THE INTERPLAY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE: PLAY AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN LATE CAPITALISM

Practitioners of the performance form “InterPlay” utilize dance, storytelling and song to build community and generate social change. I elucidate how this community of practitioners conceptualizes “social change.” I argue that the InterPlay social movement organizes around the application of play to performances of self in everyday life. I explore how the InterPlay non-profit corporation, Body Wisdom Inc., employs this technique to address racial justice in its organizational practices. I also examine how practitioners understand their use of this performance play in places of work, concluding that—even in these endeavors—they see social change as a process immanent to both individual people and the systems they create, not as the intervention of an autonomous external power. Ultimately, I argue that, within late capitalism, play should no longer be conceptualized as an activity separate from everyday sociality but as an immanent process of change constitutive of a socioaesthetic domain.

Contemporary dramaturgy in theatre for young people : the conceptual shape of displacement and installation

This thesis investigates Theatre for Young People (TYP) as a site of performance innovation. The inquiry is focused on contemporary dramaturgy and its fieldwork aims to identify new dramaturgical principles operating in the creation and presentation of TYP. The research then seeks to assess how these new principles contribute to Postdramatic Theatre theory. This research inquiry springs from an imperative based in practice: Young people under 25 years have a literacy based on online hypertextual experiences which take the reader outside the frames of a dramatic narrative and beyond principles such as linearity, dramatic unity, teleology and resolution. As a dramaturg and educator I wanted to understand the new ways that young people engage in cultural products, to identify and utilize the new principles of dramaturgy that are now in evidence. My research examines how two playwright/directors approach their work and the new principles that can be identified in their dramaturgy. The fieldwork is scoped into two case studies: the first on TJ Eckleberg working in Australian Theatre for Young People and the second on Kristo Šagor working in German Children’s and Young People’s Theatre (KJT). These case studies address both types of production dramaturgy - the dramaturgy emergent through process in devised performance making, and that emergent in a performance based on a written playscript. On Case Study One the researcher, as participant observer, worked as production dramaturg on a large scale, site specific performance, observing the dramaturgy in process of its director and chief devisor. On Case Study Two the researcher, as observer and analyst, undertook a performance analysis of three playscripts and productions by a contemporary German playwright and director. Utilizing participant observation, reflective practice and grounded analysis the case studies have identified two new principles animating the dramaturgy of these TYP practitioners, namely ‘displacement’ and ‘installation.’ Taking practice into theory, the thesis concludes by demonstrating how displacement and installation contribute to Postdramatic Theatre’s “arsenal of expressive gestures which serve as theatre’s response to changed social communication under the conditions of generalized communication technologies” (Lehmann, H.-T., 2006, p.23). This research makes an original contribution to knowledge by evidencing that the principles of Postdramatic Theory lie within the practice of contemporary Theatre for Young People. It also contributes valuable research to a specialized, often overlooked terrain, namely Dramaturgy in Theatre for Young People, presented here with a contemporary, international and intercultural perspective.

Conceptual fashion : design, practice and process

While Conceptual fashion design practices have been a pervasive influence in fashion since the early 1980s, there is little academic analysis that might explain how they are distinct from conventional fashion design practices. In addition, fashion practitioners have not historically contributed to fashion research. As a result, contemporary fashion practitioners have difficulty setting critical contexts and expanding their creative work as there is little relevant literature available from practitioner perspectives. This project uses practice-led research to develop a discourse for understanding Conceptual fashion design process and how it relates to more conventional fashion design practices. In this exegesis I use Conceptual art as a lens to expand understandings of Conceptual fashion and my own creative practice. This analysis demonstrates that there are valuable connections to be drawn between Conceptual art and Conceptual fashion practice. In particular, these connections reveal the differences between the way Conceptual and more conventional fashion designers relate to the conceptual and the visual in their design process. This exploration demonstrates that while fashion is a visual field, Conceptual fashion designers produce a more ‘intellectual’ type of fashion that uses the visual to communicate ideas that question the nature of fashion. I explore the relevance of these ideas through application and experimentation in my creative practice projects by drawing from systems and rules identified in the work of early Conceptual artists and contemporary Conceptual fashion designers.

Constructing the shitting citizen : the promise of scatological art as environmental and social activism

Art activism uses visual and performance art to promote social and environmental agendas. In this paper, I explore attempts to raise awareness of sanitation issues at the global, local and personal level using scatological art. I focus on the successes of the open-air public art exhibition set up in the Brisbane (Queensland, Australia) central business district to celebrate World Toilet Day in 2008. The art in this exhibition featured included one hundred toilets decorated to raise awareness of global sanitation issues and the distribution of promotional materials featuring scatological images including postcards and stickers. Given the subject matter and intent, the toilet art and promotional materials presented at the One Hundred Toilet exhibition can be seen as an example of scatological art employed for the purposes of social and environmental activism. Through the One Hundred Toilet exhibition, I consider the political aims and activist potential of using scatological art to progress social and environmental agendas and consider how this kind of ‘shit on show’ approach can contribute to the construction of the shitting citizen; one who is simultaneously responsible for and responsive to managing the waste that they produce and recognising and responding to broader sanitation issues.

Processes of transformation : art into pop and back again

This research project was a case study for managing and innovating an interdisciplinary practice: specifically across music, performance and contemporary art. Key works included painting/sound/video installation, experimental performance, electronic pop music, music video and electronic pop music performance. An idiosyncratic and transformative use of colour emerged as an underlying theme and strategy for cohesion. The project offers strategies for the challenges of interdisciplinary practice specifically addressing the limitations related to institutionalised value systems, aesthetic traditions and disciplinary languages.

Automatic Tonic Identification in Indian Art Music: Approaches and Evaluation

The tonic is a fundamental concept in Indian art music. It is the base pitch, which an artist chooses in order to construct the melodies during a rg(a) rendition, and all accompanying instruments are tuned using the tonic pitch. Consequently, tonic identification is a fundamental task for most computational analyses of Indian art music, such as intonation analysis, melodic motif analysis and rg recognition. In this paper we review existing approaches for tonic identification in Indian art music and evaluate them on six diverse datasets for a thorough comparison and analysis. We study the performance of each method in different contexts such as the presence/absence of additional metadata, the quality of audio data, the duration of audio data, music tradition (Hindustani/Carnatic) and the gender of the singer (male/female). We show that the approaches that combine multi-pitch analysis with machine learning provide the best performance in most cases (90% identification accuracy on average), and are robust across the aforementioned contexts compared to the approaches based on expert knowledge. In addition, we also show that the performance of the latter can be improved when additional metadata is available to further constrain the problem. Finally, we present a detailed error analysis of each method, providing further insights into the advantages and limitations of the methods.

Digital Debris of Internet Art: An Allegorical and Entropic Resistance to the Epistemology of Search

This Ph.D., by thesis, proposes a speculative lens to read Internet Art via the concept of digital debris. In order to do so, the research explores the idea of digital debris in Internet Art from 1993 to 2011 in a series of nine case studies. Here, digital debris are understood as words typed in search engines and which then disappear; bits of obsolete codes which are lingering on the Internet, abandoned website, broken links or pieces of ephemeral information circulating on the Internet and which are used as a material by practitioners. In this context, the thesis asks what are digital debris? The thesis argues that the digital debris of Internet Art represent an allegorical and entropic resistance to the what Art Historian David Joselit calls the Epistemology of Search. The ambition of the research is to develop a language in-between the agency of the artist and the autonomy of the algorithm, as a way of introducing Internet Art to a pluridisciplinary audience, hence the presence of the comparative studies unfolding throughout the thesis, between Internet Art and pionners in the recycling of waste in art, the use of instructions as a medium and the programming of poetry. While many anthropological and ethnographical studies are concerned with the material object of the computer as debris once it becomes obsolete, very few studies have analysed waste as discarded data. The research shifts the focus from an industrial production of digital debris (such as pieces of hardware) to obsolete pieces of information in art practice. The research demonstrates that illustrations of such considerations can be found, for instance, in Cory Arcangel’s work Data Diaries (2001) where QuickTime files are stolen, disassembled, and then re-used in new displays. The thesis also looks at Jodi’s approach in Jodi.org (1993) and Asdfg (1998), where websites and hyperlinks are detourned, deconstructed, and presented in abstract collages that reveals the architecture of the Internet. The research starts in a typological manner and classifies the pieces of Internet Art according to the structure at play in the work. Indeed if some online works dealing with discarded documents offer a self-contained and closed system, others nurture the idea of openness and unpredictability. The thesis foregrounds the ideas generated through the artworks and interprets how those latter are visually constructed and displayed. Not only does the research questions the status of digital debris once they are incorporated into art practice but it also examine the method according to which they are retrieved, manipulated and displayed to submit that digital debris of Internet Art are the result of both semantic and automated processes, rendering them both an object of discourse and a technical reality. Finally, in order to frame the serendipity and process-based nature of the digital debris, the Ph.D. concludes that digital debris are entropic . In other words that they are items of language to-be, paradoxically locked in a constant state of realisation.

Autonomic prediction of error-related ERP components in perceptual and conceptual tasks in older and younger adults

In studies of cognitive processing, the allocation of attention has been consistently linked to subtle, phasic adjustments in autonomic control. Both autonomic control of heart rate and control of the allocation of attention are known to decline with age. It is not known, however, whether characteristic individual differences in autonomic control and the ability to control attention are closely linked. To test this, a measure of parasympathetic function, vagal tone (VT) was computed from cardiac recordings from older and younger adults taken before and during performance of two attentiondemanding tasks - the Eriksen visual flanker task and the source memory task. Both tasks elicited event-related potentials (ERPs) that accompany errors, i.e., error-related negativities (ERNs) and error positivities (Pe's). The ERN is a negative deflection in the ERP signal, time-locked to responses made on incorrect trials, likely generated in the anterior cingulate. It is followed immediately by the Pe, a broad, positive deflection which may reflect conscious awareness of having committed an error. Age-attenuation ofERN amplitude has previously been found in paradigms with simple stimulus-response mappings, such as the flanker task, but has rarely been examined in more complex, conceptual tasks. Until now, there have been no reports of its being investigated in a source monitoring task. Age-attenuation of the ERN component was observed in both tasks. Results also indicated that the ERNs generated in these two tasks were generally comparable for young adults. For older adults, however, the ERN from the source monitoring task was not only shallower, but incorporated more frontal processing, apparently reflecting task demands. The error positivities elicited by 3 the two tasks were not comparable, however, and age-attenuation of the Pe was seen only in the more perceptual flanker task. For younger adults, it was Pe scalp topography that seemed to reflect task demands, being maximal over central parietal areas in the flanker task, but over very frontal areas in the source monitoring task. With respect to vagal tone, in the flanker task, neither the number of errors nor ERP amplitudes were predicted by baseline or on-task vagal tone measures. However, in the more difficult source memory task, lower VT was marginally associated with greater numbers of source memory errors in the older group. Thus, for older adults, relatively low levels of parasympathetic control over cardiac response coincided with poorer source memory discrimination. In both groups, lower levels of baseline VT were associated with larger amplitude ERNs, and smaller amplitude Pe's. Thus, low VT was associated in a conceptual task with a greater "emergency response" to errors, and at the same time, reduced awareness of having made them. The efficiency of an individual's complex cognitive processing was therefore associated with the flexibility of parasympathetic control of heart rate, in response to a cognitively challenging task.

A baseline appraisal of water-dependant ecosystem services, the roles they play within desakota livelihood systems and their potential sensitivity to climate change

This report forms part of a larger research programme on 'Reinterpreting the Urban-Rural Continuum', which conceptualises and investigates current knowledge and research gaps concerning 'the role that ecosystems services play in the livelihoods of the poor in regions undergoing rapid change'. The report aims to conduct a baseline appraisal of water-dependant ecosystem services, the roles they play within desakota livelihood systems and their potential sensitivity to climate change. The appraisal is conducted at three spatial scales: global, regional (four consortia areas), and meso scale (case studies within the four regions). At all three scales of analysis water resources form the interweaving theme because water provides a vital provisioning service for people, supports all other ecosystem processes and because water resources are forecast to be severely affected under climate change scenarios. This report, combined with an Endnote library of over 1100 scientific papers, provides an annotated bibliography of water-dependant ecosystem services, the roles they play within desakota livelihood systems and their potential sensitivity to climate change. After an introductory, section, Section 2 of the report defines water-related ecosystem services and how these are affected by human activities. Current knowledge and research gaps are then explored in relation to global scale climate and related hydrological changes (e.g. floods, droughts, flow regimes) (section 3). The report then discusses the impacts of climate changes on the ESPA regions, emphasising potential responses of biomes to the combined effects of climate change and human activities (particularly land use and management), and how these effects coupled with water store and flow regime manipulation by humans may affect the functioning of catchments and their ecosystem services (section 4). Finally, at the meso-scale, case studies are presented from within the ESPA regions to illustrate the close coupling of human activities and catchment performance in the context of environmental change (section 5). At the end of each section, research needs are identified and justified. These research needs are then amalgamated in section 6.

A conceptual framework of corporate and business ethics across organizations

Purpose – The objective of this paper is to introduce and describe a conceptual framework of corporate and business ethics across organizations in terms of ethical structures, ethical processes and ethical performance.

Design/methodology/approach – A framework is outlined and positioned incorporating an ethical frame of reference in the field of organizational chain management.

Findings – A number of areas and sub-areas of corporate and business ethics are framed in the context across organizations.

Research limitations/implications – The introduced framework should be seen as a seed for further development and refinement. It provides opportunities for further research of ethical concerns across organizations.

Practical implications – Organizations may benefit from the findings and insights presented and they may be used to enhance their ability to manage, monitor and evaluate ethical business practices across organizations.

Social implications – Changing societal and market patterns may enforce organizations to address ethical concerns across organizations. A myopic approach restricted to the judicial system may become insufficient and unsatisfactory from the perspective of other stakeholders of the organization.

Originality/value – The framework makes a contribution bringing in ethical concerns across organizations, providing a basis for their ethical values and culture, as well as asymmetric relationships in terms of power and dependence. The authors believe that a true learning organization needs to realise the importance of an extended view of its endeavors of corporate and business ethics in terms of ethical structures, ethical processes and ethical performance across organizations.

Immersive interfaces for art education teaching and learning in virtual and real world learning environments

Selected ubiquitous technologies encourage collaborative participation between higher education students and educators within a virtual socially networked e-learning landscape. Multiple modes of teaching and learning, ranging from real world experiences, to text and digital images accessed within the Deakin Studies Online learning management system and a constructed virtual world in which the user's creative imagination transports them to the “other side” of their computer screens is discussed in this paper. These constructed environments support interaction between communities of learners and enable multiple simultaneous participants to access graphically built 3D environments, interact with digital artifacts and various functional tools and represent themselves through avatars, to communicate with other participants and engage in collaborative art learning. A narrative interpretative research approach was used to profile the 21st century higher education student learner, to investigate the lived experience and multiple art learning perspectives documented in student visual journal entries and art educator observations to ascertain if an e-technology rich augmented learning environment resulted in the establishment of more effective e-learning communities of practice.

Conceptual model for adaptable and extensible visual data exploration

Interactive visual representations complement traditional statistical and machine learning techniques for data analysis, allowing users to play a more active role in a knowledge discovery process and making the whole process more understandable. Though visual representations are applicable to several stages of the knowledge discovery process, a common use of visualization is in the initial stages to explore and organize a sometimes unknown and complex data set. In this context, the integrated and coordinated - that is, user actions should be capable of affecting multiple visualizations when desired - use of multiple graphical representations allows data to be observed from several perspectives and offers richer information than isolated representations. In this paper we propose an underlying model for an extensible and adaptable environment that allows independently developed visualization components to be gradually integrated into a user configured knowledge discovery application. Because a major requirement when using multiple visual techniques is the ability to link amongst them, so that user actions executed on a representation propagate to others if desired, the model also allows runtime configuration of coordinated user actions over different visual representations. We illustrate how this environment is being used to assist data exploration and organization in a climate classification problem.

Tenofovir in second-line ART in Zambia and South Africa: collaborative analysis of cohort studies

Tenofovir (TDF) is increasingly used in second-line antiretroviral treatment (ART) in sub-Saharan Africa. We compared outcomes of second-line ART containing and not containing TDF in cohort studies from Zambia and the Republic of South Africa (RSA).

Measurement of the muon reconstruction performance of the ATLAS detector using 2011 and 2012 LHC proton-proton collision data

This paper presents the performance of the ATLAS muon reconstruction during the LHC run with pp collisions at √s = 7–8 TeV in 2011–2012, focusing mainly on data collected in 2012. Measurements of the reconstruction efficiency and of the momentum scale and resolution, based on large reference samples of J/ψ → μμ, Z → μμ and ϒ → μμ decays, are presented and compared to Monte Carlo simulations. Corrections to the simulation, to be used in physics analysis, are provided. Over most of the covered phase space (muon |η| < 2.7 and 5 ≲ pT ≲ 100 GeV) the efficiency is above 99% and is measured with per-mille precision. The momentum resolution ranges from 1.7% at central rapidity and for transverse momentum pT ≅ 10 GeV, to 4% at large rapidity and pT ≅ 100 GeV. The momentum scale is known with an uncertainty of 0.05% to 0.2% depending on rapidity. A method for the recovery of final state radiation from the muons is also presented.

Is more capability always beneficial for firm performance? Market orientation, core business process capabilities, and business environment

This study examines the role of capabilities in core marketing-related business processes–product development management (PDM), supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM)–in translating a firm’s market orientation (MO) into firm performance. The study is the first to examine the interplay of all three business process capabilities simultaneously, while investigating how environmental conditions moderate their performance effects. A moderated mediation analysis of 468 product-focused firms finds that PDM and CRM process capabilities play important mediating roles, whereas SCM process capability does not mediate the relationship between MO and performance. However, the relative importance of the capabilities as mediators varies along the degree of environmental turbulence, and under certain conditions, an increase in the level of business process capability may even turn detrimental.