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Farmers have long used selective plant breeding to improve crop yields and nutritional content. Now, perhaps more than ever, new cultivars of agriculturally relevant crops are needed for coping with widely varying climates, increases in world population, and diminishing natural resources.
Selective breeding programs can require decades of trial and error to arrive at desirable characteristics in a cultivar. However, such programs can be accelerated significantly through computational and experimental genomics.
ACPFG scientists apply information about genome composition, gene expression, and metabolic processes to arrive at descriptions of complex processes in plants. These fundamental insights can accelerate production of new cultivars that can cope with adverse environmental conditions with improved yields and nutritional content for a growing world population. ACPFG focuses these efforts on crops such as wheat and barley.
Traditional selective breeding and genetic engineering approaches are based on trial and error. The lack of rationale can extend the time to develop a cultivar to ten years and more. This situation is improved in programs that utilize insights into gene expression and function, which are obtained from molecular level investigations of biochemical processes. Insight into plant processes at a molecular level facilitates sharpened approaches toward producing viable cultivars.
ACPFG investigates the areas within the plant that respond to stressful conditions like drought, salinity, heat, frost and nutrient deficiencies.
Areas of keen interest to ACPFG involve processes associated with stress-related damage, adaptation to growing conditions, and nutritional content.
Improvements in these plant responses deliver tangible industry outcomes like cereal varieties tailored to withstand hostile environments. | http://www.acpfg.com.au/index.php?id=6&linkid=96 |
The Internet of Things (IOT) is a term describing interconnected computing devices, mechanized and digital equipment, physical objects, animals or people who are offered with exceptional identifiers as well as the ability to send data over a network without the need of human-to-human and human-to-computer interface.
The Internet of Things (IOT) is furthermore a structure of physical objects, gadgets, as well as other things embossed with electronic components, software, sensors, and network connection that enable these kinds of materials to gather and substitute data very easily. The IOT permits items to be sensed and also regulated wirelessly across available network infrastructure, establishing possibilities for much more direct integration of the natural world into computer-based techniques, and leading to developed effectiveness, accuracy and economical profit.
The fundamental features that helps make internet of things a fact are the following:
– Hardware-Making physical objects sensitive and giving them functionality to fetch data and answer directions Software-Enabling the data collection, storage, processing, manipulating and instructing.
– Communication Infrastructure-Most important of all is the communication infrastructure which consists of protocols and technologies which enable two physical objects to exchange data. | https://amattias.se/category/internet-of-things-iot/ |
IOT stands for Internet of Things. It is a network in which various Things can communicate with each other using a Network as a means of communication between them. Usually, this Network will be an internet.
Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical objects or people called “things” that are embedded with software, electronics, network, and sensors that allow these objects to collect and exchange data. The goal of IoT is to extend to internet connectivity from standard devices like computer, mobile, tablet to relatively dumb devices like a toaster.
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The power of Internet grows drastically when people, data and things are interconnected through the Internet. Internet of Things aka IoT, is a network of things or objects implanted with sensors and other smart electronic devices which enables them to communicate with each other and other targets in the network through exchange of data.
These sensors generate a lot of data that needs to be stored, managed and analyzed. There are options to connect memory cards or computers to these sensors or we can integrate the sensors in to devices with further networking capabilities. Most of the applications of IoT use a cloud-based system to store and analyze data. The applications of IoT is so vast that we can expect these things to generate massive amounts of data which has to be gathered, stored and processed quickly and efficiently. The advantages of using a cloud-based system is that it is scalable and the data is easily accessible through appropriate web applications. By the end of this project, the goal is to design and set up a unix cloud-based server to store and visualize sensor data that was collected, through a web interface. | https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Using-A-Cloud-Based-System-F32FKC3EJPL9X |
The Internet of things (IoT) is the inter-networking of physical devices, vehicles (also referred to as “connected devices” and “smart devices”), buildings, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity which enable these objects to collect and exchange data.
- The IoT allows objects to be sensed or controlled remotely across existing network infrastructure, creating opportunities for more direct integration of the physical world into computer-based systems, and resulting in improved efficiency, accuracy and economic benefit in addition to reduced human intervention.
“ Forecasts show an expected IoT universe with between 20 and 30 billion connected devices by 2020 “
[Image Source: https://www.i-scoop.eu/internet-of-things-guide/]
IoT is expected to offer advanced connectivity of devices, systems, and services that goes beyond machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and covers a variety of protocols, domains, and applications.
Some of the important IoT messaging protocols are:
- AMQP(Advanced Message Queuing Protocol) – An open standard application layer protocol for message-oriented middleware. The defining features of AMQP are message orientation, queuing, routing (including point-to-point and publish-and-subscribe), reliability and security.
- MQTT (Message Queueing Telemetry Transport)- or MQ Telemetry Transport is a lightweight connectivity protocol geared for IoT applications. It is based on the TCP/IP stack which uses the publish/subscribe method for transportation of data. It is open-ended and supports a high level of scaling, which makes it an ideal platform for development of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions.
- HTTP/2 – Enables a more efficient use of network resources and a reduced perception of latency by introducing header field compression and allowing multiple concurrent exchanges on the same connection.
- CoAP(Constrained Application Protocol) – CoAP is a web transfer protocol based on the REST model. It is mainly used for lightweight M2M communication owing to its small header size. It is designed especially for constrained networks and systems withing the Internet of Things paradigm, hence the name, Constrained Application Protocol.
- XMPP(Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol) – An open technology for real-time communication, which powers a wide range of applications including instant messaging, presence, multi-party chat, voice and video calls, collaboration, lightweight middleware, content syndication, and generalized routing of XML data.
We will go through about them in detail in later posts.
That’s all for now. Keep reading.
Sources: | https://nithinmohantk.info/2017/01/05/internet-of-things-iot-introduction/ |
This paper summarizes the discussion in a panel session on the Internet of things (IoT) at the 2017 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Seoul, Korea. The panel explored a research agenda on IoT technology and its interaction with business and society. IoT refers to the ever-growing number of numerous physical devices that feature software and location-based technologies that connect together in a network and exchange data with one another. IoT has garnered significant attention in information systems due to its rapidly expanding market and demand from a wide range of stakeholders such as consumers, businesses organizations, and government agencies. The IoT may be the next industrial revolution in which interconnected physical devices will automate skills and tasks. In today’s hyper-connected economy, IoT can radically transform businesses and society through increased transparency, optimized production processes, and decreased operating expenses. Overall, the panel identified a sixpronged IS research agenda for IoT that comprises the IoT’s impact on business and society, IoT monetization and end-user services, the IoT as a distributed platform, the convergence of the IoT and blockchain, security concerns and solutions, and the IoT and ethics. The paper concludes with a future direction for IoT.
The Transformative Effect of the Internet of Things on Business and Society. / Shim, J. P.; Avital, Michel; Dennis, Alan R.; Rossi, Matti; Sørensen, Carsten; French, Aaron M.
In: Communications of the Association for Information Systems, Vol. 44, 5, 03.2019, p. 129–140.
N2 - This paper summarizes the discussion in a panel session on the Internet of things (IoT) at the 2017 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Seoul, Korea. The panel explored a research agenda on IoT technology and its interaction with business and society. IoT refers to the ever-growing number of numerous physical devices that feature software and location-based technologies that connect together in a network and exchange data with one another. IoT has garnered significant attention in information systems due to its rapidly expanding market and demand from a wide range of stakeholders such as consumers, businesses organizations, and government agencies. The IoT may be the next industrial revolution in which interconnected physical devices will automate skills and tasks. In today’s hyper-connected economy, IoT can radically transform businesses and society through increased transparency, optimized production processes, and decreased operating expenses. Overall, the panel identified a sixpronged IS research agenda for IoT that comprises the IoT’s impact on business and society, IoT monetization and end-user services, the IoT as a distributed platform, the convergence of the IoT and blockchain, security concerns and solutions, and the IoT and ethics. The paper concludes with a future direction for IoT.
AB - This paper summarizes the discussion in a panel session on the Internet of things (IoT) at the 2017 International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) in Seoul, Korea. The panel explored a research agenda on IoT technology and its interaction with business and society. IoT refers to the ever-growing number of numerous physical devices that feature software and location-based technologies that connect together in a network and exchange data with one another. IoT has garnered significant attention in information systems due to its rapidly expanding market and demand from a wide range of stakeholders such as consumers, businesses organizations, and government agencies. The IoT may be the next industrial revolution in which interconnected physical devices will automate skills and tasks. In today’s hyper-connected economy, IoT can radically transform businesses and society through increased transparency, optimized production processes, and decreased operating expenses. Overall, the panel identified a sixpronged IS research agenda for IoT that comprises the IoT’s impact on business and society, IoT monetization and end-user services, the IoT as a distributed platform, the convergence of the IoT and blockchain, security concerns and solutions, and the IoT and ethics. The paper concludes with a future direction for IoT. | https://research.cbs.dk/en/publications/the-transformative-effect-of-the-internet-of-things-on-business-a |
The Internet of Things (IoT) consists of interconnected things with built-in and function-oriented sensors, essentially constituting a network of physical devices. These devices have the ability to gather measurement or observation data, and then communicate or exchange data with each other by communication networks. IoT systems can be applied in various fields to improve human life, especially applications for smarter cities or smarter homes.
However, basic IoT systems have been unable to meet the requirements of a modern smart city or smart home that features various and complex functionality with hybrid communication networks. Modern applications of IoT systems must be assisted by powerful artificial intelligence (AI) technology to process and analyze big data and deal with the problems of finding an optimal solution, making the best decision, detecting events, and identifying objects. Artificial intelligence simulates natural intelligence as exhibited by humans or animals and can make the system capable of performing tasks without the assistance of humans, and even perform tasks better than humans can. Modern AI technology usually utilizes evolutionary computation, nature-inspired algorithms, machine learning, or deep learning to solve the problems of optimization, decision making, event detection, and object identification. The integration of IoT systems and AI technology is very suitable for interconnected things to enhance intelligence, thus the artificial intelligence of things (AIoT), which enables the establishment of innovative IoT systems and applications for the modern smart city and smart home.
This Special Issue aims to solicit the submission of original research articles with a focus on challenging issues in the field of innovative AI-based IoT in smart cities and smart homes. Theoretical, experimental, and practical contributions containing innovative architectures, communications, algorithms, approaches, systems, or applications with new insights and findings are welcomed. Review articles which describe the current state of the art are especially welcomed.
Potential topics include but are not limited to the following: | https://www.hindawi.com/journals/wcmc/si/132537/ |
The Internet of things (IoT) describes the network of physical objects—“things”—that are embedded with sensors, software, and other technologies for the purpose of connecting and exchanging data with other devices and systems over the Internet.
Internet of things(IoT) means a connection of physical devices like sensors, processors that exchange data with each other through the internet. Things become complicated for different technologies, machines, etc. Traditional technologies, sensors, automation all need IOT. In the customer community, IoT is very synonyms for Smart homes, smart building, or smart speakers, or automation. IoT can be used in the health-care system.
There are some drawbacks of IoT. Especially in the case of the privacy and security system of government. Many International fora started working on it and developing it. Octagen Infotech helps organizations and companies with their 12 years of experience in building their cost-effective solutions of every obstruction and create a right and smooth pathway in front and give the time effective solution in the budget. | https://octageninfotech.in/service/iot/ |
The amount of devices being connected to the internet is rapidly growing. This trend, often referred to as the “Internet of Things” (IoT), illustrates how everyday objects such as cars, TVs and wearables are gradually becoming equipped with sensory technology. These sensors enable the device to collect data from physical events and subsequently communicate about this information with other devices or with centralized IT systems via the ...
Design and implementation of UWB transceivers for Internet of Things applications KU Leuven
In today's world, daily life is influenced significantly by the connectivity between millions of individuals and devices all around the world, which exchange information and data via the internet. The main architecture in which all internet-enabled objects are connected is called the Internet of Things (IoT). The IoT has various applications in smart cities, smart farming, smart industry, e-health, etc. In the case of smart cities, the IoT ...
Scalability of Data Processing in Multi-Tier Internet of Things Architectures KU Leuven
Sensor networks typically gather information and centralize in a backend server application. However, considering the current evolution of the number of Internet of Things (IoT) devices this will amount to a huge network traffic and a substantial load of the backend application. This PhD topic wants to utilize the whole IoT infrastructure to distribute data processing steps. In this way, a multi-tier data processing chain can be constructed ...
Signal/circuit/full-wave co-design of resilient ultra-wideband wireless systems for the Internet of Things KU Leuven
Integrated wireless units for the Internet of Things and the fifth-generation (5G) wireless communication system must provide stable high data rates at a reasonable cost. These new ultrawideband (UWB) devices will be integrated in low-cost objects and deployed in adverse conditions that cause drastic variations in the antenna’s radiation characteristics and RF frontend’s operating point. This project provides a fundamentally new formalism to ...
Resilient Signal/Circuit/Full-wave co-design of ultra-wideband wirelesssystems for the Internet of Things Ghent University
The project performs fundamental research in the area of wireless communication, aiming for a novel adaptive ultra-wideband (UWB) communication paradigm compatible with the fifth generation wireless communication system and the Internet of Things.
Simulation based testing of large scale internet of things applications. University of Antwerp
Scalability of data analytics in Health related Activity recognition in Internet of Things KU Leuven
Ubiquitous presence of wearables and smartphones has enabled unobtrusive collection of human activity and vital signs related data in abundance from sensors such as accelerometer, photoplethysmogram, galvanic skin response, electrocardiogram among many others. Data analytics on such healthcare data has immense potential in improving quality of life outside hospital and nursing homes. In this work, we focus on developing learning approaches ...
Tetra Project: "Horizontal IoT" Towards a more powerful internet of things (IoT) with oneM2M driven service standardization and an ingenious combination of various low-power radio technologies Erasmushogeschool Brussel
European Integrated Research Training Network on Advanced Cryptographic Technologies for the Internet of Things and the Cloud. KU Leuven
Summary
The goal of this ETN is to develop advanced cryptographic techniques for the Internet of Things and the Cloud and to create implementations that offer a high level of security and increased usability, for a wide range of physical computation platforms. The ITN will equip a group of 15 early stage researchers with a set of interdisciplinary skills combining mathematics, computer science and electrical engineering that will allow ... | https://researchportal.be/en/search?search_api_fulltext=INTERNET%20OF%20THINGS&f%5B0%5D=fris_content_type%3Aproject |
The following definitions are reflect sources identified within three principal documents: (1) the DoD’s Policy Recommendations for the IoT; (2) IEEE’s “Toward a Definition of Internet of Things (IoT)”, which is heavily referenced therein; and (3) GAO’s Report to Congressional Committees on the “Internet of Things: Enhanced Assessments and Guidance Are Needed to Address Security Risks in DoD“. This article is simply intended as a reference page that reflects a sample of definitions most relevant to the Department of Defense. Because a secondary intention was to generate a word-cloud reflecting the content of these definitions, some of the language has been adjusted. Original sources are provided, and these are sorted in ascending order by year. Happy reading!
Is a network that connects uniquely identifiable things to the Internet. The things have sensing/actuation and potential programmability capabilities. Through the exploitation of unique identification and sensing, information about the ‘Thing’ can be collected and the state of the ‘Thing’ can be changed from anywhere, anytime, by anything.
Envisions a self-configuring, adaptive, complex network that interconnects things to the Internet through the use of standard communication protocols. The interconnected things have physical or virtual representation in the digital world, sensing/actuation capability, a programmability feature and are uniquely identifiable. The representation contains information including the thing’s identity, status, location or any other business, social or privately relevant information. The things offer services, with or without human intervention, through the exploitation of unique identification, data capture and communication, and actuation capability. The service is exploited through the use of intelligent interfaces and is made available anywhere, anytime, and for anything taking security into consideration.
Is a scenario in which objects, animals or people are provided with unique identifiers and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
Has evolved from the convergence of wireless technologies, micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) and the Internet.
Has been most closely associated with machine-to-machine (M2M) communication in manufacturing and power, oil and gas utilities. Often, products built with M2M communication capabilities are referred to as being smart (smart label, smart meter, smart grid sensors).
Includes sensors and actuators, physical objects and locations, and even people.
Is essentially about the role of Web technologies to facilitate the development of applications and services for things and their virtual representation, which include sensors and actuators, as well as physical objects tagged with a bar code or NFC.
Our world is getting more and more connected. In the near future not only people will be connected through the Internet, but Internet connectivity will also be brought to billions of tangible objects, creating the Internet of things.
Is the set of IP-addressable devices that interact with the physical environment, which contain elements for sensing, communications, computational processing, and actuation. | https://www.unitedglobalgrp.com/uncategorized/defining-the-iot/ |
The Internet of Things, or IoT refers to physical objects that require an IP address, are connected to the internet, and collect and exchange information with each other via cloud services such as ifttt.com. Reed Switches and reed sensors help monitor various parameters on Internet connected devices using Apps, for example, to monitor the status of a window, or the level of water in a sump etc.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, animals or people that are provided with unique identifiers (UIDs) and the ability to transfer data over a network without requiring human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.
The definition of the Internet of Things has evolved due to the convergence of multiple technologies, real-time analytics, machine learning, commodity sensors, and embedded systems. Traditional fields of embedded systems, wireless sensor networks, control systems, automation (including home and building automation), and others all contribute to enabling the Internet of Things. In the consumer market, IoT technology is most synonymous with products pertaining to the concept of the "smart home", covering devices and appliances (such as lighting fixtures, thermostats, home security systems and cameras, and other home appliances) that support one or more common ecosystems, and can be controlled via devices associated with that ecosystem, such as smartphones and smart speakers.
There are a number of serious concerns about dangers in the growth of IoT, especially in the areas of privacy and security, and consequently industry and governmental moves to begin to address these. | https://www.reed-sensor.com/glossary/internet-of-things/ |
The Internet of Things (IoT) is the ever-expanding network of physical devices, vehicles, home appliances, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and connectivity. These objects connect to and exchange data with each other and with the end user. With the Internet expected to connect more than 20 billion devices by 2020, managing these huge networks is a complex task.
LGS IoT solutions enable the fusion of distributed sensors – connected by a variety of wireless protocols – with analytics tools to enable rapid decision making and responses to aggregated data.
Our IoT solutions leverage a wide range of best-in-class software and hardware elements within a modular and extensible architecture, which we extend with our technical expertise to empower rapid expansion and integration of capabilities needed to manage large IoT systems and networks. | https://www.lgsinnovations.com/pnp-iot-solutions/ |
A complex architecture is required for the realization of an effective, efficient and reliable IoT that takes into account the issues of sensing the real world, transmitting data, and managing the relevant services to build applications . The Internet of the Future is expected to have huge content-oriented traffic, intensive interactions between billions of persons, heterogeneous communications among hosts and smart objects, and provisioning of millions of services, with strict real-time requirements and flexibility in connecting everyone and everything. Key component of the Internet of Future is the Internet of Service, which is aimed at making every possible service widely and easily available through the Internet yielding to higher productivity. Strictly linked to the IoS is the Internet of Things, which is aimed at embodying into the Internet a large number of objects that through standard communication protocols and unique addressing schemes provide services to the final users.
IoTis envisioned to bring together billions of devices, also denoted as smart objects, by connecting them in an Internet-like structure, allowing them to communicate and exchange information and to enable new forms of interaction among things and people. Smart objects are typically equipped with a microcontroller, a radio interface for communication, sensors and/or actuators. Smart objects are constrained devices, with limited capabilities in terms of computational power and memory. They are typically battery-powered, thus introducing even more constraints on energy consumption: this motivates the quest for energy-efficient technologies, communication/networking protocols and mechanisms. The Internet Protocol (IP) has been widely envisaged as the true IoT enabler, as it allows to bring the full interoperability among heterogeneous objects .
2. Social IoT and Service Search
The Internet of Things (IoT) integrates a large number of heterogeneous and pervasive objects that continuously generate information about the physical world . A SIoT network is based on the idea that every object can autonomously establish a connection for the desired service by using its relationships, query in its friends and the friends of its friends in a distributed manner, guaranteeing an efficient and scalable discovery of objects and services following the same principles of social networks for humans
of objects connected to the network is increasing exponentially, leading to an enormous searching space.A centralized system has been proposed in where objects are contacted based on a prediction model that calculates the probability of matching the query. In this way, the search engine does not need to contact all the sensors leading to good scalability with the number of objects; nevertheless, it is not scalable with the network traffic, since the number of possible results is significantly larger than the number of actual results, so a lot of sensors are contacted for no reason.
Like for human beings, one way of socialization among objects can be a parental object relationship, defined among similar objects, built in the same period by the same manufacturer. This relationship is easily implemented during the item production, will not change overtime and is only updated by events of disruption/obsolescence of a given device.
Moreover, objects can establish co-location object relationship and co-work object relationship, like humans do when they share personal or public experiences. These relations are determined whenever objects(e.g., sensors, actuators, RFID Tags, etc.) constantly reside in the same place (e.g., to offer home/industrial automation services) or periodically cooperate to provide a common IoT application, such as emergency response and telemedicine .A further type of relationship is ownership object relationship, defined for objects owned by the same user (mobile phones, game consoles, etc.). The last relationship is social object relationship, established when objects come into contact, sporadically or continuously, for reasons purely related to relations among their owners (e.g., devices/sensors belonging to friends).
Similarly to people exchanging their contacts (phone numbers, e-mail addresses, etc.), the device, if properly authorized, autonomously exchanges its social profile. The driving idea is that devices with similar characteristics and profile can share best practice to solve problems already faced by ‘friends’.
3. Security and Privacy
Inadequate security on Internet of Things devices could enable intruders to access and misuse sensitive information collected and transmitted by the device. In a complex system of Iot, introducing objects into the active control processes without human intervention, makes IoT security very difficult to address.
The confidentiality of private data and information is of utmost importance in order to ensure the privacy of users. The device authenticity can be easily achieved in network-dependent communication. However, in an autonomous network, device authentication is still an issue .The integrity of the data transmitted in huge amount of traffic that will be generate din the IoT environment needs to be ensured on an end-to-end basis on every link on a multi-hop route.
There are two types of security attacks in device-to-device communication in IoT:
1) Inference attack: This is an attack on privacy, which is carried out by logically or statistically studying data transmission patterns between devices.
2) Distributed denial-of-service attack: This can be carried out by jamming autonomous device-to-device communications to disable the operation of devices.
The general network architecture is divided into three layers: sensing layer, transport layer and application layer. The threat of RFID and Wireless sensor network’s security are the major security problems of sensing layer . There are many security problems in the sensor network, such as external attack and link layer security, Witch attack, HELLO flooding attack, wormhole and sewage pool, selective forwarding attack, broadcast authentication and flooding etc.
The transport layer is composed of a variety of networks, including the internet, 3G communication network and the cloud computing platform, it is the centre of the whole network, it is in charge of the transmission and processing of information which is obtained by perception layer. Key technologies of the transport layer include long distance wired and wireless communication protocol, network integration technology and magnanimous intelligent information processing technology etc. There are many security problems in the transport layer, such as DOS attack, DDOS attack, impersonation attack, middleman attacks, cross heterogeneous network attacks etc. .
The application layer is interface between the Internet of things and users, which uses data mining, cloud computing, fuzzy recognition and other intelligent computing technologies to process magnanimous data and provide effective information
1. Quick and decisive actions need to be taken to manage and protect the label identity, to use communication technology and biological recognition technology, to protect RFID security and privacy better. Wireless sensor network is an important part of the sensing layer. The password and key technology, secure routing, secure data aggregation, security and privacy protection should be studied more comprehensive.
2. Transport layer security mechanism can be comprehensive utilization of point to point encryption and end-to-end encryption mechanism. In addition, we should strengthen the transport layer of the cross domain authentication and cross network authentication.
3. Strengthen the database access control policy, Strengthen authentication mechanism and encryption mechanism of different scenarios, strengthen the data tracing ability and network forensics capability and improve the network crime forensics mechanism, then establish a comprehensive, unified efficient safety management platform. | https://www.essaysauce.com/information-technology-essays/essay-effective-efficient-and-reliable-iot/ |
In 1999, when the whole world was getting ready for the so-called “millennium bug”, which feared thought to paralyze individual computers as well as entire networks due to a faulty calendar date format, Kevin Ashton coined the term “the Internet of Things” (IoT) in which physical objects could directly or indirectly obtain, store, send, or process data, mostly via computer networks. Twenty years on, no conclusive definition of IoT has been widely adopted, despite a vast body of publications on the subject. One way to describe the IoT concept is to acknowledge a great proliferation of interconnected smart products with advancements in the field of sensor technology and Internet connectivity. In this approach, the Internet has been extended to encompass physical objects capable of communicating with each other. Thus, the Internet as a technology is here thought to form a sphere that could also accommodate a multiplicity of smart devices, and as such it is termed the Internet of Things.
In another approach, the IoT concept is grounded in machines and devices equipped with sensors and actuators for executing actions. In this context, these interconnected physical objects delineate areas for Internet activity, such as collecting data, remote monitoring, decision-making algorithms, process optimization, etc.
Irrespective of the approach to defining the IoT, the concept is founded on four basic elements:
- objects equipped with sensors and actuators,
- a computer network connecting the objects,
- data exchange and processing systems,
- modules (e.g., computer applications) for generating information and making inferences.
The above elements constitute prerequisites for the IoT as physical objects themselves, even those possessing the most technologically advanced sensors and actuators, but without connectivity (computer networks) and without systems enabling data exchange and processing, cannot function in the Internet sphere. On the other hand, the presence of physical objects in the Internet sphere would be pointless if they did not generate information (by means of applications).
Within the IoT, objects are expected to be enabled with four basic functionalities:
- monitoring,
- control,
- optimization,
- autonomy.
“the IoT concept is grounded in machines and devices equipped with sensors and actuators for executing actions”
The first two functionalities are associated with sensors installed in physical objects. The application of actuators and information-generating and inference modules can greatly enhance the functionality of such objects. Furthermore, monitoring, control, and optimization may ensure levels of autonomy unattainable without the cooperation of all elements comprising the IoT. Thus, the IoT is a concept that presupposes the simultaneous presence of certain components and defines some of their functionalities. Thus, the IoT can be conceived of as an ecosystem in which objects communicate with one another, with or without human participation. The main application areas of this ecosystem are thought to be :
- environment and water management,
- industry and manufacturing,
- transport and energy,
- cities, buildings, and homes,
- health and living.
Simply speaking, the elements that may obtain, collect, send, or process data using a computer network (the constitutive components of the IoT) may be present in all areas of human life, that is, at home, at work, during travel, and indeed, wherever humans may find themselves, the only precondition being access to a network ensuring connectivity between those devices. This is schematically presented in Fig. 2.
Fig. 2. Areas of IoT applicability
The author of the IoT probably did not anticipate the vast number of devices that would be consistent with his novel concept, which has been growing rapidly over the past years. According to Gartner’s predictions, the global sales of IoT devices are going to reach 25 billion by 2050, which means a more than eightfold increase on 2013 (approx. 3.0 billion). According to sales data from the manufacturers of mobiles devices, in 2015 Apple sold 78.1 million smart devices for daily activity and vital sign monitoring, a major increase from 28.8 million the year before.9
SMART PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT SYSTEMS
Smart personal protective equipment (PPE) systems have also been defined in different ways. According to the current definition by the European Committee for Standardization (CEN) , these are products containing smart textiles or having built-in electronic elements to facilitate the user’s integration with the work environment. Another definition, very similar to the one above, further specifies the design and functioning of such devices as individual PPE products or sets thereof incorporating smart and/or active materials or sensors and micro-electromechanical systems enabling additional, specific functions, and especially active interaction between the user and the environment.
Thus, the definition of smart PPE systems depends not only on technological advancement, but also on assumptions concerning the materials and features that such products must possess. While the CEN’s definition mentions only “smart textiles” (a term that could be substituted, more broadly, with “active materials”), it is a critical part of the definition referring to materials or technology.
Given that smart PPE has become a familiar notion in the occupational and health literature (OSH), and being aware of the evolution of its definition with scientific developments, we hereby propose the term “smart PPE systems,” which consist of personal protective products with integrated sensors and other hardware and software components enabling the transmission and storage of data from those sensors. If those data further lead to the generation of information triggering user interaction, the system should be deemed “smart.”
DATA AND INFORMATION CIRCULATION IN SMART PPE SYSTEMS
An example illustrating the circulation of data and information in a work environment is presented below (Fig. 3). It describes a system consisting of sensors integrated with PPE products. The constitutive elements of the system are:
- an electronic identifier (a chip card),
- a sensor module integrated with PPE enabling the monitoring of such parameters as the heart rate, skin temperature, breathing rate, motion (presence or absence of movement), and position,
- a computer with software controlling the system,
- an alarm module alerting the user to health hazards or restricted locations,
- a computing cloud.
Fig. 3. Sample scheme of data and information circulation in a system consisting of PPE with integrated sensors
In the example given above, the user has an electronic identifier, such as a chip card containing his or her ID data. In order to initialize the system, the user must log in by means of, e.g., his or her name, position, function, etc., to enable the software to correlate the data received by the sensors with a given person. Those data are sent on-line to the cloud via electronic modules. Thus, sensors should be understood as elements containing both detectors and data transmission systems. Once in the cloud, the data are sent to a computer with software operating the system. The software also contains applications that generate information about the user’s health and location. That information is redirected to the cloud, where it may trigger an alarm (in the case of a health hazard or a restricted location). Information about alarms is also sent via the cloud to a computer which records the history of such alarms.
Data may also be stored in identifiers and electronic modules. Given that electronic identifiers fulfil the function of an ID card, the safety of the data recorded in them is largely the responsibility of the users. Indeed, users should be aware of the fact that in the event of a loss or unauthorized sharing of the identifier, a third party may log into the system. In the case of modules enabling data transmission to the cloud, it is recommended that they do not record data, and in particular personal details, for the sake of data security. Modules transmitting data to the cloud are typically integrated with the PPE, either permanently or not. In the latter case, such modules may be external to the sensors and placed in a specially designed pouches or pockets. The permanent local storage or personal data would pose the risk of unauthorized access (e.g., by technical staff or cleaning personnel, etc.).
The above example of data and information circulation in a work environment shows that in order to ensure the security of the data and information generated by the system, one should implement independent security solutions for the three layers of the IoT architecture, that is, the perception, transport, and application layers.
Perception layer security means preventing access of unauthorized persons to all physical elements of the system presented in Fig. 3, that is, computers, electronic identifiers, sensors, etc. In this case, authorized personnel includes:
- smart PPE systems,
- work supervisor,
- system maintenance specialist,
- data administrator.
Importantly, users, who obviously have access to the sensors and alarm modules integrated with PPE, should not be able to modify their function. Any and all activities linked to the operation, maintenance, and calibration of those modules may be performed only by the designated person responsible for those areas. Identifiers should be accessible not only to the users, but also to the maintenance and supervising personnel. Access to the computer with software operating the system should be restricted to the maintenance and security staff, as well as the data administrator. Last but not least, only the administrator should be able to access the data in the cloud.
In the transport layer, data security should be ensured by encrypting data and information transmission in all the instances shown in the diagram. The encryption of data transmission is the responsibility of the maintenance personnel.
In the application layer, protection involves encrypted access points to all applications available in the cloud and on the computer (using a login, password, fingerprint verification, etc.). In this layer, it is the data administrator who is responsible for data security and who should verify passwords (for strength), login procedures, and the status of the resources stored in the memory of the computer supporting the system and in the computing cloud.
RECOMMENDATIONS FOR SECURE DATA AND INFORMATION CIRCULATION IN SMART PPE SYSTEMS
Integrity, confidentiality and accessibility must be ensured for all data. Integrity means that the collected data are complete and collected with sufficient accuracy to generate the desired information while providing appropriate processing methods. According to the principle of confidentiality, the collected data / information should be only available to the authorized personnel. Finally, accessibility means that authorized persons should have access to the data / information whenever necessary. In order to ensure the safety of the data generated, stored and transmitted by smart PPE systems operating within the implemented security architecture, it is crucial for the employer to fulfil the following conditions:
- Fulfilling the legal requirements. The procedures for generating, storing and transmitting data should comply with the applicable regulations (GDPR). The employer should appoint an administrator responsible for the security of personal data as well as a supervisor overseeing the work of smart PPE users and a maintenance officer responsible for the entire smart PPE system.
- Training and keeping workers informed. Smart PPE users should be informed about procedures for data generation, storage, and transmission. They should also be trained in the use of smart PPE systems and data access protocols.
- Obtaining consent from workers. Smart PPE users should express informed consent for their personal data to be processed.
- Securing access. Access to the various components of the smart PPE system should be enabled only for authorized personnel.
- Preventing data leaks. To prevent data leaks, it is not recommended for monitored data to be sent to the employer’s servers or computing clouds. Ideally, the data should be recorded locally on the device used by the worker. Data may be sent only in justified cases. Under no circumstances should one post data (in particular sensitive data) on social networks.
- Deleting data that are no longer needed. At the end of work, all inessential data that were collected by smart PPE systems should be deleted, if possible, automatically.
- System control and supervision. The efficient operation of smart PPE systems, both in technical terms (including penetration tests, sensor inspections, etc.), as well as in terms of compliance with procedures for the verification of passwords and personnel authorized to access the various elements of the system, is an indispensable element of data and information security.
Fig. 4 shows a schematic diagram of the seven elements listed above, crucial to the secure circulation of the data and information generated, stored and transmitted by smart PPE systems.
Fig. 4. Schematic representation of the elements crucial to the secure circulation of the data and information generated, stored and transmitted by smart PPE systems
To efficiently implement the above-mentioned best practices, it is essential to follow general data protection and cyber-security recommendations applicable to all systems, and to smart PPE systems in particular. Of key importance is also a good understanding of the applicable regulations pertaining to the protection and flow of personal data. | https://www.hsimagazine.com/press-release/the-iot-and-ppe/ |
The Internet of things (IoT) is the inter-networking of physical devices, vehicles (also referred to as “connected devices” and “smart devices”), buildings, and other items embedded with electronics, software, sensors, actuators, and network connectivity which enable these objects to collect and exchange data.
Addressing cybersecurity of the Internet of Things this conference is a direct partnership with the PETRAS Research Hub, a consortium of nine leading UK universities working together to explore critical issues in privacy, ethics, trust, reliability, acceptability, and security and IoTUK, a national programme designed to accelerate the UK’s Internet of Things (IoT) capability, launched as part of the Government’s £32m investment in IoT.
This inaugural conference will provide insight into how society can benefit from the power of interconnected devices (the IoT) while remaining safe, secure and resilient.
The event programme incorporates keynote plenary talks, interactive panel discussions, technical paper presentations, poster displays, industry exhibition, workshops, seminars and demonstrations workshops.
The IoTUK exhibition and forum will be held in conjunction with the Living in the Internet of Things main conference. With representatives from all IoTUK Programme: PETRAS academics, the NHS IoT Testbeds, Manchester’s CityVerve smart city initiative, the Hardware Accelerators – Startupbootcamp and R/GA Ventures and from Digital Catapult as well as speakers from leading industry PETRAS partners, expect engaging panel discussions as well as an opportunity to learn more about the work of the IoTUK programme.
All delegates will also gain access to the IoTUK exhibition and forum which will focus on how the internet of things is changing the world around us: how citizens are responding to the IoT deployments in smart cities, how complex ecosystems are being created which combine business, academia and the public sector to deploy IoT technology; considerations around privacy, security, risk and trust in IoT and more. There will also be an opportunity to network with key players in the IoT industry.
All attendees of the Living in the IoT conference can attend the IoTUK exhibition and forum. | https://commnet.ac.uk/event-alert-living-in-the-internet-of-things-a-petras-iotuk-iet-conference-forum-exhibition/ |
Worker bees are all female and perform various roles in the hive depending on their age. These roles include: nurse bees (clean cells, feed and care for brood) heater bees (warm brood to consistent temperature), guard bees (defend the hive, inspect incoming foraging bees), and bees who serve in the court of the queen (feed and care for the queen). Later in life, (approx. 35-49 days old) bees will become field bees (or foragers) who forage for nectar, pollen, water and propolis. They do not gather all these during a single trip, but are specific depending on the needs of the colony. They can travel up to 4 miles to a nectar source, foragers make thousands of trips from the field to the hive to fill a comb with nectar. Their average lifespan is about 6-8 weeks in the summer time. The average foraging life of a bee has been estimated as less than seven days, because of the many risks and severe metabolic costs associated with foraging.
Drones are all male and are larger than worker bees. They are fuzzy with larger globed eyes and do not have a stinger to defend the hive. The drones like the queen, do not have body parts to collect nectar and pollen, so they get a bad rap for eating all the honey and doing no work in the hive. But drones have a very important role of passing along the genetics of the colony. This is accomplished by mating with a virgin queen from the local geographical area. Drones will gather about 500 feet in the air, in what is called a drone congregation area, waiting for a queen to mate. By surrounding the inside of the hive at night, they help to maintain brood temperatures at night and during the early Spring. Drones are the only caste members in the hive that can go into another hive and be accepted. Drones do not mate with their own queen. Drones do not overwinter in the hive, they are kicked out of the hives in the fall.
In a backyard hive there is only one queen per hive. She can be identified by her much longer abdomen. Her main function is reproduction, and she will lay thousands of eggs during her lifespan. During peak colony buildup, the queen will lay nearly her body weight in eggs every day, up to 2,000 eggs a day. Her life can last up to 4 to 6 years in optimal conditions. She mates only once in her life with up to about 13 drones in a mating flight. The “Queen's court” (worker bee helpers) attend to the queen to feed and care for her.
What is the difference between a colony and a bee hive?
The bee hive is the 'structure', man -made or natural, like a hollow in a tree, that the bees inhabit. The colony is the group of bees that live inside an individual hive. | https://backyardhive.com/blogs/is-beekeeping-for-me/corwin-what-are-the-types-of-bees-in-a-colony-or-bee-hive |
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Journal Articles
Division of labor in honey bees is associated with transcriptional regulatory plasticity in the brain
In collection:Neuroethology
Adam R. Hamilton, Ian M. Traniello, Allyson M. Ray, Arminius S. Caldwell, Samuel A. Wickline, Gene E. Robinson
J Exp Biol (2019) 222 (14): jeb200196.
Published: 16 July 2019
Abstract
ABSTRACT Studies in evolutionary and developmental biology show that relationships between transcription factors (TFs) and their target genes can be altered to result in novel regulatory relationships that generate phenotypic plasticity. We hypothesized that context-dependent shifts in the nervous system associated with behavior may also be linked to changes in TF–target relationships over physiological time scales. We tested this hypothesis using honey bee ( Apis mellifera ) division of labor as a model system by performing bioinformatic analyses of previously published brain transcriptomic profiles together with new RNAi and behavioral experiments. The bioinformatic analyses identified five TFs that exhibited strong signatures of regulatory plasticity as a function of division of labor. RNAi targeting of one of these TFs ( broad complex ) and a related TF that did not exhibit plasticity ( fushi tarazu transcription factor 1 ) was administered in conjunction with automated analyses of foraging behavior in the field, laboratory assays of aggression and brood care behavior, and endocrine treatments. The results showed that changes in the regulatory relationships of these TFs were associated with behavioral state, social context and endocrine state. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that TF–target relationships in the brain are altered in conjunction with behavior and social context. They also suggest that one mechanism for this plasticity involves pleiotropic TFs high up in regulatory hierarchies producing behavior-specific transcriptional responses by activating different downstream TFs to induce discrete context-dependent transcriptional cascades. These findings provide new insights into the dynamic nature of the transcriptional regulatory architecture underlying behavior in the brain.
Includes: Supplementary data
Journal Articles
J Exp Biol (2018) 221 (23): jeb153163.
Published: 26 November 2018
Abstract
ABSTRACT For over a century, biologists have proposed a role for phenotypic plasticity in evolution, providing an avenue for adaptation in addition to ‘mutation-first’ models of evolutionary change. According to the various versions of this idea, the ability of organisms to respond adaptively to their environment through phenotypic plasticity may lead to novel phenotypes that can be screened by natural selection. If these initially environmentally induced phenotypes increase fitness, then genetic accommodation can lead to allele frequency change, influencing the expression of those phenotypes. Despite the long history of ‘plasticity-first’ models, the importance of genetic accommodation in shaping evolutionary change has remained controversial – it is neither fully embraced nor completely discarded by most evolutionary biologists. We suggest that the lack of acceptance of genetic accommodation in some cases is related to a lack of information on its molecular mechanisms. However, recent reports of epigenetic transgenerational inheritance now provide a plausible mechanism through which genetic accommodation may act, and we review this research here. We also discuss current evidence supporting a role for genetic accommodation in the evolution of eusociality in social insects, which have long been models for studying the influence of the environment on phenotypic variation, and may be particularly good models for testing hypotheses related to genetic accommodation. Finally, we introduce ‘eusocial engineering’, a method by which novel social phenotypes are first induced by environmental modification and then studied mechanistically to understand how environmentally induced plasticity may lead to heritable changes in social behavior. We believe the time is right to incorporate genetic accommodation into models of the evolution of complex traits, armed with new molecular tools and a better understanding of non-genetic heritable elements.
Journal Articles
J Exp Biol (2016) 219 (22): 3554–3561.
Published: 15 November 2016
Abstract
ABSTRACT We used transcriptomics to compare instinctive and learned, reward-based honey bee behaviors with similar spatio-temporal components: mating flights by males (drones) and time-trained foraging flights by females (workers), respectively. Genome-wide gene expression profiling via RNA sequencing was performed on the mushroom bodies, a region of the brain known for multi-modal sensory integration and responsive to various types of reward. Differentially expressed genes (DEGs) associated with the onset of mating (623 genes) were enriched for the gene ontology (GO) categories of Transcription, Unfolded Protein Binding, Post-embryonic Development, and Neuron Differentiation. DEGs associated with the onset of foraging (473) were enriched for Lipid Transport, Regulation of Programmed Cell Death, and Actin Cytoskeleton Organization. These results demonstrate that there are fundamental molecular differences between similar instinctive and learned behaviors. In addition, there were 166 genes with strong similarities in expression across the two behaviors – a statistically significant overlap in gene expression, also seen in Weighted Gene Co-Expression Network Analysis. This finding indicates that similar instinctive and learned behaviors also share common molecular architecture. This common set of DEGs was enriched for Regulation of RNA Metabolic Process, Transcription Factor Activity, and Response to Ecdysone. These findings provide a starting point for better understanding the relationship between instincts and learned behaviors. In addition, because bees collect food for their colony rather than for themselves, these results also support the idea that altruistic behavior relies, in part, on elements of brain reward systems associated with selfish behavior.
Includes: Supplementary data
Journal Articles
Diet and endocrine effects on behavioral maturation-related gene expression in the pars intercerebralis of the honey bee brain
J Exp Biol (2015) 218 (24): 4005–4014.
Published: 01 December 2015
Abstract
ABSTRACT Nervous and neuroendocrine systems mediate environmental conditions to control a variety of life history traits. Our goal was to provide mechanistic insights as to how neurosecretory signals mediate division of labor in the honey bee ( Apis mellifera ). Worker division of labor is based on a process of behavioral maturation by individual bees, which involves performing in-hive tasks early in adulthood, then transitioning to foraging for food outside the hive. Social and nutritional cues converge on endocrine factors to regulate behavioral maturation, but whether neurosecretory systems are central to this process is not known. To explore this, we performed transcriptomic profiling of a neurosecretory region of the brain, the pars intercerebralis (PI) . We first compared PI transcriptional profiles for bees performing in-hive tasks and bees engaged in foraging. Using these results as a baseline, we then performed manipulative experiments to test whether the PI is responsive to dietary changes and/or changes in juvenile hormone (JH) levels. Results reveal a robust molecular signature of behavioral maturation in the PI, with a subset of gene expression changes consistent with changes elicited by JH treatment. In contrast, dietary changes did not induce transcriptomic changes in the PI consistent with behavioral maturation or JH treatment. Based on these results, we propose a new verbal model of the regulation of division of labor in honey bees in which the relationship between diet and nutritional physiology is attenuated, and in its place is a relationship between social signals and nutritional physiology that is mediated by JH.
Includes: Supplementary data
Journal Articles
J Exp Biol (2013) 216 (18): 3474–3482.
Published: 15 September 2013
Abstract
SUMMARY During the nest-founding phase of the bumble bee colony cycle, queens undergo striking changes in maternal care behavior. Early in the founding phase, prior to the emergence of workers in the nest, queens are reproductive and also provision and feed their offspring. However, later in the founding phase, queens reduce their feeding of larvae and become specialized on reproduction. This transition is synchronized with the emergence of workers in the colony, who assume the task of feeding their siblings. Using a social manipulation experiment with the bumble bee Bombus terrestris , we tested the hypothesis that workers regulate the transition from feeding brood to specialization on reproduction in nest-founding bumble bee queens. Consistent with this hypothesis, we found that early-stage nest-founding queens with workers prematurely added to their nests reduce their brood-feeding behavior and increase egg laying, and likewise, late-stage nest-founding queens increase their brood-feeding behavior and decrease egg-laying when workers are removed from their nests. Further, brood-feeding and egg-laying behaviors were negatively correlated. We used Agilent microarrays designed from B. terrestris brain expressed sequenced tags (ESTs) to explore a second hypothesis, that workers alter brain gene expression in nest-founding queens. We found evidence that brain gene expression in nest-founding queens is altered by the presence of workers, with the effect being much stronger in late-stage founding queens. This study provides new insights into how the transition from feeding brood to specialization on reproduction in queen bumble bees is regulated during the nest initiation phase of the colony cycle.
Includes: Supplementary data
Journal Articles
J Exp Biol (2013) 216 (11): 2031–2038.
Published: 01 June 2013
Abstract
SUMMARY The natural history of adult worker honey bees ( Apis mellifera ) provides an opportunity to study the molecular basis of learning in an ecological context. Foragers must learn to navigate between the hive and floral locations that may be up to miles away. Young pre-foragers prepare for this task by performing orientation flights near the hive, during which they begin to learn navigational cues such as the appearance of the hive, the position of landmarks, and the movement of the sun. Despite well-described spatial learning and navigation behavior, there is currently limited information on the neural basis of insect spatial learning. We found that Egr , an insect homolog of Egr-1 , is rapidly and transiently upregulated in the mushroom bodies in response to orientation. This result is the first example of an Egr-1 homolog acting as a learning-related immediate-early gene in an insect and also demonstrates that honey bee orientation uses a molecular mechanism that is known to be involved in many other forms of learning. This transcriptional response occurred both in naïve bees and in foragers induced to re-orient. Further experiments suggest that visual environmental novelty, rather than exercise or memorization of specific visual cues, acts as the stimulus for Egr upregulation. Our results implicate the mushroom bodies in spatial learning and emphasize the deep conservation of Egr -related pathways in experience-dependent plasticity.
Journal Articles
Seth A. Ament, Queenie W. Chan, Marsha M. Wheeler, Scott E. Nixon, S. Peir Johnson, Sandra L. Rodriguez-Zas, Leonard J. Foster, Gene E. Robinson
J Exp Biol (2011) 214 (22): 3808–3821.
Published: 15 November 2011
Abstract
SUMMARY Worker honey bees undergo a socially regulated, highly stable lipid loss as part of their behavioral maturation. We used large-scale transcriptomic and proteomic experiments, physiological experiments and RNA interference to explore the mechanistic basis for this lipid loss. Lipid loss was associated with thousands of gene expression changes in abdominal fat bodies. Many of these genes were also regulated in young bees by nutrition during an initial period of lipid gain. Surprisingly, in older bees, which is when maximum lipid loss occurs, diet played less of a role in regulating fat body gene expression for components of evolutionarily conserved nutrition-related endocrine systems involving insulin and juvenile hormone signaling. By contrast, fat body gene expression in older bees was regulated more strongly by evolutionarily novel regulatory factors, queen mandibular pheromone (a honey bee-specific social signal) and vitellogenin (a conserved yolk protein that has evolved novel, maturation-related functions in the bee), independent of nutrition. These results demonstrate that conserved molecular pathways can be manipulated to achieve stable lipid loss through evolutionarily novel regulatory processes.
Includes: Supplementary data
Journal Articles
Nicholas L. Naeger, Byron N. Van Nest, Jennifer N. Johnson, Sam D. Boyd, Bruce R. Southey, Sandra L. Rodriguez-Zas, Darrell Moore, Gene E. Robinson
J Exp Biol (2011) 214 (6): 979–987.
Published: 15 March 2011
Abstract
Honey bees can form distinct spatiotemporal memories that allow them to return repeatedly to different food sources at different times of day. Although it is becoming increasingly clear that different behavioral states are associated with different profiles of brain gene expression, it is not known whether this relationship extends to states that are as dynamic and specific as those associated with foraging-related spatiotemporal memories. We tested this hypothesis by training different groups of foragers from the same colony to collect sucrose solution from one of two artificial feeders; each feeder was in a different location and had sucrose available at a different time, either in the morning or afternoon. Bees from both training groups were collected at both the morning and afternoon training times to result in one set of bees that was undergoing stereotypical food anticipatory behavior and another that was inactive for each time of day. Between the two groups with the different spatiotemporal memories, microarray analysis revealed that 1329 genes were differentially expressed in the brains of honey bees. Many of these genes also varied with time of day, time of training or state of food anticipation. Some of these genes are known to be involved in a variety of biological processes, including metabolism and behavior. These results indicate that distinct spatiotemporal foraging memories in honey bees are associated with distinct neurogenomic signatures, and the decomposition of these signatures into sets of genes that are also influenced by time or activity state hints at the modular composition of this complex neurogenomic phenotype.
Includes: Supplementary data
Journal Articles
J Exp Biol (2009) 212 (2): 163–168.
Published: 15 January 2009
Abstract
SUMMARY The role of cocaine as an addictive drug of abuse in human society is hard to reconcile with its ecological role as a natural insecticide and plant-protective compound, preventing herbivory of coca plants( Erythroxylum spp.). This paradox is often explained by proposing a fundamental difference in mammalian and invertebrate responses to cocaine, but here we show effects of cocaine on honey bees ( Apis mellifera L.)that parallel human responses. Forager honey bees perform symbolic dances to advertise the location and value of floral resources to their nest mates. Treatment with a low dose of cocaine increased the likelihood and rate of bees dancing after foraging but did not otherwise increase locomotor activity. This is consistent with cocaine causing forager bees to overestimate the value of the floral resources they collected. Further, cessation of chronic cocaine treatment caused a withdrawal-like response. These similarities likely occur because in both insects and mammals the biogenic amine neuromodulator systems disrupted by cocaine perform similar roles as modulators of reward and motor systems. Given these analogous responses to cocaine in insects and mammals, we propose an alternative solution to the paradox of cocaine reinforcement. Ecologically, cocaine is an effective plant defence compound via disruption of herbivore motor control but, because the neurochemical systems targeted by cocaine also modulate reward processing, the reinforcing properties of cocaine occur as a `side effect'.
Journal Articles
Herman K. Lehman, David J. Schulz, Andrew B. Barron, Lydia Wraight, Chris Hardison, Sandra Whitney, Hideaki Takeuchi, Rajib K. Paul, Gene E. Robinson
J Exp Biol (2006) 209 (14): 2774–2784.
Published: 15 July 2006
Abstract
SUMMARY The biogenic amine octopamine (OA) is involved in the regulation of honey bee behavioral development; brain levels are higher in foragers than bees working in the hive, especially in the antennal lobes, and treatment causes precocious foraging. We measured brain mRNA and protein activity of tyramineβ-hydroxylase (T βh), an enzyme vital for OA synthesis, in order to begin testing the hypothesis that this enzyme is responsible for the rising levels of OA during honey bee behavioral development. Brain OA levels were greater in forager bees than in bees engaged in brood care, as in previous studies, but T βh activity was not correlated with bee behavior. Tβh mRNA levels, however, did closely track OA levels during behavioral development, and T βh mRNA was localized to previously identified octopaminergic neurons in the bee brain. Our results show that the transcription of this neurotransmitter synthetic enzyme is associated with regulation of social behavior in honey bees, but other factors may be involved.
Journal Articles
J Exp Biol (2005) 208 (24): 4641–4649.
Published: 15 December 2005
Abstract
SUMMARY In many social insects, including honey bees, worker energy reserve levels are correlated with task performance in the colony. Honey bee nest workers have abundant stored lipid and protein while foragers are depleted of these reserves; this depletion precedes the shift from nest work to foraging. The first objective of this study was to test the hypothesis that lipid depletion has a causal effect on the age at onset of foraging in honey bees ( Apis mellifera L.). We found that bees treated with a fatty acid synthesis inhibitor (TOFA) were more likely to forage precociously. The second objective of this study was to determine whether there is a relationship between social interactions, nutritional state and behavioral maturation. Since older bees are known to inhibit the development of young bees into foragers, we asked whether this effect is mediated nutritionally via the passage of food from old to young bees. We found that bees reared in social isolation have low lipid stores, but social inhibition occurs in colonies in the field, whether young bees are starved or fed. These results indicate that although social interactions affect the nutritional status of young bees, social and nutritional factors act independently to influence age at onset of foraging. Our findings suggest that mechanisms linking internal nutritional physiology to foraging in solitary insects have been co-opted to regulate altruistic foraging in a social context.
Journal Articles
Phenotypic deconstruction reveals involvement of manganese transporter malvolio in honey bee division of labor
J Exp Biol (2004) 207 (19): 3281–3288.
Published: 01 September 2004
Abstract
SUMMARY Molecular analysis of a complex behavioral phenotype is facilitated by dissecting it into simpler behavioral components. Using this approach, we present evidence implicating increased manganese transport by the malvolio ( mvl ) gene into brain cells as one factor that influences age-related division of labor in honey bee colonies. We studied mvl because manganese affects sucrose responsiveness in Drosophila melanogaster , and sucrose responsiveness is related to division of labor in honey bee colonies. Honey bee foragers are more responsive to sucrose in the laboratory than are younger nurse bees, and pollen foragers are more responsive to sucrose than nectar foragers. Levels of mvl mRNA in the brain and manganese in the head were higher in pollen foragers compared with nurses, with nectar foragers intermediate. Manganese treatment increased honey bee sucrose responsiveness and caused precocious foraging. Manganese levels showed a similar pattern to mvl mRNA but manganese treatment did not increase pollen foraging. These results suggest that, while there are molecular pathways common to sucrose responsiveness and division of labor, linkages between a complex behavior and some of its simpler behavioral components are not obligatory. Together with previous findings,these results support the idea that some feeding-related genes in Drosophila have been used in social evolution to regulate division of labor.
Journal Articles
Juvenile hormone and division of labor in honey bee colonies: effects of allatectomy on flight behavior and metabolism
Joseph P. Sullivan, Susan E. Fahrbach, Jon F. Harrison, Elizabeth A. Capaldi, Jennifer H. Fewell, Gene E. Robinson
J Exp Biol (2003) 206 (13): 2287–2296.
Published: 01 July 2003
Abstract
SUMMARY Three experiments were performed to determine why removal of the corpora allata (the glands that produce juvenile hormone) causes honey bees to fail to return to their hive upon initiating flight. In Experiment 1, the naturally occurring flights of allatectomized bees were tracked with radar to determine whether the deficit is physical or cognitive. The results indicated a physical impairment: allatectomized bees had a significantly slower ground speed than sham and untreated bees during orientation flights, but otherwise attributes such as flight range and area were normal. Flight impairment was confirmed in Experiment 2, based on observations of takeoff made in the field at the hive entrance. The allatectomized group had a significantly smaller percentage of flightworthy bees than did the sham and untreated groups. Experiment 3 confirmed the flight impairment in laboratory tests and showed that allatectomy causes a decrease in metabolic rate. Allatectomized bees had significantly lower metabolic rates than untreated and sham bees, while allatectomized bees receiving hormone replacement had intermediate values. These results indicate that allatectomy causes flight impairment, probably partly due to effects on metabolic rate. They also suggest that juvenile hormone plays an additional, previously unknown, role in coordinating the physiological underpinning of division of labor in honey bee colonies. | https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/search-results?f_AllAuthors=Gene+E.+Robinson |
As concerns for pollinators, especially honey bees, continue to grow in the eye of the public, interest from the science community has grown just as much to advance understanding of the many threats bees are facing. For instance, risk assessments have examined the ways in which honey bees can be exposed to pesticides whenever they’re used. However, such assessments have previously utilized honey bees as stand-ins for all types of bees. Bee species are much more varied than just the honey bee, and entomologists are working to improve risk assessments to consider the variations between the honey bee and its bumble, stingless, and solitary bee cousins.
When it comes to bumblebees, Dr. Angela Gradish, who is a research associate with the University of Guelph’s School of Environmental Sciences, says, “The most important thing honey bee risk assessments miss is the potential exposure of bumblebee queens to pesticides.” Whereas the queens of honey bee colonies live solely in their hive while the worker bees are out foraging, bumblebee queens actually spend large amounts of time outside the colony foraging. With honey bees as the standard, queens being directly exposed to pesticides isn’t considered during a risk assessment. “This is significant because the loss of a bumblebee queen means the potential loss of an entire bumblebee colony,” says Gradish.
Gradish was the lead writer for a report recently published in Environmental Entomology, which reviewed the existing research for bumblebee pesticide exposure and compared it with honey bees. Another key difference in the exposure risks of bumblebees and honey bees is the effect of pesticides on soil. Differentiating from honey bees, some bumblebees make nests in the soil and others hibernate in it, where queens can make contact with residue from pesticides. | https://manukahoneyusa.com/do-pesticides-have-different-risks-for-non-honey-bees/ |
The Florida Honeybee
A honey bee (or honeybee) is any member of the genus Apis, primarily distinguished by the production and storage of honey and the construction of perennial, colonial nests from wax.
Honey bees are the only extant members of the tribe Apini, all in the genus Apis. Currently, only seven species of honey bee are recognized, with a total of 44 subspecies, though historically, from six to eleven species have been recognized.
Honey bees represent only a small fraction of the roughly 20,000 known species of bees. Some other types of related bees produce and store honey, but only members of the genus Apis are true honey bees. The study of honey bees is known as apiology.
Honey bees appear to have their center of origin in South and Southeast Asia (including the Philippines), as all but one (i.e. Apis mellifera), of the extant species are native to that region.
Notably, living representatives of the earliest lineages to diverge (Apis florea and Apis andreniformis) have their center of origin there.
The first Apis bees appear in the fossil record at the Eocene–Oligocene boundary (23–56 mya), in European deposits. The origin of these prehistoric honey bees does not necessarily indicate Europe as the place of origin of the genus, only that the bees were present in Europe by that time. A few fossil deposits are known from South Asia, the suspected region of honey bee origin, and fewer still have been thoroughly studied.
No Apis species existed in the New World during human times before the introduction of A. mellifera by Europeans. Only one fossil species is documented from the New World, Apis nearctica, known from a single 14 million-year old specimen from Nevada.
The close relatives of modern honey bees – e.g. bumblebees and stingless bees – are also social to some degree, and social behavior seems a plesiomorphic trait that predates the origin of the genus. Among the extant members of Apis, the more basal species make single, exposed combs, while the more recently evolved species nest in cavities and have multiple combs, which has greatly facilitated their domestication.
Most species have historically been cultured or at least exploited for honey and beeswax by humans indigenous to their native ranges. Only two of these species have been truly domesticated, one (A. mellifera) at least since the time of the building of the Egyptian pyramids, and only that species has been moved extensively beyond its native range.
As in a few other types of eusocial bees, a colony generally contains one queen bee, a fertile female; seasonally up to a few thousand drone bees, or fertile males; and tens of thousands of sterile female worker bees.
Details vary among the different species of honey bees, but common features include:
Eggs are laid singly in a cell in a wax honeycomb, produced and shaped by the worker bees. Using her spermatheca, the queen actually can choose to fertilize the egg she is laying, usually depending on into which cell she is laying. Drones develop from unfertilised eggs and are haploid, while females (queens and worker bees) develop from fertilised eggs and are diploid. Larvae are initially fed with royal jelly produced by worker bees, later switching to honey and pollen. The exception is a larva fed solely on royal jelly, which will develop into a queen bee. The larva undergoes several moultings before spinning a cocoon within the cell, and pupating.
Young worker bees, sometimes called “nurse bees”, clean the hive and feed the larvae. When their royal jelly-producing glands begin to atrophy, they begin building comb cells. They progress to other within-colony tasks as they become older, such as receiving nectar and pollen from foragers, and guarding the hive. Later still, a worker takes her first orientation flights and finally leaves the hive and typically spends the remainder of her life as a forager.
Worker bees cooperate to find food and use a pattern of “dancing” (known as the bee dance or waggle dance) to communicate information regarding resources with each other; this dance varies from species to species, but all living species of Apis exhibit some form of the behavior. If the resources are very close to the hive, they may also exhibit a less specific dance commonly known as the “round dance”.
Honey bees also perform tremble dances, which recruit receiver bees to collect nectar from returning foragers.
Virgin queens go on mating flights away from their home colony to a drone congregation area, and mate with multiple drones before returning. The drones die in the act of mating. Queen honey bees do not mate with drones from their home colony.
Colonies are established not by solitary queens, as in most bees, but by groups known as “swarms”, which consist of a mated queen and a large contingent of worker bees. This group moves en masse to a nest site scouted by worker bees beforehand. Once they arrive, they immediately construct a new wax comb and begin to raise new worker brood. This type of nest founding is not seen in any other living bee genus, though several groups of vespid wasps also found new nests by swarming (sometimes including multiple queens). Also, stingless bees will start new nests with large numbers of worker bees, but the nest is constructed before a queen is escorted to the site, and this worker force is not a true “swarm”.
A caste is a different form, morphologically or reproductively, within the same sex of a species.
Honey bees have three castes, drones, workers, and queens. There are two sexes: drones are male, while workers and queens are female.
Drones
Males or drones are typically haploid, having only one set of chromosomes. They are produced by the queen if she chooses not to fertilize an egg; or by an unfertilized laying worker. Diploid drones may be produced if an egg is fertilized but is homozygous for the sex-determination allele. Drones take 24 days to develop and may be produced from summer through autumn. Drones have large eyes used to locate queens during mating flights. Drones do not have a sting.
Workers
Workers are female bees and have two sets of chromosomes. They are produced from an egg that the queen has selectively fertilized from stored sperm. Workers typically develop in 21 days. A typical colony may contain as many as 60,000 worker bees. Workers exhibit a wider range of behaviors than either queens or drones. Their duties change upon the age of the bee in the following order (beginning with cleaning out their own cell after eating through their capped brood cell): feed brood, receive nectar, clean hive, guard duty, and foraging. Some workers engage in other specialized behaviors, such as “undertaking” (removing corpses of their nestmates from inside the hive).
Workers have morphological specializations, including the corbiculum or pollen basket, abdominal glands that produce beeswax, brood-feeding glands, and barbs on the sting. Under certain conditions (for example, if the colony becomes queenless), a worker may develop ovaries.
Queens
Queen honey bees, like workers, are female. They are created at the decision of the worker bees by feeding a larva only royal jelly throughout its development, rather than switching from royal jelly to pollen once the larva grows past a certain size. Queens are produced in oversized cells and develop in only 16 days. Queens have a different morphology and behavior from worker bees. In addition to the greater size of the queen, she has a functional set of ovaries, and a spermatheca, which stores and maintains sperm after she has mated. The sting of queens is not barbed like a worker’s sting, and queens lack the glands that produce beeswax. Once mated, queens may lay up to 2,000 eggs per day. They produce a variety of pheromones that regulate behavior of workers, and helps swarms track the queen’s location during the migratory phase.
The bee featured here is only a few minutes old, having just hatched from a Palm Beach Beekeepers Association hive during their exhibit at Daggerwing Nature Center’s 2015 Earth Day Celebration.
For more information on beekeeping and honey bees, visit the Palm Beach Beekepers’ Association’s website.
For more information on other native Floridian flora and fauna, visit Daggerwing Nature Center’s website or stop by the location in person. | http://morg.rocks/fl-honey-bee/ |
How do scientists know that all the worker and soldier bees in a colony are female? It doesn't make sense that scientists would just kill all the bees in a colony and then dissect them to determine their gender.
Most likely, scientists can determine the gender of the bees visually.
Scientists observing a beehive most likely noted that all the bees that were foraging or defending the hive had the characteristics of female, and from that they might have concluded that all the worker bees in a colony are female. | https://www.qalaxia.com/questions/Question-about-bees |
This colony of bees was very docile – I probably could have done the whole removal without a bee suit – but I always suit up – just in case one rogue wants to tag me.
When performing removals – we don’t always get to pick the ideal conditions. Environmental factors play a big role in the behavior of a hive.
When it’s windy, overcast, humid, etc, etc… there are more bees at home than usual – and are in defense mode instead of out foraging.
These bees have been in the soffit for a while. The homeowner bought the house recently, and needs to do some work – that the bees were preventing.
After a successful removal – the bees were re-homed to a Harmony Hollow Apiary outyard – and are doing well.
It’s been a while, however I found this gem of a video in the vault – that never got published. A swarm arrived at this young lady’s home the night before. | http://www.bohemianutopia.com/?cat=105 |
Abstract - The individual behavior of foraging bees was analysed at low-reward conditions within a collective context. This study compared bee's foraging behavior under non-competitive (individual) and highly competitive (collective) conditions. A regular pattern in the visitation, non-visitation times and the frequency of foraging bouts was observed in bees that collected individually. In contrast, when bees foraged collectively, they demonstrated great variability in their behaviors. Some bees had regular visits to the feeder while others had only sporadic bouts. Individual foraging parameters related to the "persistency" at the feeder were well correlated with the prior foraging experience at this site. Results suggests that prior experience at a feeding place and efficiency as nectar carriers are positively correlated during collective foraging. | https://www.apidologie.org/articles/apido/abs/2005/03/M4063/M4063.html |
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The importance of dietary salt may explain why bees are often observed collecting brackish water, a habit that may expose them to harmful xenobiotics. However, the individual salt preferences of water-collecting bees were not known. We measured the proboscis extension reflex (PER) response of Apis mellifera water foragers to 0-10% w/w solutions of Na, Mg and K, ions that provide essential nutrients. We also tested phosphate, which can deter foraging. Bees exhibited significant preferences, with the most PER responses for 1.5-3% Na and 1.5% Mg. However, K and phosphate were largely aversive and elicited PER responses only for the lowest concentrations, suggesting a way to deter bees from visiting contaminated water. We then analyzed the salt content of water sources that bees collected in urban and semi-urban environments. Bees collected water with a wide range of salt concentrations, but most collected water sources had relatively low salt concentrations, with the exception of seawater and swimming pools, which had >0.6% Na. The high levels of PER responsiveness elicited by 1.5-3% Na may explain why bees are willing to collect such salty water. Interestingly, bees exhibited high individual variation in salt preferences: individual identity accounted for 32% of variation in PER responses. Salt specialization may therefore occur in water foragers.
© 2016. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd.
Apis mellifera; PER; Salt concentration; Sodium preference; Water foraging
National Center for
Biotechnology Information, | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26823100 |
So many people don’t understand what is happening with the Bees! Learn more and save the Bees!
Honey Bees Are Disappearing At An Extremely Fast Rate!
Although it is unknown the exact cause of Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) (a phenomenon at which worker bees from honey bee colonies disappear), we do know there are a lot of likely causes:
- An Overuse Of Pesticides
- Destruction Of Bee Habitats
- Global Warming
- Protruding Species
- Environmental Causes
Why Do Bees Matter?
Our ecosystem relies on the critical role that bees play in it. A third of the fruits and vegetables we eat are depended on the bees for pollination! Bees are vital pollinators! So the sudden disappearance of bees has been very critical to our environment.
Here are some Fruits, Nuts and Vegetables that are dependent on the bees:
- Almonds
- Strawberries
- Blueberries
- Blackberries
- Raspberries
- Kiwifruit
- Peaches
- Cherries
- Apples
- Oranges
- Squash
- Pumpkins
- Melons
- Cucumbers
- AND THE LIST GOES ON AND ON!! EEK!! | http://www.blackwaterbeekeepers.org/save-the-bees/ |
In this lesson students will be able to:
Identify the queen, worker and drone bees from a diagram and the jobs they do
Understand the difference between nectar and pollen and how bees make honey and beeswax
Bliss Value
Have the fun of acting like a bee
Tasting honey
Materials
Diagram of the three types of bees
List of worker bee jobs
Materials to build a honeycomb
Manilla folders cut vertically into three pieces
Small balls or plastic eggs to represent the eggs
Pebbles in cups to represent pollen
Yarn, flagging tape or other "fluid" material to represent honey
Hexagonal paper cut outs to act as cap for each cell
Lots of paper clips to clip cells together
Honey sticks or other honey sample
Preparation
To prep for cell wall construction:
Cut off the tab and indent of the file folders so they are straight across
Cut each file folder vertically in three even parts. These three pieces will form the six sides of each cell.
Open each piece. About 1/2" from each end make a cut halfway from the top of one end and halfway through the bottom of the other end so they can be assembled without glue or scissors
Assemble 7 cells prior to class and paper clip them together to start the honeycomb before the class begins
Fill large colored plastic cups (representing flowers) and fill them 1/3 full of small pebbles (pollen) and place them around the room or garden space
Make hexagonal paper cut outs for each cell by cutting off the corners of a 8 1/2 x 11 " paper leaving six sides
Allow enough room in the class or garden to accommodate the honeycomb. Each cell will be about one foot across. (A class of 15 will require about 6' x 6' plus room to move around the comb)
Procedure
In the opening circle:
Introduce the lesson "A Bee's Life"
Show the students the diagram of the three types of bees. Ask them what they are and why they are different. Identify each of the bees on the diagram and briefly discuss the responsibilities of each. Queen: lays eggs, worker bee: female bees who do all the work in the hive, drone: male bees responsible for mating with the queen (couch potato when it comes to work in the hive!)
Show them the chart of the "Worker Bee Jobs" and explain how workers do different jobs according to their age. Define any new or unfamiliar terms
Tell the students that today they will be performing all the tasks of the worker bees in order to understand them all. (The teacher will be the Queen and the drones will be discussed but not acted out)
Building the honey comb:
Hand out 3 pieces of cut file folders to each student
Show them how to slide the side the pieces together matching the slits on top and bottom until a hexagon is formed
Have paper clips available so they can each clip their hexagon to the growing honeycomb by clipping it to the surrounding cells
Talk about how bees love to be clean and neat and have them clean out any debris from the cells to get ready to receive the eggs
Have the Queen bee (teacher) lay an egg in each cell and explain that when the eggs hatch, the larva will be very hungry. The worker bees forage for pollen and nectar from flowers to feed the larva.
Explain the difference between pollen and nectar. Show where the pollen is found either on a diagram or real flower and explain how the bee collects the pollen and carries it from flower to flower, pollinating the flowers so they can make seeds.
Send the students around the garden (or classroom) to collect "pollen" from the plastic cup 'flowers" to put in each cell
Because the nectar is a liquid when it is collected from the flower, talk about the nectar pouch and how the bee turns nectar into honey with enzymes on its tongue. Pass out yarn or flagging tape and have the students add it to the cells.
Explain that the sugar in the nectar can also be turned into the wax that is used to make the honeycomb and cap for the cells. Pass out the hexagonal cut outs and have the students cap the cells.
Explain to the students that the larvae will stay in the cells and eat for about 8 days. Then it will make a cocoon and go through the process of metamorphosis and turn into a baby bee. The worker bee will then chew a hole in the cap and let the new generation of bees out.
Extra honey added to some cells will create drones and a special substance called royal jelly will be added to those cells that will create the next queen.The new queen and the old queen will fight to see who will lay eggs for the following season. The defeated queen will fly away to make a new nest bringing some of the worker bees with her in a swarm
Also discuss how the worker bees clean the hive and guard it from predators
Supplemental material
Tags: | https://www.gardenofbliss.org/single-post/a-bee-s-life |
We briefly touched on laying workers in our post “My Colony is Queenless”. Here we will tell you how to be sure that you have laying workers and what, if anything, you can do to fix the colony.
Firstly lets look at what a “Laying Worker” is. Laying workers is exactly that’ it is worker bees that are laying eggs. The presence of brood in a colony inhibits the ovarian development in the female worker bee so our worker bees don’t have ovaries and therefore cannot lay eggs. When a colony becomes queenless and broodless there is a chance that the workers in your colony can be stimulated into developing their ovaries to enable them to lay eggs.
We often get asked how long can I leave my colony for before the workers start laying. There is no answer this question, its like asking how long is a piece of string. Your colony could be queenless for many many weeks and never develop laying workers but then again they may be queenless and broodless for just a week or two and then you may find that some workers have started laying. If you are unfortunate enough to have laying workers the eggs that they lay are of course unfertilised as the worker has not mated. All the eggs laid will therefore be drones (male). The eggs will also be laid haphazardly through out the colony and not laid in a neat pattern like a queen. It worth noting here that early identification of laying workers can be easily missed as we often only look for eggs in the middle frames and usually we start to look in the center of the middle frames.
Laying workers will lay anywhere in the hive so you need to check every part of every frame. They will also lay multiple eggs in the same cell. The worker bees abdomen is shorter than that of the queen so the eggs are often laid along the cell walls or are to one side at the bottom of the cell and not in the center of the cell as a queens egg would be. It is worth noting that a newly mated queen, or a damaged queen, can also lay multiple eggs in a cell. A newly mated queens will soon get over this so whilst you may see a few multiple eggs this should stop if a few days. The best indication as to whether its a queen or laying worker would be the placement of eggs in the cell.
When laying worker drones are capped over, they are often stunted in size. Even when the drones hatch they are considerably smaller than a queen’s drone. To the untrained eye laying worker drone brood can be difficult to identity and can be confused with a drone laying queen. This is especially true if you have put a new queen into a colony that has been broodless for a while and didn’t notice that some of your workers had started laying. In this situation you will see the queen on the frame so you will assume she is a drone layer. If however you look closely you will see that your queen is being ignored by the workers and she is not looking for cells to lay in. If left the queen will eventually will die as the workers will not attend to her or feed her.
The two photos both show drone brood. The one on the left is a very scattered pattern and if you had the frame in your hands you see some cells have multiple eggs in them; these were laid by a worker bee. The picture on the right is a drone laying queens brood. You will see the lay pattern is better and if you had the frame in your hand you would see single eggs in cells.
So, having identified that you have laying workers what, if anything, can you do?
If your colony has laying workers as advanced as the above photo on the left, this colony has a lot of sealed brood and some drones have started to emerge, then the colony has probably gone too far to be fixed. In this instance you are best to shut the bees up, carry the hive as far away as possible and shake the bees out. If you have other bees in your apiary, that are sited not too far away from where the one with laying workers was, then the flying bees will find those hives.
If you spot the laying worker early enough, you see multiple eggs and maybe a little larvae but no sealed brood, and your colony is of fair strength and has not been queenless for too many weeks, then you may be able to save the colony.
If you do want try to save the colony you will need a mated queen and, if you have another colony, its worth taking a frame of emerging brood from it. If you have, or can get, a mated queen but don’t have a frame of emerging brood and your colony with laying workers has lots of bees then it is possible that you may still save them. How we deal with laying workers is that we carry the colony away as far from its location as far as we can, ideally around 30 yards or more and then we shake all the bees out. We need to ensure every single bee is shaken off every frame and off the brood box walls and floor etc. We do this because we have no idea which worker or workers are laying but we do know she is a house bee rather then a forager. By shaking all the bees out the house bees will not know their way home only the flying bees will. It is for this reason that the colony needs to be reasonably strong as you will lose all your none flying bees. Already flying bees will be returning to the original site so if you have a spare hive it is best to set this up on the original site with one frame in for the flying bees to return to. I always put the new mated queen, in her cage, in the new hive ready as well. By the time you have finished shaking out the bees a good proportion of the flying bees will have made it back to the hive (new hive) with the mated queen in the cage. Return to the original site and populate the hive with your frames, make sure you have some frames of food. Any frames that have multiple eggs, or sealed worker drone, should be thrown away and replaced. If you did have a frame of emerging brood from another colony drop this into the hive as well, positioned in the middle, and remove the tab from the queen cage. The queen will be let out of the cage and if all is well you will have eggs when you check the colony in 10 days.
Dealing with laying workers does not have a great success rate however if this is your only colony, or one of a few, then it is likely you will want to try and save them. Do bear in mind the time of the year, you are not likely to build a colony up strong enough for winter if its end August and you find laying workers.
If the laying workers have gone too far and you do have other colonies that are strong you can always make a nuc up and place this where the laying worker colony was and then shake you bees out at a good distance. If the nuc had been made up from bees on the same site then a good proportion of the bees will be flying bees, these will return to their parent hive, and the bees you shake from the laying worker colony will then boost the nuc. | https://beckybees.blog/2022/03/11/how-do-i-deal-with-laying-workers/ |
The journey between Leuven and Brussels runs for about 15.5 mi and usually takes approximately 1 h 12 min. However, this figure is an average and will vary according to a number of factors. Depending on the method of transport that you choose, you might be able to arrive in less time.
Yes, the driving distance between Leuven to Brussels is 30 km. It takes approximately 25 min to drive from Leuven to Brussels. Get driving directions
Yes, the driving distance between Brussels to Leuven is 31 km. It takes approximately 27 min to drive from Brussels to Leuven. Get driving directions
Check out how easy it is to be in the centre of Leuven in less than half an hour. More info: www.visitleuven.be
Leuven's railway station is one of the busiest of Belgium. There are frequent direct trains to and from: Brussels Airport (13 minutes) Brussels (Brussels North: 18 minutes; Brussels Central: 24 minutes; Brussels Zuid/Midi: 30 minutes) Mechelen (20 minutes), Lier and Antwerp (50 minutes) Ghent (1 hour) and Bruges (1 hour 20 minutes)
It takes an average of 22m to travel from Leuven to Brussels-Airport-Zaventem by train, over a distance of around 10 miles (16 km). There are normally 60 trains per day travelling from Leuven to Brussels-Airport-Zaventem and tickets for this journey start from €11.30 when you book in advance. Journey time.
The geographic midpoint between Leuven and Brussels is in 7.66 mi (12.33 km) distance between both points in a bearing of 261.58°. It is located in Belgium, Flanders, Flemish Brabant, Halle-Vilvoorde, Zaventem, Sterrebeek (België / Belgique / Belgien, Vlaanderen, Vlaams-Brabant, Halle-Vilvoorde, Zaventem, Sterrebeek).
LUCA School of Arts is een hogeschool in Vlaanderen met bachelor- en masteropleidingen in audiovisuele kunsten en technieken, beeldende kunsten en vormgeving, fotografie, interieurvormgeving, bouw, muziek, drama, productdesign en een lerarenopleiding.
Train ticket prices from Leuven to Brussels Midi can start from as little as €7.50 when you book in advance. The cost of tickets can vary depending on the time of day, route and class you book and are usually more expensive if you book on the day.
Leuven (/ ˈ l ɜː v ən /, Dutch: [ˈløːvə(n)] ()) or Louvain (/ l uː ˈ v æ̃ /, also US: / l uː ˈ v eɪ n /, French: ; German: Löwen [ˈløːvn̩] ()) is the capital and largest city of the province of Flemish Brabant in the Flemish Region of Belgium.It is located about 25 kilometres (16 miles) east of Brussels.The municipality itself comprises the historic city and the former
You can find trains between Leuven and Brussels to cost on average $9 (€8) one way if you book within the next 7 days. But we recommend buying train tickets in advance to score the best deals and save money on your route. You'll see tickets for the Leuven to Brussels train generally on sale a few months before the planned travel date.
Boek uw Hotel in Brussel online. Reserveer online, laagste prijzen. | http://www.casertaccelera.it/leuven-to-brussels-664/ |
A light earthquake magnitude 4 (ml/mb) has occurred on Saturday, 9 kilometers (6 miles) from L’Aquila in Italy. The epicenter was at a depth of 7.66 km (5 miles). The temblor was picked up at 02:18:45 / 2:18 am (local time epicenter). Global time and date of event 31/03/18 / 2018-03-31 01:18:45 / March 31, 2018 @ 1:18 am UTC/GMT. Exact location of event, longitude 13.4689 East, latitude 42.4196 North, depth = 7.66 km. Id of earthquake: us1000dbrv. Event ids that are associated: us1000dbrv. A tsunami warning has not been issued (Does not indicate if a tsunami actually did or will exist).
Nearby country/countries, Italy (c. 60 340 000 pop) (That might be effected). Epicenter of the earthquake was 60 km (38 miles) from Pescara (c. 116 600 pop), 70 km (44 miles) from Terni (c. 97 100 pop), 78 km (48 miles) from Guidonia Montecelio (c. 67 500 pop), 86 km (53 miles) from Foligno (c. 47 700 pop), 56 km (35 miles) from Montesilvano Marina (c. 46 000 pop), 64 km (40 miles) from San Benedetto del Tronto (c. 45 900 pop). Nearest city/cities or towns, with min 5000 pop, to epicentrum/hypocenter was Segni, Castel di Sangro, Tolentino.
In the past 24 hours, there have been one, in the last 10 days one, in the past 30 days one and in the last 365 days ten earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or greater that have been detected in the same area. Earthquakes 4.0 to 5.0 are often felt, but only causes minor damage. There are an estimated 13,000 light quakes in the world each year.
How would you describe the shaking?
How did you respond? Did any furniture slide, topple over, or become displaced? Leave a comment or report about activity, shaking and damage at your home, city and country. Read more about the earthquake, Distances, Seismometer information, Date-Time, Parameters, Location and details about this quake, that has struck: 9 km NE of L’Aquila, Italy. This data comes from the USGS Earthquake Notification Service.
Copyright © 2018 earthquakenewstoday.com All rights reserved. | http://www.earthquakenewstoday.com/2018/04/01/light-earthquake-4-mag-was-detected-near-laquila-in-italy/ |
URUMQI -- Northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region plans to invest 10 billion yuan (US$1.29 billion) in the construction of highways this year, said the region's department of communications on Sunday.
An official with the scheme said that 7.66 billion yuan (US$988 million) will be used to build nearly 4,000 km of trunk roads, including over 1,000 km of expressway.
The remaining 2.34 billion yuan (US$302 million) will be spent on 5,600 km of highways in rural areas.
The investment will cover 31 projects, 10 of which are scheduled to open to traffic by the end of this year.
Xinjiang plans to invest 55 billion yuan (US$7.1 billion) in the construction of highways in the period 2006-2010, the official added.
During the period 2001-2005, Xinjiang invested 33 billion yuan (US$4.25 billion) in highway construction, increasing the total length of highways in the region to nearly 90,000 km. | http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-02/11/content_806639.htm |
# Scale-free ideal gas
The scale-free ideal gas (SFIG) is a physical model assuming a collection of non-interacting elements with a stochastic proportional growth. It is the scale-invariant version of an ideal gas. Some cases of city-population, electoral results and cites to scientific journals can be approximately considered scale-free ideal gases.
In a one-dimensional discrete model with size-parameter k, where k1 and kM are the minimum and maximum allowed sizes respectively, and v = dk/dt is the growth, the bulk probability density function F(k, v) of a scale-free ideal gas follows
where N is the total number of elements, Ω = ln k1/kM is the logaritmic "volume" of the system, w ¯ = ⟨ v / k ⟩ {\displaystyle {\overline {w}}=\langle v/k\rangle } is the mean relative growth and σ w {\displaystyle \sigma _{w}} is the standard deviation of the relative growth. The entropy equation of state is
where κ {\displaystyle \kappa } is a constant that accounts for dimensionality and H ′ = 1 / M Δ τ {\displaystyle H'=1/M\Delta \tau } is the elementary volume in phase space, with Δ τ {\displaystyle \Delta \tau } the elementary time and M the total number of allowed discrete sizes. This expression has the same form as the one-dimensional ideal gas, changing the thermodynamical variables (N, V, T) by (N, Ω,σw).
Zipf's law may emerge in the external limits of the density since it is a special regime of scale-free ideal gases. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_ideal_gas |
Tumour cell dissemination is a major issue with the treatment of cancer, thus new therapeutic strategies which can control this process are needed. Antagonism of integrins highly expressed in tumours is one potential strategy. The integrins are transmembrane glycoprotein adhesive receptors. Two of the integrins, αVβ3 and αIIbβ3, are highly expressed in a number of tumours and induce bi-directional signalling through their interaction with extracellular matrix proteins, and growth factor receptors. Through this signalling they play an important role in a number of cellular processes that are involved in tumour dissemination such as tumour growth, migration, invasion, metastasis and angiogenesis. Dual αIIbβ3 and αVβ3 integrin antagonism will have a direct effect on β3-expressing tumour cells that leads to the inhibition of cell migration and dissemination. Furthermore, through targeting tumour cell interaction with endothelial cells and platelets, this will also lead to inhibition of angiogenesis and metastasis. The aim of this project was to characterise the expression of αVβ3 and αIIbβ3 integrin in a panel of tumour cell lines and in human tumour xenograft samples, and to develop and utilise cell-based models to investigate potential novel β3 antagonists. The expression of αV and β3 subunits was detected in xenograft tissue using immunoblotting techniques. A panel of cell lines of different tumour types including melanoma, prostate, breast, colon and non small cell lung carcinoma was then characterised for αVβ3 and αIIbβ3 integrin expression using immunoblotting and immunocytochemistry. Melanoma cell lines demonstrated the strongest αVβ3 expression. No αIIbβ3 integrin expression was seen in any of the cell lines evaluated. A selection of cell lines with varying αVβ3 expression were then used to develop a functional test for cell migration, the scratch wound healing assay. Migration of tumour cells that expressed αVβ3 integrin was inhibited by the known β3 antagonists, cRGDfV peptide and LM609 antibody. A panel of 12 potential novel β3 integrin antagonists was screened for cytotoxicity and activity in the validated scratch assay. ICT9055 was the most effective antagonist in inhibition of M14 cell migration as determined by the scratch assay, with an IC₅₀ of < 0.1 μM. Therefore the work presented in this thesis has established models and tools for evaluating potential novel β3 integrin antagonists, and identified a promising molecule to progress for further preclinical evaluation. | https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.600458 |
Warning: -1 is not an element of the Time index.
Cause
Your model is evaluating a dynamic loop. During this evaluation, an expression attempted to access an element (e.g., using Subscript) that does not correspond to an element of the Time index. This might occur, for example, if you tried to use a value from a time period before your first time period.
Remedy
This might be exposing a logical error. But if this is intention, this is only a warning, so you can ignore it, e.g.:
Change:
X[Time = v]
to
IgnoreWarnings(X[Time = v])
or you can make the logic explicit:
If v >= 0 Then X[Time = v] Else Null
Or you can specify a default value:
X[Time = v, defval: 0]
The defval is used when
v is not found in the Time index. | https://wiki.analytica.com/index.php?title=Error_Messages/40099 |
From Campomoro to Senetosa.
Calculated time is computed with the distance, the height difference, and an average speed of 2.2 mph. For an intermediate walker, this time includes small breaks.
(1) From the car park near the Heliport, head along the coast to reach the Calanova allotments and continue to Bassa Turi.
(2) Turn left towards the sea and then back to the left and walk along the coastline.
Arrive at the rocky point of Scogli di Longhi (3) then at a second rocky point, Punta di Scalonu (4).
Reach the beach, marking the mouth of the small stream of the Canuseddu plains.
(5) Leave the coast before the beach and head back along the stream.
(6) Cross an artificial water reservoir.
Arrive at the path back around the big loop. (7) Take a left down a hill that starts off gentle and then becomes more steep, taking you in the direction of the ridge.
Cross the ridge without taking the old track. At the crossroads when you reach way back along the shortest loop, you will discover an ancient wheat-growing area (8).
Then go right towards Bassa Turi then on to the starting point.
Waypoints :
D/A : km 0 - alt. 2m
1 : km 1.32 - alt. 15m
2 : km 2.64 - alt. 4m
3 : km 3.16 - alt. 12m
4 : km 3.71 - alt. 3m
5 : km 4.22 - alt. 23m
6 : km 5.4 - alt. 77m
D/A : km 7.66 - alt. 2m
Visorando and this author cannot be held responsible in the case of accidents or problems occuring on this walk.
The Bouches de Bonifacio nature reserve.
For more walks, use our search engine.
The GPS track and description are the property of the author. | https://www.visorando.com/en/walk-in-the-garden-of-the-wind/ |
Discover Dan Kabba in Nigeria
Dan Kabba in the region of Katsina is a town located in Nigeria - some 286 mi or ( 460 km ) North of Abuja , the country's capital .
Local time in Dan Kabba is now 11:08 PM (Tuesday) . The local timezone is named " Africa/Lagos " with a UTC offset of 1 hours. Depending on your flexibility, these larger cities might be interesting for you: Sokoto, Minna, Katsina, Kano, and Kaduna. When in this area, you might want to check out Sokoto . Are you looking for some initial hints on what might be interesting in Dan Kabba ? We have collected some references on our attractions page.
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Interesting facts about this location
Katsina Airport
Katsina Airport is an airport located 4 kilometres from the center of Katsina, a city in the Katsina State of Nigeria.
Located at 13.01 7.66 (Lat./Long.); Less than 23 km away
Katsina Township Stadium
Katsina Township Stadium is a multi-use stadium in Katsina, Katsina State, Nigeria. It is currently used mostly for football matches and is the home stadium of Spotlight F.C. of the Nigeria National League. The stadium has a capacity of 5,000 people.
Located at 13.00 7.61 (Lat./Long.); Less than 27 km away
Related Locations
Information of geographic nature is based on public data provided by geonames.org, CIA world facts book, Unesco, DBpedia and wikipedia. Weather is based on NOAA GFS. | https://trip-suggest.com/nigeria/katsina/dan-kabba |
Q. 22 D5.0( 2 Votes )
Answer the following question:
A choke coil in series with a lamp is connected to a dc line. The lamp is seen to shine brightly. Insertion of an iron core in the choke causes no change in the lamp’s brightness. Predict the corresponding observations if the connection is to an A.C. line.
Answer :
When an iron core is connected in series with the lamp connected to the A.C. line then the choke coil and iron will increase the impedance and the lamp will glow dim.
Rate this question :
The teachers of Geeta’s school took the students on a study trip to a power generating station, located nearly 200 km away from the city. The teacher explained that electrical energy is transmitted over such a long distance to their city, in the form of alternating current (ac) raised to a high voltage. At the receiving end in the city, the voltage is reduced to operate the devices. As a result, the power loss is reduced. Geeta listened to the teacher and asked questions about how the ac is converted to a higher or lower voltage.
(a) Name the device used to change the alternating voltage to a higher or lower value. State one cause for power dissipation in this device.
(b) Explain with an example, how power loss is reduced if the energy is transmitted over long distances as an alternating current rather than a direct current.
(c) Write two values each shown by the teachers and Geeta.Physics - Board Papers
A. Draw a labeled diagram of AC generator. Derive the expression for the instantaneous value of the emf induced in the coil.
B. A circular coil of cross-sectional area and 20 turns is rotated about the vertical diameter with angular speed of in uniform magnetic field of magnitude Calculate the maximum value of the current in the coil.
OR
A. Draw a labeled diagram of a step-up transformer. Obtain the ratio of secondary to primary voltage in terms of number of turns and currents in the two coils.
B. A power transmission line feeds input power at 2200 V to a step-down transformer with its primary windings having 3000 turns. Find the number of turns in the secondary to get the power output at 220 V.Physics - Board Papers
(a) In a series LCR circuit connected across an ac source of variable frequency, obtain the expression for its impedance and draw a plot showing its variation with frequency of the ac source.
(b) What is the phase difference between the voltages across inductor and the capacitor at resonance in the LCR circuit ?
(c) When an inductor is connected to a 200 V dc voltage, a current of 1A flows through it. When the same inductor is connected to a 200 V, 50 Hz ac source, only 0.5 A current flows. Explain, why ? Also, calculate the self inductance of the inductor.
OR
(a) Draw the diagram of a device which is used to decrease high ac voltage into a low ac voltage and state its working principle. Write four sources of energy loss in this device.
(b) A small town with a demand of 1200 kW of electric power at 220 V is situated 20 km away from an electric plant generating power at 440 V. The resistance of the two-wire line carrying power is 0.5 Ω per km. The town gets the power from the line through a 4000-220 V step-down transformer at a sub-station in the town. Estimate the line power loss in the form of heat. | https://goprep.co/a-choke-coil-in-series-with-a-lamp-is-connected-to-a-dc-line-i-1njz94 |
The village of Beauchery-Saint-Martin is a small village located north central of France. The town of Beauchery-Saint-Martin is located in the department of Seine-et-Marne of the french region Île-de-France. The town of Beauchery-Saint-Martin is located in the township of Villiers-Saint-Georges part of the district of Provins. The area code for Beauchery-Saint-Martin is 77026 (also known as code INSEE), and the Beauchery-Saint-Martin zip code is 77560.
The altitude of the city hall of Beauchery-Saint-Martin is approximately 155 meters. The Beauchery-Saint-Martin surface is 27.96 km ². The latitude and longitude of Beauchery-Saint-Martin are 48.615 degrees North and 3.404 degrees East. Nearby cities and towns of Beauchery-Saint-Martin are : Villiers-Saint-Georges (77560) at 3.98 km, Léchelle (77171) at 4.30 km, Voulton (77560) at 5.15 km, Louan-Villegruis-Fontaine (77560) at 5.69 km, Rupéreux (77560) at 5.98 km, Bouchy-Saint-Genest (51310) at 6.43 km, Saint-Brice (77160) at 7.66 km, Augers-en-Brie (77560) at 7.98 km.
The population of Beauchery-Saint-Martin was 363 in 1999, 390 in 2006 and 394 in 2007. The population density of Beauchery-Saint-Martin is 14.09 inhabitants per km². The number of housing of Beauchery-Saint-Martin was 171 in 2007. These homes of Beauchery-Saint-Martin consist of 138 main residences, 13 second or occasional homes and 20 vacant homes.
Here are maps and information of the close municipalities near Beauchery-Saint-Martin.
Search hotels near Beauchery-Saint-Martin : Book your hotel now !
At right you can find the localization of Beauchery-Saint-Martin on the map of France. Below, this is the satellite map of Beauchery-Saint-Martin. A road map, and maps templates of Beauchery-Saint-Martin are available here : "road map of Beauchery-Saint-Martin". This map show Beauchery-Saint-Martin seen by the satellite of Google Map. To see the streets of Beauchery-Saint-Martin or move on another zone, use the buttons "zoom" and "map" on top of this dynamic map.
To search hotels, housings, tourist information office, administrations or other services, use the Google search integrated to the map on the following page : "map Beauchery-Saint-Martin".
Photo of the town of Beauchery-Saint-Martin or neighboring municipalities Silos de Beauchery St-Martin.
This is the last weather forecast for Beauchery-Saint-Martin collected by the nearest observation station of Provins.
The latest weather data for Beauchery-Saint-Martin were collected Monday, 22 April 2019 at 14:51 from the nearest observation station of Provins. | http://www.map-france.com/Beauchery-Saint-Martin-77560/ |
Mon, 10 May 2021
This analysis was first published by Lexis®PSL on 5th May 2021.
PI & Clinical Negligence Analysis: The Claimant, a licensed taxi driver, brought a claim including £11,825.49 in respect of hire charges relating to his taxi which was damaged in an RTA. The hire claim was fully dismissed at the contested MOJ Stage 3 Hearing as the Claimant had not made a claim for, or provided any evidence in support of a loss of profit (Hussain v EUI Limited followed).
The Claimant successfully appealed against that decision on the grounds that the Defendant had failed to properly identify the basis for disputing hire within the RTA Protocol, having raised only the issue of rates within Stage 2 and the issue of loss of profit for the first time at the Stage 3 hearing itself (paras 7.31 and 7.66 RTA Protocol and Practice Direction 8B considered).
The dismissal was set aside. The Court declined to transfer the matter to Part 7 and remitted the case back for determination at a Stage 3 hearing before a different District Judge. (Hulholland v Hughes considered).
Mr Said Bourous v London Borough of Islington Lexis Citation 50
What are the practical implications of this case?
This decision is not limited in scope to hire claims or taxi claims, but rather is of significant importance and application in all claims subject to the RTA Protocol.
It aptly demonstrates that when disputing a claim, a defendant is required to fully explain the basis of any challenge within the Stage 2 Settlement Pack (para 7.41 of the RTA Protocol).
Failure to do so means that matters not raised at Stage 2 must not be referred to within the comments included within the Court Proceedings Pack (para 7.66 of the RTA Protocol). Since the court is required to determine the claim at Stage 3 based upon the Court Proceedings Pack, the court concluded at para :
‘A defendant cannot object to a claim under a particular head of damage raised by the claimant at Stage 3 except on grounds raised at Stage 2’.
This case is a stark warning to all defendants that they should properly set out the basis of any dispute (which in the context of hire would be to identify the issue of need, rate, period, intervention, contract, loss of profit or otherwise). The same would similarly apply to any other disputed claim (particularly areas such as rehabilitation costs or loss of earnings, which are often the subject of various legal challenges).
Furthermore, even in a technical area such as credit hire, the court demonstrated an unwillingness to ‘brush’ the defendant’s failure to properly identify the grounds of dispute ‘under the carpet’ and resolve the issue by transfer to Part 7, where a full defence as to quantum would have been permitted.
What was the background?
The claimant brought a claim against the defendant/respondent following an RTA in which his taxi sustained damage. In addition to claiming for credit hire charges of £11,825.49 in respect of the hire of a replacement vehicle while his own vehicle was unavailable, the claimant sought to recover damages for personal injury and storage. Vehicle repair charges had been agreed.
Liability was admitted within the portal at Stage 1. As damages could not be agreed at Stage 2, pursuant to CPR PD 8B, a claim was brought under CPR 8, following which the matter proceeded to a hearing at Stage 3 on 21 July 2020. At that hearing, the defendant argued that the appropriate remedy open to the claimant was to claim for loss of profit and not hire in accordance with Hussain v EUI Ltd EWHC 2647 (QB). As the claimant had evidently neither made a claim for loss of profit nor provided any evidence to support personal use of the damaged vehicle or any need to continue working, the hire claim was dismissed, although judgment was given for storage and repairs in the sum of £4,076.
The claimant appealed (with the permission of the Deputy District Judge) arguing that it was not open to the defendant to raise the issue of loss of profit for the first time at the Stage 3 hearing in circumstances where the only dispute identified by the defendant at Stage 2 in respect of the credit hire charges was in relation to the rate of hire.
In particular, the claimant relied on the decision of His Honour Judge (HHJ) Freedman in Mulholland v Hughes Lexis Citation 333, where the claimant’s appeal succeeded in circumstances where the defendant had failed to raise the issue of need at Stage 2 and went on to argue need at Stage 3. [While acknowledging that the Settlement Pack and Response were not pleadings, the court in Mulholland considered that they were analogous and therefore principles that derived from the rules governing statements of case in CPR 16, and Schedules of Loss in the Practice Direction to Part 16 were of application].
The defendant argued that the argument was appropriately raised when it was and further, that litigants are not obliged to point out their opponent’s mistakes (Barton v Wright Hassall LLP UKSC 12).
What did the court decide?
Although reaching the same practical conclusion as HHJ Freedman in Mulholland, specifically agreeing with the judgment at para , the court, in this case, carried out an analysis of the RTA Protocol and Practice Directions (rather than focussing on CPR 16) in such a way to, ‘give effect both to the literal meaning of the words and to their spirit and intendment’ (para ).
The court interpreted paras 7.41 and 7.66 of the RTA Protocol in conjunction with CPR PD 8B as creating an environment where disputes not raised by the defendant at Stage 2 could not be relied on at Stage 3. In considering the decision of Phillips v Willis EWCA Civ 401, where Lord Justice Jackson referred to the ‘inexorable character’ of ‘the RTA process’, and in Blair v Wickes Building Supplies Ltd EWCA Civ 1934 where Lord Justice Baker described the Pre-Action Protocol for Low Value Personal Injury (Employers’ Liability and Public Liability) Claims (regarded as being ‘closely analogous to the RTA Protocol’ (para )) as ‘a tightly drawn and standalone code with tight deadlines and draconian sanctions, all of which strongly encourage compliance’.
The court went on to say in Bourous at para :
‘It is clear from the strong language of the Court of Appeal that defendants must comply with the clearly expressed requirements of the Protocol and that they will not be permitted to gain any forensic advantage from their failure to do so.’
Following judgment on the appeal, the defendant sought to persuade the court to transfer the matter to Part 7 so that there would be an opportunity to file and serve a defence and evidence in relation to need, period, rates and impecuniosity. In declining that request and remitting the claim back to Stage 3, the court concluded that it was ‘too late’, commenting at para that:
'Although this is quite a high claim for car hire, on the material before the Court it does not involve any complex issues of law or fact which are not suitable for resolution at a Stage 3 hearing'.
Case details
- Court: County Court at Mayor's and City of London
- Judge: His Honour Judge Hellman
- Date of judgment: 12/1/2021
To read the judgement click here. | https://www.no5.com/media/publications/rta-protocol-credit-hire-taxi-mr-said-bourous-v-london-borough-of-islington/ |
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A block slides 42 m down a ramp that makes an angle of 60 degrees with the ground. Determine the mass of the block if 10 400 J of work was done. (Assume 1 kg exerts a force of 9.8 N).
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Cephalexin (I), cephradine (II), cephazolin sodium (III), cefaclor (IV), cefoxitin sodium (V), cephamandole nafate (VI) and cefotaxime sodium (VII) were determined spectrophotometrically in the pure form and in pharmaceutical formulations by using molybdophosphoric acid as an oxidising agent. The molar absorptivities and Sandell sensitivities (in l mol–1 cm–1 and ng cm–2, respectively) were 2.93 × 103 and 118.5 for I, 2.48 × 103 and 140.9 for II, 7.66 × 103 and 62.2 for III, 3.23 × 103 and 119.4 for IV, 9.05 × 103 and 49.7 for V, 7.16 × 103 and 71.6 for VI, and 6.20 × 103 and 77.0 for VII. Six replicate analyses of solutions containing seven different concentrations of each of the substances examined were carried out and gave a mean correlation coefficient ⩽0.9998; the factors of the regression line equation for these drugs were calculated.
The proposed method was applied to the determination of these cephalosporins in pharmaceutical formulations and the results demonstrated that the method is equally accurate, precise and reproducible as the official methods. | https://pubs.rsc.org/en/Content/ArticleLanding/1988/AN/AN9881301083 |
What draws people to live in a location? What features do ancient civilizations look for in locations to build a village?
-
$\begingroup$ You need to clarify level of technology since this bears strongly on which local resources are exploitable and which are a don't care $\endgroup$– rumguffSep 15 '15 at 20:04
Actually they will look for a place where they can live well. In particular, the following questions will arise:
Can you survive there?
This is the first and most fundamental question. If you have no chance to survive at that place, there's no point to settle there. In particular, you'll need water to drink, and either arable land (or, if you are herdsmen, pastures) with enough water for producing food, or a way to make sure that you will always buy whatever you need (for example, being on a trade route at the only place where a big river can be crossed so you can demand tolls, or having valuable resources nearby that you can sell for food).
Can you actually build homes there?
That is, do you have some space where you can build homes (in whatever technique the culture knows or is able/willing to use), as well as the materials/tools needed? Note that in ancient times, unless you were filthy rich, you couldn't afford to carry building materials from far away.
Can the place secured?
You'll not live long at a place if you cannot defend it against dangers, which may be either natural dangers or other people, sometimes both. Early settlements were usually close to rivers, but seldom directly at rivers, because of the danger that the rivers flood the settlements. Also places where you can overview the surroundings well allow you to spot approaching enemies early. And a place which is naturally hard to reach may be of advantage (but then, if you're dependent on trade, being hard to reach is a bad idea).
Of course the importance of this point depends very much on the actual danger at that time. For example, in times when warriors come from the sea, you may prefer to settle away from the sea so the warriors have a harder time to reach you (and especially cannot attack you from the ships), while in times where the main danger comes from the land, you'd actually prefer living at the sea which protects one side of your settlement from the land attackers (in addition to the advantages of sea access to food production and trade).
How far is the next settlement?
If you want to do any trade, you want to have trade partners nearby. Also, if some foreign power attacks, it may be of advantage if there are several settlements which can combine forces for defence. Also, there might be some fortification where you can get protection in times of danger.
Are there hostile people around?
The last thing you want is to be surrounded by people who would do everything to get rid of you (unless you're there to evangelise; in that case you may actually seek such places, as long as they are not too dangerous). Reasons why this would happen are many. One major reason would be a different religion, but that's certainly not the only possibility.
How do your people like that place?
Assuming they have the choice, people will not settle at a place which is not of their liking. This of course depends very much on the culture. For example, for a culture where wine plays a major role, the availability of hills appropriate for growing wine will possibly be important, while a culture that cares more for beer will prefer fields where they can grow hop. Also the climate of the place enters here; people will not settle at places with bad climate unless they have no choice (or all their other choices are even worse).
Any culture looks for access to water, food, and building materials for shelter and tools when evaluating a location. Depending on how advanced the culture is, they may also look for trade routes or access to the sea. Access to a specific resource such as copper ore may also influence their decision.
It could also just be because their leader said "This is far enough. Here we will build." without regard to how well that location would actually do as a location to live. | https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/25722/culturally-correct-choosing-a-location |
A rare chance to acquire a restored church and adjoining vestry and villa, magnificent position in Monte Santa Maria Tiberina, 5 beds, 4 baths, heated pool and 5.4 hectares of land. Dates from 1500 century.
DETAILS
|Name:||Chiesa Monte Santa Maria Tiberina|
|Reference:||51292|
|Location:||Monte Santa Maria Tiberina|
|Town/City:||Monte Santa Maria Tiberina|
|Region:||Umbria - Italy|
|Property Size:||255 mq|
|Land:||5.4 hectares|
|Property Type:||Church|
|Position:||South Facing|
|Nearest Towns:||Monte Santa Maria Tiberina 4km, Citta di Castello 16km, Monterchi 13km, Arezzo 41km, Perugia 57km|
|Access:||white road (very good condition 2300m)|
|Condition:||Luxury/Excellent|
|Construction:||Stone|
|Services:||Well, Electricity, Gas/Fuel oil, Septic System|
|Bedrooms:||5|
|Bathrooms:||4|
|Reception Rooms:||3|
|Total Rooms:||14|
|Outbuildings:||–|
|Swimming Pool:||Yes|
FEATURES
Ancient brick door/window surround
Arches
Cut-stone corners
Exposed beams
Hand-made floor/ceiling tiles
Stone door/window surrounds
Stone fireplace
Cistern
Electric gates
External lighting
Fenced land
Irrigation system
Landscaping
Mature gardens
Central Heating
Double glazed windows
Security system
Under floor heating
Energy Rating - G
Swimming Pool 5x10
DESCRIPTION
A rare chance to acquire a restored church and adjoining vestry and villa in a magnificent position in the Municipality of Monte Santa Maria Tiberina one of the most charming and beautiful medieval villages in Italy. Once an independent state and now a large Municipality in the Province of Perugia it sits 650 metres above sea level offering breathtaking distant views. There is a good restaurant and small grocery store, post office and even a Police station.
The sympathetic restoration was completed about seven years ago using all reclaimed material and introducing modern bathrooms and kitchen to an exceptional high level.
The rare and interesting feature about this property is the connection from the large house to the vestry and church allowing this property to flow and the church a wonderful living area the result is a welcoming family house that really works.
The ground floor has an entrance hall that leads to a shower room clad in a rare stone that maintains the wood grain formed from its origins, a bedroom and the vestry now a TV room and into the 45 square metre church with the old wooden alter, baby grand piano with three high windows and glass doors giving generous natural light, there is a modern fitted kitchen with two dishwashers, two ovens, dining room with stone fireplace and the all important pantry with various fridges sink and matching units to the kitchen. There is a technical room with a separate entrance which also stores the pool loungers in the winter.
The upper floor has two bedrooms that share a travertine shower room, a third bedroom en-suite and the master bedroom with an impressive cararra marble clad bath and separate WC and shower.
A stone staircase takes you to the four attic rooms that are a further 85 square metres with windows and
skylight that although to low for legal habitation are a project to complete for the children’s ideal play rooms.
The fenced garden is well kept with a front lawn where croquet is played, various seating areas, BBQ area and a the 10 x 5 heated salt water pool with electric cover.
There is a total of 5.4 hectares around the house.
Most of the furniture is available under separate negotiation.
Measurements are approximate, and no responsibility is taken for any error, omission or misunderstanding in these particulars, which do not constitute an offer or contract. No representation or warranty whatever is made or given either during negotiation, in particulars or elsewhere. | https://ipncastello.com/properties/chiesa-monte-santa-maria-tiberina/ |
These results highlight an array of contexts in which these extraordinary objects played roles as social actors. The first is within the producing culture. The analytical methods of the study of the British Museum eggs reveal that they were acquired from the wild in different regions of the eastern Mediterranean and northern Africa, and that egg sources may have fluctuated between relatively local and more distant locations in both the Bronze and Iron Ages. This implies that their trade networks were more flexible, opportunistic and extensive than previously thought (compare with Aruz et al. 2014, pp. xviii–xix).
It remains unclear whether an egg was traded before or after it was decorated, however. Contemporary shipwreck evidence—which is not especially plentiful to begin with for the Bronze and Iron Ages, relatively speaking—suggests that cargoes could carry raw and finished goods. For example, the Bajo de la Campana wreck of the late seventh/early sixth century BCE, found off the coast of Spain near Cartagena, carried amber, branch wood logs, and globs of resin or pitch as some of the raw goods traded, while finished exotica include boxwood combs, carved ivory dagger handles, elephant tusks, and worked ostrich eggshell (Polzer 2014; Roldán Bernal et al. 1995. The elephant tusks, some of which had Phoenician graffiti, may have been intended as finished objects, given that a number of the inscriptions are votive in nature, or as raw, perhaps recycled, material for ivory carving). On the other hand, the ostrich eggshells found on the Late Bronze Age Uluburun shipwreck, near the southwestern tip of Turkey at Kaş, were blown (emptied) but otherwise unworked (Bass 1997). Therefore, it is possible that some cargoes may have carried just unworked goods, or only worked products, or transported both. It is difficult to assess any such pattern at a fixed time, much less to determine diachronic and regional developments, because the nature of our shipwreck evidence is extremely variable. There are very few shipwrecks of Late Bronze Age date, and none between ca. 1200 and ca. 750 BCE, the period when movement between the eastern and western Mediterranean becomes more regularised; by the seventh and sixth centuries BCE, diverse maritime networks were operating around the Mediterranean, and involved cabotage and long-distance routes and maritime vessels (see Hodos 2020, pp. 116–122). The variable nature of our maritime evidence from the late second millennium to the middle of the first millennium BCE renders it difficult to determine the extent to which the first millennium BCE evidence may represent continuity of earlier practices.
The study also highlights the range of people involved in the full chaîne opératoire of luxury production. It starts with those who had to track the animals to their nest sites and take their eggs, whether by stealth or killing the parents. Either way, acquiring eggs entailed risk to the tracker. Firstly, it could take days to find nest sites, since a male ostrich’s territory may extend up to 20 km2, and nest locations seem to have no relation to nest sites from previous seasons within a territory (on nests and nesting habits, see Bertram 1992, which examines the South African species; the North African and Levantine indigenous ostrich species are now extinct, but given the general similarity of practices between other closely related animal species, it seems relatively safe to presume that their practices would not have been dramatically different to those of their extant sub-Saharan relatives). In addition, the ostrich was recognised as a dangerous animal, especially by the Assyrians, who used it iconographically partly to highlight the might of the king (Collon 1998; Albenda 2005, pp. 97–101). Furthermore, not only is it known that an ostrich can kill a human with a single kick, but other predators equally dangerous to humans inhabited the same ancient landscapes as ostriches, such as lions and elephants (e.g. Collon 1977; Albenda 2008; Karlsson 2016, pp. 133–140). Therefore, even if the tracker chose to kill an ostrich to acquire its eggs rather than merely steal the eggs, the bird itself was not the only threat. What kind of social impact did tracking and acquisition skills bestow upon the tracker (and anyone else involved in collecting eggs, for we do not know for certain that the tracker was the same individual to collect the eggs)?
There are also questions of exchanging eggs, even in areas where ostrich eggs could already be procured. Did eggs from different areas have different perceived values? Who conducted these exchanges? What arguments would an individual have used to persuade someone to acquire their ‘foreign’ eggs when eggs could be acquired more regionally?
Furthermore, the team learned from ethnographic evidence that ostrich eggs need to dry naturally for 6–24 months after blowing before the shells are ready to be worked; they cannot be put in the sun or an oven to dry to speed up the process (2 May 2017 interview by the author with J. Cutts, President of the former Egg Crafters Guild of Great Britain). This adds to the complexity of the question about trade of the eggs themselves, because we must now consider additional individuals responsible for their storage, and the impact the responsibility of secure, stable storage had upon those in charge of their care during this period. This may have also added to the eggs’ luxury status, since it represents a long-term investment before a return can be realised.
Either way, only once the eggs were suitably dried could highly skilled craftsmen proceed to undertake their decoration. Who determined the imagery depicted on the eggs? Were these solely at the discretion of the craftsman or did the patron have a say? How did such decisions impact upon an artisan’s own practices and behaviours in life? Traders were then required to transport the eggs from workshops and arrange for their distribution around the Mediterranean by sea and land; luxury goods required a type of secure storage on board to ensure they did not get damaged, misplaced, or stolen, influencing the behaviour of the loaders and perhaps crew members. All of this activity had to take place before an elite recipient could purchase or receive such an object. In short, individuals involved in the production and distribution of this luxury were varied in terms of time, place, occupation, and social status. Nevertheless, their engagement in the biography of these objects impacted upon their behaviour and perhaps social status, although the extent to which we can discuss this beyond speculating how, exactly, is limited, given that we have no direct evidence from the individuals themselves. Even so, we now have a better idea of how the luxury industry affected members of a wide range of society and in diverse locales considerably beyond their elite customers, much like it does today, despite our relative neglect in considering this aspect of luxuries serving as social actors.
These eggs also served as social actors between cultures, as more widely recognised already (see above). They are found in many different ancient Mediterranean cultures, who had distinctive material cultures, beliefs, practices, rituals, languages and customs, and who were often in conflict with one another. Nevertheless, these groups shared a common expression of what it meant to be ‘elite.’ The fact that these eggs are found consistently in elite contexts during the Bronze and Iron Ages around the wider ancient Mediterranean world, including in regions where ostriches were not indigenous, suggests that they played a role specifically as agents of shared status expression alongside their own socio-cultural specificities (e.g. Hodos 2009, 2020). That they remained popular, albeit in exclusive contexts, over the third, second and first millennia BCE demonstrates that they influenced elites in their self-expressions of what it meant to be rich diachronically.
By the second half of the first millennium BCE, however, ostrich eggs are found predominantly only in the western Mediterranean, primarily in regions associated with the Phoenician-Punic realm of southern Iberia, the Balearic islands and the north-west African coast, and their local networks within those landscapes. Their working does not appear to rely on such highly skilled artisans (motifs are mostly painted, and increasingly less elaborately: Savio 2004), and their find contexts are less exclusive, although still recognised as of comparatively elevated status. This hints at how the eggs themselves worked as social actors upon society more broadly diachronically, and how their status evolved over time, as well (further research on this dimension is ongoing by the author in collaboration with C. López-Ruiz).
Thus, these objects are extraordinary for reasons beyond their predominantly luxury status, challenging acquisition, and craftsmanship display. In addition to communicating common understanding while fostering localised differences between cultures and their individual users—in the more traditional understanding of objects as social agents—it is now clear that many more individuals were involved in the making of these objects than previously considered (if considered at all). A complex chain of interpersonal, collaborative relationships existed that necessitated social interaction, knowledge and understanding. The eggs thus had potential to impact upon individual, and group, behaviour and practice at every step of the chaîne opératoire. Arguably, there is still much we do not know about the extent to which these extraordinary objects were social actors upon and between those involved in their production and distribution. The extent of our understanding may also remain limited in the absence of emic records of those involved. Nevertheless, consideration of the entire production process draws out the complex and evolving impacts of the luxury material culture industry upon a number of social groups and individuals beyond wealthy consumers, and highlights more substantially the role luxuries play as social actors. | https://civilengineering365.com/eggstraordinary-artefacts-decorated-ostrich-eggs-in-the-ancient-mediterranean-world/ |
Noble laureate Daniel Kahneman has established that the confidence we have in our beliefs is no measure of their accuracy. This has been clearly demonstrated by the amendments to the Land Acquisition Bill.
Before the government begins on an acquisition binge, it needs to tabulate its own unused lands.
In all probability there are over 2 lakh hectares of land lying with various government or public sector units, that can be made available immediately for private sector industrial expansion.
These entities will not cede control of their lands willingly and the government could be worried about dispossessing their own unused lands for the private sector for fear of agitation from trade unions and political parties or CAG notings.
I have not included the 1 lakh hectares of land owned by the Indian Railways, which should be capitalised to fund railway modernisation and expansion. In neither of these tabulations have I included defence lands and wasteland.
It may appear the government wishes to fund new highways by selling land for industrialisation and to colonisers along the new expressways, where they want to construct.
“Nothing wrong with that, but the clause to acquire one kilometre of land on each side of the highway for development is plain right foolish. It makes the government appear more like a property developer or someone under the influence of property sharks, rather than being a force seeking development or wanting to create jobs.”
On this one issue, industrialists and my fellow farmers are all flummoxed. So as farmers we propose our own amendment:
Industrialists want to locate close to urban centres and have fast access to the site of development. Being on the highway or in the city is not the priority. Understanding the difference, the government should have proposed not to acquire land up to 5 kms on either side of the highway or within 50 kilometres of municipal limits.
It would be easy to add a few kilometres of expressway connectivity from the main highway to these development hubs. Such a development would deliver more inclusive growth in the back regions.
Further from the highway and the municipal limits, it would be easier to secure the farmers consent.
Normally the circle rate decided by the revenue department of the state government is accepted as market rate in case of acquisitions. In most cases the circle rate is same for an administrative block and does not differentiate between locations close to or away from the highway.
The circle rate for land within 1 km of the highway will invariably be far less than the actual market potential of the land and farmers will be unwilling to part with the same.
“As we move away from the highway or municipal limits the cost of land reduces drastically. The amendments also stipulate four times the market value to farmers on acquisition. So farmers with land 5 km away from the highway or further from municipal limits, may feel adequately compensated to entice a willing consent for acquisition.”
UPA made a choice, now it is BJP’s turn to decide between economists’ complicated theories or the farmer’s common sense. | https://ajayvirjakhar.com/land-acquisition-plain-right-foolish-to-acquire-along-highway/ |
Beijing is eager to reciprocate the pivot to the East, by making Qatar a key partner in its "Belt and Road" initiative, which it promoted last month when Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi visited the capital Doha.
The "Belt and Road" moniker is a reference to the infrastructure and trade networks put forward by Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013.
Via the Silk Road Economic Belt, the Chinese government proposes to bring together China, Central Asia, Russia and Europe, by linking China with the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean Sea through Central Asia and the Indian Ocean.
"As China is thirsty for energy resources to fuel its projects, Beijing clearly sees the benefits of strengthening ties with the gas-rich Persian Gulf emirate," wrote the experts, who see scope for Doha to establish petroleum and petrochemical facilities in China, helping the kingdom to acquire a greater share of the energy market there.
"China and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are at the moment undertaking negotiations for a free-trade agreement, which will likely have positive implications for both Beijing and Doha," including the abolition of custom duties and an increase in their trade partnership.
"Throughout recent years, China has become the Gulf's largest trading partner, and their partnership continues to thrive."
In addition, China plans for a growing share of its trade partnership with Qatar to be cleared in renminbi, through the RMB clearing center and currency swap agreements.
"As Qatar's second top LNG export partner, China has and will continue to offer Doha an opportunity to counter-balance the geopolitical interests of its Western allies, giving more important players in the international arena higher stakes in Qatar's future," the analysts concluded. | https://sputniknews.com/world/201606031040742200-qatar-china-silk-road/ |
Rare opportunity to acquire a detached house in the first row facing the sea. The land is freehold, it is located just 200m from the beach. The land overlooks the sea by about 10m and offers a magnificent sea and lagoon view from the ground floor.
Additional Information
Reference RK_301125
Land Surface (m²) 418.00
Interior Surface (m²) 160.00
Beachfront Yes
Bedrooms:
3
Price Type: | https://www.lexpress-petites-annonces.mu/en/mauritius-real-estate/buy-house-villa/flic-en-flac-house-villa-buy/202475 |
The Sc’ianew First Nation took a big step towards its goal of establishing an Indigenous protected area at Mary Hill on Thursday.
The First Nation announced a standstill agreement signed between the District of Metchosin, Pearson College UWC and the Habitat Acquisition Trust that commits them for the next 18 months to work towards either an Indigenous protected area or a residential development that would see money flow back to the community.
The Te’mexw Treaty Association is currently negotiating with the federal government to acquire the Mary Hill lands as part of the B.C. treaty process. The land has been closed to the public ever since the Department of Defence fenced it off after World War II, but is within the Sc’ianew’s traditional territory.
“We’ve been talking about endangered species, but I think the most endangered species at Mary Hill is the Beecher Bay people themselves. We haven’t set foot on the land in years,” said Chief Russ Chipps, who had never been to Marry Hill in his life before touring it as part of the negotiations. While establishing an Indigenous protected area is the goal, Chipps said “conservation costs money” and the housing needs of the nation need to be met.
“Creating that economic thing – that’s going to bring our people home. We have people out there that have been away from our home for years that have not stepped on Beecher Bay land or at Mary Hill for years,” Chipps added.
The 338-acre area is home to more than 20 species at risk and 15 per cent of the remaining old-growth coastal Douglas-fir habitat, which is extremely rare, according to Katie Blake, executive director of Habitat Acquisition Trust who is working as part of the team.
With its campus on a portion of the Mary Hill land, Pearson College is offering 36 acres of school-owned land to Sc’ianew that is to be included in a potential protected area.
“This initiative, Mary Hill has, for as long as I can remember, been near and dear to the heart of Metchosin residents. It’s a special place, and it’s something that we’ve always believed should be preserved in its natural state, but never knew how to do it,” said Metchosin Mayor John Ranns.
Erin Thomson-Leach, legal counsel for Sc’ianew, said finalizing a deal to establish an Indigenous protected area could take several years, as the treaty negotiations are still ongoing. The decision to establish a protected area would also need to be approved by band members before it can be finalized.
@moreton_bailey
[email protected]
Like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter. | https://www.vancouverislandfreedaily.com/news/scianew-signs-deal-working-with-partners-to-protect-mary-hill/ |
International Logistics3 min read
When we talk about international movers san Francisco, there are quite a number of things that come into our minds. But there are quite a few misconceptions associated with the same as well which we would, in this article, try and debunk. First and foremost, it is important to understand what international logistics is all about. International logistics is essentially the procedure of managing and planning products and goods from your business to your ultimate customer where any piece of the delivery route includes crossing over more than one international boundary.
There are two main elements involved in international logistics which include international transportation and international distribution. International transportation involves movement of freight from one destination to another which can either be domestically or internationally. International transportation has to go through many international logistics networks which include land, air, sea and even green trade. International distribution involves movement of raw materials and finished products from one point to another which is either located within or beyond the boundaries of your country. In order to facilitate international trade, you have to build global supply chains which involve manufacturers, suppliers, brokers, distributors and exporters who in turn provide services to your clients all over the world.
Read Also: What Are the Major Challenges For Shipping?
One of the most crucial aspects of international logistics management deals with the international distribution. The international distribution involves transporting goods from one stage to another. There are many international distribution networks that you can choose to work with like road transport, rail transport, air transport and water transport. Depending on the type of goods that you want to distribute, you will have to take into consideration factors like speed, cost, weight and safety. Also, in order to facilitate the international transportation of goods, there are international transfer facilities that you can use.
One of the major issues in international logistics management is with regard to the physical movement of the goods. There are two types of physical movement that have to be taken into consideration. One is the physical movement of the goods from one country to another and the other is the movement of goods between two countries as part of an international trade. The physical movement of goods is mainly concerned with the handling, storage, transport, marketing and sale of the goods. This requires major transportation and logistic investments.
On the other hand, when we talk about the international logistics of an international trade, we refer to the process by which the international cargo is carried from one place to another and from one buyer to another buyer. The supply chain also has an important role to play in this process. There are numerous factors that you have to consider in the supply chain including the manufacturer, the exporter, the transport provider, the warehouse where the goods are stored until they reach the customers and finally the end users.
There are several factors that have to be considered in the international logistics of a trade. One such factor is the temporary storage of the goods that are being transported. There are many types of temporary storage available for use. These may include storage buildings, silos, trucks, boxes, racks, cages and palletized warehousing. The duration of the storage depends upon the nature of the product and the type of goods being transported.
Another factor that has to be considered in international logistics is the transport of the raw materials. Most of the businesses are aware of the fact that there is no dearth of raw materials in one country but in another country. There could be a problem in the supply chain involving the shipment of these raw materials.
One major factor that has to be considered in international logistics is the contract between the parties involved. The most common method of international cargo transportation is by air freight. However, there are many other methods that are used for the international transportation of goods. There are some instances when the international cargo is actually transported using cargo ships. These include passenger vessels and container ships. | https://webonlinestudio.com/blog/international-logistics/ |
Source: Adapted from William Black (2000) “An Unpopular Essay on Transportation”, Douglas Fleming lecture, Presented at the meeting of the Association of American Geographers, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Several alternatives, each having a specific topology, are possible to establish a level of service through a transportation network. Each topology is reflective of a level of network connectivity:
- (A) Minimum network. Represents the simplest configuration possible to link a set of locations, but has also the longest average path length.
- (B or C) Intermediate network. Represents a network topology seeking to find a compromise between the shortcomings of minimalism and the excess of redundancies. Hub-and-spoke networks are an attempt to rationalize services using a specific network topology (C). Mesh-like networks are also intermediate forms of connectivity. It is usually the maximum level of connectivity that a physical transport network can take.
- (D) Complete network. A highly redundant network with a complex topology which has an average path length close to the geographic barrier; the lowest possible average path length. These are usually abstract networks such as social networks and are very rare because of the complexity that this high level of connectivity would entail. | https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter2/geography-of-transportation-networks/network-topology-connectivity/ |
Beginning from Quanzhou Fujian Province, the Maritime Silk Road was the earliest voyage route that was formed within the Qin and Han dynasties, developed from the Three Kingdoms Period towards the Sui Dynasty, flourished inside the Tang and Song dynasties, and fell into decline inside the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Via the Maritime Silk Road, silks, china, tea, and brass and iron have been the four key categories exported to foreign countries; even though spices, flowers and plants, and rare treasures for the court had been brought to China. Consequently, the Maritime Silk Road was also known as "the Maritime China road" or "the Maritime spices road".
The Maritime Silk Road, like its overland counterpart, had its origins through the Han Dynasty (202 BC-220 AD). Although vast seas separate the four corners on the Earth, with advances in shipbuilding and navigational technologies, maritime transport came to provide unprecedented access for the most distant destinations.
It truly is identified that the bulk with the raw and processed silk transported along the overland Silk Road throughout the Han Dynasty was produced mainly along China's southern coast and inside the coastal Wu, Wei, Qi, and Lu regions (present-day Shandong Province). Because ancient times, these locations have already been thriving centers of shipbuilding too as silk production. They had been thus able to supply each commodities for export plus the signifies to transport them across the sea. It was this combination that offered the social and material conditions essential for the development of maritime trade throughout the Han Dynasty.
The maritime routes opened by Emperor Han Wudi (reigned 140-87 BC) supplied access for the Roman Empire through India, marking the first oceanic route at the same time because the earliest maritime trading route within the world. This enabled China to actively seek out overseas markets and establish foreign trade relations, and laid the foundation for the development on the Maritime Silk Road.
Han Shu Record (also referred to as The History in the Han Dynasty) kept the first comprehensive vivid record on China's boats sailing into the Indian Ocean from the South Sea through the Malacca Strait in Southeast Asian waters. Han ships would leave from Xuwen in South China's Guangdong Province, or Hepu in South China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, and by way of the South Sea, would arrive in India and Sri Lanka -- a transfer station, where pearls, colored glazes, along with other exotic items could be purchased. Chinese silk was transported to Rome hereafter. Such was the Maritime Silk Road.
In his book Nature History, Gaius Plinius Secundus, a knowledgeable scientist in ancient Rome, recorded, "four sailors from (today's Sri Lanka) left for Rome (through the Caesar Era). According to one of the sailors named Rutgers, each Rome and Sri Lanka had direct trade relations with China."
In 166 from the Han Dynasty, the Roman Emperor sent envoys to China, presenting various such gifts as ivory and hawksbill turtles to the imperial royal court, which marked the earliest friendly relations between China and European countries. A direct route in the East to the West was hence opened up.
Through the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), Chinese ships set sail from Guangzhou, bound across the South China Sea, hence pioneering the most essential routes with the maritime Silk Road. Also to transporting silk, the South China Sea routes stimulated both material and cultural exchange. Nations all through Southeast Asia, South Asia, West Asia, and in some cases Europe dispatched emissaries to China by way of the new maritime routes to establish diplomatic relations, obtain silk, and engage of trade of all sorts. Silk, because the principal maritime trade commodity, flowed inside a steady stream from China to other countries.
Earnings in the maritime trade were one on the Chinese government's main sources of income during this time. The Tang, Song (960-1279), and Yuan (1279-1368) Dynasties all appointed particular Commissions of Maritime Affairs at coastal cities which includes Guangzhou (Canton), Mingzhou (present-day Ningbo), and Quanzhou. These offices have been accountable for overseeing maritime trade and providing logistic support and preferential treatment for foreign merchants in China. The maritime Silk Road as a result became a conduit for advertising friendly relations and linking East and West.
East China Sea Route
Kaiyuan Temple in Quanzhou, the starting place of Maritime Silk Road. The East China Sea Route enjoys a lengthy history of about 3,000 years. It was during the Zhou Dynasty that Ji Zi, a court official, was sent on a journey east, setting off from Shangdong Peninsula's Bohai Gulf and navigating his way across the Yellow Sea, which led towards the introduction of sericiculture (silkworm farming), filature and silk spinning into Korea.
When Emperor Qin Shi Huang united China, many Chinese fled to Korea and took with them silkworms and breeding technology. This sped up the development of silk spinning in Korea. These new skills and also the technologies had been subsequently introduced into Japan through the Han Dynasty. Since the Tang Dynasty, the silks produced by Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces have been directly shipped to Japan. Many Japanese envoys and monks had been also in a position to travel to Chang'an (now Xi'an) along this sea route.
South China Sea Route
Guangzhou represented the starting-point with the South China Sea Route, which extended across the Indian Ocean and then on to numerous nations situated around the Persian Gulf. The kinds goods dispatched for trade consisted primarily of silk, china and tea, whilst imported merchandise incorporated several different spices, flowers and grasses - hence it being typically known as the sea's 'China Road' plus the sea's 'Flavor Road' .
The route was initial used inside the Qin and Han Dynasties, and increased in recognition in the Three Kingdoms Period (220-280) to the Sui Dynasty (581-618). Up until the Tang Dynasty Anshi Rebellions (755-762), this route was viewed as a secondary option to the Silk Road, On the other hand inside the latter half from the eighth century, owing towards the scourge of wars in the vast Western Regions, trade volumes along the Maritime Silk Road boomed as those on its overland counterpart steadily declined.
Delicate Silk Technologic advances in shipbuilding and navigation led to the opening of new sea-lanes to the Southeast Asia, Malacca, areas in the Indian Ocean plus the Persian Gulf. Guangzhou became the initial wonderful harbor in China about the time of the Tang and Song Dynasties, though it was later substituted by Quanzhou inside the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) as the most important trade port.
The Naval Expedition to the West by Zheng He within the early part of the Ming Dynasty demonstrated the wonderful value of the Silk Road and was to represent the peak of its recognition. The governments from the Ming and Qing Dynasties issued a ban on maritime trade, contributing to huge decline in its use. As the Opium War broke out in 1840, the Silk Road on the Sea completely disappeared.
As early as 2,000 years ago, the Maritime Silk Road started from China's south-east coastal regions, traversing a vast expanse of oceans and seas to nations in Southeast Asia, Africa and Europe.
This trading route that connects the East and also the West, had enhanced the exchanges of commodities, people and culture among nations situated around the road.
To be able to revive the ancient Maritime Silk Road and bring additional benefits towards the relevant nations and peoples, the initiative that China and nations along the ancient Maritime Silk Road would create together a new Maritime Silk Road on the 21st Century was proposed by China.
Such an initiative draws inspiration both from history and from most up-to-date developments in the 21st century. The aim is always to inject sturdy impetus in enhancing political mutual trust, deepening economic cooperation, and advertising cultural also as people-to-people exchanges among relevant nations by means of joint cooperation, frequent development and regional integration. All nations along the Maritime Silk Road are welcome to plan, develop and benefit with each other in the initiative.
Since the initiative was initial raised, quite a few countries have actively supported and engaged themselves in the development in the or the Silk Road Financial Belt (the "Belt and Road" for quick) or both.
On Oct. 24, 2014, twenty-first Asian nations signed the Memorandum of Understanding on Establishing the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) in Beijing, aiming to finance and facilitate infrastructure constructions for Asian countries along the "Belt and Road".
The MOU specifies that the authorized capital of AIIB is 100 billion U.S. dollars and the initial subscribed capital is anticipated to become around 50 billion dollars. The paid-in ratio is going to be 20 %.
The 21 nations are Bangladesh, Brunei, Cambodia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Laos, Malaysia, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Oman, Pakistan, the Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
At the APEC Summit 2014 held in Beijing in November, 2014, China announced to contribute US$40 billion to set up a Silk Road Fund to provide investment and financial support to carry out infrastructure, resources, industrial and financial cooperation as well as other projects connected to connectivity for countries along the "Belt and Road".
With much more support from other countries and wider coverage across the region, the 21st Century Maritime Silk Road has come to be an initiative not for one country but for all countries who welcome and support the initiative and are operating together closely with one another for economic and social advancement at the same time as for the welfare of their peoples. The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road has always been and can nevertheless be open to all countries along the road. | https://www.knowpia.com/s/blog_ed09f2e248fde631 |
# Trade route
A trade route is a logistical network identified as a series of pathways and stoppages used for the commercial transport of cargo. The term can also be used to refer to trade over bodies of water. Allowing goods to reach distant markets, a single trade route contains long-distance arteries, which may further be connected to smaller networks of commercial and noncommercial transportation routes. Among notable trade routes was the Amber Road, which served as a dependable network for long-distance trade. Maritime trade along the Spice Route became prominent during the Middle Ages, when nations resorted to military means for control of this influential route. During the Middle Ages, organizations such as the Hanseatic League, aimed at protecting interests of the merchants and trade became increasingly prominent.
In modern times, commercial activity shifted from the major trade routes of the Old World to newer routes between modern nation-states. This activity was sometimes carried out without traditional protection of trade and under international free-trade agreements, which allowed commercial goods to cross borders with relaxed restrictions. Innovative transportation of modern times includes pipeline transport and the relatively well-known trade involving rail routes, automobiles, and cargo airlines.
## History
### Development of early routes
#### Early development
Long-distance trade routes were developed in the Chalcolithic Period. The period from the middle of the 2nd millennium BCE to the beginning of the Common Era saw societies in Southeast Asia, Western Asia, the Mediterranean, China, and the Indian subcontinent develop major transportation networks for trade.
One of the vital instruments which facilitated long-distance trade was portage and the domestication of beasts of burden. Organized caravans, visible by the 2nd millennium BCE, could carry goods across a large distance as fodder was mostly available along the way. The domestication of camels allowed Arabian nomads to control the long-distance trade in spices and silk from the Far East to the Arabian Peninsula. Caravans were useful in long-distance trade largely for carrying luxury goods, the transportation of cheaper goods across large distances was not profitable for caravan operators. With productive developments in iron and bronze technologies, newer trade routes – dispensing innovations of civilizations – began to rise.
#### Maritime trade
Navigation was known in Sumer between the 4th and the 3rd millennium BCE. The Egyptians had trade routes through the Red Sea, importing spices from the "Land of Punt" (East Africa) and from Arabia.
In Asia, the earliest evidence of maritime trade was the Neolithic trade networks of the Austronesian peoples among which is the lingling-o jade industry of the Philippines, Taiwan, southern Vietnam, and peninsular Thailand. It also included the long-distance routes of Austronesian traders from Indonesia and Malaysia connecting China with South Asia and the Middle East since approximately 500 BCE. It facilitated the spread of Southeast Asian spices and Chinese goods to the west, as well as the spread of Hinduism and Buddhism to the east. This route would later become known as the Maritime Silk Road, although that is a misnomer, since spices, rather than silk, were traded along this route. Many Austronesian technologies like the outrigger and catamaran, as well as Austronesian ship terminologies, still persist in many of the coastal cultures in the Indian Ocean.
Maritime trade began with safer coastal trade and evolved with the manipulation of the monsoon winds, soon resulting in trade crossing boundaries such as the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal. South Asia had multiple maritime trade routes which connected it to Southeast Asia, thereby making the control of one route resulting in maritime monopoly difficult. Indian connections to various Southeast Asian states buffered it from blockages on other routes. By making use of the maritime trade routes, bulk commodity trade became possible for the Romans in the 2nd century BCE. A Roman trading vessel could span the Mediterranean in a month at one-sixtieth the cost of over-land routes.
#### Visible trade routes
The peninsula of Anatolia lay on the commercial land routes to Europe from Asia as well as the sea route from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea. Records from the 19th century BCE attest to the existence of an Assyrian merchant colony at Kanesh in Cappadocia (now in modern Turkey). Trading networks of the Old World included the Grand Trunk Road of India and the Incense Road of Arabia. A transportation network consisting of hard-surfaced highways, using concrete made from volcanic ash and lime, was built by the Romans as early as 312 BCE, during the times of the Censor Appius Claudius Caecus. Parts of the Mediterranean world, Roman Britain, Tigris-Euphrates river system and North Africa fell under the reach of this network at some point of their history.
According to Robert Allen Denemark (2000):
"The spread of urban trading networks, and their extension along the Persian Gulf and eastern Mediterranean, created a complex molecular structure of regional foci so that as well as the zonation of core and periphery (originally created around Mesopotamia) there was a series of interacting civilizations: Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley; then also Syria, central Anatolia (Hittites) and the Aegean (Minoans and Mycenaeans). Beyond this was a margin which included not only temperate areas such as Europe, but the dry steppe corridor of central Asia. This was truly a world system, even though it occupied only a restricted portion of the western Old World. Whilst each civilization emphasized its ideological autonomy, all were identifiably part of a common world of interacting components."
These routes – spreading religion, trade and technology – have historically been vital to the growth of urban civilization. The extent of development of cities, and the level of their integration into a larger world system, has often been attributed to their position in various active transport networks.
### Historic trade routes
#### Combined land and waterway routes
##### Incense Route
The Incense Route served as a channel for trading of Indian, Arabian and East Asian goods. The incense trade flourished from South Arabia to the Mediterranean between roughly the 3rd century BCE to the 2nd century CE. This trade was crucial to the economy of Yemen and the frankincense and myrrh trees were seen as a source of wealth by its rulers.
Ptolemy II Philadelphus, emperor of Ptolemaic Egypt, may have forged an alliance with the Lihyanites in order to secure the incense route at Dedan, thereby rerouting the incense trade from Dedan to the coast along the Red Sea to Egypt. I. E. S. Edwards connects the Syro-Ephraimite War to the desire of the Israelites and the Aramaeans to control the northern end of the Incense route, which ran up from Southern Arabia and could be tapped by commanding Transjordan.
Gerrha – inhabited by Chaldean exiles from Babylon – controlled the Incense trade routes across Arabia to the Mediterranean and exercised control over the trading of aromatics to Babylon in the 1st century BCE. The Nabateans exercised control over the routes along the Incense Route, and their hold was challenged – without success – by Antigonus Cyclops, emperor of Syria. The Nabatean control over trade further increased and spread in many directions.
The replacement of Greece by the Roman empire as the administrator of the Mediterranean basin led to the resumption of direct trade with the East and the elimination of the taxes extracted previously by the middlemen of the south. According to Milo Kearney (2003) "The South Arabs in protest took to pirate attacks over the Roman ships in the Gulf of Aden. In response, the Romans destroyed Aden and favored the Western Abyssinian coast of the Red Sea." Indian ships sailed to Egypt as the maritime routes of Southern Asia were not under the control of a single power.
##### Pre-Columbian trade
Some similarities between the Mesoamerican and the Andean cultures suggest that the two regions became a part of a wider world system, as a result of trade, by the 1st millennium BCE. The current academic view is that the flow of goods across the Andean slopes was controlled by institutions distributing locations to local groups, who were then free to access them for trading. This trade across the Andean slopes – described sometimes as "vertical trade" – may have overshadowed the long-distance trade between the people of the Andes and the neighboring forests. The Callawaya herbalists traded in tropical plants between 6th and the 10th centuries, while copper was dealt by specialized merchants in the Peruvian valley of Chincha. Long-distance trade may have seen local elites resorting to struggle in order for manipulation and control.
Prior to the Inca dominance, specialized long-distance merchants provided the highlanders with goods such as gold nuggets, copper hatchets, cocoa, salt etc. for redistribution among the locals, and were key players in the politics of the region. Hatchet shaped copper currency was produced by the Peruvian people, in order to obtain valuables from pre Columbian Ecuador. A maritime exchange system stretched from the west coast of Mexico to southernmost Peru, trading mostly in Spondylus, which represented rain and fertility and was considered the principal food of the gods by the people of the Inca empire. Spondylus was used in elite rituals, and the effective redistribution of it had political effect in the Andes during the pre-Hispanic times.
#### Predominantly overland routes
##### Silk Road
The Silk Road was one of the first trade routes to join the Eastern and the Western worlds. According to Vadime Elisseeff (2000):
"Along the Silk Roads, technology traveled, ideas were exchanged, and friendship and understanding between East and West were experienced for the first time on a large scale. Easterners were exposed to Western ideas and life-styles, and Westerners, too, learned about Eastern culture and its spirituality-oriented cosmology. Buddhism as an Eastern religion received international attention through the Silk Roads."
Cultural interactions patronized often by powerful emperors, such as Kanishka, led to development of art due to introduction of a rich variety of influences. Buddhist missions thrived along the Silk Roads, partly due to the conducive intermixing of trade and cultural values, which created a series of safe stoppages for both the pilgrims and the traders. Among the frequented routes of the Silk Route was the Burmese route extending from Bhamo, which served as a path for Marco Polo's visit to Yunnan and Indian Buddhist missions to Canton in order to establish Buddhist monasteries. This route – often under the presence of hostile tribes – also finds mention in the works of Rashid-al-Din Hamadani.
##### Grand Trunk Road
The Grand Trunk Road – connecting Chittagong in Bangladesh to Peshawar in Pakistan – has existed for over two and a half millennia. One of the important trade routes of the world, this road has been a strategic artery with fortresses, halting posts, wells, post offices, milestones and other facilities. Part of this road through Pakistan also coincided with the Silk Road.
This highway has been associated with emperors Chandragupta Maurya and Sher Shah Suri, the latter became synonymous with this route due to his role in ensuring the safety of the travelers and the upkeep of the road. Emperor Sher Shah widened and realigned the road to other routes, and provided approximately 1700 roadside inns through his empire. These inns provided free food and lodgings to the travelers regardless of their status.
The British occupation of this road was of special significance for the British Raj in India. Bridges, pathways and newer inns were constructed by the British for the first thirty-seven years of their reign since the occupation of Punjab in 1849. The British followed roughly the same alignment as the old routes, and at some places the newer routes ran parallel to the older routes.
Vadime Elisseeff (2000) comments on the Grand Trunk Road:
"Along this road marched not only the mighty armies of conquerors, but also the caravans of traders, scholars, artists, and common folk. Together with people, moved ideas, languages, customs, and cultures, not just in one, but in both directions. At different meeting places – permanent as well as temporary – people of different origins and from different cultural backgrounds, professing different faiths and creeds, eating different foods, wearing different clothes, and speaking different languages and dialects would meet one another peacefully. They would understand one another's food, dress, manner, and etiquette, and even borrow words, phrases, idioms and, at times, whole languages from others."
##### Amber Road
The Amber Road was a European trade route associated with the trade and transport of amber. Amber satisfied the criteria for long-distance trade as it was light in weight and was in high demand for ornamental purposes around the Mediterranean. Before the establishment of Roman control over areas such as Pannonia, the Amber Road was virtually the only route available for long-distance trade.
Towns along the Amber Road began to rise steadily during the 1st century CE, despite the troop movements under Titus Flavius Vespasianus and his son Titus Flavius Domitianus. Under the reign of Tiberius Caesar Augustus, the Amber Road was straightened and paved according to the prevailing urban standards. Roman towns began to appear along the road, initially founded near the site of Celtic oppida.
The 3rd century saw the Danube river become the principal artery of trade, eclipsing the Amber Road and other commercial routes. The redirection of investment to the Danubian forts saw the towns along the Amber Road growing slowly, though yet retaining their prosperity. The prolonged struggle between the Romans and the barbarians further left its mark on the towns along the Amber Road.
##### Via Maris
Via Maris, literally Latin for "the way of the sea", was an ancient highway used by the Romans and the Crusaders. The states controlling the Via Maris were in a position to grant access for trade to their own citizens and collect tolls from the outsiders to maintain the trade route. The name Via Maris is a Latin translation of a Hebrew phrase related to Isaiah. Due to the biblical significance of this ancient route, many attempts to find its present-day location have been made by Christian pilgrims. 13th-century traveler and pilgrim Burchard of Mount Zion refers to the Via Maris route as a way leading along the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
##### Trans Saharan trade
Early Muslim writings confirm that the people of West Africa operated a sophisticated network of trade, usually under the authority of a monarch who levied taxes and provided bureaucratic and military support to his kingdom. Sophisticated mechanisms for the economic and political development of the involved African areas were in place before Islam further strengthened trade, towns and government in western Africa. The capital, court and trade of the region find mention in the works of scholar Abū 'Ubayd 'Abd Allāh al-Bakrī; the mainstay of the trans Saharan trade was gold and salt.
The powerful Saharan tribes, Berber in origin and later adapting to Muslim and Arab cultures, controlled the channels to western Africa by making efficient use of horse-drawn vehicles and pack animals. The Songhai engaged in a struggle against the Sa'di dynasty of Morocco over the control of the trans Saharan trade, resulting in damage on both sides and a weak Moroccan victory, further strengthening the uninvolved Saharan tribes. Struggles and disturbances continued till the 14th century, by which the Mandé merchants were trading with the Hausa, between Lake Chad and the Niger. Newer trade routes developed following extension of trade.
#### Predominantly maritime routes
##### Austronesian maritime trade network
The first true maritime trade network in the Indian Ocean was by the Austronesian peoples of Island Southeast Asia. They established trade routes with Southern India and Sri Lanka as early as 500 BCE, ushering an exchange of material culture (like catamarans, outrigger boats, sewn-plank boats, and paan) and cultigens (like coconuts, sandalwood, bananas, and sugarcane); as well as connecting the material cultures of India and China. They constituted the majority of the Indian Ocean component of the spice trade network. Indonesians, in particular were trading in spices (mainly cinnamon and cassia) with East Africa using catamaran and outrigger boats and sailing with the help of the Westerlies in the Indian Ocean. This trade network expanded to reach as far as Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, resulting in the Austronesian colonization of Madagascar by the first half of the first millennium AD. It continued up to historic times, later becoming the Maritime Silk Road. This trade network also included smaller trade routes within Island Southeast Asia, including the lingling-o jade network, and the trepanging network.
In eastern Austronesia, various traditional maritime trade networks also existed. Among them was the ancient Lapita trade network of Island Melanesia; the Hiri trade cycle, Sepik Coast exchange, and the Kula ring of Papua New Guinea; the ancient trading voyages in Micronesia between the Mariana Islands and the Caroline Islands (and possibly also New Guinea and the Philippines); and the vast inter-island trade networks of Polynesia.
##### Roman-India routes
The Ptolemaic dynasty (305 to 30 BC) had initiated Greco-Roman maritime trade contact with India using the Red Sea ports. The Roman historian Strabo mentions a vast increase in trade following the Roman annexation of Egypt, indicating that monsoon was known and manipulated for trade in his time. By the time of Augustus up to 120 ships were setting sail every year from Myos Hormos to India, trading in a diverse variety of goods. Arsinoe, Berenice Troglodytica and Myos Hormos were the principal Roman ports involved in this maritime trading network, while the Indian ports included Barbaricum, Barygaza, Muziris and Arikamedu.
The Indians were present in Alexandria and the Christian and Jewish settlers from Rome continued to live in India long after the fall of the Roman empire, which resulted in Rome's loss of the Red Sea ports, previously used to secure trade with India by the Greco-Roman world since the time of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
##### Hanseatic trade
Shortly before the 12th century the Germans played a relatively modest role in the north European trade. However, this was to change with the development of Hanseatic trade, as a result of which German traders became prominent in the Baltic and the North Sea regions. Following the death of Eric VI of Denmark, German forces attacked and sacked Denmark, bringing with them artisans and merchants under the new administration which controlled the Hansa regions. During the third quarter of the 14th century the Hanseatic trade faced two major difficulties: economic conflict with the Flanders and hostilities with Denmark. These events led to the formation of an organized association of Hanseatic towns, which replaced the earlier union of German merchants. This new Hansa of the towns, aimed at protecting interests of the merchants and trade, was prominent for the next hundred and fifty years.
Philippe Dollinger associates the downfall of the Hansa to a new alliance between Lübeck, Hamburg and Bremen, which outshadowed the older institution. He further sets the date of dissolution of the Hansa at 1630 and concludes that the Hansa was almost entirely forgotten by the end of the 18th century. Scholar Georg Friedrich Sartorius published the first monograph regarding the community in the early years of the 19th century.
##### From the Varangians to the Greek
The trade route from the Varangians to the Greeks (Russian: Путь "из варяг в греки", Put' iz varyag v greki, Swedish: Vägen från varjagerna till grekerna, Greek: Εμπορική Οδός Βαράγγων – Ελλήνων, Emporikḗ Odós Varángōn-Ellḗnōn) was a trade route that connected Scandinavia, Kievan Rus' and the Byzantine Empire. The route allowed traders along the route to establish a direct prosperous trade with Byzantium, and prompted some of them to settle in the territories of present-day Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
The route began in Scandinavian trading centres such as Birka, Hedeby, and Gotland, crossed the Baltic Sea entered the Gulf of Finland, followed the Neva River into the Lake Ladoga. Then it followed the Volkhov River, upstream past the towns of Staraya Ladoga and Velikiy Novgorod, crossed Lake Ilmen, and up the Lovat River. From there, ships had to be portaged to the Dnieper River near Gnezdovo. A second route from the Baltic to the Dnieper was along the Western Dvina (Daugava) between the Lovat and the Dnieper in the Smolensk region, and along the Kasplya River to Gnezdovo. Along the Dnieper, the route crossed several major rapids and passed through Kiev, and after entering the Black Sea followed its west coast to Constantinople.
##### Maritime republics' Mediterranean trade
The economic growth of Europe around the year 1000, together with the lack of safety on the mainland trading routes, eased the development of major commercial routes along the coast of the Mediterranean. The growing independence of some coastal cities gave them a leading role in this commerce: Maritime Republics, Italian "Repubbliche Marinare" (Venice, Genoa, Amalfi, Pisa, Gaeta, Ancona and Ragusa), developed their own "empires" in the Mediterranean shores.
From the 8th until the 15th century, they held the monopoly of European trade with the Middle East. The silk and spice trade, involving spices, incense, herbs, drugs and opium, made these Mediterranean city-states phenomenally rich. Spices were among the most expensive and demanded products of the Middle Ages. They were all imported from Asia and Africa. Muslim traders – mainly descendants of Arab sailors from Yemen and Oman – dominated maritime routes throughout the Indian Ocean, tapping source regions in the Far East and shipping for trading emporiums in India, westward to Ormus in Persian Gulf and Jeddah in the Red Sea. From there, overland routes led to the Mediterranean coasts. Venetian merchants distributed then the goods through Europe until the rise of the Ottoman Empire, that eventually led to the fall of Constantinople in 1453, barring Europeans from important combined-land-sea routes.
##### Spice Route
As trade between India and the Greco-Roman world increased spices became the main import from India to the Western world, bypassing silk and other commodities. The Indian commercial connection with South East Asia proved vital to the merchants of Arabia and Persia during the 7th and 8th centuries.
The Abbasids used Alexandria, Damietta, Aden and Siraf as entry ports to India and China. Merchants arriving from India in the port city of Aden paid tribute in form of musk, camphor, ambergris and sandalwood to Ibn Ziyad, the sultan of Yemen. Moluccan products shipped across the ports of Arabia to the Near East passed through the ports of India and Sri Lanka. Indian exports of spices find mention in the works of Ibn Khurdadhbeh (850 CE), al-Ghafiqi (1150), Ishak bin Imaran (907) and Al Kalkashandi (14th century). After reaching either the Indian or the Sri Lankan ports, spices were sometimes shipped to East Africa, where they were used for many purposes, including burial rites.
On the orders of Manuel I of Portugal, four vessels under the command of navigator Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope, continuing to the eastern coast of Africa to Malindi to sail across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. The wealth of the Indies was now open for the Europeans to explore; the Portuguese Empire was one of the early European empires to grow from spice trade.
##### Maritime Jade Road
The Maritime Jade Road was an extensive trading network connecting multiple areas in Southeast and East Asia. Its primary products were made of jade mined from Taiwan by animist Taiwanese indigenous peoples and processed mostly in the Philippines by animist indigenous Filipinos, especially in Batanes, Luzon, and Palawan. Some were also processed in Vietnam, while the peoples of Malaysia, Brunei, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, and Cambodia also participated in the massive animist-led trading network. Participants in the network at the time had a majority animist population. The maritime road is one of the most extensive sea-based trade networks of a single geological material in the prehistoric world. It was in existence for at least 3,000 years, where its peak production was from 2000 BCE to 500 CE, older than the Silk Road in mainland Eurasia or the later Maritime Silk Road. A notable artifact that the trading network made, the Lingling-o artifacts, were made by artisans around 500 BCE. The network began to wane during its final centuries from 500 CE until 1000 CE. The entire period of the network was a golden age for the diverse animist societies of the region.
##### Maritime Silk Road
The Maritime Silk Road refers to the maritime section of historic Silk Road that connects China, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, Arabian peninsula, Somalia and all the way to Egypt and finally Europe. It flourished between 2nd-century BCE and 15th-century CE. Despite its association with China in recent centuries, the Maritime Silk Road was primarily established and operated by Austronesian sailors in Southeast Asia, and by Persian and Arab traders in the Arabian Sea.
The Maritime Silk Road developed from the earlier Austronesian spice trade networks of Islander Southeast Asians with Sri Lanka and Southern India (established 1000 to 600 BCE), as well as the earlier Maritime Jade Road, known for lingling-o artifacts, in Southeast Asia, based in Taiwan and the Philippines. For most of its history, Austronesian thalassocracies controlled the flow of the Maritime Silk Road, especially the polities around the straits of Malacca and Bangka, the Malay Peninsula, and the Mekong Delta; although Chinese records misidentified these kingdoms as being "Indian" due to the Indianization of these regions. Prior to the 10th century, the route was primarily used by Southeast Asian traders, although Tamil and Persian traders also sailed them. The route was influential in the early spread of Hinduism and Buddhism to the east.
China later built its own fleets starting from the Song dynasty in the 10th century, participating directly in the trade route up until the end of the Colonial Era and the collapse of the Qing dynasty.
### Modern routes
The modern times saw development of newer means of transport and often controversial free trade agreements, which altered the political and logistical approach prevalent during the Middle Ages. Newer means of transport led to the establishment of new routes, and countries opened up borders to allow trade in mutually agreed goods as per the prevailing free trade agreement. Some old trading route were reopened during the modern times, although in different political and logistical scenarios. The entry of harmful foreign pollutants by the way of trade routes has been a cause of alarm during the modern times. A conservative estimate stresses that future damages from harmful animal and plant diseases may be as high as 134 billion US dollars in the absence of effective measures to prevent the introduction of unwanted pests through various trade routes.
#### Wagonway routes
Networks, like the Santa Fe Trail and the Oregon Trail, became prominent in the United States with wagon trains gaining popularity as a mode of long-distance overland transportation for both people and goods. The Oregon–California routes were highly organized with planned rendezvous locations and essential supplies. The settlers in the United States used these wagon trains – sometimes made up of 100 of more Conestoga wagons – for westward emigration during the 18th and the 19th centuries. Among the challenges faced by the wagon route operators were crossing rivers, mountains and hostile Native Americans. Preparations were also made according to the weather and protection of trade and travelers was ensured by a few guards on horseback. Wagon freighting was also essential to American growth until it was replaced by the railroad and the truck.
#### Railway routes
The 1844 Railway act of England compelled at least one train to a station every day with the third class fares priced at a penny a mile. Trade benefited as the workers and the lower classes had the ability to travel to other towns frequently. Suburban communities began to develop and towns began to spread outwards. The British constructed a vast railway network in India, but it was considered to serve a strategic purpose in addition to the commercial purpose. The efficient use of rail routes helped in the unification of the United States of America, and the first transcontinental railroad was completed in 1869.
The modern times saw nations struggle for the control of rail routes: The Trans-Siberian Railway was intended to be used by the Russian government for control of Manchuria and later China; the German forces wanted to establish Berlin-Baghdad Railway in order to influence the Near East; and the Austrian government planned a route from Vienna to Salonika for control of the Balkans. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica (2002):
Railroads reached their maturity in the early 20th century, as trains carried the bulk of land freight and passenger traffic in the industrialized countries of the world. By the mid-20th century, however, they had lost their preeminent position. The private automobile had replaced the railroad for short passenger trips, while the airplane had usurped it for long-distance travel, especially in the United States. Railroads remained effective, however, for transporting people in high-volume situations, such as commuting between the centres of large cities and their suburbs, and medium-distance travel of less than about 300 miles between urban centres. Although railroads have lost much of the general-freight-carrying business to semi-trailer trucks, they remain the best means of transporting large volumes of such bulk commodities as coal, grain, chemicals, and ore over long distances. The development of containerization has made the railroads more effective in handling finished merchandise at relatively high speeds. In addition, the introduction of piggyback flatcars, in which truck trailers are transported long distances on specially-designed cars, has allowed railroads to regain some of the business lost to trucking.
#### Modern road networks
The advent motor vehicles created a demand for better use of highways. Roads evolved into two way roads, expressways, freeways and tollways during the modern times. Existing roads were developed and highways were designed according to intended use.
Trucks came into widespread use in the Western World during World War I, and quickly gained reputation as a means of long-distance transportation of goods. Modern highways, such as the Trans-Canada Highway, Highway 1 (Australia) and Pan-American Highway allowed transport of goods and services across great distances. Automobiles continue to play a crucial role in the economies of the Industrialized countries, resulting in rise of businesses such as motor freight operation and truck transportation.
The emission rate for cars using highways has been on a decline between 1975 and 1995 due to regulations and the introduction of unleaded petrol. This trend is especially notable since there has been a growth in vehicles and vehicle miles traveled by automobiles using these highways.
#### Modern maritime routes
A consistent shift from land based trade to sea-based trade has been recorded since the last three millennia. The strategic advantages of port cities as trading centers are many: they are both less dependent on vital connections and less vulnerable to blockages. Oceanic ports can help forge trading relationships with other parts of the world easily.
Modern maritime trade routes – sometimes in the form of artificial canals like the Suez Canal – had visible impact on the economic and political standing of nations. The opening of the Suez Canal altered British interactions with the colonies of the British Empire as the dynamics of transportation, trade and communication had now changed drastically. Other waterways, like the Panama Canal played an important role in the histories of many nations. Inland water transportation remained significantly important even as the advent of railroads and automobiles resulted in a steady decline of canals. Inland water transport is still used for the transportation of bulk commodities e.g. grains, coal, and ore.
Waterway commerce was historically important to Europe, particularly to Russia. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica (2002): "Russia has been a significant beneficiary. Not only have inland waterways opened vast areas of its interior to development, but Moscow – linked to the White, Baltic, Black, Caspian, and Azov seas by canals and rivers – has become a major inland port."
Oil spills are recorded both in case of maritime routes and pipeline routes to the main refineries. Oil spills, amounting to as much as 7.56 billion liters of oil entering the oceans every year, occur due to damaged equipment or human error.
The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road is a current project of the Chinese government to expand and intensify trade on the maritime Silk Road. This is leading to major investments in ports, traffic routes and other infrastructure in Europe and Africa as well. The maritime silk road essentially runs from the Chinese coast to Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, via the Sri Lankan Colombo towards the southern tip of India, to the East African Mombasa, from there to Djibouti, then via the Suez Canal to the Mediterranean, there via Haifa, Istanbul and Athens to the Upper Adriatic region to the northern Italian hub of Trieste with its international free port and its rail connections to Central and Eastern Europe and the North Sea.
#### Free trade areas
Historically, many governments followed a policy of protection of trade. International free trade became visible in 1860 with the Anglo-French commercial treaty, and the trend gained further momentum during the period after World War II. According to The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition:
"After World War II, strong sentiment developed throughout the world against protection and high tariffs and in favor of freer trade. The results were new organizations and agreements on international trade such as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1948), the Benelux Economic Union (1948), the European Economic Community (Common Market, 1957), the European Free Trade Association (1959), Mercosur (the Southern Cone Common Market, 1991), and the World Trade Organization (1995). In 1993, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was approved by the governments of Canada, Mexico, and the United States. In the early 1990s, the nations of the European Union (the successor organization to the Common Market) undertook to remove all barriers to the free movement of trade and employment across their mutual borders."
In May 2004 the United States of America signed the American Free trade Agreement with five Central American nations.
#### Air routes
Air transport has become an indispensable part of modern society. People have come to use air transport both for long and middle distances, with the average route length of long distances being 720 kilometers in Europe and 1220 kilometers in the US. This industry annually carries 1.6 billion passengers worldwide, covers a 15 million kilometer network, and has an annual turnover of 260 billion dollars.
This mode of transportation links national, international and global economies, making it vital to many other industries. Newer trends of liberalization of trade have fostered routes among nations bound by agreements. One such example, the American Open Skies policy, led to greater openness in many international markets, but some international restrictions have survived even during the present times.
Express delivery through international cargo airlines touched US$20 billion in 1998 and, according to the World Trade Organization, is expected to triple in 2015. In 1998, 50 pure cargo-service companies operated internationally.
Air transport particularly favors light, expensive and small products: electronic media rather than books, for example, and refined drugs rather than bulk food.
#### Pipeline networks
The economic importance of pipeline transport – responsible for a high percentage of oil and natural gas transportation – is often unrecognized by the general public due to the lack of visibility of this mode. Generally held to be safer and more economical and reliable than the other modes of transport, this mode has many advantages over rival modes, such as trucks and railways. Examples of modern pipeline transport include Alashankou-Dushanzi Crude Oil Pipeline and Iran-Armenia Natural Gas Pipeline. International pipeline transport projects, like the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, presently connect modern nation states – in this case, Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey – through pipeline networks.
In some select cases, pipelines can even transport solids, such as coal and other minerals, over long distances; short-distance transportation of goods such as grain, cement, concrete, solid wastes, pulp etc. is also feasible. | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_routes |
In 2006, 83.9 percent of all new immigrants to Canada came from regions outside of Europe, and the very moniker "visible minority" to designate nonwhite Canadians had become a questionable descriptor of Canada’s urban populations. Over 96 percent of Canada’s "visible minorities" live in metropolitan regions. Two main groups - south Asians and self-identified ethnic Chinese - accounted for half of all visible minorities in Canada, with each accounting for roughly a quarter of the total. Ethnic Chinese and south Asians account for eight percent of Canada’s total population, but because they have settled overwhelmingly in either the metropolitan regions of Toronto or Vancouver, they have transformed those cities. Between 1980 and 2001, for instance, the largest proportion of new migrants to Canada were ethnic Chinese who came from various locations in southeast Asia (including Hong Kong), along with migrants born in the People’s Republic of China. These various ethnic Chinese migrants went overwhelmingly (87 percent ) to the five largest cities in Canada, with 41 percent going to Toronto and 31 percent to Vancouver alone.2 Chinese Canada is not homogenous, with a range of linguistic and social variation reflecting diverse origins not only in Asia, but from around the globe. The same can be said of south Asians, who, like ethnic Chinese, often come to Canada as part of global diasporas that emanated from home villages decades and even centuries earlier, bringing with them a wide array of family journeys and complicated histories from around the world and over many generations. By 2006, south Asians had slightly surpassed ethnic Chinese as the largest group of "visible minorities" in Canada, but both are categories that envelop a complex spectrum of family and personal histories that cannot be reduced to simple ethnocultural or racial categorizations. Ironically, the new Pacific Canada is also a return to an old Pacific Canada, a world in which migration networks and trade flows connected the new nation of Canada to Asia and the Pacific region. In the late 19th century, both before and after Confederation, British Columbia was engaged with a Pacific world through its dominant migration patterns and trade connections. It is often seen as a matter of ethnic trivia that "the Chinese built the railroad," but the fact that trans- Pacific migrants from China built the Pacific portions of every major transcontinental railroad in the late 19th century is a significant indication of a growing Pacific world of migration and trade that had been developing throughout the century. It was much easier for migrants to the western coasts of North America to arrive by transPacific shipping than it was for migrants to come from the Atlantic coast. In 1789, when the expedition of Captain John Meares arrived to trade with the Nu-chul-nath peoples, on board were 29 Chinese who helped build the fort and who likely intermarried with local First Nations peoples after the trading post failed. In 1858, when the colony of Victoria was established as the first British colony on the Pacific coast, Chinese merchants and labourers arrived at the same time as British migrants. The 15,000 or so Chinese workers who built the western portion of the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s did so because it was possible to bring them in large numbers to British Columbia by water from China and from California. It should also be noted that the British capital that funded the bunding of the CPR would find a return on its investment from the creation of a more rapid means of transporting the luxury goods of Asia across the land barrier of North America, avoiding the difficult sea journey around either the Cape of Good Hope in Africa or Cape Horn at the tip of South America. Silk and other trade goods from Asia were rapidly unloaded in Vancouver and rushed across Canada on express trains before being loaded onto waiting ships in Halifax for the journey to European markets. | http://www.history.ubc.ca/citation/global-migrants-and-new-pacific-canada |
They say that even the best-laid plans can go awry. That’s doubly true in the National Basketball Association.
The Brooklyn Nets parted with a lot to acquire James Harden. To be specific, they rerouted Jarrett Allen, Caris LeVert, Taurean Prince, Rodion Kurucs, and a historic amount of draft capital (three first-round picks and four first-round pick swaps) to various locations to land the perennial MVP candidate.
It’s looking increasingly likely that they made a long-term investment on a short-term rental.
Rumors are running rampant that Harden’s discontent with Brooklyn’s situation is growing. Kyrie Irving is only available on a part-time basis. Kevin Durant is periodically injured and only getting older. After popularizing the phrase “heliocentric offense” during his tenure in Houston, Harden forced his way to the Big Apple in hopes of having to do less.
Yet, regularly, Harden is left carrying a supporting cast headlined by Patty Mills. It’s eerily reminiscent of his days as a Rocket. So much so, in fact, that some are speculating about his return to Houston.
The Houston Rockets have ‘made it clear’ to James Harden that they would welcome him back in Houston if that was ever in the cards, per @sam_amick pic.twitter.com/Xsg0zhAmcu— NBA Central (@TheNBACentral) February 5, 2022
Of course, most of the chatter links Harden to the Philadelphia 76ers. There, he’d have the opportunity to reunite with former Rockets general manager Daryl Morey and team up with MVP candidate Joel Embiid.
Frankly, it makes a lot more sense than reuniting with the franchise he left a mere year ago.
Could James Harden return to the Rockets?
The short answer, of course, is yes. In this era of player empowerment, Harden could probably force any scenario that suits him. The question is, why would Harden want to return to the Rockets?
Looking at the team’s present roster, it’s hard to conclude that they’re a Harden away from bona fide title contention. The Rockets boast a surplus of young, dynamic talent, but lack the veteran infrastructure most championship teams have.
Kevin Porter Jr. is still learning the ropes as an NBA point guard. Jalen Green has flashed elite potential but remains wildly inconsistent. Alperen Sengun is still adjusting to the rigors of playing major minutes at the sport’s highest level.
Meanwhile, the NBA trade deadline is fast approaching. Players like Christian Wood and Eric Gordon have virtually the entire season on the team’s chopping block. Changing course to accommodate a veteran superstar like Harden would require a rapid 180-degree turn, even by the offseason.
None of which is to say that Harden’s return is an impossibility. NBA rosters are increasingly malleable. The Rockets could make an instantaneous pivot. It feels crazy to even type this, but with the rebuilding assets that Rafael Stone possesses, the team could hypothetically sign Harden and broker a series of deals for a co-star and better cast of role players.
Even if that option were on the table, should the Rockets take it?
Should the Rockets welcome Harden back?
To be quite frank: no.
Feel free to disagree. There is a prevailing logic in the NBA that if you can acquire a star player, you always do. That’s fine. There are also exceptions to every rule.
Suppose Harden declines his player option with the Nets and outright signs with the Rockets. Surely, he wouldn’t be interested in teaming up with Kevin Porter Jr, Jalen Green, Alperen Sengun, and Josh Christopher. He would also likely be indifferent to the team’s draft capital. All of those players and assets are likely to be moved to acquire a star running mate for Harden.
Looking at the league’s current landscape, that would likely be one of Bradley Beal, Jaylen Brown, or Damian Lillard. Following that transaction, the team would likely sink whatever assets they had remaining into high-level veteran rotation players. They’d be getting right back to the place they were in two years ago: competing for an NBA championship led by James Harden.
It all sounds tempting. It also has the makings of an outright disaster.
First of all, NBA championships are notoriously difficult to win. In taking this route, the Rockets would establish a standard where any other outcome would be an abject failure. After all, they’d be sacrificing a bevy of young potential stars in the process. Are we really confident that Harden, Beal, and a supporting cast assure the Rockets a real chance at the Larry O’Brien Trophy?
We shouldn’t be. That’s particularly true given one unfortunate reality: James Harden is on the decline. His box plus/minus (BPM) of 4.2 is the lowest figure he’s posted since his third year in the league. It’s a far cry from the astonishing 11.0 he posted as a Rocket in 2018-19.
Anyone who has routinely watched The Beard this season won’t be surprised by those numbers. While his historically elite basketball IQ remains intact, it’s clear that he’s lost a portion of the change-of-pace athleticism he leaned so heavily into in Houston. At 32, it’s unlikely that he’ll ever get it back.
A world in which the Rockets part with their rebuilding assets to acquire Harden, only to fall short of a championship, is not a world we should care to imagine. Rafael Stone’s previous declaration that we can’t fairly evaluate the original Harden trade until 2030 would suddenly appear shortsighted.
Meanwhile, it’s even harder to imagine the team reuniting with Harden only for him to mentor the youth movement. That simply doesn’t satisfy either Harden or the team’s needs.
A reunion doesn’t make sense for either side. The Rockets should not cut a promising rebuild short for an aging superstar on the decline. Likewise, Harden should look to join a team that already supports NBA title contention.
Rockets fans have understandably mixed feelings about James Harden. Some continue to support him in Brooklyn, while others stopped doing so from the moment their jersey was finished burning. Personal feelings aside, it remains possible that he’ll retire in Rockets red.
It’s simply not a good business decision at the moment. | https://www.thedreamshake.com/houston-rockets-nba-trade-rumors/2022/2/7/22921566/nba-rumors-would-james-harden-return-to-the-houston-rockets-and-should-he-be-welcomed-back |
CONTINUITY/RUPTURE: ART AND ARCHITECTURE IN CENTRAL EUROPE 1918-1939
In the decades before 1918 there was a vibrant debate over the nature of ‘national art’ in Central Europe. For many this was embodied in folk art and culture. By 1914, this idea was increasingly challenged by avant-garde interests in the metropolis. After the War, however, a return to folk art and regionalism was revisited and gained increasing importance in the decades leading up the Second World War. Within a broad artistic landscape, folk art and culture was used to search for a fundamental essence of human culture, as in the case of the Hungarian painters Lajos Vajda and Dezső Korniss; to create a ‘national style’ with reinterpretations of folk art, as in 1920s Czechoslovakia; and to seek renewal outside a lost imperial capital, like in Austria.
Merged with modern culture, reinterpretations of folk art developed as manifold ‘vernacular modernisms’ which emphasised the importance of local tradition in the post-imperial environment. Which ideals formed the core of these ‘vernacular modernisms’? What was the relationship between ‘vernacular modernism’ and the avant-garde? How did regional and cosmopolitan approaches to art and architecture overlap and influence each other?
As part of the ERC-funded project Continuity/Rupture? Art and Architecture in Central Europe 1918–1939 this workshop re-examines the place the avant-garde is granted in art history by looking at a broader artistic landscape that to a large extent engaged in folk art and culture. Considering intersections and overlaps between the avant-garde, ‘moderate’, and ‘reactionary’ developments in modern art and architecture, it challenges traditional hierarchies and assesses the role that a renewed attention to folk art played in the formation of a multi-faceted artistic environment across Central Europe.
Proposals (300 words) are invited for 30-minute papers that examine topics such as:
- Folk art as a resource for Central European Modernism after 1918
- Regionalism in interwar art and architecture
- Folk art and identity politics in interwar modernism
- The fragmentation of Central European cultural centres after 1918
- The emancipation of regional galleries and museums
- The relationship between regional and central artistic networks
- Reactionary modernism vs. renewal through folk culture
Discussants will be confirmed shortly. | https://architexturez.net/pst/az-cf-191748-1558598844 |
Avant-garde arts have always played an important role in the Western society. Through introductory and innovating research in form and content artists developed new ideas that later found there place in society at large. Since the beginning the avant-garde distinguishes itself through:
-a militant and activist character;
-radical ways of expression;
-a non-conformist attitude;
-artistic autonomy;
-a battle for the future combined with a heroic attitude;
-the redefinition of the relationship between high and popular culture;
-a critical attitude towards (artistic) institutes;
-the production of anti-art (the avant-garde is against the past in all its forms and only interested in destroying the old values and traditions. Through this an anti-art came into being, an art form that has no relation with the aesthetic tradition. Even to the avant-garde tradition itself no honor is paid.).
2 There is always a need for an avant-garde
The avant-garde lost most of her value when after the Second World War the term and the concept got a broader exposure and became popularized. Before the avant-garde was the vanguard in the arts with a style of their own (the anti-style). As a movement the avant-garde fought against the stagnating powers in society. The traditional enemy was the bourgeoisie.
At the end of the nineteen-fifties and the beginning of the nineteen-sixties the avant-garde became unexpectedly and unintentionally successful. This didn’t mean the ideas ventilated in the expressions got more exposure and became widely spread. The contrary happened.
Pop art as an avant-garde style was both aesthetically and in content acceptable to the public at large, despite the fact that it was a reaction against the consumer society. Pop art expressions reflected and criticized popular culture, which consisted of symbols without value and content.
The critical aspect of Pop art missed its aim and the term avant-garde became popularized in mass culture. This marks what you could call the decline of the true avant-garde. Style and content were bend into acceptable forms.
This process of decline was possible and accelerated due to the use of the term in the mass media and the incorporation of the avant-garde aesthetics in popular culture. Exposure of the deformed style to the public at large through mainstream channels led to acceptation.
At the same time the position of the artist in society changed. This partly due to the rise of state regulated public art education (which meant a centralization of ideas and technical formulas and procedures of what is “good art”). Next to that the position of the artist in society changed due to social acceptation of the artists as an occupation. This was accelerated of course by the rise of the state institutions of art education.
Despite that after Pop art there were a few more radical movements the overall mood around art, and therefore also avant-garde art, had changed. Art had to be funny and accessible. This tendency is still present.
However, from the end of the nineteen-seventies a new avant-garde movement took shape. This is what we, the Elitepop platform, call Elitist Pop Culture. Elitepop thus sees itself not as the originator or the only exponent of this movement. But, we are responsible for giving it its name, the definition and the establishment of a new platform for associated art expressions.
Elitist Pop Culture makes use of forms of popular culture that are made artistic again. This takes shape during a conversion which can be done in two ways.
– Forms of popular culture, or popularized artistic expressions, are made artistic through adding content and/or applying different ways of production, distribution and/or promotion as is used in popular culture. Thus the content and context of the original forms and expressions are changed.
-Unpopular content is used in popular forms. So-called politically incorrect (socially unwanted) symbolism is used in popular cultural forms.
The result from this conversion of cultural forms is that the newly created expressions cannot be popularized because of their radical and elitist nature and/or nonconformist character when it comes to content, production and/or promotion.
This doesn’t however mean that all expressions need to be a progressive or shocking. They can be conservative and Neo-Romantic as well. Essential is that all Elitist Pop expressions articulate an uncommon idea or feeling. It has something to say that is not heard everyday.
Thus, popular cultural expressions are made artistic and are meant for a selective group of interested people. These people understand certain codes and are able to decode the piece of work and by doing that understand the meaning of the work and give value to the work.
Summarizing this makes clear that Elitist Pop Culture is a combination of avant-garde attitudes and popular culture elements. The avant-garde has an orientation on solving technical and aesthetical problems. Popular culture works with formulas and standardized procedures.
Elitist Pop Culture brings forth deviating artistic expressions and/or technical and aesthetical renewal through the use of formulas and standardized procedures.
This way the artistic work expresses:
-social and political values that are critical, deviating from and/or defying the dominant culture;
-a redefinition of the relation between high art and popular culture;
-a critical attitude towards (artistic) institutes and their way of working.
We like to call this the revenge of the avant-garde as there is a conversion of popular culture into artistic expressions. Meaning and symbolism is brought back into art. Ironically this is done through the same ritual that was applied by Pop art expressions, and which had turned avant-garde art into something acceptable in the past.
Next to that Elitist Pop Culture is produced, distributed and promoted in niches. There is a protective attitude towards the expressions and the exposure of them in society at large. All activities take place within a specific network that is set up by the people involved in the creative process themselves. Also all activities are financed with private money. No use is made of established institutes and organizations in the production, distribution and promotion process. Everything takes place outside the common artistic spheres to secure true independence.
Just like the traditional avant-garde the Elitist Pop Culture should be seen as a movement, this because it is about more then just artistic expressions. It is about a creative process that articulates a certain perception on reality and in doing this it articulates an explicit view on the world and mankind.
Elitist Pop Culture differs on the other hand on some points with the traditional avant-garde movement as it:
-has respect for the aesthetic tradition and the values of the Old World (awareness about its own past is important to be able to create and develop something new for the movement);
-(therefore) doesn’t reject, and doesn’t use satire to defy, the aesthetic tradition;
-doesn’t display and reflect dominant values but truly defy them;
-doesn’t enfeeble the content from symbols and signs but emphasizes this.
3 The artistic world is characterized by disinterest, conformism and commerce
Original ideas and styles in the arts find their origin more or less spontaneous and are discovered, cherished and valued by a select group of people. These ideas and styles are later taken over and popularized by the culture industry and made a standard by established institutions in the cultural field. At the same time new ideas and styles are taking shape that try to reject and rise above this dominant standard.
Through this a cycle of innovation and establishment of a new style and a set of ideas, and the rejection of that, has come into existence. This cycle is all but a natural one as it is heavily influenced, and shaped by, economic powers and control over markets by a few big players in the field. Monopolies are being formed (think for example about major record labels) which develop into diversified organizations. These organizations are a network on their own and can thus control a complete market cycle of creation, distribution and promotion by themselves. That way they are able to exclude other players in that market.
This cycle is a classic economic cycle that can for example be found in the development of the music industry that started in the United States from the nineteen-fifties and is still present now on global level.
Thus resulted in the situation that major record companies not only take over a certain fashionable sound or style and popularize this but also take over complete labels that served as platform for this style before it became widespread. Due to this a once independent label becomes a division of a large diversified organization. It looses control over the process of creation, distribution and promotion (and thus content). Still the major company will use the original labels independent image to sell the music. A lot of so-called independent labels are in reality not at all independent but mere marketing tools of major companies.
4 Due to the increase of hollow and shapeless cultural consumption products there is a growing need for authentic artistic cultural expressions
Due to the undeniable presence of a large number of uniform commercial cultural products on the global market there is a tendency that more and more people experience the dominant culture as being imposed.
The homogeneous powers that are connected to globalization triggered on a completely different level the interest in deviating cultural expressions from these for the mass manufactured products. Thus, the dominance of the omnipresent and the general has created a demand for the obscure and the specific.
Next to the dominant culture there came in to being more interest for alternatives, the small, the local and the authentic. Authentic, traditional and local cultural expressions have gained a renewed exposure through this. There is a demand for knowledge about (ones own) history, a new unity and a need for a clear identity.
This counter reaction has to be seen in a larger context as part of the resistance against modernity. Modernity is seen here as in the sense of an endless stream of each other swiftly succeeding developments, new trends and technological discoveries.
Artistic cultural expressions appeal to people on a different level as only on the material (satisfaction) or a produced artificial emotional. A true and authentic expression, and the experience of that work, is connected to real emotions. The person experiencing this has the feeling to be part of it and to belong to a select group that is also experiencing that work. It gives direction to existence and provides, or consolidates, ones identity. These are characteristics that cannot be found in products manufactured for the masses, simply because these lack the personal touch of a true artist.
Elitist Pop Culture is a way of resistance against hollow uniform global culture and a way of resistance against the industry and cycle that feeds the world with these products.
An important part in this resistance is the Internet. The Internet is a space that allows different worlds to exist next to each other. With different worlds is meant here different perceptions on reality and the manifestation of these perceptions in everyday reality.
In everyday reality deviating visions on the dominant perception, and the manifestations of these, are being marginalized. On the Internet these different ways of looking at and thinking about reality can exist. They cannot as easily be averted and suppressed as in traditional media.
Next to that the Internet is a world in which one can escape from the dominant (cultural) expressions that are omnipresent in everyday life. The Internet is not a mass medium for passive consumers but an interactive medium for active participants. It is a place for people who know what they want and what they don’t want and who are searching to fulfill their needs in an active way.
5 All art is political / Elitist Pop Culture
To choose for artistic autonomy and true independence on a business level is a political choice against the hollow and shapeless culture industry and against the dominant and tunnel vision perception and manifestation of reality.
If an expression has not adopted an explicit or implicit position on the above described situation it may not be defined as art.
Elitist Pop Culture has the aim to expose a way of looking at and thinking about reality that is often invisible in everyday life. Elitist Pop Culture also has the aim to create and expose all possible alternatives on the perception of the world around us, and how and by whom this world is given shape. Elitist Pop Culture wants you, the observer and participant, to think about this and take action. That is a political act. Elitist Pop Culture is here for those who want and dare to experience this and who want to help giving shape to this act.
Elitepop Manifesto 2005
M. | https://www.enfant-terrible.nl/elitist-pop-culture/ |
In contemporary humanities a collection is no longer regarded as an erudite addition to the history of art, element of a merely supportive character, thus at most a testimony of an individual taste of the collector, but most often as a reservoir for preserving the works of art. It is being interpreted as an important cultural phenomenon situated in the borderland of art and history, but also of religion, politics, economy, social relations and reflction over the civilisation, science, nature. It is in the same time one of the places of art, places of exhibiting and meeting: exhibiting the artefacts and artefacts meeting artefacts, artefacts meeting people and people meeting people. After all, the relations between the art and the collection as a semantic, spatial and social structure are complex. Artistic collection, over several hundreds years of its history, has developed into the most eventful and culturally fertile kind of collecting. It can be defied as an assemblage of human products of a particular status of ARTWORKS resulting from their authenticity, uniqueness and virtuosity (in a sense of a personal production) conditioned by the artists’ talent.
It is however neither parallel in time, nor synonymous with collecting in a broad understanding, although the artefacts have always occupied an import ant position in this area – it is a historical phenomenon, the result of a long-lasting process of transformations leading to the development of a separate symbolic sphere for art, distinct from the sphere of cult, power, tradition or ideology. In a kunstkammer, an early modern form of colleting, art gave witness to history and illustrated, or substituted for what was inaccessible in a form of drawings, prints, paintings. It mad one of the elements of universum, much more corresponding with the Medieval artes than with the weighty Romantic phenomenon with a capital “A”. The artistic collection in a full sense that emerged from that assemblage of artworks has been developing over the 17th and 18th centuries, flurished in 19th century and reached its apogee in the era of Avant-garde in early 20th century, when the idea of art adopted by artists was the closest to its character and allocation. The process of formation of such a collection has been initiated by the Renaissance “cult of the Antiquity” in the South of Europe and the Reformation iconoclasm in the North, that in a way have liberated art from the supremacy of religion. Highly important role have played here the transformations in perception of art, that led to the development of aesthetics as an autonomous science, and later – the Romantic idea of art and artist. The apogee of development of that form of collection came in the era of Modernism and Avant-garde, a particular, ephemeral form of it being the 20th century exhibition concept of the white cube presupposing a special kind of reception of an artwork: its undisturbed, unbiased and aesthetic contemplation. The crisis came in the 20th century, when modern art adopted “inartistic” materials and objects, of mass production, often entirely devoid of any aesthetic and decorative features, when it replaced a material artwork with the creative process or its idea, which forced employment of procedures form other filds of creativity (music, fim, theatre) or application of advanced technology. Collectable objects produced by artists more and more often could not but also would not be either authentic, or unique or virtuosic, so they were not ARTWORKS any more. This has forced new forms of collecting to emerge, depriving artistic collection of its signifiant monopole of the most noble way to appropriate art. | https://apcz.umk.pl/czasopisma/index.php/AUNC_ZiK/article/view/AUNC_ZiK.2014.010 |
While the expression is not an innocent one, I want to strip it bare from any additional theoretical burden, and propose to conceptualize it simply – with all the risks assumed – as the internalization of the spirit of the avant-garde by kinema ikon in their artistic practice (film or other media forms). Internalization meaning the (un)conscious absorption of certain cultural patterns and artistic values and, at the same time, the act of undermining and complicating them. That is, a combination between inductive reasoning based on experience and concept, and the instinctive need to take a step ahead while prospecting the openings, the non-obvious, the newness (or, as Rosalind Krauss put it in her meaningfully titled text, the „possibility for vision itself”). 2 In other words, it means to acknowledge avant-garde as an implicit condition, while operating an autonomization of the artistic act vis-à-vis the rationalization and historicization of the avant-garde. Certainly, kinema ikon’s practice maps onto the avant-garde logic (one that is actually not historically circumscribed) in what concerns aesthetic radicalism and anti-establishment command, although the group has never adopted similar logistic or communicational strategies – such as publishing premeditated “manifestos” or engaging in a programmatic scheme – preferring instead an intuitive artistic attitude and organic collaborative work. This is evident in the assumed underground and/or marginal status, one that – perhaps paradoxically – didn’t prevent them from being synchronous with what was happening under the lights of the artistic international mainstage during these decades.
The historical avant-garde in Romania was quite radical, much of its scope and force being given by numerous publications and the influential personalities involved, most of them maintaining important links with their international peers. However, the Romanian avant-garde had no great appetence for filmmaking: written invective and rebel painting were preferred to any lens-based discourse. Given this absent legacy to which we should add the lack of any direct connection between the historical avant-garde, neo-avant-garde and what followed afterwards (due to the cultural hiatus imposed by communism), one would legitimately ask where kinema ikon took their drive and vision? Theorist George Săbău, the veteran leader of kinema ikon, provides an answer to this question when he mentions that the group was always in search for “something else – differently.”3 Indeed, the group’s working ethics focused on innovation and “difference” is what characterizes (the avant-garde unconscious of) kinema ikon in the first place.
The avant-garde unconscious has numerous manifestations and works in various ways at different levels. One aspect that accounts for this status at kinema ikon is the assumed diversity. Firstly, the people involved. From the very beginning, those working within and around kinema ikon came from an assortment of professions and artistic backgrounds, and this played a key role in the group’s hybrid and ingenious production. Moreover, kinema ikon – as a cine-club or as an artistic group – has always been involved in organizing/participating in intense exchanges and interdisciplinary meetings in smaller or larger, but always diverse circles, both before and after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Their organizational identity in the seventies and eighties was not unlike similar enterprises such as The London Film-makers’ Co-op (LFMC), The Film-Makers’ Cooperative founded in 1962 in New York City by Jonas Mekas, Shirley Clarke, Stan Brakhage, and others, or, in Eastern Europe, the Workshop of Film Form in Łódź, The Balázs Béla Studio in Budapest, Independent Videoart Prague, and the Cinema Clubs from several cities in former Yugoslavia. Equally important for the interdisciplinary ethos of the group is the Media Arts Festival organized in Arad by Călin Man and Ileana Selejan since 2014, a spin-off of kinema ikon project. All these organizational commitments helped shape kinema ikon’s values, attitudes and forms. But, perhaps the most evident expression of the diversity affirmed by the group is the artistic production itself that spans five decades and cover many genres and mediums, analog and digital, online and offline, pluri-centric and ex-centric (to which I will shortly turn).
The eclecticism embraced by kinema ikon has effect also on political grounds – another important aspect of the avant-garde unconscious. Falling between genres, mediums and categories, that is, rejecting a clear working typology and artistic profiling was in itself a critical gesture with political undertones during communist times. If this was not well regarded by politically-controlled institutions (also because censorship never really understood the experimental films), it nonetheless helped the group maintain a self-imposed marginal/underground status, a convenient situation since it left them room for meetings, creativity and intellectual exchanges. Moreover, the group’s consistent documentary film production on officially accepted themes (history, ethnography, personalities) helped the group to maintain not only the needed legitimization, but also to obtain the equipment necessary for producing experimental films (interestingly, there are 62 documentary films, paralleled by exactly the same number of experimental films, made between 1970 and 1990).
But there is yet another aspect of the political incidence of kinema ikon’s avant-garde unconscious, especially before the Iron Curtain, and this is related to the East-West equation. The group’s progressive vision and diversity, together with their sustained up-to-date-ness and consonance with the “grand” artistic narratives from the West, challenge the simplistic reading of the East-West cultural divide. More exactly, kinema ikon is very efficient in relativizing the opinion that sees the equation West-East as a rapport between center and periphery, between the dominant model and the “weak” term. While taking Western culture as the model to follow – like almost all Eastern European artists – kinema ikon developed somehow unconsciously a certain cultural “perspective that would emphasize the ‘otherness’ of their part of the continent,” as art historian Piotr Piotrowski has observed.4 This “otherness” is (or rather was) represented, on the one hand, by the “conviction in the power of art, something that has vanished long before in the West,”5 and, on the other, by a certain state of exception or idiosyncrasy, a way to construct a different, most of the times subversive set of norms and codes, and, importantly for kinema ikon at least, a genuine appetence for humor. Although the latter’s subversive power has certainly changed after 1990, it still plays a political function for kinema ikon today. George Săbău’s statement is clear in this sense: “Between militant activism and experimental playfulness, the KI group opted, and still does, for the latter.”6 Kudos, ki!
Indeed, humor and irony are other key manifestations of the avant-garde unconscious. They were efficient weapons for avant-garde artists of all generations, simply because they were destabilizing in and of themselves. Through various strategies that involve sarcasm, wit and wordplay, this attitude has the capacity to disrupt the public sphere, to engage in polemics and to shock the bourgeoisie and mainstream art. Moreover, it is important to note that humor and irony were effective survival strategies during the communist oppressive regime. However, if this avant-gardist arsenal was present at kinema ikon, it was not used by the group to act out an open dissidence and direct power critique. Rather, kinema ikon, opted in a discreet manner for the double entendre, intelligent irony and absurd content, all of them constant features in their artistic production over the years. Operating on these coordinates, as George Săbău has emphasized, the members of the group played “an essential part in the act of instating an inciting, provocative, ludic, ironic, intellectual climate, also freed from cultural clichés, language stereotypes, ‘idola theatri’; they have permanently promoted an unconventional attitude, which induced the experiment atmosphere a continuous ‘facultas ludentes’.”7 Many titles of their works are relevant in this sense (to name just a few, equally from the group’s filmic production and hypermedia/multimedia years): Kitsch, Kitsch, Ura! (Daniel Motz, 1977), Bopacul (kinema ikon, 1979), Nu trageți în pianist / Don’t shoot the piano player (Romulus Bucur, 1984), Mise-en-écran (Roxana Cherecheș & Liliana Trandabur, 1989), Ready Media (kinema ikon, 1995), Opera Prima (kinema ikon, 1996), Commedia del Multimedia (kinema ikon, 1997), alteridem.exe (kinema ikon, 2002; 2003), Uninvited.Rușine (reVoltaire, 2003-2016), Skepsis (kinema ikon, 2011) 46016’92”N 21031’57”E / ȘANTIER ARGHEOLOGIC / 4175 A.D. (geosab & kf, 2015), ki:ss (kinema ikon, 2015), DADADA (reVoltaire, 2016), kºi—∆r.mΩ1øø (kinema ikon, 2017), OST’n’ReST (kinema ikon, 2019), etc.8
Another way in which the avant-garde unconscious resurfaces in kinema ikon’s artistic practice, one that is symptomatic for their vision and mission, is related to aesthetics. More exactly, this is about the unique combination between, on the one hand, a DIY philosophy, wit and improvisation and, on the other, a rigorous research, intense readings and careful construction of the visual vocabulary. This crisscrossed approach led to a working strategy focused on the permanent investigation of various – read new – visual expressions, thought-provoking messages and conceptualizations, and on a methodology aimed at ever pushing the limits of the medium. Kinema ikon was interested, basically, in all the categories of the experimental film genre and, later, in exploring most of the possibilities offered by installationism, digitality, network production and hypermedia. Some of the works authored individually or as a group should be mentioned here as they illustrate these diverse interests and, in this sense, are instrumental in explaining the avant-garde unconscious of the group’s working philosophy.
In the field of experimental film production, we should note George Săbău’s Ipostaze simultane / Hypostases (1970), where one can identify the typical experimental film vocabulary that will later become the mark of most of the group’s films: split screen, superimpositions, jump cuts, put at work to deliver a vague and bizarre narration. In the same vein, Emanuel Ţeţ’s Dynamic Poem (1978) and Ioan Plesh’s Panta Rhei (1979) employ a series of techniques – hand painting and scratching on the film strip – that turn the film into a gestural, intimate discourse, with a strong visual impact, projects which could easily compete with similar endeavors such as Lettrist experimental films of the fifties in France, and U.S. neo-avant-garde filmmaking of the sixties and seventies. Roxana Cherecheş & Liliana Trandabur’s Mise en écran (1989) evokes Surrealist sensibilities, in a pseudo-narrative that reminds of Maya Deren’s dreamlike images. And if we are to find other similarities, we should also note George Săbău’s Fragmentarium (1985-1990) a film that, like Stan Brakhage’s visual experiments, proposes a refined image that reveals a keen interest in textures and natural forms, employed not for their power of signification but rather for their optical function. Călin Man’s What’s happening (1986-1994) is constructed according to a non-linear logic, with an incongruous relationship between image and sound, a solution that anticipates, somehow, the later hyper-textual constructions of the group’s digital period. The same strategy is employed in Călin Man’s K_attacK (2005), although within a fully animated film that speculates the gadgetry and the effect, while borrowing elements from his previous work Esoth Eric, which was part of the larger project alteridem.exe_2 presented at the Venice Biennale in 2003. 9
Among the numerous examples of the group’s works which are related to various forms of hypermedia we should mention Ready Media (1995) a somehow programmatic project that makes an unequivocal reference to the conceptual and material forms of historical avant-garde and which emphasizes, once more, the group’s avant-garde unconscious. Opera Prima, (1996) assumes – via its title – a “primordial” position, an ironic, although serious way to claim avant-garde’s close-and-restart strategies. Commedia del Multimedia, (1997), a work with a captivating title, a pun which makes (postmodern) references to established cultural benchmarks and to the contemporary, inescapably hybrid, media sphere. alteridem.exe, (2002, 2003) makes a direct reference to the file extension of an executable program in Windows environment, an excellent illustration of Lev Manovich’s catchphrase/book title, “Software takes command”. Wunderkammer, (2011, 2012, 2015 ongoing) is a concept-collection, and then a permanent exhibition, a combination between the cabinet of curiosities and a technical museum which functions as a statement referring to the forward-thinking (technologies) as a guiding light for the group (or what I call here avant-garde unconscious). Serial (2013-2016) was a series of interventions by invited artists and curators who worked in collaboration with / employing works by kinema ikon, a symptomatic example of crowdsourcing and auctorial decentralization. OST’n’ReST (2019) is a collaboration between five Romanian and five Belgian artists who were asked to rescore a selection of ten experimental films produced by kinema ikon for a World Première at the Ghent Film Festival / Vooruit Ghent, followed by a tour.
The fact that most of the works produced by kinema ikon, old and new, are based on abstraction, repetition and visual discontinuity, points to another aspect of the avant-garde unconscious: the propensity for the fragment, i.e., the recourse to fragmentation as an artistic strategy. Fragmentation is one of the avant-garde’s dearest tactics – see its use in collage, photomontage, film montage, assemblage etc. – precisely for its efficiency in radically undermining the idea of the image as a homogeneous representation, fluid narrative and unitary surface. For example, the introduction of collage by the cubists and the dadaists was meant to break with the tradition of pictorial mimesis, leading, on the one hand, to the hybridization of painting and, on the other, to the creation of a concrete relationship with reality. In cinema, Dziga Vertov (among others) promoted the idea of the fragmentary image and montage as revolutionary tools “on the belief that the moving image can reorganize society and sight, reform vision, and liberate maker and viewer alike.”10 The neo-avant-garde and the artistic movements that followed made full use of the fragment and its aesthetic potential, especially in installationist circumstances and performative situations, fueled as they were by the deconstructivist karma floating around. In installation, the metonymic cultivation of the fragment – of the object that contains and determines the whole – and the interplay between contiguous components are defining features for the genre. In the performative act, fragmentation works through decorporealization and by assigning a functional autonomy to the anatomical fragment by delegating functions and senses. New media and remix culture contributed in a radical manner to expand and complicate the visual and conceptual potential of the fragment proposing different forms of multi-perspectival narration, unstable visualization, temporal aggregation, collective production and plurality of reception. The result is a radical questioning of basic values in art, such as uniqueness, authorship, originality and copyright.
Kinema ikon has absorbed and employed all these potentialities of the fragment equally as a background (or rather unconscious) expression of avant-gardism and as a solution to deal with the symptoms of the contemporary art condition. Fragmentation, therefore, was seen not so much the goal, as a means to address the message, the medium and the masses. A few examples are relevant in this sense: Alexandru Pecican, Exercițiu subliminal / Subliminal Exercise (1979), a film that alternates between intimate and public scenes shot at various speeds with hallucinatory effects that match the psychedelic soundtrack; George Săbău’s Decupaje / Cuting ups (1980-1985), a film with a programmatic title, which presents a sequence of random images taken with different framings, in different locations, their aleatory articulation effectively turning them into simple visual signs; Ioan Plesh’s, Emergenţă / Emergence (1982), a poetic succession of images that acquire new meanings in the ensemble (plus the author’s trademark motions: drawings on film, solarizations and superimpositions); kinema ikon’s, Ready-Media (1995) a group video installation based on a series of images recorded from TV broadcast which create an ample video collage, an absurd exercise of manipulation that actually points to the fragility of “truth” in mass media; mistik&01’s, Digital Body (2006) an almost abstract, but poetic rendition of a body painted with digits; kinema ikon’s, Skepsis (2011) a fast-forward, disruptive view of a virtual “wunderkammer.”
Most of the works mentioned above demonstrate that through the manipulation of the fragment, audacious montage, and an unorthodox approach to apparatus, the final product becomes an entity with its own visual and conceptual condition, rather than a simple mimetic trace of reality or an expression of a “meaningful”, linear narration. Speaking about the aesthetic relevance of the fragment at kinema ikon, art theorist Cristian Nae rightly observes that the group’s works show “an insistence on the autonomous fragment of reality, which is decontextualized until it reaches the state of a seemingly meaningless grapheme.” 11 Rightly so, since, we should remember that, at least in a certain historical moment (that is, during communism), this was a strategy to emancipate the artistic discourse from a profoundly politicized reality. Building and assuming aesthetic autonomy was – unlike in the West, where it was identified with medium purity, abstraction and alienation – an approach aimed at tacitly confronting official artistic norms and creating a distinct artistic discourse. Nonetheless, the open-endedness and hybridization unfolding through fragmentation acquired a different, extended dimension during kinema ikon’s later digital phase, thus confirming its aesthetic meaningfulness, regardless of epoch or context.
So, it might become clear now that the phrase avant-garde unconscious is a theoretical tool that has relevance and applicability to various periods within the history of kinema ikon and, thus, might cut across any attempt to fix the group’s activity within the divisive modern/post-modern framework. On the one hand, the avant-garde unconscious in kinema ikon’s practice can be read in a modernist key as it activates aesthetic autonomy, self-reflexivity, the structural exploration of the medium through image and montage, artistic means that work within the logic of avant-garde precepts and neo-avant-garde explorations. However, any such identification is problematic: the avant-garde unconscious is to (neo)avant-garde what, in Jacques Lacan’s opinion, the unconscious is to reason: not something different, but something outside of it. On the other hand, the avant-garde unconscious seems to be a post-modernist affair, as well. The inclination towards hybridity, recycling images, post-mediality and ironic references would signal a post-modern sensibility. Nonetheless, while kinema ikon’s practice defies rigid modernist values, it also demonstrates that the group’s work is and has always been genuinely new and, horribile dictu, original! A very effective way to suggest that – paraphrasing Bruno Latour – we have never been postmodern. Actually, George Săbău is clear in defying these cultural patterns and differences: “nothing can stop us [from] including digital experimental films in the same paradigm with the analogic ones, and both in the avant-garde movements.”12 Or, I would say, within the same conceptual and functional paradigm of the avant-garde unconscious.
Horea Avram, PhD, is an art historian, media theorist and independent curator. He researches and writes about media art, experimental film, representation theory, and visual culture. He teaches at the Department of Cinema and Media, Babeș-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
A version of this essay was initially published under the title „The avant-garde unconscious: On kinema ikon’s (filmic) practice” in kinema ikon: films 1970-2020, catalogue edited by Călin Man. Bucharest: kinema ikon/Dark Publishing, 2019, pp. 246-251.
Rosalind E. Krauss, The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, Mass. and London, England: The MIT Press, 1993, p. 217.
George Săbău, „A contextual history of the kinema ikon group”, kinema ikon catalogue, edited by kinema ikon. Bucharest: The National Museum of Contemporary Art, 2005, p. 8. The leader of the group is presently Călin Man/reVoltaire.
Piotr Piotrowski, In the Shadow of Yalta. Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945-1989. Translated by Anna Brzyski. London: Reaktion Books, 2009, p. 12.
Hans Belting, Art History after Modernism. Translated by Caroline Saltzwedel and Mitch Cohen, with Keneth Northcott. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2003, p. 58.
George Săbău, „kinema ikon. Experimental films: analogic and digital”. In kinema ikon. Experimental films: analogic and digital 1970-2010, edited by kinema ikon, Arad: Art Museum Arad, 2010, unpaginated.
George Săbău, „A contextual history of the kinema ikon group”, Ibid. p. 16.
For more details, see kinema ikon
About the beginning of working with computer within kinema ikon, see Călin Man, “Interviu hackuit cu Călin Man, unul dintre principalii actori ai artei new media” by Ioana Calen. Vice, 4 November 2014.(accessed December 2019).
Erika Suderburg, “Database, Anarchéologie, the Commons, Kino-Eye, and Mash. How Bard, Kaufman, Svilova, and Vertov Continue the Revolution” in Resolutions 3. Global Networks of Video, edited by Ming-Yuen S. Ma and Erika Suderburg. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2012, p. 99.
Cristian Nae, “Reality unbound. The politics of fragmentation in the experimental productions of kinema ikon,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 7: 1 (2016): 25-38.
George Săbău, „kinema ikon. Experimental films: analogic and digital”, Ibid. | https://spam-index.com/the-avant-garde-unconscious-at-kinema-ikon-from-experimental-film-to-hypermedia/ |
Bank of Palestine has been the main sponsor of the Palestinian Museum since its inception, and attends all cultural and artistic events held at the museum. As part of this sponsorship, the bank recently supported the new art exhibition entitled “Intimate Terrains: Representations of a Disappearing Landscape,” which is implemented under the supervision of the museum guest-curator Dr. Tina Sherwell, and will run from 2 April until 31 December 2019. The exhibition will also feature a busy program of several cultural and educational events.
The exhibition features over 100 art pieces ranging from paintings, photographs, drawings, art videos, installation art, sculpture and artwork within the museum gardens, presented by 36 Palestinian artists from Palestine and the Diaspora. It gathers a spectrum of art works that explore how representations of the Palestinian landscape have evolved over the decades, and how the concepts of loss and ongoing transformations of the landscape worked their way in art representations, and addresses questions of the experience of distance from one’s homeland and exile. It also explores the changing representation of landscape by Palestinian artists, and people’s relationship with place and geographical location through themes of erasure, fragmentation, distance and sense of belonging.
The exhibition is considered a reference for diverse Palestinian art and features the viewpoints of Palestinian artists from different generations, and concepts about the land and the natural landscape, the transformations they have undergone and the relationship of Palestinians with this land and landscape. It also depicts the lives of artists from different geographical areas, within Palestine and the diaspora, who witnessed different political regimes and experiences.
Along the sidelines of the exhibition, the Palestinian Museum announced the launching of the Public and Educational Program for 2019, which will feature dozens of art seminars, debates, workshops, open days, lectures and tours that are planned around the monthly themes of the exhibition. The Museum aims to build a bridge for transferring various forms of knowledge, art and viewpoints to vast groups within Palestinian society.
Bank of Palestine’s support for this exhibition is a reflection of the artistic and cultural partnership between the bank and the Museum with an aim to promote Palestinian culture, increase people’s familiarity, promote Palestinian historic and civilizational heritage, highlight different aspects that mirrored a living image of Palestinian culture and concrete evidence on its characteristics and values. The bank’s support stems from its strategy to promote corporate social responsibility that aims to develop cultural development projects to fulfill the dream of many Palestinian pioneers and promote an open and vibrant Palestinian culture at the local and international levels. | https://www.bankofpalestine.com/en/media-center/newsroom/details/686 |
Over the decades, London has become a diverse landscape for all forms of graffiti and street art. From the better-known artists, down to the constant stream of fresh new talent attracted to the streets, London is a graffiti artist’s paradise and the images represent a London simmering with artistic flair.
Featuring glossy photos of ground-breaking graffiti, London Graffiti and Street Art is the perfect companion for anyone excited by this most vibrant and changing of art form, and aims to give an insight into the creative output lost and found in and around the capital. | https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/109/1099150/london-graffiti-and-street-art/9780091958688.html |
that we cannot be in all places at all times.
So those who would like to can write a “report”
or “editorial” or “correspondence” to share
experiences for the benefit of others.
To take part, send submission or for more information
please write to [email protected]
or post online:
http://www.16beavergroup.org/journalisms/contact.php
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‘You Can’t Anticipate Explosions’ is a part of a larger discussion/debate
pertaining to the Avant-garde initiated by Chto delat, more of which can be found on their website and their latest issue:
http://www.chtodelat.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=category§ionid=17&id=177&Itemid=179
Magun: The question we would like to discuss with you today is the connection between aesthetics and politics. Is there a specific type of art that would be both productive and relevant to the contemporary political and cultural situation? Our hypothesis is that the avant-garde – both as a phenomenon and a notion – could be important for us today. This view comes out of our historical situation, which was shaped by the constitutive moment of perestroika. As democratic mobilization challenged the authoritarian and corrupt power of the Soviet state, there was a major revival of interest in both Western modernism (not just Kafka and Joyce, but also Pollock, etc.) and the Soviet avant-garde art of the 1920-30s; what seemed important was the conjunction of this type of art with political emancipation. What do you think? Is the avant-garde is still usable as a notion?
Ranciére: What strikes me is precisely that your relation to avant-gardist art was mediated through the democratic aspirations of the time of the perestroika. This means that it took its relevance in a certain present as a thing of the past. The question is: what thing and what past exactly? It seems to me that there are two concepts of avant-garde art and of its political effect. There is the idea of avant-garde art as an art intentionally designed to create new forms of life. Such was the art of the Russian futurists and constructivists, the art of El Lissitsky , Rodtchenko and their likes. They were people who really had a project to change the world, using certain materials and certain forms. Avant-garde art, in that way, was destined to create a new fabric of common sensible life, erasing the very difference between the artistic sphere and the political sphere. When you mention Kafka, Joyce or Pollock, it is not the same at all. What they have in common with the former is the rejection of standard representational art. But they did not want to create new forms of life, they did not want to merge art and politics. In this case, the political effect of art is something like what you mentioned: a transformation of our ways of feeling and thinking, the construction of a new sensorium. But this new sensorium is not the consequence of a desire to create new forms of collective experience. Instead it is the very break between the contexts in which Joyce or Kafka created and the context in which you read them that gave them their “political” relevance. So, I would say, first, that the idea of the avant-garde entails two different things, two different ideas of the connection between the artistic and the political, second, that the concept of the avant-garde that you had in mind at that time was a retrospective construction. As a matter of fact, avant-gardism and modernism as they are used in contemporary debates are retrospective constructions that are supposed to allow us to have it both ways: to have both the collective impulse and aspiration to a new life and the separating effect of the aesthetic break.
Vilensky: Still, maybe we can start by positing some generic features of the avant-garde. For example, what immediately springs to mind is the principle of sublation of art into life. Then, of course, there is the direct connection with political struggle, and the idea that art should and must change the world, on different levels. Then, there is also a very interesting idea, and a very complicated one, coming from Adorno, namely that art should keep its own non-identity. To me, this means that the avant-garde is not about some tangible object of art, it’s always about the composition of different things. For example, Malevich was not just about pictures. Actually most of his paintings were sketches for large-scale public art projects. So I think that avant-garde is based on the rejection of fetishization into objects that are bought and sold; its main goal is to supply the subject with instruments for self-knowledge and self-realization through aesthetic experience.
Magun: Maybe the definition of such features could help us to draw a line between the avant-garde and modernism? Because modernism uses innovative, non-representative techniques to sublimate art as such, to make an absolute work of art that would contain the entire world. The avant-garde uses the same techniques to do the opposite: to break up art, to explode art into life, achieving a kind of a Hegelian end of art. So, modernism would mean “life absorbed into art,” and avant-gardism “art absorbed into life.”
Ranciére: It’s unclear if the techniques really are the same. I wonder whether you can describe a general model of modernism, a general model of artistic destruction and change in the forms of perception and sensibility. In fact, artistic modernism, just as avant-gardism, can be defined either in terms of minimalist subtraction or in terms of excess. Modernist art in the 1910s may mean the creation of pure abstract forms in the way of Mondrian or the dynamic explosion in the way of Boccioni. In both cases, there is a rupture with the standards of figurative painting or sculpture, but it is not the same procedure. In the same way, literary modernism could mean Khlebnikov as well as Kafka; in the 1940s, Adorno still had to oppose a true (Schönberg) and a false (Stravinsky) musical modernism. So I don’t think that there is a kind of general model of artistic invention that can define art’s modernism. It has to be defined by a certain connection of artistic practice with the modern forms of social life. Modernism involves a specific impulse, some kind of will to change the world, to connect the forms of artistic practice with forms of life. Let us think about abstract painting: you took the example of Pollock , but if you compare Pollock to, for example, Malevich, it is clear that for the latter it was a question of inventing new social forms, new dynamics of life. And in Pollock, it’s absolutely the contrary. With Pollock it was the end of a certain form of activist art, of a certain form of involvement of art in social practice that had been very strong in the United States in the 1930s . The American abstraction of the 1940s was a return to art and only art, after the involvement of many artists in the Popular Front. So it is not a question of separating autonomous modernism from avant-gardism viewed of as the fusion of art and life. The point is that there are two concepts of modernism. The modernists of the 1910s and 1920s were concerned with an art oriented towards the fusion of art and life, or at least with an art whose forms would match the forms and rhythms of modern life . This is true for painters like Malevich, Delaunay or Boccioni, for architects and designers like Gropius or Le Corbusier, stage designers like Appia, film-makers like Abel Gance, most of which had no political avant-gardist commitment . That modernism in general was about an art fitting modern life. The second concept is that which was elaborated retrospectively in the 1940s by theorists like Adorno and Greenberg as a consequence of the former’s failure. They privileged figures of “subtraction” – abstract painting, dodecaphonic music, minimalist literature- because they equated that artistic subtraction with the withdrawal of the “totalitarian” will to merge art into life and eventually with the mosaic rejection of the images. That’s why Kafka and Schönberg became emblems of modernity for Adorno. I would call it an after-modernism or a counter-modernism. Ironically, it is that after-modernism that became the target of post-modern criticism.
Magun: Nevertheless, I want to insist that we have to distinguish between the avant-garde proper and a broader modernism, between a first and a second modernism as you define them (just as we would have to differentiate w between the politicized and depoliticized wings of the “first” modernism), but there are still a number of important moments that they have in common. First, this is the destruction of form, of figure, and disassembly of this form into elements, characters of both minimalist and ornamental strategies. Second, there is a constant reflection on form and art’s framing, included in the artwork as a form of irony or the destruction of representative illusions etc. Third, in the terms of your own aesthetic theory, it is the direct presentation of background and not of the figure, the revelation of the non-thematic layers of perception.
Of course, in the 20th century, most of the great art of both types tended towards prosaization, de-auratization, in terms of Benjamin (even though the loss of aura can of course itself be auratic), and an enthusiastic absorption of technologies and industrialization. This is more characteristic of avant-garde, but there was such trend in the modernism, too (if you take Joyce, Eliot or the late Ezra Pound). In your terms, this is a prosaization and inner critique of art is most characteristic of both wings of the “first” modernism, but the minimalism of post-war modernism also fits into this quite well.
In general, both modernism and the avant-garde, are imbued with a strange kind of utopia, one that is sealed; it is a promise of utopia, or the utopia of promise. Even Malevich’s square is either black and impenetrable (the utopia of modernism), or white and dissolved into life to the point of being unrecognizable (the utopia of the avant-garde. In both cases, art fails to unfold, and works through the destructions of significance and the declaration of senselessness. Modernism holds a mirror that does not reflect anything to the world, while the avant-garde forces raw, crude life and its senseless corporeality to emerge from behind the familiar reality of significance…
Ranciére: When you designate avant-gardism as an impulse to put art into life, the point is that this definition of avant-gardist art may come down to what I called the ethical regime. When Plato discusses poetry, both Plato and the poets are convinced that poetry is a form of education, and the question is, whether it is a good form of education. So, the idea of the intervention of art into life is not something novel or specific to avant-gardism. In a certain way, it is something from the past. The contradiction of the aesthetic regime of art is that the political potential of art is first defined not on the basis not of the autonomy of art, but of the autonomy of aesthetic experience. Because Schiller’s idea of the “aesthetic education of humanity” (and all that followed) is based precisely on the idea that there is a very specific aesthetic experience that is at odds with normal forms of experience. Before this aesthetic turn, which was punctuated by Kant and Schiller, forms of art were always connected with forms of life, art was destined to express religious truth or the majesty of the monarchs, to decorate palaces and enchant aristocratic life, etc. And the aesthetic break means that there is something as a specific sphere of experience of art, which has nothing more to do with any kind of social function … The problem is that that the idea of the political potential of art was first defined on the basis of this disruption. This is what I tried to describe when I spoke about workers’ emancipation. I mentioned there that worker’s emancipation was also aesthetic emancipation, and that aesthetic emancipation precisely had to do with the fact that there was something as an aesthetic experience available to everybody. That availability of a new form of experience was possible because art works were now identified in such a way that they could be seen as works of art regardless of why and for whom they had been created. The utopian potential of aesthetic experience was first predicated on that “autonomisation” of aesthetic experience from the ethical adequation between art and life.
The internal contradiction of avant-gardism is that it is defined on the basis of the potential of the aesthetic experience qua autonomous experience, and at the same time it tries to stop precisely this separation in order to create a new sensorium of common life . This is why for me it is impossible to give an unequivocal definition of avant-gardism. Avant-gardism may be defined as the transformation of the forms of art into forms of life. And it may be defined as the preservation of the autonomy of aesthetic experience from that transformation. This withdrawal can also be described as a utopia, as the preservation of a utopian promise enclosed in the very contradiction of autonomy, in the form of the veil or the enigma as with Adorno. I’d say that both positions have good arguments precisely because they reflect the original contradiction I indicated above.
Vilensky: It is very important that you mentioned the autonomy of aesthetic experience. I think it would be interesting to reconsider the idea of art’s autonomy in relation to ideas of workers’ autonomy that were developed in Italy by the Autonomia Operaia. Not separation in the Adornian sense, but autonomy in the sense of the self-organization of cultural production that countermands the market system with a pressure of its own…
Ranciére:Well, I think there may be confusion about the word “autonomy”. I tried to distinguish between the autonomy of the aesthetic experience and the autonomy of art. Defining the aesthetic experience also means defining a specific kind of capacity. Art is about creating a space for unexpected capacities, which means also space for unexpected possibilities. I think that is not the same as the idea of autonomy in the sense, for instance of the Italian “operaisti” . In a sense their autonomy meant the autonomy with respect to the organization of parties, communist parties and trade unions. This is still a minimal definition of autonomy. The real content of autonomy is equality: it is the recognition and the enforcement of the capacity of anybody. The Italian autonomist movement involved that capacity. But it tied it up with something quite different, which is a view of the global economic process coming down to the idea that everything belongs to the same basis. Then everything is production, and this form of production produces this form of organization, and then there is a complete translatability between working, struggling, loving, making art, and so on. I’d say that this idea of autonomy in fact suppresses precisely the autonomy of the spheres of experience.
And with respect to the relation between the art and the market – there has already been a long search for a form of art that would not be marketable at all. Today there is a form of artistic activism that asks artists to make only interventions, to act directly as political activists. But this means in, a certain way, that you keep art as the property of the artist, for instance as an action of the artist. I’d say that this is a certain form of deprivation, because when you say that art is action, that it must not be made visible and marketable, this means that aesthetic experience is not made available to anybody.
Also, I think, it’s quite difficult to define artistic practice on the negative basis of doing something that would not be marketable, because everything can be marketable. In the 1970s, the conceptual artists said: if you don’t create objects you don’t create anything for the market, and thus it is political subversion. We know what happened to conceptual art, right? They did not sell objects, they sold ideas! It’s a kind of perfection of the capitalist system, and not at all a break with it.
Skidan: Maybe I can shift the angle of our discussion a little bit? I’d like to talk about poetry and literature. In the Sixties and Seventies, in the Soviet Union at least, poetry was a very powerful thing. There was no public politics that could translate and organize discussions on philosophical and political issues, so poetry took over this task. Then, in the late Eighties and Nineties, this collapsed totally; poetry is now something very marginal. So, I’d like to turn to this art of words to say that there is a very interesting and special option in language. Mainly the negativity of the language which only poetry and special rhetorical devices can uncover and use, in opposition and in resistance to these marketable things. That’s why I think Artem is right in referring to figures like Kafka. One could also think of Beckett or Blanchot, whose strategy it was to work directly with negativity – not in the sense of deformation of syntax, words, or normative grammar, but as a special strategy which refuses to bring an expression to fulfillment, which works in suspension and negativity as the inner force of every language. Because when we name, we usually think that we open a new meaning or a new space for new meaning. I mean that poetry works vice versa, at least the avant-garde and post-avant-garde poetry. So what do you think about this negativity as a force of politicizing the art of words?
Ranciére:Well, the question is how you would define “negativity.” I prefer to speak in terms of dissensus. “Dissensus” means that you question the legitimacy of the division of things and the division of words, of how they mean or of how they conceal the meaning — and this can be done in many ways. This dissensus always refers to a certain dominant state of language. So I’d say that the poetic subversion is always referred to a certain consensual type of language. And the consensual or dominant practice of language changes very fast. It is clear for instance that surrealism has by now been mostly reintegrated in the dominant language. Surrealism as a kind of uncanny connection between words is today the principle of many advertising slogans. So what I mean is that perhaps there is a too easy idea of the subversion, as if there was a power of subversion in the poetry as such – no I don’t think so. There is a power to struggle against the dominant ways of presenting things, making sense of things, of connecting words and so on. But I’m not sure that negativity is a good term for this . Because negativity is one of those terms that precisely anticipate and presuppose a kind of identity between political invention and political subversion. For instance if we define a way of connecting words with words as negativity, we bestow it in advance with a power which is not that obvious. For instance – speaking of Kafka and Beckett – I’m not sure that negativity is a good word for defining Kafka’s art. You can also think of Kafka as of a writer who wants to renew the tradition of the fable, you can inscribe it inside a modernist tradition of the short story- from Maupassant to Borges – which is multi-faceted and whose structure has many various , if not antagonistic, implications and uses : social denunciation, nihilistic irony, new mythology, etc. It is something wider and much more complex than the idea of negativity. The same, by the way, is true of the idea of minimalism, as though minimalism was kind of a guarantee of political radicalism. In France, for the last 20 or 30 years you know, there has been produced a big bulk of minimalist literature. Yes, it is minimal – but it is generally consensual and bourgeois. It has nothing to do with any kind of political subversion.
Magun: So there is no such thing as subversion and everything depends on context? Take, for example, Eisenstein and Riefenstahl. Both worked for totalitarian regimes, but there is a difference in their poetics. In Eisenstein, even though we see the ideological overdetermination, we still see the avant-gardist impulse, negativity preserved, while Riefenstahl (like many “socialist realist” authors) art is subordinated to the goal of sublimation. Maybe there is something in great art that cannot be appropriated. It is an Adornian argument but I am using it here in a sense that is larger than the Adornian one.
Ranciére: The point is to know to what extent you can identify avant-gardist impulse with negativity. Well, you mentioned Eisenstein as a case of artistic negativity, because of his theory of montage and his practice of fragmentation. But it is unclear, you know, on what exactly the power of Eisenstein’s movies was predicated. Let us take, for example, “The General Line”. It’s unclear whether the force of this film was predicated on the montage or on the certain forms of lyricism reminiscent of the Russian paintings of 19th century, they are striking, those huge paintings of people working in the fields! Perhaps the force of this film is related to this kind of lyricism of the gesture of work, you know, and not actually with the montage. More precisely the montage has two different uses in his film: there is the dialectical parallel between the old and the new, which is certainly not the most exciting in the film; and there is the “ecstatic” montage in the sequences of the cream machine or of reaping in which the technical innovation is used to order to provide a sense of collective epics. “Negativity” here eventually means a combination of formalism and lyricism that fell off target. From my point of view it reveals the tension between aesthetic separation and ethical will which is inherent in the aesthetic regime of art. But it is not a concept actually able to account either for its artistic texture or for its political implementation.
I don’t say that the political import of art is only a question of context. What I want to say is that the creation of political zones of autonomy is based on an aesthetic experience, which is not the consequence of artistic strategies. The question is: what forms of perception, what space of experience are constructed as the result of artistic practice? If we want to contribute to a free space of experience, we have to step a little back from the idea of artistic practice as anticipating the new life.
Magun: I have another question. You are saying that art reframes the relationships between what is visible or not, what is acceptable or not to see. But, again isn’t there a step or a move that art should do before that, like some more fundamental gesture that has exactly to do with negativity, with the explosion of this border before any reframing takes place. Any reframing relies on some kind of crisis, of some sort of destruction. It is the same point with political revolution. Because if you look into the history of the political and social forms you can say with Tocqueville that actually nothing really happened in the French revolution, that there was just a constant process of transformation. But we know that there was something more fundamental which really made a crisis out of this transformation, which brought this slow transformation into an explosion. I wonder if this is not an additional problem and additional level on which we have to consider aesthetics.
Ranciére:Well, the point is that precisely you can’t anticipate explosions. Or, if you anticipate an explosion, you precisely risk to forbid it or divert it from its own law, from its own form of progression. It is true that education can provoke this form of explosion, but it’s unclear whether you can predict the form of transformation and the way in which it becomes an explosion. I have the suspicion there is a certain reminder of transcendence in the idea of the radical break. It is true, at a certain time you can see what a radical break is: if you cut the head of the king then yes, it’s a radical break, if you design a new kind of constitution, which gives new rights to the population, new capacities to the people etc., you can say that there is a radical break. But in the field of art it’s quite difficult to define the moment of radical break. This is true for forms of art, and it is also true for their social and political implementation. Let us take the case of abstract art which has often been thought of as the right example of artistic break. As a matter of fact, this break had been anticipated from the 19th century by a move in the way painting was looked at. In the 19th century prose of art criticism , you can see this shift of the gaze that makes that figurative paintings are more and more viewed with an “abstract eye” which sees in them no more the story or the anecdotes but the events of matter and color. In that way “realist” writers of the 19th century, like the Goncourt, have created the conditions of visibility of “abstract” painting. The dismissal of figurative painting is part of a much wider process which may itself be viewed off in terms of evolution or in terms of revolutionary break. Abstract forms, as Dima said, were about the construction of new buildings and new settings. At this point, the question is to what extent we can connect the “destructive” moment with a political break. The glorification of “function” in the revolution of architecture and design, from the Werkbund to the Bauhaus and the “Esprit nouveau” was intended as a reaction against the 19th century bourgeois imitation of the aristocratic styles. But it led to the achievement of a new capitalistic and Fordist rationality as well as to the idea of a workers’ new world. And in fact the new architecture conceived for the multitudes very often ended up in the construction of elegant villas for the wealthy. The power of technique could be aligned with the power of the engineers, the power of the workers or that of the “educated” classes. Le Corbusier’s book Towards an Architecture heralds a “regeneration”, a new epoch for Humanity. But it sets it up as a dilemma: “Architecture or Revolution”…
Skidan: This makes me think that that there is a mixture of two different logics at work. We have been trying to find this disjunctive connection, connection through the rupture between aesthetics and politics. But at the same time, I am haunted by the feeling that there is actually an immanent logic of art itself, an artistic development that has picked up speed, as you note, somewhere in the mid-19th century. According to this logic, each next step must be a break with earlier rules and norm. We can see that artistic ideas that were full of political meaning soon become products that write themselves into the frame of an immanent aesthetic logic, which has no relation to the transformation of the existing order of things. This is the double bind of contemporary art. As a result, aesthetics take on the role of a double agent: on the one hand, you do something that addresses the outside and demands “a change of the world,” but at the same time, it is a finite product, evaluated within aesthetic space and its criteria.
Vilensky: I think, Sasha, that both art and emancipatory politics always have a surplus that cannot be approrpriated by the institutions of power. Another thing is that we should not only think of the market’s totality, but also of the emancipatory practices that that constantly break this totality. I think that the avant-garde is indelibly connected to political events or movement that prepare its way. But if we look at these movements, we can see that their form is historical and that it changes. For example, the new “movement of movements” that arose after Seattle has basically transformed its subjectivities and the forms of their political representation. This is a moment of dynamism – or rupture – in both politics and art. | http://16beavergroup.org/journalisms/2007/09/21/chto-delat-jacques-ranciere-you-cant-anticipate-explosions/ |
European Art stretches back to the earliest paintings discovered on the walls of French caves. Dated to around 13,000-11,000 BC, these images of horses, mammoths, and bison paved the way for centuries of artistic creation.
We have been celebrating the art of painting as one of the finest examples of human intelligence and creativity ever since.
This introduction presents the significant styles of art in Europe and some of the most famous European paintings.
Scholars split art in Europe into many stylistic periods. Often, these styles of paintings overlap.
Some took place in specific countries (such as French Impressionism or Pre-Raphaelite paintings in Britain). In contrast, others (for instance, Classical and Neoclassical art) crossed national borders.
In brief, the primary forms of European art were:
● Classical Arts: art from ancient Greek and Rome. With stunning frescos, decorative vases, and sculptures, these artworks centered around notions of proportion, harmony, and elegance. Classical art deeply inspired later artistic styles, including Renaissance, Baroque and Neoclassical trends.
● Byzantine art: encompassing artworks from the Eastern Roman Empire. This style included Christian Orthodox countries in Eastern Europe as well as the Islamic states of the eastern Mediterranean. Shimmering gold icons and detailed mosaics were widespread.
● Medieval Gothic art: A style of Medieval art originally stemming from Northern France in the twelfth century. This sophisticated artistic style soon spread throughout Europe, including painting and church architecture, illuminated manuscripts, and sculpture.
● Renaissance art: representing the flourishing of art and culture that began in fourteenth-century Italy and dominated artistic creation until the early seventeenth century. Renaissance oil paintings by most famous artists, such as Leonardo da Vinci, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Raphael, worked during this period.
● Mannerism: a style of painting responding to Renaissance developments. Mannerist artists moved away from strictly classical influences and focused on more expressive artworks. They championed asymmetry and figures with beautifully long (often distorted) proportions.
● Baroque: Art of the Baroque period is exuberant and colorful and was a flourishing 17th century art movement in Europe. The Catholic Church encouraged these developments to counter the simplicity of the Protestant Reformation.
● Rococo: otherwise known as the "Late Baroque", this style was incredibly ornate and theatrical. Exemplified by artists such as Jean-Honore Fragonard and Jean-Antoine Watteau, lavish outfits and scrolling curves were common.
● Neoclassical: a style harking back to Greece and Rome (particularly popular in France), championed by artists such as Jacques-Louis David, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, and William-Adolphe Bouguereau.
● Modern Art: incorporating avant-garde developments such as Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Symbolism, Surrealism, Fauvism, and Expressionism. An incredibly diverse category, these art movements, and artists questioned preconceived ideas of artistic beauty and creation.
● Postmodern art: includes various contemporary artistic developments that experimented with new media and art forms. This style incorporates a wide variety of creativity, for instance, installation artworks, conceptual sculptures, and performance art.
With such a wide array of artistic movements and styles, defining a single type of art in Europe is nearly impossible. Nonetheless, early European painting (such as Classical, Gothic, and Renaissance art) focused on realistic depictions of nature.
While this allowed a certain amount of stylistic freedom (for instance, long, flowing forms in Gothic art), painters carefully observed nature and depicted what they saw.
This focus continued for centuries (particularly with European landscape oil painting), producing some of the most stunning depictions of the natural world. British painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Constable, Turner, and Gainsborough, exemplified the continuation of a realistic approach.
This overarching "realist" approach changed with Modern Art movements such as Surrealism and Expressionism. While these styles were still figurative (i.e., taking inspiration from the natural world), they focused primarily on artists' emotions and feelings.
These avant-garde movements led the way for conceptual and abstract art developments, championed by painters such as Malevich and Mondrian.
Botticelli's The Birth of Venus is one of the most celebrated artworks of the early Italian Renaissance. Depicting the moment the Goddess Venus arrives at the seashore, it borrows from earlier gothic styles and classical themes. Today, art lovers can find Botticelli's The Birth of Venus in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy.
The Mona Lisa by Leonardo Da Vinci is one of the most famous European paintings. It's also one of the most enigmatic and mysterious portraits, spawning various artistic debates.
If there's one overriding mystery of the Mona Lisa, it's her enigmatic smile. Indeed, scholars even disagree whether she's smiling at all. The portrait also survived multiple attacks over the years, with red paint, rocks, and teacups all thrown at the masterpiece.
Rembrandt's The Night Watch is a true masterpiece of the Dutch Golden Age of art. The painting shows "Captain Banninck Cocq" (who commissioned the artwork in 1639) and his militia.
Overall, Rembrandt's group portrait shows thirty-four individuals. It's a bravura display of artistic skill, measuring over 3.6 by 4.3 meters.
If there's one iconic example of art in Europe, it must be Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh. As well as one of the most recognizable European landscape paintings, it's a tragic yet beautiful insight into Van Gogh's troubled mental state.
Van Gogh painted the artwork during his stay at an asylum in Saint-Remy-de-Provence after his 1888 breakdown. Sadly, he died shortly afterward (on 29 July 1890) from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
The Kiss represents the pinnacle of Gustav Klimt's "Gold Phase". It's also a defining artwork of the Austrian Symbolist movement. This artistic style sought to represent absolute truths through metaphors and symbolic images.
As a result, the painting by Klimt The Kiss is the highest expression of love between two humans. In the painting, two figures recline against a shimmering gold backdrop, locked in an eternal embrace.
If you love large wall art and famous European paintings, browse our extensive collection of art reproductions.
Buy Renaissance oil paintings by artists like Leonardo da Vinci to Sandro Botticelli or fine art reproductions of some of the world’s top 100 most famous paintings. | https://www.reproduction-gallery.com/art-movement/european-art/?page=5&perpage=30 |
The study of the Russian communist avant-garde is of singular importance if we are to understand the logic of contemporary political arts evolution because of the way that it anticipated, albeit incompletely and even unsuccessfully, the future of art and social life. For the possibilities that were opened to art in Soviet Russia in the twenties cannot be compared with those that even the most wealthy democratic state might offer it today. Friedrich Schiller, who in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man dreamt of a state of beauty in appearance where peoples dreams of universal equality would be brought to life, could not even imagine the degree to which this political-aesthetic utopia was realized. The socialist revolution gave the artist the chance to come into contact with social reality in an immediate that is, non-alienatedmode that had no need of convention, illusion, and fiction in order to convey the artists utterances. The Revolution liberated zones of reality that previously had been subjected only to estrangement and distancing; it opened channels for the immediate construction of mans life world. It was not merely matter of artists participating in largescale architectural and urban planning projects, the artistic design of streets and squares, the choreography of massive revolutionary celebrations, and the production of practical forms of clothing for the mass consumer and holistic elements of communal life. Most of all, the revolution effected a shift in relationships between people and gave birth to a new man who was liberated from a master-slave sensuality and consciousness.
The agit-prop character of proletarian art, so disturbing for liberals, meant in fact the continuous exchange of its material and form, of the practical and poetic idioms. From the standpoint of form, the characteristic tendentiousness of this art was a no less productive device than the illusory impartiality of contemplative art. In its immanent forms, the very material of the new life supplied the artist with the broadest choice of motivations and techniques. In essence, we see here the selforganization of social material via the reciprocal motion of workers fighting for freedom and artists moving into the sphere of production.
The heirs of Russian futurism, who united in the twenties in LEF (Left Front of the Arts), which was headed by Vladimir Mayakovsky, seized at this historic chance. However, their example today shows us all the advantages and drawbacks that arise when art takes it upon itself to decide directly political questions and wield cultural power.
Whereas before the revolution the cubo-futurists, transrational (zaum) poets, and non-figurativists (Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh, Kamensky, Rodchenko et al.) could demonstrate in their works only the alienation of the object world and the human world under capitalist conditions, the construction of socialism caused the work of these artists to undergo a complicated albeit logical transformation towards productionist art and factography. The stance of early futurismprovocative and negative vis-à-vis realitygives way after the revolution to artistic strategies designed to impact sensuality and intellect, and to direct life-construction. This transformation was conditioned, first and foremost, by the unified political consciousness of these artists. This consciousness ensured the continuity between such seemingly different forms of left art in terms of how this arts nature and tasks were understood. And these artists were united in their rejection of mimetic-reflective strategies, fictionalism, figuration, plottedness, etc.
Although they often surpassed the possibilities of real artistic practice, the fundamental theoretical positions of the LEF artists contained nothing fantastic or unusual. They were based on the labor theory of art that dated all the way back to Hegelthat is, the theory that viewed art as a species of labor determined at the material and formal level by the social means of its production and consumption. Here, the artwork was transformed from a plaything of the ruling class into a useful thing linked to the entire mode of social life, a thing that found its ultimate justification and meaning in collective daily existence without any harm to its aesthetic form. Unlike, however, such utilitarian Arts and Crafts advocates as Ruskin and Morris, the productionists relied on the movement of the laboring masses, mechanized industrial production, and the idea of the scientific organization of labor. Correspondingly, their task was to raise the work process to the level of art making, and to return art to the sphere of production from which it had been separated under capitalism.
In LEFs reliance on the broad social base, which combined both representatives of the proletariat and fellow travelers, we can see the most consistent manifestation of democratism during that complex period. We should also not fail to mention LEFs internal self-governance, the absence of diktat even on the part of such an authoritative poet of the revolution as Mayakovsky. Everyone regarded LEF not merely as a journal in which likeminded authors were published. LEF was indeed a revolutionary artistic-political project that no one, including Mayakovsky, bent to his will or used for personal career goals. Moreover, the participants of LEF sometimes engaged in fundamental, no-holds-barred polemics (e.g., the Chuzak-Brik and Arvatov-Shklovsky debates). However, LEFs sound ideological base enabled it, over the course of fairly lengthy period of time, to encompass such divergent phenomena of the twenties as futurism and factography, formalism and the emergent sociology of art, the Kino-eyes and the theater of attractions, productionism and constructivism.
Already from its very first issues, however, LEFs aggressive left-wing ideas ran into the misunderstanding, envy, and rivalry of politicians and other art groups struggling for power in the cultural field. The LEFists fought not so much for power as for a particular understanding of it that sprung not from the nominal politicization of the author as a communist (the position of the Trotskyites) or from his actual social status as a proletarian (Proletkult, RAPP), but from the real engagement of the artist in the process of revolutionizing the world by artistic means. Osip Briks dialectical formulathat proletarian art is neither art for proletarians nor the art of proletarians, but the art of artist-proletarianscombined the idea of revolutionism and mastery in art. As far as the sociopolitical aspect was concerned, this formula assumed that a representative of any social stratum could embody the viewpoint of the most progressive class. In terms of art, it simultaneously militated against amateurism by insisting on the quality of artworks and fought for the continuous revolutionizing of artistic forms as against the use of outmoded techniques, which was justified by the mere participation of the author in the Party.
As a consequence, however, of the enormous effort they expended on defending themselves and countering the criticism of a wide variety of authors and groups (Lunacharsky and Trotsky, RAPP and the At Ones Post [Na postu] circle, The Smithy [Kuznitsa] and Crossing [Pereval] groups), the LEF theorists often had no time to develop their own positive program. Hence they simplified their positions, although a synthesis of various artistic ideas around a common political platform was initially quite feasible.
Thus, in my view, LEFs genuine Achilles heel was the issue of arts relationship to cognition. The view of art not as a privileged form of individual activity but as a practice that was, however complexly mediated, nevertheless a social practice, was definitely full of promise, particularly in light of the dangers of sociological reductionism. But the desire of the comfuturists to oppose all manifestations of symbolism and mimetic-reflective art led them to overkillto a rejection of functions that even works created in the productionist or factographic modes do not cease to perform. So the attempts of LEF to proclaim the overcoming of aesthetics in their understanding of art were mostly a matter of polemics. For the fusion of art and life could be only a vector and an ultimate goal. Along the road to this goal, dangerous simulacra (for example, fascism) lay in wait both for art and for politics. Besides, knowledge does not necessarily contradict the revolutionizing of reality. We should understand Marxs famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach to mean that the world has to be changed, and that thought and science are among the means of changing it.
Aside from internecine conflicts, however, during the period of the New Economic Policy the LEF strategy collided with a number of contradictions that finally led to this leftist groups collapse. The problem was that their artistic program corresponded only to an actually realized ideal of the commune in which the utopian and the aesthetic, beauty and freedom would really coincide. During the transition to the new state system, however, left art was confronted with a recoding of all its aims; understood literally, they could have begun to play a directly opposite role. That is why, in the thirties, the avant-garde moves from literary facts to figures of tragic irony and the absurd (Andrei Platonov, OBERIU).
In the precise sense of the word, art may be termed avant-garde only during a revolutionary struggle and the ensuing construction of communism. That is, despite its historicity, the avant-garde does not have a history of its own and, consequently, it has no prospects for continuation under another kind of social regime. Avant-garde art is post-historical: it ruptures the flow of history with the time of the event, with revolution. The avant-garde is fundamentally transitive in nature, corresponding to radical changes in societythe destruction or total transformation of all the forms and norms that had previously been operative within it.
It is precisely for these reasons that the avant-garde stance does not enable us nowadays to speak of art only as a self-sufficient production of forms: although they remain in relative opposition to capitalism, over time they are almost completely appropriated by it. Under these conditions, to speak in any way of the development of the avant-garde is merely to move backwards, to undermine its techniques, and even to pervert its commandments.
Thus, a literal adherence to the aims of productionist art can lead today only to the decoration and design of the bourgeois lifestyle. The new series of Adidas sports wear produced from sketches by Varvara Stepanova and sold by the Guggenheim Museums is a glaring example of this. The requirement that the artistic product be of high quality, so important for the productionists, which they opposed to the expression of the individual artists genius, looks like an irony of history in the context of contemporary market-oriented art technologies.
That is why faithfulness to the ideological project of the avant-garde (to borrow Alain Badiou’s expression) has to be accompanied by a positive critique of its formal (academic) repetition together with a total boycott of the zones of contemporary art as the spaces where it has been captured by capitalism. It is not only possible for the artist to make this choice today; it is the only adequate choice given the logic of history and a political appraisal of the current state of affairs. But we are not speaking here of pure negation and passive protest. Faithfulness to the avant-garde means, more than anything, the discovery of new artistic forms in the social field itself; it means that the artist works directly with the material of everyday life, not with cultural contexts, quotations, and the traditional artistic arsenal. The communist decoding of capitalist reality that Dziga Vertov argued for in his time or an art of socialist techniques might prove to be an effective means of revealing the emerging contours of the future even in our present age, which has been hurled backwards into the past. And factography might be the idiom for expressing this future.
The main point, however, is that art should reorient itself, both on the level of material and the level of technique, away from the petit bourgeois audience and the circle of its connoisseurs and towards the whole of society, especially societys most oppressed strata. If you like, the artist should be able to take up the position of the working class, notwithstanding the phenomenological absence of this class. For only an art that is wholly determined by social practice is capable of filling in the real, unorganized tendencies of life (Boris Arvatov). We can still march in a left front of the arts, comrades!
Igor Chubarov is a philosopher and editor based in Moscow. He is a research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy of the Russian Academy of the Sciences, and is editor-in-chief of the publishing house Logos-altera (Moscow). | https://chtodelat.org/b8-newspapers/12-50/we-can-still-marchin-a-left-front-of-the-arts-comrades/ |
A biennale is one of the most influential forms of international art exhibition and is an opportunity to present the spirit of the city in which it is hosted. As an international, cultural and academic event held on a large scale, it is an ideal platform for exchanging artistic ideas and displaying the latest achievements and innovations of art – both local and global. A large-scale, high-quality biennale of this sort is also an opportunity for the city in which it is hosted: to boost its economy, nurture its art and culture, develop its infrastructure and strengthen its ties with the international community.
Chengdu occupies an important position in China’s general development strategy. Along with Chongqing, it is a part of the southwest’s “Twin City Economic Circle” and as such plays an important role in China’s plans for high-quality development in leading zones and advancing new urban construction, as well as the One Belt One Road Initiative. Chengdu is the site of a new development project based on the concept of the “Garden City”, an attempt to explore means of sustainable urban development in the new era. This project prioritizes the environment and green development, as well as building a city that is centered around its inhabitants. As a new model for the Garden City, Chengdu will bring the urban, the human and the natural into harmony with one another, establishing a new urban environment that encapsulates diverse cultures and realizes the ideal of the future city. Chengdu is a city with its own special character: old architecture adjoins new districts, leisure accompanies enterprise, old traditions encounter the latest fashions, and the local interacts with the international. As such it is a vibrant and eclectic city, a super-fusion of multiple dimensions, fields and levels. It is a source of great inspiration for artists and provides fertile land for a large-scale art exhibition.
Since its conception, the Chengdu Biennale has always sought to support and foster Chinese art with a view to exploring the cultural and historical context behind contemporary artistic production, presenting the current status of Chinese art, and helping Chinese artworks attain international status among the artistic community and society more broadly. However, with the arrival of the new era, the Chengdu Biennale has taken on a new mission. The aim of this year’s Biennale is to realise the spirit of the fifth plenary session of the Nineteenth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China. The year that China’s Fourteenth Five-Year Plan is put into action will see two new art galleries open in Chengdu, with the Chengdu Biennale showcasing the latest achievements of the city’s cultural sector. Based on the new development stage, embodying the principles of new development, establishing a new development order and guided by the doctrine of high-quality development, the exhibitions will act as a cultural cornerstone, collecting outstanding art – with an emphasis on new works – from China and abroad under the concept of “Art Blooms in Garden City” thus satisfying the people’s growing need for beauty and culture, and contributing to Chengdu’s cultural infrastructure and high-quality development.
The world has entered a new era in which previous orders and systems no longer hold, and great changes are taking place in the fields of politics, economics, culture and ecology. The fates of people the world over have never been so intimately interconnected. The age in which we live calls for greater dialogue and co-operation between us all, a new system of cultural values that inspires hope. Contemporary art provides precisely the kind of spiritual support humanity needs in such a challenging period of crisis. It is for this reason that the 2021 Chengdu Biennale has chosen Super Fusion for its theme, in the hope that bringing together the global and the local, the urban and the spiritual, the conceptual and the technical, the fashionable and the innovative, the ecological and the esthetic, the traditional and the avant-garde, and uniting these within the form of the art exhibition, we are able to create a super-fusion of ideas and a space for communication that acts across various disciplines and multiple dimensions. The Biennale hopes to build an esthetic home in the ecological space of the Garden City, to open new paths for artistic exploration, and to present the potential for the mutual flourishing of the urban and esthetic.
As a vast artistic event, the Biennale consists of eight themed exhibitions and one international conference of gallery directors, which are entitled Polymorphic Co-Existence, Urban Co-Habitation, Technological Co-Respondence, Zeitgeist Co-Evolution, Ecological Co-Development, Craft Co-Operation, Ethnic Co-Creation, Artistic Co-Inspiration and Future Co-Conception. The Biennale will feature works from more than 270 artists or artistic groups. We believe that “Art Blooms in Garden City – Super Fusion” provides both an opportunity to encounter an important cross-section of international contemporary art and a profound insight into important cultural questions facing humanity. Under the conditions of a world struggling against the COVID pandemic, and China’s approach to managing the crisis in particular, the Chengdu Biennale embodies the vitality of artistic and infrastructural development in China’s cities and will bring the world’s gaze to focus upon China’s cultural confidence and inclusivity. | https://skny.com/news-events/laurent-grasso-in-super-fusion-2021-chengdu-biennale |
Immigration within the first world defines the social base of modernism; the formation and the formulation of modernism occur in what Raymond Williams terms the "metropolitan-immigrant functions" of early twentieth-century capitals of imperial and capitalist states (Culture 84).1 Have altered conditions of production and reception of art in the age of global communication technology and multinational capitalism closed forever the age of modernism as revolutionary artistic practice? As Neil Larsen asks in Modernism and Hegemony, has modernism as an ideological signifier—not only of art but also of theoretical discourses ranging from aesthetics to philosophy, culture, and politics—relinquished yet its intellectual [End Page 549] and cultural hegemony (xxii, xxiii)? And has a new form of postcolonial immigration unlodged this hegemony?
To what extent were the artistic practices of modernism aligned with the ideologies and politics of imperialism and capitalism? Larsen argues that modernism, "as an ideology dominated by but not specific to the realm of aesthetics, is the inversion (the 'inverted consciousness') of a historically objective 'crisis in representation' affecting the construction of what are initially social and political identities."2 This crisis, he claims (in agreement with analyses by Raymond Williams in The Politics of Modernism and Fredric Jameson in works such as "Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism"), is "the result of the modernization of capital itself during the nineteenth century, especially in the period leading up to the transformation of the 'classical' free market capitalism into monopoly/state capitalism and imperialism." Modernism stems from the crisis in representation that entails also a crisis in agency, and it comprehends this crisis in representation as itself stemming from "an intrinsic falsity residing in a purely conceptual operation, representation—and inverts it. The crisis in representation becomes a crisis of representation." But modernism does not relinquish the master narrative that the crisis of representation threatens to dissolve. "Agency must be retained," Larsen points out, "despite its apparent evacuation of the political." It is in this retention of agency that modernism claims the aesthetic, the (modern) work of art "which alone among the postpolitical or subpolitical practices appears to hold out the promise of an oppositional synthesis." It is the logic of ascribing historical agency to aesthetic works and practices that for Larsen is common to modernist ideology, including the avant-garde: "'Works of art' become the conceptual inversions of historical aporias, conceptual forms of anticapital" (Modernism and Hegemony xxiv-xxv).
Even the historical avant-garde oppositional movements of the early twentieth century, those dissident-bourgeois formations of formalist and libertarian radicalism, rebelling against the "institutionalized discourse about art" in bourgeois society, attempting to "reintegrate art into the praxis of life," remain caught in the grip of the very aesthetic logic they were seeking to shatter (Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde). As Williams notes, the avant-garde anticipates not revolution or socialism but imperialism and even late capitalism: "avant-garde formations, developing specific and distanced styles within the metropolis, at once reflect and [End Page 550] compose kinds of consciousness and practice which became increasingly relevant to a social order itself developing in the directions of metropolitan and international significance beyond the nation-state and its borders" (Culture 84).
In exploring what is indeed beyond not only the borders of the nation-state but also the periphery of the metropolitan, late-capitalist state, where "the modern and its Other meet along a boundary more spatial than temporal," Larsen points out that "under such conditions the crisis in representation is overshadowed and displaced by the crisis of the ground itself as the terrain upon which the unity of the historical subject with its object is both affirmed and denied." In these social and historical spaces where capital concentrates its most extreme contradictions, representation retains its problematic aspect. But, Larsen maintains, "the dialectic stipulating its falsity and the necessity to overcome it in a 'work' that directly contains an otherwise impossible synthesis gives way to the more urgent project of producing the terrain of synthesis per se."
The "work" can appear to make available the ideological space for... | https://muse.jhu.edu/article/243479/pdf |
Home » Newspapers » #special issue: When Artists Struggle Together » Igor Chubarov /// We Can Still March in a Left Front of the Arts, Comrades!
The agit-prop character of proletarian art, so disturbing for liberals, meant in fact the continuous exchange of its material and form, of the practical and poetic idioms. From the standpoint of form, the characteristic tendentiousness of this art was a no less productive device than the illusory impartiality of contemplative art. In its immanent forms, the very material of the new life supplied the artist with the broadest choice of motivations and techniques. In essence, we see here the selforganization of social material via the reciprocal motion of workers fighting for freedom and artists moving into the sphere of production.
The heirs of Russian futurism, who united in the twenties in LEF (Left Front of the Arts), which was headed by Vladimir Mayakovsky, seized at this historic chance. However, their example today shows us all the advantages and drawbacks that arise when art takes it upon itself to decide directly political questions and wield cultural power.
Whereas before the revolution the cubo-futurists, transrational (zaum) poets, and non-figurativists (Khlebnikov, Mayakovsky, Kruchenykh, Kamensky, Rodchenko et al.) could demonstrate in their works only the alienation of the object world and the human world under capitalist conditions, the construction of socialism caused the work of these artists to undergo a complicated albeit logical transformation towards productionist art and factography. The stance of early futurismprovocative and negative vis-à-vis realitygives way after the revolution to artistic strategies designed to impact sensuality and intellect, and to direct life-construction. This transformation was conditioned, first and foremost, by the unified political consciousness of these artists. This consciousness ensured the continuity between such seemingly different forms of left art in terms of how this arts nature and tasks were understood. And these artists were united in their rejection of mimetic-reflective strategies, fictionalism, figuration, plottedness, etc.
Although they often surpassed the possibilities of real artistic practice, the fundamental theoretical positions of the LEF artists contained nothing fantastic or unusual. They were based on the labor theory of art that dated all the way back to Hegelthat is, the theory that viewed art as a species of labor determined at the material and formal level by the social means of its production and consumption. Here, the artwork was transformed from a plaything of the ruling class into a useful thing linked to the entire mode of social life, a thing that found its ultimate justification and meaning in collective daily existence without any harm to its aesthetic form. Unlike, however, such utilitarian Arts and Crafts advocates as Ruskin and Morris, the productionists relied on the movement of the laboring masses, mechanized industrial production, and the idea of the scientific organization of labor. Correspondingly, their task was to raise the work process to the level of art making, and to return art to the sphere of production from which it had been separated under capitalism.
In LEFs reliance on the broad social base, which combined both representatives of the proletariat and fellow travelers, we can see the most consistent manifestation of democratism during that complex period. We should also not fail to mention LEFs internal self-governance, the absence of diktat even on the part of such an authoritative poet of the revolution as Mayakovsky. Everyone regarded LEF not merely as a journal in which likeminded authors were published. LEF was indeed a revolutionary artistic-political project that no one, including Mayakovsky, bent to his will or used for personal career goals. Moreover, the participants of LEF sometimes engaged in fundamental, no-holds-barred polemics (e.g., the Chuzak-Brik and Arvatov-Shklovsky debates). However, LEFs sound ideological base enabled it, over the course of fairly lengthy period of time, to encompass such divergent phenomena of the twenties as futurism and factography, formalism and the emergent sociology of art, the Kino-eyes and the theater of attractions, productionism and constructivism.
Already from its very first issues, however, LEFs aggressive left-wing ideas ran into the misunderstanding, envy, and rivalry of politicians and other art groups struggling for power in the cultural field. The LEFists fought not so much for power as for a particular understanding of it that sprung not from the nominal politicization of the author as a communist (the position of the Trotskyites) or from his actual social status as a proletarian (Proletkult, RAPP), but from the real engagement of the artist in the process of revolutionizing the world by artistic means. Osip Briks dialectical formulathat proletarian art is neither art for proletarians nor the art of proletarians, but the art of artist-proletarianscombined the idea of revolutionism and mastery in art. As far as the sociopolitical aspect was concerned, this formula assumed that a representative of any social stratum could embody the viewpoint of the most progressive class. In terms of art, it simultaneously militated against amateurism by insisting on the quality of artworks and fought for the continuous revolutionizing of artistic forms as against the use of outmoded techniques, which was justified by the mere participation of the author in the Party.
As a consequence, however, of the enormous effort they expended on defending themselves and countering the criticism of a wide variety of authors and groups (Lunacharsky and Trotsky, RAPP and the At Ones Post [Na postu] circle, The Smithy [Kuznitsa] and Crossing [Pereval] groups), the LEF theorists often had no time to develop their own positive program. Hence they simplified their positions, although a synthesis of various artistic ideas around a common political platform was initially quite feasible.
Thus, in my view, LEFs genuine Achilles heel was the issue of arts relationship to cognition. The view of art not as a privileged form of individual activity but as a practice that was, however complexly mediated, nevertheless a social practice, was definitely full of promise, particularly in light of the dangers of sociological reductionism. But the desire of the comfuturists to oppose all manifestations of symbolism and mimetic-reflective art led them to overkillto a rejection of functions that even works created in the productionist or factographic modes do not cease to perform. So the attempts of LEF to proclaim the overcoming of aesthetics in their understanding of art were mostly a matter of polemics. For the fusion of art and life could be only a vector and an ultimate goal. Along the road to this goal, dangerous simulacra (for example, fascism) lay in wait both for art and for politics. Besides, knowledge does not necessarily contradict the revolutionizing of reality. We should understand Marxs famous eleventh thesis on Feuerbach to mean that the world has to be changed, and that thought and science are among the means of changing it.
Aside from internecine conflicts, however, during the period of the New Economic Policy the LEF strategy collided with a number of contradictions that finally led to this leftist groups collapse. The problem was that their artistic program corresponded only to an actually realized ideal of the commune in which the utopian and the aesthetic, beauty and freedom would really coincide. During the transition to the new state system, however, left art was confronted with a recoding of all its aims; understood literally, they could have begun to play a directly opposite role. That is why, in the thirties, the avant-garde moves from literary facts to figures of tragic irony and the absurd (Andrei Platonov, OBERIU).
In the precise sense of the word, art may be termed avant-garde only during a revolutionary struggle and the ensuing construction of communism. That is, despite its historicity, the avant-garde does not have a history of its own and, consequently, it has no prospects for continuation under another kind of social regime. Avant-garde art is post-historical: it ruptures the flow of history with the time of the event, with revolution. The avant-garde is fundamentally transitive in nature, corresponding to radical changes in societythe destruction or total transformation of all the forms and norms that had previously been operative within it.
It is precisely for these reasons that the avant-garde stance does not enable us nowadays to speak of art only as a self-sufficient production of forms: although they remain in relative opposition to capitalism, over time they are almost completely appropriated by it. Under these conditions, to speak in any way of the development of the avant-garde is merely to move backwards, to undermine its techniques, and even to pervert its commandments.
Thus, a literal adherence to the aims of productionist art can lead today only to the decoration and design of the bourgeois lifestyle. The new series of Adidas sports wear produced from sketches by Varvara Stepanova and sold by the Guggenheim Museums is a glaring example of this. The requirement that the artistic product be of high quality, so important for the productionists, which they opposed to the expression of the individual artists genius, looks like an irony of history in the context of contemporary market-oriented art technologies.
That is why faithfulness to the ideological project of the avant-garde (to borrow Alain Badiou’s expression) has to be accompanied by a positive critique of its formal (academic) repetition together with a total boycott of the zones of contemporary art as the spaces where it has been captured by capitalism. It is not only possible for the artist to make this choice today; it is the only adequate choice given the logic of history and a political appraisal of the current state of affairs. But we are not speaking here of pure negation and passive protest. Faithfulness to the avant-garde means, more than anything, the discovery of new artistic forms in the social field itself; it means that the artist works directly with the material of everyday life, not with cultural contexts, quotations, and the traditional artistic arsenal. The communist decoding of capitalist reality that Dziga Vertov argued for in his time or an art of socialist techniques might prove to be an effective means of revealing the emerging contours of the future even in our present age, which has been hurled backwards into the past. And factography might be the idiom for expressing this future.
The main point, however, is that art should reorient itself, both on the level of material and the level of technique, away from the petit bourgeois audience and the circle of its connoisseurs and towards the whole of society, especially societys most oppressed strata. If you like, the artist should be able to take up the position of the working class, notwithstanding the phenomenological absence of this class. For only an art that is wholly determined by social practice is capable of filling in the real, unorganized tendencies of life (Boris Arvatov). We can still march in a left front of the arts, comrades!
Igor Chubarov is a philosopher and editor based in Moscow. He is a research fellow at the Institute for Philosophy of the Russian Academy of the Sciences, and is editor-in-chief of the publishing house Logos-altera (Moscow). | https://chtodelat.org/b8-newspapers/12-50/we-can-still-marchin-a-left-front-of-the-arts-comrades/ |
The desire to blur the boundaries between art and life was shared by a great if not all, avant-garde utopias – failed in their ambition to change the world, and more believes that this new relationship allows an actual blurring of art and life, . Between Art and Life: Postwar Avant-garde Art critical literature, and contemporaneous theories, we will wrestle with the relationship between art, history, and. Read about the most groundbreaking art movements of the 20th It was the very first time the term avant garde, or avant-garde, was used in relations to the arts, and . A concept inseparable from progress, avant garde demanded art to .. life , which somehow became associated with kitsch rather than art.
Embracing change and linking humans to machines and vice versa, with the emphasis on violence and the technological triumph of humanity over nature, this avant garde movement is one of the most controversial movements of the Modernist era.
Discarding the traditional artistic and cultural forms of the past at the center of the Futurist platform was, in fact, the endorsement of war.
Understanding the Significance of Avant-garde
Futurism, coined in a manifesto by Filippo Marinetti, was not limited to just one art form, but its artists worked across an array of different art disciplines such as sculpture, ceramics, graphic design, theater, film, textiles, literature, and music.
Frequent subject matters of the artist were cars, trains, animals, dancers, and large crowds. Borrowing the intersection of planes from Cubism, the vibrant and expressive color, along with the dynamic brushstroke from Fauvism, the art produced glorified the virtues of speed.
As the devastation of the First World War was realized, the Futurism lost its steam. The rejection of the conventional idea of the linear perspective in favor of the emphasis on the two-dimensional picture plane shocked the art academies of Europe. Discarding the conventions of the past that promoted the mimicry of nature and high constructed realism, the Cubists highlighted the flat dimensionality of the canvas surface and its unity with the depicted scene helping to pave the way for non-representational art.
As one of the best-known movements of the Modernist era, Cubism has come to be associated with two major figures, Pablo Picassoand Georges Braque. It was their experimentations, which helped to reshape the traditional understanding of art and to change the course of it.
For a movement to be considered a truly avant garde movement it carries with it an implication that it must shake the core of the status quo. Like the most powerful protest art, the force of the new art that comes must shake all of the predisposed aesthetic and conceptual ideas about what art is and what it must do. To the mentioned avant garde movements we owe the birth of the later 20th-century Modern Art ideas such as Surrealism, Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, Happenings and Performances, whose impact on the contemporary art today we are all witnesses to.
A concept inseparable from progress, avant garde demanded art to be revolutionized and redefined. Challenging every convention, rule and aesthetic idea they could identify, these artists wanted to look beyond the artwork and ask the question about the role of art in the construction of another world.
Agreeing that the past should be torn up and cultural clock reset to zero, these artists proposed various combinations of new and old media such as performance, political engagement and metaphysics. As the most radical and ambitious of all movements, Dada was first to question the concept of art.
As movements proliferated, this concept started to reach various fields such as fine arts, music, photography and theater. He has built tje noise machines that replicated the clatter of the industrial age and the boom of warfare, but none of these instruments and designs survived.
This machine music had a powerful influence on a number of composers of the era, as well as on the contemporary ones.
At the same time in the United States, John Cagewho considered himself an experimental artist, had a more revolutionary vision. Throughout his practice, Cage promoted altered instruments, sounds of nature, found sounds, the movements of the performer and audience, random noises to the status of music.
He also first introduced the concepts of indeterminacy and randomness into performing and created the so-called aleatoric music. InPierre Schaeffer created a laboratory in Paris for musique concrete to explore theories of Luigi Russolo.
With this musical form that was a type of electronic music using recordnigs, Schaeffer pioneered found sounds. Karlheinz Stockhausen contributed greatly to popularize all the main techniques of electronic music. He experimented with electronics, voice, tape and various samples and was interested in the way the sound moves through the space. Additionally, he pioneered subgenres of electro-acoustic chamber music in and live electronic music in Pursuing technical innovations and emotional expression, avant garde jazz was a unique hybrid that combined the extended technique, originality and genius with improvisational skills.
Originally synonymous with free jazz, much of the avant garde jazz was distinct from that style. As a uniquely black artform, avant garde jazz emerged during colonial wars, occupations, the Cold War and the struggle for racial and gender equality, and due to these conditions it reflected uncertainty and anguish and celebrated the plebeian and absurd. Blurring the division between the written and the spontaneous, avant garde jazz was imbued with formal complexity and emotional directness.
Still, avant garde jazz was distinguished from other avant gardes by its claims to art, not by a rejection of it. John Coltrane, via musictour.
First starting as portraiture photography in photographic studios, the relatively low cost of the daguerreotype led to a general rise in the popularity of portrait photography over a painted portrait. Photography as a medium was arguably avant garde in itself, since having a portrait taken was no longer the prerogative of the very rich. By the late nineteenth century, many photographers have rejected traditional settings and started to expand the genre of pictorial photography and promote it to High Art.
What first started as a simple tool for documentation, became a genuine artistic medium in its own right. When first simple-to-use small format cameras reached the streets, the photography was completely democratized and revolutionized as a medium with various avant garde approaches that greatly affected the visual culture. The avant garde photography in France, whose capital served as the unquestioned center of the international avant garde, was rooted in Surrealism that advocated the social transformation by rejecting bourgeois values and conventions.
Surrealist photographers employed techniques such as double exposure, combination printing and reversed tonality to create the imagery that blurred the line between the dream and reality.
- Precursors of the 20th Century Art Movements
- Avant-Garde, Value, and the Politics of Life
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Russian artists El Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko made use of various techniques that served to break the conventions of perception and visual representation such as extreme close-ups, tilted horizons or abstracted forms. This period between the two wars was certainly one of the richest in photographic history and it pushed this medium beyond its previous limits. Man Ray — Mode, via modearte. De Angelis argues convincingly that the everyday social field is made up of non-capitalist value practices and reproductive processes, too, and so any model of a totalizing capitalism that rearticulates all forms of social cooperation as market-based exchanges misses a key part of the picture and, worse, limits our ability to theorize and practice real alternatives.
The difference between the turn of the twentieth century and the turn of the twenty-first, then, is the relative importance of the state as a mediator of social reproduction.
Clearly some reversal has taken place in the strategies of value struggles.
And so a recent twist in the narrative of the avant-garde should be a cause for concern. Surveying a large sample of American and French management texts from the s, Chiapello and Boltanski observe that the once-opposed logics of managerialism and the avant-garde have begun to overlap significantly. In its shift from the hierarchical models of Taylorist planning in favor of postmodern, flexible networks of improvisation, entrepreneurialism, and self-management, the management of enterprise has, Chiapello observes, deployed avant-garde rhetorics and techniques to transform itself.
Organized anarchy, workplace insurrection, business revolution: The endurance of his critique lies in the basic antinomy that he attributes to the historical avant-garde. Bluntly, the historical avant-garde was undone by its faith in aesthetic self-critique as a sufficient condition for social transformation.
One key consequence of real subsumption, according to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, is the rise of immaterial labor, or the transformation of previously semi-autonomous spheres like intellectual and cultural work, as well as the very production of subjectivities, into a new source of the production and accumulation of value.
But this raises the question of what the concept of the avant-garde had to offer to a critique of capitalism in the s, or why it became necessary to evaluate social and artistic movements of that decade in terms of a prior cultural formation. Here the picture gets complicated, but in broad outline, the failure of the historical avant-garde was only partial: All of which is to say that the s rediscovery of the avant-garde was, in a sense, directed against its own false realization.
But here it becomes necessary to make a distinction between specific historical avant-gardes. All of them contest the very forms of instrumental rationality that would manifest themselves in the Fordist rationalization of production and the managerialist basis of the postwar Keynesian state. It sought to rehabilitate much more than just a stagnant art world: One of the more historically and ideologically remote aspects of the early avant-gardes is their unproblematic enthusiasm for industry and mass production.
It was in this way that planning and industrial design were positioned as market-based solutions to the demands for liberation posed by historical avant-garde. First, the historical avant-garde set itself against bourgeois liberalism, whose expanding industrial organization was at odds with its residually classicist culture, and provided the aesthetic and ideological critique necessary for an ascendant managerialism.
Our present-day unease with the avant-garde concept follows in the wake of this second recuperation. Like any survey, this one is cursory. But that problem dissolves if we adopt a thoroughly historical understanding of these movements, one that refers itself to broad changes in the organization of production, as well as the different justifications used to perpetuate them.
For example, the problem I opened with — avant-gardism as management doctrine, and as part of a new labor regime based on flexible networks — seems a scandal precisely because our conceptual tools for the avant-garde are outdated. Contemporary Disavowals Today, the dynamics of the avant-garde have changed: Typically these redefinitions are accompanied by an almost ritualized, anxious disavowal of the avant-garde, but with decidedly mixed results.
This new collectivism carries with it the spectral power of collectivisms past just as it is realized fully within the hegemonic power of global capitalism. Its creativity stands in relationship to the modernist image and the postmodernist counterimage much in the same way that the multitude of Sunday painters and other amateurs does to the handful of art stars: Vastly more extensive and difficult to pinpoint, this new collectivist fetish inhabits the everywhere and nowhere of social life.
Its editors are not its authors. They were content merely to introduce a little order into the common-places of our time, collecting some of the murmurings around barroom tables and behind closed bedroom doors.
It remains to be seen whether this anti-organizational politics, based as much on Deleuzian lines of flight as coalitions of anti-globalization activist groups in recent years, can overcome its very formlessness, or what Ernesto Laclau has called the lack, in the figure of the resistant multitude, of a theory of articulation.
Relationship between avant-garde art and American pop culture
Still, if the political horizon of these movements is a genuinely globalized capital, then how does the concept of the avant-garde resonate outside the West? This raises a theoretical legacy that routinely excludes non-Western avant-gardes, both historical and contemporary.
Anti-colonial revolutions and uprisings swept across the non-Western world in the early twentieth century, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean, and each adapted avant-gardist techniques to its specific circumstances. In many cases, peripheral avant-gardes were enthusiastic about the forces of modernization and development which in those contexts contested the rule of an older oligarchy.
This logic included the creation of coherent meanings, cultural identities, and social solidarities — or organizing the relations of gender, class, and ethnicity. That is, we must be careful not to assume that the forces of [capitalist] integration [of a world market] were, themselves, the driving forces of twentieth-century global development. That would only reduce world history to the history of western domination. It raises important questions about how aesthetics resides at the center of a political desire for new forms of life, though these can no longer be, as they were for the Futurists, considered external to capitalist accumulation, nor can they be tied to state-revolutionary ideologies.
Two conclusions follow — one necessary, and one speculative. The first is that a reconsideration of avant-gardes as value struggles aligns them, today, with a different model of resistance: Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture Bloomington: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism Bloomington: Enjoyment as a Political Factor London: A recent issue of New Literary History indicates that the question of the avant-garde is due for critical re-evaluation. Hard-Edge Painting Hard-edge painting is characterized by large, simplified, usually geometric forms on an overall flat surface; precise, razor-sharp contours; and broad areas of bright, unmodulated color that have been stained into unprimed canvas.
It differs from other types of geometric abstraction in that it rejects both lyrical and mathematical composition because, even in this simplified field, they are a means of personal expression for the artist. Minimal hard-edge painting is the anonymous construction of a simple object. Make a reference to the part of the encyclopedia entry that this came from Similarities between Minimalist Sculpture[ edit ] Much like minimalist painting, minimalist sculpture used extremely simple, monumental geometric forms made of fiberglass, plastic, sheet metal, or aluminum, either left raw or solidly painted with bright industrial color in order to convey the art for the usage of the visual response without allowing the art to create responses elsewhere.
Pop Art One of the last major avant-garde artforms that proved to be very influential to the American pop culture was Pop Art. This art form had much of its roots in Great Britain in the early s, but made its way into the American culture by the late s and remained a popular art form in America from the s. Primarily, each piece uses commonplace items comic strips, soup cans, road signs, and hamburgers as the subject matter of their pieces.
They emphatically present any iconography that has created a major impact on contemporary life without praise or condemnation but with overwhelming immediacy, and by means of the precise commercial techniques used by the media from which the iconography itself was borrowed. It was also an attempt to return to a more objective, universally acceptable form of art after the dominance in both the United States and Europe of the highly personal Abstract Expressionism.
Blurring the Boundaries between Art and Life (in the Museum?) – Tate Papers | Tate
Pop art became a cultural event because of its close reflection of a particular social situation and because its easily comprehensible images were immediately exploited by the mass media. However, due to the numbers of immigrants from Europe who were involved with the avant-garde movement in Europe, Dadaist artists from Europe like Marcel Duchamp moved to America carrying their avant-garde ideals with them. Once they arrived in New York City, many of these Dadaists decided to collaborate, making art to display to the public.
Some factors that played to the lack of attention of the Dadaists at the time included the lack of museums throughout the United States and the lack of funding to the artists who created and advertised the art.
Rather, he feels that the possibility of a progress in knowledge is a function of the development of the object toward which insight directs itself Marx demonstrates through the example of the category of labor also applies to objectifications in the arts Dadaism, for instance, was seized upon by the group as appropriate for their anti-aesthetic creations and protest activities, which were engendered by disgust for bourgeois values and despair over World War I. Another example of this is John Hartfield's usage of photomontage to express his anti-Nazi views.
Although it didn't initially take off, by the s, their art and the art from artists that were inspired by these individuals began to rise in popularity. To do so, congress passed bills in which expanded the number of museums around the nation and funded the government to allow the artists to produce more art. In addition to this, if the artists were to do so, they would need to form communities in which the artists could gather to produce their art.
Understanding the Significance of Avant-garde | Widewalls
If there was art depicting how grand, majestic, and free the United States of America is, they felt this would increase Patriotism among the people so the people would be willing to agree with whatever the government had to offer. For instance, in practice, Abstract Expressionism was influenced by Dada by the fact that the art form had its similarities not in the way that the art was constructed, but rather from the concept that the genres exemplify.
For the case of pop art, it could have been anything that proved influential in popular culture, whether it be comic strips, soup cans, or magazine advertisements. | https://catchsomeair.us/relationship-between-and/relationship-between-art-and-life-in-avant-garde.php |
In early 1910s, two pioneering women entrepreneurs, Nadezhda Dobychina in St Petersburg and Klavdia Mikhailova in Moscow set up two of the first art galleries in Russia. Skilfully balancing current art market trends and daring avant-garde experimentations, Dobychina and Mikhailova soon transformed their establishments into vibrant centres of Russian artistic life. Their exhibitions of well-established national and international artists attracted enthusiastic crowds and won acclaim from leading art critics.
They did not hesitate to engage in more provocative ventures, including the controversial Goncharova retrospectives in 1914, which for the first time put on view over 500 cutting-edge avant-garde works, and the famous 0.10 exhibition of 1915 at Dobychina's Art Bureau in St. Petersburg, where Malevich's famous Black Square was displayed for the very first time. Based on previously unpublished archival materials and illustrations, this book will tell the story of the lives and adventures of these two remarkable women.
Operating in a predominantly man's world, they focussed on discovering and promoting those Russian artists who later went on to become major figures in the history of world modernism. | https://shop.pushkinhouse.org/products/two-women-patrons-of-the-russian-avant-garde-nadezhda-dobychina-and-klavdia-mikhailova-by-natalia-murray-and-natalia-budanova |
Art has been defined as a form of creative human activity involving physical skill, visual art, and imaginative imagination to express aesthetic beauty, physical strength, emotional power, or other creative ideas. Artistic production is one of the oldest forms of communication, dating from pre-history up to the present. In most cases, art derives from the desire for beauty and novelty, combined with the ability to manipulate objects according to a perceived plan. This article focuses on defining art, analyzing its various components, and providing examples of artistic production in everyday life.
Philosophy considers art as a form of human excellence and it is an attempt to uncover the deeper meaning of beauty through a process of analysis and interpretation. The history of Philosophy begins with the earliest recorded appearances of aesthetic art, especially in architecture. Later philosophers associated art with the idea of value, particularly with the value of human beauty. Later philosophers developed various theories about how to measure the value of art, with some even arguing that beauty and value are identical.
The history of visual arts is divided into two sections: prehistoric and modem. Pertaining to the later of the two sections, the prehistoric period witnessed the development of Paleolithic Art. The Paleolithic Age was characterized by the appearance of ‘permanent art’, the necessity of tools for daily use, and the absence of any significant societal organization. Art in this period can be classified primarily into two forms: (a) facial paintings or (b) figurative art. In addition, Art of the Upper Paleolithic Age (also called Old Stone Age) witness the first appearance of pictorial images, and cuneiform sculptures, which are the earliest known ciphers. Art in the latter period mainly concerns its production in terms of ceramic goods, weapons, ceramic glasses, figurative paintings, and other fine art.
The history of art also witnessed the appearance of Minimal Art, which arose around the start of the Early Modern Period. This art consists of highly refined representational art (such as Impressionism) and iconographic or abstract art. The key takeaways from this period are the reduction of the role of the artist, the materialization of art on the canvas, and the development of mass consumer art. Minimal art may be further subdivided into graphic art, typography, and cartography.
Art of the Post-Renaissance Period witnessed the birth of new aesthetic traditions, which tended to legitimate the importance of the human visual arts and crafts as a socially valuable form. By the seventeenth century, however, the European society had become so fragmented that the role of the artist was no longer of central significance. As a result, new aesthetic trends arose, which emphasized naturalness and the aesthetic values of the average person. Among these new aesthetic trends were the Pre-Raphaelites, who promoted an avant-garde approach to art, an approach which did not necessarily challenge the authority of the artist but which nevertheless gave merit to the role of the artistic producer as a central subject of artistic discussion.
Modern art is a continuation of the history of artistic experimentation and artistic invention, which can be seen throughout the history of art, literature and cinema. However, with the development of digital technology and the increased influence of the Internet, there is now a much larger scope for artists. In the past, artists had to set up their own institutions in order to receive patronage and promotion for their artistic creations. With the Internet, artists can now use the internet as a medium of communication and exchange information regarding their work, thus benefitting from the increased interest and knowledge about art. | https://arthurmurraynyc.com/index.php/2021/08/05/art-through-the-ages-from-the-renaissance-to-modern-art/ |
Chapman, Michael. “Fusion and the Avant-garde.” Fusion Journal, no. 1, 2013.
Abstract
In his 1974 work, Theory of the Avant-Garde, Peter Bürger developed a sociological argument that the practices of the historical avant-garde had emerged as a fusion of art and life, merging practices into a hybrid assault on autonomy that can be characterized as distinctly avant-garde. Refuting previous positions, Bürger argued that the avant-garde wasn’t concerned with merely dismantling the classifications of art, but the institution of art in its entirety. This was dramatically opposed to Clement Greenberg’s hegemonic theory of art practice, where the segregated medium was the sole attribute through which the avant-garde could advance. It was in opposition to this diffusion of art practice that Bürger’s theory framed a radicalized lens through which the avant-garde could be reconceptualised: combatting the segregation of medium with a deliberate fusing of the structures of art and their political and social histories. This paper will look at the significant role fusion, as a strategy, plays in Bürger’s seminal work and its reception. It is the recognition of fusion as an oppositional system in art production that not only distinguishes his approach from early incarnations of modernism, but has also seen the extension of his work into ongoing critical projects in art theory in America, which have radicalised fusion as a critical and creative practice.
Fusion and the Avant-Garde
When Peter Bürger wrote his short but influential Theory of the Avant-Garde in 1974 he was writing in a cultural climate of immense change where many of the structures and institutions of modernism were being violently torn apart. Frustrated with the failures of the May 1968 riots in Paris and committed to extending the Marxist dialectic of the Frankfurt School, Bürger’s treatise is written partly out of disgust with the rampant commoditisation of the art market and partly out of a personal need to document the unprecedented historical transformations that were occurring in front of him. Bürger drew heavily from the aesthetic positions of Georg Lukacs, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin that had presciently linked the practices of art with those of capitalist production thereby demonstrating the revolutionary potential and limitations of the autonomous art object. For Adorno in particular, the category of art raised important and unprecedented questions in relationship to cultural production, and foreshadowed the inherent commercialisation with which capitalism and autonomy were intertwined. However, Bürger’s thesis goes beyond the social philosophy of art and its critical reception in order to sketch a historical framework for the avant-garde and an ideological critique of its tactics.
Bürger’s subject matter is not new. By 1974, theorising the avant-garde had been a fascination of critics for over four decades and had been somewhat of a preoccupation in American art theory and particularly within the formalist circle of Clement Greenberg and his followers. The point of departure for Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde was its insistence on developing a radicalised historical structure for studies of the avant-garde, positioning the avant-gardes of the 1910s and 1920s as the origin of radical art and all subsequent activity as a derivation of this initial and most pure revolutionary form. Bürger rejected the more heavily trodden path of theorising the avant-garde in dialectical opposition to the popular (or kitsch). Instead, Bürger conceptualised the avant-garde as a distinct historical phenomenon, peculiar to the first decades of the twentieth century and in opposition to the bourgeois aesthetic practices that were, in his view, rampant in the historical periods either side of it.
Bürger’s argument is relatively straightforward. He argued that a process of institutionalising art had occurred in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and this had led to the gentrification of art and the isolation of its inherently bourgeois audience [35-54]. In this sense, he follows the earlier precedents of Adorno and Benjamin, who drew a distinction between “organic” and “nonorganic” artworks: the former being associated with the bourgeois structures intrinsic to the production of art and meaning and the latter with the category of avant-gardiste works characterised by fragmentation and a collapse of the structures of holistic meaning. Bürger maintained that the radical creative approaches of the first decades of the twentieth century were an attempt to both identify and dismantle this institutionalisation of art, attacking the bourgeois gentrification of art process and, ultimately, realigning creativity with the experience of modern life. In short, the historical avant-garde attacked the autonomy of the art object and its institutionalisation and conflated the categories of art and life. For Bürger this meant that the history of the avant-garde needed to be distinguished from the broader history of modernism.
Bürger and Greenberg
Fusion operates at a number of levels in Bürger’s theory. Not only is the fusion between art and life framed as a central aim of avant-gardism’s assault on autonomy, but the fusion of creative practices into a hybrid critical practice is a characteristic of the avant-garde of the 1920s and its ongoing influence. There is no doubt that Bürger’s theory challenged the prevailing attitudes towards avant-garde practice, and particularly those advanced in the formalism of Clement Greenberg, who saw the avant-garde as a taxonomy of independent, and highly individuated strategies, which challenged the inherent structures of their medium but nothing beyond. The tension between Greenberg’s depoliticized approach, and Bürger’s highly ideological one, has had an enduring influence on American art theory, marking a paradigm shift in attitudes towards early modernism [Carrier]. Greenberg had arrived at an attitude towards the avant-garde in response to a number of contextual (and continental) debates within art in the interwar period, where both the identity and agency of American art was being challenged. Not only did Greenberg align the avant-garde with the radical aesthetic experiments of Abstract Expressionism but, at the same time, accepted an inherently bourgeoisie complexion to the art market which was especially exaggerated in America at the time. For Greenburg, art was defined by its articulation of process and any agency it possessed was constrained to the medium within which it operated. This amounted to a diffusion of art practices into highly determined categories of production which not only accepted the conventions of traditional art history but, in a number of ways, set out to inoculate them. Greenberg’s modernism comprised a phalanx of diverse artistic strategies that independently set out to reconstruct the social and technological patterns of the twentieth century, by entrenching and preserving the artistic categories of the nineteenth century.
The early 1970s, when Bürger’s theory first appeared, had witnessed a discernible fragmentation of American art criticism and the two recognizable and public defenders of Clement Greenberg’s “modernism”—Rosalind Krauss and Michael Fried—had both taken alternate paths: Fried to pursue a career in art history rather than criticism; Krauss to abandon the ideas of Greenberg altogether in order to dismantle the premise of formalism through a detailed reading of French post-structuralism and a radical rethinking of the project of modernism. The careers of Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland and even Frank Stella—the second wave of American formalism featured famously in the Three American Painters exhibition—had begun to wane and the anti-institutional forays of both Minimalism and Conceptual Art were dramatically restructuring the New York art market and the intellectual apparatus that supported it. At the same time, the site-specific works that came to characterize the art of the 1970s had deliberately encroached on the disciplinary boundaries of architecture, causing critics, including Krauss, to investigate the “expanded field” in which art operates [276-290].
Greenberg’s enormous stewardship of American art theory in the decades after the Second World War and the skewed emphasis on a “diffused” formalism served to enlarge the disciplinary boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, at a time when these practices were pursuing a project of greater alignment. Greenberg’s entrenched segregation of the categories of artistic production are an extension of bourgeois aesthetic practices and have limited the productive avenues through which these practices have otherwise been contained. It is in this area, that the writings centred around the journal October and its editors have been instrumental in expanding upon Bürger’s theory of avant-garde practice and extending its relevance to a broader audience of critical theory [Carrier; Siedell].
If Bürger’s works radically repositioned the concept of fusion in relationship to art, it was in dialectical response to the fragmentation and demarcation implicit in Greenburg’s theory. Written in 1939, Clement Greenberg’s “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” is one of the formative texts in the study of the avant-garde and occupies a critical starting point in its theorisation. While often considered the foundational text of American formalism, the text is highly politicized and presented an argument that was a direct response to the intellectual conditions of the emerging New York art scene, harbouring a deep-seated parochialism that had, as its goal, the dethroning of European art and the political structures that had underpinned it. However, the broader context of Greenberg’s thinking was what Serge Guilbaut has referred to as the “de-Marxification of the New York intelligentsia,” which saw a dramatic shift away from the left and towards the values of neo-conservatism [See: Cooney; Wald]. At the heart of this shift was the writing of Meyer Shapiro who, in the 1937 essay “Nature of Abstract Art” [77-98] argued for a moderate positioning of abstract art that was no longer the by-product of an elitist individualism (as the communists had claimed) but was tied to the conditions of economic production and social infrastructure. As a result, Schapiro saw the individual artist as hopelessly immersed in the broader current of society, helpless and lethargic in the face of its mounting pressures and certainly not in the possession of the agency for revolutionary cultural transformation. Trotsky echoed this fatalistic position in his 1938 text “Art and Politics” published in Partisan Review . Arguing that the work of art was the solitary vessel through which creative thought should be explored, Trotsky maintained that the radical work of art, by inspiring those who had contact with it, had the potential to restructure the economic and cultural foundations of a society provided that artists preserved their autonomy (from society) and had a social conscience which was liberated from the machinery of capitalism [see Taminiaux 52-66]. This was not so much a fusion between art and life, but an embedded cultural milieu, which the artist had to both endure and resist.
Greenberg took the fusing of art and society implicit in the writing of Trotsky and Schapiro as a point of departure, framing an alternative perspective which, rather than advancing a fusion between art with the proletariat, understood the role of the artist as the prevention of popular annihilation (through segregation). Where Trotsky and Breton had argued that the independent artist was the solitary defense against the prevailing specter of capitalism, Greenberg argued that the avant-garde was culture’s only defense against the popular and, most specifically, the kitsch. For Greenberg, the avant-garde project was drawn not from the needs of the proletariat but from the desires of the bourgeoisie . As Greenberg writes,
a part of Western bourgeoisie society has produced something unheard of heretofore—avant-garde culture. A superior consciousness of history—more precisely, the appearance of a new kind of criticism of society, an historical criticism—made this possible… it was no accident therefore that the birth of the avant-garde coincided chronologically—and geographically too—with the first bold development of scientific revolutionary thought in Europe .
In direct and deliberate contradiction to the theory of Trotsky, Greenberg positioned the avant-garde as the salvation of a fragmenting culture, which could only be restored through the medium specific advances of high art. Guilbaut has shown that the publication of “Avant-Garde and Kitsch” coincided with both the Soviet invasion of Finland and their signing of a non-aggression pact with the Germans which both had a dramatic effect on the perception of communism in America. There was also a paradigmatic shift in the intellectual culture of New York with the splintering of the (Stalinist) American Artist’s Conference and the subsequent migration of a number of its members (including Schapiro) to the more moderate Federation of American Painters and Sculptors. This apparent diffusion of the American intelligentsia created a theoretical culture of connection, which saw to advance art as a marrying of disparate and often warring cultural and creative forces. Within all of these maneuverings was the need to create a synthesis between a new language of abstract art and a viable form of social praxis led by a rejuvenated theory of modern art. Greenberg’s essay fulfilled this criteria exactly, preserving the artistic (and elitist) autonomy of art while at the same time establishing an idealised role for the artist in rebuilding society, rather than revolutionising it. This depoliticisation of art became one of the defining characteristics of formalism and was central to the growth of the decontextualising aesthetics that characterised Abstract Expressionism [See S. Foster 20-24].
Counterpoints
While fusion is implicit in the positions of both Greenburg and Bürger, it would be difficult to find two more antithetical theorists of avant-garde practice. While Greenberg had corresponded with Adorno on friendly terms [see: Franscina 4] his position could not be more opposed to the Marxist leanings of the Frankfurt school or the emphasis on negation that structured it. Where Greenberg positioned avant-garde practice as an inherently aristocratic pursuit, enabled through the robust autonomy of the institution of art, Bürger saw the avant-garde project as the collapse of the institution of art and the alignment of art with the praxis of (proletariat) life through an artist-led fusion of artistic processes and life experiences. Greenberg proselytized the singularity of media; praising painting for its inherent flatness, sculpture for its implied three-dimensionality; architecture, for its requisite spatiality. For Greenberg, artists should be developing representational strategies that are internal to the medium of painting, rather than extraneous to it and there was no possibility for intermarriage between independent mediums. Bürger, on the other hand, saw a primary characteristic of the avant-garde as the collapse of medium, and its dispersal into fragments that are imperfectly reassembled by the viewer and the society that houses them. This required interpretive modes that were beyond the medium of art and engaged the praxis of life, with the aim of ultimately transforming society and the behavior of its inhabitants. Where Greenberg heavily criticized surrealism and virtually dismissed Dada as agents of avant-garde strategies, Bürger saw Dada and surrealism as the primary authentic form of the avant-garde and its enduring legacy.
While Greenberg had argued for a return to medium, Bürger considers that, by marginalising the historical medium and its categorisations altogether, Dada and surrealism had initiated a larger critique of the institution of art itself. He argues that the fusing tactics of Dada and surrealism imply a redefinition of the nature of art, as well as questioning the work of art as the primary outcome of this process. Well beyond an argument about technique, Burger had argued that the avant-garde was inherently involved in a fusion of the praxis of life and, as a result, the tactics of Dada and surrealism (devoid of aesthetic content) were indicative of the primary operations of the avant-garde, which sought a politicization of artistic production and a transformation of the social roles that had been assigned to it.
Greenberg took a fundamentally different view of Dada and surrealism, aligning it with the populist machinations of kitsch and arguing that “works of art are self-sufficient and not required inevitably to be either mirrors of reality or decoration” [1986 131]. In a later essay entitled “Avant-Garde Attitudes: New Art in the Sixties” [1993 292-303] Greenberg had argued against the reification of art that had been initiated by Duchamp, by dividing avant-garde practice into two distinct categories: “the popular avant-garde” which he rebuked and “the unpopular” avant-garde which he gravitated towards. For Greenberg, the unpopular avant-garde “was the real and original one” and the tactics of Dada in particular were a counter-attack, motivated by “a retreat from ‘difficult’ to ‘easy’ art” . The inherent fusion implied within Duchamp’s project was no doubt a critical junction in Greenberg’s ambivalence towards it.
The entrenched categorization and segregation of Greenberg’s aesthetics is of significance as it serves to articulate a dialectical counterpoint to the theory of Bürger. The categories of Greenberg’s theory of the avant-garde are essentially a continuation of the bourgeois aesthetics that Bürger’s theory attempts to dismantle. As Robert Somol observes, there is an inherent ambiguity in the categories of Greenberg’s theory which positions the “high-modern” as an avant-garde practice while a number of the important mechanisms of the historical avant-garde (including surrealism) are pejoratively given the label of “kitsch”. Bürger’s theory, on the contrary, is aligned with the politicisation of the art object in the 1920s and the development of expanded categories through which art is produced and, as importantly, received. In Bürger’s writing modernism and the avant-garde are distinct trajectories concerned with autonomy (in the former) and a reconnection with life (in the latter). Fusion is an undercurrent in both aspects [see: Calinescu 140].
The emphasis that Greenberg placed on the bourgeois origins of avant-garde art (marked as a continuation of the nineteenth century experimentations of Impressionism), as well as the preoccupation with a narrowly focused obsession with painting (as the primary form through which avant-garde tactics were expressed) were two significant points that Bürger’s theory of the avant-garde sought to oppose in the historicisation of art practice. For Bürger, these formalist cues were the polemical triggers that structured his dialectical hypothesis: the avant-garde was a historical phenomenon, defined by its opposition to the bourgeois institutionalisation of art and the autonomy of artistic production; the avant-gardiste work of art, as a negation of artistic production, was defined by its opposition to the established aesthetic categories of institutional aesthetics and, as a result, required the formulation of new ones. In tandem, these twin strategies required the formation of the concept of the “avant-garde” as a response to the paradigmatic shifting of categories that they initiated.
That there is an inherent positivism to Bürger’s relationship to the historical avant-garde has been a subject of recent criticism and can be juxtaposed with the rampant nihilism with which Adorno saw aesthetics, and its commodification, more generally. While Bürger operated within the broader discourse of the Frankfurt School, there is no doubt that he redeemed and, to some extent, romanticised avant-garde practice and to an extent far beyond the contemporaneous Marxist critiques of artistic production such as the “bleakest” and “implacably negative” critique of Tafuri, as Jameson was to later label it [60-63]. This should not overlook Bürger’s clear conclusion that the historical avant-garde has failed, and its assault on the commercial institutionalisation of art only served to highlight, rather than refute, the bourgeoisie fetishisation of the work of art which has continued unabated since the 1920s. As Bürger noted in a recent essay, it was not the end of (bourgeois) art but in fact its opposite—its indoctrination. As Bürger concedes,
[t]he institution demonstrates its strength by embracing its attackers and assigns them a prominent place in the pantheon of great artists. Indeed, the impact of the failed avant-garde extends even further. After Duchamp, not only can the everyday artefact claim the status of an artwork but the discourse of the institution is molded by the avant-gardes to a degree that no one could have predicted. Avant-garde categories such as rupture and shock gain admittance to the discourse of art, while at the same time concepts such as harmony and coherence are suspected of conveying a false appearance and a reconciliation with a degraded status quo [2010, 705].
The implied positivism of Bürger’s proselytization of the historical avant-garde is with a detailed awareness of both its limitations and its susceptibility to commercial appropriation. While Greenburg saw the avant-garde’s isolation from populism as its primary strength in regards to cultural direction, Bürger was more than aware of its susceptibility to forces of mass-consumerism, if not to the same extent with which Adorno had defined them.
Legacies
The project of aligning avant-garde ambitions with a fusing of creative practices in Bürger’s theory has been met enthusiastically within art theory in the United States, where a rigorous exploration of hybrid artistic practice has replaced the formalist hegemony of Greenberg since the 1970s, and provides a natural counterpoint to the segregation of high modernism. In fact, Bürger’s treatise has been the focus of much fascination for the group of art theorists gathered around the journal October and who, anxious to reignite research into the historical avant-garde have, typically, used Bürger’s theory critically to facilitate their own interest in re-framing this connection with contemporary art. Not surprisingly, it has been the same circle of critics that have been the most aggressive and forthright in interrogating Bürger’s work as well as expanding upon its theoretical preconceptions in order to frame a post-Greenbergian methodology for the study of both art and its history. As will be seen, fusion is a critical and recurring theme within this reception of Bürger’s work.
While it is important not to conflate the writings linked to the circle of October too much, constituting the parallax views of a number of independent (and highly individualistic) writers and thinkers, it is clear that there is an editorial perspective that runs through its various publications and a commonality in subject matter [see: Siedell, 95-105] that unites the various editors (as well as a number of its authors). The 2004 publication of Art Since 1900, under the co-authorship of Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve Alain Bois and Benjamin Buchloh is the best evidence yet of the harmonising critical views of these authors and the collaborative force of their larger project to critically redeem the historical avant-garde and establish its presence in the activities of contemporary art. Presenting their own view of modernism by effectively fusing the methodologies of psychoanalysis, sociology, structuralism (linguistics) and post-structuralism (all central to the journal October), it was in response to the publication of this volume that Amelie Jones coined the term “Octoberism” , arguing that the collaborative efforts of these authors had assumed the force of a hegemony: effectively providing a platform from which a selective reading of art history (and modernism) was being projected [see also: Storr 382-385; Batchen 375-376; Troy 373-375; Lee 379-381].
One of the frustrations for historians of the alternative histories of art and modernism is the focus that the Octoberist critics have placed on the historical avant-garde and, in particular, the work of Peter Bürger. Jones, for instance, laments the methodological approach of these critics who frequently base their “value judgements” in art on “an early-twentieth-century conception of avant-gardism, reinforced and refined […] by Peter Burger’s arguments in his 1974 Theory of the Avant-Garde” [Jones 378]. However, even beyond the thematic fascination with the historical avant-garde is a methodological affiliation with Bürger’s approach, which privileges the work of art and its production over social diversity, equality or human experience. Critical of the neglect of contextual issues relating to colonialism, gender and conflict, Jones argues that
these authors haven’t let go of an essentially modernist belief in the connection between the work (“structurally” interpreted) and the artist as an originary force of meaning and value, and because they fail to interrogate their own participation in the posing of value judgments and in the positioning of origins and authors […their work], while brilliant and innovative in its analyses and structural organization, baldly reveals the conservatism of Octoberism as a hegemonic discourse .
The opposition to this critical hegemony notwithstanding, there is an undisputed meditation within the circle of October critics that has unpacked and advanced the writing of Bürger, focusing particularly on the fusing of artistic medium with which he was most preoccupied. The most celebrated and enduring critique of Bürger’s argument was by Benjamin Buchloh, interleaved between rampant gallery advertisements in the glossy pulp pages of Art in America [1984 19-21]. While Buchloh took issue with a number of aspects of Bürger’s argument, his primary criticisms were twofold. First of all, Bürger had constructed a theory of the avant-garde that positioned all radical activity in historical relationship to the original avant-garde. For Buchloh, this was a devaluation of contemporary practice and represented an inability to recognise the creative potential of the present. Secondly, Bürger’s theory presumed that the intention and motivation of all artistic activity was political and thereby failed to acknowledge the possibility of engaging other fields that the art-object may impact upon. In this sense, Buchloh saw Bürger’s theory as part of a broader Frankfurt School pessimism that was inherently and robustly critical of the present and ideologically opposed to its capitalist allegiances. For Buchloh, there was certainly no prerequisite that art needed to be political and, in a number of cases, art was deliberately opposed to politics (anti-political). Buchloh establishes a less linear model of historical evolution whereby the positivistic values of the historical avant-garde are no longer the “origin” of art and its nihilistic collapse in the neo-avant-garde is no longer its endpoint.
Buchloh’s most strident critique of Bürger’s work is, fittingly, anchored to notions of fusion. Clearly Buchloh takes issue with the overwhelming pessimism that is characteristic of Bürger’s concluding remarks, where the opportunities first articulated by the avant-garde had not only failed but had also been appropriated by the institutions and social structures against which they were directed. Buchloh, in contrast, arrives at a vastly different conclusion, arguing that
the assault on the false isolation of art and on the ideology of its autonomy by the “original” avant-garde cannot be abandoned simply because it was aborted. It seems more viable to define avant-garde practice as a continually renewed struggle over the definition of cultural meaning, the discovery and representation of new audiences, and the development of new strategies to counteract and develop resistance against the tendency of ideological apparatuses of the culture industry to occupy and to control all practices and all spaces of representation .
Both Bürger and Buchloh, in their own ways, have been integrated in the English language reception of Theory of the Avant-Garde, tacitly accepting the thrust of Bürger’s argument with the necessary clarifications, readjustments, and contextualisations that were illustrated by Buchloh [2003, xxiv], and later rebutted by Bürger [2010, 695-715]. Within the peculiar context of New York art criticism generally, Bürger’s ideas have become a seminal starting point from which to project a rejuvenated role for the avant-garde in contemporary culture, and one framed by the fusion of competing cultural and artistic positions. Hal Foster is one of the most important examples, structuring a large part of his research on the contemporary relevance of the historical avant-garde and the shifts in its critical reception. In his book The Return of the Real he develops a more moderate stance towards the binary positions of Buchloh and Bürger and, in a critical sense, advances the position of both. While acknowledging, in the endnotes, his debt to Buchloh [2001 230], Foster’s work uses Bürger’s thesis as the point of departure for reinvigorating the practices of the neo-avant-garde and their broader relationship to the history of art and architecture. His process amounts to a fusing of critical practices across time as well as in relationship to each other. To understand the relationship of these practices to broader ideas in art history Foster stresses the importance of perspective, both of the artist and, across a distance of several decades, the critic. Within Foster’s work, fusion is framed as a historical condition that is embodied, to a large extent, by artist, critic and viewer.
After identifying the contextual flaws in Bürger’s selective and linear historical reading of the avant-garde, Foster presents an alternate model for understanding this fusing of creative practices, which is not the nihilistic end of art, but instead the emergence of new forms of critical practice which are responding to different and ephemeral conditions in broader culture. The neo-avant-garde of the 1960s, for Foster at least, didn’t replicate the historical avant-garde but reappropriated it to develop new hybrid practices of critical activity. These practices were inherently excluded from the narrowing structures of Greenberg in the 1950s and, partially as a result, have provided a suitable counterpoint in both art practice and art theory. For Foster at least, the neo-avant-garde represents a continuation of these practices in a new critical context that, by targeting cultural values outside of the domain or art, is “enact[ing] its project for the first time” [2001 20].
The other critical aspect of Foster’s argument is that the historical avant-garde was far less organised, strategic, or even legible than Bürger assumes and, for Foster, the activity that occurred in the historic avant-garde was a project that was fundamentally disrupted and inherently incomplete. Ironically, it is the tendency of Bürger to overstate the fusion of practices within the avant-garde, that has given his work extended relevance into the twenty-first century. Drawing from the Freudian concept of deferral, Foster argues that it was with an understanding of this latent avant-garde project that the neo-avant-garde developed a revitalised critical practice, reinvigorating the historical avant-garde project and redirecting its tactics against a new target. Despite his own scepticism towards the application of contentious psychoanalytical positions to extra-disciplinary concerns, Bürger is significantly more sympathetic to the critique of Foster in his recent evaluation of critics of his work, describing it as “distinctly more sophisticated” [2010, 708] than the critiques of Buchloh from the 1980s. For Bürger , despite the methodological dilemmas implied in this project, Foster’s analysis opens onto a broader question of the “return” of avant-garde practices that, whether internal or extraneous to psychoanalytical techniques, is at the core of his original thesis and, despite the vast literature since, is still yet to be adequately theorised.
Conclusion
If fusion is to be appreciated as a strategy endemic to the avant-garde in the twentieth century, it is only with a conscious awareness of the historical nature of this relationship, that this position can be advanced. The limitation implicit in Bürger’s theory is that, while framing fusion within a broader aesthetic ideology, his work fails to account for the historical and social pressures that inherently transformed this model of practice and ultimately disseminated it to a vast array of media practices that were hungrily absorbing all cultural influences throughout the closing decades of the twenty-first century. Where Greenberg has sought to narrow avant-garde practice to the segregated demands of flatness in painting, Bürger sought to locate the hybridization of art within an exceedingly narrow network of practices from the 1920s. That these practices have accelerated exponentially in art and media since the publication of his work is only further evidence of the prescient role of these fusing tactics as well as Bürger’s niave project to arrest them within this enclosing temporal frame. In this regard, it is through a culturally and temporally specific reading of the work of Bürger, such as that extended in Hal Foster’s work, that the strategy of fusion can be severed from the historical baggage of the 1920s or the ideological conservatism of Greenberg and find a reference point specific to the present, and the media practices that have constructed it.
References
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Author Biography
Michael Chapman is a Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and the Built Environment at the University of Newcastle where he teaches architectural theory, architectural design and research methods. He has recently completed his PhD on the theories of the avant-garde and their relationship to architecture. Together with Michael Ostwald and Chris Tucker, his is the author of Residue: Architecture as a Condition of Loss published by RMIT Press in 2007. | http://www.fusion-journal.com/issue/001-fusion/fusion-and-the-avant-garde/ |
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Description
This sweeping work, at once a panoramic overview and an ambitious critical reinterpretation of European modernism, provides a bold new perspective on a movement that defined the cultural landscape of the early twentieth century. Walter L. Adamson embarks on a lucid, wide-ranging exploration of the avant-garde practices through which the modernist generations after 1900 resisted the rise of commodity culture as a threat to authentic cultural expression. Taking biographical approaches to numerous avant-garde leaders, Adamson charts the rise and fall of modernist aspirations in movements and individuals as diverse as Ruskin, Marinetti, Kandinsky, Bauhaus, Purism, and the art critic Herbert Read. In conclusion, Adamson rises to the defense of the modernists, suggesting that their ideas are relevant to current efforts to think through what it might mean to create a vibrant, aesthetically satisfying form of cultural democracy.
Praise For Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe…
“This [is an] erudite, richly comparative study of avant-garde aesthetics and public engagement.”
— Laura Winkiel
University of California Press, 9780520261532, 448pp.
Publication Date: August 17, 2009
About the Author
Walter L. Adamson is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History at Emory University where he teaches modern European intellectual and cultural history as well as modern Italian history. He is author of Avant-Garde Florence: From Modernism to Fascism. winner of the Howard Marraro Prize of the American Historical Association, and Hegemony and Revolution (UC Press), winner of the Howard Marraro Prize of the Society for Italian Historical Studies. | https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780520261532 |
Popular imagery of India is often full of bright colours that create vibrant landscapes. Taking a closer look it becomes clear that not only are India’s many forms of street art a huge source of these aesthetics, but also that they are changing. Canadian filmmaker Cyrus Sundar Singh, enchanted with the hand-painted billboards apparent on the Indian streetscape since he was a child, has made a documentary looking at where these billboards come from and what is happening to them.
Three Questions for Prashant Kadam
For a long time, bioscopes have been a part of India’s bustling landscape, an aspect of childhood that came and went as bioscopewallahs travelled through the country. Bioscopes are an early movie projector taking the form of a wooden box, the interior of which has pictures that can be viewed through four circular holes. Bioscopewallahs are the people who would make their living by them, setting up temporarily and offering them as entertainment to children.
Five Questions for Noah Cowan
Fun fact about the TIFF Bell Lightbox: its Artistic Director started out as a box-office volunteer. As a teenager, Noah Cowan volunteered for the relatively young “Festival of Festivals”, now the Toronto International Film Festival. Since those humble beginnings, he has started Midnight Madness, founded the Global Film Initiative, curated major retrospectives on Indian and Japanese cinema, started a production company, been a film critic, Co-Directed TIFF and became Artistic Director of TIFF Bell Lightbox- but not exactly in that order. | https://www.rom.on.ca/en/collections-research/blog/category/South%20Asia?page=2 |
Since China’s post-Mao reform program began in 1979, the country has witnessed the emergence of an extremely diverse and dynamic art scene, in spite of the continuing difficulties still involved in independent art production. This has attracted enormous interest in the west in recent years. Chinese artists have entered the international art world with ease, adeptly making use of various media, techniques and forms of expression developed in the west, from the traditional genres of oil painting and sculpture to installation, photography, performance, body art and video. At the same time, the specifically Chinese roots – pre-modern tradition on the one hand and the socialist realism prescribed by the CP until the late 1970s on the other hand – are tangible in many of their works. One typical trait, for instance, in comparison to western art, is the emphasis on figurative painting. Some artists consciously address their national identity by adopting the techniques and/or formal syntax of traditional Chinese art (ink drawings, calligraphy, porcelain etc.) and placing them in a new context. Another important theme involves parodying or reflecting on western art and its art historical canon from a Chinese point of view. Above all, however, Chinese avant-garde art is to be considered in the light of the enormous social and economic change the country has undergone in the past few decades; in particular, many works clearly reflect the tension between the socialist ideals that are still officially operative and the consumerism unleashed by capitalist reforms.
Swiss collector Uli Sigg has first-hand knowledge of Chinese culture through his close links with China since the late 1970s. In 1980, he helped to negotiate the first joint venture between China and a western company (Schindler). From1995-98 he was Swiss ambassador to Beijing. Together with his wife Rita, Uli Sigg has been collecting Chinese art since the mid-1990s and is something of a pioneer in this field. Having started out purchasing only current works, he soon began extending his collection to include “historic” avant-garde works of the 1980s and early 1990s. The result is a collection of contemporary Chinese art of a scope and quality unparalleled anywhere in the world.
The representative cross-section of works to be shown at Kunstmuseum Bern will be the first time that the Sigg Collection has been presented to the public on this scale. This survey of a quarter of a century of Chinese avant-garde art (1979-2004) will surpass all previous exhibitions in both scope and quality. The exhibition is structured into clearly legible themes, starting with a selection of Mao propaganda art intended to shed light on the roots of Chinese art of the late 1970s. To ensure that the exhibition is also accessible to the many visitors who are likely to be more or less unfamiliar with the artistic, social and political context of the works, background information appropriate to the complexity of the subject matter will be included. Ideally, this will enable visitors to gain an insight into the life and culture of modern China. An extensive catalogue published by Hatje Cantz will accompany the exhibition. It will include an interview with the collector, essays by the curators, explanations and analyses of individual works and general introductions to socio-political and artistic developments in China (by Li Xianting, Hou Hanru, Pi Li, Estelle Bories) over the past three decades.
Fringe events related to the exhibition, with lectures, performances, a film and video program, concerts etc., will also introduce the audience to other aspects of Chinese culture. | https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/42162/mahjong-contemporary-chinese-art-from-the-sigg-collection/ |
Over the past years, the audiovisual media which includes photos, films, radios, TVs, and other multimedia occupy a field of human perception that was previously reserved exclusively for classical arts and their various genres like paintings, music and theatre. When photography was invented in 1839 and its widely distribution, reinforced by new printing techniques in the second half of the early 19th century, the fast rising of film into a globally effective industry at early 20th century and the almost explosive dynamics of the emergence of radio in the 1920s – all this shows the power of these distribution and production instruments.
Each of the media techniques poses new aesthetic questions. Firstly, media-immanent, which forms of representation make possible and requires the medium such as various forms of montage in photo, film and digital image media, secondly is the overall cultural context, that is, what reference does it have to existing media and art forms.
After photography was invented, painting was proclaimed dead, this is repeated in television in relation to film, yet painting and filming continue to this day. But the already established art and media forms react to the following developments not only in Impressionism, but also in Cubism and Surrealism, painting shows precisely those physiological and psychological aspects that escape photography. In contrast to the piecemeal and multi-voiced mass of information on television, cinema emphasizes the closed, emotionally binding story. Against the perfection of the industrial images, the artistic videos and performances set the breaking points and disturbances of a new authenticity. The avant-garde and the mainstream have thus been in an intensive interrelationship, both in terms of media and aesthetic situ, since the beginning of modernity.
Why is media used by artists?
There are two reasons why artists use the media. First reason lies in a loss of the broad impact of modern art, and is profoundly felt as it is clearly recognized. Since the emergence of the advanced medias at the end of the 19th century, at the latest at the beginning of the 20th century with the Abstraction and Cubism, advanced art has lost the general acceptance of the aesthetic “commonsense” of the contemporary population. The use of new techniques such as film and funk, which are potentially mass media, is linked to the hope of leading the avant-garde out of its self-inflicted isolation in order to “reconcile art and the people”, as Guillaume Apollinaire writes at the end of his book on Cubism in 1912.
The 1920s – 1960s
This development of contemporary media art was interrupted by the Second World War and only continued in the 1960s. There is a crucial difference between the utopias of the 1920s and the practice after the war. In the early 1920s, the film and radio were still seen as potential art forms, as if they were a continuation of art history by other means. In the 1960s, on the other hand, resignation spread to what is now called “the mass media” and is considered a lost ground for culture. Individual artists are working on alternative models in order to reclaim the media, at least symbolically, but without being able to change the commercially and politically shaped media system as a whole. | https://www.ghanatoghana.com/media-replaces-art |
Manuel Fontán del Junco
This exhibition aims to present a wide-ranging, yet focused and intensive examination of a dimension of the historical avant-gardes that is typically relegated to a position of secondary importance. It constitutes the least "artistic" manifestation of the avant-gardes (in the modern sense of "art," at any rate) and, at the same time, represents their most novel contribution. Their legacy in this regard is the historical outcome of the "application" of the ideals of the avant-gardes to various spheres of human activity and in certain media-those very ideals that filled artists' manifestoes with ambitious proclamations and radical slogans and that directed their activities in the field of art narrowly conceived; that is, "pure art" as that notion developed within the tradition of modernity.
The spheres to which the exponents of the historical avant-gardes "applied" those ideals were, in short, every single one that structures organized social life: its domestic realm, its urban planning, the architecture of its private homes and public spaces, its political order, its educational institutions, its religion, its economy, the dissemination of its ideas and ideologies, its entertainment and leisure activities, its sports [...]. In sum, all the various spheres of existence that, intertwined, give form to everyday human life. In the "application" of their ideals with the aim of transforming society, and in order to communicate and disseminate those transformative notions, the promoters of the avant-gardes turned to representational media traditionally viewed as secondary and inherently inferior to the privileged medium of representation, namely, the classic genres of high art: painting and sculpture. The new media to which the avant-gardes were fruitfully applied included the poster and the pamphlet, the newspaper and the magazine, the book, and the photographic image, fragmented and manipulated in photomontages and set in motion in the cinema. That fruitful "application" generated a prodigious number of works in a veritable apotheosis of the play of forms and signs, in contexts that previously had been alien to the practice of the arts-most especially and by no means fortuitously, in the context of written language: the text.
Thus, in addition to their activities within the framework of art "proper," in applying their avant-garde ideals to all those other diverse contexts and by means of those new media, these artists made perhaps their most novel and determinant contribution to the profound conceptual changes in the understanding of art and the meaning of artistic activity that had been the legacy of modernity.
I would like to call attention to the fact that what defines the supposedly ancillary nature of the "applied" avant-garde (as we are calling it here) is also a characteristic of that supposedly primordial, "pure" art: the undeniable fact, in other words, that, until the advent of the historical avant-gardes, what we consider pure art has always been at its core a kind of design, stripped of its original function.
Modern aesthetics in the end devised a formalist notion of the work of art as a purely autonomous reality and applied to it an askesis of pure contemplation. Modern aesthetic awareness turned art and its product, beauty, into a representation of the human or natural world whose sole purpose was to be contemplated.
Later, certain movements that appeared at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth accentuated in part that modern notion of the autonomy of art, as was the case with the Viennese Secession or the Arts and Crafts Movement and, above all, the historical avant-gardes, from Futurism to Bauhaus and including De Stijl and Constructivism. Thus, the historical avant-gardes burst forth into the modern conscience and subjected the prevailing aesthetics that had shaped it to a cold shower. The champions of the avant-garde arrived proclaiming their manifestoes, which, though manifold and diverse, all shared in common the possibility of being redirected toward an attempt to reintegrate art and beauty into the space and time of human existence, in every sphere and through every available medium, including the direct incorporation of fragments of that existence into the work of art itself, as in the pieces of newspaper or other objects in collages glued to the traditional support of canvas-or even the placement of entire objects from that existence within the spaces devoted to the work of art, as in Duchamp's urinal sitting on a pedestal in a museum.
*Extracted from the essay The Avant-Garde Applied, 1890-1950 (A User's Manual), by Manuel Fontán del Junco, in the catalogue. | https://www.march.es/arte/madrid/exposiciones/vanguardia-aplicada/vida-cotidiana.aspx?l=2 |
As we argue in the overview of avant-garde theories, the seminal histories and theories of the avant-garde have tended to focus on male-dominated movements, erasing or marginalizing contributions of women and people of color. In recent years, scholars have sought to clarify women’s contributions, while articulating the importance of gender, sexuality, and race to the avant-garde, in studies such as: Futurist Women: Florence, Feminism, and the New Sciences (Paola Sica, 2016), The Women Artists of Italian Futurism: Almost Lost to History (Mirella Bentivoglio and Franca Zoccoli, 1998), Mamas of Dada: Women of the European Avant-Garde (Paula Kamenish, 2016), Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity (Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, 1998), Surrealist Women: An International Anthology (Penelope Rosemont, 1998), Surrealism and Women (Mary Ann Caws, Rudolf E. Kuenzli, and Gwen Raaberg, 1991) and Women Artists and the Surrealist Movement (Whitney Chadwick, 1991).
While these studies have transformed our understanding of the avant-garde, scholars have yet to offer a comprehensive theory of the avant-garde that accounts for the distinct experiences of women and people of color, who were often ambivalent about claiming affiliation with white, male-dominated movements. Griselda Pollack and Cythia Park Hong do, however, lay the foundations for revisionary feminist theorizing.
Pollack calls us to resist monolithic, linear models of avant-garde history in favor of “diverse and discontinuous avant-garde moments at which the defining collision of social and aesthetic radicalisms occurred.” Her paradigm emphasizes plurality and diversity, thus making room for women and writers of color.
Hong, on the other hand, rejects the term “avant-garde” altogether as representative of a fundamentally and continuously “racist tradition”:
From its early 20th century inception to some of its current strains, American avant-garde poetry has been an overwhelmingly white enterprise, ignoring major swaths of innovators—namely poets from past African American literary movements—whose prodigious writings have vitalized the margins, challenged institutions, and introduced radical languages and forms that avant-gardists have usurped without proper acknowledgment.
The avant-garde’s celebrated subversion of authorial identity, its disavowal of subjectivity and history, are extravagant forms of white privilege unavailable to writers of color: “Fuck the avant-garde,” Hong concludes, “We must hew our own path.”
The term “avant-garde,” derived from the “advance guard” of an army, emphasizes the militant, oppositional stance of the early twentieth-century movements to which it was first applied. Rather than attempting to rehabilitate this term to include a broader range of artists and strategies, we take up Hong’s charge to “hew our own path.” Taking a cue from classical ballet rather than warfare, we propose the term en dehors garde to describe the strategies of writers and artists whose mode of experimentation does not conform to the oppositional stance associated with the modernist avant-garde. En dehors means “coming from the outside” or “turning outward.” Rather than assuming a militant position at the forefront of culture, women and people of color often came from the outside and operated on the margins, working strategically to transform gendered, racialized literary traditions and visual cultures.
Loy’s artistic career invites us to rethink the “avant-garde” as an en dehors garde—a strategic pose or move, rather than a fixed structural position (Greenberg), shared psychological condition (Poggioli), or monolithic sociopolitical stance (Burger). Reimagining the avant-garde as a strategic pose allows for multiple, revolving, discontinuous, overlapping, intersecting, and consecutive moments of experimental or innovative artistic practice, with variable motives, attitudes, targets, and publics.
En dehors garde strategy may be understood as a pose of self-conscious differentiation: a difference, defiance, or critique of social norms or artistic conventions. As a strategic pose, the en dehors garde is both spatial and temporal, but it is not locked into any structural position, psychological disposition, or sociopolitical stance.
Differentiation from norms and conventions does not necessarily entail strident opposition or violent rupture, either. It might, for example, accommodate strategies of renovation or rehabilitation. At the “moment” of her artistic awakening by the Italian Futurists, for example, Loy exalted the power of avant-garde art to disrupt habits of perception and thought, and in the process to transform consciousness. She asserted in “Aphorisms on Futurism” that:
CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that moulds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it.
Loy’s “Aphorisms” call a rehabilitation of consciousness—a gradual expansion of the mind as it is stretched and reformed by new and unfamiliar art forms.
We aim to develop new forms of digital scholarship and theory commensurate to the en dehors garde. As Elisabeth Frost argues, to look back at history with the inclusion of female experimental writers and artists “challenges the way in which avant-gardism itself has been conceptualized” (xv). Digital platforms offer new technologies for documenting and analyzing women’s negotiations with the historical avant-garde, allowing us to chart an alternative en dehors garde that proves to be neither a mere supplement to nor plea for inclusion within the current critical models of avant-garde formation. Open-source tools enable us to transform our scholarly methods and products in the same spirit of avant-garde innovation and collaboration that animated Loy’s feminist designs a century ago.
The term “en dehors garde” was suggested by Nancy G. Selleck, Associate Professor of English at University of Massachusetts Lowell, a scholar of early modern literature and culture, as well as a dramaturg and theatre director and at Harvard, Boston Directors’ Lab, and UMass Lowell, and a former professional ballet dancer in New York. It seems especially appropriate that the idea was generated in conversation between friends across different fields and disciplines. | https://minaloy2017.suzannechurchill.com/feminist-challenges/?shared=email&msg=fail |
This thesis is dedicated to the work of the Russian Avant-Garde artist Ivan Albertovich Puni (1892-1956): an artist, a theorist and writer, an organizer of exhibition, a teacher of art, and above all, an innovator. This thesis presents an account of the artist's Berlin period (1920-1924), which has so far lacked scholarly attention.
The thesis begins with a close analysis of Puni's Russian period (1914-1919). In this time span,
Ivan Puni demonstrated his ability to adopt a wide gamut of diverse artistic styles. Puni first elaborated works akin to Cubist constructions. However, starting from 1915, the artist became a major representative of the Russian avant-garde movement, also known as the Russian Futurist style. Puni organized the two Futurist exhibits in St. Petersburg (between 1915 and 1916) and co-signed the Suprematist Manifesto (1915) together with Kazimir Malevich. Until 1919, he himself presented ground-breaking Cubo-Futurist works (notably Window Cleaning, 1915), and above all elaborated a Suprematist redefinition of the object and the letter (based on the Russian concepts of zaum and faktura). At the same time, Puni had been putting to the test the Suprematist definition of the traditional representational still life.
Those features of his art would subsequently become important in Berlin, where Puni and his wife moved to in autumn 1920 due to the deteriorating political situation in the budding USSR. Whereas the Berlin period has not previously been examined closely, this thesis argues that it was a critical period, leading Puni to synthesize Russian avant-garde styles with Western art practice. Puni’s exhibition of Dada-like works at the gallery Der Sturm in February 1921 consisted of works conceived in Russia, many recreated, or reassembled according to new artistic parameters. The exhibition largely consisted of a ‘happening’ and had absorbed major aspects of Dadaism. Most remarkably, within his painting The Synthetic Musician (1921-1922), Puni then managed to epitomize his development as an artist and his contesting of non-objective art. Puni’s book Современная Живопись [Sovremennaya Zhivopis’ or Contemporary Art], published in Berlin in 1923, explains at length his rejection of non-objective art and his first preference for Cubist construction, which combined with single, selected elements (such as factura), led him to coin a new term: Constructive Naturalism.
In sum, this thesis hopes to demonstrate the originality and abiding intellectual value of Puni’s works during his Berlin period.
Recommended Citation
Kakuriev, Elena, "Ivan Puni's Berlin Period: 1920-1924" (2021). CUNY Academic Works. | https://academicworks.cuny.edu/hc_sas_etds/670/ |
Huda Lutfi – redefining ‘Egyptian’Egyptian art is much more than the classic artefacts of the pharaohs and works that tow the tight state line, points out DJ, music critic and composer Katrine Ring. She recommends that we take a look into the much broader and more internationally oriented Egyptian art scene reflected in the book Huda Lutfi – a book which also portrays an interesting contemporary artist, who is striving to push the boundaries of social cultural norms, religion and artistic form.
Facts about Huda Lufti
- Huda Lutfi is one of Egypt’s most influential artists.
- Born in Cairo, Egypt, in 1948, where she currently lives and works.
- Holds a PhD in Arab Cultural History from McGill University, Montréal, Canada
- Huda Lutfi’s debut exhibition was held in 1996 at the American University in Cairo, followed by solo and group exhibitions in the USA, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Bahrain, Belgium, Senegal, Mali, Greece; Denmark and other countries.
- Lived three months in the Nørrebro district of Copenhagen, during which time she exhibited at Copenhagen’s Nikolaj Kunsthal in 2010 at the My World Images exhibition.
- The book includes six further chapters covering a variety of diverse themes, all written by the author. These are mainly short introductions to various individual themes about the singer and role model Umm Kulthum, about gender as a cultural construction, about spirituality, and others. The book includes a wealth of photographic material supporting the main theme of each chapter allowing readers to explore and discover specific themes in her works.
Our knowledge of Egyptian art is very limited. When thinking about Egyptian art, our thoughts turn to the artefacts of the pharaohs and the strict state control of artistic expression; but there is much more to Egyptian art than this blinkered and quite prejudiced view. For alongside the state-controlled art scene, there exists a lively, vibrant, and internationally oriented Egyptian art scene that is breaking with the clichés and forging ahead in new directions. With the book Huda Lutfi, about the female artist of the same name, we are provided with a broad perspective of the current status of the contemporary Egyptian art scene and given a splendid portrait of a very interesting artist.
The core of the book essentially consists of two substantial chapters. Firstly, Samira Mehrez, the Egyptian professor of modern Arabic literature, provides a detailed insight into the historical and political correlation of art, in which she describes the position held by art within the state. This is a highly relevant essay for understanding the reality in which Huda Lutfi operates as an artist in Cairo, Egypt and the world at large. Secondly, there is the chapter written by Huda Lutfi herself, in which she tells of her background and about the origins and unfolding of her artistic career. Included in this chapter are some though-provoking descriptions of a selection of reactions that her art has received.
New definitions of ‘Egyptian’
Huda Lutfi was university educated in Montréal in Canada and at the American University in Cairo. It was as a cultural historian that Huda Lutfi’s artistic rise began to gain momentum; her intrigue regarding the absence of women artists in Arab art history led her to focus on the presence of women within art. Her art history learning and methodology were challenged, leading Huda Lutfi herself to begin working as an artist. For the first many years, here medium of choice was collage, but later she branched out to working with objects she found discarded on the streets. The richly diverse photographs in the book show the complexity and variety of her works.
When discussing Egyptian art, it is first important to discuss who sets the definition of what ‘Egyptian’ is. Here, Samira Mehrez’s chapter is particularly illuminating. She explains the historical positioning of art within the state, starting from the days of British colonialism and leading through to the present day. Previously, the matter had been simple as, until very recently, the state held the monopoly on determining what was or was not classed as being Egyptian. Later on, international art curators butted in with their definition of “genuine Egyptian art”. If an artist was not able to meet the criteria of the one definition or the other, things were difficult – artists had to find their own way.
Today, the reality for the Egyptian cultural landscape is both new and different. To a far greater extent, artists have liberated themselves from the state and its strict line regarding art. Also, they are able to commute between state-owned and private-owned galleries and institutions. These two things have helped to limit the historic grip the state has held on art production and in its role as sole patron. Simultaneously, it has had an educative effect on those working for the state, instilling them with a broader artistic perspective. Additionally, it has resulted in an increased interest from the state to include in various state-managed projects artists who work in the private realm and internationally.
From academic to practicing artist
When artists began to relate to and make inroads into the international art scene – for example, by becoming educated at art schools in Paris, London and in the USA – they themselves became able to define their art. The growing art market in the Gulf area, particularly in Bahrain and Dubai, served also as a contributory factor for this growing awareness.
Here, Huda Lutfi is a model example. In many ways, she is an unusual artist in Egypt because she lacks a formal artistic education from a state-run art school; in actuality, she is an art historian. Nevertheless, today she enjoys recognition as a world-renown artist, and commands much respect in her home country.
Sacrilege
Huda Lutfi exhibited her work for the first time at the gallery of the American University in Cairo. Since then, she has moved into the well-respected private galleries of Cairo and further onto the international art scene – including in Dubai. The recognition and respect she enjoys in the private galleries, and now internationally, has led to her becoming a highly well-received figure in her homeland. Today, she is one of the artists whom the state invites to participate in state-organised projects, even though the state continues to have periodic issues with Huda Lutfi’s form of expression. One particular example of such an issue is described in the chapter entitled The Testimony, where she describes how her work consisting of a shoemaker’s last (the form used to shape a shoe) painted silver and covered with Sufi texts has continued to be a bone of contention for many years. The result is censorship/self-censorship.
The reason for the state’s objection to this particular work turned out to be the fact that, according to Islam, it is sacrilege to write Sufi texts on any kind of shoe – even though here it was merely a shoemaker’s last and not an actual shoe. This work was exhibited at the Townhouse Gallery, one of the leading private galleries in Cairo. The poster advertising the exhibition showed this work with the shoemaker’s last, and as they were hung up in public places the work became the object of much focus. As a result, the authorities clamped down hard; all the posters had to be taken down from the streets and the exhibition could only be seen upon prior arrangement with the artist – who was required to be present. The struggle to have the work exhibited internationally dragged on for an entire year. Today, the work remains impounded with the customs authorities.
At odds with the authorities
As an artist, Lutfi works with issues of gender and culture, in particular, she works to increase the visibility of perceptions of women and their roles. She does so by creating dolls; here, she challenges the perception of what is authentic, when even traditional Egyptian dolls are now being produced in China. She also objectifies dolls with writing, providing them with statements such as “No to War!” – not because the statement itself is controversial, but rather because the context makes it controversial. In this case, it was because of the Iraq war and the 9/11 attacks. The context always plays a role in how her art is to be understood, the result of which is that, as an artist, she remains controversial and at odds with the authorities.
A particular strength of Lutfi’s work emanates from her background of studying art history. In her art, she depicts everyday culture – something that is far more controversial in her homeland than we as outsiders can comprehend. Using objects she has found littering the streets and alleyways and markets of Cairo, Huda Lutfi depicts a local culture that can be far more shocking to look at than we could imagine – such as when she finds damaged dolls on the street and exhibits these. And when she works with pictures of women icons and draws attention to the women role models that exist in Egypt. She explains that it is not something that needs to be invented as it is already inherent within the culture.
Global perspective – local inspiration
Lutfi sees herself as being a universal artist. In her experience, an artist should not be too attached to his or her original culture as this makes looking beyond personal confines difficult. Such people easily lose their perspective and fail to distance themselves from their own point of being; as a result, such artists are unable to appreciate the wealth and complexities of other cultures to an adequate degree. To this, she could also add a gender aspect as she often seems to run into conflict with the authorities, including the state, the police and customs and excise; it is men in particular who are incapable of looking beyond their own limitations. She provides many an example that would be funny, were it not for the tragedy of their myopia.
Except from the chapter written by Professor Samira Mehrez, the entire book is written by Huda Lutfi herself. She writes with an elegant reserve and a fair degree of humour. Art is the primary focus, and it is clear that the artistic topics chosen have personal roots. When Huda Lutfi deals with the topics of women, gender and roles, these are based upon her own personal experiences and a cast of characters close to her, including her mother, her aunt and well-known female personalities. Cairo, the city where she herself lives, provides the backdrop, offering a great deal of material for her to work with. So without doubt, she is an Egyptian, from Egypt, and an artist.
Danish-Arab Partnership Programme
KVINFO's programme in the Middle East and North Africa is financed by:
As a result of her position in the upper middleclass, Lutfi is also active in many social circles. Here, she tends more towards the international agenda regarding the description of women’s roles, rather than the local Egyptian agenda, where the social stratum a person moves has a huge and differing affect upon women, gender and roles. As a result, the descriptions given in the book solely represent the areas in which Lutfi herself moves – but it would be unfair to expect otherwise. No matter what way we look at it, she as a role model is an exciting figure: her artistic format is both esteemed and globally-recognised, and she is paving the way for the next things to follow. | https://kvinfo.dk/huda-lutfi-redefining-egyptian/?lang=en |
Les années 1970 – 1980 : L’explosion de la couleur Exhibition catalog
This exhibition will throw the spotlight on the 1970s and 1980s, two pivotal decades that marked a rupture between what we call modern art and contemporary art. Characterised by post-modernism and the final days of the avant-garde, the period in question was responsible for shaping the modes of artistic creation we see in practice today.
The 1970s and 1980s were marked by great technical advances and profound societal upheavals. As colour found its place as an ever-present feature across an ever-increasing variety of media in the arts, it became a structural element for many artists. With their diverse forms of artistic expression, Loïs Frederick, Marie Raymond, Rougemont and Gérard Schneider represent a select group of virtuoso colourist painters at the forefront of these fundamental decades. | https://dianedepolignac.com/en/home-gb/exhibitions-en/exhibitions-gb/exhibition-les-annees-1970-1980-lexplosion-de-la-couleur-2021/ |
The artist Henryk Stażewski is hailed as one of the undisputed pioneers of the European avant-garde movement during the 20th century. His life’s work spans more than eight decades, crosses borders from Russia to France and finds its apogee in the experimental inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s. We discover more about Henryk Stażewski, from painter and cubist to surrealist interior designer.
The origin of Stażewski’s artistic philosophy is intimately linked to his period of study at the Warsaw School of Fine Arts during the 1910s. At a time when the first out-and-out Constructivists were appearing in Bolshevik circles in Moscow, the artistic scene in Warsaw was also in the midst of a transformation – moving from the visceral realism of figures like Stanisław Lentz to more abstract forms, drawing inspiration from already established avant-garde schools such as Cubism and Russian Futurism. Consequently, any appreciation of the work produced by Stażewski’s in the following decades must be seen in the greater context of a European-wide movement towards the avant-garde. This took the form, more specifically, of a united desire to merge the respective fields of art, politics, cultural criticism, technology and science.
Henryk Stażewski, Witold S. Kozak, Edward Krasiński(1979).
Stażewski’s journey away from realist and objectivist art forms began in earnest just before his graduation in 1920, when he first joined the Polish Expressionist movement. He began working and exhibiting his pieces alongside artists like Tytus Czyzewski and Mieczysław Szczuka, whose art was overtly cubist in form and veered towards a new Polish aesthetic more in line with the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists.
Stażewski’s transformative period reached its height in the New Art Exhibitions of 1923 (in Łódź and Vilnius), which brought with them the foundation of the Polish ‘Blok’ and ‘Praesens’ groups that would go on to dominate the avant-garde scene in Warsaw for the best part of the decade. This marked the final realisation of Stażewski’s dream for a national theory of art, which brought creative processes firmly into the social sphere.
In the late 1920s, Stażewski began exploring the avant-garde offerings of Europe, spending increasing amounts of time in Paris. Here, he quickly ingratiated himself with the abstract artists of the Cercle et Carré and started to exhibit his Constructivist pieces further afield, with a view to propagating his newfound Polish aesthetic throughout other European contemporary art scenes. Soon, Stażewski was being shown in Lviv, Kraków, Basel, Paris, and even New York.
Unfortunately, hardly a single piece of Stażewski’s work created prior to the Second World War remains intact. There are plenty of reasons to believe, however, that his artistic philosophy remained the same, with iconic works like Relief 6 from 1968 displaying the same hallmarks of that pre-war constructivism: the detached geometric shapes; the misaligned tektonika; the uncertain spatial reality. In fact, such works were the beginning of a cycle of reliefs that would span the 1960s and 1970s, rising to become perhaps the most definitive of all Stażewski’s creations—marking what most critics consider to be the height of geometric abstraction in Polish art.
In 1965, Stażewski once again helped to unite the cream of Poland’s avant-garde to form the famous Foksal Gallery of Warsaw, with the help of critics Wiesław Borowski, Anka Ptaszkowska and Mariusz Tchorek. The gallery went from strength to strength, as the stricture enforced by Soviet art censorship began to relax in the late 1960s. Stażewski even began hosting classes and soirées at the state apartment he’d been allocated on nearby Swierczewskiego Street.
Eventually, that same apartment would turn into hallowed ground for followers of the Polish avant-garde movement, representing a temporal space of experimentation where Stażewski – and later Edward Krasiński too – would play with geometry, shapes and new methods of alignment, pushing the boundaries of their own abstract forms.
It was also during this period that Stażewski produced his iconic series of works entitled Reductions, which perhaps represent the prime achievement of his constructivist fantasies after the War. In these pieces, the artist reduces the work to a minimalist array of uniform squares and intersecting lines, inviting the viewer to consider the fundamental component of art and artistic creation – shape. In this way, Stażewski was able to level a critique against the realist artistic traditions that had preceded the avant-garde in both Poland and the USSR and also – through the implicit connections between constructivist creation and social action – indirectly critique the political status quo.
In many ways, it’s that questioning of the world at large that defined Stażewski’s work throughout his life. Some people find themselves contemplating the great swathes of white space left empty on his canvasses and reliefs, wondering what forms or organic creations should be present to create order from his subjectivist chaos. Others look to the geometry that is there and think of the implications that such stark reductionism has on art and – crucially – society in general. | https://theculturetrip.com/europe/poland/articles/henryk-sta-ewski-the-polish-pioneer-of-the-avant-garde/ |
Creating Transparency for Equitable Government
Transparency is key to a fair and equitable government. That’s the mandate for San Francisco’s Ethics Commission, formed in 1993 to serve the public, city employees, officials, and candidates for public office, by educating and enforcing campaign finance, lobbying, conflicts of interests, and governmental ethics laws. It’s a hub for all kinds of critical services — filing financial disclosures, accessing public records, investigating and adjudicating complaints, and helping shape public policy by developing local political reform laws.
Last year, I began my fellowship at the Ethics Commission with a clear objective: to improve the online presence of ethics-related compliance and disclosure information ultimately to help increase public engagement and to strengthen accountability in local government through improved legal compliance. The Commission holds a large, broad, and varied swath of information, including compliance requirements and procedures, forms and instructions, pertinent laws, public disclosures, open data, policy proposals, staff reports, enforcement updates, public notices, and audit reports. For most people, these topics can be complex to interpret and navigate, so the goal was to present them in a format that’s interactive and engaging, and can help regular users quickly find the services they use most. For instance, the site should be as accessible to a campaign committee looking to file a financial statement, as to a member of the public who wants to learn about the Commission for the first time. Getting a thorough understanding of the types of end-users was going to be instrumental in providing them relevant and useful information in a user-friendly manner that caters to their unique needs.
Based on the day-to-day interactions with the public, the agency over time had developed a good knowledge base of common-use cases, especially of those who actively engage with the Commission’s programs and initiatives. The services and communications on the site need to be easily understandable and accessible to a broad range of people with diverse needs, digital skills, and familiarity with the subject matter.
Fact Finding
My biggest challenge at the outset — to understand exactly what those end-users need — was going to be the hardest part, because there were not many avenues available to directly gather information from end-users about their experiences with the Commission.
I used several approaches to address this gap. As a first step, I focused on surveying internal stakeholders to capture the institutional knowledge about online and offline user requests and interactions, and the processes that supported those activities. One-on-one and group discussions with staff members helped identify and prioritize critical use cases of the services offered by the agency.
Understanding the importance of human-centered design, I also conducted interviews and user-testing sessions with some of the end-users to get their feedback about specific aspects of the content design, user interfaces, and service delivery. These sessions helped clarify users’ expectations, verify key assumptions, and narrow down the areas of improvements. For example, I learned that the online information pertaining to financial disclosure requirements was not structured in a way that was easy for the filers to understand. Users also shared that they were expecting to see specific keywords and language on the site to direct them to the information they were looking for. This type of feedback was valuable to help pinpoint the problem areas, which I addressed iteratively to improve the overall user experience.
I then took it one step further to gather feedback at a broader scale. I created online surveys that were designed to capture the users’ comments regarding their experiences, challenges, and suggestions. This exercise surfaced up the programmatic changes that needed to be incorporated into the agency’s day-to-day operations and also helped identify specific enhancements for the web content and design. To continue gathering feedback from users on an ongoing basis and capture their emerging needs, I worked with the agency’s staff to design an online feedback form that we embedded on every page on the website. This facilitated direct and real-time communication with the support team, which enabled the team to be agile and responsive to users’ immediate needs.
Reaching Out To The Underserved
Now that I had a foundational understanding of the active users, I wanted to focus on gathering feedback from those who used the agency’s services less often, and potential users who were unfamiliar with the agency. To that end, I collaborated with the agency’s staff and the city’s Public Voice program team to conduct resident user-testing sessions. The program invited city residents to participate in testing the agency’s website on desktop and mobile platforms.
This model is a great way to incorporate a feedback loop in a city’s service design process to gather input from residents, before the launch of a new service. These testing sessions provided valuable insights about our website including feedback on the layout, content, usability, and site features, and helped surface unmet needs. One of the key benefits of these sessions was that they helped us understand the user experiences of new visitors, which were quite different from those of our active users. We identified incremental changes that could significantly transform the experience of a new user, covering aspects such as choice of words, placement of content, information gaps, and intuitive navigation.
My user research also included understanding the experiences of differently-abled individuals, to better serve their needs. Along with the agency’s staff, I consulted with accessibility subject matter experts to identify design changes that made it easier for differently-abled users to access the content, for example, correctly tagging web elements to help blind individuals better navigate the site through screen readers. There are well-established best practices that can be incorporated into a web design to ensure that city services can reach all types of users.
Overall, these initiatives provided the agency a tried and tested framework of techniques that can help the Commission more closely engage with the public, as well as a user-focused mindset to design content and services that directly support the users’ needs.
What I Learned
Over the course of the year, working on this project exposed me to the specific needs, challenges, and constraints that are unique to the public sector. These are some of the insights I learned about getting traction in local government:
Leverage the wealth of knowledge of internal experts.
As much as it is important to understand the end-user experience, it is also crucial to understand the experiences of those delivering the services. Staff members who interface with users, online or offline, can help clarify key assumptions and goals behind a service implementation. They can also help us learn more about the users and about the solutions that have already been tried in the organization.
Experiment ideas using incremental changes.
City departments are often extremely tight on resources so big ideas are not easy to implement due to budget, timeline, or operational constraints. But there’s always a way to break down the scope of an idea into manageable and realistic pieces that can be tested iteratively with much fewer resources. This can help us validate specific aspects of the solution relatively quickly and get us one step closer to the desired end state.
Collaborate with others who are solving the same problems.
Although city departments may be different functionally, many have the same goals, like providing quality service to residents, service accessibility, public disclosure, complying with city laws, and addressing resource constraints. The act of intentionally reaching out to other departments to explore different solutions can greatly expedite the problem-solving process.
Implement feedback loops.
User-focused design cannot be approached as a onetime activity. It needs to be integrated into all aspects of operations on a day-to-day basis. Identifying and implementing user feedback mechanisms, be it online or offline, are extremely vital to continually engage the users and flexibly adapt to their evolving needs.
Discussion
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Read more from MeetingoftheMinds.org
Spotlighting innovations in urban sustainability and connected technology
How Stormwater Infrastructure Balances Utility and Placemaking
I see the outcomes of Duke Pond as a representation of the importance of the profession of landscape architecture in today’s world. Once obscured by the glaring light and booming voice long-generated by building architects, landscape architects are steadily emerging as the designers needed to tackle complex 21st century problems. As both leaders and collaborators, their work is addressing the effects of rising sea level on coastal cities, creating multi-modal pedestrian and vehicular transportation systems to reduce carbon emissions, reimagining outdated infrastructure as great urban places, and as with the case of Duke Pond, mitigating the impacts of worsening drought.
The 7 Forces of Artificial Intelligence in Cities
AI has enormous potential to improve the lives of billions of people living in cities and facing a multitude of challenges. However, a blind focus on the technological issues is not sufficient. We are already starting to see a moderation of the technocentric view of algorithmic salvation in New York City, which is the first city in the world to appoint a chief algorithm officer.
There are 7 primary forces determining the success of AI, of which technology is just one. Cities must realize that AI is not the quick technological fix that vendors sell. Not everything will be improved by creating more algorithms and technical prowess. We need to develop a more holistic approach to implementing AI in cities in order to harness the immense potential. We need to create a way to consider each of the seven forces when cities plan for the use of AI.
I Am The River, The River is Me: Prioritizing Well-being Through Water Policy
In New Zealand, persistent, concentrated advocacy and legal cases advanced by Māori people are inspiring biocentric policies; that is, those which recognize that people and nature, including living and non-living elements, are part of an interconnected whole. Along the way, tribal leaders and advocates are successfully making the case that nature; whole systems of rivers, lakes, forests, mountains, and more, deserves legal standing to ensure its protection. An early legislative “win” granted personhood status to the Te Urewera forest in 2014, which codified into law these moving lines:
“Te Urewera is ancient and enduring, a fortress of nature, alive with history; its scenery is abundant with mystery, adventure, and remote beauty … Te Urewera has an identity in and of itself, inspiring people to commit to its care.”
The Te Urewera Act of 2014 did more than redefine how a forest would be managed, it pushed forward the practical expression of a new policy paradigm. | https://meetingoftheminds.org/creating-transparency-equitable-government-23587 |
Creating Transparency for Equitable Government
Transparency is key to a fair and equitable government. That’s the mandate for San Francisco’s Ethics Commission, formed in 1993 to serve the public, city employees, officials, and candidates for public office, by educating and enforcing campaign finance, lobbying, conflicts of interests, and governmental ethics laws. It’s a hub for all kinds of critical services — filing financial disclosures, accessing public records, investigating and adjudicating complaints, and helping shape public policy by developing local political reform laws.
Last year, I began my fellowship at the Ethics Commission with a clear objective: to improve the online presence of ethics-related compliance and disclosure information ultimately to help increase public engagement and to strengthen accountability in local government through improved legal compliance. The Commission holds a large, broad, and varied swath of information, including compliance requirements and procedures, forms and instructions, pertinent laws, public disclosures, open data, policy proposals, staff reports, enforcement updates, public notices, and audit reports. For most people, these topics can be complex to interpret and navigate, so the goal was to present them in a format that’s interactive and engaging, and can help regular users quickly find the services they use most. For instance, the site should be as accessible to a campaign committee looking to file a financial statement, as to a member of the public who wants to learn about the Commission for the first time. Getting a thorough understanding of the types of end-users was going to be instrumental in providing them relevant and useful information in a user-friendly manner that caters to their unique needs.
Based on the day-to-day interactions with the public, the agency over time had developed a good knowledge base of common-use cases, especially of those who actively engage with the Commission’s programs and initiatives. The services and communications on the site need to be easily understandable and accessible to a broad range of people with diverse needs, digital skills, and familiarity with the subject matter.
Fact Finding
My biggest challenge at the outset — to understand exactly what those end-users need — was going to be the hardest part, because there were not many avenues available to directly gather information from end-users about their experiences with the Commission.
I used several approaches to address this gap. As a first step, I focused on surveying internal stakeholders to capture the institutional knowledge about online and offline user requests and interactions, and the processes that supported those activities. One-on-one and group discussions with staff members helped identify and prioritize critical use cases of the services offered by the agency.
Understanding the importance of human-centered design, I also conducted interviews and user-testing sessions with some of the end-users to get their feedback about specific aspects of the content design, user interfaces, and service delivery. These sessions helped clarify users’ expectations, verify key assumptions, and narrow down the areas of improvements. For example, I learned that the online information pertaining to financial disclosure requirements was not structured in a way that was easy for the filers to understand. Users also shared that they were expecting to see specific keywords and language on the site to direct them to the information they were looking for. This type of feedback was valuable to help pinpoint the problem areas, which I addressed iteratively to improve the overall user experience.
I then took it one step further to gather feedback at a broader scale. I created online surveys that were designed to capture the users’ comments regarding their experiences, challenges, and suggestions. This exercise surfaced up the programmatic changes that needed to be incorporated into the agency’s day-to-day operations and also helped identify specific enhancements for the web content and design. To continue gathering feedback from users on an ongoing basis and capture their emerging needs, I worked with the agency’s staff to design an online feedback form that we embedded on every page on the website. This facilitated direct and real-time communication with the support team, which enabled the team to be agile and responsive to users’ immediate needs.
Reaching Out To The Underserved
Now that I had a foundational understanding of the active users, I wanted to focus on gathering feedback from those who used the agency’s services less often, and potential users who were unfamiliar with the agency. To that end, I collaborated with the agency’s staff and the city’s Public Voice program team to conduct resident user-testing sessions. The program invited city residents to participate in testing the agency’s website on desktop and mobile platforms.
This model is a great way to incorporate a feedback loop in a city’s service design process to gather input from residents, before the launch of a new service. These testing sessions provided valuable insights about our website including feedback on the layout, content, usability, and site features, and helped surface unmet needs. One of the key benefits of these sessions was that they helped us understand the user experiences of new visitors, which were quite different from those of our active users. We identified incremental changes that could significantly transform the experience of a new user, covering aspects such as choice of words, placement of content, information gaps, and intuitive navigation.
My user research also included understanding the experiences of differently-abled individuals, to better serve their needs. Along with the agency’s staff, I consulted with accessibility subject matter experts to identify design changes that made it easier for differently-abled users to access the content, for example, correctly tagging web elements to help blind individuals better navigate the site through screen readers. There are well-established best practices that can be incorporated into a web design to ensure that city services can reach all types of users.
Overall, these initiatives provided the agency a tried and tested framework of techniques that can help the Commission more closely engage with the public, as well as a user-focused mindset to design content and services that directly support the users’ needs.
What I Learned
Over the course of the year, working on this project exposed me to the specific needs, challenges, and constraints that are unique to the public sector. These are some of the insights I learned about getting traction in local government:
Leverage the wealth of knowledge of internal experts.
As much as it is important to understand the end-user experience, it is also crucial to understand the experiences of those delivering the services. Staff members who interface with users, online or offline, can help clarify key assumptions and goals behind a service implementation. They can also help us learn more about the users and about the solutions that have already been tried in the organization.
Experiment ideas using incremental changes.
City departments are often extremely tight on resources so big ideas are not easy to implement due to budget, timeline, or operational constraints. But there’s always a way to break down the scope of an idea into manageable and realistic pieces that can be tested iteratively with much fewer resources. This can help us validate specific aspects of the solution relatively quickly and get us one step closer to the desired end state.
Collaborate with others who are solving the same problems.
Although city departments may be different functionally, many have the same goals, like providing quality service to residents, service accessibility, public disclosure, complying with city laws, and addressing resource constraints. The act of intentionally reaching out to other departments to explore different solutions can greatly expedite the problem-solving process.
Implement feedback loops.
User-focused design cannot be approached as a onetime activity. It needs to be integrated into all aspects of operations on a day-to-day basis. Identifying and implementing user feedback mechanisms, be it online or offline, are extremely vital to continually engage the users and flexibly adapt to their evolving needs.
Discussion
Leave your comment below, or reply to others.
Please note that this comment section is for thoughtful, on-topic discussions. Admin approval is required for all comments. Your comment may be edited if it contains grammatical errors. Low effort, self-promotional, or impolite comments will be deleted.
0 Comments
Submit a Comment
Read more from MeetingoftheMinds.org
Spotlighting innovations in urban sustainability and connected technology
How Urban Industry Can Contribute Green Solutions for COVID-Related Health Disparities
The best nature-based solutions on urban industrial lands are those that are part of a corporate citizenship or conservation strategy like DTE’s or Phillips66. By integrating efforts such as tree plantings, restorations, or pollinator gardens into a larger strategy, companies begin to mainstream biodiversity into their operations. When they crosswalk the effort to other CSR goals like employee engagement, community relations, and/or workforce development, like the CommuniTree initiative, the projects become more resilient.
Air quality in urban residential communities near industrial facilities will not be improved by nature alone. But nature can contribute to the solution, and while doing so, bring benefits including recreation, education, and an increased sense of community pride. As one tool to combat disparate societal outcomes, nature is accessible, affordable and has few, if any, downsides.
Crisis funding for public parks
I spoke last week to Adrian Benepe, former commissioner for the NYC Parks Department and currently the Senior Vice President and Director of National Programs at The Trust for Public Land.
We discussed a lot of things – the increased use of parks in the era of COVID-19, the role parks have historically played – and currently play – in citizens’ first amendment right to free speech and protests, access & equity for underserved communities, the coming budget shortfalls and how they might play out in park systems.
I wanted to pull out the discussion we had about funding for parks and share Adrian’s thoughts with all of you, as I think it will be most timely and valuable as we move forward with new budgets and new realities.
3 Ways Communities Can Bond with Residents in the Age of Covid & Beyond
There is a risk of further widening the gap between so-called ‘knowledge workers’ able to do their jobs remotely and afford to move, and those with place-based employment who cannot. Beyond that, retreating residents might take the very identity and uniqueness of the places they abandon with them.
Nurturing the community-resident bond could be an antidote to these dismaying departures, and new research sheds light on how. A recent report by the Urban Institute and commissioned by the Knight Foundation surveyed 11,000 residents of 26 U.S. metro areas to uncover what amenities created a “sense of attachment and connection to their city or community.” Three key recommendations emerged in Smart Cities Dive’s synopsis of the results. | https://meetingoftheminds.org/creating-transparency-equitable-government-23587 |
When everything's connected, how we connect is everything… and we'd like to connect with you too! We are seeking a Quality Assurance Manager.
Quality Assurance Managers (QAM) supervises the operational and fiscal activities of the Quality Assurance department. QAMs ensure direct reports meet targets, goals, and deliverables supporting operations and account-wide call quality metrics for each line of business. Utilize systems and procedures to improve the operating quality and efficiency of the quality department. Oversee all aspects of the delivery of quality related services keeping operations informed and engaged regarding training gaps and sharing best practices. Manage the staff in accordance with company policies, procedures, and client quality metrics ensuring all direct reports are meeting contractual monitors and audits.
Regularly meet with operations partners to ensure coaching action plans are being completed. Work daily to improve processes and performance that enhance bottom line results through meetings and calibration calls with client and business partners. Quality Assurance Managers are responsible for team engagement, leadership, performance management, coaching, talent development, and auditing specialists and Team leads. They adhere to TeleTech key performance objectives, indicators, metrics, and ratios ensuring maximum team performance. QAMs create and maintain a positive work environment and ensure shifts appropriately cover operations schedules.
Key Performance Objectives
· Achieve 100% of quality goals per client contract. Actively implement strategies and initiatives to enable the Quality Assurance department to achieve its objectives. Communicate the core strategy and quality goals to the team.
· Establish metrics for success, set clear daily priorities, and drive the team to meet quality goals. Understand the key business objectives, timeframes, and requirements associated with each goal. Ensure that the team meets contractual quality monitors and audits, accuracy and receive proper feedback. (Strategic thinking, project management, results orientation, business acumen, enthusiasm)
· Manage day-to-day quality operations and deliverables. Responsible for understanding and executing quality metrics specific to program(s) or line(s) of business supported. This includes observation of and providing feedback to the team. Translate individual performance into a level of client and customer satisfaction. Participate in quality evaluations by monitoring and scoring calls.
· Evaluate scores against client contractual expectations and calibrate in order to discover gaps and challenges. Communicate gaps and challenges with stakeholders, guide the coaching process and provide an action plan to ensure the issues get addressed. Follow up with the staff on the progress. Involved with the quality dispute process. Manage regular preparation of relevant quality reports and share reporting with client and operations business partners. (Problem solving, attention to detail, can-do attitude, persuasion and influence)
· Improve the key success metrics associated with quality assurance department. These include:
- Ensure the client's expectations are being met through the QBR process
- Partner with operations to ensure improvement of CSAT scores for our clients on a semi-annual basis
- Provide roll-up (analytical, productivity, and calibration) data with plans for improvement for the team on a monthly basis
- Gather information, analyze data, observe the process, and lead the effort to consistently improve each quality process and performance. This includes challenging every aspect of the processes. Recommended changes must be monitored and measured to ensure bottom-line impact to the process.
- Held accountable for attrition, hiring, and performance of Quality Assurance team. (Data analysis, customer focus, ROI calculations, persuasion, problem solving, strategic thinking, achievement motivation) Actively manage the staff, support, motivate and retain an outstanding team.
- Responsible for mentoring, training, evaluating, and developing the staff while providing support, information, and assistance. Accountable for managing all day-to-day issues prioritizing and responding as appropriate. Help the staff to set realistic and measurable quality goals and develop suitable reward program as needed. Take responsibility for motivating and retaining Quality Assurance Team Leads and Specialists. Provide coaching and development opportunities, and address performance issues.
- Regularly facilitate one-on-one with direct reports. Monitor progress towards achieving quality goals. (Leadership, staff development, accountability, coaching, motivation, resourcefulness, high integrity)
- Manage the communication. Maintain a positive, respectful and caring attitude. Communicate problems clearly and collaborate with business partners to ensure that issues will be resolved quickly with a minimum long term impact. Offer clear and objective alternatives and work with Quality Assurance team to help implement solutions. Identify and communicate any potential problems or challenges as they surface. Communicate changes in priorities and direction of the goal or project to the staff. Regularly communicate and coordinate with Operations and Learning and Leadership Development and Human Capital teams to analyze quality gaps and issues and work on action plans to eliminate them. (Team work and collaboration, fairness, follow through, engagement, honesty, openness, directness, timeliness)
- Escalate system level issues to the appropriate systems/IT support/vendor team/client. Clearly identify and action all system level errors including the scope of problems and relative urgency. Provide unambiguous documentation of problem(s) via e-mail or ticketing system to the proper team. Answer questions and assist in isolating the root cause of problems and testing solutions to ensure problems have been addressed. (Systems troubleshooting, sense of urgency, timeliness, analysis and problem solving)
- Ensure compliance with TTEC's processes, tools, and system changes. Ensure compliance TTTEC's internal policies and procedures as well as client quality requirements to prevent and/or minimize potential challenges and problems. Responsible for continuous improvement in the overall quality assurance process. Provide immediate and direct feedback to the team to ensure full compliance with client quality expectations and high performance. Provide specific training and constructive feedback on all aspects of the process. Maintain confidentiality of sensitive data (Process understanding, attention to detail, process improvement, timeliness, accountability, judgment)
Basic Qualifications
- Strong understanding of TTEC's business, core values, and goals
- Strong verbal and written communication skills
- Ability to manage multiple, complex, on-going tasks and projects
- Ability to lead and partner successfully with staff and chain of command
- Proficient English, both written and verbal
- Great interpersonal skills
- Strong attention to detail
- Open, honest, and empathetic manner when dealing with people
- High customer service orientation
- Working knowledge of database applications such as MS Office(Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint), Oracle, Kronos or ability to learn technology quickly
- High level of integrity, honesty, and judgment
- Action Planning
- Strong coaching skills
- Five years of experience working in quality assurance
Preferred Qualifications
- Knowledge of call center business
- Call center experience
- Reporting
Notice to external Recruiters and Recruitment Agencies: TTEC does not accept unsolicited headhunter and agency resumes. Headhunters and recruitment agencies may not submit resumes/CVs through this web site or directly to any employee. TTEC , and any of our subsidiaries, will not pay fees to any third-party agency or company that does not have a signed agreement with TTEC .
Employment Requirements: TTEC requires all employees hired in the United States to successfully pass a background check and depending on location and client program a drug test, as a condition of employment. TTEC is an Equal Opportunity Employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or protected veteran status.
TTEC is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. TTEC embraces and is committed to building a diverse and inclusive workforce that respects and empowers the cultures and perspectives within our global teams. We strive to reflect the communities we serve by not only delivering amazing service and technology, but also humanity. We make it a point to make sure all our employees feel valued and comfortable being their authentic selves at work. As a global company, we know diversity is our strength. It enables us to view projects and ideas from different vantage points and allows every individual to bring value to the table in their own unique way. But don't take our word for it — check out some our women in leadership and diversity awards on TTECjobs.com.
Lead Everyday w Do the Right Thing w Reach for Amazing w Seek First to Understand w Act as One w Live life Passionately. | https://www.orlandojobs.com/job/6468202/manager-quality-assurance/ |
Startup Insider: 4 questions with Hospital IQ CEO Rich Krueger on operations management
Hospital leaders are inundated with a variety of data from EHR, revenue cycle and patient feedback systems. Now beyond simply collecting data from disparate sources, knowing how to leverage these diverse datasets for actionable insights poses a new challenge.
Hospital IQ has proposed one solution: using data to mimic a hospital's daily operations. Since 2013, the Newton, Mass.-based health IT startup has provided hospitals and health systems with a data analytics platform that simulates the best way to align resources — such as on-duty staff, operating rooms and inpatient beds — with predicted patient flow to eliminate waste and streamline patient care.
"Our platform synthesizes a tremendous amount of internal data from EHR, bed management, emergency department, scheduling, surgical and financial systems, as well as external sources to get a holistic understanding of the entire hospital or health system operation and its interdependencies," explains Rich Krueger, founder and CEO of Hospital IQ. Hospitals can then use these simulations to allocate resources like staff and beds more efficiently.
Mr. Krueger spoke with Becker's Hospital Review about how data insights can give hospital leaders a "bird's-eye view" into day-to-day operations.
Editor's note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Question: What prompted you to found Hospital IQ?
Rich Krueger: I was looking for an opportunity to use technology to solve a problem that would help people. I was familiar with the problems facing the healthcare industry, and it didn't take long for me to see the operations management tools available to hospitals and health systems were extremely limited. My background is in operations, so I knew high-performance operations would be the lynchpin to enhancing quality, lowering costs and improving access to care. With upward of $250 billion in waste in healthcare on an annual basis in the U.S., we saw an opportunity to provide a software platform that incorporates operations science, math and simulation to produce actionable and prescriptive insights and recommendations that would take waste out of the healthcare system.
Q: What challenges do hospitals face with operations management?
RK: Hospitals don't have a holistic view of what's occurring operationally. In fact, too many critical operations decisions are made based on guesswork or anecdotal evidence gained from walking the floor or from past experience, and this information is often viewed in a vacuum. Without a holistic, bird's-eye view of operating room, emergency department and inpatient operations, a hospital can't understand how a change in one critical area will impact another. They are unable to anticipate and proactively course correct to prevent unnecessary stress or crisis. This ultimately has a negative effect on throughput, costs and quality.
Q: What advice do you have for other health IT companies focused on data analytics?
RK: The right analytics solutions must be easy to deploy and use, integrate with existing systems without a lot of IT lift, provide full data transparency and, to the extent possible, offer accurate, prescriptive insights and recommendations. Hospitals and their staff are drowning in data, while administrators and clinicians are caught up in the day-to-day activities of running their organizations and caring for patients. Hospitals also face increasing cost constraints that prevent them from hiring massive data teams. So our role isn't to offer another system that adds to the technology exhaustion, but to enable hospitals to use the data they already have to make real, meaningful change that will improve operational margins and patient experience.
Q: How would you characterize your company culture, and how do you foster this, as a startup?
RK: Our company culture is transparent, trusting, challenging, independent, inclusive and respectful. We strongly believe we're helping solve a critical problem facing society. That is exciting on a professional level, as well as rewarding on a personal level. We have all had experiences with the healthcare system, and it's inevitable we will continue to experience healthcare in one form or another throughout our lives. Fixing healthcare is everyone's problem. The Hospital IQ environment is one where we relish the challenge of operations management. Our employees are inspired and passionate about this mission. We don't put constraints on people. We encourage independence and inclusiveness so everyone has a tremendous amount of input on our product and support services.
More articles on health IT:
4 questions with Mount Sinai Health System CIO Kumar Chatani
8 things to know about gene-editing tech CRISPR
Startup Insider: 5 questions with Edgility CEO Balaji Ramadoss on situational awareness
© Copyright ASC COMMUNICATIONS 2020. Interested in LINKING to or REPRINTING this content? View our policies by clicking here. | https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/startup-insider-4-questions-with-hospital-iq-ceo-rich-krueger-on-operations-management.html |
Improving processes of consultation between students and administration at the University of Toronto using Design Thinking research and interview methods.
TEAM
5 staff & 4 students (including me) selected from various faculties & departments
METHOD
Qualitative Research
TIMELINE
3 months
MY ROLE
Designer
Researcher
The Challenge
Student engagement and feedback is essential to the university in developing programs and policies within the institution. However, with a student body of more than 60 thousand, student voices can get lost in the process. In this project, we focused on gathering insights about current methods of student consultation across campus and discovering potential areas for improvement from students and relevant stakeholders.
Rather than collecting quantitative data and mapping the consultation procedures at every unit within the university, the project focused exclusively on qualitative research approaches to gather more meaningful insights.
My reflections and notes
will go here.
We started by defining "student consultation" as any process that involves getting student feedback, from mandatory course evaluation surveys, interactions between student councils and the administration, to special task forces with focused group interviews. In our recruitment plan, we made sure to list contacts of under-represented groups and cover all stakeholder groups involved in the consultation process.
Over 2 weeks, we interviewed 22 participants who can be categorized as such:
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Students who are already engaged (e.g. involved in councils/ advisory boards/ student groups)
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Students representative of varied backgrounds
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Staff/faculty member with in-depth knowledge of governing bodies (e.g. people who run student advisory boards)
Here are some questions we asked:
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To staff/faculty
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What are the current methods used at your unit to gather student feedback?
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Is student representation accounted for in decision-making processes?
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On what sorts of issues do you find it important to have student input?
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To students
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Who/what is your first point of contact to ask questions about, or voice your concerns regarding the University? Why?
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Do you find these processes worthwhile?
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If you haven’t participated in consultation before, are you aware of any that has been happening on campus?
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It was difficult to grasp the concept of "student consultation" because each unit defines it differently and there were no standardized processes across U of T.
We relied on each members' personal connections, gathering people like student council leaders, student residence staff, a special task force researcher, a college principle, and more.
Key Insights
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Students want to feel heard. Whether students feel their feedback matter relates to how strongly they feel connected to the university. A sense of belonging, community and other deeper needs must be addressed for consultations to be meaningful.
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Infrastructure for communication is varied and decentralized. Each unit at the university operates in its own ways. Top-down initiatives to increase student engagement may not trickle down to front-line action. Smaller communities may have closer connections that foster stronger feedback loops, but may not be in touch with the university at large. Marginalized groups might also be hard to reach or not typically included in university decision-making processes.
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Consultation fatigue kicks in when the input doesn't lead to meaningful changes. In such a large institution, communication may get lost in the process and changes come slowly. Students feel doubtful about whether their feedback makes a difference, and staff feel powerless when they are not able to respond to students with concrete actions.
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Consistent relationship-building is key to addressing power imbalance in the consultation process. Even if students are invited to the table, they may not feel comfortable speaking their minds if there wasn't an existing relationship between the student and institution.
We gathered in a room to create an affinity map for common themes raised by the participants. It would have been helpful to also create a journey map to contextualize the pain points and insights gathered.
Reframing the Question
After uncovering insights from our research, we wanted to narrow the scope of our project question to focus the direction of our ideation process. Taking into account different stakeholder interests and structural limitations of the institution, we reframed the question as follows:
How might the university engage students in a meaningful manner that feels safe and comfortable to them?
Design Principles
We synthesized our research findings into the following points as design principles to guide us through the ideation process:
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Be mindful of accessibility and power imbalance. Account for the power dynamics between students and administration, and how that might play out in the consultation process.
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Recognize diversity in the student body. Students come from varied backgrounds, and different methods are needed to cater to different needs.
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Address structural limitations at the institution. The scale of the university is a huge challenge to standardizing operational and communication methods. Other mitigating practices like more collaboration across units and consistent ongoing programs should be in place.
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Maintain strong relationships with student groups. Ensure avenues for feedback and involvement are sound. Make sure students know how their inputs are included by following-up after consultation processes and sharing project reports or progress updates.
Brainstorming
We started by imagining what a "typical student" may experience in the process of student consultation, some pain points include:
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Feeling like their voices don't matter, so why bother?
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Fear of speaking freely in formal spaces
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Who to talk to? What resources are available?
We also considered other stakeholder positions and their challenges:
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Administrative staff who are students' first point of contact may feel powerless when they don't have means of channelling the student feedback and responding with concrete actions.
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The people in positions of power may be disconnected with the student body and need means of interacting with students.
Here are some of our best ideas:
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Mandatory workshops during Orientation to set the stage for awareness around policy, self-advocacy, methods of consultation, and resources available.
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Speaker corners/pop-up booths strategically placed in high-traffic locations, scheduled for a set time period each term. A semi-formal consultation platform that could capture important topics that can be further addressed in more formal settings.
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Critique sessions, inviting students to openly critique the university on various selected topics.
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Regular check-ins with students, e.g. personalized emails, paired staff mentors, drop-in meal sessions with faculty members.
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A landing page that redirects students to a repository of feedback and changes made over the years of corresponding projects after surveys are completed.
Shortly after our ideation meeting, the pandemic struck and the city went under lockdown. The abrupt transition disrupted further developments to the project.
Further Reccommendations
Throughout the process of ideating, we kept coming back to the same issues of the institution's decentralized structure and a lack of a specific target group that makes it difficult to cater the solution to specific needs. Due to the nature of the project being a high-level, explorational approach to investigate the current consultation landscape, there were areas we could not cover, and leave the following areas as suggestions for further research:
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Mapping existing resources: What are students' first point of contact in each unit? What are resources that are under-utilized?
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Communication among staff: How might we create opportunities for staff across different units to gather and share their experiences? Could there be best practices developed through such conversations?
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The follow-up: Could there be standardized reporting templates to expedite the follow-up process?
moving
forward
The project ended quite abruptly because the pandemic struck and the stakeholder presentation that was originally planned became more of an informal sharing session among the program participants. If the project was to continue, we could select one idea to develop low-fidelity prototypes of, and invite the community to test the solutions, which can then provide feedback for further improvements.
Lessons Learnt
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Meaning is not universal: It is impossible to create a solution that feels "meaningful" to everyone. More work could be done to investigate what "meaningful" entails to different groups of people on campus. From there, more targeted projects can be carried out to better serve different needs.
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Quality vs Quantity: The project was limited to qualitative research methods due to how the program was designed. This provided us with valuable insights from specific individuals recruited through our personal contacts. However, some quantitative approaches would have complemented the insights to provide us with a broader picture of the demographic and nature of the current landscape.
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Communication & commitment matter: Working with staff and student members with affiliations to different parts of the campus was a great learning experience. However, as each member also has full-time obligations outside of the project, it was difficult to coordinate times for all 9 members to meet. We used tools such as Slack and Sharepoint as compromise, but more face-to-face discussions would have benefitted the project more. | https://www.jingtey.com/case-study-2 |
PCAOB Addresses Emerging Audit Issues in the 2011 Forum on Auditing in the Small Business Environment
The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board today announced the 2011 schedule for its Forum on Auditing in the Small Business Environment. The first of seven events will be held in Boston, Mass., on Thursday, April 28.
The forums, which are updated annually, are designed to share important information about PCAOB activities with registered public accounting firms operating in the small business community. They also provide a unique opportunity for PCAOB Board Members and staff to hear the comments and concerns of auditors working with small businesses.
"We see the PCAOB Small Business Forum as an excellent opportunity to engage directly with auditors involved in the small business community," said James R. Doty, PCAOB Chairman. "The PCAOB uses the forums both to educate auditors about the PCAOB's programs and highlight important practice issues as well as to gain insights from participants about current issues and challenges facing the small business community."
The 2011 forum agenda features several case studies and the following discussion topics that address issues that affect audits of small businesses. These include:
- Economic outlook and audit risk update
- Risk assessment standards and audit practice alerts
- Future standard-setting priorities
- Internal control and IT control issues
- Enforcement and inspection update
A synopsis of PCAOB regulatory oversight of auditors of brokers and dealers also will be included in the forums.
In addition, staff from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Division of Corporation Finance will provide an update on recent SEC activities and observations about common financial reporting issues facing smaller public companies.
"The goal of these forums, now in their eighth year, is to open an avenue for discussion and dialogue with accounting firms that serve the small business community," said Daniel L. Goelzer, who will be hosting the Boston forum. "The 2011 program will target some of the special challenges that the Board's inspection program has highlighted in smaller company audits."
Each forum is hosted by a member of the PCAOB Board and is open to PCAOB-registered firms. There is no fee charged to participate in these events but pre-registration is required. Attendees also have the opportunity to earn continuing professional education credits.
The PCAOB held its first Small Business Forum in 2004 and has continued to hold forums since then in cities across the country, meeting with more than 4,000 representatives of smaller registered accounting firms.
Feedback received from these forums assists the PCAOB to understand and consider the unique needs and challenges of the small business community in its inspection and standard-setting processes.
The 2011 schedule is as follows:
- Boston, Mass., April 28, 2011
- Las Vegas, Nev., May 19, 2011
- New York, N.Y., July 28, 2011
- Chicago, Ill. Sept. 23, 2011
- Seattle, Wash., Oct. 5, 2011
- Dallas, Texas, Nov. 3, 2011
- St. Petersburg, Fla., Dec. 1, 2011
In addition to these seven meetings, the PCAOB will hold two other forums prepared specifically for auditors of brokers and dealers. Information will be posted regarding these forums in late spring. These forums will be held in:
For more information, including a detailed agenda of the Small Business Forum, please visit the Forum on Auditing in the Small Business Environment on the PCAOB Web site at www.pcaobus.org. If you have further registration questions, please contact Margaret Hopkins at [email protected] or (202) 207-9081. | https://pcaobus.org/news-events/news-releases/news-release-detail/pcaob-addresses-emerging-audit-issues-in-the-2011-forum-on-auditing-in-the-small-business-environment_322 |
Understanding the impact and importance of employment laws in the context of your daily work is critical to your success.
In this course, you will review best practices for understanding, identifying, preventing, and managing employee-related issues that have potential legal concerns. You will gain up-to-date information on employment laws and court cases on employment practices. You'll also engage with case scenarios to apply practical implications of those laws on policies and day-to-day operations.
Key Course Takeaways
- Examine the scope of employment laws that impact organizations, including strategies and preventive actions related to legal issues and policies
- Identify questions to ask about potential legal issues and their relationships to policies
- Discuss the impact of recent legislation and court cases defining employer-employee rights and obligations
- Discuss case scenarios with practical implications of the laws in day-to-day HR operations
- Review best practices and cases from employment lawyers
- Apply new concepts and skills through small and whole group case-study role plays, activities with feedback, discussions, Q&A, and sharing of best practices
Who Should Enroll
- Entry-level to senior HR professionals
- Global HR managers
- Employee relations managers
- Generalists seeking to move into a specialized role
- EEO, compliance and security professionals conducting internal employee-related investigations
Related Workshops
See more workshops on Employee Relations, Internal Investigations and Employment Law Workshops.
Customized Delivery
Get Updates
Have Questions?
Contact us. | https://d8-edit.ilr.cornell.edu/programs/professional-education/co111/human-resources-and-law |
Why EVV Implementation is Delayed Across the U.S.
Under the provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act, states were mandated to implement EVV for Medicaid personal care services by January 1, 2020.
However, in May 2019, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced states could apply for a Good Faith Effort (GFE) exemption and defer EVV implementation for up to one year as long as they could demonstrate they made a good faith effort to comply and encountered unavoidable delays. With the exception of Tennessee, all states applied for a GFE exemption and received approval from CMS.
Earlier this year, Applied Self-Direction, an organization that provides practical expertise for self-direction programs, hosted a webinar examining the reasons behind states’ delays to EVV implementation. The ASD webinar and the CMS-issued approval letters were both released before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. While delays were already apparent before COVID-19, due to the challenges posed by the virus, many states have delayed their implementation efforts altogether. Some states, such as Florida, are not requiring providers to submit claims through the EVV system, though they must continue to verify the delivery of services using EVV to the fullest extent possible. In this blog post, HHAeXchange will take a closer look at those challenges with insights from our team of dedicated homecare experts.
Overview
To examine the reasons behind states’ delays in EVV implementation, Applied Self-Direction (ASD) completed an in-depth review of all the GFE approval letters published by CMS, which are available here on the CMS website.
With 49 states and DC receiving approvals for GFE exemptions, there was clearly a universal need for additional time in order to implement EVV. Note, however, that requesting and receiving an extension does not mean that these states haven’t already started implementing, or don’t plan to implement, EVV before January 2021.
ASD members were polled as to whether they felt the states they were assigned to would be fully implemented by the new deadline. Below are their responses:
The varying responses from Financial Management Services (FMS) providers reflect the fact that states face different challenges in implementing EVV and some may be more impacted by certain obstacles than others.
The Top 10 Reasons for Delays (and then some)
In their requests to CMS for GFE exemptions to delay EVV, states were required to list their reasons for needing an extension. ASD analyzed the reasons cited in the CMS-issued approval letters and found the following to be the most commonly noted:
Prolonged RFP Process
Technology Issues
Competing State Priorities
Budget Limitations
Provider Engagement and Training
State Processes
Stakeholder Engagement and Training
Responding to Stakeholder Feedback
Accommodating Unique Issues of Self-Direction
Staffing Limitations
Additional Reasons for Delay:
Adjusting to Guidance Released by CMS
Vendor Issues
Complexity of Coordinating with Numerous Agencies
Issues Identified in Implementation
Coordinating with FMS Providers
State Legislation
Negotiations with Unions
Implementing a New Waiver
ASD members also reported their concerns regarding issues reported by the states:
1. Prolonged RFP Process
According to the GFE letters, 21 states cited a prolonged RFP process as a main reason for delay. ASD noted obstacles such as protests prior to awarding a contract; the need to incorporate stakeholder feedback; the volume of questions from potential vendors, prolonged contract negotiations, and veto of a budget bill as contributing factors.
ASD noted that states that have yet to begin the RFP process should expect delays. Completing an RFP process is an early step in EVV implementation, and future complications are bound to arise, such as those involving technology.
2. Technology Issues
Among all of the states that cited concerns about technology in their letters to CMS, the most common technology issue reported was “system interoperability”.
According to the Cures Act, the term ‘interoperability’ means health information technology that – “(A) enables the secure exchange of electronic health information with, and use of electronic health information from, other health information technology without effort on the part of the user; “(B) allows for complete access, exchange, and use of all electronically accessible health information for authorized use under applicable State or Federal law; and “(C) does not constitute information blocking as defined in section 3022 (a).”
The need for custom configuration was also noted by a handful of states. “Every state Medicaid Agency is designed to support the unique needs of their specific stakeholder populations, and is governed not only by federal laws but also state-specific legislation,” said Kimberly Glenn, Senior Vice President of Government Health Plans at HHAeXchange. “This allows each state agency to select vendors and systems to better serve their members, but also brings with it some difficulties for integration and interoperability. Successful integration in one state in no way means that same configuration will be a simple plug and play solution for the next state, especially given only a handful of EVV systems have been deployed at the state level to date.”
Glenn continued, “To succeed in this space, EVV vendors will have to provide some degree of configuration but cannot be a completely customizable offering. In order to achieve this balance and avoid technology issues, businesses should look to vendors with open API interfaces, powerful business rules engines, and a strong and thorough test plan. From the State’s end, the challenge lies in the availability of resources and a timeline often governed by federal deadlines. Early adoption is critical to not only allow for proper testing and configuration, but also to engage stakeholders and increase buy-in to reduce provider abrasion.”
3. Competing State Priorities
Fourteen states were challenged by balancing EVV implementation with competing state priorities, such as:
Other CMS/Medicaid Initiatives, including Medicaid Expansion, CMS Corrective Action Plan (CAP) recommendations
Managed care transitions
Technology investments, including modernization of Medicaid Management Information System (MMIS)
Response to other issues such as natural disasters and the opioid crisis
These obstacles are also closely related to staffing and budget limitations, ASD noted.
4. Budget Limitations
Among states that were held back in their EVV implementation by budget limitations, several noted that their funding hinged on state legislation. The overall start-up and maintenance costs of EVV implementation can be difficult for states to predict, and for some is still unknown.
5. Provider Engagement & Training
Many states said they needed more time to proactively conduct outreach to providers, while in other states, providers were slow to implement EVV or needed more time for training to address technical issues and other problems. The nature of provider issues seems to vary in states and is heavily dependent on their chosen EVV implementation model.
6. State Processes
Nine states cited various idiosyncratic state processes that have drawn out EVV implementation, such as:
Lengthy RFP/project approval process
Mandatory timeframe for budget approval
Promulgation process for regulations
7. Stakeholder Engagement & Training
Several states needed additional time to gather feedback from stakeholders to inform EVV implementation and to train them to participate in EVV. Outreach to participants has been time-intensive and often requires a more hands-on approach than expected. In New Jersey, for example, the state specifically sought more time to allow outreach to individuals who self-direct their services.
8. Responding to Stakeholder Feedback
When states engage stakeholders, they often learn new information that may cause delays in implementation. Several states had already engaged stakeholders for feedback and needed to delay implementation to allow time to respond to stakeholder issues such as concerns around onboarding, training, or policy, and changes to EVV business requirements.
For example, in New York, the state sufficiently demonstrated that it had made a good faith effort to comply with EVV requirements of the 21st Century Cures Act by completing a statewide environmental scan and issuing a Request for Information (RFI).
“Through these and other stakeholder engagement activities, such as regional listening sessions and the creation of an EVV webpage and email inbox, the State published a summary of the feedback in an EVV Stakeholder Convening Report,” said Andrew Segal, former Director of the Division of Long Term Care in New York State. “In its Good Faith Effort exemption request to CMS, the State cited unavoidable delays in implementing its EVV system, including additional time needed to conduct a survey and three rounds of follow-up to adequately assess providers´ EVV awareness and implementation status, and ensure the State is able to obtain input from a full range of stakeholders.”
9. Accommodating Unique Issues for Self-Direction
ASD has heard that some states are implementing EVV in traditional services before rolling out to self-directed programs. Therefore, they expect some states to encounter additional delays as they roll-out EVV with self-direction programs in the coming year. Additional delays related to self-direction may include the need to develop an alternate EVV solution as a result of CMS’s August 2019 guidance on web-based electronic timesheets, additional software testing and training required, and implementing workaround for self-directed individuals who do not have access to cell phones and/or computers.
10. Staffing Limitations
Seven states noted “staffing limitations” such as staff turnover, competing priorities for a small staff, limited budget to make new hires, and staff vacancies as delays to EVV implementation. In some states, there may only be one or two people focused on EVV, which indeed poses a challenge.
Meet Your State’s EVV Deadline
While implementing EVV takes time, the benefits are worth it. In addition to Cures Act compliance, states that successfully implemented EVV have achieved a reduction in fraud, waste, and abuse; streamlined operations; improved member care, and more.
If you still have questions about EVV, HHAeXchange is here to help. We are the leading homecare management platform with the most advanced EVV capabilities in the market. To learn more about HHAeXchange can help you meet your state’s EVV deadline, schedule a demo. | https://www.hhaexchange.com/resources/blog/why-evv-implementation-is-delayed |
As the Outcomes and Improvement Manager, you will lead Flourish Australia’s monitoring and evaluation (outcomes and improvement) program. In this role, you will:
- Implement the Outcomes and Improvement Framework and continuously review the approach to implementing the framework.
- Provide meaningful feedback to the people we support about their recovery.
- Communicate data insights to staff, managers, the SLT and funders.
- Build capacity across the organisation to better understand monitoring and evaluation, and how to gather and use data to highlight performance and outcomes.
Selection Criteria
- Masters degree, or equivalent, in health, behavioural sciences or social policy.
- Extensive experience in using monitoring and evaluation frameworks, including their successful implementation.
- Experience in analysing quantitative and qualitative data, and co-design/co-evaluation processes, including human research ethics.
- Experience in embedding outcome focussed reporting in organisations and teams.
- Experience of working in monitoring or evaluation teams and the ability to develop and manage people within those teams.
- Demonstrated experience in using outcomes data to improve services.
About the Benefits
- Attractive annual salary starting at $130,000
- Tax-Free Salary Packaging available up to $15,900
- Family-friendly working conditions
- Flexible work from home options
About the organisation
Flourish Australia is one of Australia’s most experienced community mental health organisations. For over 60 years, we have provided individual support to people with a lived experience of a mental health issue for them to live purposeful lives.
Our services are comprehensive and our proven approach is highly personalised because each person’s experience will be different and their needs, as an individual, are unique. We start by fully understanding an individuals strengths, the challenges they face and what flourishing looks like for them. Together we set goals, connect individuals with the right people, support services and opportunities to meet their needs.
Everyone who works at Flourish Australia is dedicated to providing people experiencing mental health issues with the day-to-day support and encouragement they need to create a rewarding life for themselves in their community.
How to apply
Please quote in application: Outcomes and Improvement Manager via Pro Bono Australia. | https://probonoaustralia.com.au/jobs/2021/05/outcomes-and-improvement-manager/ |
JP Morgan Chase & Co. [JPM] announced former Chief of Staff of the Army Gen. Raymond Odierno was appointed to a senior advisory position effective Sept. 1, the company said Thursday.
Odierno retired from military service on Aug. 14, after serving as Chief of Staff of the Army since September 2011.
He is to provide strategic advice and global insights to the chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, the board of directors, and members of the operating committee on a range of issues including international planning, country risk analysis, technology, operations, and cyber security, the company said. Odierno will also provide expertise to help structure and carry out the firm’s leadership development training programs and assist in other leadership and workforce development issues, JP Morgan Chase said.
The company said Odierno is also expected to represent the company through engagement with clients, government officials, and policy makers in the United States and internationally. He will participate in the firm’s regional advisory groups in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Asia-Pacific region, and Latin America.
“I am proud to announce that General Odierno has joined JPMorgan as a senior adviser. Ray has dedicated his life to serving our country, rising to the top of the Army with proven leadership that delivers results. His experience, vision and impressive track record of success when confronting overwhelming challenges will provide significant value to our leadership team, the firm and our clients across a wide range of issues,” Dimon said in a statement.
“I’m excited to work with Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon, a leader in the financial industry, and to have the opportunity to contribute to JPMorgan Chase – a globally recognized industry leader,” Odierno added.
Odierno will also advise on the company’s military and veterans affairs strategy and execution as a member of the Military and Veterans Affairs Advisory Council. There he will engage on the company’s stated commitment to help military members, veterans, and their families achieve success in their post-service lives through employment, housing, and education. JP Morgan awarded over 800 homes to veterans and their families through nonprofit partners and hired over 9,100 veterans, the company said.
Odierno served in the military for over 39 years. Before being appointed as Army Chief of Staff, he previously served as commander of the 4th Infantry Division during Operation Iraqi Freedom, the day-to-day Commanding General of all coalition forces in Iraq during the “surge,” Commanding General of all coalition forces in Iraq, and Commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command. He is known as one of the key architects of the 2007-2008 Iraqi surge. | https://www.defensedaily.com/odierno-appointed-senior-advisor-at-jp-morgan-chase/business-financial/ |
16.10 - 16.55: Holiday Pay: Whats Happening?
We've seen large scale change in Holiday Pay and calculations. This session will review how the new legislation is working, changes to management of varied hours staff, case law and what's happening with enforcement
Julie Northover, Payroll Specialist, PayPartner
16.10 - 16.55: Optimisation and global management
A review of the implications of a global work force and technology
18.30 - 23.30: Reward 300 Gala Dinner
The highly anticipated Reward 300 Gala Dinner will reveal the 2020 index.
From 08.00: Registration, coffee and croissants
Network with other delegates and enjoy refreshments before the conference starts
09.10 - 09.45: Parliamentary keynote
Sir David will be discussing the ambitions of the new UK government and what this means for the Brexit negotiations as well as the structure of government and its approach to technological change
Sir David Lidington KCB, CBE
09.45 - 10.30: Employment law
Our legal expert takes us through key areas that have affected the HR and payroll industry with respect to employment law
Mike Tremeer, Employment Partner, Fladgate
10.30 - 11.00: Tea and coffee served
11.00 - 11.45: Breakout Sessions
11.00 - 11.45: International payroll and HR update
This session will look at key payroll changes happening around the globe and highlight some of the issues you should consider exploring further if you have responsibility for payrolls overseas
Tim Kelsey, Global Payroll Consultant, Kelsey's Payroll Services
11.00 - 11.45: Plan, process, manage, report
Whats hot and whats not when reviewing employee benefits, we look at case studies and benefit packages to understand value in real organisations
Fern Brooks, Payroll Lecturer, The Payroll Centre
11.00 - 11.45: Optimisation and global management
A review implications of a global workforce and technology
Considering the changes made over the last few years and looking forward at the future of pensions.This panel will also discuss the pension dashboard and what this will mean for pension saving in the UK.
Dave Roberts, Head of Pensions, Benefits and Wellbeing, Virgin Media
13.30 - 14.10: Breakout Session
13.30 - 14.10: Trends and challenges in payroll
This panel session looks at all areas of payroll, whether that be in-house, accounting firms or bureaus, the challenges they face and what trends we expect to see in the next decade
Sophia Baker, Head of Payroll, Harrods
Jim Woodlingfield, Payroll and Pensions Manager, NCG
13.30 - 14.10: In-house panel perspective: Brexit, Britian's left the building. Now what?
Following months of political upheaval and ambiguity affecting all areas of business; this session will address the impact Brexit has had on payroll. The panel of speakers will openly and honestly discuss the repercussions, how their payroll operations have been affected and the work ahead for them
13.30 - 14.10: UK devolution in work and payroll
The United Kingdom is becoming increasingly disunited as the implications of devolution impact UK payroll professionals on a day-to-day basis. This session will look at each of the devolved nations and the issues that we have to be consider in our working lives
Ian Holloway, Head of Legislation and Compliance, Cintra
14.15 - 15.00: Policies: Managing staff and leave
This session looks at how we manage the ever changing workforce and how we look at all areas of leave now and in the future. From maternity and paternity leave to bereavement and medical leave. As well as how best to engage employees whilst on leave
14.15 - 15.00: Company Transparency: Its not just about the pay gap
With employer reporting requirements increase over the recent years, this session will examine current and future requirements, from pay gaps to worker status
Laura Todd, Global Inclusion and Wellbeing Director, Capita
Megan O'Shaughnessy, Head of Reward - Consumer, BT
Andrew West, Head of Reward UK & Ireland, BOC
14.15 - 15.00: The payroll professionals roundtable
Join this roundtable discussion on payroll today and in the future. An opportunity for you to discuss challenges in your day-to-day payroll and hear from industry peers on how they are tackling these
15.00 - 15.15: Tea and coffee served
This session looks at staff and management development in payroll, the routes to improve both knowledge, skills, education and qualifications. As well as tools available to ensure your team is the best it can be
Chair: Amber-Ainsley Pritchard, Editor, Reward Strategy
Karen Beckett, Head of Reward and Payroll, Dorset Healthcare University
Michelle Sutton, Head of Compensation and Reward, SUEZ
Stacey Hooper, Payroll Supervisor, Virgin Atlantic Airways
To stay up to date with the latest news and updates of the agenda via the button below: | https://www.reward-strategy.com/payroll-reward-conference/full-agenda2020 |
8:00 A.M. - 10:00 A.M.
The ABC-VA Hampton Roads region is hosting an Estimator Forum to address challenges associated with Estimator Development & Continuing Education, Use of Multiple Software Platforms for ITB
Distribution, and to gather feedback from our membership related to challenges being encountered.
The lack of Estimator development, both for Prime and Subcontractors, is one of the primary issues facing our region. The intent of the forum is to gather critical input from our membership as
necessary to develop curriculum, creation of certification program(s), assist in the establishment of best practices for the region, and to discuss ethics in Estimating.
The event is limited to one (1) representative per member company and space is limited to 35 attendees. This will be a morning session to accommodate potential conflict with afternoon
bids. Registrants are encouraged to submit discussion topics in advance of the event. If your business is facing challenges related to estimating, please attend.
Location
ABC-VA Hampton Roads Training Facility
5505 Robin Hood Road
Norfolk, VA 23513
*Student parking is located in the back of the building. Enter through Door #21.*
COST
$35 per person (Members Only)
*Continental breakfast included
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Contact
Email
Jamie Carrow
or call her at: (757) 855-8220
Please note a reservation constitutes a financial commitment unless cancellations are made 48 hours in advance. | http://www.abcva.org/home/ctl/viewdetail/mid/9207/itemid/25123/d/20181016 |
Amazon is looking for a Network Operations Manager to build and lead a team of highly skilled Network Engineers. This team is the escalation point of contact for all critical network issues in Amazon Fulfillment Centers and Amazon Logistics sites globally. The team is responsible for providing Tier 3 support for the Amazon network infrastructure and other specialized technical services. The support provided by this team will have global reach and support tens of thousands of Amazon Associates.
As a Network Operations Manager you will be responsible for leading a team of 6-8 Network Engineers. In addition, you will be responsible for end-to-end problem management for our network infrastructure to include coordinating with other engineering and support organizations, and vendors to drive solutions. At Amazon, we ask our technical managers to be strong engineers who can dive deep and get involved in addition to being strong managers.
As a manager you will be expected to drive operational excellence in everything we do. This includes creating processes, procedures, and automation to improve efficiency in our day-to-day tasks and projects. You will work closely on supporting our internal customers and ensuring that their needs and issues are being addressed.
You will be expected to drive quality into the metrics we report to assist us in focusing on the areas that give us the best ROI. This includes measurement of our resolution rates, project plans, and response times.
You will own all facets of performance and career management for the team. Regular one-on-one meetings with all team members are required. You will be expected to provide both technical and ‘soft skill’ mentoring in order to maintain a well-rounded, world-class organization. This includes project management, quality audits, and coordination of training sessions with senior-level engineers as well as day-to-day oversight of the team including scheduling.
You will be integral to developing and improving incident and change management within the Networking space. Responsibilities include driving initiatives regarding improvements to existing tools & processes and providing feedback on new practices & procedures in order to scale with the rapid expansion of the Amazon platform and customer base.
You will take the lead in hiring quality personnel who not only fit the needs of the current organization but also will allow the team to scale with platform and service growth. You will coordinate with Amazon and external recruiting staff to evaluate potential candidates, participate in initial phone screens and provide relevant guidance and feedback during on-site interview loops. You will also be responsible for ensuring that proper training takes place for all new hires.
This is an amazing opportunity in terms of responsibility, interesting challenges and high visibility. We truly are looking for the highest quality candidates, so you should expect a rigorous interview process.
· A Bachelor’s degree from an accredited university.
· Experience supporting enterprise level network infrastructure.
· 2+ years managing networking support teams or engineering teams.
· 7+ years managing technical teams.
· Experience as Escalation Engineer or with problem management.
· Former role as a network engineer.
· Demonstrated ability to automate basic tasks in Perl, Python, Ruby or Java.
· CCNA/CCNP/JNCIA/JNCIS certifications a plus.
· Excellent interpersonal skills; ability to work successfully with teams across the organization, including Engineering, Program Management, Operations, and Senior Leadership. | http://cciejobs.com/jobs/network-operations-manager/ |
Use this worksheet as a guide for things to consider as you develop your field study opportunity.
Internship Programs Under the Fair Labor Standards Act (PDF)
Engage: Annotated Bibliography
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Professional Organizations
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NACE - National Association of Colleges and Employers
CIWEA - California Internship & Work Experience Association
Roles and Responsibilities
What is the placement site’s role?
Placements sites provide a learning environment where students actively engage in the day-to-day operations of the site and conduct research and observations. Supervisors provide 1:1 supervision, feedback and mentoring.
What is the student’s role?
The role of the student at most placement sites is that of a participant observer. Students are expected to be professional, engaged, inquisitive, and ready to learn and contribute.
What are the supervisor’s responsibilities?
- Recruit and accept qualified students on a quarterly basis for 1 full academic year. Sites that are accepted mid-year are expected to continue through June of the following academic year.
- Notify all students who apply about availability of opportunities
- Structure the field work to provide a learning opportunity directly related to curriculum in Social Ecology
- Develop and assign responsibilities, so that students may learn both technical and non-technical skills
- Clearly communicate expectations and responsibilities to students.
- Adhere to program deadlines
- Schedule hours during the placement period so that student can complete the hours required.
- Provide training, supervision and feedback to each student -approximately 1 hour per week
- Confirm students in field study placements are authorized by Social Ecology by reviewing field study Agreement Forms
- Provide a verbal and written evaluation to the student and certify the number of hours the student completed via the evaluation form
- Contact Field Study Staff if there are any problems or issues that cannot be resolved with the student
- Nominate outstanding students for recognition
How should opportunities be structured?
Ideal placement sites provide students with a pre-professional experience and structure activities that allow the student to: | https://fieldstudy.soceco.uci.edu/pages/best-practices |
At Defence Science and Technology Agency (DSTA), we have a shared purpose – to develop leading-edge technological and engineering solutions for the defence and security of our nation.
Get plugged into what’s happening at DSTA and read the latest media releases and speeches.
Phase 1 of the Next Generation Procurement System (NGPS) was launched in May 2018. Developed by DSTA, the NGPS is an integrated system to address obsolescence issues faced by existing procurement systems, and to facilitate smart procurement through automated, end-to-end processes. The system improves productivity, strengthens governance and helps to achieve value for money.
Manual processes, such as ranking of tender returns, have been digitalised with the introduction of NGPS which enables a shorter turnaround time. To ensure compliance with procurement policies, the NGPS incorporated built-in rules and auto-checks. Process automation was also designed into the NGPS for operational efficiency and reduction in human error.
Incorporating business information analytics, the interactive dashboards of the NGPS provide both strategic and tactical insights into challenges faced by procurement businesses. For instance, insights gained from the contract renewal dashboard would enable targeted interventions to avoid renewal lapses.
Furthermore, the analytics developed can identify possible collusion and circumvention of procurement rules, and track the volume of transactions by staff to enable effective allocation of work and manpower.
The DSTA team strove to design a user-centric interface that is aligned with users’ mental models of day-to-day work. Process tips, templates and contextual information including ‘how-to’ videos and FAQs are also made easily accessible in NGPS to enhance accuracy of transactions. In addition, the NGPS provides an online ticket system for users to request for technical support or provide their feedback without having to call the helpdesk separately. | https://www.dsta.gov.sg/programme-centres/enterprise-it/developing-smart-procurement |
Last month, we fielded our second mini survey to gather perspectives and insights from our shelter and rescue network about the changing landscape in 2020.
Here are some key findings from the survey, which went to about 1,600 shelters and rescues that have applied for or received PEDIGREE Foundation grants or signed up for our newsletter.
Fostering Continues to be Critical
As was true in the spring, shelters and rescues continue to use fostering extensively to keep dogs in homes. In our June survey, respondents said the number of dogs in shelters had risen, on average, by about 8 percent during the spring.
In August, we asked how their use of fostering had changed since April. Nearly 50% said it had stayed the same and 35% said it had grown.
Still Working in New Ways
During the pandemic, shelters and rescues across the country have had to find new ways of working, from launching “curbside adoption” programs to introducing pets to families via Zoom.
In August, nearly 75% of our survey respondents told us they are still not open for walk-in adoptions, and about half are using technology to facilitate their operations.
Exploring Transport Challenges
Following up on write-in comments from our spring mini survey, we asked shelters and rescues to tell us about the transportation challenges they’ve been facing during the pandemic.
They ranked as the top three issues:
- Source shelters unable to partner due to regional or state travel restrictions
- Source shelters unable to partner due to financial challenges
- Source shelters having a lack of pets available for transport
When we invited open-ended feedback about transport challenges, we heard a wide range of comments and concerns, including:
- “We’re bogged down waiting for veterinary care.”
- “Transporters unwilling to drive as far or as often.”
- “We’re trying to transition to a fully foster-based rescue.”
- “Covid-19 is exhausting.”
- “Community surrenders have increased exponentially.”
- “Hard to find drivers to do the transport.”
- “We believe animal intakes will increase as unemployment benefits run out.”
- “Affordable spay/neuter is the biggest problem for us during COVID-19.”
- “We are full of dogs who are in limbo due to the courts being closed for a long time.”
- “Fewer transport drivers want the exposure associated with travel.”
- “Unable to afford health certificates and quarantine prior to transport.”
The Strain on Shelters and Rescues is Great
Again in August, we asked shelters and rescues to rank the key challenges they’re facing – and again the highest ranked concerns were financial.
Organizations continue to miss the fundraising opportunities they typical count on, like events and adoption fees. They also reported a lack of funds for day-to-day operations.
Please Help us Help
As shelters and rescues continue working to help the dogs in their care and get them into homes, we’re working on how we can help.
Since April, PEDIGREE Foundation has awarded more than 100 Disaster Relief Grants for COVID-19 to shelters and rescues across the country. We hope our annual grants will provide even more support, with help from our generous donors.
If you can help, please donate here. The more we can assist shelters and rescues, the more dogs can get the loving homes they deserve.
Check below for our full August infographic (click to download as a PDF!). Click here to see the June 2020 results. | https://www.pedigreefoundation.org/aug2020survey/ |
A reduction in anti-social and criminal behaviour in Rotorua’s CBD has resulted from a tougher line in policing the area.
Stung late last year by pointed comments from business leaders, the Rotorua Lakes Council and local police joined forces to clamp down on unsavoury activities which included intimidation and begging.
Vigilance has increased through the imposition of safety patrols and CCTV camera operations to catch miscreants.
A safety campaign augmented by the two bodies is having a positive impact, the council says in an end of week statement issued on Friday.
“People’s safety is paramount,” Rotorua mayor Steve Chadwick says.
“And people should not have to put up with anti-social and criminal behaviour while they’re going about their day-to-day business.
“It’s really pleasing to hear that this initiative is having a positive effect and people are feeling safer.”
The council is aiming for “a safe and friendly” inner city environment for businesses, staff and the public through increased patrols and CCTV monitoring to deter anti-social and criminal behaviour and to deal promptly with emerging issues or incidents.
Since December 11, police, security staff and the Safe City Guardians have increased their presence in the inner city and are patrolling together whenever possible with patrols constant between 8am and 4am daily.
Feedback from members of the public and businesses has contributed to the pattern of improved behaviour.
Police and Council jointly launched the summer safety initiative in December following increased concern about CBD safety; a police survey revealed many people felt unsafe in the inner city at night.
Increased monitoring of the council’s CCTV footage from Thursdays to Sundays enabled more potential issues to be prevented and/or people who do engage in anti-social or criminal behaviour to be identified, the council said.
Daily briefings were held to share information.
“With locals on holiday and visitors, the number of people in our CBD swells during the busy summer period so it’s important to ensure everyone feels safe,” Chadwick says.
Rotorua Police Area Commander, Inspector Anaru Pewhairangi, says working more closely with Council’s Safe City Guardians and having security staff in the CBD is providing additional support for sometimes stretched police resources.
“It means if we are having to deal with issues elsewhere, we know we still have eyes and ears on the ground in the CBD who can deter bad behaviour and/or alert us if something does develop.”
The joint initiative will continue until at least the end of February. It will be reviewed earlier to determine if a need exists for it to continue. Cost considerations will be taken into account. | https://sunlive.co.nz/news/197424-inner-city-safety-campaign-working-rotorua.html |
On March 26 the US Presidential Commission into the Study of Bioethical Issues released the second volume of its report in developments in neuroscience . Volume II of Grey Matters: Topics at the intersection of neuroscience, ethics, and society examines three key areas in which neuroscience intersects with ethics.
Perhaps the most topical - considering media discussion surrounding the sentencing of Boston Bombing perpetrator Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, is the role of neuroscience in the courtroom. The report catalogues the various contributions that neuroscience could potentially make to our understanding of human action and the criminal mind, and also examines ethical concerns such as the potential for misinterpretation and overstatement of the implications of neuroscientific research.
Among a number of recommendations, the authors of the report call for educational tools to help judges and lawyers grasp the rudiments of neuroscience.
"Government bodies and professional organizations, including legal societies and nonprofit organizations, should develop, expand, and promote training resources, primers, and other educational tools that explain the application of neuroscience to the legal system for distribution to members of the public, jurors, judges, attorneys, and others."
The report also cautions against the perennial temptation to overstate the implications of scientific research.
"Neuroscientists, attorneys, judges, and members of the media should not overstate or rely too heavily on equivocal neuroscientific evidence to draw conclusions about behavior, motivations, intentions, or legal inferences."
"The key issue here is that a sophisticated knowledge of science, its strengths and limitations, is entered into the deliberative process during court proceedings. And this will require a back and forth interaction between sophisticated neuroscientists and sophisticated legal minds." | http://lifeissues.net/writers/sym/sym_163neuroscienceandlaw.html |
There is often an open argument on the existence of good and bad, with most people arguing that the good and bad cannot exist together. This means that any given individual would have to choose between being good and being bad. The reality however, as will be argued in this paper is that people are often motivated to act depending on their circumstances and desires. It is often not particularly decided that an individual would only partake in good or bad deeds. One’s actions are simply as a result of their motivations and desires regardless of whether they end badly, or they end well. While most people abhor bad acts, in most cases, people do not intend to do bad things; they just fail to see that their actions would have a bad outcome.
Desires and Motivations
People are driven by their desires depending on their specific contexts. In A good man is hard to find, the grandmother starts thinking about her younger days and she starts to tell the children a story from her happier memories. The children are engrossed in the story that they persuade their father to take them to the house in the story, which would imply a side trip that deviates from their planned trip. This turns out to be a mistake as the grandmother eventually remembers that the house she had been talking about was actually in Tennessee. The underlying desire in this case was simply a moment to relive her youth, but she ends up misleading the family. Secondly, upon realizing her mistake, she startles the cat, which in the end causes her son to lose control of the car and they end up having an accident. In this story, it can be appreciated that one’s actions are not in any way guided by a desire to do good or to do bad. The actions are mainly guided by desires or motivations that are not in any way hinged on the laws of right and wrong. The grandmother in this story simply felt a string urge to appreciate the good old days especially after her conversation with Red Sammy, the owner of the old diner where they had stopped for lunch. The present had become such a brutal and scary place that the poor woman simply could not stop looking back with nostalgia.
Another context for desires and motivations would be in the character of The Misfit. In the story, this individual is introduced as a dangerous murderer with a record of accomplishment of taking innocent lives without a specific justification for his actions. When he shows up at the scene of the accident, he is even very polite to the grandmother and he seems to try to help the family. The desire of this murderer is not in any way linked to giving pain but rather liberating the people into an afterlife. When The Misfit is arguing with Bobby Lee after killing the entire family, he states that there is no real fun in life. In this instance, it becomes clear that the murderer believes that life is faulty in one way or another and thus that dying is a better option. In his own twisted way, he desires to ‘help’ people by freeing them from life and possibly sending them into another better phase where they may be able to enjoy some happiness. The Misfit’s ideology on life may have been borne out of his own experiences while growing up but they give him a strong desire to inflict not pain but peace, through death. Thus without trying to justify the murders, it can be noted that the actions portrayed by this character are not hinged on the definition of good and bad. Rather, they are based on the perpetrator’s desires and motivations founded on their perspective on life. This perspective is in this case responsible for distorting the line between bad and good from The Misfit’s point of view.
Outcomes and Intentions
In the story, The Misfit and the grandmother present clear contexts within which outcomes and intentions can be considered based on their impact on defining good and bad. The grandmother did not intend to send the family to the wrong place with her story about a house from her younger years. She was simply reminiscing on the good old days and in this case, her intentions were very noble. She could not be faulted for having good memories. In addition, when she involuntarily kicked the cat and caused a commotion in the car it was not intentional either. She had been startled to realize that she had actually made a mistake in directing the family to the house in her memories. These were the intentions in the story but their outcomes were not as pleasant. First, it is noted that the grandmother ends up misleading the family based on her memories that arouse the children’s interest in the house. In this scenario, the family ends up deviating from their original trip and wasting more time on the road for nothing. Secondly, when she kicks the cat and causes the commotion in the car they end up having an accident. This is yet another bad outcome from an act that was not ill-intended. The grandmother is a good woman, as even The Misfit contends. She however can be argued to be the source of the family’s troubles considering she is even the one who flags down The Misfit to help them after the accident. She would however never put the family in danger intentionally.
As for The Misfit, it can be argued that his intentions are also not as bad. The Misfit is an escaped prisoner with a biased perspective on life. He seems to believe that there are not many positive things in the life that he knows and thus the better option for people is to die. In the story, The Misfit kills the entire family without really overthinking it mainly because he feels that he is doing them a favor. He could be right within his specific perspective on life but he ends up taking the lives of an entire family. Taking a life is not justifiable in most circumstances regardless of the specific beliefs that one holds. The intentions of The Misfit’s deeds in this case may or may not be right but the outcomes of these deeds are obviously and definitely wrong.
Conclusion
Generally, when most people act, they believe that they are doing the right thing based on their specific desires and motivations. The grandmother was motivated to tell the children about the house because she felt a strong desire to relive the past. The Misfit on the other hand felt the desire to liberate people from their lives, which he believed were full of misery. These desires and motivations are what led both characters to act in the way they did, with the outcomes of their actions failing to match their initial intentions. Most people are blinded by their desires and motivations that they fail to evaluate the actual outcomes of their deeds. This is how they end up doing wrong things and even endangering their lives and those of others around them. | https://great-essays.com/essays/battle-of-the-good-and-the-bad/ |
I have done research on belief in COVID-19 conspiracy belief through a survey (March/April 2020) and a systematic review of the antecedents and consequences of these beliefs.
Review of COVID-19 conspiracy belief
COVID-19 conspiracy theories emerged almost immediately after the beginning of the pandemic, and the number of believers does not appear to decline. Believing in these theories can negatively affect adherence to safety guidelines and vaccination intentions, potentially endangering the lives of many. Thus, one part of successfully fighting the pandemic is to understand the antecedents and consequences of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs.
We developed a new theoretical framework, the dual-inheritance model of conspiracy beliefs, which proposes that a combination of content and context antecedents, more specifically uncertainty-information and threat-trust pathways, underlies conspiracy beliefs, and is linked to epistemic and existential motives, respectively. We use this framework to present a narrative synthesis of COVID-19 conspiracy belief research from 85 articles, identified and appraised through a systematic review.
We evaluate the contribution of individual difference variables (demographic variables, personality traits, coping with threat and uncertainty), beliefs, biases, and attitudes (epistemically suspect beliefs, thinking styles and cognitive biases, attitudes towards science), and social factors (group identities, trust in authorities, social media) to COVID-19 conspiracy theories. We discuss the consequences of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs in regard to safeguarding behaviours (hygiene, distancing, and mask-wearing), self-centred (hoarding) and misguided behaviours (pseudoscientific practices), vaccination intentions, mental health and negative social consequences (e.g., discrimination and violence).
We conclude that our model is supported by the findings: low levels of information and trust but high perceived uncertainty and threat underlie the antecedents of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs and their consequences. Research is urgently needed to address potential interventions to (re-)establish trust and provide accessible information about COVID-19, and recommend that future research considers both pathways simultaneously.
Preprint available here.
See here for a blog post with the synopsis of the cognitive aspects of COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs.
The Role of Trust and Information
The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis, and the spread of the virus needs to be curbed. We hypothesized that trust in authorities is required for informed adherence to guidelines, meaning populism and conspiracy thinking are risk factors in the effort to curb the pandemic. Through a large survey in twelve countries worldwide (N = 7,755), we show that adherence to protective guidelines is driven by concern about COVID-19, perceived risk, female gender, feeling informed, and trust in scientists. Endorsement of conspiracy belief that the virus is artificially created was predicted by distrust in scientists, trust in populist governments, and distrust in non-populist governments. Conspiracy belief was associated with trust in Facebook and distrust in institutional websites (WHO, government and healthcare). This research shows that trust in authorities and access to trustworthy information is paramount to encourage adherence to safety guidelines and avoid conspiracy thinking during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Preprint available here. | https://valerievanmulukom.com/conspiracy-belief/ |
The violent acts of suicide and homicide sadly affect the lives of many individuals in the U. S. and abroad each year. Further, these two acts often remain generally misunderstood with regard to the individual motivations or underlying reasons for the decision to engage in either suicide or homicide. In some instances, we are provided some insight into the individual’s thinking or intentions via notes, journals, or speech to others that may include ideations of intent to commit suicide or homicide. In today’s world of social media, there are many examples found on websites that include individual expressions, messages, texts, declarations of intent, and even the acts of suicide and homicide posted for others to witness. The expanse of television news coverage and continually growing use of surveillance cameras in society today often captures awful images of suicides, homicides, mass shootings, mass acts of homicide, and acts of terror intended to inflict mass homicide and the maiming of numerous individuals. Often, the first questions that arise in the media, law enforcement agencies and the general public include “Who would do such a horrible thing,” “What could possibly motivate someone to commit such an act,” and “What was going on in the perpetrator’s head before, during or after committing this heinous act.” The answers to these questions sometimes come to light after an exhaustive analysis of the event, yet at other times we simply find the answers to such questions unanswered.
This book examines and enlightens research into the possible motivathe findings shed invaluable insight upon the motivations, the thinking, and the underlying reasons . . . | https://www.questia.com/library/120093203/the-common-language-of-homicide-and-suicide-evidence |
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