Suchergebnisse

The work leading to these results was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the projects GOMINOLA (PID2020-118112RB-C21 and PID2020-118112RB-C22, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033), CAVIAR (TEC2017-84593-C2-1-R, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER "Una manera de hacer Europa"), and AMIC-PoC (PDC2021-120846-C42, funded by MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 and by "the European Union "NextGenerationEU/PRTR"). This research also received funding from the European Union's Horizon2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No 823907 (http://menhir-project.eu, accessed on 17 November 2021). Furthermore, R.K.'s research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPI grant PRE2018-083225). ; Emotion recognition is attracting the attention of the research community due to its multiple applications in different fields, such as medicine or autonomous driving. In this paper, we proposed an automatic emotion recognizer system that consisted of a speech emotion recognizer (SER) and a facial emotion recognizer (FER). For the SER, we evaluated a pre-trained xlsr-Wav2Vec2.0 transformer using two transfer-learning techniques: embedding extraction and fine-tuning. The best accuracy results were achieved when we fine-tuned the whole model by appending a multilayer perceptron on top of it, confirming that the training was more robust when it did not start from scratch and the previous knowledge of the network was similar to the task to adapt. Regarding the facial emotion recognizer, we extracted the Action Units of the videos and compared the performance between employing static models against sequential models. Results showed that sequential models beat static models by a narrow difference. Error analysis reported that the visual systems could improve with a detector of high-emotional load frames, which opened a new line of research to discover new ways to learn from videos. Finally, combining these two modalities with a late fusion strategy, we achieved 86.70% accuracy on the RAVDESS dataset on a subject-wise 5-CV evaluation, classifying eight emotions. Results demonstrated that these modalities carried relevant information to detect users' emotional state and their combination allowed to improve the final system performance. ; Spanish Government PID2020-118112RB-C21 PID2020-118112RB-C22 MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033 TEC2017-84593-C2-1-R MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033/FEDER PDC2021-120846-C42 ; European Union "NextGenerationEU/PRTR") ; European Union's Horizon2020 research and innovation program 823907 ; German Research Foundation (DFG) PRE2018-083225

"PowerPoint has become an integral part of academic and professional life across the globe. In this book, Hubert Knoblauch offers the first complete analysis of the PowerPoint presentation as a form of communication. Knoblauch charts the diffusion of PowerPoint and explores its significance as a ubiquitous and influential element of contemporary communication culture. His analysis considers the social and intellectual implications of the genre, focusing on the dynamic relationships between the aural, visual and physical dimensions of PowerPoint presentations, as well as the diverse institutional contexts in which these presentations take place. Ultimately, Knoblauch argues that the parameters of the PowerPoint genre frames the ways in which information is presented, validated and absorbed, with ambiguous consequences for the acquisition and transmission of knowledge. This original and timely book is relevant to scholars of communications, sociology and education"--

AbstractThis article looks to two songs, "Layla Said" and "Mammad, You Weren't There to See," to examine the politics of representation, race, religion, and nationalism in late twentieth-century Iran. "Layla Said," a religious eulogy sung by Jahanbakhsh Kurdizadeh, would serve as inspiration for the most popular song of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) in terms of melody, rhythm, and lyrics. Kurdizadeh, a visibly Black Iranian, is not popularly remembered as the source of the eulogy, an omission that compounds many of the politics of Black representation in Iran. Through an investigation of film, aural recordings, photographs, and more, this article follows the many mutations of the eulogy-turned-anthem to identify the various ways ethnography and documentary works frame blackness in Iran. Kurdizadeh's life and marginalized legacy highlights the tacit erasure of blackness on the national stage in Iran.

Brecht's canonical literary work's indigenization in Pakistan can offer a valuable transcultural adaptation study because it was performed through a radical theatre with a distinct dramaturgy and political philosophy in two different cultural contexts and historical frame of references. As the foremost representative of Brecht's radical dramaturgy, philosophy and literary works in Pakistan since 1983, Ajoka theatre utilized these adaptations as a platform for airing a critique on capitalism in Pakistan. Prior researches focused on the formal criticism: visual and aural elements. No contextual reading is conducted to explore its political and cultural dimensions of these transcultural adaptations in providing descriptive critique on capitalist society of Pakistan. Realizing the paucity of indigenous academic work in this area this article takes this initiative and addresses this 'research gap' by first conducting a new historicist study of Brecht selected work and its transcultural adaptations in Pakistan. This article also investigates the theatrical and cultural factors which contributed to the enormous success of these transcultural adaptations of Brecht's selected work in Pakistan in light of Hutcheon's theory of adaptation.

Brecht's 'canonical' literary work's indigenization in Pakistan can offer a valuable transcultural adaptation study because it was performed through a radical theatre with a distinct dramaturgy and political philosophy in two different cultural contexts and historical frame of references. As the foremost representative of Brecht's radical dramaturgy, philosophy and literary works in Pakistan since 1983, Ajoka theatre utilized these adaptations as socio-political spaces to challenge dominant discourses on the rise of dictatorship and capitalism in Pakistan. Prior studies explored the formal elements of these adaptations of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui(1942) : visual and aural and the intellectual content i.e. political dimension of this 'social action theatre' is still unexamined. This contextual reading attempts to fulfill this 'gap' by conducting a seminal contextual criticism on 'literary representations' of Pakistani pro-capitalist dictators in selected transcultural adaptations of Brecht's work in light of new historicism and Hutcheon's Theory of Adaptation. The article also explores how in the second phase Brecht's social and political philosophy is reflected in Ajoka's signature plays, Bala King (1997) and The Third Knock (1970).

This article reflects on the possibilities and pitfalls of a website, No Way to Make a Living at: http://nowaytomakealiving.net , as a sociological space for exploring what work (paid or unpaid) is like in today's world. The site includes research projects, short thoughts on everyday working lives, and different kinds of textual (fictional, autobiographical and analytical), aural, and visual representations of work. It emerged as a collaborative project from our frustrations with some dominant representations of work in contemporary photography, and the limitations in the forms of knowledge we can convey in academic publishing. We argue that the contemporary complexity of work exceeds the dominant forms of sociological representation available to us, and illustrate how a website provides multi-media opportunities to gain new insights into work. However, we also problematise the status of visual and sensory methodologies as a panacea for the shortcomings in more conventional sociological practices. We discuss the analytical and imaginative potential of absence as well as presence. And in the final section, we frame the site as a contribution towards a more 'open sociology', and one which engages with a readership we can only partially know.

Pavelka created the Scenographic, set and costume design for a Shakespeare double bill with the all-male Propeller Theatre company, of which he is a founding member. The critically applauded production was coupled with 'The Comedy of Errors' and toured both nationally and internationally through Europe and an extesive tour of three venues in the USA including a six week residency at the Huntington Theatre (University of Boston). It is the aim of the Propeller Theatre Company to stage all three final plays of Shakespeare's history cycle: Henry V, Henry VI (Parts 1,2 and 3) and Richard III. The ambitious undertaking is to produce one of these each year from 2011 to 2013 and to ultimately join them together as a 'demi-cycle'. The concept that underpins the sequence of Histories, chronicling a pattern of blood-letting, power politics and compulsive revenge, is that the England portrayed on stage descends into a regressively barbaric state. Pavelka's design therefore takes us back in time, reversing generations from the 20th back to the 19th centuries: the increasingly violent acts counterpointed by an incremental stiffening of the clothing. Richard III therefore tested the range of these ideas and presented opportunities to rejoin the beginning of the cycle. The production explored Richard's obsessive, compulsive behaviour and the resulting serial killing-spree from the subjective, internal perspective of his psyche - he was 'observed' by the audience, as a patient might in a Victorian sanatorium. The Propeller ensemble was designed as masked hospital orderlies who at first served Richard's destruction of his family and rivals and then, of himself. The scenic space bore all the hallmarks of Pavelka's design signature; both stretching and condensing of space allowing for the visual and aural presence of the ensemble whilst focusing the action and supporting the dramatic situation. Highly mobile and flexible semi transparent hospital screens changed the dynamics of the stage which was contextualised by a fixed, contemporary industrial framework, emblematic single flagpole and vanishing vista. This frame will become a generic landscape for both Henry V and Rose Rage (the two-part adaptation of Henry VI, Parts 1,2 and 3) and therefore the Histories Cycle.

This dissertation examines the early artistic production of contemporary Iranian American artist, Shirin Neshat, focusing in particular on her important breakthrough series of photographs, Women of Allah (1993-1997). Although Women of Allah constitutes Neshat's most widely recognized and oft-reproduced production, the series' achievement remains little understood and insufficiently theorized. Opposing the prevailing tendency to read the photographs hermetically and as about the allegedly enduring vicissitudes of Muslim women's experience, this dissertation takes a wider, yet more historically specific, approach, contending that the series is insistently particular in its attempts to come to terms with the social and political consequences of Iran's Islamic Revolution of 1978-79. Revealing Women of Allah as a project based on visual and textual citations and appropriations resonant particularly within Iranian and American contexts, this dissertation claims that the photographs construct a divided viewership, delimiting viewers according to such polarizing national distinctions -- as either "Iranian" or "American." Splitting viewers between those who can and cannot read the untranslated Iranian poems written on the photographs' surfaces, Women of Allah parallels the unresolved and combative nature of contemporary encounters between Iran and the U.S. This "superficial" split, however, also emphasizes the broader ways in which American and Iranian viewers approach Neshat's art with different frames of reference and cultural armatures, calling upon particular histories, senses and forms of knowledge -- one primarily visual, the other textual or literary, but also oral/aural and embodied.This dissertation therefore proposes to understand meaning in Women of Allah as multi-dimensional, dynamic and dialogical. As this study explores, Women of Allah repeatedly stages hyper-charged scenarios in which the viewer and the women in the photographs face off, the photographs eliciting distinct encounters depending on the habits and capacities of their varied viewers. Appropriating and revising U.S. media representations of Iranians from the 1980s and early 90s, Women of Allah attends to the continued force that such representations command in American perceptions of, and confrontations with, Iran and Iranians today. At the same time, through its citations of well-known contemporary Iranian poetry, Women of Allah calls upon longstanding, if dynamic and ever-evolving, Iranian customary practices in which the quotation and recitation of poetry comprise a significant means of social exchange. Thus, the photographs also offer an exploratory inquiry into relations among secular and Muslim Iranians in the divided, post-revolutionary context and under the contemporary clerical Islamic regime.Ultimately, sustained reflection upon Women of Allah reveals that it need not remain entirely divisive. Instead, insisting on recuperating historical memory within both Iran and the United States, these photographs provide bridges across national, political, cultural and religious divides, gesturing viewers toward ethical modes of engagement with Others in their world.

Being one in a series of intense and ethereal or (as here) kaleidoscopically vibrant and sparkling symphonic portraits of the nine muses, Terpsichore (a showpiece for large orchestra) is itself divided into nine dance scenes: 1. The precocious Muse begins her wild, whirling dance 2. Entrancing Terpsichore dazzles all those who behold her 3. A most majestic and dramatic solo performer 4. The beguiling Muse slows and strikes a pose 5. Her frenzied dance resumes 6. The Muse displays her hypnotic, swaying gracefulness 7. She pauses one last time 8. Her recollection of past glories, and homage to the ancient circular dances 9. The capricious Terpsichore's Finale! Duration is ca. 14'30" A Note on Dissemination: The recording featuring this work was officially released on 7th January 2008. (See Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Terpsichore-Other-Jonathan-Little-Composer/dp/B0018O3MMA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1378159518&sr=8-1&keywords=%22jonathan+little%22+%3D+terpsichore) Terpsichore was later re-released on the album POLYHYMNIA in 2011, and then on the "Digital Only" classical compilation album, FINE MUSIC, VOL. 4, on Navona (USA) NV5916, with a release date of 7th May, 2013 (distributed by Amazon, iTunes, ClassicsOnline, Spotify and Naxos Music Library). COMMENTARY Terpsichore explores the concept of how one might construct a vibrant and colourful latter-day orchestral "showpiece" (in the same spirit as works such as Chabrier's España) yet here by drawing together an incredibly diverse array of musical influences that would sit quite comfortably within a modern plural society and worldview, all set within a dance-inspired framework (containing nine programmatic episodes – as described above).1 Thus, the work is intended (as reviewers did in fact respond to it) as orchestral tour-de-force consisting of a set of "aural pictures" that aim to maximise variety of orchestral colour and mood, ultimately rising to ecstatic frenzy by its conclusion.2 Rhythm – just as much as texture and orchestration – is a key element in this dance-based piece, and indeed it treats the percussion section in a democratic way as a full and equal partner with all other sections of the orchestra. (The string section does not in this work, therefore, occupy the pre-eminent position that it does in many 19th-century works, for instance – where the strings tend to play a good proportion of the time). Terpsichore indeed was the work that launched the composer's series of epic orchestral tone pictures inspired by the "Nine Muses" of Greek myth, and was the first work where critics began to pick up on its subtle use of newer types of minimalism blended with elements of the British pastoral tradition, as well as the fact that it conveyed a sense of orchestral brilliance and "ecstasy" at climactic points. Terpsichore set out to capture a great array of moods, all in a relatively short time frame, while also referencing other musics and challenging players and listeners alike with its various performance and aural demands – yet in a wry, spirited, quirky, accessible and enjoyable way. 3 NOTES: 1. Typical of the comments of several reviewers, Simon Thomas drew attention to the "whirling kaleidoscope of sounds … ending on something like the succulent grandeur of a Respighi tone poem. … An extraordinary range of sensations." (Music OMH, Nov. 2008). And of its dance inspiration, Tempo concluded: "[Terpsichore unleashes] a positively dynamic musical palette, portraying the wild behaviour and dancing of Terpsichore in an astonishingly hypnotic range of musical sketches … moving the listener irrevocably onward to a brightly illuminated plain of poetic splendour, rhythm and ecstasy. Could this be a 21st-century version of Maurice Ravel's choreographic symphony, Daphnis et Chloe?" See: Tempo, Vol. 62, Issue 243 (Jan. 2008), Cambridge University Press. 2. Tempo (January 2008) further described Terpsichore as a "ground-breaking tour de force … incandescent", while, in America, Fanfare magazine (May-June 2008) admired its "music of tremendous power … [and] astonishing range of colors and moods". By December, this debut album was being featured in Fanfare Magazine's "Want List 2008" as one of the top worldwide recordings of the year, showcasing what it called "a major new, original and quite brilliant classical voice". 3. Australia's Music Forum several times paid particular attention to the composer's "finely honed" crafting and "command of orchestration … lush and at ease with the tropes of modernist tonal music" (see the issues of Feb-April 2009, and May-July 2009), and the UK's Music and Vision (25th September, 2012) likewise spoke of the work's "dazzling displays". RECORDING supported by the Kenneth Leighton Trust (UK) and the Foundation for New Music (USA). FIRST PERFORMANCE SCORE reproduced with the aid of a grant from the Society for the Promotion of New Music's "Francis Chagrin Fund" (UK). ISMN M720072234. ASCAP/MCPS Registered.

My doctoral submission, Sounding Expanded Affinities, examines how strides toward gender equality might be made, but it postulates that this is too difficult while marriage remains at the core of our patriarchal value system. This patriarchal system is one which oppresses women by manipulating subjects into its preferred roles often in subtle, chronic ways, using repetition and pairing as its tools. The doctoral submission then formulates a synchronous model of time to critique and disturb the operation of convention, to evaluate alternative forms of relationships, and finally, to propose a new relationship form with egalitarianism as its aim.I approach the doctoral project as an artistic practitioner first. Therefore, I have extracted a methodology from my sound installation work that I refer to as "polytemporality". I borrow this musical term to bring together thinking from different historical moments about how women might achieve greater equality. The project focuses on the United States context, specifically the period between the nineteenth century and now. I ultimately build on this research into earlier utopian proposals for gender equality to develop an idea that I call "expanded affinities": this is a proposal for a more egalitarian form of relationship. The two terms are both method and subject of the artworks, dissertation, and writing that comprise my doctoral submission, Sounding Expanded Affinities. I see the two as linked since I believe that gender inequality is reinforced by notions of linear time. "Polytemporality", which I define as a synchronous sense of the past, present, and future, is therefore meant to disrupt the normative ideas about gender within relationships. The word "polytemporal" further serves as a conscious nod to the politics of polyamory, or, non-monogamy, taken up in this text. The notion of expanded affinities builds on my research into earlier historical attempts to form more egalitarian types of relationships in intentional communities or through experimenting with different modes of relating. It is a concept that contributes to feminist and queer critiques of heteronormative constructs insofar as it decenters marriage and biological kinship, and redistributes the state's economic investments in those forms of belonging to the individual instead of the couple. Expanded affinities is ultimately a way of relating that exceeds present-day restrictions and hierarchies within love relations.The first two installations that are part of Sounding Expanded Affinities are Utopians Dance and A Reeducation. Together, these two installations take up the initial terms of gender identity, feminism, sexuality, utopian communities, and alternative economics. The third installation includes the radio play ReCast: LIVE ON-AIR in which feminist voices from across 200 years are brought together in an omnipresent radio station to discuss relationship forms. Polytemporality is not only the method of writing, but the form too, as ReCast: LIVE ON-AIR aims to create a hybrid sense of time in the physical and aural space of installation. The dissertation appendix includes reprints of my script and book from the above mentioned installations.I use the polytemporal method in my dissertation as well. Chapter one introduces the concept, and chapter two offers an historical analysis of the patriarchal nature of marriage that also identifies the residual asymmetrical power structures from the past that still exist today. The third chapter evaluates the egalitarian potential of ethical non-monogamies for women, in part by examining earlier historical communities where non-monogamy was practiced in order to create more egalitarian modes of relating. The fourth chapter introduces the concept of expanded affinities as my alternative to ethical non-monogamy that is intended to be a more inclusive and more equal relationship form.Together, the concept of expanded affinities and polytemporality allow the personal register to speak across time to create bonds beyond the constraints of the present, of the couple, and of gender roles. The installations provide an element of embodiment and performativity; the dissertation offers analysis and scholarship; and the artistic writings contain fractured narratives. It is my hope that such an interdisciplinary approach to form and expression will work to forward the frames within which feminist art and discourse can take place today.