Panoramic Sea Happening (After Kantor): Video Installation

Panoramic Sea Happening (After Kantor) is a 7 minute durational film that reimagines part of Tadeusz Kantor's original sea happenings from 1967 in a landscape in which the sea has retreated. The conductor of Kantor’s original performance is replaced with a sound object cast adrift on a beach in Dungeness (UK). The object plays back the sound of the sea into the landscape, which was performed live and then filmed from three distinct angles. The first angle mimics the position of the conductor in Kantor’s original happening, facing outwards into the horizon of the beach and recalls the image in Kantor’s work of a human figure undertaking the absurd task of orchestrating the sound of a gigantic expanse of water. The second angle exposes the machine itself and the large cone that amplifies the sound, reinforcing the isolation of the object. The third angle reveals a decommissioned nuclear power station and sound objects used as a warning system for the power plant. Dungeness is a location where the sea has been retreating from the land, leaving traces of human activity through the disused boat winches, abandoned cabins and the decommissioned nuclear buildings. It is a place in which the footprint of the anthropocene is keenly felt. The sound object is intended to act as an anthropomorphic figure, ghosting the original conductor and offering the sound of the sea back into the landscape through a wide mouthpiece, echoing Kantor’s own load hailer in the original sequence of sea happenings. It speculates on Kantor's theory of the bio-object, which proposed a symbiotic relationship between the human and the nonhuman object in performance, as a possible instrument to access a form of geologic imagination. In this configuration, the human itself is absent, but is evoked through the objects left behind. The sound object, helpless in a red dingy, might be thought of as a co-conspirator with the viewer, enabling a looking back to the past in a landscape of an inevitable future. The work was originally commissioned by the University of Kent in collaboration with the Polish Cultural Institute for the Symposium Kantorbury Kantorbury in Canterbury (UK) to mark the 100 years since Tadeusz Kantor’s birth (15 - 19 September 2015). It should be projected and requires stereo speakers.

Évaluation de la performance des drains et des matériaux filtrants à ralentir le colmatage et l’ensablement en sol sableux et ferreux

Au Québec, les drains installés dans les sols sableux-limoneux sont sensibles au colmatage par ensablement et/ou par ocre de fer. Dans le passé, les drains avec des pertuis inférieurs à 2 mm étaient utilisés au Québec avec un filtre tissé de 110 microns ou un filtre tricoté de 450 microns. Récemment, des drains avec des pertuis supérieurs à 2 mm ainsi qu’un filtre de 250 microns ont été introduits sur le marché mais n’ont jamais été testés. Le projet avait pour objectif de déterminer les vitesses auxquelles se feront l’ensablement et le colmatage ferrique pour différentes combinaisons de drains (pertuis de 1,8 mm et de 3 mm) et de filtres (110 μm, 250 μm et 450 μm) dans un sol sableux à Bécancour. Un dispositif expérimental en blocs complets (3) aléatoires a été utilisé. Les débits ont été mesurés à la sortie des drains de chaque parcelle et les hauteurs des nappes ont été mesurées avec un bulleur dans des puits d’observation. Le suivi du pH, du potentiel d’oxydoréduction et du contenu en Fe2+ a été réalisé dans l’eau de la nappe et celle des drains. Les drains excavés 13 mois après leur installation ne montrent que des traces de sédiments et de colmatage ferrique. Les niveaux de Fe2+ sont significativement plus faibles dans l’eau à la sortie des drains que dans l’eau de la nappe. Le processus de colmatage ferrique ne semble que commencer et son impact n’est pas mesurable au niveau des débits unitaires à la sortie des drains.

Online MBPeT dashboard : enabling performance testing as a service in the cloud

In this thesis, tool support is addressed for the combined disciplines of Model-based testing and performance testing. Model-based testing (MBT) utilizes abstract behavioral models to automate test generation, thus decreasing time and cost of test creation. MBT is a functional testing technique, thereby focusing on output, behavior, and functionality. Performance testing, however, is non-functional and is concerned with responsiveness and stability under various load conditions. MBPeT (Model-Based Performance evaluation Tool) is one such tool which utilizes probabilistic models, representing dynamic real-world user behavior patterns, to generate synthetic workload against a System Under Test and in turn carry out performance analysis based on key performance indicators (KPI). Developed at Åbo Akademi University, the MBPeT tool is currently comprised of a downloadable command-line based tool as well as a graphical user interface. The goal of this thesis project is two-fold: 1) to extend the existing MBPeT tool by deploying it as a web-based application, thereby removing the requirement of local installation, and 2) to design a user interface for this web application which will add new user interaction paradigms to the existing feature set of the tool. All phases of the MBPeT process will be realized via this single web deployment location including probabilistic model creation, test configurations, test session execution against a SUT with real-time monitoring of user configurable metric, and final test report generation and display. This web application (MBPeT Dashboard) is implemented with the Java programming language on top of the Vaadin framework for rich internet application development. The Vaadin framework handles the complicated web communications processes and front-end technologies, freeing developers to implement the business logic as well as the user interface in pure Java. A number of experiments are run in a case study environment to validate the functionality of the newly developed Dashboard application as well as the scalability of the solution implemented in handling multiple concurrent users. The results support a successful solution with regards to the functional and performance criteria defined, while improvements and optimizations are suggested to increase both of these factors.