that offers articulations through the ubiquitous web in concert with the distinct perspectives that a physical gallery experience uniquely offers: engagement and removal, reflection and transference. Art that tells us who we are today calls for an aesthetics of contradiction. — Ro Lawrence (and all avatars) 2011, revised 2013, 2015, 2018. The manifesto above grew from an artistic practice beginning in 1998 as I started producing a website for every project that I made in traditional media. The Internet work does not just document or promote the project, nor is it “Netart” in the common sense of creative work restricted to a browser window. All of my efforts with the Internet are directly linked to my projects in traditional media and the web components offer parallel aesthetic voices that augment or overtly contradict the reading suggested by the traditional visual components of each project.This hybrid work grew out of a previous decade of transmedia work in video installation and sculpture, where I would create physical contexts for silent video as a way to remove the video image from the seamless flow of broadcast culture. A video image can signify very differently in a physical context that separates it from the flow of mass media and rather reconnects it to lived physical culture. A significant part of the aesthetic pleasure of this kind of work comes from nuances of dissonance arising from contradictory ways viewers had learned to read the object world and the ways we were then still learning to read the electronic image world. This video installation work was about “relocating” the electronic image, but I was also “locating” the electronic image in another sense, within the boundaries of geographic and cultural location. Linking all my projects to specific geographic locations set up contrasts with the spatial ubiquity of electronic media. In 1998 I amplified this contrast with my addition of extensive Internet components with each installation I made.The Way Things Grow (1998) began as an installation of sculptures combining video with segments of birch trees. Each piece in the gallery was linked to a specific geographic location within driving distance of the gallery exhibiting the work. In the years just before this piece I had moved from a practice of text-augmented video installations to the point where I had reduced the text to small printed handouts that featured absurd Scripts for Performance. These text handouts that viewers could take with them suggested that the work was to be completed by the viewer later outside the gallery. This to-be-continued dynamic was the genesis of a serial form in work going forward from then on. Thematic and narrative elements in the work were serialized via possible actions viewers would perform after leaving the gallery. In the installation for The Way Things Grow, there was no text in the gallery at all to suggest interpretations of this series of video sculptures. Even the titles offered no direct textual help. Rather than telling the viewers something about the work before them in the gallery, the title of each piece led the viewer away from the gallery toward serial actions in the specific geographic locations the works referred to. Each piece was titled with an Internet address.Figure 1: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, video Installation with web components at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/grow.html, 1998.When people went to the web site for each piece they found only a black page referencing a physical horizon with a long line of text that they could scroll to right for meters. Unlike the determinedly embodied work in the gallery, the web components were disembodied texts floating in a black void, but texts about very specific physical locations.Figure 2: Lawrence, Robert, The Way Things Grow, partial view of webpage at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/growth_variant4.html, 1998.The texts began with the exact longitude and latitude of a geographical site in some way related to birch trees. ... A particularly old or large tree... a factory that turned birch trees into popsicle sticks and medical tongue depressors... etc. The website texts included directions to the site, and absurd scripts for performance. In this way the Internet component transformed the suite of sculptures in the gallery to a series of virtual, and possibly actual, events beyond the gallery. These potential narratives that viewers were invited into comprised an open-ended serial structure. The gallery work was formal, minimal, essentialist. On the web it was social, locative, deconstructive. In both locations, it was located. Here follows an excerpt from the website. GROWTH VARIANT #25: North 44:57:58 by West 93:15:56. On the south side of the Hennepin County Government Center is a park with 9 birch trees. These are urban birches, and they display random scratchings, as well as proclamations of affection expressed with pairs of initials and a “+” –both with and without encircling heart symbols. RECOMMENDED PERFORMANCE: Visit these urban birches once each month. Photograph all changes in their bark made by humans. After 20 years compile a document entitled, "Human Mark Making on Urban Birches, a Visual Study of Specific Universalities". Bring it into the Hennepin County Government Center and ask that it be placed in the archives.An Acre of Art (2000) was a collaborative project with sculptor Mark Knierim. Like The Way Things Grow, this new work, commissioned by the Minneapolis Art Institute, played out in the gallery, in a specific geographic location, and online. In the Art Institute was a gallery installation combining sculptures with absurd combinations of physical rural culture fitting contradictorily into an urban "high art" context. One of the pieces, entitled Landscape (2000), was an 18’ chicken coop faced with a gold picture frame. Inside were two bard rock hens and an iMac. The computer was programmed to stream to the Internet live video from the coop, the world’s first video chicken cam. As a work unfolding across a long stretch of time, the web cam video was a serial narrative without determined division into episodes. The gallery works also referenced a specific acre of agricultural land an hour from the Institute. Here we planted a row of dwarf corn at a diagonal to the mid-western American rural geometric grid of farmland. Visitors to the rural site could sit on “rural art furniture,” contemplate the corn growing, and occasionally witness absurd performances. The third stream of the piece was an extensive website, which playfully theorized the rural/urban/art trialectic. Each of the three locations of the work was exploited to provide a richer transmedia interpretation of the project’s themes than any one venue or medium could. Location Sequence is a serial installation begun in 1999. Each installation has completely different physical elements. The only consistent physical element is 72 segments of a 72” collapsible carpenter's ruler evenly spaced to wrap around the gallery walls. Each of the 72 segments of the ruler displays an Internet web address. Reversing the notion of the Internet as a place of rapid change compared to a more enduring physical world, in this case the Internet components do not change with each new episode of the work, while the physical components transform with each new installation. Thematically, all aspects of the work deal with various shades of meaning of the term "location." Beginning/Middle/End is a 30-year conceptual serial begun in 2002, presenting a series of site-specific actions, objects, or interventions combined with corresponding web pages that collectively negotiate concepts related to time, location, and narrative. Realizing a 30-year project via the web in this manner is a self-conscious contradiction of the culture of the instantaneous that the Internet manifests and propagates.The installation documented here was completed for a one-night event in 2002 with Szilage Gallery in St Petersburg, Florida. Bricks moulded with the URLs for three web sites were placed in a historic brick road with the intention that they would remain there through a historical time frame. The URLs were also projected in light on a creek parallel to the brick road and seen only for several hours. The corresponding web site components speculate on temporal/narrative structures crossing with geographic features, natural and manufactured.Figure 3: Lawrence, Robert, Beginning/Middle/End, site-specific installation with website in conjunction with 30-year series, http://www.h-e-r-e.com/beginning.html, 2002-32.The most recent instalment was done as part of Conflux Festival in 2014 in collaboration with painter Ld Lawrence. White shapes appeared in various public spaces in downtown Manhattan. Upon closer inspection people realized that they were not painted tags or stickers, but magnetic sheets that could be moved or removed. An optical scan tag hidden on the back of each shape directed to a website which encouraged people to move the objects to other locations and send a geo-located photo to the web site to trace the shape's motion through the world. The work online could trace the serial narrative of the physical installation components following the installation during Conflux Festival. Figure 4: Lawrence, Robert w/Lawrence, Ld, Gravity Ace on the Move, site-specific installation with geo-tracking website at http://www.h-e-r-e.com/gravityace/. Completed for Conflux Festival NYC, 2014, as part of Beginning/Middle/End.Dad's Boots (2003) was a multi-sited sculpture/performance. Three different physical manifestations of the work were installed at the same time in three locations: Shirakawa-go Art Festival in Japan; the Phipps Art Center in Hudson, Wisconsin; and at the Tampa Museum of Art in Florida. Physical components of the work included silent video projection, digital photography, computer key caps, and my father's boots. Each of these three different installations referred back to one web site. Because all these shows were up at the same time, the work was a distributed synchronous serial. In each installation space the title of the work was displayed as an Internet address. At the website was a series of popup texts suggesting performances focused, however absurdly, on reassessing paternal relationships.Figure 5: Lawrence, Robert, Dad’s Boots, simultaneous gallery installation in Florida, Wisconsin and Japan, with website, 2003. Coincidently, beginning the same time as my transmedia physical/Internet art practice, since 1998 I have had a secret other-life as a tango dancer. I came to this practice drawn by the music and the attraction of an after-dark subculture that ran by different rules than the rest of life. While my life as a tanguero was most certainly an escape strategy, I quickly began to see that although tango was different from the rest of the world, it was indeed a part of this world. It had a place and a time and a history. Further, it was a fascinating history about the interplays of power, class, wealth, race, and desire. Figure 6: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Intervention, site-specific dance interventions with extensive web components, 2007-12.As Marta Savigliano points out in Tango and the Political Economy of Passion, “Tango is a practice already ready for struggle. It knows about taking sides, positions, risks. It has the experience of domination/resistance from within. …Tango is a language of decolonization. So pick and choose. Improvise... let your feet do the thinking. Be comfortable in your restlessness. Tango” (17). The realization that tango, my sensual escape from critical thought, was actually political came just about the time I was beginning to understand the essential dynamic of contradiction between the physical and Internet streams of my work. Tango Intervention began in 2007. I have now, as of 2018, done tango interventions in over 40 cities. Overall, the project can be seen as a serial performance of contradictions. In each case the physical dance interventions are manifestations of sensual fantasy in public space, and the Internet components recontextualize the public actions as site-specific performances with a political edge, revealing a hidden history or current social situation related to the political economy of tango. These themes are further developed in a series of related digital prints and videos shown here in various formats and contexts.In Tango Panopticon (2009), a “spin off” from the Tango Intervention series, the hidden social issue was the growing video surveillance of public space. The first Tango Panopticon production was Mayday 2009 with people dancing tango under public video surveillance in 15 cities. Mayday 2010 was Tango Panopticon 2.0, with tangointervention.org streaming live cell phone video from 16 simultaneous dance interventions on 4 continents. The public encountered the interventions as a sensual reclaiming of public space. Contradictorily, on the web Tango Panopticon 2.0 became a distributed worldwide action against the growing spectre of video surveillance and the increasing control of public commons. Each intervention team was automatically located on an online map when they started streaming video. Visitors to the website could choose an action from the list of cities or click on the map pins to choose which live video to load into the grid of 6 streaming signals. Visitors to the physical intervention sites could download our free open source software and stream their own videos to tangointervention.org.Figure 7: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0, worldwide synchronous dance intervention with live streaming video and extensive web components, 2010.Tango Panopticon also has a life as a serial installation, initially installed as part of the annual conference of “Digital Resources for Humanities and the Arts” at Brunel University, London. All shots in the grid of videos are swish pans from close-ups of surveillance cameras to tango interveners dancing under their gaze. Each ongoing installation in the series physically adapts to the site, and with each installation more lines of video frames are added until the images become too small to read.Figure 8: Lawrence, Robert, Tango Panopticon 2.0 (For Osvaldo), video installation based on worldwide dance intervention series with live streaming video, 2011.My new work Equivalence (in development) is quite didactic in its contradictions between the online and gallery components. A series of square prints of clouds in a gallery are titled with web addresses that open with other cloud images and then fade into randomly loading excerpts from the CIA torture manual used at Guantanamo Bay Detention Center.Figure 9: Lawrence, Robert, Eauivalence, digital prints, excerpts from CIA Guantanamo Detention Center torture manual, work-in-progress.The gallery images recall Stieglitz’s Equivalents photographs from the early 20th century. Made in the 1920s to 30s, the Equivalents comprise a pivotal change in photographic history, from the early pictorial movement in which photography tried to imitate painting, and a new artistic approach that embraced features distinct to the photographic medium. Stieglitz’s Equivalents merged photographic realism with abstraction and symbolist undertones of transcendent spirituality. Many of the 20th century masters of photography, from Ansel Adams to Minor White, acknowledged the profound influence these photographs had on them. Several images from the Equivalents series were the first photographic art to be acquired by a major art museum in the US, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.My series Equivalence serves as the latest episode in a serial art history narrative. Since the “Pictures Generation” movement in the 1970s, photography has cannibalized its history, but perhaps no photographic body of work has been as quoted as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. A partial list includes: John Baldessari’s series Blowing Cigar Smoke to Match Clouds That Are the Same(1973), William Eggleston’s series Wedgwood Blue (1979), John Pfahl’s smoke stack series (1982-89), George Legrady’s Equivalents II(1993), Vik Muniz’sEquivalents(1997), Lisa Oppenheim (2012), and most recently, Berndnaut Smilde’s Nimbus Series, begun in 2012. Over the course of more than four decades each of these series has presented a unique vision, but all rest on Stieglitz’s shoulders. From that position they make choices about how to operate relative the original Equivalents, ranging from Baldessari and Muniz’s phenomenological playfulness to Eggleston and Smilde’s neo-essentialist approach.My series Equivalence follows along in this serial modernist image franchise. What distinguishes it is that it does not take a single position relative to other Equivalents tribute works. Rather, it exploits its gallery/Internet transmediality to simultaneously assume two contradictory positions. The dissonance of this positioning is one of my main points with the work, and it is in some ways resonant with the contradictions concerning photographic abstraction and representation that Stieglitz engaged in the original Equivalents series almost a century ago.While hanging on the walls of a gallery, Equivalence suggests the same metaphysical intentions as Stieglitz’s Equivalents. Simultaneously, in its manifestation on the Internet, my Equivalence series transcends its implied transcendence and claims a very specific time and place –a small brutal encampment on the island of Cuba where the United States abandoned any remaining claim to moral authority. In this illegal prison, forgotten lives drag on invisibly, outside of time, like untold serial narratives without resolution and without justice.Partially to balance the political insistence of Equivalence, I am also working on another series that operates with very different modalities. Following up on the live streaming technology that I developed for my Tango Panopticon public intervention series, I have started Horizon (In Development).Figure 10: Lawrence, Robert, Horizon, worldwide synchronous horizon interventions with live streaming video to Internet, work-in-progress.In Horizon I again use live cell phone video, this time streamed to an infinitely wide web page from live actions around the world done in direct engagement with the horizon line. The performances will begin and automatically come online live at noon in their respective time zone, each added to the growing horizontal line of moving images. As the actions complete, the streamed footage will begin endlessly looping. The project will also stream live during the event to galleries, and then HD footage from the events will be edited and incorporated into video installations. Leading up to this major event day, I will have a series of smaller instalments of the piece, with either live or recorded video. The first of these preliminary versions was completed during the Live Performers Workshop in Rome. Horizon continues to develop, leading to the worldwide synchronous event in 2020.Certainly, artists have always worked in series. However, exploiting the unique temporal dimensions of the Internet, a series of works can develop episodically as a serial work. If that work unfolds with contradictory thematics in its embodied and online forms, it reaches further toward an understanding of the complexities of postInternet culture and identity. ReferencesSaviligliano, Marta. Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

Blaise Pascal once offered the following advice to those perennially worried about knowing fact from fiction: “how few things can be demonstrated! Proofs only convince the mind; custom provides the strongest and most firmly held proofs” (148). The concern about whether or not God existed was for Pascal an unnecessary anxiety: the question couldn’t be answered by human knowledge, and so ultimately one just had to “wager” on whatever stood to be most beneficial, act as if this chosen answer was true, and the mind would eventually fall into line. For Pascal, if one stood to gain from believing in the truth of an idea then the great problems of epistemology could be reduced to a relatively simple and pragmatic calculation of benefit. Doubt, suspicion, and all the attendant epistemological worries would only count as wasted time.It might at first seem surprising that this somewhat antiquated idea of Pascal’s, conceived in seventeenth-century France, appears at the core of a novel by a writer considered to be the quintessential “modern” author, David Foster Wallace. But consider the following advice offered to a recovering drug addict in Wallace’s 1996 novelInfinite Jest. To reap the benefits of the AA program, Don Gately, one of the central characters of the novel, is told by resident counsellor Gene M to imagine he is holding a box of Betty Crocker Cake Mix. The box of cake mix represents Boston AA. Gately is advised that the “box came with directions on the side any eight-year-old could read”: Gene M. said all Gately had to do was for fuck’s sake give himself a break and relax and for once shut up and just follow the directions on the side of the fucking box. It didn’t matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result, or whether he understood the like fucking baking-chemistry of howa cake would result: if he just followed the motherfucking directions, and had sense enough to get help from slightly more experienced bakers to keep from fucking the directions up if he got confused somehow, but basically the point was if he just followed the childish directions, a cake would result. He’d have his cake. (467) This advice indeed seems lifted from Pascal almost verbatim (plus or minus a few turns of phrase, of course):Learn from those who have been bound like you, and who now wager all they have. They are people who know the road you want to follow and have been cured of the affliction of which you want to be cured. Follow the way by which they began ... (Pascal 156).While the Pascalian influence on Wallace’s work is perhaps interesting in its own right, and there are certainly more extensive and capable analyses of it to be done than mine, I invoke it here to highlight a particular emphasis in Wallace’s work that I think exceeds the framework through which it is usually understood. Wallace’s fiction is commonly considered an attack on irony, being supposedly at the vanguard of a movement in recent American literature that Adam Kelly, in an illuminating analysis, has called the “New Sincerity” (131). But before anything else irony is a particular trope of understanding, a way of situating oneself in regards to an object of knowledge, and so Wallace’s work needs not only to be understood in terms of what a culture considers unhip, trite, and sentimental, but how it comes to decide upon those things at all, how it chooses to understand its reality. Inspired by the Pascalian influence apparent in Wallace’s portrayal of the Alcoholics Anonymous program, I intend to shift the focus away from issues of irony and sincerity and instead consider the importance of the epistemological tropes of suspicion and trust in reading Infinite Jest. More than anything else Wallace’s depiction of the AA program tells us he is interested, like Pascal, in the existential implications of suspicion, in what might be lost in following doubt to its most “radical” conclusions. I SuspicionIt is fruitful to view Western intellectual practice as exhibiting suspicious tendencies. From Descartes’s “hyperbolic doubt,” the “hermeneutics of suspicion” that Ricœur and Foucault see coming out of the legacy of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, to the endless “paranoia of the postmodern” that typifies recent academic trends (Bywater 79), the refusal to trust the veracity of surfaces has been a driving force in post-Enlightenment thought, becoming largely inextricable from how we understand the world. As a mode of critique, suspicion has a particular anxiety about the way fiction masquerades as truth. When a suspicious mind reads a given object, be it an advertisement, a novel, a film, a supermarket, or an egg carton, it most often proceeds by first separating the text into what Paul Ricœur calls an “architecture of meaning” (18), defining those elements it considers fictive and those it considers truer, more essential, in order to locate what it considers “the intentional structure of double meaning” (Ricœur 9). Beneath the fictive surface of a novel, for example, it might find hidden the “truer” forces of social repression and patriarchy. Behind the innocence of a bedtime tale it might discern the truth of the placating purpose of story, or the tyranny of naïve narrative closure, the fantasies of teleology and final consonance. And behind Pascal’s wager it might find a weak submission to ideological fictions, a confirmation of the processes of social conditioning.Over the years suspicion has doubtless proved itself a crucial resource for various politics of resistance, for challenging ossified structures of knowledge, and for exposing heinous fictions that definitely needed exposing. But some contend that these once fruitful intellectual practices have become so deeply entrenched that they are now the things to be suspiciously overcome. Rather than being a subversive tactic of liberation, the “routinisation” of suspicion can stand to mark a hermeneutic stasis. It can even, as Bruno Latour argues, mire important social and ecological issues in counterproductive doubt, the most obvious example being the tiresome “debates” about global warming:the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact—as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past—but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! (Latour 227) The work of David Foster Wallace can be considered another example of such a discourse, one that definitely admits suspicion’s hermeneutic force, but is a little uneasy with its predominance. While Wallace’s work is most commonly understood in relation to irony, irony itself, as I have suggested, can in turn be understood as related to a subtending culture of suspicion and cynicism. In his 1993 essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Wallace notes a complex interaction between knowledge, suspicion, art, and televisual culture, in which a particular rendering of irony—a mistrust in clichéd sentiment and all those words we now so confidently put between “shudder” quotes—is commoditised and exploited in order to constantly provide the psychological payoffs of knowingness, those feelings of superiority, safety, and power that come from suspiciously seeing through to the “truth” of things. In Wallace’s reading, ostensibly postmodern advertisements draw attention to their fictive layers to make viewers feel attuned to the supposed truth of their intent. But this access to the “truth” is itself just another fiction aimed to mislead them into commercial pliancy:[TV can] ease that painful tension between Joe’s need to transcend the crowd and his status as Audience member. For to the extent that TV can flatter Joe about “seeing through” the pretentiousness and hypocrisy of outdated values, it can induce in him precisely the feeling of canny superiority it’s taught him to crave, and can keep him dependent on the cynical TV-watching that alone affords this feeling. (Wallace 180) The ironic viewer who would stand above these deliberately naive appeals would then also, and perhaps before anything else, be a suspicious reader, someone predisposed to seeing through the “surface” of a text. Irony, in these examples, would even be alike to the effect gained from “successful” suspicion, something like its reward, rather than an epistemological mode in itself. While in his essay Wallace ultimately intends that his critique of such tendencies will highlight the way much contemporary fiction struggles to subvert this culture, and thus we cannot help but look to his own work to see how it supposedly “attacks” irony, it is also just as crucial to consider its embedded critique of suspicious hermeneutics.II Trust In Infinite Jest’s portrayal of Boston’s Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous programs, Wallace attempts to propose a kind of neo-Pascalian “wager.” And like Pascal’s, Wallace’s is based on the willed performance of that most critically maligned of concepts, trust: that is, a willingness to become, like Pascal, blasé with truth as long as it stands to be beneficial. Within the novel the fictitious Ennet Drug and Alcohol House, along with the adjacent Enfield Tennis Academy, is staged as a school of personal (re)development, dramatising approaches to self-help in the damaged landscape of the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment’s Boston. And it is here where Don Gately, the novel’s unlikely hero, has ended up on his quest to escape the “spider” of addiction. As it openly admits, Alcoholics Anonymous is an easy target for a suspicious mode of thought bent on locating fictions because it “literally makes no sense” (368). But like Pascal, Wallace’s AA submits the problem of truth and error to a more primary consideration of benefit, and celebrates the power of language and custom to create realities, rather than being suspicious of this process of linguistic mediation. So it is a system, like signification itself, that functions on “the carrot-and-donkey aspect of trudging to Meetings only to be told to trudge to still more Meetings” (1001); like any transcendental signifier, the revelations it hints at can never truly arrive. It is also based on assertions that “do not make anything resembling rational sense” (1002). For example, Joelle van Dyne battles with the AA precept “I’m Here But For the Grace of God.” She finds the phrase is literally senseless, and regardless of whether she hears it or not it’s meaningless, and that the foamy enthusiasm with which these folks can say what in fact means nothing at all makes her want to put her head in a Radarange. (366) But perhaps the strongest reason Joelle feels uncomfortable with the present example is that she senses in its obvious untruth the potential truth of all meaning’s fictitiousness, how all sense might just be made up of nonsense of one form or another. Within the AA program these words are a means to an end, rather than something to be resisted or deconstructed.To exist within Infinite Jest’s AA program is thus to be uncomfortably close to the linguistic production of reality, to work at meaning’s coalface, exposed to the flames of its fictitiousness, but all the while being forced to deny this very vista. So while AA is a process firmly against the mechanisms of denial (one of its favourite slogans is “Denial is not a river in Egypt” [272]), it is also based on a paradoxical imperative to deny the status of meaning as a production, as well as the denial of the significance of this paradox: For me, the slogan [Analysis-Paralysis] means there’s no set way to argue intellectual-type stuff about the Program [...] You can’t think about it like an intellectual thing [...] You can analyse it til you’re breaking tables with your forehead and find a cause to walk away, back Out There, where the Disease is. Or you can stay and hang in and do the best you can. (1002) Although it is common knowledge that its precepts are full of logical contradiction and impasse, that it is a blatantly fictitious enterprise, the difficulty which Wallace’s portrayal poses, both for his characters and for his readers schooled in suspicious hermeneutics, is that as a process of healing the AA program somehow seems to work with great efficacy. Enter the redemption of Don Gately.Despite his initial reluctance to embrace the program’s undertakings, much to his surprise Gately finds it having a definite effect: he “all of a sudden realised that quite a few days had gone by since he’d even thought about Demerol or Talwin or even weed” (467). The bracketing of the desire to know and interpret, and the willed trust in the efficacy of a process that one cannot know by necessity, initially frustrates him, and even makes him suspicious: “He couldn’t believe it. He wasn’t Grateful so much as kind of suspicious about it, the Removal [of his addiction]” (468). And all this can definitely be intellectually uncomfortable for a reader well-versed in suspicious hermeneutics, let alone the somewhat unintellectual Gately:It did, yes, tentatively seem maybe actually to be working, but Gately couldn’t for the life of him figure out how just sitting on haemorrhoid-hostile folding chairs every night looking at nose-pores and listening to clichés could work. Nobody’s ever been able to figure AA out, is another binding commonality. (349)Ultimately the AA program presents the novel’s hero and its readers with an impasse, a block to what one knows and can critique, refuting the basic assumption that links narrative progression and change with the acquisition of knowledge. While others in AA seek to understand and debunk it, they also significantly fail to achieve the kind of recovery experienced by Gately. As Elizabeth Freudenthal suggests, “despite the problems one may have with AA as a vehicle for healthy living, Gately’s mode of fighting addiction is the only one in the novel that actually works” (191). And while Freudenthal suggests that Gately’s success comes through a ritual “anti-interiority,” a “mode of identity founded in the material world of both objects and biological bodies and divested from an essentialist notion of inner emotional, psychological, and spiritual life” (192), to me it seems that were Gately unable to resist the pleasures of the suspicious mind then little of his “abiding” in the exterior world would be possible. Ultimately, what Gately achieves comes through a kind of epistemological “trust.”III Reading TrustfullyBy occupying such a central place in the narrative, this neo-Pascalian wager around which the novel’s AA program is built is obviously intended to bear not only on its characters, but on how the novel is read. So how might we also “learn” from such Pascalian gambits? How might we read the novel without suspicion? What might we gain by becoming Don Gately? What, on the other hand, might we lose? While this essay is far too short to conduct this kind of investigation in full, a few points might still be raised in lieu of a proper conclusion.By openly submitting to his ignorance of what his actions mean, Gately is able to approach success, conclusion, and fulfillment. What the novel’s ending has in store for him is another question altogether, but Freudenthal views Gately’s closing scenes as the apotheosis of his “anti-intellectual endeavor” (206). Gately’s narrative thus also presents a challenge to readers thoroughly led by suspicious hermeneutics, and encourages us, if we are to accept this notion that is key to Infinite Jest (but we can, of course, refuse not to), to place ourselves in the position of the AA attendee, as a subject of the text’s discourse, not in possession of knowledge through which to critique it and scale that “architecture of meaning.” Many aspects of the novel of course impel us to read suspiciously, to gather clues like detectives, to interrogate the veracity of claims. Consider, for example, the compounded conflicting accounts of whether Joelle van Dyne has been horribly disfigured by acid, or is sublimely beautiful (compare, for instance, the explanation given on 538 with that on 795). Yet ultimately, recalling the AA ethos, the narrative makes it difficult for us to successfully execute these suspicious reading practices. Similar to a text like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, that for Brian McHale ultimately resists any attempt to answer the many questions it poses (90-91), Infinite Jest frequently invokes a logic of what we might call epistemological equivocation. Either the veil-wearing Joelle van Dyne is hideously and improbably deformed or is superlatively beautiful; either AA is a vapid institution of brainwashing or is the key to recovery from substance abuse; either the novel’s matriarch, Avril Incandenza, is a sinister “black widow” or a superlatively caring mother. The list goes on.To some extent, the plethora of conflicting accounts simply engages an “innocent” readerly curiosity. But regardless of the precise nature of this hermeneutic desire stimulated by the text, one cannot help but feel, as Marshall Boswell suggests, that “Wallace’s point seems to be that these issues are not the issue” (175). If we read the novel attempting to harmonise these elements, interrogating the reliability of the given textual evidence, we will be sorely disappointed, if not doomed to the “analysis paralysis” that is much feared in the novel’s AA program. While one of the pleasures Wallace’s novel offers readers is the encouragement to participate actively in the text, it is also something it is wary of. And this is where the rub of the book lies. Just like in AA, we can potentially keep analysing its ambiguities forever; it is indeed designed to be pleasurable in just this way. But it is also intended, at least so Wallace tells us, to resist the addictive nature of pure entertainment:The original title was A Failed Entertainment. The idea is that the book is structured as an entertainment that doesn’t work [...]. And the tension of the book is to try to make it at once extremely entertaining—and also sort of warped, and to sort of shake the reader awake about some of the things that are sinister in entertainment. (Wallace in Lipsky 79)If we consider what it might mean to view the book as a “Failed Entertainment,” and consider what it is we love to do when reading suspiciously, we can then see that it is perhaps intended to steer us away from trying to decode it, especially when it is constantly suggested to us that it is this effort of analysis that tends to move one out of the immediacy of a given moment. The fact that “nobody’s ever been able to figure AA out” (349), yet it still indubitably works, seems to suggests how we are to approach the novel.But what are we offered instead of these pleasures of suspicious reading? Perhaps, like the AA attendee, the novel wants us to learn to listen to what is already in front of us: for the AA member it is all those stories offered up at the “podium”; for us it is all the pain and joy written in the text. In place of a conclusive ending that gives us all that we want to know, that shows us everything that “happens,” in its final scene the novel instead tells the story of a man finding his “bottom,” his lowest ebb, waking up “flat on his back on the beach in the freezing sand” (981). This man, of course, is Don Gately. If we see this final moment only as a frustration of narrative desire, as a turning away from full understanding, from a revelation of the “truth” the narrative has been withholding, then we perhaps fail the task Wallace’s text, like AA, constantly asks of us: to listen, to accept, to trust.ReferencesBoswell, Marshall. Understanding David Foster Wallace. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 2003.Bywater, William. “The Paranoia of Postmodernism.” Philosophy and Literature 14.1 (1990): 79–84. Foucault, Michel. “Nietzsche, Freud, Marx.” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology: Essential Works of Foucault 1954–84, Volume 2. Ed. James Faubion. Trans. Robert Hurley et al. London: Penguin, 2000. 269–78. Freudenthal, Elizabeth. “Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest.” New Literary History 41.1 (2010): 191–211. Kelly, Adam. “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction.” Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays. Los Angeles: Sideshow Media Group Press, 2010. 131–46.Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225–48.Lipsky, David. Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip With David Foster Wallace. New York: Broadway Books, 2010.McHale, Brian. “Modernist Reading, Post-Modern Text: The Case of Gravity's Rainbow.” Poetics Today 1.1 (1979): 85–110.Pascal, Blaise. Pensées and Other Writings. Trans. Honor Levi. Ed.Anthony Levi. New York: Oxford UP, 1995.Ricœur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Denis Savage. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970.Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 13.2 (1993): 151–94. ---. Infinite Jest. New York: Back Bay Books, 1996.

While Young Adult dystopian texts commonly manipulate expectations of time and space, it is largely in a linear sense—projecting futuristic scenarios, shifting the contemporary reader into a speculative space sometimes only slightly removed from contemporary social, political, or environmental concerns (Booker 3; McDonough and Wagner 157). These concerns are projected into the future, having followed their natural trajectory and come to a dystopian present. Authors write words and worlds of warning in a postapocalyptic landscape, drawing from and confirming established dystopian tropes, and affirming the activist power of teenage protagonists in cultivating change. This article examines the intersections between dystopian Young Adult literature and Indigenous Futurisms, and the possibilities for sharing or encoding Indigenous Knowledge through the disruption or revision of genre, where the act itself become a movement of activism and survival echoed in text. Lynette James acknowledges the “ruptures” (157) Indigenous authors have made in the genre through incorporating Indigenous Knowledge into story as an embedded element – not only of narrative, but of structure. Ambelin Kwaymullina, of the Palyku people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, exemplifies this approach in her disruption or rupture of the dystopian genre in her embodiment of Indigenous Knowledge in the Young Adult (YA) text The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. Kwaymullina centres Indigenous Knowledge throughout the trilogy, offering a powerful revision of key tropes of the dystopian YA genre, creating a perspective that privileges Indigenous Knowledge. This is most significantly identified through her depiction of time as a non-linear concept, at once realised narratively, conceptually, and structurally in the text. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, the first of a trilogy of novels in “The Tribe” series, presents a futuristic post-apocalyptic world, set 300 years after the Reckoning, a cataclysmic environmental disaster. The protagonist, Ashala Wolf, is one of a number of people with supernatural abilities that are outlawed by their government and labelled Illegals. As the novel begins, Ashala is being interrogated by the villainous Neville Rose, held in a detention centre as she plots to escape, free her fellow detainees, and return to the Tribe in the Firstwood. The plot draws from historical and contemporary parallels in Australia, yet part of the text’s subversive power is that these parallels and connections are never made explicit on the page. The reader is invited to become an active participant in coding meaning by applying their own understandings of the context and connections, creating an inter-subjective dialogue between reader and text, and Indigenous and non-Indigenous knowing. This article looks to the first novel in the trilogy as the key exemplifier of the disruption of genre and knowledge through the representation of time. It is in this novel that these concepts are established and realised most clearly, being predominantly from Ashala’s perspective as a direct descendant of Indigenous Australians, with the following two novels divided between Ashala, Georgie, and Ember as polyphonic narrative focalisers. Acting as an introduction to the series, The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf presents a foundation for readers to challenge their perceptions on both genre and knowledge. Kwaymullina entangles the two, imbuing knowledge throughout narrative and structure which in turn disrupts genre. In her revisioning of narrative through genre and structural focus of time as a non-linear concept, Kwaymullina puts into practice Conrad Scott’s argument that “the potential healing of moments or processes of crisis in Indigenous dystopias is never possible without a strategic engagement with narrative itself, and even the formal aspects of the text” (73).While the series fits the conventions of the dystopian genre, it has been more commonly identified as speculative fiction, or Indigenous futurism, as Kwaymullina herself defines her work. James notes the significance of acknowledging a text as Indigenous futurism, writing, “identifying a work as Indigenous futurism rather than simply as YA dystopia asks readers, critics, and scholars to adjust their orientation in ways that may radically alter both their perception and reception of it” (153). For the purposes of this article, I acknowledge the clear value and importance of identifying the text as Indigenous futurism, but also find value in the movements that define the shift from dystopian literature to Indigenous futurism, in its engagement with and recasting of dystopian conventions in the text. In embedding Indigenous Knowledge in her worldbuilding and narrative, Kwaymullina actively rewrites dystopian expectations and tropes. These notions would be expected or normalised when grounded in Indigenous futurism, but are regarded as a subversion and revision when read in dystopian fiction. The text engages directly with the specific tropes and expectations of dystopian genre—its significance in rewriting the spaces, narratives, and structures of the genre cannot be overstated. The employment of the dystopian genre as both framework and space of revision speaks to larger debates of the value of dystopian fiction in examining socio-cultural issues over other genres such as realism. Critics argue the speculative nature of dystopian fiction that remains linked to concerns of the present and past allows audiences to envision and experience their own transformative experience, effecting political change (Kennon; Mallan; Basu, Broad, and Hintz; Sypnowich). Balaka Basu, Katherine Broad, and Carrie Hintz argue that serious issues presented in fantastic futuristic scenarios “may provide young people with an entry point into real-world problems, encouraging them to think about social and political issues in new ways, or even for the first time” (4-5). Kerry Mallan notes the “ability of dystopian fiction to open up to readers a dystopian social elsewhere serves a double function: On the one hand, it offers readers an opportunity to reflect on their current existence to compare the similarities and differences between the real and the fictional; on the other, these stories implicitly exhort young people to take responsibility for their own lives and the future of society” (16). Drawing on these metanarrative structures with the interweaving of Indigenous knowledge increases the active responsibility for the reader. It invokes Nnedi Okorafor’s labelling of Indigenous Futurisms as “the most truthful way of telling the truth” (279), creating opportunities for the Indigenous and non-Indigenous reader to engage with narratives of a real apocalypse on invaded land. The dystopian setting and expectations form a buffer between reader and text (Basu, Broad, and Hintz 4), making the narrative more accessible to the reader without shying away from the embedded trauma, while drawing on dystopian fiction’s balance of despair and optimism (Basu, Broad, and Hintz 2).The stakes and value of dystopian fiction are heightened when engaging with Indigenous narratives and knowledge; as Claire Coleman (a Noongar woman from the south coast of Western Australia) notes, Indigenous Australians live in a post-apocalyptic state as “all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people alive today are the descendants of people who survived an apocalypse” (n.p.). James, quoting Uppinder Mehan, concurs, writing “these narrators are ‘survivors—or the descendants of survivors’ [162], not just of broken dystopian worlds or post-cataclysmic events but of the real historical legacies of slavery, conquest, and oppression” (157). Writing on Indigenous futurisms in dystopian and utopian fiction, Mary Morrison argues “people outside Western hegemonic power structures would likely be well-placed to transform the utopian imagination, to decolonize it” (11), acknowledging the significance in the intersection of genre and lived experience by author and character.Kwaymullina expands on this, noting that for Indigenous authors the tropes of speculative fiction are familiar lived experiences. She writes thatmany of the ideas that populate speculative-fiction books – notions of time travel, astral projection, speaking the languages of animals or trees – are part of Indigenous cultures. One of the aspects of my own novels that is regularly interpreted as being pure fantasy, that of an ancient creation spirit who sung the world into being, is for me simply part of my reality. (“Edges” 27)Kwaymullina affirms Coleman and James in her approach, writing “Indigenous people lived through the end of the world, but we did not end. We survived by holding on to our cultures, our kin, and our sense of what was right in a world gone terribly wrong” (“Edges” 29). The Tribe series demonstrates survivance, with Kwaymullina’s approach forming possibilities for intersubjective dialogues across genre. The concept is reinforced through Ashala’s repeated, joyful cries of hope throughout the text: “I live! We live! We survive!” (197, 200, 279, 391).Sara K. Day, Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz note dystopian literature considers possible futures from the outlook and failures of the present (8), arguing “the label ‘dystopia’ typically applies to works that simultaneously imagine futures and consider the present, essentially occupying a liminal space between these times” (Day, Green-Barteet, and Montz 9). This sense of liminality is heightened with the engagement of time from an Indigenous perspective; as Scott writes, “Indigenous dystopian fiction presents not only the crisis of the future but the ongoing crisis of the present time, and that which is still resonant from the past” (73). In “Respect, Relationships, Renewal: Aboriginal Perspectives on the Worlds of Tomorrow”, Kwaymullina notes that linear time can “become a tool of ideology, with colonial characterisations of Indigenous peoples as being of an earlier (less ‘advanced’) time through the use of terms such as ‘primitive’, ‘prehistoric’ and ‘prehistory’” (“Respect” 126).In shifting to a dystopian world where Australia as a colonised or invaded country is no longer recognised, but Country is still alive and read by those who live on it, Kwaymullina recasts the use of linear time as a tool of ideology to reaffirm Coleman’s argument that Indigenous Australians already exist in a post-apocalyptic state. She draws from the past and present and casts it into the future, while simultaneously recognising that all three are linked and circular—events are repeating and being relived. Kwaymullina depicts numerous parallels between the dystopian world and a post-invasion Australia, populating her world with references to detention centres; othering and distinct labelling of a vilified minority deemed a threat or aberrant to the majority colonising community; the name and title of the series’ central villain Chief Administrator Neville Rose in a clear reference to A.O. Neville, WA Chief Protector of Aborigines.At the outset, the government uses labels to separate and denigrate the Other—individuals with Abilities are called Illegals, distinct from Citizens, although they can apply for Exemptions if their Ability is deemed useful and passive. The terminology of Exemption draws deliberate connections to the Exemption Certificate Indigenous Australians could apply for from the Aborigines Protection (Amendment) Act 1943. The text consistently operates in modes of survivance, as Ashala and the Tribe redefine their world through a distinctly Indigenous perspective (Murphy 179). Ashala gains power through the tool used to suppress her by claiming and embracing this status, identifying her friends and herself as the Tribe and choosing a forest name emblematic of the totems that each Tribe member has a particular connection to (e.g. Georgie Spider, Ember Crow, Ashala Wolf). Continual parallels are drawn to Indigenous Knowledge: Ashala’s Ability is Sleepwalking, where she enters a state in dreaming where she can alter reality, a liminal space that suggests connections to the Dreamtime. While the land is no longer called or recognised as Australia, and the tectonic plates have shifted land mass, it remains Country, as recognised in Ashala’s relationship with the Firstwood. The Balance, the inherent harmony between all life, animate and inanimate, is a clear reflection of an Indigenous understanding, positioning it as the mainstream ideology.Kwaymullina weaves Indigenous knowledge through the text as demonstrated through narrative, key thematic concepts, and structure, disrupting the tropes of dystopian fiction in a manner that subverts genre and presents new possibilities for both reader and writer while presenting a shift to Indigenous Futurisms. As an organic by-product of this ideological framework, regressive or gendered tropes are re-envisioned as feminist and ecologically centred, ultimately conveying a sense of hope and survivance. Key tropes of YA dystopian fiction include a female teenager protagonist oppressed by her government, often initially unknowingly so embedded is she in the system, potentially profiting from it in some way. She is often introduced to the reader in a setting that the character initially reads as utopian, but is revealed to be dystopian and authoritarian in its construction. As identified by Ann M.M. Childs, a common dynamic in the genre that reinforces gender roles in heterosexual relationships see the protagonist introduced to the concept of rebellion or dissent through a male love interest already embedded in a resistance movement, at the cost of losing or betraying a female friend (188). Childs notes the protagonist may be resistant to the idea of rebellion, but after falling for the love interest, grows to genuinely care for the cause. Technology is depicted as advanced, alien or dehumanising, and both belongs to and represents the repressive society the protagonist seeks to escape and change. The natural environment is depicted in binary opposition, with characters finding resilience, freedom, and personal agency in a return to nature (McDonough and Wagner 157). Society will have attempted to restrict, destroy, or otherwise mine the natural world, but this attempt for control will inevitably fail or backfire. Initially the environment is displayed as a potentially antagonistic element, wild and dangerous; however, after the character escapes their confining world, it becomes an ally. In her employment of a perspective framed by Indigenous Knowledge, Kwaymullina subverts each of these established tropes, offering an alternative reading of conventions often embedded in the genre. Ashala is introduced as already entrenched in a rebellion that she is both leader and pivotal figure of. Inverting the dynamic outlined by Childs, she is love interest Connor’s motivation for rejecting the government and joining the Tribe: “You are the reason I came here, Ashala Wolf” (Kwaymullina 263). Kwaymullina dismisses Childs’ concern over the removal of female friendship in favour of heterosexual romance by centering Ashala’s relationships with Georgie and Ember as fundamental to Ashala’s well-being, where sistahood is a key paradigm of hope: “I carry my friends with me” (Kwaymullina 39). For Ashala and the Tribe, nature as exemplified through the Firstwood is Country, not only sanctuary but an animate being that Ashala speaks with, asks permission to live within, and offers protection and apology for the harm down to it by humans in the past. The privileging of environment, and reading all animate or inanimate beings as living, extends to challenging the nature/technology dichotomy. Even the static or sterile environments of the detention centres are recognised for their connection to nature in their construction from recycled materials: “Nothing ever truly ends, only transforms” (Kwaymullina 141). In “Learning to Read the Signs: Law in an Indigenous Reality”, Ambelin Kwaymullina and Blaze Kwaymullina write thatsince everything must interconnect and interrelate to survive, if a pattern is fixed in time, it loses its ability to dynamically connect with other patterns. To be temporally fixed is therefore to be isolated; frozen. In an Indigenous worldview, it is, in fact, an impossibility – for that which cannot move, cannot interact, and that which cannot interact is inanimate. And there is nothing inanimate in country. (200)This can be read as representative of Kwaymullina’s rupture or revision of dystopian tropes and genre. When tropes are read as static or absolute, they run the risk of freezing or limiting the knowledge encoded in these stories. By integrating Indigenous Knowledge, new patterns can emerge and interact, extending to the reader’s own understanding of genre, time, and epistemology. Kwaymullina’s revisioning of dystopian tropes through an embedded and celebrated Indigenous perspective culminates in the successful thematic, narrative, and structural expression of time as a non-linear concept. Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina acknowledge the division between the reductionist and linear perspective of time through a Western worldview in comparison to the non-linear perception from that of an Indigenous Australian worldview. They acknowledge that their expression of time is not to be read as representative of all Indigenous Australians’ perspective of time, but one informed by their own Country and upbringing. Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina write,in an Aboriginal worldview, time—to the extent that it exists at all—is neither linear nor absolute. There are patterns and systems of energy that create and transform, from the ageing process of the human body to the growth and decay of the broader universe. But these processes are not ‘measured’ or even framed in a strictly temporal sense, and certainly not in a linear sense. (199)This is enacted through the narrative structure of The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. The text is set across four days, yet spans years, shifting through narrative in a non-linear manner and reflecting the Indigenous understanding of time as a circular, evolving concept. These four days act as the containers for the text, as Kwaymullina distinguishes the departure from linear time for the uninitiated reader by including headings and subheadings in chapter titles, marked as “Day One”, “Day Two”, “Day Three”, and “Day Four”, before the final section, “The Escape”. Within these containers, themselves marked linearly, narrative ebbs and flows across time and space, taking Ashala away from the Detention Centre to different moments from her past, spanning years. These ‘flashbacks’ are not presented in a linear fashion; the text revisits and repeats key moments of Ashala’s life out of sequence, providing an immediate focus on these seemingly past moments. This is key in shaping the reader’s understanding of “the patterns and systems of energy that create and transform” (Kwaymullina and Kwaymullina 199)—as Ashala revisits or rediscovers memory through time, perceptions of character, motive, relationships, and key plot points are changed and transformed. Meaning is formed through this relationship of narrative and time in a manner not possible through a linear structure. Over the course of the novel, Ashala and the reader find she’s chosen to give herself false memories to protect the Tribe and complete a master plan to defeat Neville Rose. As such, as the novel begins the reader, aligned with Ashala as narrative focaliser, is positioned to read key points through a flawed perspective. Connor is presented as an enemy and betrayer of the Tribe, while Ashala denies her feelings towards him. The reader is aligned with Ashala’s perspective—she has already fallen in love with Connor, but neither she nor the reader knows it due to the displacement of knowledge through narrative structure and memory. This also speaks to identity formation in the text—Ashala is herself, and not herself until the novel reaches full circle, and she and the reader have experienced multiple points of time. As Ember explains, “it’s not about losing small pieces of information. This stuff shapes your entire understanding of reality” (Kwaymullina 167). If the reader revisits the text with this knowledge, they find further value in exploring the non-linear, circular narrative, finding subtext in characters’ interactions and decisions. The disruption in the non-linear narrative structure is twofold: to reflect the representation of time in an Indigenous epistemology, further rewriting the genre; and to create an intersubjective dialogue. As such, the narrative structure creates a space of invitation to the reader. Rather than positioning Ashala as embedded and aware of her status as a custodian of Indigenous knowledge, the text places her as ingrained in Indigenous epistemology, but unaware of it. In this way, the text effectively invites the reader in, mirroring Ashala’s journey of (re)discovery. The non-Indigenous reader enters the text alongside Ashala, with Indigenous knowledge embedded subtly throughout the text echoed in Kwaymullina’s engagement with dystopian tropes, and integrated Indigenous epistemology. By the time Ashala meets the Serpent, her Grandfather, and has her ancestry explained to her, the reader has already been immersed in Ashala’s own way of thinking, an inherently Indigenous one; for instance, throughout the text, she acknowledges the value and interconnectedness of all beings, human and non-human, animate and inanimate. The text leaves space for the reader to be active in their own construction of meaning and knowledge by never using the terms “Indigenous” or “Aboriginal”, themselves colonial inventions employed to control and label. Instead, the reader is encouraged to engage in the metatextual intersubjective dialogue introduced by Kwaymullina to acknowledge Indigenous epistemology—but by way of her approach, Kwaymullina further encourages the reader to “forget Aborigines” (Healy 219) by centring knowledge in its own right, rather than in direct opposition to Western epistemologies. That is, Kwaymullina disrupts Western perspectives framing of Indigenous knowledge as “other”, altering expectations of the norm as non-Indigenous. As Kwaymullina writes, to conceive of time in a non-linear way is at once a great gift and a great responsibility. The responsibility is that our individual actions matter powerfully, radiating out across relationships and affecting all that might be thought of in a linear sense as past, present and future. But the gift is that the passage of linear time has never moved us so far that we cannot take meaningful action to heal the wounds of colonialism. (“Respect” 126-127)In The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf, Kwaymullina realises this gift and responsibility. By framing structural, conceptual, and narrative time through an Indigenous epistemology, Kwaymullina privileges Indigenous Knowledge and effectively subverts and revises the genre through the rupture of dystopian conventions. Possibilities of hope and healing emerge in the text’s construction of time and genre as spaces of growth and change are emphasised; like Ashala, the reader finds themselves at the end and beginning of the world at once.ReferencesBasu, Balaka, Katherine R. Broad, and Carrie Hintz, eds. Contemporary Dystopian Fiction for Young Adults: Brave New Teenagers. New York: Routledge, 2013. Booker, M. Keith. Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1994. Bradford, Clare, et al. New World Orders in Children’s Literature: Utopian Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Childs, Ann M.M. “The Incompatibility of Female Friendships and Rebellion.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Eds. Sara K. Day et al. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. 187-201.Coleman, Claire G. “Apocalypses Are More than the Stuff of Fiction — First Nations Australians Survived One.” ABC News 8 Dec. 2017. 30 Sep. 2019 <https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-08/first-nations-australians-survived-an-apocalypse-says-author/9224026>.Day, Sara K., Miranda A. Green-Barteet, and Amy L. Montz, eds. Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. Green-Barteet, Miranda A., and Meghan Gilbert-Hickey. “Black and Brown Boys in Young Adult Dystopias: Racialized Docility in ‘The Hunger Games Trilogy’ and ‘The Lunar Chronicles Feather Journal.’” Red Feather Journal 8.2 (2017). 30 Sep. 2019 <https://www.redfeatherjournal.org/volume-8-issue-2.html>.Harris, Anita. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2004. Healy, Chris. Forgetting Aborigines. Sydney: U of NSW P, 2008.Hintz, Carrie, and Elaine Ostry, eds. Utopian and Dystopian Writing for Children and Young Adults. New York: Routledge, 2003.James, Lynette. “Children of Change, Not Doom: Indigenous Futurist Heroines in YA.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 57.1-2 (2016). 20 Sep. 2019 <https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2016.9>.Kennon, Patricia. “‘Belonging’ in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction: New Communities Created by Children.” Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 15.2 (2005). 28 Sep. 2019 <http://www.paperschildlit.com/pdfs/Papers_2005_v15no2_p40.pdf>.Kwaymullina, Ambelin. The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf. Newtown: Walker Books Australia, 2012.———. “Edges, Centres and Futures: Reflections on Being an Indigenous Speculative-Fiction Writer.” Kill Your Darlings 18 (2014): 22-33.———. “Respect, Relationships, Renewal: Aboriginal Perspectives on the Worlds of Tomorrow.” Westerly 64.1 (2019): 121-134. Kwaymullina, Ambelin, and Blaze Kwaymullina. “Learning to Read the Signs: Law in an Indigenous Reality.” Journal of Australian Studies 34.2 (2010). 21 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14443051003721189>.Mallan, Kerry. “Dystopian Fiction for Young People: Instructive Tales of Resilience.” Psychoanalytic Inquiry 37.1 (2017). 22 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/07351690.2017.1250586>.McDonough, Megan, and Katherine A. Wagner. “Rebellious Natures: The Role of Nature in Young Adult Dystopian Female Protagonists’ Awakenings and Agency.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Eds. Sara K. Day et al. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. 157-170.Montz, Amy L. “Rebels in Dresses: Distractions of Competitive Girlhood in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction.” Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction. Eds. Sara K. Day et al. Farnham: Taylor & Francis, 2014. 107-121.Morrison, Mary. “Decolonizing Utopia: Indigenous Knowledge and Dystopian Speculative Fiction.” Dissertation. U of California, 2017.Murphy, Graham J. “For Love of Country: Apocalyptic Survivance in Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Tribe Series.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 57.1-2 (2016). 20 Sep. 2019 <https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2016.10>.Okorafor, Nnedi. “Organic Fantasy.” African Identities 7.2 (2009). 22 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1080/14725840902808967>.Scott, Conrad. “(Indigenous) Place and Time as Formal Strategy: Healing Immanent Crisis in the Dystopias of Eden Robinson and Richard Van Camp.” Extrapolation: A Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy 57.1-2 (2016). 20 Sep. 2019 <https://online.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/pdf/10.3828/extr.2016.6>.Sypnowich, Christine. “Lessons from Dystopia: Critique, Hope and Political Education.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 52.4 (2018). 22 Sep. 2019 <https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9752.12328>.

Home is the place where one knows oneself best; it is where one belongs, a space one longs to be. Indeed, the longing for home seems to be grounded in an anthropological need for anchorage. Although in English the German loanword ‘Heimat’ is often used synonymously with ‘home’, many would have claimed up till now that it has been a word particularly ill equipped for use outside the German speaking community, owing to its specific cultural baggage. However, I would like to argue that – not least due to the political dimension of home (such as in homeland security and homeland affairs) – the yearning for a home has experienced a semantic shift, which aligns it more closely with Heimat, a term imbued with the ambivalence of home and homeland intertwined (Morley 32). I will outline the German specificities below and invite an Australian analogy. A resoundingly positive understanding of the German term ‘Heimat’ likens it to “an intoxicant, a medium of transport; it makes people feel giddy and spirits them to pleasant places. To contemplate Heimat means to imagine an uncontaminated space, a realm of innocence and immediacy.“ (Rentschler 37) While this description of Heimat may raise expectations of an all-encompassing idyll, for most German speakers “…there is hardly a more ambivalent feeling, hardly a more painful mixture of happiness and bitterness than the experience vested in the word ‘Heimat’.” (Reitz 139) The emotional charge of the idiom is of quite recent origin. Traditionally, Heimat stimulates connotations of ‘origin’, ‘birth place, of oneself and one’s ancestors’ and even of ‘original area of settlement and homeland’. This corresponds most neatly with such English terms as ‘native land’, ‘land of my birth’, ‘land of my forefathers’ or ‘native shores’. Added to the German conception of Heimat are its sensitive associations relating, on the one hand, to Romanticism and its idolisation of the fatherland, and on the other, to the Nazi blood-and-soil propaganda, which brought Heimat into disrepute for many and added to the difficulties of translating the German word. A comparison with similar terms in Romance languages makes this clear. Speakers of those tongues have an understanding of home and homeland, which is strongly associated with the father-figure: the Greek “patra”, Latin and Italian “patria” and the French “patrie”, as well as patriarch, patrimony, patriot, and patricide. The French come closest to sharing the concept to which Heimat’s Germanic root of “heima” refers. For the Teutons “heima” denoted the traditional space and place of a clan, society or individual. However, centuries of migration, often following expulsion, have imbued Heimat with ambivalent notions; feelings of belonging and feelings of loss find expression in the term. Despite its semantic opaqueness, Heimat expresses a “longing for a wholeness and unity” (Strzelczyk 109) which for many seems lost, especially following experiences of alienation, exile, diaspora or ‘simply’ migration. Yet, it is in those circumstances, when Heimat becomes a thing of the past, that it seems to manifest itself most clearly. In the German context, the need for Heimat arose particularly after World War Two, when experiences of loss and scenes of devastation, as well as displacement and expulsion found compensation of sorts in the popular media. Going to the cinema was the top pastime in Germany in the 1950s, and escapist Heimat films, which showed idyllic country scenery, instead of rubble-strewn cityscapes, were the most well-liked of all. The industry pumped out kitsch films in quick succession to service this demand and created sugar-coated, colour-rich Heimat experiences on celluloid that captured the audience’s imagination. Most recently, the genre experienced something of a renaissance in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent accession of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, also referred to as East Germany) to the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG or West Germany) in 1990. Described as one of the most seminal moments in modern history, the events led to large-scale change; in world politics, strategic alliances, but were most closely felt at the personal and societal level, reshaping community and belonging. Feelings of disbelief and euphoria occupied the hearts and minds of people all around the world in the days following the night of the 9 November 1989. However, the fall of the Wall created within weeks what the Soviet Union had been unable to manage in the previous 40 years; the sense of a distinctly Eastern identity (cf. Heneghan 148). Most of the initial positive perceptions slowly gave way to a hangover when the consequences of the drastic societal changes became apparent in their effects on populace. Feelings of disenchantment and disillusionment followed the jubilation and dominated the second phase of socio-cultural unification, when individuals were faced with economic and emotional hardship or were forced to relocate, as companies folded, politically tainted degrees and professions were abolished and entire industry sectors disappeared. This reassessment of almost every aspect of people’s lifestyles led many to feel that their familiar world had dissipated and their Heimat had been lost, resulting in a rhetoric of “us” versus “them”. This conceptual divide persisted and was cemented by the perceived difficulties in integration that had emerged, manifesting a consciousness of difference that expressed itself metaphorically in the references to the ‘Wall in the mind’. Partly as a reaction to these feelings and partly also as a concession to the new citizens from the East, Western backed and produced unification films utilised the soothing cosmos of the Heimat genre – so well rehearsed in the 1950s – as a framework for tales about unification. Peter Timm’s Go, Trabi, Go (1991) and Wolfgang Büld’s sequel Go, Trabi, Go 2. Das war der Wilde Osten [That Was the Wild East, 1992] are two such films which revive “Heimat as a central cultural construct through which aspects of life in the new Germany could be sketched and grasped.” (Naughton 125) The films’ references to Eastern and Western identity served as a powerful guarantor of feelings of belonging, re-assuring audiences on both sides of the mental divide of their idiosyncrasies, while also showing a way to overcome separation. These Heimat films thus united in spirit, emotion and consumer behaviour that which had otherwise not yet “grown together” (cf. Brandt). The renaissance of the Heimat genre in the 1990s gained further momentum in the media with new Heimat film releases as well as TV screenings of 1950s classics. Indeed Heimat films of old and new were generally well received, as they responded to a fragile psychological predisposition at a time of change and general uncertainty. Similar feelings were shared by many in the post-war society of the 1950s and the post-Wall Europe of the 1990s. After the Second World War and following the restructure after Nazism it was necessary to integrate large expellee groups into the young nation of the FRG. In the 1990s the integration of similarly displaced people was required, though this time they were having to cope less with territorial loss than with ideological implosions. Then and now, Heimat films sought to aid integration and “transcend those differences” (Naughton 125) – whilst not disputing their existence – particularly in view of the fact that Germany had 16 million new citizens, who clearly had a different cultural background, many of whom were struggling with perceptions of otherness as popularly expressed in the stereotypical ethnographies of “Easterners” and “Westerners”. The rediscovery of the concept of Heimat in the years following unification therefore not only mirrored the status quo but further to that allowed “for the delineation of a common heritage, shared priorities, and values with which Germans in the old and new states could identify.” (Naughton 125) Closely copying the optimism of the 1950s which promised audiences prosperity and pride, as well as a sense of belonging and homecoming into a larger community, the films produced in the early 1990s anticipated prosperity for a mobile and flexible people. Like their 1950s counterparts, “unification films ‘made in West Germany’ imagined a German Heimat as a place of social cohesion, opportunity, and prosperity” (Naughton 126). Following the unification comedies of the early 1990s, which were set in the period following the fall of the Wall, another wave of German film production shifted the focus onto the past, sacrificing the future dimension of the unification films. Leander Haußmann’s Sonnenallee (1999) is set in the 1970s and subscribes to a re-invention of one’s childhood, while Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye Lenin (2003) in which the GDR is preserved on 79 square metres in a private parallel world, advocates a revival of aspects of the socialist past. Referred to as “Ostalgia”; a nostalgia for the old East, “a ‘GDR revival’ or the ‘renaissance of a GDR Heimatgefühl’” (Berdahl 197), the films achieved popular success. Ostalgia films utilised the formula of ‘walking down memory lane’ in varying degrees; thematising pleasing aspects of an imagined collective past and tempting audiences to revel in a sense of unity and homogeneous identity (cf. Walsh 6). Ostalgia was soon transformed from emotional and imaginary reflection into an entire industry, manifesting itself in the “recuperation, (re)production, marketing, and merchandising of GDR products as well as the ‘museumification’ of GDR everyday life” (Berdahl 192). This trend found further expression in a culture of exhibitions, books, films and cabaret acts, in fashion and theme parties, as well as in Trabi-rallies which celebrated or sent up the German Democratic Republic in response to the perceived public humiliation at the hands of West German media outlets, historians and economists. The dismissal of anything associated with the communist East in mainstream Germany and the realisation that their consumer products – like their national history – were disappearing in the face of the ‘Helmut Kohl-onisation’ sparked this retro-Heimat cult. Indeed, the reaction to the disappearance of GDR culture and the ensuing nostalgia bear all the hallmarks of Heimat appreciation, a sense of bereavement that only manifests itself once the Heimat has been lost. Ironically, however, the revival of the past led to the emergence of a “new” GDR (Rutschky 851), an “imaginary country put together from the remnants of a country in ruins and from the hopes and anxieties of a new world” (Hell et al. 86), a fictional construct rather than a historical reality. In contrast to the fundamental social and psychological changes affecting former GDR citizens from the end of 1989, their Western counterparts were initially able to look on without a sense of deep personal involvement. Their perspective has been likened to that of an impartial observer following the events of a historical play (cf. Gaschke 22). Many saw German unification as an enlargement of the West; as soon as they had exported their currency, democracy, capitalism and freedom to the East, “blossoming landscapes” were sure to follow (Kohl). At first political events did not seem to cause a major disruption to the lives of most people in the old FRG, except perhaps the need to pay higher tax. This understanding proved a major underestimation of the transformation process that had gripped all of Germany, not just the Eastern part. Nevertheless, few predicted the impact that far-reaching changes would have on the West; immigration and new minorities alter the status quo of any society, and with Germany’s increase in size and population, its citizens in both East and West had to adapt and adjust to a new image and to new expectations placed on them from within and without. As a result a certain unease began to be felt by many an otherwise self-assured individual. Slower and less obvious than the transition phase experienced by most East Germans, the changes in West German society and consciousness were nevertheless similar in their psychological effects; resulting in a subtle feeling of displacement. Indeed, it was soon noted that “the end of German division has given rise to a sense of crisis in the West, particularly within the sphere of West German culture, engendering a Western nostalgica for the old FRG” (Cooke 35), also referred to as Westalgia. Not too dissimilar to the historical rehabilitation of the East played out in Ostalgic fashion, films appeared which revisit moments worthy of celebration in West German history, such as the 1954 Soccer World Championship status which is at the centre of the narrative in Sönke Wortmann’s Das Wunder von Bern [Miracle of Bern, 2003]. Hommages to the 1968 generation (Hans Weingartner’s Die fetten Jahre sind vorbei [The Educators, 2004]) and requiems for West Berlin’s subculture (Leander Haußmann’s Herr Lehmann [Mr Lehmann, 2003]) were similar manifestations of this development. Ostalgic and Westalgic practices coexisted for several years after the turn of the millennium, and are a tribute to the highly complex interrelationship that exists between personal histories and public memories. Both narratives reveal “the politics, ambiguities, and paradoxes of memory, nostalgia, and resistance” (Berdahl 207). In their nostalgic contemplation of the good old days, Ostalgic and Westalgic films alike express a longing to return to familiar and trusted values. Both post-hoc constructions of a heimatesque cosmos demonstrate a very real reinvention of Heimat. Their deliberate reconstruction and reinterpretation of history, as well as the references to and glorification of personal memory and identity fulfil the task of imbuing history – in particular personal history – with dignity. As such these Heimat films work in a similar fashion to myths in the way they explain the world. The heimatesque element of Ostalgic and Westalgic films which allows for the potential to overcome crises reveals a great deal about the workings of myths in general. Irrespective of their content, whether they are cosmogonic (about the beginning of time), eschatological (about the end of time) or etiologic myths (about the origins of peoples and societal order), all serve as a means to cope with change. According to Hans Blumenberg, myth making may be seen as an attempt to counter the absolutism of reality (cf. Blumenberg 9), by providing a response to its seemingly overriding arbitrariness. Myths become a means of endowing life with meaning through art and thus aid positive self-assurance and the constructive usage of past experiences in the present and the future. Judging from the popular success of both Ostalgic and Westalgic films in unified Germany, one hopes that communication is taking place across the perceived ethnic divide of Eastern and Western identities. At the very least, people of quite different backgrounds have access to the constructions and fictions relating to one another pasts. By allowing each other insight into the most intimate recesses of their respective psychological make-up, understanding can be fostered. Through the re-activation of one’s own memory and the acknowledgment of differences these diverging narratives may constitute the foundation of a common Heimat. It is thus possible for Westalgic and Ostalgic films to fulfil individual and societal functions which can act as a core of cohesion and an aid for mutual understanding. At the same time these films revive the past, not as a liveable but rather as a readable alternative to the present. As such, the utilisation of myths should not be rejected as ideological misuse, as suggested by Barthes (7), nor should it allow for the cementing of pseudo-ethnic differences dating back to mythological times; instead myths can form the basis for a common narrative and a self-confident affirmation of history in order to prepare for a future in harmony. Just like myths in general, Heimat tales do not attempt to revise history, or to present the real facts. By foregrounding the evidence of their wilful construction and fictitious invention, it is possible to arrive at a spiritual, psychological and symbolic truth. Nevertheless, it is a truth that is essential for a positive experience of Heimat and an optimistic existence. What can the German situation reveal in an Australian or a wider context? Explorations of Heimat aid the socio-historical investigation of any society, as repositories of memory and history, escape and confrontation inscribed in Heimat can be read as signifiers of continuity and disruption, reorientation and return, and as such, ever-changing notions of Heimat mirror values and social change. Currently, a transition in meaning is underway which alters the concept of ‘home’ as an idyllic sphere of belonging and attachment to that of a threatened space; a space under siege from a range of perils in the areas of safety and security, whether due to natural disasters, terrorism or conventional warfare. The geographical understanding of home is increasingly taking second place to an emotional imaginary that is fed by an “exclusionary and contested distinction between the ‘domestic’ and the ‘foreign’ (Blunt and Dowling 168). As such home becomes ever more closely aligned with the semantics of Heimat, i.e. with an emotional experience, which is progressively less grounded in feelings of security and comfort, yet even more so in those of ambivalence and, in particular, insecurity and hysteria. This paranoia informs as much as it is informed by government policies and interventions and emerges from concerns for national security. In this context, home and homeland have become overused entities in discussions relating to the safeguarding of Australia, such as with the establishment of a homeland security unit in 2003 and annual conferences such as “The Homeland Security Summit” deemed necessary since 9/11, even in the Antipodes. However, these global connotations of home and Heimat overshadow the necessity of a reclaimation of the home/land debate at the national and local levels. In addressing the dispossession of indigenous peoples and the removal and dislocation of Aboriginal children from their homes and families, the political nature of a home-grown Heimat debate cannot be ignored. “Bringing them Home”, an oral history project initiated by the National Library of Australia in Canberra, is one of many attempts at listening to and preserving the memories of Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders who, as children, were forcibly taken away from their families and homelands. To ensure healing and rapprochement any reconciliation process necessitates coming to terms with one’s own past as much as respecting the polyphonic nature of historical discourse. By encouraging the inclusion of diverse homeland and dreamtime narratives and juxtaposing these with the perceptions and constructions of home of the subsequent immigrant generations of Australians, a rich text, full of contradictions, may help generate a shared, if ambivalent, sense of a common Heimat in Australia; one that is fed not by homeland insecurity but one resting in a heimatesque knowledge of self. References Barthes, Roland. Mythen des Alltags. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1964 Berdahl, Daphne. “‘(N)ostalgie’ for the Present: Memory, Longing, and East German Things.” Ethnos 64.2 (1999): 192-207. Blumenberg, Hans. Arbeit am Mythos. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Brandt, Willy. “Jetzt kann zusammenwachsen, was zusammengehört [Now that which belongs together, can now grow together].” From his speech on 10 Nov. 1989 in front of the Rathaus Schöneberg, transcript available from http://www.bwbs.de/Brandt/9.html>. Cooke, Paul. “Whatever Happened to Veronika Voss? Rehabilitating the ‘68ers’ and the Problem of Westalgie in Oskar Roehler’s Die Unberührbare (2000).” German Studies Review 27.1 (2004): 33-44. Gaschke, Susanne. “Neues Deutschland. Sind wir eine Wirtschaftsgesellschaft?” Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte B1-2 (2000): 22-27. Hell, Julia, and Johannes von Moltke. “Unification Effects: Imaginary Landscapes of the Berlin Republic.” The Germanic Review 80.1 (Winter 2005): 74-95. Heneghan, Tom. Unchained Eagle: Germany after the Wall. London: Reuters, 2000. Kohl, Helmut. “Debatte im Bundestag um den Staatsvertrag.” 21 June 1990. Morley, David. Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity. London: Routledge, 2000. Naughton, Leonie. That Was the Wild East. Film Culture, Unification, and the “New” Germany. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. Rentschler, Eric. “There’s No Place Like Home: Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (1934).” New German Critique 60 (Special Issue on German Film History, Autumn 1993): 33-56. Reitz, Edgar. “The Camera Is Not a Clock (1979).” In Eric Rentschler, ed. West German Filmmakers on Film: Visions and Voices. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1988. 137-141. Rutschky, Michael. “Wie erst jetzt die DDR entsteht.” Merkur 49.9-10 (Sep./Oct. 1995): 851-64. Strzelczyk, Florentine. “Far Away, So Close: Carl Froelich’s Heimat.” In Robert C. Reimer, ed., Cultural History through the National Socialist Lens. Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000. 109-132. Walsh, Michael. “National Cinema, National Imaginary.” Film History 8 (1996): 5-17. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Ludewig, Alexandra. "Home Meets Heimat." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/12-ludewig.php>. APA Style Ludewig, A. (Aug. 2007) "Home Meets Heimat," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/12-ludewig.php>.

In the last months of his life, 86-year-old Albert Facey became a best-selling author and revered cultural figure following the publication of his autobiography, A Fortunate Life. Released on Anzac Day 1981, it was praised for its “plain, unembellished, utterly sincere and un-self-pitying account of the privations of childhood and youth” (Semmler) and “extremely powerful description of Gallipoli” (Dutton 16). Within weeks, critic Nancy Keesing declared it an “Enduring Classic.” Within six months, it was announced as the winner of two prestigious non-fiction awards, with judges acknowledging Facey’s “extraordinary memory” and “ability to describe scenes and characters with great precision” (“NBC” 4). A Fortunate Life also transformed the fortunes of its publisher. Founded in 1976 as an independent, not-for-profit publishing house, Fremantle Arts Centre Press (FACP) might have been expected, given the Australian average, to survive for just a few years. Former managing editor Ray Coffey attributes the Press’s ongoing viability, in no small measure, to Facey’s success (King 29). Along with Wendy Jenkins, Coffey edited Facey’s manuscript through to publication; only five months after its release, with demand outstripping the capabilities, FACP licensed Penguin to take over the book’s production and distribution. Adaptations soon followed. In 1984, Kerry Packer’s PBL launched a prospectus for a mini-series, which raised a record $6.3 million (PBL 7–8). Aired in 1986 with a high-rating documentary called The Facey Phenomenon, the series became the most watched television event of the year (Lucas). Syndication of chapters to national and regional newspapers, stage and radio productions, audio- and e-books, abridged editions for young readers, and inclusion on secondary school curricula extended the range and influence of Facey’s life writing. Recently, an option was taken out for a new television series (Fraser).A hundred reprints and two million readers on from initial publication, A Fortunate Life continues to rate among the most appreciated Australian books of all time. Commenting on a reader survey in 2012, writer and critic Marieke Hardy enthused, “I really loved it [. . .] I felt like I was seeing a part of my country and my country’s history through a very human voice . . .” (First Tuesday Book Club). Registering a transformed reading, Hardy’s reference to Australian “history” is unproblematically juxtaposed with amused delight in an autobiography that invents and embellishes: not believing “half” of what Facey wrote, she insists he was foremost a yarn spinner. While the work’s status as a witness account has become less authoritative over time, it seems appreciation of the author’s imagination and literary skill has increased (Williamson). A Fortunate Life has been read more commonly as an uncomplicated, first-hand account, such that editor Wendy Jenkins felt it necessary to refute as an “utter mirage” that memoir is “transferred to the page by an act of perfect dictation.” Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson argue of life narratives that some “autobiographical claims [. . .] can be verified or discounted by recourse to documentation outside the text. But autobiographical truth is a different matter” (16). With increased access to archives, especially digitised personnel records, historians have asserted that key elements of Facey’s autobiography are incorrect or “fabricated” (Roberts), including his enlistment in 1914 and participation in the Gallipoli Landing on 25 April 1915. We have researched various sources relevant to Facey’s early years and war service, including hard-copy medical and repatriation records released in 2012, and find A Fortunate Life in a range of ways deviates from “documentation outside of the text,” revealing intriguing, layered storytelling. We agree with Smith and Watson that “autobiographical acts” are “anything but simple or transparent” (63). As “symbolic interactions in the world,” they are “culturally and historically specific” and “engaged in an argument about identity” (63). Inevitably, they are also “fractured by the play of meaning” (63). Our approach, therefore, includes textual analysis of Facey’s drafts alongside the published narrative and his medical records. We do not privilege institutional records as impartial but rather interpret them in terms of their hierarchies and organisation of knowledge. This leads us to speculate on alternative readings of A Fortunate Life as an illness narrative that variously resists and subscribes to dominant cultural plots, tropes, and attitudes. Facey set about writing in earnest in the 1970s and generated (at least) three handwritten drafts, along with a typescript based on the third draft. FACP produced its own working copy from the typescript. Our comparison of the drafts offers insights into the production of Facey’s final text and the otherwise “hidden” roles of editors as transformers and enablers (Munro 1). The notion that a working man with basic literacy could produce a highly readable book in part explains Facey’s enduring appeal. His grandson and literary executor, John Rose, observed in early interviews that Facey was a “natural storyteller” who had related details of his life at every opportunity over a period of more than six decades (McLeod). Jenkins points out that Facey belonged to a vivid oral culture within which he “told and retold stories to himself and others,” so that they eventually “rubbed down into the lines and shapes that would so memorably underpin the extended memoir that became A Fortunate Life.” A mystique was thereby established that “time” was Albert Facey’s “first editor” (Jenkins). The publisher expressly aimed to retain Facey’s voice, content, and meaning, though editing included much correcting of grammar and punctuation, eradication of internal inconsistencies and anomalies, and structural reorganisation into six sections and 68 chapters. We find across Facey’s drafts a broadly similar chronology detailing childhood abandonment, life-threatening incidents, youthful resourcefulness, physical prowess, and participation in the Gallipoli Landing. However, there are also shifts and changed details, including varying descriptions of childhood abuse at a place called Cave Rock; the introduction of (incompatible accounts of) interstate boxing tours in drafts two and three which replace shearing activities in Draft One; divergent tales of Facey as a world-standard athlete, league footballer, expert marksman, and powerful swimmer; and changing stories of enlistment and war service (see Murphy and Nile, “Wounded”; “Naked”).Jenkins edited those sections concerned with childhood and youth, while Coffey attended to Facey’s war and post-war life. Drawing on C.E.W. Bean’s official war history, Coffey introduced specificity to the draft’s otherwise vague descriptions of battle and amended errors, such as Facey’s claim to have witnessed Lord Kitchener on the beach at Gallipoli. Importantly, Coffey suggested the now famous title, “A Fortunate Life,” and encouraged the author to alter the ending. When asked to suggest a title, Facey offered “Cave Rock” (Interview)—the site of his violent abuse and humiliation as a boy. Draft One concluded with Facey’s repatriation from the war and marriage in 1916 (106); Draft Two with a brief account of continuing post-war illness and ultimate defeat: “My war injuries caught up with me again” (107). The submitted typescript concludes: “I have often thought that going to War has caused my life to be wasted” (Typescript 206). This ending differs dramatically from the redemptive vision of the published narrative: “I have lived a very good life, it has been very rich and full. I have been very fortunate and I am thrilled by it when I look back” (412).In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that literary markets exist for stories of “narrative wreckage” (196) that are redeemed by reconciliation, resistance, recovery, or rehabilitation, which is precisely the shape of Facey’s published life story and a source of its popularity. Musing on his post-war experiences in A Fortunate Life, Facey focuses on his ability to transform the material world around him: “I liked the challenge of building up a place from nothing and making a success where another fellow had failed” (409). If Facey’s challenge was building up something from nothing, something he could set to work on and improve, his life-writing might reasonably be regarded as a part of this broader project and desire for transformation, so that editorial interventions helped him realise this purpose. Facey’s narrative was produced within a specific zeitgeist, which historian Joy Damousi notes was signalled by publication in 1974 of Bill Gammage’s influential, multiply-reprinted study of front-line soldiers, The Broken Years, which drew on the letters and diaries of a thousand Great War veterans, and also the release in 1981 of Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli, for which Gammage was the historical advisor. The story of Australia’s war now conceptualised fallen soldiers as “innocent victims” (Damousi 101), while survivors were left to “compose” memories consistent with their sacrifice (Thomson 237–54). Viewing Facey’s drafts reminds us that life narratives are works of imagination, that the past is not fixed and memory is created in the present. Facey’s autobiographical efforts and those of his publisher to improve the work’s intelligibility and relevance together constitute an attempt to “objectify the self—to present it as a knowable object—through a narrative that re-structures [. . .] the self as history and conclusions” (Foster 10). Yet, such histories almost invariably leave “a crucial gap” or “censored chapter.” Dennis Foster argues that conceiving of narration as confession, rather than expression, “allows us to see the pathos of the simultaneous pursuit and evasion of meaning” (10); we believe a significant lacuna in Facey’s life writing is intimated by its various transformations.In a defining episode, A Fortunate Life proposes that Facey was taken from Gallipoli on 19 August 1915 due to wounding that day from a shell blast that caused sandbags to fall on him, crush his leg, and hurt him “badly inside,” and a bullet to the shoulder (348). The typescript, however, includes an additional but narratively irreconcilable date of 28 June for the same wounding. The later date, 19 August, was settled on for publication despite the author’s compelling claim for the earlier one: “I had been blown up by a shell and some 7 or 8 sandbags had fallen on top of me, the day was the 28th of June 1915, how I remembered this date, it was the day my brother Roy had been killed by a shell burst.” He adds: “I was very ill for about six weeks after the incident but never reported it to our Battalion doctor because I was afraid he would send me away” (Typescript 205). This account accords with Facey’s first draft and his medical records but is inconsistent with other parts of the typescript that depict an uninjured Facey taking a leading role in fierce fighting throughout July and August. It appears, furthermore, that Facey was not badly wounded at any time. His war service record indicates that he was removed from Gallipoli due to “heart troubles” (Repatriation), which he also claims in his first draft. Facey’s editors did not have ready access to military files in Canberra, while medical files were not released until 2012. There existed, therefore, virtually no opportunity to corroborate the author’s version of events, while the official war history and the records of the State Library of Western Australia, which were consulted, contain no reference to Facey or his war service (Interview). As a consequence, the editors were almost entirely dependent on narrative logic and clarifications by an author whose eyesight and memory had deteriorated to such an extent he was unable to read his amended text. A Fortunate Life depicts men with “nerve sickness” who were not permitted to “stay at the Front because they would be upsetting to the others, especially those who were inclined that way themselves” (350). By cross referencing the draft manuscripts against medical records, we can now perceive that Facey was regarded as one of those nerve cases. According to Facey’s published account, his wounds “baffled” doctors in Egypt and Fremantle (353). His medical records reveal that in September 1915, while hospitalised in Egypt, his “palpitations” were diagnosed as “Tachycardia” triggered by war-induced neuroses that began on 28 June. This suggests that Facey endured seven weeks in the field in this condition, with the implication being that his debility worsened, resulting in his hospitalisation. A diagnosis of “debility,” “nerves,” and “strain” placed Facey in a medical category of “Special Invalids” (Butler 541). Major A.W. Campbell noted in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1916 that the war was creating “many cases of little understood nervous and mental affections, not only where a definite wound has been received, but in many cases where nothing of the sort appears” (323). Enlisted doctors were either physicians or surgeons and sometimes both. None had any experience of trauma on the scale of the First World War. In 1915, Campbell was one of only two Australian doctors with any pre-war experience of “mental diseases” (Lindstrom 30). On staff at the Australian Base Hospital at Heliopolis throughout the Gallipoli campaign, he claimed that at times nerve cases “almost monopolised” the wards under his charge (319). Bearing out Facey’s description, Campbell also reported that affected men “received no sympathy” and, as “carriers of psychic contagion,” were treated as a “source of danger” to themselves and others (323). Credentialed by royal colleges in London and coming under British command, Australian medical teams followed the practice of classifying men presenting “nervous or mental symptoms” as “battle casualties” only if they had also been wounded by “enemy action” (Loughran 106). By contrast, functional disability, with no accompanying physical wounds, was treated as unmanly and a “hysterical” reaction to the pressures of war. Mental debility was something to be feared in the trenches and diagnosis almost invariably invoked charges of predisposition or malingering (Tyquin 148–49). This shifted responsibility (and blame) from the war to the individual. Even as late as the 1950s, medical notes referred to Facey’s condition as being “constitutional” (Repatriation).Facey’s narrative demonstrates awareness of how harshly sufferers were treated. We believe that he defended himself against this with stories of physical injury that his doctors never fully accepted and that he may have experienced conversion disorder, where irreconcilable experience finds somatic expression. His medical diagnosis in 1915 and later life writing establish a causal link with the explosion and his partial burial on 28 June, consistent with opinion at the time that linked concussive blasts with destabilisation of the nervous system (Eager 422). Facey was also badly shaken by exposure to the violence and abjection of war, including hand-to-hand combat and retrieving for burial shattered and often decomposed bodies, and, in particular, by the death of his brother Roy, whose body was blown to pieces on 28 June. (A second brother, Joseph, was killed by multiple bayonet wounds while Facey was convalescing in Egypt.) Such experiences cast a different light on Facey’s observation of men suffering nerves on board the hospital ship: “I have seen men doze off into a light sleep and suddenly jump up shouting, ‘Here they come! Quick! Thousands of them. We’re doomed!’” (350). Facey had escaped the danger of death by explosion or bayonet but at a cost, and the war haunted him for the rest of his days. On disembarkation at Fremantle on 20 November 1915, he was admitted to hospital where he remained on and off for several months. Forty-one other sick and wounded disembarked with him (HMAT). Around one third, experiencing nerve-related illness, had been sent home for rest; while none returned to the war, some of the physically wounded did (War Service Records). During this time, Facey continued to present with “frequent attacks of palpitation and giddiness,” was often “short winded,” and had “heart trouble” (Repatriation). He was discharged from the army in June 1916 but, his drafts suggest, his war never really ended. He began a new life as a wounded Anzac. His dependent and often fractious relationship with the Repatriation Department ended only with his death 66 years later. Historian Marina Larsson persuasively argues that repatriated sick and wounded servicemen from the First World War represented a displaced presence at home. Many led liminal lives of “disenfranchised grief” (80). Stephen Garton observes a distinctive Australian use of repatriation to describe “all policies involved in returning, discharging, pensioning, assisting and training returned men and women, and continuing to assist them throughout their lives” (74). Its primary definition invokes coming home but to repatriate also implies banishment from a place that is not home, so that Facey was in this sense expelled from Gallipoli and, by extension, excluded from the myth of Anzac. Unlike his two brothers, he would not join history as one of the glorious dead; his name would appear on no roll of honour. Return home is not equivalent to restoration of his prior state and identity, for baggage from the other place perpetually weighs. Furthermore, failure to regain health and independence strains hospitality and gratitude for the soldier’s service to King and country. This might be exacerbated where there is no evident or visible injury, creating suspicion of resistance, cowardice, or malingering. Over 26 assessments between 1916 and 1958, when Facey was granted a full war pension, the Repatriation Department observed him as a “neuropathic personality” exhibiting “paroxysmal tachycardia” and “neurocirculatory asthenia.” In 1954, doctors wrote, “We consider the condition is a real handicap and hindrance to his getting employment.” They noted that after “attacks,” Facey had a “busted depressed feeling,” but continued to find “no underlying myocardial disease” (Repatriation) and no validity in Facey’s claims that he had been seriously physically wounded in the war (though A Fortunate Life suggests a happier outcome, where an independent medical panel finally locates the cause of his ongoing illness—rupture of his spleen in the war—which results in an increased war pension). Facey’s condition was, at times, a source of frustration for the doctors and, we suspect, disappointment and shame to him, though this appeared to reduce on both sides when the Repatriation Department began easing proof of disability from the 1950s (Thomson 287), and the Department of Veteran’s Affairs was created in 1976. This had the effect of shifting public and media scrutiny back onto a system that had until then deprived some “innocent victims of the compensation that was their due” (Garton 249). Such changes anticipated the introduction of Post-Traumatic Shock Disorder (PTSD) to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 1980. Revisions to the DSM established a “genealogy of trauma” and “panic disorders” (100, 33), so that diagnoses such as “neuropathic personality” (Echterling, Field, and Stewart 192) and “soldier’s heart,” that is, disorders considered “neurotic,” were “retrospectively reinterpreted” as a form of PTSD. However, Alberti points out that, despite such developments, war-related trauma continues to be contested (80). We propose that Albert Facey spent his adult life troubled by a sense of regret and failure because of his removal from Gallipoli and that he attempted to compensate through storytelling, which included his being an original Anzac and seriously wounded in action. By writing, Facey could shore up his rectitude, work ethic, and sense of loyalty to other servicemen, which became necessary, we believe, because repatriation doctors (and probably others) had doubted him. In 1927 and again in 1933, an examining doctor concluded: “The existence of a disability depends entirely on his own unsupported statements” (Repatriation). We argue that Facey’s Gallipoli experiences transformed his life. By his own account, he enlisted for war as a physically robust and supremely athletic young man and returned nine months later to life-long anxiety and ill-health. Publication transformed him into a national sage, earning him, in his final months, the credibility, empathy, and affirmation he had long sought. Exploring different accounts of Facey, in the shape of his drafts and institutional records, gives rise to new interpretations. In this context, we believe it is time for a new edition of A Fortunate Life that recognises it as a complex testimonial narrative and theorises Facey’s deployment of national legends and motifs in relation to his “wounded storytelling” as well as to shifting cultural and medical conceptualisations and treatments of shame and trauma. ReferencesAlberti, Fay Bound. Matters of the Heart: History, Medicine, and Emotions. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2010. Butler, A.G. Official History of the Australian Medical Services 1814-1918: Vol I Gallipoli, Palestine and New Guinea. 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