Zeros and Os:Silence, Absence and Erasure in an Intercultural O-thello

The performative function of sound and music has received little attention in performance theory and criticism and certainly much less so in studies of intercultural theatre. Such an absence is noteworthy particularly since interculturalism is an appropriative Western theatrical form that absorbs Eastern sources to re-create the targeted Western mise en scene. Consequently, a careful consideration of the employment of sound and music are imperative for sound and music form the vertebrae of Asian traditional performance practices. In acoustemological and ethnomusicological studies, sound and music demarcate cultural boundaries and locate cultures by an auditory (dis)recognition. In the light of this need for a more considered understanding of the performative function of sound and music in intercultural performance, this paper seeks to examine the soundscapes of an intercultural production of Shakespeare’s Othello – Desdemona. Directed by Singaporean Ong Keng Sen, Desdemona was a re-scripting of Shakespeare’s text and a self-conscious performance an identity politics. Staged with a multi-ethnic, multi-national cast, Desdemona employed various Asian performance traditions such as Sanskrit Kutiyattam, Myanmarese puppetry, and Korean p’ansori to create the intercultural spectacle. The spectacle was not only a visual aesthetic but an aural one as well. By examining the soundscapes of fractured silences and eruptive cultural sounds the paper hopes to establish the ways in which Desdemona performs absences and erasures of ‘Asia’ in a simultaneous act of performing an Asian Shakespeare.

Bit erasure analysis of binary adders in quantum-dot cellular automata

As a post-CMOS technology, the incipient Quantum-dot Cellular Automata technology has various advantages. A key aspect which makes it highly desirable is low power dissipation. One method that is used to analyse power dissipation in QCA circuits is bit erasure analysis. This method has been applied to analyse previously proposed QCA binary adders. However, a number of improved QCA adders have been proposed more recently that have only been evaluated in terms of area and speed. As the three key performance metrics for QCA circuits are speed, area and power, in this paper, a bit erasure analysis of these adders will be presented to determine their power dissipation. The adders to be analysed are the Carry Flow Adder (CFA), Brent-Kung Adder (B-K), Ladner-Fischer Adder (L-F) and a more recently developed area-delay efficient adder. This research will allow for a more comprehensive comparison between the different QCA adder proposals. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first time power dissipation analysis has been carried out on these adders.

The Advent of Modern Irish Drama and the Abjection of Peasant Popular Culture: Folklore, Fairs and Faction Fighting

This paper is part of a larger project in which the author is interested in recovering popular performative traditions and practices that have been occluded by the modernist project of the Irish Revival. This erasure has been compounded by subsequent historiographical paradigms that have reinforced the revivalist narrative of theatre history and excluded indigenous forms, traditions and practices (mumming, rhymers, strawboys) along with the wider performative culture of patterns, wakes, fairs, faction fights etc. This essay subjects to scrutiny what the author sees as a disjuncture between the riotous reality of peasant popular culture and its representation in Revivalist dramas to argue that Irish Theatre Studies needs to develop alternative historiographies of performance and to methodologically engage with theoretical models extant in Performance Studies.

History, an Exit Strategy: The Retrofuture Fabulations of kara lynch

A cartographer constructs a map of an individual creative history, that of the American artist kara lynch, as it emerges in connection to a collective history of African American cultural expression. Positioning history as complex, dynamic systems of interwoven memory networks, the map follows lynch’s traversals through various “zones of cultural haunting”: places where collective memories made invisible through systematic processes of cultural erasure may be recovered and revived. Through these traversals, which are inspired by lynch’s “forever project” Invisible, the map covers such terrains as haunted narratives, mechanisms of abstraction and coding within African American media production, water as an informational technology, the distribution of memory in blood, the dialectics of materiality and immateriality that frame considerations of black subjectivity, and the possibility that place of music might not be the site of sound but instead the social production of memory.

How Does Justice Sound? Enunciative Modalities, Law’s Logos and Woman’s Voice

In the throes of her mimetic exposure of the lie of phallocratic discursive unity in 'Speculum of the Other Woman', Irigaray paused on the impossibility of woman’s voice and remarked that ‘it [was] still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables.’ Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don’t understand. After all, she said, ‘they never have understood.’ (Irigaray 1985, 143).

That the law has never understood a uniquely feminine narrative is hardly controversial, but that this erasure continues to have real and substantive consequences for justice is a reality that feminists have been compelled to remain vigilant in exposing. How does the authority of the word compound law’s exclusionary matrix? How does law remain impervious to woman’s voice and how might it hear woman’s voice? Is there capacity for a dialogic engagement between woman, parler femme, and law?

This paper will explore these questions with particular reference to the experience of women testifying to trauma during the rape trial. It will argue that a logically linked historical genealogy can be traced through which law has come to posit itself as an originary discourse by which thinking is very much conflated with being, or in other terms, law is conflated with justice. This has consequences both for women’s capacity to speak or represent the harm of rape to law, but also for law’s ability to ‘hear’ woman’s voice and objectively adjudicate in cases of rape. It will suggest that justice requires law acknowledge the presence of two distinct and different subjects and that this must be done not only at the symbolic level but also at the level of the parole, syntax and discourse.

Nonequilibrium Quantum Landauer Principle

Using the operational framework of completely positive, trace preserving operations and thermodynamic fluctuation relations, we derive a lower bound for the heat exchange in a Landauer erasure process on a quantum system. Our bound comes from a nonphenomenological derivation of the Landauer principle which holds for generic nonequilibrium dynamics. Furthermore, the bound depends on the nonunitality of dynamics, giving it a physical significance that differs from other derivations. We apply our framework to the model of a spin-1/2 system coupled to an interacting spin chain at finite temperature.

Peace by Piece: (Re) imagining Division in Belfast’s Contested Spaces through Memory

This paper investigates processes and actions of diversifying memories of division in Northern Ireland’s political conflict known as the Troubles. Societal division is manifested in its built fabric and territories that have been adopted by predominant discourses of a fragmented society in Belfast; the unionist east and the nationalist west. The aim of the paper is to explore current approaches in planning contested spaces that have changed over time, leading to success in many cases. The argument is that divided cities, like Belfast, feature spatial images and memories of division that range from physical, clear-cut segregation to manifested actions of violence and have become influential representations in the community’s associative memory. While promoting notions of ‘re-imaging’ by current councils demonstrates a total erasure of the Troubles through cleansing its local collective memory, there yet remains an attempt to communicate a different tale of the city’s socio-economic past, to elaborate its supremacy for shaping future lived memories. Yet, planning Belfast’s contested areas is still suffering from a poor understanding of the context and its complexity against overambitious visions.