Journal articles on the topic 'Screens (furniture)'

Coromandel lacquer screen is a Chinese folding screen made from the 17th century to 19th century in China. The screen is usually about 250cm high, 600cm width and consisting of twelve panels. Although these screens were made in China during the Qing dynasty, they received their name from India’s Coromandel coast, where they were transshipped to Europe in the late 17th and early 18th centuries by merchants of the English and Dutch East India companies. The Dutch traders carried these screens from Bantam in Java, and in early accounts they were frequently called Bantam screens as well as Coromandel screens. This paper examines Coromandel lacquer screen's art historical significance in the incising global interaction and consumer culture in the 17th and 18th centuries. It first discusses historical and cultural background of production in China which have been little known about. The primary sources focus on the record of <i>Xiu Shi lu</i>, the 16th century book about lacquer, and the inscriptions left on the screens. They will give information about when the screens were produced, what was the purpose of them, and the technique of decoratively incising lacquer and adding polychrome to the voids, called <i>kuan cai</i> in Chinese. The lacquer screen features a continuous scene run through all twelve panels, just like a hand-scroll painting with variety of colours. The prominent subjects for decoration are human figures, landscape and bird-and-flower. The narrative theme with human figures, such as Birthday Reception for General Guo Ziyi and the World of Immortals were shaped by literature or play. Also, the parallels between the lacquer screens and the paintings on the same theme are found. The scenes with Europeans are rare but bring various interpretations within the historical context of the time. The landscape themes, such as the Scenes of Lake Xihu and the Nine Bend in Mountain Wuyi, were depicted famous scenic spots in China. The composition and expression of the screens were probably inspired by landscape woodblock prints, it’s because the technique of lacquer screen and woodblock cutting are similar. Lastly, bird-and-flower theme has a long tradition of wishing longevity, happiness and peace in one’s life and produced in various medium. Thanks to the enormous progress in navigation and discovered sea roots in the 16th century, Dutch and England East India Companies imported quantities of Chinese lacquerworks in the 17th century. As Chinoiserie gain popularity all over Europe, Chinese objects were consumed in various ways. Imported Coromandel lacquer screens were incorporated into European interiors. They were cut into a number of panels, which mounted within wood paneling on walls and inserted into contemporary furniture. The lacquer screen also inspired European’s imitation of Asian lacquer known by a variety of names. This paper surveys Coromandel lacquer screen’s domestic production, exploding consumption and global conquest from the 17th century to 18th centuries, when the screen was explosively made. The lacquer screen is an active participant in cross-cultural interaction, not merely a passive commodity of china. Investigating the material culture of the lacquer screen, it was originally created in chinese domestic background concerned with social prestige, in Europe, consumed to show off exotic luxury and triggered a new stylistic changes in chinoiserie.

Abstract As a primitive furniture with the longest history in China, the screen (pingfeng) originated in the western Zhou Dynasty and went through the Han and Tang dynasties, the Five Dynasties, the Song Dynasty, and the Ming and Qing dynasties and is still being used to date. This paper aims to explore the modern aesthetics contained in the traditional screen line and measure the contribution of some linear elements to the overall modern characteristics of the screen. By adopting the method of Kansei engineering, quantitative research is carried out on the Kansei image and the linear patterns of the traditional Chinese screens. The results show that the factors affecting the modern aesthetics of the screen have three linear elements: the top section (pingmao), the upright brackets (zhanya), and the base (dunzuo), with the top section and the base having the greatest influence on the “modern” kansei image of the screen. On the basis of these linear features, the style of the screen can be determined, and the quantitative data can provide reference for the design of modern screens.

Purpose This paper serves as a case study, detailing an academic library’s three-year process of redesigning, implementing, and using a library electronic classroom. The purpose of this paper is to share the challenges and successes of a library’s attempt to create a high-tech space that both accommodates active learning and is entirely flexible and free of wires. The paper provides technical details for implementing features such as wireless screen sharing and offers practical advice for librarians who are creating new teaching and learning spaces at their institutions. Design/methodology/approach This is a descriptive case study, which details the lessons learned in implementing an active learning space that incorporates technology such as wireless display to multiple screens. Findings There are still major challenges in having a truly wire-free classroom including authentication policies, wireless display technology, instructor’s station mobility, and student laptop control. Successes include flexible furniture, battery-power management solutions, and using multiple wireless devices in a single room. Practical implications Practical implications of this paper include recommendations for planning this type of upgrade in a library electronic classroom. Originality/value The unique feature of this case was the effort to combine the mobile features of a flexible learning space with some of the robust technology of a hardwired active learning classroom. This paper features technical details beyond what can be found in the library literature. For example, very little has been written about the issues involved in wirelessly displaying a computer screen to multiple devices in a classroom.

Media façades is a subdivision of urban computing integrating digital displays into buildings, including structures and road furniture. It is frequently connected with overdimensional screens and vivified, lit up publicizing, and places like Times Square. The façade is dematerialized and transformed into one immense promoting medium for sending messages. Media façades can bring out the most assorted feelings, from a major city feeling to disturbance at light contamination. They are likewise seen as Pop Art or as blemishes. Design tends to utilize media façades increasingly as a stylistic component. What used to be added to exteriors after the building development more in the method for a flaw is currently a part of the design procedure and offers new extension for visionary outline which is authored to the term 'Mediatecture'.This research identifies the impact of using media façades on commercial buildings environmentally and economically. In addition to that experimental design cases of interactive building façades will be discussed and a SWOT analysis would be made to exemplify the challenges and discuss how they may be addressed. Also, the examples are presented to demonstrate how to work with the difficulties inalienable in media façade design forms taking into account the formation of different proposals for a media façade on current Public buildings and new ones in Egypt.

Media façades is a subdivision of urban computing integrating digital displays into buildings, including structures and road furniture. It is frequently connected with over dimensional screens and vivified, lit up publicizing, and places like Times Square. The façade is dematerialized and transformed into one immense promoting medium for sending messages. Media façades can bring out the most assorted feelings, from a major city feeling to disturbance at light contamination. They are likewise seen as Pop Art or as blemishes. Design tends to utilize media façades increasingly as a stylistic component. What used to be added to exteriors after the enhanced building development in the method for a flaw is currently a part of the design procedure and offers new extension for visionary outline which is authored to the term 'Mediatecture'. This research identifies the impact of using media façades on commercial buildings environmentally and economically. In addition to that, experimental design cases of interactive building façades will be discussed and a SWOT analysis will be analyzed to exemplify the challenges and discuss how they may be addressed. Also, the examples are presented to demonstrate how to work with the difficulties inalienable in media façade design forms taking into account the formation of different proposals for a media façade on current public and new buildings in Egypt.

At the beginning of June 1904, the Hungarian capital was in a state of frenzy. The bullfights, starring Pouly fils—a toreador from Nîmes, France—as the matador, and scheduled to take place in a recently built 15,000-seat bullring in the Budapest City Park, attracted everyone's attention. Reporting a wave of “Spanish fever” spreading among inhabitants of the city, the newspapers highlighted the fact that a large percentage of the population was talking about “toreadors, picadors, matadors, and bulls.” The toreadors dressed in their “exotic costumes” caused a stir everywhere they went (Figure 1). As the toreadors visited Budapest's tourist attractions many female passersby noticed their “suntanned faces and muscular bodies.” The matador's collar ornament, consisting of two studs representing two “miniature diamond bulls,” was a subject of conversation on everyone's lips. Local tailors proposed “Spanish collars” replicating those worn by Pouly as the ne plus ultra of fashion to their customers. Furniture makers and carpenters witnessed their sales of Spanish dressing-screens skyrocket. Surfing the wave of public interest, the Uránia, a local association for the popularization of science, scheduled slide shows about Spain. The Budapest Orpheum hired Tortajada, a well known Spanish female dancer, for several appearances on its stage. Parodic plays, mimicking a bullfight, were staged throughout June both on the site of Ős Budavára (Ancient Buda Castle), a historical theme park that opened in the City Park in 1896, and on an improvised outdoor stage on the Margaret Island. Theaters also claimed their share by scheduling operas such as Carmen, the Marriage of Figaro, and the Barber of Seville. Restaurants offered a new cocktail drink called “Krampumpouly.” Journalists turned into impromtu poets and wrote poems dedicated to the bulls. Even politicians joined in the popular enthusiasm for the bullfights, declaring in the Budapest parliament, as a journalist sarcastically remarked, that for the local political body from that moment on: “Vox popouly” is “vox dei.”

The article discusses the technologies and methods for creating universal environment, features of their use and their possibilities of functional extension placement by limited area. The analysis of world experience (Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Robert Fulton, Nikola Tesla, Joan Littlewood, Cederic Price, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, Peter Alexander, Mies van Dral Roeta Lille Reich, Dieter Rams). The light effecting on the proportions of the placement. For example of such groups like: Lightand Space, Aqua Creations, Manta Ray Light. The lighting system allows you to add dynamics into the space, expressiveness or isolation. Created an environment which would be change for human need. Use sliding partitions - screens, for example Popup Interactive Apartment is represented by Hyperbody design team from DelftUniversity of Technology. Authors idea is to place all placemant in a room with area of 50 square meters (smart technology) - where you can move not only partitions, but also furniture, which can suit specific human needs. The curtains were expertly fitted into the interior of the Samt & Seide cafe by architects Mies van der Roet Lilly Reich, which was designed for Die Modeder Dame exhibition in Berlin. A space with 300 square meters was zoned with using silk and velvet curtains, which were divided according to their color and height. Examples of flexible space are WAarchi's architectural project: architects have successfully rethought the space of the first building of Taiwan's Chiao Tung University construction school. Also, the article outlines prospect development of adaptive design on architecture and historical background, show the results of the analysis of questions adaptive spaces in the context modern development of society. Studding thematic publications gave it possible to highlighting the main tools dimensional zoning in interior design. Often used by architects and designers: work with light (own lighting, navigation, and communication with the observer); sliding partitions (take up less space in placement and can be transform); color and material (divide space on functional zone); kinetic elements of equipment, which can change their position in space or shape/ Describe the areas of their used on based for examples from world architectural practice, provide them the grade.

With mortise and tenon structure furniture as the design carrier, the cultural connotation of traditional symbols is absorbed and new ideas for the inheritance and development of traditional culture in modern life are explored. Starting from the analysis of the modeling characteristics, decorative characteristics, and allegorical connotations of the swastika, its feature elements is summarized, the keywords of the design elements are screened, applications and extensions on this basis are designed, the basic model of furniture products is established, then the tenon and tenon forms that meet the strength requirements and material requirements according to the model are screened, the overall construction of tenon and tenon structure furniture products is completed, and the physical production of the products is guided. Combining the swastika form with the tenon structure bookcase design, the traditional symbolic feature elements are effectively integrated into the design of the tenon structure furniture, which verifies the feasibility and effectiveness of the method and provides a reference for the design research of related tenon and tenon products.

Objective: To explore the potential classroom furniture mismatch with students’ anthropometric measurements and back pain related to sitting for extended periods. Methods: This cross-sectional study was carried out on all twelve male and female intermediate and secondary schools located in Abha city. Anthropometric and classroom furniture measurements were assessed, and the mismatch was determined using standardized methods. Students were also screened for back pain related to long sitting at school. Results: A total number of 879 students was selected. The study revealed seat height mismatch in both intermediate, and secondary school of 84.3%, and 75.6%, respectively. Seat depth mismatch was 74.0% in intermediate schools and reached 84.5% in secondary schools. The desk height was improper for 94.1%, and 82.3% of students in intermediate, and secondary schools, respectively. The levels of mismatch differ significantly by grade level and gender. A prevalence of 10.8% of back pain related to long sitting at school was found. In multivariable logistic regression, males, intermediate school children, and the presence of buttock-popliteal length/seat depth mismatch were significantly associated with pain. On the other hand, practicing exercise was a significant protective factor. Conclusions: There is a prevalent mismatch between students’ dimensions and existing schools’ furniture. School furniture providers should take in consideration the average Saudi students’ dimensions, while designing school furniture especially for males, and at intermediate schools, or provide schools with adjustable seats and desks.

The authors present a vision based augmented reality system called Happy Measure to facilitate the measurement, 3D modeling, and visualization of furniture and other objects using a smartphone or mobile device equipped with a camera. They also study the concomitant interaction metaphors that enable interactive 3D model capture and manipulation in augmented environments. The proposed system allows for interactive measurement of an object’s size and the creation of primitive based 3D models from a single photograph. The appearance of the furniture (color textured model) is captured by the system using the underlying (or multiple) images taken by the user. This allows the user to capture textured 3D models of furniture or other objects and manipulate them virtually for visualization purposes. The authors compare two interaction metaphors used to capture 3D textured models of object to ensure easy interaction while still obtaining accurate measurements in a user test. Results suggest that one is superior in terms of measurement accuracy and also subjective user experience as it allows for continuous touch interaction on the whole screen. Virtually placing a modeled object in another location is another aspect of the presented system and the authors explore a novel interaction paradigm to perform this task along with initial user tests.

PurposeThe purposes of this research were to review, analyze, synthesize and define the principles, indicators and required design elements of crime prevention through environmental design (CPTED) and the potential role of the design of the courtyards in preventing campus violence; to examine the relationships between built environment design and campus violence inside Al al-Bayt University (AABU), Jordan; and to examine to what extent the design of the open public spaces and courtyards inside AABU meet the design principles of the CPTED.Design/methodology/approachThis research used descriptive-analytical approach, semi-structured interviews, archival records and videos to collect the location-based data of violent events and incidents that occurred on the campus of AABU (the locations of students' fights). Additionally, this research used AABU images; plans, spatial analysis, site visits and direct observations to analyze and assess the courtyards’ design and to examine to what extent the design of courtyards and open public spaces in AABU achieve the CPTED indicators, and the availability and the quality of the required design elements of CPTED and their role in violence prevention.FindingsThis research found that environmental-based design plays a major role in reducing crime opportunities and promote positive social behavior. This research found that the indicators to achieve the CPTED principles in all courtyard design inside AABU are very low and all the courtyards’ designs are not complied and conformed to the CPTED principles, and as a result, the design of the courtyards encourages and may facilitate violence in the university campus. It has been found that the availability and the quality of the required CPTED design elements are very low in all courtyards. Therefore, the existing design elements in all courtyards in AABU are not preventing the university violence. The correlation result revealed that there is significant relationship and strong/very strong negative linear association between the numbers of the students' fights and the applying of CPTED principles, indicators and required design elements (r = −0.85).Research limitations/implicationsThe data collected from AABU campus only and a larger study is certainly required to underpin these findings. Therefore, future research is needed to replicate and duplicate this research in order to expand the results.Practical implicationsThis research has implications for designing/redesigning the open public space and courtyards inside universities. This research recommended that redesigning all courtyards and applying the principles of CPTED are necessary to prevent campus violence. Redesigning includes adding landscaping elements, fountains, water features, pedestrian furniture, portrait, setting areas, new modern sculptures, shaded areas, lighting, memorial places, digital screens and cameras. Moreover, this research recommended that the university should pay more attention to continuous control, repair and maintenance to all courtyards after redesigning them. Finally, this research introduced a design proposal for one of the courtyards to apply the CPTED principles that promote positive behavior and prevent campus violence.Originality/valueIn the last few years in Jordan, some of the public and private Jordanian universities suffered from a newly emerging negative phenomenon, which is violence between students inside the campus. Many researchers and governmental institutions have stressed the urgency to explore the social, cultural, behavioral and environmental strategies that may effectively prevent campus violence. Additionally, little attention has been paid to the role of built environmental design in preventing campus violence. Moreover, no research assesses the applying of the CPTED principles and their indicators in courtyards’ design in Jordanian campuses.

Virtual Reality does not have to be limited to only being a representation and experiential tool - it can be a powerful way of conceiving objects for our physical world as well. The unique features of this technology revolve around the usage of peripheral devices such as controllers (joysticks) and gloves in tandem with VR goggles. By using this type of modeling, designers can overcome some of the current limitations of the design process such as transitioning from sketch to model, scalability of physical models and manipulation difficulties of computer generated models. An analysis has been made of the evolution of design methodology and its natural progression to virtual and augmented reality. Traditionally the design process of urban design objects starts on paper is evolved through computer modeling and is later tested via physical models and full-scale prototypes. Virtual reality modeling can significantly optimize this process by merging several of the design development phases into one. Sketching, building and testing can be done fully in the virtual environment and the representation of newly created objects will no longer be limited to a 2D surface such as a sheet of paper or a computer screen. The transition to 3D printing is also streamlined with the outcome of the VR designed object being a clear manifestation of the object created in virtual reality. The goal of the study is to develop a piece of urban furniture, using a virtual reality headset, joysticks and modeling software, manipulate its features and multiply/scale it within the digital environment. The research question is whether such modeling can be precise enough to not only be used as a sketching and sculpting tool but can become the next frontier after computer 3D modeling. The experiment is carried out in two different parts of the world simultaneously – USA and Bulgaria and conceived and manipulated in real-time. The results are analyzed and the advantages and disadvantages of the approach are compared to current design development tools.

Machine vision technology was integrated into the manufacturing workshop, to achieve an effective and high-quality production mode for furniture manufacturing. Machine vision can be used for information collecting, quality detecting, positioning, automatic sorting, intelligent monitoring, etc., which largely make up for the shortcomings of poor quality, low precision, low efficiency, and high labor intensity of manual operation. In this study, the method of systematic literature review was applied, and 128 relevant literatures in the field of machine vision application in manufacturing were retrieved and screened from 2011 to 2022. Statistical analysis was carried out on the extracted application directions and related technologies. The current status of machine vision technology’s implementation in furniture manufacturing was summarized. In view of the new demand of the rapid development of intelligent manufacturing, the challenges, faced by machine vision, were also summarized. To build a more intelligent, comprehensive, and effective manufacturing workshop for wooden products, cutting-edge technologies, such as deep learning and 3D point cloud, must be further integrated into machine vision. This study can efficiently assist the pertinent practitioners in furniture manufacturing in quickly grasping the pertinent technical principles and future development directions of machine vision, which would be benefit for accomplishing intelligent manufacturing.

Goal-oriented dialogue agents can comfortably utilize the conversational context and understand its users' goals. However, in visually driven user experiences, these conversational agents are also required to make sense of the screen context in order to provide a proper interactive experience. In this paper, we propose a novel multimodal conversational framework where the dialogue agent's next action and their arguments are derived jointly conditioned both on the conversational and the visual context. We demonstrate the proposed approach via a prototypical furniture shopping experience for a multimodal virtual assistant.

The appearance of the screen as a social and cultural phenomenon is closely related to the idea of the daily life of the Chinese, which includes folklore, as well as cultural and folk traditions. The paintings, the plot of which is a screen, reflect a unique Chinese aesthetic concept and the author's view of life and values. In addition, the properties of the screen can be studied from different angles: from a practical piece of furniture to an abstract art form. The focus of this article is the images of the screen in the pictorial art of China. The purpose of the study is to identify the cultural and philosophical meanings behind these images. The novelty of the research is connected with the chosen perspective: such a complex phenomenon of Chinese culture as a screen is viewed through the prism and in close connection with the traditions of Chinese pictorial art. In the course of the study, a conclusion was made about the manifestation of religious-philosophical, ideological, moral and aesthetic ideas of the Chinese in the images of the screen. In addition, the educational role of these images, which carry an educational function, is determined. A special contribution of the author can be called the identification of Confucian and Taoist ideas symbolically embodied in the images of the screen in Chinese painting. In general, the screen in this work is considered as a key to understanding of the deep meanings of traditional painting.

Tridax procumbens linn. of family- Compositeae (Asteraceae) is found plentifully in the plane areas near rivers and on marshy land. The villagers use this plant in bronchial asthma, dysentery and diarrhaea. Leaf juice is generally used to kill the bed bug in cote and wooden furniture and to protect the woods from termites etc.The whole herb juice in decoction is used by the villagers to check the hemorrhage of wounds.The detailed chemistry of the insecticidal compound was carried out, which revealed the structure of the compound. In the present communication, an effort has been made to screen the Tridax procumbens,a common plant used in folk medicines.

In order to rationalize material selection in green design, this study presents an attempt to combine the methods of generalized Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS). By establishing a green material index system, the G-CCR model of generalized DEA was first used to select effective materials from the candidate samples, and TOPSIS was then used to sort the effective suppliers. The combined DEA/TOPSIS model helps to rank the materials by quality, and then integrate both the merits ofG-CCR model and the key characteristics of TOPSIS. The results of this study showed that the combined DEA/TOPSIS model can screen and exclude materials with poor performance when selecting wood for the furniture industry. Therefore, the combined model that is presented in this study provides a more rational and evidentiary basis for material selection in green design.

Augmented reality has a high potential in interior design due to its capability of visualizing numerous prospective designs directly in a target room. In this paper, we present our research on utilization of augmented reality for interactive and personalized furnishing. We propose a new algorithm for automated interior design which generates sensible and personalized furniture configurations. This algorithm is combined with mobile augmented reality system to provide a user with an interactive interior design try-out tool. Personalized design is achieved via a recommender system which uses user preferences and room data as input. We conducted three user studies to explore different aspects of our research. The first study investigated the user preference between augmented reality and on-screen visualization for interactive interior design. In the second user study, we studied the user preference between our algorithm for automated interior design and optimization-based algorithm. Finally, the third study evaluated the probability of sensible design generation by the compared algorithms. The main outcome of our research suggests that augmented reality is viable technology for interactive home furnishing.

The possibility of recycling waste from medium density fiberboard (MDF) production into wood-cement composites was evaluated. A large quantity of lignocellulosic wastes is generated worldwide from various sources, including wood and furniture industries, leading to environmental concerns. Medium density fiberboard (MDF) is an engineered wood product, which is made from wood fibers (mainly form coniferous trees) with wax and a resin binder. This paper presents an experimental study which investigated the potential utilization of medium density fiberboard wastes (MDFW) for producing lightweight insulation concrete. The wastes were screened on #8 mm sieve to exlude big irregular elements which could negatively affect compaction and strength properties. All lignocellulosic substrates have detrimental effects on cement setting so different techniques were applied to offset the retarding effect of compounds like sugar and tannin present in the bio-based particles before mixing the wastes with cement. One type of cement CEM I 42,5 R was used in the experiment. Flexural strength, compressive strength in air-dry and wet states, and water absorption of lightweight concrete were tested. Compressive strength ranging from 0,5 to 5.3 MPa was obtained depending on the material used for the initial impregnation of MDFW fibers.

Background: The Government of India launched the child health screening and early Intervention programme called Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram in 2014 to screen children from 0 to 18 years for the early detection of 4 Ds (Defects, Diseases, Deficiency, and Developmental Delays including disabilities). Under this program, district early intervention centres (DEICs) are set up as nodal centres at the district level to manage the cases of 4Ds. Objectives: To assess the available resources, challenges of District Early Intervention Centre under Rashtriya Bal Swasthya Karyakram at District Jodhpur. Methodology:A cross sectional study was conducted in the month of April. Jodhpur district was selected by purposive sampling.Data regarding the available resources was collected by using observational checklist and the information regarding the challenges was collected by semi structured questionnaire through face-to-face interview with the DEIC manager. Results: The resultsreveal that DEIC of district Jodhpur is deficient in terms of staff, equipment and physical space. The challenges identified were resistance in caretakers regarding treatment and less staff and physical space available for DEIC. Conclusion: Overallthe researcher identified that there was a deficiency of staff, furniture and medical equipment and tools at DEIC and the main challenges were community resistance, less staff and physical space. There is a need to be filled up vacant post and provide needed infrastructural facilities. separately so that RBSK program in DEIC can run smoothly and effectively.Education and sensitization of community with reinforcement could help to overcome the resistance in community.

The future of the museumsA lot of people worry on behalf of the museums. Museums are boring and dusty, and no one can be bothered to visit them, the young ones not at all, they want adventure, they want int eractive computer games. In a report published jointly by Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen, minister of cultural affairs, and Pia Gjellerup, then minister of commerce, in December 2000, the two ministers decreed that ”it is necessary for Danish economy that the cultural sector – museums, too – begin to think commercially.” If one asks what it takes, the answer is often: ”make the museum s come alive.” A visit to a museum should be an experience similar to a visit to Legoland or Disneyland. We presently see museum leaders anxious about being left behind by the development and feverishly trying to make their museums come alive. Visitors’ centres spring up like mushrooms in the Danish museum landscape, and the National Museum in Copenhagen recently hosted the Missing Link – alive! exhibition, which illustrated the development of humankind through four million years. Here, showcases contained moving robots, interactive elements where the visitors could measure their strength against the Neanderthal Man, compare hands with some of our supposed ancestors, touch copies of tools, answer questions about the development of man etc. – hardly any original material was presented. It is my belief that the idea shared by politicians and some museums – that re-enactment may attract visitors – is utterly unrealistic and that too much attention is paid to a couple of isolated successes.l am not against people having a good time. However, I do not think this an area for the museums to make themselves seriously felt. Other media deal with history coming alive. Historical plays by Shakespeare, Racine, Johann Friedrich Schiller and August Strindberg have been performed a thousand times. People have cried in torrents over the destiny of Anne Frank, they have shivered to witness the brutal murder on Julius Caesar, and they have breathlessly followed the conflict between Charles V and his son, Don Carlos, the governor of the Netherlands, which is described by Schiller in such a spellbinding fashion. Museums will never be able to create anything similar to this, no matter how much they dress the ticket seller or the museum keepers in medieval clothing, and no matter how many monkey tricks are made in the museum cafés in order to serve medieval food and sour ale.Re-enacting the past is not a museum task. Films, theatre, and literature will do that. Still, this does not mean that there is no room for museums. Because the museums have something no one else has. They have things from the past. Most things by far are lost in the course of time, and so it should be. At least that is how it is. Most furniture is worn out and goes to pieces, and the same fate befalls clothes, glasses, shoes, cars, toys, tractors, packing, calculating machines, ladles, anything. Things are perishable; they disappear due to the ravages of time. Items slip away between our hands, just as the time, and much faster than we think. In most homes only a few things are older than fifty years.So, the museums are treasuries that protect the few remaining items for eternity. Only a single pale yellow wrong-coloured Swedish three-shilling stamp from 1855 exists. It is the world’s most expensive stamp, traded in the 1990s for thirty million Dkr. It is depicted in books on stamps, you see it in newspapers, on the Internet, everywhere, but there is only a single original one. It was sold for a fortune, the rest of the millions of reproductions of it have no price – they are used for wrapping up fish, they are me rely copies. The whole truth, the whole authenticity, the radical certainty that in 1855, a Swedish printer by mistake used a three-shilling pr inting plate while printing yellow eightshilling stamps is held within the pushing presence of the original.The aura of authenticity raises the original items to a class by themselves and makes them incomparable to anything else. The real is the trump card of the museums. The more freewheeling flow of pictures, the more monitors and TV-screens that are put up wherever you turn, the more worthless copies, the more tokens are circulated, the larger is the hunger for real things. The museum is the very place where the flow of copies ends, the place where the neverending maelstrom of reproductions is stopped, in the museums there is peace, here the flicker and the noise and absent-minded clicking of the mouse ends, here the world begins. At a time where the monitor replaces reality, museums may satisfy the hunger for the real thing.The de-realisation of reality, the daily encounter with fleeting pictures of things has created a huge demand for meeting the things in themselves. Museums are a countermeasure against the monitors. The museums safeguard the spaciousness and the plasticity, the tangibly existing against the cold immateriality of cyberspace. The truth is concrete, not abstract. If the museums want it, they have a future.The museums are the owners of a marvellous raw material, which on the other hand gives no guarantee of success; it is merely the prerequisite for success – just as the best theat replay does no t guarantee a successful performance. The good exhibition makes it possible to rediscover direction and meaning in a world tortured by fear of the future. If the museums would trust themselves and open their eyes to the immense treasure of original objects that they have at their disposal and not let themselves be seduced by all the talk of the great narrative being lost and everything being hopeless, then they have a great time ahead of them. I for one am not worried.Thorkild KjærgaardNordborgTranslated by Annette Lerche Trolle

The problems of legal regulation of remote work from the point of view of safety and labor protection are considered. During the pandemic, the number of remote employees increased by eight times, and the labor protection of this category of the employees remained at the same level. The Labor Code of the Russian Federation significantly reduces the rights and obligations of both the employer and the remote employee, therefore, the risk of an incident increases. It is difficult to establish a connection specifically between the incident with production activities, and not with the household chores. It is noted that the employers are reluctant to investigate incidents with remote employees. However, an investigation is required since administrative responsibility is provided for concealing an incident. Investigation will help not only to get the employee due compensation but also to prevent future incidents. Several traumatic factors are highlighted related to the home office: sharp corners of the furniture, broken glass, toilets and bathrooms, wet floor, armchair, chair, ceiling cabinets (head injuries), carpets and cables (stumbling), equipment and cables (short circuit), fire, stairs. Presumably, the most frequent occupational diseases associated with the remote work (longer stay behind the computer screen) were identified: dry eye and carpal tunnel syndromes, cardiovascular, gastrointestinal diseases, etc. Recommendations for the prevention of occupational diseases and injuries were proposed: briefings on labor protection, risk assessment at the workplaces, preliminary and periodic medical examinations, an ergonomic working environment, compliance with the work and rest regimes, preservation and (or) documentation of the incident site before the arrival of the commission, etc.

Mobile Mapping Systems (MMS) are now commonly acquiring lidar scans of urban environments for an increasing number of applications such as 3D reconstruction and mapping, urban planning, urban furniture monitoring, practicability assessment for persons with reduced mobility (PRM)... MMS acquisitions are usually huge enough to incur a usability bottleneck for the increasing number of non-expert user that are not trained to process and visualize these huge datasets through specific softwares. A vast majority of their current need is for a simple 2D visualization that is both legible on screen and printable on a static 2D medium, while still conveying the understanding of the 3D scene and minimizing the disturbance of the lidar acquisition geometry (such as lidar shadows). The users that motivated this research are, by law, bound to precisely georeference underground networks for which they currently have schematics with no or poor absolute georeferencing. A solution that may fit their needs is thus a 2D visualization of the MMS dataset that they could easily interpret and on which they could accurately match features with their user datasets they would like to georeference. Our main contribution is two-fold. First, we propose a 3D point cloud stylization for 2D static visualization that leverages a Principal Component Analysis (PCA)-like local geometry analysis. By skipping the usual and error-prone estimation of a ground elevation, this rendering is thus robust to non-flat areas and has no hard-to-tune parameters such as height thresholds. Second, we implemented the corresponding rendering pipeline so that it can scale up to arbitrary large datasets by leveraging the Spark framework and its Resilient Distributed Dataset (RDD) and Dataframe abstractions.

(1) Background: There is increasing awareness that the quality of the indoor environment affects our health and well-being. Indoor air quality (IAQ) in particular has an impact on multiple health outcomes, including respiratory and cardiovascular illness, allergic symptoms, cancers, and premature mortality. (2) Methods: We carried out a global systematic literature review on indoor exposure to selected air pollutants associated with adverse health effects, and related household characteristics, seasonal influences and occupancy patterns. We screened records from six bibliographic databases: ABI/INFORM, Environment Abstracts, Pollution Abstracts, PubMed, ProQuest Biological and Health Professional, and Scopus. (3) Results: Information on indoor exposure levels and determinants, emission sources, and associated health effects was extracted from 141 studies from 29 countries. The most-studied pollutants were particulate matter (PM2.5 and PM10); nitrogen dioxide (NO2); volatile organic compounds (VOCs) including benzene, toluene, xylenes and formaldehyde; and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) including naphthalene. Identified indoor PM2.5 sources include smoking, cooking, heating, use of incense, candles, and insecticides, while cleaning, housework, presence of pets and movement of people were the main sources of coarse particles. Outdoor air is a major PM2.5 source in rooms with natural ventilation in roadside households. Major sources of NO2 indoors are unvented gas heaters and cookers. Predictors of indoor NO2 are ventilation, season, and outdoor NO2 levels. VOCs are emitted from a wide range of indoor and outdoor sources, including smoking, solvent use, renovations, and household products. Formaldehyde levels are higher in newer houses and in the presence of new furniture, while PAH levels are higher in smoking households. High indoor particulate matter, NO2 and VOC levels were typically associated with respiratory symptoms, particularly asthma symptoms in children. (4) Conclusions: Household characteristics and occupant activities play a large role in indoor exposure, particularly cigarette smoking for PM2.5, gas appliances for NO2, and household products for VOCs and PAHs. Home location near high-traffic-density roads, redecoration, and small house size contribute to high indoor air pollution. In most studies, air exchange rates are negatively associated with indoor air pollution. These findings can inform interventions aiming to improve IAQ in residential properties in a variety of settings.

Представляемое здесь исследование посвящено элементам архитектурного декора (базы, колонны, капители, перемычки, детали алтарных преград, декоративные рельефы, др.), которые были найдены в памятниках теля Шило в первичном (in situ), вторичном, третичном использовании или вне архитектурного контекста. Малая часть из них кратко опубликована, но большая их часть никогда не публиковалась и не анализировалась. Основная часть исследования включает в себя каталогизирование объектов, их обмеры, стилистический анализ и атрибуцию с предположительными датировками (данные работы уже частично проведены автором, материал неоднократно изучался натурно). Но прежде необходимо уточнить топографические особенности римского города, остатки ранних строений, дорог, из которых могли происходить детали, расположение ранневизантийских церквей с ориентацией на уже существующий контекст, чему и посвящена данная статья. Таким образом, здесь характеризуется эллинистический, римский контекст города, с последовательно вписанным в него ранневизантийским и раннеисламским, что до сих пор делалось лишь кратко и неполно. The present research is devoted to reporting on the recovery of architectural fragments in the Roman and Byzantine periods (bases, pedestals, shafts, capitals, lintels, chancel screen elements, decorative reliefs, etc.). They were found at the monuments of Tel Shilo in situ, in secondary, in tertiary use or out of the architectural context. Only a small part of them was published as part of the general reports on the excavations at Tel Shilo, which were conducted by Swedish and American expeditions and in the framework of regular works of the Civil Administration of Judea and Samaria (Dr. Aage Shmidt, Hans Kjær, Sven Holm-Nilsen, Marie-Louise Buhl, Flemming Gorm Andersen, Hananya Hizmi, Reut Livyatan ben Arie, Yodan Fleitman, et al.). Most of them (especially the fragments at the Basilica church, which I consider mainly Roman spolia) weren’t published or ever analyzed, except in some very general works and in general photographs. Besides, several architectural fragments were found during the last years of the excavations. The main section of the research includes a catalog of the objects, their measurements, stylistic analysis, attribution with preliminary dating. This work was accomplished in part and is still ongoing. The objects were examined at the site, photographed against the scale, and measured. But before proceeding to this main part of the research, it is necessary to outline and to present the main Roman and Early Byzantine architectural context at Tel Shilo. It is impossible to discover the original derivation, function, actual date and style of the details without characterization of the monuments, for which they may have been originally executed. Thus, the present article is devoted mainly to the architectural context of the town, which is divided into three main periods with sub-phases: Late Hellenistic and Roman decumani with several smaller in their scale cardines, their rebuilding during the Late Roman period (enlarging of the western colonnade of decumanus in front of cardo), tower on the outer edges of the settlement; Early Byzantine Northern churches, baptistery and Basilica church, which were, by my theory, inserted into the earlier system of roads with the use of their foundations, stylobate and members (though plenty of Roman spolia were reused, liturgical furniture was especially imported for the churches); and finally - Early Islamic mosques (Jami’ al Yetin, Jami’ Arbain, Jami’ es-Sittin), that were built on the place of the churches and inside the Roman tower with the use of all their elements (it seems that no special decorative elements were executed for mosques). It was done only in a brief and fragmentary manner before, without general systematization. The preliminary attempt to coordinate the known architectural details to their original architectural context is also presented here.

AbstractFalls are a leading cause of unintentional injuries and can result in devastating disabilities and fatalities when left undetected and not treated in time. Current detection methods have one or more of the following problems: frequent battery replacements, wearer discomfort, high costs, complicated setup, furniture occlusion, and intensive computation. In fact, all non-wearable methods fail to detect falls beyond ten meters. Here, we design a house-wide fall detection system capable of detecting stumbling, slipping, fainting, and various other types of falls at 60 m and beyond, including through transparent glasses, screens, and rain. By analyzing the fall pattern using machine learning and crafted rules via a local, low-cost single-board computer, true falls can be differentiated from daily activities and monitored through conventionally available surveillance systems. Either a multi-camera setup in one room or single cameras installed at high altitudes can avoid occlusion. This system’s flexibility enables a wide-coverage set-up, ensuring safety in senior homes, rehab centers, and nursing facilities. It can also be configured into high-precision and high-recall application to capture every single fall in high-risk zones.

El presente trabajo tiene como propósito conocer la situación actual del trabajo en la oficina respecto a las condiciones ergonómicas y los muchos factores tanto de diseño de mobiliario (mesa, silla, pantallas de visualización de datos) como de factores ambientales (iluminación, ruido, entre otros), que afectan al personal docente y administrativo en las instituciones públicas y privadas de educación superior, que realizan grandes esfuerzos por mejorar la implementación de mobiliarios, incorporando equipos de cómputo modernos o actualizándolos, sin embargo hay una parte importante que han pasado por alto: La importancia de trabajar en un ambiente ergonómico adecuado, donde no se ha contemplado en su diseño criterios ergonómicos, lo cual puede generar a corto y mediano plazo malestares físicos y emocional es en el personal que lo ocupa, disminuyendo la eficacia y productividad laboral. Dada la situación expuesta, se generó el interés por realizar el presente trabajo en una institución educativa de nivel superior, con la finalidad de conocer la situación laboral que prevalece en ésta. En conclusión un adecuado diseño de las instalaciones (oficina, climatización, iluminación, y acondicionamiento acústico), una correcta selección del equipamiento que se compra (sillas, mesas de trabajo, equipos informáticos, entre otros) y una correcta organización en las tareas permitirá prevenir una buena parte de las molestias de tipo postural, condiciones ambientales correctas y problemas de naturaleza psicosocial. Finalmente, todas las acciones antes mencionadas pueden resultar ineficaces si se deja de lado la necesaria labor de formación e información de los trabajadores. Palabras claves: Enfermedades, psicosocial, mobiliario, ergonómico, acondicionamiento acústico. Diagnosis of ergonomic risks that affect the development of teaching and administrative activities Abstract The purpose of this work is to know the current labor situation in the office regarding of ergonomic conditions and of the many factors of furniture design (table, chair, data visualization screens) and environmental factors (lighting, noise, others), which affect the teaching and administrative staff in public and private institutions of higher education, who make great efforts for improve the implementation of furniture, incorporating modern computer equipment or updating them, however there is an important part that have been ignored : The importance this work is an appropriate ergonomic environment, where ergonomic criteria have not been considered in its design, which can generate short and medium term physical and emotional discomfort in the personnel occupying it, reducing efficiency and labor productivity. Given the situation exposed, the interest was generated to carry out the present work in an educational institution of higher level, with the purpose of knowing the labor situation that prevails in this one. In conclusion, an adequate design of the facilities (office, air conditioning, lighting, and acoustic conditioning), a correct selection of the equipment that is bought (chairs, work tables, computer equipment, among others) A good part of the postural type discomfort, correct environmental conditions and problems of a psychosocial nature. Finally, all the above-mentioned actions can be ineffective if the necessary training and information of the workers is left aside. Keywords: Diseases, psychosocial, furniture, ergonomic, acoustic conditioning.

Abstract Introduction Thirdhand smoke (THS) is ultrafine particulate matter and residue resulting from tobacco combustion, with implications for health-related harm (eg, impaired wound healing), particularly among hospitalized infants. Project aims were to characterize nicotine (THS proxy) transported on neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) visitors and deposited on bedside furniture, as well as infant exposure. Methods Cross-sectional data were collected from participants in a metropolitan NICU. Participants completed a survey and carbon monoxide breath sample, and 41.9% (n = 88) of participants (n = 210) were randomly selected for finger-nicotine wipes during a study phase when all bedside visitors were screened for nicotine use and finger-nicotine levels. During an overlapping study phase, 80 mother–infant dyads consented to bedside furniture-nicotine wipes and an infant urine sample (for cotinine analyses). Results Most nonstaff visitors’ fingers had nicotine above the limit of quantification (&gt;LOQ; 61.9%). Almost all bedside furniture surfaces (93.8%) and infant cotinine measures (93.6%) had values &gt;LOQ, regardless of household nicotine use. Participants who reported using (or lived with others who used) nicotine had greater furniture-nicotine contamination (Mdn = 0.6 [interquartile range, IQR = 0.2–1.6] µg/m2) and higher infant cotinine (Mdn = 0.09 [IQR = 0.04–0.25] ng/mL) compared to participants who reported no household-member nicotine use (Mdn = 0.5 [IQR = 0.2–0.7] µg/m2; Mdn = 0.04 [IQR = 0.03–0.07] ng/mL, respectively). Bayesian univariate regressions supported hypotheses that increased nicotine use/exposure correlated with greater nicotine contamination (on fingers/furniture) and infant THS exposure. Conclusions Potential furniture-contamination pathways and infant-exposure routes (eg, dermal) during NICU hospitalization were identified, despite hospital prohibitions on tobacco/nicotine use. This work highlights the surreptitious spread of nicotine and potential THS-related health risks to vulnerable infants during critical stages of development. Implications THS contamination is underexplored in medical settings. Infants who were cared for in the NICU are vulnerable to health risks from THS exposure. This study demonstrated that 62% of nonstaff NICU visitors transport nicotine on their fingers to the NICU. Over 90% of NICU (bedside) furniture was contaminated with nicotine, regardless of visitors’ reported household-member nicotine use or nonuse. Over 90% of infants had detectable levels of urinary cotinine during NICU hospitalizations. Results justify further research to better protect infants from unintended THS exposure while hospitalized.

The concept of augmented space opens up new horizons in street furniture design, bringing to life a new, screen-enabled generation of “smart” urban objects. Their deployment, however, is not without issues – from sidewalk cluttering to identity dilution. Beyond technological obsession and nostalgic rejection, I discuss digital placemaking from the perspective of relationships. Starting from Heidegger's distinction between things and objects, and through the case of Luciole, a network of augmented public benches, the article proposes a vision of digital augmentation that, instead of focusing on information, storytelling or function, aims at triggering urban events.

Abstract Background Early detection of scoliosis is a preface to prevent progression. In resource-constrained countries like Ethiopia, there is a need for a cost-effective reliable solution for screening. The surprising fact is that there is neither idiopathic scoliosis screening nor reporting of data from Ethiopia. This study aimed to identify the magnitude, associated factors of scoliosis among school children by using non-invasive and less expensive scoliometer Smartphone app and Adams forward bending test. Methods A school-based cross-sectional survey was carried out from March to June 2019 at seven primary schools. Children were screened by using physical examination (Adams forward bend test) and scoligauge iPhone app. Univariate and multivariable binary logistic regression model analysis was used to identify factors associated with idiopathic scoliosis. Results A total of 1905 children aged between 5 and 16 years were screened, 3.3 % (95 % CI 2.5–4.1) of them were found positive using the scoligauge HD and among them only 1.8 % were identified positive for Adam’s forward bend test. The associated factors of idiopathic scoliosis identified by multivariate analysis were; spinal pain (AOR 4.1, 95 % CI 2.42, 6.89), student sitting on stool: (AOR, 7.03; 95 % CI, 1.52, 32.5), sitting on the bench with a backrest (AOR 4.12; 95 %CI, 1.12, 15.14) and sitting on the bench without backrest: (AOR 4.56; 95 % CI 1.20, 17.34). Conclusions The magnitude of idiopathic scoliosis was relatively low in study setup. More attention is needed towards sitting furniture designs and for children reporting spinal pain.There is a reasonable level of recommendation to advocate that large school-based scoliosis screening was able to detect scoliosis among school children.

The use of phytoconstituents single or combined with standard medicines has been utilized in cure of different diseases. Many plants of genus Cordia comprise of trees and shrubs are widely distributed in warmer regions and have been utilized in management of various diseases. Cordia africana Lam. (family- Boraginaceae) is a small to medium-sized evergreen tree, 4 to 15 (30) m high, heavily branched with a spreading, umbrella-shaped or rounded crown. Bole typically curved or crooked. Bark grayish-brown to dark brown, smooth in young trees, but soon becoming rough and longitudinally fissured with age; young branch lets with sparse long. Uses of C. africana: firewood, timber (furniture, beehives, boxes, mortars, church, drums), food (fruit), medicine (bark, roots), fodder (leaves), bee forage, mulch, soil conservation, ornamental, shade. Various phytoconstituents like flavonoids, alkaloids, tannins, terpenoids, saponins, steroids, anthraquinones, carbohydrates and protins having different activities were screened and isolated from different parts of Cordia africana. Various important Pharmacological properties including Antioxidant, Cytotoxicity, anti-inflammatory, anthelmintic, antimicrobial, anti-nociceptive, and others have been well documented for this plant. Therefore, we have briefly reviewed the various bioactivities of Cordia africana to improve our knowledge on plant phytochemicals as therapeutic entities. The present review describes the various phytoconstituents and therapeutic potential of Cordia africana that can be followed for future research on this plant for human health benefits.

The newly opened Alan Gilbert Learning Commons (AGLC) provides a flexible learning space catering to students from across the University of Manchester With over 1000 study spaces, ranging from informal to formal, enclosed to open, complimented by state of the art innovative technology, the AGLC is an attractive central hub for students to visit anytime of the day and night. However, the Library's vision for the AGLC travels far beyond the physical space and seeks to engage with students at a much deeper level enhancing and developing their learning. To this end, the AGLC was a driver for the library to deliver its own unique training programme and open learning materials in support of the learning and development needs of all students, irrespective of academic discipline. This is achieved through collaboration and partnership between the current providers across campus, with the Learning Commons providing a central focus for a wide range of activity, to exemplify the best of what the University of Manchester can offer to enhance the student learning experience. This paper describes the development of the Learning Commons, from planning to launch, in particular highlighting how ‘the learning' was put into the learning commons. It will illustrate some of the ways in which the Learning Commons joins up existing and newly developed activity from across the campus to proactively encourage and support engagement with learning as well as providing a physical space that students really want to learn in. It will describe the current open training programme and this is now being developed further from a pedagogic perspective and through partnerships with other skills providers across the University to enhance the AGLC offer and to ensure effective integration of student skills provision. The Alan Gilbert Learning Commons (AGLC) is the newest library service at the University of Manchester and opened in October 2012. The £24 million investment in the space is part of a wider strategy at the University to invest in the student experience. The facility provides flexible learning space and caters for students from all parts of the university. There are over 1000 study spaces, ranging from informal to formal, enclosed to open, complimented by state of the art innovative technology. Learning has always been in mind when building the AGLC and the design encourages this through materials and technology in the space and flexible and formative furniture and learning opportunities. The infrastructure also supports learning, it is a 24/7 building 244 days of the year with excellent wifi coverage both indoors and in the outside garden space. There are power points wherever possible and room to put in more, 30 group rooms which encourage learning across distance with as well as in a specific PC cluster that encourages students to use that software as a collaboration tool. The furniture is flexible and reconfigurable, with whiteboards and digital screens integrated throughout the building. No spaces are labelled instead students have the flexibility to make them their own. Even the quiet areas are not labelled, but depend on the students to decide where and exactly how quiet an area might need to be. This allows the building to flexibly support the students with whatever their needs are at the time, serving them best as they shape the space around them. The building aims to inspire students; there are creative concepts commissioned throughout the building to inspire those studying and working in the space. Student's artwork adorns the walls and glass in the building, and there are distinguished alumni tiles in the entrance area which all show students they don't just learn in this space but stand on the shoulders of giants. There are quotes from the great and the good of Manchester engraved into the solid oak panels that adorn the stairwells. There are 25 bespoke Nobel Laureate chairs associated with the University of Manchester intended to enthuse and inspire students to aspire to equal greatness. There is also a dedicated flexible training room in the building with laptops, clickers, a touch screen TV, stackable chairs and tables and a coffee machine and biscuits to encourage our students to want to be in this environment. The AGLC is an attractive central hub for students to visit anytime of the day and night. It is at the heart of the campus, opposite the main library, students union and University visitors centre. However the learning part of the building goes beyond the physical. Students and staff from across the University acted as consultants to ensure that the University tapped into the needs of its students and it became clear that a key area was supporting academics and schools to help them with developing student skills. Academic support provision at the University was not consistent. This clear need led to the creation of a learning development team dedicated to developing an open training programme that would support these areas of learning. This team delivers its own unique training programme of open learning materials in support of the learning and development needs of all students, irrespective of academic discipline. In fact the idea of these not being subject aligned is extremely important to the programme, none of the training is school aligned and any student is able to come to any session, interdisciplinarity is encouraged and exploration into the thoughts of someone from a different mindset expected. The training offer is achieved through collaboration and partnership between the current providers across campus, with the AGLC providing a central focus for a wide range of activity, to exemplify the best of what the University of Manchester can offer to enhance the student learning experience. The programme develops and delivers training and workshops that are new ,innovative, and following a facilitative model, covering topics from Academic Writing to Presentation Skills to Interview and Job Searching. It brings together the expertise and best practices already available on campus with the library acting as a bridge between the students' needs and the wider university resources. The goal is not to duplicate already existing resources, or create a parallel programme, but to create training that links students to the resources they need, wherever they happen to be provided. Going forward, what is really exciting is that this is part of a wider context, a Manchester vision. At the University of Manchester there is clearly a skills agenda. The University of Manchester has recently announced its "vision" for 2020, a vision that includes the sort of skills development currently being created by the library. Students at the university will be expected and encouraged to investigate beyond the strict content of their degree programmes and invest time in developing a broader and more varied set of skills than is traditionally expected. To achieve this goal, the partnerships across the university become key, an opportunity to demonstrate both the resources available and the multitude of ways the skills and knowledge acquired at university can impact a student after they have left. The open training programme (My Learning Essentials) allows students to self-select workshops and resources they use. There are online learning resources, formal workshops and informal face-to-face components. The workshops are designed to give students the tools they need to be more successful learners, not answers. With this goal in mind, we can invite students from all degree programmes to attend the workshops and learn from each other, as the process is often broadly transferable no matter the specific content. It may be that our students don't suffer from a skills gap, where they don't know "how" to do something, but that they are not sure "what" to do. Given examples and guidance (but not answers), they will be able to use the skills they have to acquired during their time at University to attack problems far beyond their time in their degree programmes. This also changes the conversation around the skills agenda. It is not about identifying what is wrong; instead, it is about students' ability to self-evaluate and improve-whatever their starting point. Feedback is used from students and staff (and data gathered from registers) to understand which workshops should be offered and how the resources are being used. This helps develop the most appropriate resources and also works to target groups that appear to be under-served. One of the key components of student success with feedback (and, in fact, with the student experience) is understanding how to move forward and improve. These workshops, because they focus on process, allow students to answer the question of "what next?" that makes feedback (and other support resources) most useful. The offer during the Spring of 2013 was deliberately kept minimal in order to assess both student demand and the optimal timing and design of the programme. The workshops that were developed covered areas from academic writing to presentation skills and also included an employability emphasis led by a partnership with the careers division at the university, focusing on CVs, interview skills and job search techniques. In all, twenty one workshops were delivered to nearly 300 students in a twelve week period. This was a soft pilot, so minimal marketing was done, but attendance rates were generally very high, with, on average, over 60% of students signing up then attending a session. September 2013 saw a fuller launch, there are now 17 different titles delivered and take up has been considerable. In October 2013 My Learning Essentials saw 429 students, a significant increase and 97% of attendants found the sessions useful. The programme does not intend to replace skills support in schools (there is not enough resource in the library to help every student that needs this support), but will work to improve it across the University. In this sense, the workshops, online provision, work with faculties and work with other partners will add up to more than the sum of its parts. Expertise of the entire university will be drawn upon to deepen the student experience and create a unique and innovative programme that goes beyond skills support and actively impacts learning. Much of the work has involved seeking partnerships with other service providers across the university and inviting them to create workshops and become an active part of the open training programme. The courses delivered on this programme are open to all students at the university, regardless of year, degree programme or postgraduate or undergraduate designation. These workshops and training sessions allow the students to evaluate and self-select areas where they feel they need support or have an interest in improving or learning. This structure moves the focus from a top-down remedial model to one where students are encouraged to explore the options and resources available to them at university, providing pathways for success that go beyond the traditional content studied during a degree.

Purpose: To evaluate the association between elements of the built environment and physician well-being using a scoping review. Background: Physicians currently report low work satisfaction, high burnout and depression. The built environment has been shown to affect well-being in the general population, but its relationship to physician well-being is not well understood. Gaining a better understanding of this relationship will allow for better evidence-based design for physician well-being. Methods: A scoping review of the literature was conducted of Scopus and PubMed databases using key words for (1) environmental variables such as “environmental design”; (2) physician terms, such as “doctor”; and (3) outcome measures of well-being, such as “burnout.” Studies were included if they had at least one measure of the built environment and one measure of physician well-being. Of 1,723 abstracts screened, 146 full-text articles were reviewed, leaving 16 articles to be included for data extraction. Results: Included studies were from all around the world, except for, notably, the United States. Robust interpretation of the data was challenging because of the lack of standardization in the assessment of environmental factors and physician well-being. Excessive noise was the variable most linked to well-being. Suitable surroundings, including lighting, furniture, and art, were also linked with satisfaction, but it was unclear whether there was an association with well-being. Conclusion: Understanding how environmental factors affect physician well-being is paramount but considerably understudied. Standardization of research approach should be developed in order to produce more robust research to create evidence-based designs for physician well-being.

Исследовали параметры электромагнитного излучения (ЭМИ), исходящего от лицевой поверхности широко распространённых офисных электрических приборов: системный блок Ramec, монитор Acer, клавиатура hp, многофункциональное устройство (МФУ) Brother. Установили, что приборы имеют различные уровни электромагнитного излучения. На расстоянии 0,5 метра, который установлен требованиями СанПиН 2.2.2/2.4.1340–03, наибольшее излучение распространяют Монитор Acer, МФУ Brother и системный блок Ramec. Показатели напряженности электрического поля в диапазоне частот 5 Гц – 2 кГц на расстоянии 0,5 метра у этих приборов превышают уровень 25 В/м, который установлен требованиями СанПиН 2.2.2/2.4.1340–03. Напряженность электрического поля в диапазоне частот 2 – 400 кГц и плотность магнитного потока в диапазоне частот 5 Гц – 2 кГц и 2 – 400 кГц на расстоянии 0,5 метра у всех испытанных приборов отвечает существующим требованиям. Показатели ЭМИ достигают максимальных значений у лицевой поверхности прибора. Так, у поверхности исследованного оборудования напряженность электрического поля превышает в 4…24 раза, а плотность магнитного потока – в 1…16 раз аналогичные показатели, зафиксированные на расстоянии 0,5 м. Наиболее значимым в смысле необходимости защиты является системный блок компьютера. Поскольку пользователь может находиться в различных положениях по отношению к системному блоку, исследовали уровни ЭМИ с разных сторон прибора. Установили, что показатели напряженности электрического поля в диапазоне частот 5 Гц – 2 кГц на расстоянии 0,5 метра по всем сторонам системного блока не отвечают требованиям санитарных норм. Напряженность электрического поля в диапазоне частот 2 – 400 кГц и плотность магнитного потока в диапазоне частот 5 Гц – 2 кГц и 2 – 400 кГц на расстоянии 0,5 метра со всех сторон прибора отвечают нормативам СанПиН 2.2.2/2.4.1340–03. Наиболее опасным является ЭМИ со стороны нижней поверхности системного блока компьютера по показателю напряжённости электрического поля. Высокие уровни напряжённости исходят также от задней, верхней и боковых поверхностей прибора. Современная офисная мебель изготавливается преимущественно из древесностружечных плит (ДСП). Предположили, что плиты могут выполнять экранирующую функцию для защиты от ЭМИ. Исследовали способность трёх типов промышленных ДСП мебельного назначения поглощать электромагнитное излучение. В качестве источника ЭМИ использовали нижнюю сторону системного блока компьютера. Полученные данные показывают, что величины напряженности электрического поля и плотности магнитного потока за экраном из ДСП близки к значениям ЭМИ без экрана. Изменения показателей не имеют выраженного характера, имеются как величины пониженного значения, так и увеличенные по сравнению с ЭМИ без экрана. Основная масса изменений за экраном из ДСП составляет ±20%, т. е. они укладываются в диапазон погрешности измерительных приборов ИЭП-05, ИМП-05/1 и ИМП-05/2. Таким образом, мебельные древесностружечные плиты толщиной 16,3 мм не поглощают электромагнитное поле, исходящее от офисных электрических приборов. Для придания плитам защитной способности необходимо ввести в их состав вещества, способные поглощать ЭМИ. We studied the parameters of electromagnetic radiation (EMP), emanating from the front surface of widespread office electrical appliances: the Ramec system unit, Acer monitor, hp keyboard, Brother multifunctional device (MFD). It was found that the devices have different levels of electromagnetic radiation. At a distance of 0.5 meter, that is established by the requirements of SanPiN 2.2.2 / 2.4.1340–03, the greatest radiation is distributed by the Acer Monitor, Brother MFP and the Ramec system unit. The electric field strength in the frequency range 5 Hz – 2 kHz at a distance of 0.5 meters for these devices exceeds the level of 25 V / m, which is established by the requirements of SanPiN 2.2.2 / 2.4.1340–03. The electric field in the frequency range 2 – 400 kHz and the magnetic flux density in the frequency range 5 Hz – 2 kHz and 2 – 400 kHz at a distance of 0.5 meters for all tested devices meets the existing requirements. EMR indicators reach maximum values at the front surface of the device. So, at the surface of the equipment under investigation, the electric field strength exceeds 4 ... 24 times, and the magnetic flux density – 1 ... 16 times the same indicators recorded at a distance of 0.5 m. The most important in the sense of the need for protection is the computer system unit. Since a user can be in different positions with respect to system unit, the EMR levels from different sides of the device were examined. It was found that the electric field strength indicators in the frequency range of 5 Hz – 2 kHz at a distance of 0.5 meter on all sides of the system unit does not meet the requirements of sanitary standards. The electric field strength in the frequency range of 2 – 400 kHz and magnetic flux density in the frequency range of 5 Hz – 2 kHz and 2 – 400 kHz at a distance of 0.5 meters from all sides of the device comply with SanPiN 2.2.2 / 2.4. 1340-03. The most dangerous is the EMR from the side of the lower surface of the computer system unit in terms of the electric field strength. High levels of tension also come from the back, top and side surfaces of the device. Modern office furniture is made primarily from particleboards. It was suggested that the plates can perform a shielding function to protect against EMP. We investigated the ability of three types of industrial furniture particleboards to absorb electromagnetic radiation. The lower side of the computer system unit was used as the source of electromagnetic radiation. The data obtained show that the values of the electric field strength and magnetic flux density behind the screen from the particleboards are close to the values of EMP without the screen. Changes in indicators are not expressed, there are both low values and increased compared to EMP without a screen. The bulk of the changes behind the screen from the chipboard is ± 20%, i.e. they fit into the error range of measuring instruments IEP-05, IMP-05/1 and IMP-05/2. Thus, 16.3 mm thick particleboards do not absorb the electromagnetic field emanating from office electrical appliances. To give the plates a protective ability, it is necessary to introduce substances capable of absorbing EMP into their composition.

Abstract Background During the 2020 UK COVID-19 lockdown restrictions, children spent almost all of their time at home, which had a significant influence on their physical activity (PA) and sedentary behaviour. This study aimed to: 1) determine changes to the social and physical environment at home and children’s home-based sitting, PA, standing and sitting breaks as a result of the COVID-19 restrictions; and 2) examine associations between changes at home and children’s movement behaviours. Methods One hundred and two children had their PA and sitting, standing and sitting breaks at home objectively measured pre-COVID-19 and during the first COVID-19 lockdown (June-July 2020). Children’s parents (n = 101) completed an audit of their home physical environment and a survey on the home social environment at both time points. Changes in the home physical and social environment and behavioural outcomes were assessed using Wilcoxon signed ranked tests, paired t-tests, or chi-square. Repeated linear regression analyses examined associations between changes in homes and changes in the home-based behavioural outcomes. Results During COVID-19, households increased the amount of seated furniture and electronic media equipment at home. The number of books and PA equipment decreased and fewer parents enforced a screen-time rule. Children’s preference for physical activities and socialising at home decreased. Time at home and sitting at home increased during COVID-19, whilst PA, standing and sitting breaks decreased. Both MVPA and TPA were positively associated with child preference for PA, and negatively associated with attending school. Sitting was negatively associated with child preference for PA and child preference for socialising at home. Media equipment was negatively associated with sitting breaks, whilst PA equipment was positively associated with standing. Conclusion The COVID-19 restrictions forced children to spend almost all their time at home. Children’s PA, standing, and sitting breaks at home declined during the restrictions, while sitting increased. Mostly negative changes occurred in homes, some of which impacted children’s behaviours at home. To avoid the changes persisting post-lockdown, interventions are needed to reset and promote children’s PA and discourage prolonged sitting time.

It's not only recently that computer technology and electronic networking have been surrounded with a vast amount of hyperbole -- sweeping statements of glorious futures awaiting us if we continue on the present course of technological development, with predictions from the 'paperless office' to the vision of permanently uploading one's consciousness to the global matrix, leaving the body behind. At the same time, we have seen dire warnings of a dumbing-down of society through a narrowing of human inventiveness by needlessly accepting the rules of computer logic, and through an overdependency on machines in everyday life -- indeed, the 'Y2K bug' has become something of a wet dream for neo-Luddites: the bigger the crash, the better their chances to do away with computers altogether. It doesn't take much to see that much of these predictions, hopes and dreams are centred around a dichotomy of flesh and mind: from Neuromancer to The Matrix, entering the network appears synonymous with leaving the flesh; increasingly, the growing planetwide network with its brain-like connections of nodes and centres is seen as a global mind, with the bodies of its users merely useless appendages that will be removed once we figure out how to sever mind and body and fully live online. Whether they love or abhor the idea of life in cyberspace -- most commentators' descriptions of the electronic future are to some extent fuelled by this radical and powerful imagery. Reality can't be made to fit into this dichotomy quite as easily, however. The flesh is remarkably resistant to all attempts to overcome it: we might temporarily ignore our bodies as we travel through cyberspace, but the growing rates of carpal tunnel syndrome and back pain amongst computer users are a clear sign that mind and body remain firmly connected, much to the delight of the designers of orthopaedic keyboards and office furniture. And speaking of the office: if anything, paper consumption rates have gone up rather than down, thanks to better and faster personal printers which make printing out yet another revision of the document we're currently working on a breeze (of ozone). The paperless office, once thought to be just around the corner, has receded into the distance. That's not to say that the neo-Luddites got it right on all counts, however. Their main argument against predictions of the 'death of the book' at the hands of hand-held reading screens has long been that no electronic gadget could ever replace the book in its robust versatility. They say that you don't take a laptop computer to read in bed, or while you're taking a bath, for example, and that at any rate a computer disk or an anonymous file on a hard drive just hasn't got the same aura as a rare hardcover edition of the same text. This confuses some very different types and uses of books -- you wouldn't read the rare hardcover in bed (it's too heavy to hold up for long) or, heaven forbid, in the bathtub. If we're talking about a cheap paperback instead, however, reading it in the bath probably isn't a good idea, either: steam and moisture from the water will make its cheap glue runny and its pages soggy, and you'll end up with a lump of papiermaché. And in any case, most people I know shower. This takes us to another way in which the flesh/mind distinction has been framed: descriptions according to which the flesh -- representing here the material world as such -- alone is 'solid', and the mind -- particularly in its cyberspatial/technological form -- is 'ephemeral'. We cling to solid, material artefacts (printed documents, letters, books) to fundament our thoughts, rather than their electronic counterparts (files, emails, Web pages), because the former appear to have a stronger 'presence', and this, too, is a reason the 'paperless office' remains theory. We take what we see on the Net with more than just a grain of salt, while we are far less critical of what we see in newspapers, print journals and books, just because they have a greater materiality. By this mindset, nothing published electronically, available on the World Wide Web, can ever be a classic in the way that the great books of literature we find in the libraries are classics. If you look at the less popular aisles of your library, however, you'll see a different reality emerge: here the off-mainstream works vie for the attention of occasional visitors; with budget restrictions often allowing only the purchase of paperback editions, these books will remain here until they're too worn or decayed to be loaned, or until the latest literary fad demands more storage room -- then they'll be shipped off to the warehouse or sold to whoever takes pity on them. In reality, then, for the majority of printed works (other than those instantly canonised and continually reprinted) the ephemerality of their medium is as much of a threat as it is for works published exclusively online, or perhaps even more so: the last copy of a text, available on the Web, will still be available for a potentially global audience, while the last paperback of an obscure novel, stacked away in the municipal library of a rural town, is practically lost to the world. The same is true for other forms of communication, too: trying to find a letter you received from a friend a few years back is likely to result in searching through multiple shoeboxes full of correspondence, if you bothered to keep it at all; at the same time, like many users you may never have bothered to set expiry limits for the inbox of your email programme, and still have a perfect record of every email communication you've had since you first got online. In the case of public discussion fora such as newsgroups, this may even be cause for concern: the worrysome implications of Internet archival services such as Deja News are only beginning to enter the public consciousness (Bruns, "Archiving the Ephemeral"). Websites, too, may change a lot, but for every link that's suddenly vanished it's also possible to show pages which haven't been updated in years but are still online since nobody ever bothered to delete them. With the ongoing explosion in storage space available, this trend is likely to continue: as the space on hard drives and Webservers gets increasingly difficult to exhaust, fewer people will go through the trouble of cleaning up their storage space regularly. In effect, then, the supposedly ephemeral world of cyberspace is becoming more and more anephemeral. So, how solid is the flesh, and how volatile is the mind? To ask the question this way would only mean continuing a binary division that doesn't appear to exist in reality. As we have seen, the supposedly ephemeral, bodiless existence of cyberspace is showing signs of solidification, while on the other hand the solidity of what we refer to as 'the real world' (in contrast to 'the virtual') is always only a temporal appearance: all flesh is mortal, as it were. In the end, though, perhaps the lesson is that despite all the popular fiction claiming the opposite, flesh and mind are much less divisible than they seem. We don't just leave the body behind as we enter cyberspace, and 'real life' isn't somehow automatically more 'real' than 'virtual' experience. This is evident in other fields of cyberdevelopment, too: after all, the main point of virtual reality gadgetry is to replicate physical experience -- we might want to mould the flesh into new forms, but we're hardly trying to get rid of it. References Axel Bruns. "Archiving the Ephemeral: Deja News and the Ethics of Perfect Memory." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 1.2 (1998). 1 May 1999 <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9808/deja.php>. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Axel Bruns. "How Solid Is the Flesh?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2.3 (1999). [your date of access] <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/solid.php>. Chicago style: Axel Bruns, "How Solid Is the Flesh?" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2, no. 3 (1999), <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/solid.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Author. (1999) How solid is the flesh? M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 2(3). <http://www.uq.edu.au/mc/9905/solid.php> ([your date of access]).

Augmented Reality—The Liminal Zone Within the larger context of the post-desktop technological philosophy and practice, an increasing number of efforts are directed towards finding solutions for integrating as close as possible virtual information into specific real environments; a short list of such endeavors include Wi-Fi connectivity, GPS-driven navigation, mobile phones, GIS (Geographic Information System), and various technological systems associated with what is loosely called locative, ubiquitous and pervasive computing. Augmented Reality (AR) is directly related to these technologies, although its visualization capabilities and the experience it provides assure it a particular place within this general trend. Indeed, AR stands out for its unique capacity (or ambition) to offer a seamless combination—or what I call here an effect of convergence—of the real scene perceived by the user with virtual information overlaid on that scene interactively and in real time. The augmented scene is perceived by the viewer through the use of different displays, the most common being the AR glasses (head-mounted display), video projections or monitors, and hand-held mobile devices such as smartphones or tablets, increasingly popular nowadays. One typical example of AR application is Layar, a browser that layers information of public interest—delivered through an open-source content management system—over the actual image of a real space, streamed live on the mobile phone display. An increasing number of artists employ this type of mobile AR apps to create artworks that consist in perceptually combining material reality and virtual data: as the user points the smartphone or tablet to a specific place, virtual 3D-modelled graphics or videos appear in real time, seamlessly inserted in the image of that location, according to the user’s position and orientation. In the engineering and IT design fields, one of the first researchers to articulate a coherent conceptualization of AR and to underlie its specific capabilities is Ronald Azuma. He writes that, unlike Virtual Reality (VR) which completely immerses the user inside a synthetic environment, AR supplements reality, therefore enhancing “a user’s perception of and interaction with the real world” (355-385). Another important contributor to the foundation of AR as a concept and as a research field is industrial engineer Paul Milgram. He proposes a comprehensive and frequently cited definition of “Mixed Reality” (MR) via a schema that includes the entire spectrum of situations that span the “continuum” between actual reality and virtual reality, with “augmented reality” and “augmented virtuality” between the two poles (283). Important to remark with regard to terminology (MR or AR) is that especially in the non-scientific literature, authors do not always explain a preference for either MR or AR. This suggests that the two terms are understood as synonymous, but it also provides evidence for my argument that, outside of the technical literature, AR is considered a concept rather than a technology. Here, I use the term AR instead of MR considering that the phrase AR (and the integrated idea of augmentation) is better suited to capturing the convergence effect. As I will demonstrate in the following lines, the process of augmentation (i.e. the convergence effect) is the result of an enhancement of the possibilities to perceive and understand the world—through adding data that augment the perception of reality—and not simply the product of a mix. Nevertheless, there is surely something “mixed” about this experience, at least for the fact that it combines reality and virtuality. The experiential result of combining reality and virtuality in the AR process is what media theorist Lev Manovich calls an “augmented space,” a perceptual liminal zone which he defines as “the physical space overlaid with dynamically changing information, multimedia in form and localized for each user” (219). The author derives the term “augmented space” from the term AR (already established in the scientific literature), but he sees AR, and implicitly augmented space, not as a strictly defined technology, but as a model of visuality concerned with the intertwining of the real and virtual: “it is crucial to see this as a conceptual rather than just a technological issue – and therefore as something that in part has already been an element of other architectural and artistic paradigms” (225-6). Surely, it is hard to believe that AR has appeared in a void or that its emergence is strictly related to certain advances in technological research. AR—as an artistic manifestation—is informed by other attempts (not necessarily digital) to merge real and fictional in a unitary perceptual entity, particularly by installation art and Virtual Reality (VR) environments. With installation art, AR shares the same spatial strategy and scenographic approach—they both construct “fictional” areas within material reality, that is, a sort of mise-en-scène that are aesthetically and socially produced and centered on the active viewer. From the media installationist practice of the previous decades, AR inherited the way of establishing a closer spatio-temporal interaction between the setting, the body and the electronic image (see for example Bruce Nauman’s Live-Taped Video Corridor [1970], Peter Campus’s Interface [1972], Dan Graham’s Present Continuous Pasts(s) [1974], Jeffrey Shaw’s Viewpoint [1975], or Jim Campbell’s Hallucination [1988]). On the other hand, VR plays an important role in the genealogy of AR for sharing the same preoccupation for illusionist imagery and—at least in some AR projects—for providing immersive interactions in “expanded image spaces experienced polysensorily and interactively” (Grau 9). VR artworks such as Paul Sermon, Telematic Dreaming (1992), Char Davies’ Osmose (1995), Michael Naimark’s Be Now Here (1995-97), Maurice Benayoun’s World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War (1997), Luc Courchesne’s Where Are You? (2007-10), are significant examples for the way in which the viewer can be immersed in “expanded image-spaces.” Offering no view of the exterior world, the works try instead to reduce as much as possible the critical distance the viewer might have to the image he/she experiences. Indeed, AR emerged in great part from the artistic and scientific research efforts dedicated to VR, but also from the technological and artistic investigations of the possibilities of blending reality and virtuality, conducted in the previous decades. For example, in the 1960s, computer scientist Ivan Sutherland played a crucial role in the history of AR contributing to the development of display solutions and tracking systems that permit a better immersion within the digital image. Another important figure in the history of AR is computer artist Myron Krueger whose experiments with “responsive environments” are fundamental as they proposed a closer interaction between participant’s body and the digital object. More recently, architect and theorist Marcos Novak contributed to the development of the idea of AR by introducing the concept of “eversion”, “the counter-vector of the virtual leaking out into the actual”. Today, AR technological research and the applications made available by various developers and artists are focused more and more on mobility and ubiquitous access to information instead of immersivity and illusionist effects. A few examples of mobile AR include applications such as Layar, Wikitude—“world browsers” that overlay site-specific information in real-time on a real view (video stream) of a place, Streetmuseum (launched in 2010) and Historypin (launched in 2011)—applications that insert archive images into the street-view of a specific location where the old images were taken, or Google Glass (launched in 2012)—a device that provides the wearer access to Google’s key Cloud features, in situ and in real time. Recognizing the importance of various technological developments and of the artistic manifestations such as installation art and VR as predecessors of AR, we should emphasize that AR moves forward from these artistic and technological models. AR extends the installationist precedent by proposing a consistent and seamless integration of informational elements with the very physical space of the spectator, and at the same time rejects the idea of segregating the viewer into a complete artificial environment like in VR systems by opening the perceptual field to the surrounding environment. Instead of leaving the viewer in a sort of epistemological “lust” within the closed limits of the immersive virtual systems, AR sees virtuality rather as a “component of experiencing the real” (Farman 22). Thus, the questions that arise—and which this essay aims to answer—are: Do we have a specific spatial dimension in AR? If yes, can we distinguish it as a different—if not new—spatial and aesthetic paradigm? Is AR’s intricate topology able to be the place not only of convergence, but also of possible tensions between its real and virtual components, between the ideal of obtaining a perceptual continuity and the inherent (technical) limitations that undermine that ideal? Converging Spaces in the Artistic Mode: Between Continuum and Discontinuum As key examples of the way in which AR creates a specific spatial experience—in which convergence appears as a fluctuation between continuity and discontinuity—I mention three of the most accomplished works in the field that, significantly, expose also the essential role played by the interface in providing this experience: Living-Room 2 (2007) by Jan Torpus, Under Scan (2005-2008) by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and Hans RichtAR (2013) by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The works illustrate the three main categories of interfaces used for AR experience: head-attached, spatial displays, and hand-held (Bimber 2005). These types of interface—together with all the array of adjacent devices, software and tracking systems—play a central role in determining the forms and outcomes of the user’s experience and consequently inform in a certain measure the aesthetic and socio-cultural interpretative discourse surrounding AR. Indeed, it is not the same to have an immersive but solitary experience, or a mobile and public experience of an AR artwork or application. The first example is Living-Room 2 an immersive AR installation realized by a collective coordinated by Jan Torpus in 2007 at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts FHNW, Basel, Switzerland. The work consists of a built “living-room” with pieces of furniture and domestic objects that are perceptually augmented by means of a “see-through” Head Mounted Display. The viewer perceives at the same time the real room and a series of virtual graphics superimposed on it such as illusionist natural vistas that “erase” the walls, or strange creatures that “invade” the living-room. The user can select different augmenting “scenarios” by interacting with both the physical interfaces (the real furniture and objects) and the graphical interfaces (provided as virtual images in the visual field of the viewer, and activated via a handheld device). For example, in one of the scenarios proposed, the user is prompted to design his/her own extended living room, by augmenting the content and the context of the given real space with different “spatial dramaturgies” or “AR décors.” Another scenario offers the possibility of creating an “Ecosystem”—a real-digital world perceived through the HMD in which strange creatures virtually occupy the living-room intertwining with the physical configuration of the set design and with the user’s viewing direction, body movement, and gestures. Particular attention is paid to the participant’s position in the room: a tracking device measures the coordinates of the participant’s location and direction of view and effectuates occlusions of real space and then congruent superimpositions of 3D images upon it. Figure 1: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (Ecosystems), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist. Figure 2: Jan Torpus, Living-Room 2 (AR decors), Augmented Reality installation (2007). Courtesy of the artist.In this sense, the title of the work acquires a double meaning: “living” is both descriptive and metaphoric. As Torpus explains, Living-Room is an ambiguous phrase: it can be both a living-room and a room that actually lives, an observation that suggests the idea of a continuum and of immersion in an environment where there are no apparent ruptures between reality and virtuality. Of course, immersion is in these circumstances not about the creation of a purely artificial secluded space of experience like that of the VR environments, but rather about a dialogical exercise that unifies two different phenomenal levels, real and virtual, within a (dis)continuous environment (with the prefix “dis” as a necessary provision). Media theorist Ron Burnett’s observations about the instability of the dividing line between different levels of experience—more exactly, of the real-virtual continuum—in what he calls immersive “image-worlds” have a particular relevance in this context: Viewing or being immersed in images extend the control humans have over mediated spaces and is part of a perceptual and psychological continuum of struggle for meaning within image-worlds. Thinking in terms of continuums lessens the distinctions between subjects and objects and makes it possible to examine modes of influence among a variety of connected experiences. (113) It is precisely this preoccupation to lessen any (or most) distinctions between subjects and objects, and between real and virtual spaces, that lays at the core of every artistic experiment under the AR rubric. The fact that this distinction is never entirely erased—as Living-Room 2 proves—is part of the very condition of AR. The ambition to create a continuum is after all not about producing perfectly homogenous spaces, but, as Ron Burnett points out (113), “about modalities of interaction and dialogue” between real worlds and virtual images. Another way to frame the same problematic of creating a provisional spatial continuum between reality and virtuality, but this time in a non-immersive fashion (i.e. with projective interface means), occurs in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Under Scan (2005-2008). The work, part of the larger series Relational Architecture, is an interactive video installation conceived for outdoor and indoor environments and presented in various public spaces. It is a complex system comprised of a powerful light source, video projectors, computers, and a tracking device. The powerful light casts shadows of passers-by within the dark environment of the work’s setting. A tracking device indicates where viewers are positioned and permits the system to project different video sequences onto their shadows. Shot in advance by local videographers and producers, the filmed sequences show full images of ordinary people moving freely, but also watching the camera. As they appear within pedestrians’ shadows, the figurants interact with the viewers, moving and establishing eye contact. Figure 3: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. Figure 4: Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Under Scan (Relational Architecture 11), 2005. Shown here: Trafalgar Square, London, United Kingdom, 2008. Photo by: Antimodular Research. Courtesy of the artist. One of the most interesting attributes of this work with respect to the question of AR’s (im)possible perceptual spatial continuity is its ability to create an experientially stimulating and conceptually sophisticated play between illusion and subversion of illusion. In Under Scan, the integration of video projections into the real environment via the active body of the viewer is aimed at tempering as much as possible any disparities or dialectical tensions—that is, any successive or alternative reading—between real and virtual. Although non-immersive, the work fuses the two levels by provoking an intimate but mute dialogue between the real, present body of the viewer and the virtual, absent body of the figurant via the ambiguous entity of the shadow. The latter is an illusion (it marks the presence of a body) that is transcended by another illusion (video projection). Moreover, being “under scan,” the viewer inhabits both the “here” of the immediate space and the “there” of virtual information: “the body” is equally a presence in flesh and bones and an occurrence in bits and bytes. But, however convincing this reality-virtuality pseudo-continuum would be, the spatial and temporal fragmentations inevitably persist: there is always a certain break at the phenomenological level between the experience of real space, the bodily absence/presence in the shadow, and the displacements and delays of the video image projection. Figure 5: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. Figure 6: John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer, Hans RichtAR, augmented reality installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters”, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2013. Courtesy of the artists. The third example of an AR artwork that engages the problem of real-virtual spatial convergence as a play between perceptual continuity and discontinuity, this time with the use of hand-held mobile interface is Hans RichtAR by John Craig Freeman and Will Pappenheimer. The work is an AR installation included in the exhibition “Hans Richter: Encounters” at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in 2013. The project recreates the spirit of the 1929 exhibition held in Stuttgart entitled Film und Foto (“FiFo”) for which avant-garde artist Hans Richter served as film curator. Featured in the augmented reality is a re-imaging of the FiFo Russian Room designed by El Lissitzky where a selection of Russian photographs, film stills and actual film footage was presented. The users access the work through tablets made available at the exhibition entrance. Pointing the tablet at the exhibition and moving around the room, the viewer discovers that a new, complex installation is superimposed on the screen over the existing installation and gallery space at LACMA. The work effectively recreates and interprets the original design of the Russian Room, with its scaffoldings and surfaces at various heights while virtually juxtaposing photography and moving images, to which the authors have added some creative elements of their own. Manipulating and converging real space and the virtual forms in an illusionist way, AR is able—as one of the artists maintains—to destabilize the way we construct representation. Indeed, the work makes a statement about visuality that complicates the relationship between the visible object and its representation and interpretation in the virtual realm. One that actually shows the fragility of establishing an illusionist continuum, of a perfect convergence between reality and represented virtuality, whatever the means employed. AR: A Different Spatial Practice Regardless the degree of “perfection” the convergence process would entail, what we can safely assume—following the examples above—is that the complex nature of AR operations permits a closer integration of virtual images within real space, one that, I argue, constitutes a new spatial paradigm. This is the perceptual outcome of the convergence effect, that is, the process and the product of consolidating different—and differently situated—elements in real and virtual worlds into a single space-image. Of course, illusion plays a crucial role as it makes permeable the perceptual limit between the represented objects and the material spaces we inhabit. Making the interface transparent—in both proper and figurative senses—and integrating it into the surrounding space, AR “erases” the medium with the effect of suspending—at least for a limited time—the perceptual (but not ontological!) differences between what is real and what is represented. These aspects are what distinguish AR from other technological and artistic endeavors that aim at creating more inclusive spaces of interaction. However, unlike the CAVE experience (a display solution frequently used in VR applications) that isolates the viewer within the image-space, in AR virtual information is coextensive with reality. As the example of the Living-Room 2 shows, regardless the degree of immersivity, in AR there is no such thing as dismissing the real in favor of an ideal view of a perfect and completely controllable artificial environment like in VR. The “redemptive” vision of a total virtual environment is replaced in AR with the open solution of sharing physical and digital realities in the same sensorial and spatial configuration. In AR the real is not denounced but reflected; it is not excluded, but integrated. Yet, AR distinguishes itself also from other projects that presuppose a real-world environment overlaid with data, such as urban surfaces covered with screens, Wi-Fi enabled areas, or video installations that are not site-specific and viewer inclusive. Although closely related to these types of projects, AR remains different, its spatiality is not simply a “space of interaction” that connects, but instead it integrates real and virtual elements. Unlike other non-AR media installations, AR does not only place the real and virtual spaces in an adjacent position (or replace one with another), but makes them perceptually convergent in an—ideally—seamless way (and here Hans RichtAR is a relevant example). Moreover, as Lev Manovich notes, “electronically augmented space is unique – since the information is personalized for every user, it can change dynamically over time, and it is delivered through an interactive multimedia interface” (225-6). Nevertheless, as our examples show, any AR experience is negotiated in the user-machine encounter with various degrees of success and sustainability. Indeed, the realization of the convergence effect is sometimes problematic since AR is never perfectly continuous, spatially or temporally. The convergence effect is the momentary appearance of continuity that will never take full effect for the viewer, given the internal (perhaps inherent?) tensions between the ideal of seamlessness and the mostly technical inconsistencies in the visual construction of the pieces (such as real-time inadequacy or real-virtual registration errors). We should note that many criticisms of the AR visualization systems (being them practical applications or artworks) are directed to this particular aspect related to the imperfect alignment between reality and digital information in the augmented space-image. However, not only AR applications can function when having an estimated (and acceptable) registration error, but, I would state, such visual imperfections testify a distinctive aesthetic aspect of AR. The alleged flaws can be assumed—especially in the artistic AR projects—as the “trace,” as the “tool’s stroke” that can reflect the unique play between illusion and its subversion, between transparency of the medium and its reflexive strategy. In fact this is what defines AR as a different perceptual paradigm: the creation of a convergent space—which will remain inevitably imperfect—between material reality and virtual information.References Azuma, Ronald T. “A Survey on Augmented Reality.” Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments 6.4 (Aug. 1997): 355-385. < http://www.hitl.washington.edu/projects/knowledge_base/ARfinal.pdf >. Benayoun, Maurice. World Skin: A Photo Safari in the Land of War. 1997. Immersive installation: CAVE, Computer, video projectors, 1 to 5 real photo cameras, 2 to 6 magnetic or infrared trackers, shutter glasses, audio-system, Internet connection, color printer. Maurice Benayoun, Works. < http://www.benayoun.com/projet.php?id=16 >. Bimber, Oliver, and Ramesh Raskar. Spatial Augmented Reality. Merging Real and Virtual Worlds. Wellesley, Massachusetts: AK Peters, 2005. 71-92. Burnett, Ron. How Images Think. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Campbell, Jim. Hallucination. 1988-1990. Black and white video camera, 50 inch rear projection video monitor, laser disc players, custom electronics. Collection of Don Fisher, San Francisco. Campus, Peter. Interface. 1972. Closed-circuit video installation, black and white camera, video projector, light projector, glass sheet, empty, dark room. Centre Georges Pompidou Collection, Paris, France. Courchesne, Luc. Where Are You? 2005. Immersive installation: Panoscope 360°. a single channel immersive display, a large inverted dome, a hemispheric lens and projector, a computer and a surround sound system. Collection of the artist. < http://courchel.net/# >. Davies, Char. Osmose. 1995. Computer, sound synthesizers and processors, stereoscopic head-mounted display with 3D localized sound, breathing/balance interface vest, motion capture devices, video projectors, and silhouette screen. Char Davies, Immersence, Osmose. < http://www.immersence.com >. Farman, Jason. Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media. New York: Routledge, 2012. Graham, Dan. Present Continuous Past(s). 1974. Closed-circuit video installation, black and white camera, one black and white monitor, two mirrors, microprocessor. Centre Georges Pompidou Collection, Paris, France. Grau, Oliver. Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion. Translated by Gloria Custance. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2003. Hansen, Mark B.N. New Philosophy for New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004. Harper, Douglas. Online Etymology Dictionary, 2001-2012. < http://www.etymonline.com >. Manovich, Lev. “The Poetics of Augmented Space.” Visual Communication 5.2 (2006): 219-240. Milgram, Paul, Haruo Takemura, Akira Utsumi, Fumio Kishino. “Augmented Reality: A Class of Displays on the Reality-Virtuality Continuum.” SPIE [The International Society for Optical Engineering] Proceedings 2351: Telemanipulator and Telepresence Technologies (1994): 282-292. Naimark, Michael, Be Now Here. 1995-97. Stereoscopic interactive panorama: 3-D glasses, two 35mm motion-picture cameras, rotating tripod, input pedestal, stereoscopic projection screen, four-channel audio, 16-foot (4.87 m) rotating floor. Originally produced at Interval Research Corporation with additional support from the UNESCO World Heritage Centre, Paris, France. < http://www.naimark.net/projects/benowhere.html >. Nauman, Bruce. Live-Taped Video Corridor. 1970. Wallboard, video camera, two video monitors, videotape player, and videotape, dimensions variable. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Novak, Marcos. Interview with Leo Gullbring, Calimero journalistic och fotografi, 2001. < http://www.calimero.se/novak2.htm >. Sermon, Paul. Telematic Dreaming. 1992. ISDN telematic installation, two video projectors, two video cameras, two beds set. The National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford England. Shaw, Jeffrey, and Theo Botschuijver. Viewpoint. 1975. Photo installation. Shown at 9th Biennale de Paris, Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, France.

To re-imagine can, at one extreme, be a casual thought (what if I moved all the furniture in the living room?) and, at the other, re-imagining can be a complex process (what if I adapt a classic text into a major film?). There is a long history of working with the ideas of others and of re-working our own ideas. Of taking a concept and re-imagining it into something that is similar to the original and yet offers something new. Such re-imaginations are all around us; from the various interpretations of the Sherlock Holmes stories to the adjustments made, often over generations, to family recipes. Some of these efforts are the result of a creative drive to experiment and push boundaries, some efforts are inspired by changes in society or technology, yet others will be born of a sense of 'this can be done better' or 'done differently'. Essentially, to re-imagine is to ask questions, to interrogate that which is often taken for granted. This issue of M/C Journal seeks to explore the 'why' and the 'how' of re-imagining both the everyday and the extraordinary. In a reflection of the scale and scope of the potential to re-imagine all that is around us, this issue is particularly diverse. The contributions offer explorations into varied disciplines, use a range of methodological lenses, and deploy different writing styles. To this end we present a range of articles—some of which contain quite challenging content—that cover copyright, crime fiction, the stage, the literary brand and film, horror and children’s film, television, military-inspired fashion, and a piece that focuses on events leading up to September 11, 2001. We then present three, quite different, works that explore various aspects of Australian Indigenous culture and history. We begin with our feature article: “‘They’re creepy and they’re kooky’ and They’re Copyrighted: How Copyright Is Used to Dampen the (Re-)Imagination”. In this work Steve Collins explores important issues of copyright in the re-imagining and re-purposing of content. In particular, this article unpacks—using examples from the United States—how copyright legislation can restrict the activities of creative practitioners, across varied fields, and so adds to the debate on copyright reform. In our lead article “The Re-imagining Inherent in Crime Fiction Translation”, by Alistair Rolls, ideas of re-imagination, language, and the world’s most popular genre—crime fiction—are critically appraised. Rolls looks at a suite of issues around imagining original and re-imagining, through translation, crime fiction texts. These two forms of creativity are essential to the genre's development for, as Rolls notes, this type of fiction was born, “simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two.” Amy Antonio re-imagines the femme fatale. Antonio acknowledges the centrality of the femme fatale to the noir tradition and re-imagines this iconic figure by positioning her on the Renaissance stage, explaining how the historical factors that precipitated the emergence of the noir femme fatale in the years following World War II, similarly existed in the sixteenth century and, as a result, the femme fatale can be re-imagined in a series of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. The articles in this issue turn from fiction, to theatre, and then to film with Leonie Rutherford embarking on a “Re-imagining the Brand” exercise. Through two, very informative, case studies—Adventures of Tin Tin and Silver, Return to Treasure Island—Rutherford engages with issues of re-imagining classic literary texts as big-screen blockbusters. This article addresses some of the complexities associated with the updating “of classic texts [that] require interpretation and the negotiation of subtle changes in values that have occurred since the creation of the ‘original’.” Erin Hawley also looks at film, through a lens of horror, in “Re-imagining the Horror Genre in Children’s Animated Film”. Hawley explores how animated films have always been an ambiguous space “in terms of age, pleasure, and viewership.” Hawley goes on to challenge common assumptions that “animation itself is often a signifier of safety, fun, nostalgia, and childishness; it is a means of addressing families and young audiences” and outlines how animation complements horror where, “the fantastic and transformative aspects of animation can be powerful tools for telling stories that are dark, surprising, or somehow subversive.” Issues of the small screen, and social media, are reviewed by Karin van Es, Daniela van Geenen, and Thomas Boeschoten in their work of “Re-imagining Television Audience Research on Twitter”. In particular, this work highlights issues with how audience research is undertaken and argues for new ways forward that adapt to the changing viewing landscape: one that features social media as an increasingly important tool for people to engage with more traditional types of entertainment. Fashion, too, features within this special issue with the work Emerald L. King and Denise N. Rall, “Re-imagining the Empire of Japan through Japanese Schoolboy Uniforms”. King and Rall present their research into the significant re-imagining of Japanese cultural and national identities, which are explored in this work through the cataclysmic impact of Western ideologies on Japanese cultural traditions. The idea of re-imagining is challenged by Meg Stalcup through her article “What If? Re-imagined Scenarios and the Re-virtualisation of History” which looks at several events that took place in the lead up to September 11, 2001. Several of the men who would become 9/11 hijackers were stopped for minor traffic violations. Police officers in the United States replayed these incidents of contact, yet their questioning “what if?” asked not only if those moments could have revealed the plot of that traumatic day, but also places alternate scenarios into play. John C. Ryan, Danielle Brady, and Christopher Kueh guide us through a geographical re-imagining of one of Australia’s capital cities in “Where Fanny Balbuk Walked: Re-imagining Perth’s Wetlands through Digital Modelling”. This re-imagining of a major city’s natural environment calls “attention to past indiscretions while invigorating future possibilities.” Moreover, this work highlights the value of re-imagining a city anew as well as re-imagining the original after a process of considerable change. Rachel Franks traces the history of an effort to communicate the concept of equality under the law, to the Indigenous peoples of Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania), in “A True Crime Tale: Re-imagining Governor Arthur’s Proclamation Board for the Tasmanian Aborigines”. This article provides an overview of some of the various re-imaginings of this Board—including the re-imagining of the Board’s history—and also offers a new re-imagination of this curious, colonial object; positing that the Board serves as an early “pamphlet” on justice and punishment. Brooke Collins-Gearing, Vivien Cadungog, Sophie Camilleri, Erin Comensoli, Elissa Duncan, Leitesha Green, Adam Phillips, and Rebecca Stone take a very different, and rather creative, approach to re-imagining with “Listenin’ Up: Re-Imagining Ourselves through Stories of and from Country” a work that explores Western discourses of education; and looks at ways to engage with Aboriginal knowledge through the pedagogical and personal act of listening. These authors attempt to re-imagine “the institutionalised space of our classroom through a dialogic pedagogy.” These articles are, necessarily, brief. Yet, each work does provide insight into various aspects of the re-imagining process while offering new perspectives on how re-imagining takes place—in material culture, learning practices, or in all important media re-interpretations of the world around us. We extend our thanks to our contributors. We thank, too, all those who engaged in the blind peer review process. We sincerely appreciate the efforts of those who offered their expertise and their time as well as offering valuable comments on a wide range of contributions. Rachel Franks, Simon Dwyer, and Denise N. RallEditors

Introduction Explorations of the multimedia game format within cultural studies have been broadly approached from two perspectives: one -- the impact of technologies on user interaction particularly with regard to social implications, and the other -- human computer interactions within the framework of cybercultures. Another approach to understanding or speaking about games within cultural studies is to focus on the game experience as cultural practice -- as an activity or an event. In this article I wish to initiate an exploration of the aesthetics of player space as a distinctive element of the gameplay experience. In doing so I propose that an understanding of aesthetic spatial issues as an element of player interactivity and engagement is important for understanding the cultural practice of adventure gameplay. In approaching these questions, I am focussing on the single-player exploration adventure game in particular Myst and The Crystal Key. In describing these games as adventures I am drawing on Chris Crawford's The Art of Computer Game Design, which although a little dated, focusses on game design as a distinct activity. He brings together a theoretical approach with extensive experience as a game designer himself (Excalibur, Legionnaire, Gossip). Whilst at Atari he also worked with Brenda Laurel, a key theorist in the area of computer design and dramatic structure. Adventure games such as Myst and The Crystal Key might form a sub-genre in Chris Crawford's taxonomy of computer game design. Although they use the main conventions of the adventure game -- essentially a puzzle to be solved with characters within a story context -- the main focus and source of pleasure for the player is exploration, particularly the exploration of worlds or cosmologies. The main gameplay of both games is to travel through worlds solving clues, picking up objects, and interacting with other characters. In Myst the player has to solve the riddle of the world they have entered -- as the CD-ROM insert states "Now you're here, wherever here is, with no option but to explore." The goal, as the player must work out, is to release the father Atrus from prison by bringing magic pages of a book to different locations in the worlds. Hints are offered by broken-up, disrupted video clips shown throughout the game. In The Crystal Key, the player as test pilot has to save a civilisation by finding clues, picking up objects, mending ships and defeating an opponent. The questions foregrounded by a focus on the aesthetics of navigation are: What types of representational context are being set up? What choices have designers made about representational context? How are the players positioned within these spaces? What are the implications for the player's sense of orientation and navigation? Architectural Fabrication For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. For the ancient Greeks, painting was divided into two categories: magalography (the painting of great things) and rhyparography (the painting of small things). Magalography covered mythological and historical scenes, which emphasised architectural settings, the human figure and grand landscapes. Rhyparography referred to still lifes and objects. In adventure games, particularly those that attempt to construct a cosmology such as Myst and The Crystal Key, magalography and rhyparography collide in a mix of architectural monumentality and obsessive detailing of objects. The creation of a digital architecture in adventure games mimics the Pompeii wall paintings with their interplay of extruded and painted features. In visualising the space of a cosmology, the environment starts to be coded like the urban or built environment with underlying geometry and textured surface or dressing. In The Making of Myst (packaged with the CD-ROM) Chuck Carter, the artist on Myst, outlines the process of creating Myst Island through painting the terrain in grey scale then extruding the features and adding textural render -- a methodology that lends itself to a hybrid of architectural and painted geometry. Examples of external architecture and of internal room design can be viewed online. In the spatial organisation of the murals of Pompeii and later Rome, orthogonals converged towards several vertical axes showing multiple points of view simultaneously. During the high Renaissance, notions of perspective developed into a more formal system known as the construzione legittima or legitimate construction. This assumed a singular position of the on-looker standing in the same place as that occupied by the artist when the painting was constructed. In Myst there is an exaggeration of the underlying structuring technique of the construzione legittima with its emphasis on geometry and mathematics. The player looks down at a slight angle onto the screen from a fixed vantage point and is signified as being within the cosmological expanse, either in off-screen space or as the cursor. Within the cosmology, the island as built environment appears as though viewed through an enlarging lens, creating the precision and coldness of a Piero della Francesca painting. Myst mixes flat and three-dimensional forms of imagery on the same screen -- the flat, sketchy portrayal of the trees of Myst Island exists side-by-side with the monumental architectural buildings and landscape design structures created in Macromodel. This image shows the flat, almost expressionistic trees of Myst Island juxtaposed with a fountain rendered in high detail. This recalls the work of Giotto in the Arena chapel. In Joachim's Dream, objects and buildings have depth, but trees, plants and sky -- the space in-between objects -- is flat. Myst Island conjures up the realm of a magic, realist space with obsolete artefacts, classic architectural styles (the Albert Hall as the domed launch pad, the British Museum as the library, the vernacular cottage in the wood), mechanical wonders, miniature ships, fountains, wells, macabre torture instruments, ziggurat-like towers, symbols and odd numerological codes. Adam Mates describes it as "that beautiful piece of brain-deadening sticky-sweet eye-candy" but more than mere eye-candy or graphic verisimilitude, it is the mix of cultural ingredients and signs that makes Myst an intriguing place to play. The buildings in The Crystal Key, an exploratory adventure game in a similar genre to Myst, celebrate the machine aesthetic and modernism with Buckminster Fuller style geodesic structures, the bombe shape, exposed ducting, glass and steel, interiors with movable room partitions and abstract expressionist decorations. An image of one of these modernist structures is available online. The Crystal Key uses QuickTime VR panoramas to construct the exterior and interior spaces. Different from the sharp detail of Myst's structures, the focus changes from sharp in wide shot to soft focus in close up, with hot-spot objects rendered in trompe l'oeil detail. The Tactility of Objects "The aim of trompe l'oeil -- using the term in its widest sense and applying it to both painting and objects -- is primarily to puzzle and to mystify" (Battersby 19). In the 15th century, Brunelleschi invented a screen with central apparatus in order to obtain exact perspective -- the monocular vision of the camera obscura. During the 17th century, there was a renewed interest in optics by the Dutch artists of the Rembrandt school (inspired by instruments developed for Dutch seafaring ventures), in particular Vermeer, Hoogstraten, de Hooch and Dou. Gerard Dou's painting of a woman chopping onions shows this. These artists were experimenting with interior perspective and trompe l'oeil in order to depict the minutia of the middle-class, domestic interior. Within these luminous interiors, with their receding tiles and domestic furniture, is an elevation of the significance of rhyparography. In the Girl Chopping Onions of 1646 by Gerard Dou the small things are emphasised -- the group of onions, candlestick holder, dead fowl, metal pitcher, and bird cage. Trompe l'oeil as an illusionist strategy is taken up in the worlds of Myst, The Crystal Key and others in the adventure game genre. Traditionally, the fascination of trompe l'oeil rests upon the tension between the actual painting and the scam; the physical structures and the faux painted structures call for the viewer to step closer to wave at a fly or test if the glass had actually broken in the frame. Mirian Milman describes trompe l'oeil painting in the following manner: "the repertory of trompe-l'oeil painting is made up of obsessive elements, it represents a reality immobilised by nails, held in the grip of death, corroded by time, glimpsed through half-open doors or curtains, containing messages that are sometimes unreadable, allusions that are often misunderstood, and a disorder of seemingly familiar and yet remote objects" (105). Her description could be a scene from Myst with in its suggestion of theatricality, rich texture and illusionistic play of riddle or puzzle. In the trompe l'oeil painterly device known as cartellino, niches and recesses in the wall are represented with projecting elements and mock bas-relief. This architectural trickery is simulated in the digital imaging of extruded and painting elements to give depth to an interior or an object. Other techniques common to trompe l'oeil -- doors, shadowy depths and staircases, half opened cupboard, and paintings often with drapes and curtains to suggest a layering of planes -- are used throughout Myst as transition points. In the trompe l'oeil paintings, these transition points were often framed with curtains or drapes that appeared to be from the spectator space -- creating a painting of a painting effect. Myst is rich in this suggestion of worlds within worlds through the framing gesture afforded by windows, doors, picture frames, bookcases and fireplaces. Views from a window -- a distant landscape or a domestic view, a common device for trompe l'oeil -- are used in Myst to represent passageways and transitions onto different levels. Vertical space is critical for extending navigation beyond the horizontal through the terraced landscape -- the tower, antechamber, dungeon, cellars and lifts of the fictional world. Screen shots show the use of the curve, light diffusion and terracing to invite the player. In The Crystal Key vertical space is limited to the extent of the QTVR tilt making navigation more of a horizontal experience. Out-Stilling the Still Dutch and Flemish miniatures of the 17th century give the impression of being viewed from above and through a focussing lens. As Mastai notes: "trompe l'oeil, therefore is not merely a certain kind of still life painting, it should in fact 'out-still' the stillest of still lifes" (156). The intricate detailing of objects rendered in higher resolution than the background elements creates a type of hyper-reality that is used in Myst to emphasise the physicality and actuality of objects. This ultimately enlarges the sense of space between objects and codes them as elements of significance within the gameplay. The obsessive, almost fetishistic, detailed displays of material artefacts recall the curiosity cabinets of Fabritius and Hoogstraten. The mechanical world of Myst replicates the Dutch 17th century fascination with the optical devices of the telescope, the convex mirror and the prism, by coding them as key signifiers/icons in the frame. In his peepshow of 1660, Hoogstraten plays with an enigma and optical illusion of a Dutch domestic interior seen as though through the wrong end of a telescope. Using the anamorphic effect, the image only makes sense from one vantage point -- an effect which has a contemporary counterpart in the digital morphing widely used in adventure games. The use of crumbled or folded paper standing out from the plane surface of the canvas was a recurring motif of the Vanitas trompe l'oeil paintings. The highly detailed representation and organisation of objects in the Vanitas pictures contained the narrative or symbology of a religious or moral tale. (As in this example by Hoogstraten.) In the cosmology of Myst and The Crystal Key, paper contains the narrative of the back-story lovingly represented in scrolls, books and curled paper messages. The entry into Myst is through the pages of an open book, and throughout the game, books occupy a privileged position as holders of stories and secrets that are used to unlock the puzzles of the game. Myst can be read as a Dantesque, labyrinthine journey with its rich tapestry of images, its multi-level historical associations and battle of good and evil. Indeed the developers, brothers Robyn and Rand Miller, had a fertile background to draw on, from a childhood spent travelling to Bible churches with their nondenominational preacher father. The Diorama as System Event The diorama (story in the round) or mechanical exhibit invented by Daguerre in the 19th century created a mini-cosmology with player anticipation, action and narrative. It functioned as a mini-theatre (with the spectator forming the fourth wall), offering a peek into mini-episodes from foreign worlds of experience. The Musée Mechanique in San Francisco has dioramas of the Chinese opium den, party on the captain's boat, French execution scenes and ghostly graveyard episodes amongst its many offerings, including a still showing an upper class dancing party called A Message from the Sea. These function in tandem with other forbidden pleasures of the late 19th century -- public displays of the dead, waxwork museums and kinetescope flip cards with their voyeuristic "What the Butler Saw", and "What the Maid Did on Her Day Off" tropes. Myst, along with The 7th Guest, Doom and Tomb Raider show a similar taste for verisimilitude and the macabre. However, the pre-rendered scenes of Myst and The Crystal Key allow for more diorama like elaborate and embellished details compared to the emphasis on speed in the real-time-rendered graphics of the shoot-'em-ups. In the gameplay of adventure games, animated moments function as rewards or responsive system events: allowing the player to navigate through the seemingly solid wall; enabling curtains to be swung back, passageways to appear, doors to open, bookcases to disappear. These short sequences resemble the techniques used in mechanical dioramas where a coin placed in the slot enables a curtain or doorway to open revealing a miniature narrative or tableau -- the closure of the narrative resulting in the doorway shutting or the curtain being pulled over again. These repeating cycles of contemplation-action-closure offer the player one of the rewards of the puzzle solution. The sense of verisimilitude and immersion in these scenes is underscored by the addition of sound effects (doors slamming, lifts creaking, room atmosphere) and music. Geographic Locomotion Static imagery is the standard backdrop of the navigable space of the cosmology game landscape. Myst used a virtual camera around a virtual set to create a sequence of still camera shots for each point of view. The use of the still image lends itself to a sense of the tableauesque -- the moment frozen in time. These tableauesque moments tend towards the clean and anaesthetic, lacking any evidence of the player's visceral presence or of other human habitation. The player's navigation from one tableau screen to the next takes the form of a 'cyber-leap' or visual jump cut. These jumps -- forward, backwards, up, down, west, east -- follow on from the geographic orientation of the early text-based adventure games. In their graphic form, they reveal a new framing angle or point of view on the scene whilst ignoring the rules of classical continuity editing. Games such as The Crystal Key show the player's movement through space (from one QTVR node to another) by employing a disorientating fast zoom, as though from the perspective of a supercharged wheelchair. Rather than reconciling the player to the state of movement, this technique tends to draw attention to the technologies of the programming apparatus. The Crystal Key sets up a meticulous screen language similar to filmic dramatic conventions then breaks its own conventions by allowing the player to jump out of the crashed spaceship through the still intact window. The landscape in adventure games is always partial, cropped and fragmented. The player has to try and map the geographical relationship of the environment in order to understand where they are and how to proceed (or go back). Examples include selecting the number of marker switches on the island to receive Atrus's message and the orientation of Myst's tower in the library map to obtain key clues. A screenshot shows the arrival point in Myst from the dock. In comprehending the landscape, which has no centre, the player has to create a mental map of the environment by sorting significant connecting elements into chunks of spatial elements similar to a Guy Debord Situationist map. Playing the Flaneur The player in Myst can afford to saunter through the landscape, meandering at a more leisurely pace that would be possible in a competitive shoot-'em-up, behaving as a type of flaneur. The image of the flaneur as described by Baudelaire motions towards fin de siècle decadence, the image of the socially marginal, the dispossessed aristocrat wandering the urban landscape ready for adventure and unusual exploits. This develops into the idea of the artist as observer meandering through city spaces and using the power of memory in evoking what is observed for translation into paintings, writing or poetry. In Myst, the player as flaneur, rather than creating paintings or writing, is scanning the landscape for clues, witnessing objects, possible hints and pick-ups. The numbers in the keypad in the antechamber, the notes from Atrus, the handles on the island marker, the tower in the forest and the miniature ship in the fountain all form part of a mnemomic trompe l'oeil. A screenshot shows the path to the library with one of the island markers and the note from Atrus. In the world of Myst, the player has no avatar presence and wanders around a seemingly unpeopled landscape -- strolling as a tourist venturing into the unknown -- creating and storing a mental map of objects and places. In places these become items for collection -- cultural icons with an emphasised materiality. In The Crystal Key iconography they appear at the bottom of the screen pulsing with relevance when active. A screenshot shows a view to a distant forest with the "pick-ups" at the bottom of the screen. This process of accumulation and synthesis suggests a Surrealist version of Joseph Cornell's strolls around Manhattan -- collecting, shifting and organising objects into significance. In his 1982 taxonomy of game design, Chris Crawford argues that without competition these worlds are not really games at all. That was before the existence of the Myst adventure sub-genre where the pleasures of the flaneur are a particular aspect of the gameplay pleasures outside of the rules of win/loose, combat and dominance. By turning the landscape itself into a pathway of significance signs and symbols, Myst, The Crystal Key and other games in the sub-genre offer different types of pleasures from combat or sport -- the pleasures of the stroll -- the player as observer and cultural explorer. References Battersby, M. Trompe L'Oeil: The Eye Deceived. New York: St. Martin's, 1974. Crawford, C. The Art of Computer Game Design. Original publication 1982, book out of print. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://members.nbci.com/kalid/art/art.php>. Darley Andrew. Visual Digital Culture: Surface Play and Spectacle in New Media Genres. London: Routledge, 2000. Lunenfeld, P. Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P 1999. Mates, A. Effective Illusory Worlds: A Comparative Analysis of Interfaces in Contemporary Interactive Fiction. 1998. 15 Oct. 2000 <http://www.wwa.com/~mathes/stuff/writings>. Mastai, M. L. d'Orange. Illusion in Art, Trompe L'Oeil: A History of Pictorial Illusion. New York: Abaris, 1975. Miller, Robyn and Rand. "The Making of Myst." Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Milman, M. Trompe-L'Oeil: The Illusion of Reality. New York: Skira Rizzoli, 1982. Murray, J. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Wertheim, M. The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Cyberspace from Dante to the Internet. Sydney: Doubleday, 1999. Game References 7th Guest. Trilobyte, Inc., distributed by Virgin Games, 1993. Doom. Id Software, 1992. Excalibur. Chris Crawford, 1982. Myst. Cyan and Broderbund, 1993. Tomb Raider. Core Design and Eidos Interactive, 1996. The Crystal Key. Dreamcatcher Interactive, 1999. Citation reference for this article MLA style: Bernadette Flynn. "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game." M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3.5 (2000). [your date of access] <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php>. Chicago style: Bernadette Flynn, "Towards an Aesthetics of Navigation -- Spatial Organisation in the Cosmology of the Adventure Game," M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3, no. 5 (2000), <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]). APA style: Bernadette Flynn. (2000) Towards an aesthetics of navigation -- spatial organisation in the cosmology of the adventure game. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 3(5). <http://www.api-network.com/mc/0010/navigation.php> ([your date of access]).

The habitual passenger cannot grasp the folly of traffic based overwhelmingly on transport. His inherited perceptions of space and time and of personal pace have been industrially deformed. He has lost the power to conceive of himself outside the passenger role (Illich 25).The most basic definition of Stillness refers to a state of being in the absence of both motion and disturbance. Some might say it is anti-American. Stillness denies the democratic freedom of mobility in a social system where, as Ivan Illich writes in Energy and Equity, people “believe that political power grows out of the capacity of a transportation system, and in its absence is the result of access to the television screen” (26). In America, it isn’t too far of a stretch to say that most are quite used to being interpolated as some sort of subject of the screen, be it the windshield or the flat screen. Whether in transport or tele-vision, life is full of traffic and flickering images. In the best of times there is a choice between being citizen-audience member or citizen-passenger. A full day might include both.But during the summer of 2008 things seemed to change. The citizen-passenger was left beached, not in some sandy paradise but in their backyard. In this state of SIMBY (stuck in my backyard), the citizen-passenger experienced the energy crisis first hand. Middle class suburbanites were forced to come to terms with a new disturbance due to rising fuel prices: unattainable motion. Domestic travel had been exchanged for domestication. The citizen-passenger was rendered what Paul Virilio might call, “a voyager without a voyage, this passenger without a passage, the ultimate stranger, and renegade to himself” (Crepuscular 131). The threat to capitalism posed by this unattainable motion was quickly thwarted by America’s 'big box' stores, hotel chains, and news networks. What might have become a culturally transformative politics of attainable stillness was hijacked instead by The Great American Staycation. The Staycation is a neologism that refers to the activity of making a vacation out of staying at home. But the Staycation is more than a passing phrase; it is a complex cultural phenomenon that targeted middle class homes during the summer of 2008. A major constraint to a happy Staycation was the uncomfortable fact that the middle class home was not really a desirable destination as it stood. The family home would have to undergo a series of changes, one being the initiation of a set of time management strategies; and the second, the adoption of new objects for consumption. Good Morning America first featured the Staycation as a helpful parenting strategy for what was expected to be a long and arduous summer. GMA defined the parameters of the Staycation with four golden rules in May of 2008:Schedule start and end dates. Otherwise, it runs the risk of feeling just like another string of nights in front of the tube. Take Staycation photos or videos, just as you would if you went away from home on your vacation. Declare a 'choratorium.' That means no chores! Don't make the bed, vacuum, clean out the closets, pull weeds, or nothing, Pack that time with activities. (Leamy)Not only did GMA continue with the theme throughout the summer but the other networks also weighed in. Expert knowledge was doled out and therapeutic interventions were made to make people feel better about staying at home. Online travel companies such as expedia.com and tripadvisor.com, estimated that 60% of regular vacation takers would be staying home. With the rise and fall of gas prices, came the rise of fall of the Staycation.The emergence of the Staycation occurred precisely at a time when American citizens were confronted with the reality that their mobility and localities, including their relationship to domestic space, were structurally bound to larger geopolitical forces. The Staycation was an invention deployed by various interlocutors most threatened by the political possibilities inherent in stillness. The family home was catapulted into the circuits of production, consumption, and exchange. Big TV and Big Box stores furthered individual’s unease towards having to stay at home by discursively constructing the gas prices as an impediment to a happy domestic life and an affront to the American born right to be mobile. What was reinforced was that Americans ideally should be moving, but could not. Yet, at the same time it was rather un-American not to travel. The Staycation was couched in a powerful rhetoric of one’s moral duty to the nation while playing off of middle class anxieties and senses of privilege regarding the right to be mobile and the freedom to consume. The Staycation satiates all of these tensions by insisting that the home can become a somewhere else. Between spring and autumn of 2008, lifestyle experts, representatives from major retailers, and avid Staycationers filled morning slots on ABC, NBC, FOX, CBS, and CNN with Staycation tips. CNN highlighted the Staycation as a “1st Issue” in their Weekend Report on 12 June 2008 (Alban). This lead story centred on a father in South Windsor, Connecticut “who took the money he would normally spend on vacations and created a permanent Staycation residence.” The palatial home was fitted with a basketball court, swimming pool, hot tub, gardening area, and volleyball court. In the same week (and for those without several acres) CBS’s Early Show featured the editor of behindthebuy.com, a company that specialises in informing the “time starved consumer” about new commodities. The lifestyle consultant previewed the newest and most necessary items “so you could get away without leaving home.” Key essentials included a “family-sized” tent replete with an air conditioning unit, a projector TV screen amenable to the outdoors, a high-end snow-cone maker, a small beer keg, a mini-golf kit, and a fast-setting swimming pool that attaches to any garden hose. The segment also extolled the virtues of the Staycation even when gas prices might not be so high, “you have this stuff forever, if you go on vacation all you have are the pictures.” Here, the value of the consumer products outweighs the value of erstwhile experiences that would have to be left to mere recollection.Throughout the summer ABC News’ homepage included links to specific products and profiled hotels, such as Hiltons and Holiday Inns, where families could at least get a few miles away from home (Leamy). USA Today, in an article about retailers and the Staycation, reported that Wal-Mart would be “rolling back prices on everything from mosquito repellent to portable DVD players to baked beans and barbecue sauce”. Target and Kohl’s were celebrated for offering discounts on patio furniture, grills, scented candles, air fresheners and other products to make middle class homes ‘staycationable’. A Lexis Nexis count revealed over 200 news stories in various North American sources, including the New York Times, Financial Times, Investors Guide, the Christian Science Monitor, and various local Consumer Credit Counselling Guides. Staying home was not necessarily an inexpensive option. USA Today reported brand new grills, grilling meats, patio furniture and other accoutrements were still going to cost six percent more than the previous year (24 May 2008). While it was suggested that the Staycation was a cost-saving option, it is clear Staycations were for the well-enough off and would likely cost more or as much as an actual vacation. To put this in context with US vacation policies and practices, a recent report by the Center for Economic and Policy Research called No-Vacation Nation found that the US is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation (Ray and Schmidt 3). Subsequently, without government standards 25% of Americans have neither paid vacation nor paid holidays. The Staycation was not for the working poor who were having difficulty even getting to work in the first place, nor were they for the unemployed, recently job-less, or the foreclosed. No, the Staycationers were middle class suburbanites who had backyards and enough acreage for swimming pools and tents. These were people who were going to be ‘stuck’ at home for the first time and a new grill could make that palatable. The Staycation would be exciting enough to include in their vacation history repertoire.All of the families profiled on the major networks were white Americans and in most cases nuclear families. For them, unattainable motion is an affront to the privilege of their white middle class mobility which is usually easy and unencumbered, in comparison to raced mobilities. Doreen Massey’s theory of “power geometry” which argues that different people have differential and inequitable relationships to mobility is relevant here. The lack of racial representation in Staycation stories reinforces the reality that has already been well documented in the works of bell hooks in Black Looks: Race and Representation, Lynn Spigel in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs, and Jeremy Packer in Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars and Citizenship. All of these critical works suggest that taking easily to the great open road is not the experience of all Americans. Freedom of mobility is in fact a great American fiction.The proprietors for the Great American Staycation were finding all sorts of dark corners in the American psyche to extol the virtues of staying at home. The Staycation capitalised on latent xenophobic tendencies of the insular family. Encountering cultural difference along the way could become taxing and an impediment to the fully deserved relaxation that is the stuff of dream vacations. CNN.com ran an article soon after their Weekend Report mentioned above quoting a life coach who argued Staycations were more fitting for many Americans because the “strangeness of different cultures or languages, figuring out foreign currencies or worrying about lost luggage can take a toll” (12 June 2008). The Staycation sustains a culture of insularity, consumption, distraction, and fear, but in doing so serves the national economic interests quite well. Stay at home, shop, grill, watch TV and movies, these were the economic directives programmed by mass media and retail giants. As such it was a cultural phenomenon commensurable to the mundane everyday life of the suburbs.The popular version of the Staycation is a highly managed and purified event that reflects the resort style/compound tourism of ‘Club Meds’ and cruise ships. The Staycation as a new form of domestication bears a significant resemblance to the contemporary spatial formations that Marc Augé refers to as non-places – contemporary forms of homogeneous architecture that are scattered across disparate locales. The nuclear family home becomes another point of transfer in the global circulation of capital, information, and goods. The chain hotels and big box stores that are invested in the Staycation are touted as part of the local economy but instead devalue the local by making it harder for independent restaurants, grocers, farmers’ markets and bed and breakfasts to thrive. In this regard the Staycation excludes the local economy and the community. It includes backyards not balconies, hot-dogs not ‘other’ types of food, and Wal-Mart rather than then a local café or deli. Playing on the American democratic ideals of freedom of mobility and activating one’s identity as a consumer left little room to re-think how life in constant motion (moving capital, moving people, moving information, and moving goods) was partially responsible for the energy crisis in the first place. Instead, staying at home became a way for the American citizen to support the floundering economy while waiting for gas prices to go back down. And, one wouldn’t have to look that much further to see that the Staycation slips discursively into a renewed mission for a just cause – the environment. For example, ABC launched at the end of the summer a ruse of a national holiday, “National Stay at Home Week” with the tag line: “With gas prices so high, the economy taking a nosedive and global warming, it's just better to stay in and enjoy great ABC TV.” It comes as no shock that none of the major networks covered this as an environmental issue or an important moment for transformation. In fact, the air conditioning units in backyard tents attest to quite the opposite. Instead, the overwhelming sense was of a nation waiting at home for it all to be over. Soon real life would resume and everyone could get moving again. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are examples of the breakdown and failure of capitalism. In a sense, a potential opened up in this breakdown for Stillness to become an alternative to life in constant and unrequited motion. That is, for the practice of non-movement and non-circulation to take on new political and cultural forms especially in the sprawling suburbs where the car moves individuals between the trifecta of home, box store, and work. The economic crisis is also a temporary stoppage of the flows. If the individual couldn’t move, global corporate capital would find a way to set the house in motion, to reinsert it back into the machinery that is now almost fully equated with freedom.The reinvention of the home into a campground or drive-in theatre makes the house a moving entity, an inverted mobile home that is both sedentary and in motion. Paul Virilio’s concept of “polar inertia” is important here. He argues, since the advent of transportation individuals live in a state of “resident polar inertia” wherein “people don’t move, even when they’re in a high speed train. They don’t move when they travel in their jet. They are residents in absolute motion” (Crepuscular 71). Lynn Spigel has written extensively about these dynamics, including the home as mobile home, in Make Room for TV and Welcome to the Dreamhouse. She examines how the introduction of the television into domestic space is worked through the tension between the private space of the home and the public world outside. Spigel refers to the dual emergence of portable television and mobile homes. Her work shows how domestic space is constantly imagined and longed for “as a vehicle of transport through which they (families) could imaginatively travel to an illicit place of passion while remaining in the safe space of the family home” (Welcome 60-61). But similarly to what Virilio has inferred Spigel points out that these mobile homes stayed parked and the portable TVs were often stationary as well. The Staycation exists as an addendum to what Spigel captures about the relationship between domestic space and the television set. It provides another example of advertisers’ attempts to play off the suburban tension between domestic space and the world “out there.” The Staycation exacerbates the role of the domestic space as a site of production, distribution, and consumption. The gendered dynamics of the Staycation include redecorating possibilities targeted at women and the backyard beer and grill culture aimed at men. In fact, ‘Mom’ might suffer the most during a Staycation, but that is another topic. The point is the whole family can get involved in a way that sustains the configurations of power but with an element of novelty.The Staycation is both a cultural phenomenon that feeds off the cultural anxieties of the middle class and an economic directive. It has been constructed to maintain movement at a time when the crisis of capital contains seeds for an alternative, for Stillness to become politically and culturally transformative. But life feels dull when the passenger is stuck and the virtues of Stillness are quite difficult to locate in this cultural context. As Illich argues, “the passenger who agrees to live in a world monopolised by transport becomes a harassed, overburdened consumer of distances whose shape and length he can no longer control” (45). When the passenger is the mode of identification, immobility becomes unbearable. In this context a form of “still mobility” such as the Staycation might be satisfying enough. ConclusionThe still citizen is a threatening figure for capital. In Politics of the Very Worst Virilio argues at the heart of capitalism is a state of permanent mobility, a condition to which polar inertia attests. The Staycation fits completely within this context of this form of mobile immobility. The flow needs to keep flowing. When people are stationary, still, and calm the market suffers. It has often been argued that the advertising industries construct dissatisfaction while also marginally eliminating it through the promises of various products, yet ultimately leaving the individual in a constant state of almost satisfied but never really. The fact that the Staycation is a mode of waiting attests to this complacent dissatisfaction.The subjective and experiential dimensions of living in a capitalist society are experienced through one’s relationship to time and staying on the right path. The economic slowdown and the energy crisis are also crises in pace, energy, and time. The mobility and tempo, the pace and path that capital relies on, has become unhinged and vulnerable to a resistant re-shaping. The Staycation re-sets the tempo of suburbia to meet the new needs of an economic slowdown and financial crisis. Following the directive to staycate is not necessarily a new form of false consciousness, but an intensified technological and economic mode of subjection that depends on already established cultural anxieties. But what makes the Staycation unique and worthy of consideration is that capitalists and other disciplinary institutions of power, in this case big media, construct new and innovative ways to control people’s time and regulate their movement in space. The Staycation is a particular re-territorialisation of the temporal and spatial dimensions of home, work, and leisure. In sum, Staycation and the staging of National Stay at Home Week reveals a systemic mobilising and control of a population’s pace and path. As Bernard Stiegler writes in Technics and Time: “Deceleration remains a figure of speed, just as immobility is a figure of movement” (133). These processes are inexorably tied to one another. Thinking back to the opening quote from Illich, we could ask how we might stop imagining ourselves as passengers – ushered along, falling in line, or complacently floating past. To be still in the flows could be a form of ultimate resistance. In fact, Stillness has the possibility of becoming an autonomous practice of refusal. It is after all this threatening potentiality that created the frenzied invention of the Staycation in the first place. To end where I began, Illich states that “the habitual passenger must adopt a new set of beliefs and expectations if he is to feel secure in the strange world” (25-26). The horizon of political possibility is uniformly limited for the passenger. Whether people actually did follow these directives during the summer of 2008 is hard to determine. The point is that the energy crisis and economic slowdown offered a potential to vacate capital’s premises, both its pace and path. But corporate capital is doing its best to make sure that people wait, staycate, and see it through. The Staycation is not just about staying at home for vacation. It is about staying within reach, being accounted for, at a time when departing global corporate capital seems to be the best option. ReferencesAlban, Debra. “Staycations: Alternative to Pricey, Stressful Travel.” CNN News 12 June 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://edition.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/worklife/06/12/balance.staycation/index.html›.Augé, Marc. Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Verso, London, 1995.hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.Illich, Ivan. Energy and Equity. New York: Perennial Library, 1974.Leamy, Elisabeth. “Tips for Planning a Great 'Staycation'.” ABC News 23 May 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Parenting/story?id=4919211›.Massey, Doreen. Space, Place, and Gender. Minneapolis: Minnesota U P, 1994.Packer, Jeremy. Mobility without Mayhem: Safety, Cars, and Citizenship. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2008.Ray, Rebecca and John Schmitt. No-Vacation Nation. Washington, D.C.: Center for Economic and Policy Research, May 2007.Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: Chicago U P, 1992.———. Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs. Durham, NC: Duke U P, 2001.Stiegler, Bernard. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation. Trans. Stephen Barker. California: Stanford University Press, 2009.USA Today. “Retailers Promote 'Staycation' Sales.” 24 May 2008. 6 Mar. 2009 ‹http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/retail/2008-05-24-staycations_N.htm›.Virilio, Paul. Speed and Politics. Trans. Mark Polizzotti. New York: Semiotext(e), 1986.———. In James der Derian, ed. The Virilio Reader. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 1998.———. Politics of the Very Worst. New York: Semiotext(e), 1999.———. Crepuscular Dawn. New York: Semiotext(e), 2002.

The use of the family home as a setting for television sitcoms (situation comedies) has long been recognised for its ability to provide audiences with an identifiable site of ontological security (much discussed by Giddens, Scannell, Saunders and others). From the beginnings of American sitcoms with such programs as Leave it to Beaver, and through the trail of The Brady Bunch, The Cosby Show, Roseanne, The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, and on to Home Improvement, That 70s Show and How I Met Your Mother, the US has led the way with screenwriters and producers capitalising on the value of using the suburban family dwelling as a fixed setting. The most obvious advantage is the use of an easily constructed and inexpensive set, most often on a TV studio soundstage requiring only a few rooms (living room, kitchen and bedroom are usually enough to set the scene), and a studio audience. In Singapore, sitcoms have had similar successes; portraying the lives of ‘ordinary people’ in their home settings. Some programs have achieved phenomenal success, including an unprecedented ten year run for Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd from 1996-2007, closely followed by Under One Roof (1994-2000 and an encore season in 2002), and Living with Lydia (2001-2005). This article furthers Blunt and Dowling’s exploration of the “critical geography” of home, by providing a focused analysis of home-based sitcoms in the nation-state of Singapore. The use of the home tells us a lot. Roseanne’s cluttered family home represents a lived reality for working-class families throughout the Western world. In Friends, the seemingly wealthy ‘young’ people live in a fashionable apartment building, while Seinfeld’s apartment block is much less salubrious, indicating (in line with the character) the struggle of the humble comedian. Each of these examples tells us something about not just the characters, but quite often about class, race, and contemporary societies. In the Singaporean programs, the home in Under One Roof (hereafter UOR) represents the major form of housing in Singapore, and the program as a whole demonstrates the workability of Singaporean multiculturalism in a large apartment block. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (PCK) demonstrates the entrepreneurial abilities of even under-educated Singaporeans, with its lead character, a building contractor, living in a large freestanding dwelling – generally reserved for the well-heeled of Singaporean society. And in Living with Lydia (LWL) (a program which demonstrates Singapore’s capacity for global integration), Hong Kong émigré Lydia is forced to share a house (less ostentatious than PCK’s) with the family of the hapless Billy B. Ong. There is perhaps no more telling cultural event than the sitcom. In the 1970s, The Brady Bunch told us more about American values and habits than any number of news reports or cop shows. A nation’s identity is uncovered; it bares its soul to us through the daily tribulations of its TV households. In Singapore, home-based sitcoms have been one of the major success stories in local television production with each of these three programs collecting multiple prizes at the region-wide Asian Television Awards. These sitcoms have been able to reflect the ideals and values of the Singaporean nation to audiences both at ‘home’ and abroad. This article explores the worlds of UOR, PCK, and LWL, and the ways in which each of the fictional homes represents key features of the multi-ethnic, multi-cultural Singapore. Through ownership and regulation, Singaporean TV programs operate as a firm link between the state and its citizens. These sitcoms follow regular patterns where the ‘man of the house’ is more buffoon than breadwinner – in a country defined by its neo-Confucian morality, sitcoms allow a temporary subversion of patriarchal structures. In this article I argue that the central theme in Singaporean sitcoms is that while home is a personal space, it is also a valuable site for national identities to be played out. These identities are visible in the physical indicators of the exterior and interior living spaces, and the social indicators representing a benign patriarchy and a dominant English language. Structure One of the key features of sitcoms is the structure: cold open – titles – establishing shot – opening scene. Generally the cold opening (aka “the teaser”) takes place inside the home to quickly (re)establish audience familiarity with the location and the characters. The title sequence then features, in the case of LWL and PCK, the characters outside the house (in LWL this is in cartoon format), and in UOR (see Figure 1) it is the communal space of the barbeque area fronting the multi-story HDB (Housing Development Board) apartment blocks. Figure 1: Under One Roof The establishing shot at the end of each title sequence, and when returning from ad breaks, is an external view of the characters’ respective dwellings. In Seinfeld this establishing shot is the New York apartment block, in Roseanne it is the suburban house, and the Singaporean sitcoms follow the same format (see Figure 2). Figure 2: Phua Chu Kang External Visions of the Home This emphasis on exterior buildings reminds the viewer that Singaporean housing is, in many ways, unique. As a city-state (and a young one at that) its spatial constraints are particularly limiting: there simply isn’t room for suburban housing on quarter acre blocks. It rapidly transformed from an “empty rock” to a scattered Malay settlement of bay and riverside kampongs (villages) recognisable by its stilt houses. Then in the shadow of colonialism and the rise of modernity, the kampongs were replaced in many cases by European-inspired terrace houses. Finally, in the post-colonial era high-rise housing began to swell through the territory, creating what came to be known as the “HDB new town”, with some 90% of the population now said to reside in HDB units, and many others living in private high-rises (Chang 102, 104). Exterior shots used in UOR (see Figure 3) consistently emphasise the distinctive HDB blocks. As with the kampong housing, high-rise apartments continue notions of communal living in that “Living below, above and side by side other people requires tolerance of neighbours and a respect towards the environment of the housing estate for the good of all” (104). The provision of readily accessible public housing was part of the “covenant between the newly enfranchised electorate and the elected government” (Chua 47). Figure 3: Establishing shot from UOR In UOR, we see the constant interruption of the lives of the Tan family by their multi-ethnic neighbours. This occurs to such an extent as to be a part of the normal daily flow of life in Singaporean society. Chang argues that despite the normally interventionist activities of the state, it is the “self-enforcing norms” of behaviour that have worked in maintaining a “peaceable society in high-rise housing” (104). This communitarian attitude even extends to the large gated residence of PCK, home to an almost endless stream of relatives and friends. The gate itself seems to perform no restrictive function. But such a “peaceable society” can also be said to be a result of state planning which extends to the “racial majoritarianism” imposed on HDB units in the form of quotas determining “the actual number of households of each of the three major races [Chinese, Malay and Indian] … to be accommodated in a block of flats” (Chua 55). Issues of race are important in Singapore where “the inscription of media imagery bears the cultural discourse and materiality of the social milieu” (Wong 120) perhaps nowhere more graphically illustrated than in the segregation of TV channels along linguistic / cultural lines. These 3 programs all featured on MediaCorp TV’s predominantly English-language Channel 5 and are, in the words of Roland Barthes, “anchored” by dint of their use of English. Home Will Eat Itself The consumption of home-based sitcoms by audiences in their own living-rooms creates a somewhat self-parodying environment. As John Ellis once noted, it is difficult to escape from the notion that “TV is a profoundly domestic phenomenon” (113) in that it constantly attempts to “include the audiences own conception of themselves into the texture of its programmes” (115). In each of the three Singaporean programs living-rooms are designed to seat characters in front of a centrally located TV set – at most all the audience sees is the back of the TV, and generally only when the TV is incorporated into a storyline, as in the case of PCK in Figure 4 (note the TV set in the foreground). Figure 4: PCK Even in this episode of PCK when the lead characters stumble across a pornographic video starring one of the other lead characters, the viewer only hears the program. Perhaps the most realistic (and acerbic) view of how TV reorganises our lives – both spatially in the physical layout of our homes, and temporally in the way we construct our viewing habits (eating dinner or doing the housework while watching the screen) – is the British “black comedy”, The Royle Family. David Morley (443) notes that “TV and other media have adapted themselves to the circumstances of domestic consumption while the domestic arena itself has been simultaneously redefined to accommodate their requirements”. Morley refers to The Royle Family’s narrative that rests on the idea that “for many people, family life and watching TV have become indistinguishable to the extent that, in this fictional household, it is almost entirely conducted from the sitting positions of the viewers clustered around the set” (436). While TV is a central fixture in most sitcoms, its use is mostly as a peripheral thematic device with characters having their viewing interrupted by the arrival of another character, or by a major (within the realms of the plot) event. There is little to suggest that “television schedules have instigated a significant restructuring of family routines” as shown in Livingstone’s audience-based study of UK viewers (104). In the world of the sitcom, the temporalities of characters’ lives do not need to accurately reflect that of “real life” – or if they do, things quickly descend to the bleakness exemplified by the sedentary Royles. As Scannell notes, “broadcast output, like daily life, is largely uneventful, and both are punctuated (predictably and unpredictably) by eventful occasions” (4). To show sitcom characters in this static, passive environment would be anathema to the “real” viewer, who would quickly lose interest. This is not to suggest that sitcoms are totally benign though as with all genres they are “the outcome of social practices, received procedures that become objectified in the narratives of television, then modified in the interpretive act of viewing” (Taylor 14). In other words, they feature a contextualisation that is readily identifiable to members of an established society. However, within episodes themselves, it as though time stands still – character development is almost non-existent, or extremely slow at best and we see each episode has “flattened past and future into an eternal present in which parents love and respect one another, and their children forever” (Taylor 16). It takes some six seasons before the character of PCK becomes a father, although in previous seasons he acts as a mentor to his nephew, Aloysius. Contained in each episode, in true sitcom style, are particular “narrative lines” in which “one-liners and little comic situations [are] strung on a minimal plot line” containing a minor problem “the solution to which will take 22 minutes and pull us gently through the sequence of events toward a conclusion” (Budd et al. 111). It is important to note that the sitcom genre does not work in every culture, as each locale renders the sitcom with “different cultural meanings” (Nielsen 95). Writing of the failure of the Danish series Three Whores and a Pickpocket (with a premise like that, how could it fail?), Nielsen (112) attributes its failure to the mixing of “kitchen sink realism” with “moments of absurdity” and “psychological drama with expressionistic camera work”, moving it well beyond the strict mode of address required by the genre. In Australia, soap operas Home and Away and Neighbours have been infinitely more popular than our attempts at sitcoms – which had a brief heyday in the 1980s with Hey Dad..!, Kingswood Country and Mother and Son – although Kath and Kim (not studio-based) could almost be counted. Lichter et al. (11) state that “television entertainment can be ‘political’ even when it does not deal with the stuff of daily headlines or partisan controversy. Its latent politics lie in the unavoidable portrayal of individuals, groups, and institutions as a backdrop to any story that occupies the foreground”. They state that US television of the 1960s was dominated by the “idiot sitcom” and that “To appreciate these comedies you had to believe that social conventions were so ironclad they could not tolerate variations. The scripts assumed that any minute violation of social conventions would lead to a crisis that could be played for comic results” (15). Series like Happy Days “harked back to earlier days when problems were trivial and personal, isolated from the concerns of a larger world” (17). By the late 1980s, Roseanne and Married…With Children had “spawned an antifamily-sitcom format that used sarcasm, cynicism, and real life problems to create a type of in-your-face comedy heretofore unseen on prime time” (20). This is markedly different from the type of values presented in Singaporean sitcoms – where filial piety and an unrelenting faith in the family unit is sacrosanct. In this way, Singaporean sitcoms mirror the ideals of earlier US sitcoms which idealise the “egalitarian family in which parental wisdom lies in appeals to reason and fairness rather than demands for obedience” (Lichter et al. 406). Dahlgren notes that we are the products of “an ongoing process of the shaping and reshaping of identity, in response to the pluralised sets of social forces, cultural currents and personal contexts encountered by individuals” where we end up with “composite identities” (318). Such composite identities make the presentation (or re-presentation) of race problematic for producers of mainstream television. Wong argues that “Within the context of PAP hegemony, media presentation of racial differences are manufactured by invoking and resorting to traditional values, customs and practices serving as symbols and content” (118). All of this is bound within a classificatory system in which each citizen’s identity card is inscribed as Chinese, Malay, Indian or Other (often referred to as CMIO), and a broader social discourse in which “the Chinese are linked to familial values of filial piety and the practice of extended family, the Malays to Islam and rural agricultural activities, and the Indians to the caste system” (Wong 118). However, these sitcoms avoid directly addressing the issue of race, preferring to accentuate cultural differences instead. In UOR the tables are turned when a none-too-subtle dig at the crude nature of mainland Chinese (with gags about the state of public toilets), is soon turned into a more reverential view of Chinese culture and business acumen. Internal Visions of the Home This reverence for Chinese culture is also enacted visually. The loungeroom settings of these three sitcoms all provide examples of the fashioning of the nation through a “ubiquitous semi-visibility” (Noble 59). Not only are the central characters in each of these sitcoms constructed as ethnically Chinese, but the furnishings provide a visible nod to Chinese design in the lacquered screens, chairs and settees of LWL (see Figure 5.1), in the highly visible pair of black inlaid mother-of-pearl wall hangings of UOR (see Figure 5.2) and in the Chinese statuettes and wall-hangings found in the PCK home. Each of these items appears in the central view of the shows most used setting, the lounge/family room. There is often symmetry involved as well; the balanced pearl hangings of UOR are mirrored in a set of silk prints in LWL and the pair of ceramic Chinese lions in PCK. Figure 5.1: LWL Figure 5.2: UOR Thus, all three sitcoms feature design elements that reflect visible links to Chinese culture and sentiments, firmly locating the sitcoms “in Asia”, and providing a sense of the nation. The sets form an important role in constructing a realist environment, one in which “identification with realist narration involves a temporary merger of at least some of the viewer’s identity with the position offered by the text” (Budd et al. 110). These constant silent reminders of the Chinese-based hegemon – the cultural “majoritarianism” – anchors the sitcoms to a determined concept of the nation-state, and reinforces the “imaginative geographies of home” (Blunt and Dowling 247). The Foolish “Father” Figure in a Patriarchal Society But notions of a dominant Chinese culture are dealt with in a variety of ways in these sitcoms – not the least in a playful attitude toward patriarchal figures. In UOR, the Tan family “patriarch” is played by Moses Lim, in PCK, Gurmit Singh plays Phua and in LWL Samuel Chong plays Billy B. Ong (or, as Lydia mistakenly refers to him Billy Bong). Erica Sharrer makes the claim that class is a factor in presenting the father figure as buffoon, and that US sitcoms feature working class families in which “the father is made to look inept, silly, or incompetent have become more frequent” partly in response to changing societal structures where “women are shouldering increasing amounts of financial responsibility in the home” (27). Certainly in the three series looked at here, PCK (the tradesman) is presented as the most derided character in his role as head of the household. Moses Lim’s avuncular Tan Ah Teck is presented mostly as lovably foolish, even when reciting his long-winded moral tales at the conclusion of each episode, and Billy B. Ong, as a middle-class businessman, is presented more as a victim of circumstance than as a fool. Sharrer ponders whether “sharing the burden of bread-winning may be associated with fathers perceiving they are losing advantages to which they were traditionally entitled” (35). But is this really a case of males losing the upper hand? Hanke argues that men are commonly portrayed as the target of humour in sitcoms, but only when they “are represented as absurdly incongruous” to the point that “this discursive strategy recuperates patriarchal notions” (90). The other side of the coin is that while the “dominant discursive code of patriarchy might be undone” (but isn’t), “the sitcom’s strategy for containing women as ‘wives’ and ‘mothers’ is always contradictory and open to alternative readings” (Hanke 77). In Singapore’s case though, we often return to images of the women in the kitchen, folding the washing or agonising over the work/family dilemma, part of what Blunt and Dowling refer to as the “reproduction of patriarchal and heterosexist relations” often found in representations of “the ideal’ suburban home” (29). Eradicating Singlish One final aspect of these sitcoms is the use of language. PM Lee Hsien Loong once said that he had no interest in “micromanaging” the lives of Singaporeans (2004). Yet his two predecessors (PM Goh and PM Lee Senior) both reflected desires to do so by openly criticising the influence of Phua Chu Kang’s liberal use of colloquial phrases and phrasing. While the use of Singlish (or Singapore Colloquial English / SCE) in these sitcoms is partly a reflection of everyday life in Singapore, by taking steps to eradicate it through the Speak Good English movement, the government offers an intrusion into the private home-space of Singaporeans (Ho 17). Authorities fear that increased use of Singlish will damage the nation’s ability to communicate on a global basis, withdrawing to a locally circumscribed “pidgin English” (Rubdy 345). Indeed, the use of Singlish in UOR is deliberately underplayed in order to capitalise on overseas sales of the show (which aired, for example, on Australia’s SBS television) (Srilal). While many others have debated the Singlish issue, my concern is with its use in the home environment as representative of Singaporean lifestyles. As novelist Hwee Hwee Tan (2000) notes: Singlish is crude precisely because it’s rooted in Singapore’s unglamorous past. This is a nation built from the sweat of uncultured immigrants who arrived 100 years ago to bust their asses in the boisterous port. Our language grew out of the hardships of these ancestors. Singlish thus offers users the opportunity to “show solidarity, comradeship and intimacy (despite differences in background)” and against the state’s determined efforts to adopt the language of its colonizer (Ho 19-20). For this reason, PCK’s use of Singlish iterates a “common man” theme in much the same way as Paul Hogan’s “Ocker” image of previous decades was seen as a unifying feature of mainstream Australian values. That the fictional PCK character was eventually “forced” to take “English” lessons (a storyline rapidly written into the program after the direct criticisms from the various Prime Ministers), is a sign that the state has other ideas about the development of Singaporean society, and what is broadcast en masse into Singaporean homes. Conclusion So what do these home-based sitcoms tell us about Singaporean nationalism? Firstly, within the realms of a multiethnic society, mainstream representations reflect the hegemony present in the social and economic structures of Singapore. Chinese culture is dominant (albeit in an English-speaking environment) and Indian, Malay and Other cultures are secondary. Secondly, the home is a place of ontological security, and partial adornment with cultural ornaments signifying Chinese culture are ever-present as a reminder of the Asianness of the sitcom home, ostensibly reflecting the everyday home of the audience. The concept of home extends beyond the plywood-prop walls of the soundstage though. As Noble points out, “homes articulate domestic spaces to national experience” (54) through the banal nationalism exhibited in “the furniture of everyday life” (55). In a Singaporean context, Velayutham (extending the work of Morley) explores the comforting notion of Singapore as “home” to its citizens and concludes that the “experience of home and belonging amongst Singaporeans is largely framed in the materiality and social modernity of everyday life” (4). Through the use of sitcoms, the state is complicit in creating and recreating the family home as a site for national identities, adhering to dominant modes of culture and language. References Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006. Budd, Mike, Steve Craig, and Clay Steinman. Consuming Environments: Television and Commercial Culture. New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1999. Chang, Sishir. “A High-Rise Vernacular in Singapore’s Housing Development Board Housing.” Berkeley Planning Journal 14 (2000): 97-116. Chua, Beng Huat. “Public Housing Residents as Clients of the State.” Housing Studies 15.1 (2000). Dahlgren, Peter. “Media, Citizenship and Civic Culture”. Mass Media and Society. 3rd ed. Eds. James Curran and Michael Gurevitch. London: Arnold, 2000. 310-328. Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. Hanke, Robert. “The ‘Mock-Macho’ Situation Comedy: Hegemonic Masculinity and its Reiteration.” Western Journal of Communication 62.1 (1998). Ho, Debbie G.E. “‘I’m Not West. I’m Not East. So How Leh?’” English Today 87 22.3 (2006). Lee, Hsien Loong. “Our Future of Opportunity and Promise.” National Day Rally 2004 Speech. 29 Apr. 2007 http://www.gov.sg/nd/ND04.htm>. Lichter, S. Robert, Linda S. Lichter, and Stanley Rothman. Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture. Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1994. Livingstone, Sonia. Young People and New Media: Childhood and the Changing Media Environment. London: Sage, 2002 Morley, David. “What’s ‘Home’ Got to Do with It? Contradictory Dynamics in the Domestication of Technology and the Dislocation of Domesticity.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 6 (2003). Noble, Greg. “Comfortable and Relaxed: Furnishing the Home and Nation.” Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 16.1 (2002). Rubdy, Rani. “Creative Destruction: Singapore’s Speak Good English Movement.” World Englishes 20.3 (2001). Scannell, Paddy. “For a Phenomenology of Radio and Television.” Journal of Communication 45.3 (1995). Scharrer, Erica. “From Wise to Foolish: The Portrayal of the Sitcom Father, 1950s-1990s.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 45.1 (2001). Srilal, Mohan. “Quick Quick: ‘Singlish’ Is Out in Re-education Campaign.” Asia Times Online (28 Aug. 1999). Tan, Hwee Hwee. “A War of Words over ‘Singlish’: Singapore’s Government Wants Its Citizens to Speak Good English, But They Would Rather Be ‘Talking Cock’.” Time International 160.3 (29 July 2002). Taylor, Ella. “From the Nelsons to the Huxtables: Genre and Family Imagery in American Network Television.” Qualitative Sociology 12.1 (1989). Velayutham, Selvaraj. “Affect, Materiality, and the Gift of Social Life in Singapore.” SOJOURN 19.1 (2004). Wong, Kokkeong. Media and Culture in Singapore: A Theory of Controlled Commodification. New Jersey: Hampton Press, 2001. Images Under One Roof: The Special Appearances. Singapore: Television Corporation of Singapore. VCD. 2000. Living with Lydia (Season 1, Volume 1). Singapore: MediaCorp Studios, Blue Max Enterprise. VCD. 2001. Phua Chu Kang Pte Ltd (Season 5, Episode 10). Kuala Lumpur: MediaCorp Studios, Speedy Video Distributors. VCD. 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Pugsley, Peter. "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang." M/C Journal 10.4 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>. APA Style Pugsley, P. (Aug. 2007) "At Home in Singaporean Sitcoms: Under One Roof, Living with Lydia and Phua Chu Kang," M/C Journal, 10(4). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0708/09-pugsley.php>.

In rejoinder to a New York Times’s article claiming, “the value of used pianos, especially uprights, has plummeted … Instead of selling them … , donating them … or just passing them along … , owners are far more likely to discard them” (Walkin), artists Kathleen Irwin (scenography) and Jeff Morton (sound/composition) responded to this ignoble passing with an installation playing with the borders delineating music, theatre, digital technology, and economies of value using two upright red pianos, sound and video projection—and the sensibility of relational aesthetics. The installation was a collaboration between two artists who share a common interest in the performative qualities of public space and how technological augmentation is used in identificatory and embodied art processes as a means of extending the human body and enhancing the material space of person-to-person interaction. The title of the installation, PLAY, referenced the etymology of the word itself and how it has been variously understood over time, across artistic disciplines, and in digital and physical environments. Fundamentally, it explored the relative value of a material object (the piano) and how its social and cultural signification persists, shifts, is diminished or augmented by technology. The installation was mounted at the Dunlop Art Gallery, in the Regina Public Library (Saskatchewan, Canada, 14 June - 25 August 2013) and, as such, it illustrated the Library’s mandate to support all forms of literacy through community accessibility and forms of public outreach, social arrangements, and encounters. Indirectly, (as this was not the initial focus), it also exemplified the artists’s gentle probing of the ways, means, claims, and values when layering information and enhancing our visual experience as we interact with (literally, walk through) our physical landscapes and environments—“to see the world for what it is,” as Matt Turbow says “and to see the elements within” (Chapeau). The installation reflected on, among other things, the piano as a still potent cultural signifier, the persistent ability of our imagination to make meaning and codify experience even without digital overlay, and the library as an archive and disseminator of public knowledge. The artists questioned whether old technologies such as the piano will lose their hold on us entirely as technological augmentation develops the means to enhance or colonize the natural world, through graphics, sounds, haptic feedback, smell and, eventually, commodified experiences. This paper intends to reflect on our work and initiate a friendly (playful) interdisciplinary discussion about material objects in the age of physical and digital interactivity, and the terms of augmentation as we chose to understand it through our installation. In response to the call proposed by this journal on the subject of augmentation, we considered: 1. How audio/visual apparatuses in the gallery space augmented the piano’s expressivity; 2. How the piano augmented the social function of its physical situation; 3. How the technology augmented random and fragmentary musical phrases, creating a prolonged musical composition; 4. How each spectator augmented the art through his/her subjective engagement: how there is always meaning generated in excess of the artists’s intention. Image 1: Piano installed outside Dunlop Gallery/ Regina Public Library (photo credit: Jeff Morton) To begin, a brief description of the site of the installation is in order. The first of the red pianos was installed outside the main doors of the Central Library, located in the city’s downtown. The library’s entrance is framed within a two-story glass atrium and the red piano repeated the architecture’s function to open the space by breaking down perceived barriers, and beckoning the passersby inside. Reflecting Irwin’s community-oriented, site-specific practice, this was the relational catalyst of the work—the piano made available for anyone to play and enjoy, day or night, an invitation to respond to an object inserted into the shared space of the sidewalk: to explore, as Nicolas Bourriaud suggests, “the art as a state of encounter” (16). It was the centerpiece of the exhibition's outreach, which included the exhibition’s vernissage featuring new music and performance artists in concert, a costume and prop workshop for a late night public choir procession, and a series of artist talks. This was, arguably, a defining characteristic of the work, underscoring how the work of art, in this case the piano itself, its abjection illustrated by the perfunctory means typically used to dispose of them, is augmented or gains value through its social construction, over-and-above any that is originally ascribed to it. As Bourriaud writes, any kind of production takes on a social form which no longer has anything to do with its original usefulness. It acquires exchange value that partly covers and shrouds its primary “nature”. The fact is that a work of art has no a priori useful function—not that it is socially useless, but because it is available and flexible, and has an “infinite tendency”. (42) In the Dunlop’s press release, curator Blair Fornwald also confers a supplemental value ascribed to the reframed material object. She describes how the public space in front of the library, as a place of social interaction and cultural identification—of “being seen”—is augmented by the red piano: its presence in an unfamiliar setting underscores the multitude of creative and performative possibilities inherent within it, possibilities that may extend far beyond playing a simple melody. By extension, its presence asserts that the every day is a social, cultural, and physical environment rich with potentiality and promise. (Fornwald) Juxtaposed with the first red piano, the second was dramatically staged within the Dunlop gallery. The room, painted black, formally replicated the framing and focusing conventions of the theatre: its intention to propose other ways of “being seen” and to suggest the blurring of lines between “on stage and off,” and by extension, “on line and off.” A camera embedded in the front of the piano and a large projection screen in the space provided a celebrity moment for anyone approaching the instrument and implied, arguably, the ubiquitous surveillance associated with public space. Indeed, a plausible way of reading the red piano in the darkened gallery was as a provocation to think about how the digital and physical are increasingly enmeshed in our daily lives (Jurgenson). Lit by a chandelier and staged on a circular red carpet, this piano was also available to be played. Unlike the one outside of the building, it was augmented by speakers, a microphone, and a webcam. Through a custom-built digital system (using MaxMSP software), it recorded and played back the sound and image of everyone who sat down to perform, then repeated and superimposed these over similar previously captured material. Enhanced by the unusual stark acoustics of the gallery, the sound filled the reverberant space. Affixed to the gallery’s back wall was the projection screen made up of sheet music (Bach, Debussy and Mozart) taken from the Irwin family’s piano bench, a veritable time capsule from the 1950s. Image 2: Piano installed inside Dunlop Gallery (photo credit: Jeff Morton) In addition to the centrally placed piano, a miniature red piano was situated near the gallery entrance. It and a single red chair placed near the screen, repeated the vivid colour and drew the eye into and around the space underscoring its theatrical quality. The toy piano functioned as a lighthearted invitation, as well as a serious citation of other artists—Eikoh Sudoh, Margaret Leng Tan, John Cage, and Charles M. Schulz’s “Schroeder”—who have employed the miniature instrument to great advantage. It was intended as an illustration of the infinite resonances that material objects may provide and the diverse ways they may signify contingent on the viewer. Considered in a historical context, in the golden age of the upright and at the turn of the twentieth-century, piano lessons signified for many, the formation of a modern citizen schooled in European culture and values. Owning one of these intricately engineered and often beautiful machines, as one in five households did, reflected the social aspirations of its owners and marked their upward economic mobility (Canadian Encyclopedia). One hundred years later, pianos are often relegated to the basement or dump. Irretrievably out of tune, their currency as musical instruments largely devalued. Nonetheless, their cultural and social value persists, no longer the pervasive marker of status, but through the ways they are mediated by artists who prepare, deconstruct, and leave them to deteriorate in beautiful ways. They seem to retain their hold on us through the natural impulse to engage them kinetically, ergonomically, and metaphorically. Built to be an extension of the human hand, body, and imagination, they are a sublime human-scale augmentation of a precise musical system of notation, and a mechanism evolved over centuries through physical augmentations meant to increase the expressivity of both instrument and player. In PLAY, the use of the pianos referenced both their traditional role in public life, and our current relationship with forms of digital media that have replaced these instruments as our primary means of being linked, informed, and entertained—an affirmation of the positive attributes of technology and a reminder of what we may have lost. Indeed, while this was not necessarily clear from the written responses in the Gallery’s guest book (Gorgeous!: Neat!; Too, too cool!; etc.), we surmised that memory might have played a key role in the experience of the installation, set in motion by the precise arrangement of the few material objects – red piano, the piano bench, red chair, and toy piano, each object designed to fit the shape of the body and hold the memory of physical contact. These were designed to trigger a chain of recollections, each chasing the next; each actively participating in what follows. In the Gallery’s annual exhibition catalogue, Ellen Moffat suggests that the relationship the piano builds with the player is important: “the piano plays and is played by the performer. Performing the piano assigns a posture for the performer in relation to the keyboard physically and figuratively” (Moffat 80). Technically, the piano is the sum of many parts, understandable finally as a discrete mechanical system, but unbounded in imagination and limited only by our capacity to play it. Functionally, it acts as an affective repository of memory and feeling, a tool to control the variables of physical and expressive interaction. In PLAY, the digital system in the gallery piano captured, delayed and displayed audio and video clips according to a rubric of cause and effect. Controlled by computer software designed by Morton, the installation captured musical phrases played randomly by individuals and augmented these notes by playing them back at variable speeds and superimposing one over another—musical phrases iterated and reiterated. The effect was fugue-like—an indeterminate composition with a determinant structure, achieved by intertwining physical and digital systems with musical content supplied by participants. The camera hidden in the front of the piano recorded individuals as they sat at the instrument and, immediately, they saw themselves projected in extreme close up onto the screen behind. As the individual struck a note, their image faded and the screen was filled again with the image of a previous participant abstracted and in slow motion. The effect, we suggest, was dreamlike—an echo or a fleeting fragment of something barely remembered. Like the infinite variations the piano permits, the software was also capable of expressing immense variety—each sound and image adding to an expanding archive in an ever-changing improvised composition developed through iterative call and response. Drawing on elements of relational aesthetics, scenographic representation, and digital technology, in PLAY we attempted to cross disciplines in ways that distinguished it from the other piano projects seen over the past several years. Indeed, the image of the upright piano has resonated in the zeitgeist of the international art scene with colourful uprights placed in public places in urban centers across Europe and North America. Wherever they are, individuals engage enthusiastically with them and they, in turn, become the centre of attention: this is part of their appeal. The pianos seem to evoke a utopian sense of community, however temporary, providing opportunities to rediscover old neighbours and make new friends. In PLAY, we posed two different social and aesthetic encounters—one analogue, real, “off-line” and one digital, theatrical, and “on-line,” illustrating less a false binary between two possible realities that ascribes more value to one than the other, than a world where the digital and the physical comingle. Working within a public library, this was a germane train of thought considering how these institutes struggle to stay relevant in the age of Google search and the promise of technological augmentation. The piano also represents a dichotomy: both a failure to represent and an excess of meaning. For decades replete with social signification, they have now become an encumbrance, fit only for the bone yard. As these monumental relics come to the end of their mechanical life, there is more money made in their disposal than in musical production, and more value in their recycled metals, solid wooden bodies, and ivory keys then in their tone and function. The industry that supported their commodification collapsed years ago, as has the market for their sale and the popular music publishing industry that accompanied it. Of course, pianos will be with us for a long time in one form or another, but their history, as a culturally potent object, has diverged. The assumption could easily follow that they have been rendered useless as an aesthetic, generative, and social object. What this installation offered was the possibility of an alternative ending to the story of this erstwhile entertainment console even as we seek our amusement by other means and through other devices. Not surprisingly, the title of the installation suggests that the consideration of “play,” as social and recuperative engagement, is significant. In his seminal work, Homo Ludens, Johan Huizinga discusses the importance of play, suggesting that it is primary to and a necessary condition of the making of culture. He writes, “In play there is something in play, which transcends the immediate needs of life and imparts meaning to the action” (Huizinga 97). According to games theorist Mary Flanagan, playing may serve as a way of creating something beautiful, offering frameworks for new ways of thinking, exploring divergent logic, or for imaging what is possible. She writes, “Games, both digital and analog, offer a space to explore creativity, agency, representation and emergent behaviour” (Flanagan 2010). In reaching out to Regina’s downtown community, the Dunlop Art Gallery dispersed some of the playfulness of PLAY in planned and accidental ways, as the outdoor piano became a daily destination for individuals who live rough or in the city’s hostels, some of whom who have enviable musical skills and considerable stage presence. One man came daily with sheet music in hand to practice on the indoor piano—ignoring the inevitable echo and repeat that the software triggered. Another young woman appeared regularly to perform at the outdoor piano, her umbrella raised against sun and rain, wedged under her arm to keep both hands free. Children invariably drew parents to it as they entered or exited the library—for some it may have been the first time they had touched such an instrument. Overall, in press, blogs, and the visitors’s book, responses to the pianos were enthusiastic and positive. One blogger wrote in response to an online publication, Art, Music, News (Beatty), chapeau June 13, 2013 at 11:51am this is most definitely up and running, and it would be interesting to see/hear all that will go on with that red piano. my two-and-a-half year old daughter and i jammed a bit yesterday morning, while a stranger watched and listened, then insisted that i play the same mostly crappy c-blues again while he sang! so i did, and he did, and my daughter and i learned a bit about what he feels about his dog via his singing. it was the highlight of the day for us—I mean really, jamming outside on a very red upright piano with strangers—good times! (Simpson) As evidence of public approbation, for the better part of the summer it stood unprotected on the sidewalk in front of the library encountering only one minor incident of defacement—a rather fragile tag in white spray paint, someone’s name in proper cursive writing. Once repaired and retuned, it became a dynamic focus for the annual Folk Festival that takes over the area for a week in August. In these ways, PLAY fulfilled the Library’s aim of encouraging literacy and reinforcing a sense of community—a social augmentation, in a manner of speaking. As Moffat writes, it encourages the social dimension of participation through community-engagement and dialogic practices. It blurs distinctions between spectator and participant, professional and amateur. It generates relationships between people or social actions. (Moffat 76) Finally, PLAY toyed with the overtones of the word itself—as verb, noun, and adjective—signifier, and metaphor. The title illustrated its obvious current potential and evoked the piano’s past, referencing the glittering world of the stage. While many may have more memories of seeing pianos in disrepair than in the concert hall, its iconic stage setting is never far from the imagination, although this too changes as people from other cultures and backgrounds recognize little cultural capital in such activity. In current vernacular, the word “play” also implies the re-imagination of ourselves in the digital overlays of the future. So we ask, what will be the fate of the piano and its meme in the 22nd century? Will the augmentation of reality enhance our experience of the world in inverse proportion to a loss of social interaction? Conclusion In her essay, Moffat notes that as digital technology replaces the analog piano, a surplus of second-hand uprights has become available. Citing artists Luke Jerram, Monica Yunus, and Camille Zamora (among others), she argues that the use of them as public art coincides with their disappearance, suggesting a farewell or memorial to a collective cultural icon (Moffat 76). What is there in this piece of furniture that speaks to us in art practice? The answer, it would seem, is potential. In a curatorial interview, Irwin suggested the possibility that beyond the artist’s initial meaning, there is always something more—an augmentation. The pleasure of discovering this supplement is part of the pleasure of the subjective experience of the spectator. Similarly, the aleatoric in music composition, refers to the pursuit of chance as a formal determinant and its openness to individual interpretation at the moment of reception. For Morton, the randomness of memory and affect are key components in composition. They cannot be predicted, controlled or quantified; nor can they be denied. There is no correct interpretation or response to music or, indeed, to relational art practice. Moffat concludes, as a multi-faceted media installation, PLAY proposed “a suite, chorus or a polyphony of things” (Moffat 76). Depending on your point of reference, the installation provided a dynamic venue for considering our relationships with material objects, with each other and with new technologies asking how they may or may not augment our reality in ways that supplement real-time, person-to-person interaction. References Beatty, Gregory. “Exciting Goings-On at Central Library.” Prairie Dog Blog 11 June 2013. Bourriaud, Nicolas. Relational Aesthetics. Trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. Paris: Les Presses du Réel, 1998. Canadian Encyclopedia. “Piano Building.” ‹http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/en/article/piano-building-emc/›. Chapeau [David Simpson]. “One Response to ‘Exciting Goings-On at Central Library.’” Prairie Dog Blog 13 June 2013. Fornwald, Blair. PLAY. Regina, Saskatchewan: Dunlop Art Gallery. 2013. Flanagan, Mary. “Creating Critical Play.” In Ruth Catlow, Marc Garret and Corrado Morgana, eds., Artists Rethinking Games. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010. 49-53. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens. Boston: Beacon Press, 1995. Jerram, Luke. Play Me, I’m Yours. Site-Specific Piano Installation. Multiple Venues. 2008-2013. Jurgenson, Nathan. “Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality.” Cybergology: The Society Pages 24 Feb. 2011. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/02/24/digital-dualism-versus-augmented-reality/›. Moffat, Ellen. “Stages and Players” in DAG 2 (2013). Regina: Dunlop Art Gallery, 2013. 75-87. Walkin, Daniel J. “For More Pianos, Last Note Is Thud in the Dump.” New York Times 29 June 2012. Yunus, Monica, and Camille Zamora. Sing for Hope Pianos. Site-Specific Piano Installation and Performance. New York City. 2013.

A rhetoric of freedom characterises much of the literature dealing with online communities: freedom from fixed identity and appearance, from the confines of geographic space, and from control. The prevailing view, a combination of futurism and utopianism, is that the lack of order in cyberspace enables the creation of social spaces that will enhance personal freedom and advance the common good. Sherry Turkle argues that computer-mediated communication allows us to create a new form of community, in which identity is multiple and fluid (15-17). Marcos Novak celebrates the possibilities of a dematerialized, ethereal virtual architecture in which the relationships between abstract elements are in a constant state of flux (250). John Perry Barlow employs the frontier metaphor to frame cyberspace as an unmapped, ungoverned territory in which a romantic and a peculiarly American form of individualism can be enjoyed by rough and ready pioneers (“Crime” 460). In his 1993 account as an active participant in The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link), one of the earliest efforts to construct a social space online, Howard Rheingold celebrates the freedom to create a “new kind of culture” and an “authentic community” in the “electronic frontier.” He worries, however, that the freedom enjoyed by early homesteaders may be short lived, because “big power and big money” might soon find ways to control the Internet, just as they have come to dominate and direct other communications media. “The Net,” he states, “is still out of control in fundamental ways, but it might not stay that way for long” (Virtual Community 2-5). The uses of order and disorder Some theorists have identified disorder as a necessary condition for the development of healthy communities. In The Uses of Disorder (1970), Richard Sennett argues that “the freedom to accept and to live with disorder” is integral to our search for community (xviii). In his 1989 study of social space, Ray Oldenburg maintains that public hangouts, which constitute the heart of vibrant communities, support sociability best when activities are unplanned, unorganized, and unrestricted (33). He claims that without the constraints of preplanned control we will be more in control of ourselves and more aware of one another (198). More recently, Charles Landry suggests that “structured instability” and “controlled disruption,” resulting from competition, conflict, crisis, and debate, make cities less comfortable but more exciting. Further, he argues that “endemic structural disorder” requiring ongoing adjustments can generate healthy creative activity and stimulate continual innovation (156-58). Kevin Robins, too, believes that any viable social system must be prepared to accept a level of uncertainty, disorder, and fear. He observes, however, that techno-communities are “driven by the compulsion to neutralize,” and they therefore exclude these possibilities in favour of order and security (90-91). Indeed, order and security are the dominant characteristics that less idealistic observers have identified with cyberspace. Alexander Galloway explains how, despite its potential as a liberating development, the Internet is based on technologies of control. This control is exercised at the code level through technical protocols, such as TCP/IP, DNS, and HTM, that determine disconnections as well as connections (Galloway). Lawrence Lessig suggests that in our examination of the ownership, regulation, and governance of the virtual commons, we must take into account three distinct layers. As well as the “logical” or “code” layer that Galloway foregrounds, we should also consider the “physical” layer, consisting of the computers and wires that carry Internet communications, and the “content” layer, which includes everything that we see and hear over the network. In principle, each of these layers could be free and unorganized, or privately owned and controlled (Lessig 23). Dan Schiller documents the increasing privatization of the Net and argues that corporate cyberspace extends the reach of the market, enabling it to penetrate into areas that have previously been considered to be part of the public domain. For Schiller, the Internet now serves as the main production and control mechanism of a global market system (xiv). Checking into Habbo Hotel Habbo Hotel is an example of a highly ordered and controlled online social space that uses community and game metaphors to suggest something much more open and playful. Designed to attract the teenage market, this graphically intensive cartoon-like hotel is like an interactive Legoland, in which participants assemble a toy-like “Habbo” character and chat, play games, and construct personal environments. The first Habbo Hotel opened its doors in the United Kingdom in 2000, and, by September 2004, localized sites were based in a dozen countries, including Canada, the Unites States, Finland, Japan, Switzerland and Spain, with further expansion planned. At that time, there were more than seventeen million registered Habbo characters worldwide with 2.3 million unique visitors each month (“Strong Growth”). The hotel contains thousands of private rooms and twenty-two public spaces, including a welcome lounge, three lobbies, cinema, game hall, café, pub, and an extensive hallway. Anyone can go to the Room-O-Matic and instantly create a free guest room. However, there are a limited number of layouts to choose from and the furnishings, which must be purchased, have be chosen from a catalog of fixed offerings. All rooms are located on one of five floors, which categorize them according to use (parties, games, models, mazes, and trading). Paradoxically, the so-called public spaces are more restricted and less public than the private guest quarters. The limited capacity of the rooms means that all of the public spaces are full most of the time. Priority is given to paying Habbo Club members and others are denied entry or are unceremoniously ejected from a room when it becomes full. Most visitors never make it into the front lobby. This rigid and restricted construction is far from Novak’s vision of a “liquid architecture” without barriers, that morphs in response to the constantly changing desires of individual inhabitants (Novak 250). Before entering the virtual hotel, individuals must first create a Lego-like avatar. Users choose a unique name for their Habbo (no foul language is allowed) and construct their online persona from a limited selection and colour of body parts. One of two different wardrobes is available, depending on whether “Boy” or “Girl” is chosen. The gender of every Habbo is easily recognizable and the restricted wardrobe results in remarkably similar looking young characters. The lack of differentiation encourages participants to treat other Habbos as generic “Boys” or “Girls” and it encourages limited and predictable conversations that fit the stereotype of male-female interactions in most chat sites. Contrary to Turkle’s contention that computer mediated communication technologies expose the fallacy of a single, fixed, identity, and free participants to experiment with alternative selves (15-17), Habbo characters are permitted just one unchangeable name, and are capable of only limited visual transformations. A fixed link between each Habbo character and its registered user (information that is not available to other participants) allows the hotel management to track members through the site and monitor their behavior. Habbo movements are limited to walking, waving, dancing and drinking virtual alcohol-free beverages. Movement between spaces is accomplished by entering a teleport booth, or by selecting a location by name from the hotel Navigator. Habbos cannot jump, fly or walk through objects or other Habbos. They have no special powers and only a limited ability to interact with objects in their environment. They cannot be hurt or otherwise affected by anything in their surroundings, including other Habbos. The emphasis is on safety and avoidance of conflict. Text chat in Habbo Hotel is limited to one sixty-one-character line, which appears above the Habbo, floats upward, and quickly disappears off the top of the screen. Text must be typed in real time while reading on-going conversations and it is not possible to archive a chat sessions or view past exchanges. There is no way of posting a message on a public board. Using the Habbo Console, shorter messages can also be exchanged between Habbos who may be occupying different rooms. The only other narratives available on the site are in the form of official news and promotions. Before checking into the hotel, Habbos can stop to read Habbo Today, which promotes current offers and activities, and HabboHood Happenings, which offers safety tips, information about membership benefits, jobs (paid in furniture), contest winners, and polls. According to Rheingold, a virtual community can form online when enough people participate in meaningful public discussions over an extended period of time and develop “webs of personal relationships” (Virtual Community 5). By restricting communication to short, fleeting messages between individual Habbos, the hotel frustrates efforts by members to engage in significant dialogue and create a viable social group. Although “community” is an important part of the Habbo Hotel brand, it is unlikely to be a substantial part of the actual experience. The virtual hotel is promoted as a safe, non-threatening environment suitable for the teenagers is designed to attract. Parents’ concerns about the dangers of an unregulated chat space provide the hotel management with a justification for creating a highly controlled social space. The hotel is patrolled twenty-four hours a day by professional moderators backed-up by a team of 180 volunteer “Hobbas,” or guides, who can issue warnings to misbehaving Habbos, or temporarily ban them from the site. All text keyed in by Habbos passes through an automated “Bobba Filter” that removes swearing, racist words, explicit sexual comments and “anything that goes against the “Habbo Way” (“Bad Language”). Stick to the rules and you’ll have fun, Habbos are told, “break them and you’ll get yourself banned” (“Habbo Way”). In Big Brother fashion, messages are displayed throughought the hotel advising members to “Stay safe, read the Habbohood Watch,” “Never give out your details!” and “Obey the Habbo way and you’ll be OK.” This miniature surveillance society contradicts Barlow’s observation that cyberspace serves as “a perfect breeding ground for both outlaws and new ideas about liberty” (“Crime” 460). In his manifesto declaring the independence of cyberspace from government control, he maintains that the state has no authority in the electronic “global social space,” where, he asserts, “[w]e are forming our own Social Contract” based on the Golden Rule (“Declaration”). However, Habbo Hotel shows how the rule of the marketplace, which values profits more than social practices, can limit the freedoms of online civil society just as effectively as the most draconian government regulation. Place your order Far from permitting the “controlled disruption” advocated by Landry, the hotel management ensures that nothing is allowed to disrupt their control over the participants. Without conflict and debate, there are few triggers for creative activity in the site, which is designed to encourage consumption, not community. Timo Soininen, the managing director of the company that designed the hotel, states that, because teenagers like to showcase their own personal style, “self-expression is the key to our whole concept.” However, since it isn’t possible to create a Habbo from scratch, or to import clothing or other objects from outside the site, the only way for members to effectively express themselves is by decorating and furnishing their room with items purchased from the Habbo Catalogue. “You see, this,” admits Soininen, “is where our revenue model kicks in” (Shalit). Real-world products and services are also marketed through ads and promotions that are integrated into chat, news, and games. The result, according to Habbo Ltd, is “the ideal vehicle for third party brands to reach this highly desired 12-18 year-old market in a cost-effective and creative manner” (“Habbo Company Profile”). Habbo Hotel is a good example of what Herbert Schiller describes as the corporate capture of sites of public expression. He notes that, when put at the service of growing corporate power, new technologies “provide the instrumentation for organizing and channeling expression” (5-6). In an afterword to a revised edition of The Virtual Community, published in 2000, Rheingold reports on the sale of the WELL to a privately owned corporation, and its decline as a lively social space when order was imposed from the top down. Although he believes that there is a place for commercial virtual communities on the Net, he acknowledges that as economic forces become more entrenched, “more controls will be instituted because there is more at stake.” While remaining hopeful that activists can leverage the power of many-to-many communications for the public good, he wonders what will happen when “the decentralized network infrastructure and freewheeling network economy collides with the continuing growth of mammoth, global, communication empires” (Virtual Community Rev. 375-7). Although the company that built Habbo Hotel is far from achieving global empire status, their project illustrates how the dominant ethos of privatization and the increasing emphasis on consumption results in gated virtual communities that are highly ordered, restricted, and controlled. The popularity of the hotel reflects the desire of millions of Habbos to express their identities and ideas in a playful environment that they are free to create and manipulate. However, they soon find that the rules are stacked against them. Restricted design options, severe communication limitations, and fixed architectural constraints mean that the only freedom left is the freedom to choose from a narrow range of provided options. In private cyberspaces like Habbo Hotel, the logic of the market rules out unrestrained many-to-many communications in favour of controlled commercial relationships. The liberating potential of the Internet that was recognized by Rheingold and others has been diminished as the forces of globalized commerce impose their order on the electronic frontier. References “Bad Language.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/badlanguage/>. Barlow, John Perry. “Crime and Puzzlement.” High Noon on the Electronic Frontier: Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace. Ed. Peter Ludlow. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1996. 459-86. ———. “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” 8 Feb. 1996. 3 July 2004 http://www.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html>. Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2004. “Habbo Company Profile.” Habbo Hotel. 2002. Habbo Ltd. 20 Jan. 2003 http://www.habbogroup.com>. “The Habbo Way.” Habbo Hotel. 2004. Sulake UK Ltd. 15 Apr. 2004 http://www.habbohotel.co.uk/habbo/en/help/safety/habboway/>. Landry, Charles. The Creative City: A Toolkit for Urban Innovators. London: Earthscan, 2000. Lessig, Lawrence. The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World. New York: Random, 2001. Novak, Marcos. “Liquid Architecture in Cyberspace.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1991. 225-54. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafés, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts and How They Get You through the Day. New York: Paragon, 1989. Rheingold, Howard. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. New York: Harper, 1993. ———. The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier. Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 2000. Robins, Kevin. “Cyberspace and the World We Live In.” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2000. 77-95. Schiller, Dan. Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market System. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT P, 1999. Schiller, Herbert I. Culture Inc.: The Corporate Takeover of Public Expression. New York: Oxford UP, 1991. Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity & City Life. New York: Vintage, 1970. Shalit, Ruth. “Welcome to the Habbo Hotel.” mpulse Magazine. Mar. 2002. Hewlett-Packard. 1 Apr. 2004 http://www.cooltown.com/cooltown/mpulse/0302-habbo.asp>. “Strong Growth in Sulake’s Revenues and Profit – Habbo Hotel Online Game Will Launch in the US in September.” 3 Sept. 2004. Sulake. Sulake Corp. 9 Jan. 2005 http://www.sulake.com/>. Turkle, Sherry. Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet. New York: Simon, 1997. Citation reference for this article MLA Style McGuire, Mark. "Ordered Communities." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/06-mcguire.php>. APA Style McGuire, M. (Jan. 2005) "Ordered Communities," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/06-mcguire.php>.

Showtime’s reality TV series Family Business opens with a black screen and audio: the whirring of a 16mm projector, the home movies of a generation ago. The sound connotes nostalgia, memory, family, and film. In my childhood, the sound of the projector meant family time, a glance back at our toddler years, the years of Sunday dinners in the suburbs, when my mother and all my aunts still smoked. Later, as my sister and cousins whose childhoods are fixed in that celluloid began to date and marry, family movies were a means of introducing the soon-to-be-married other into the family; this was how we told our history. This kind of telling is one side of Family Business. The other, as Adam Glasser reports in his voiceover in the opening credits is “just one more thing. My business is entertaining adults.” Glasser, producer, director and occasional actor, is known in the adult entertainment industry as Seymore Butts, alluding to his particular personal and professional interest in anal sex. He self-describes, in the opening credits of Family Business, as “a pretty average guy,” a single father who runs his business with help from his mother and cousin. Viewers glance over Glasser’s shoulder into his everyday life as he cooks breakfast for his son, dates women in his ongoing search for a lasting relationship, and goes about the business of producing pornography. Family Business uniquely combines two genres that trouble perceptions of reality mediated through television, pornography and reality TV. Reality television troubles the real by effectively blurring the lines between the actual and the contrived. With the genre of reality TV now firmly in place, viewers take pleasure in reading between those lines, trying to determine what aspects of the characters, contexts and events of a television program are “authentic”. Searching for the real demands the viewer suspend disbelief, conveniently forgetting the power of the camera’s presence. Scripted or not, the camera is always played to, suppressing the “real” in favor of performance. Like reality TV, pornography blurs the line between reality and fantasy. As Elizabeth Bell points out, the difference between soft-core pornography and hard-core pornography is the difference between simulated and real sex. Hard-core porn depends on “an ironic tension between ‘real’ sexual acts within ‘faked’ sexual contexts” (181), troubling the viewer’s sense of whether such performances could “really” take place. The lingering disbelief sets porn apart from one’s personal sex life, just as questioning the authentic in reality TV keeps it from being “real.” Reality TV plays on a tension similar to Bell’s description of hard-core pornography. Manufactured contexts succinctly expose the personalities of the actors/ordinary people who are featured on reality TV programs. As a result, the audience can gain familiarity with these individuals in a neat thirty or sixty minute time slot. Inherent in any TV series is the notion that the audience forms opinions about and alliances for or against certain characters, stepping into their lives, mediated as they are, each week. Kenneth Gergen notes that “so powerful are the media in their well-wrought portrayals that their realities become more compelling than those furnished by common experience” (57). By conflating pornography with the everyday lives of its actors and directors, Family Business works to naturalize pornography by displaying it as real. When viewers are constantly sorting between the scripted and the spontaneous, where do they locate the real on Family Business? In a mediated world, the search for the real is always already fruitless: viewers and producers of reality TV recognize that the chasm between lived experience and the depiction of lived experience on television and film can’t be crossed. Reality TV and pornography both work to bring the mediated image closer to the experience of the viewer, placing “people just like you” in everyday situations that brush up against the outrageous. Laura Kipnis argues that pornography does not reflect reality but is “mythological and hyperbolic, peopled by fictional characters. It doesn’t and never will exist.” While pornography does not try to claim itself as real, Kipnis says, it does “insist on a sanctioned space for fantasy.” Acknowledging that space, and declaring that “normal” people engage the fantasy of porn, is important cultural work for Glasser. An episode of Family Business features Glasser giving a class on ways to please your partner using methods he learned in the industry. He speaks in interviews about letters he has received, proclaiming that the Seymore Butts films have enhanced couples’ sex lives. Family Business is not only important cultural work for Glasser; it is also important professional work. Naturalizing pornography, and giving viewers a glimpse of Seymore Butts films, certainly helps his product sales. Seeing Family Business as part of the mainstreaming of pornography, Glasser says “it’s the natural course of things” for pornography to be increasingly accepted. “Sex is just so much a part of mainstream people’s lives. So it’s natural that they would be curious about sex and people who have sex for a living” (Brioux). Adam Glasser “is” Seymore Butts, or is he? Viewers are exposed to a character-within-a-character: Glasser as father, son, and entrepreneur is difficult to separate from Glasser as Butts—adult entertainment producer and actor, porn celebrity. Glasser does not appear to distinguish between these identities, but is presented as one person seamlessly performing the everyday roles of his chosen life. He is a role model for the normalizing and mainstreaming of pornography. Family Business aspires to naturalize the integration of pornography into everyday life, naturalizing the adult entertainment industry, its producers and ultimately, its consumers. Viewers see Glasser as a fun-loving, single dad who plays baseball with his son. We look on as his Cousin Stevie, nearing 60 years old, goes to the doctor for a prostate exam (which the audience voyeuristically enjoys, is repelled by, and is compelled by to tend to health concerns). That Glasser and Cousin Stevie are also producers and distributors of adult entertainment enables the viewer to naturalize her/his own consumption of pornography. Fans posting on Showtime’s Family Business message board question whether the show authentically depicts the “real” lives of its characters, with discussions about what scenes are staged and scripted. Media consumption is seldom a passive practice, and one of the pleasures of reality TV is the audience’s resistance to what is presented as “real.” While the everyday lives of the characters are hotly debated on the message board, there is little discussion of pornography, beyond assertions of support for and the rare protest against adult entertainment on cable television. The Seymore Butts movies are rarely mentioned. What Family Business gives viewers access to is a soft-porn version of the staging of Seymore Butts films, as much as censors allow for MA cable programming. According to Bell, “all theoretical treatments of hard-core pornography…begin with the declaration that the performers are engaged in real sexual activity” (183). Glasser categorizes his porn as hard-core, but should fans believe it is authentically real, not just real sex acts but also a reflection of real life? He claims that it is: “My adult movies that I’ve made for the last 12 years have been what you would call reality based,” Glasser says. “They’re basically a documentation of my life, my relationships, good and bad.” (Haffenreffer). Glasser’s documentary of his life and relationships, however, is mediated through the lens of his camera and work in the editing room, presented in such a way to be compelling to its audience. Whether there is something intrinsically real in the Seymore Butts films, the contexts of the films are certainly contrived. Viewers of Family Business see Glasser describe fantasy scenarios to the actors preparing for a scene. While the situations are more mundane than fantastic, the implausibility of a group of people spontaneously having sex while waiting for friends to come back from lunch, for example, places Glasser’s pornography in a liminal space between fantasy and the real. What renders these films different from other pornography and makes them somewhat more believable is precisely the mundane scenarios in which they occur. The conflation of pornography and the everyday is reinforced spatially on Family Business: viewers see Glasser shoot a porn film in his living room, where sexual acts are performed on the same sofa where, in another scene, Glasser’s mother Lila plays with his son, Brady. After a comment about this was posted on the show’s message board, Flower, one of Glasser’s “Tushy Girls” posted a response: “But in defence [sic] of Semyore, He has his furniture steam cleaned after every shoot. Have you ever heard of kids laying or sitting on their parents [sic] bed? Don’t parents have sex too? I’m sure plenty of kids have sat where people have had sex before. So I don’t find it strange.” What Flower asks of message board readers is the normalization of pornography, a blending of porn and private sex acts into the same category. Family Business works to eradicate the perceptions of pornography that Kipnis describes as “all the nervous stereotypes of pimply teenagers, furtive perverts in raincoats, and anti-social compulsively masturbating misfits.” Pornography is not situated in the world of the outcast, Kipnis argues. Rather, it is “central to our culture,” simultaneously revealing our mostly deeply felt desires and fears. The series functions to relieve its viewers of the sense of guilty indiscretion. It typically airs on Friday nights at 11:00 p.m., the opening of Mature Adult-rated programming on cable television. Family Business is not only pornography, it also presents itself as a family sitcom. The show provides a neat segue from prime-time programming to after-hours, commingling the two genres for viewers to seamlessly make that shift themselves. Week after week, viewers of Family Business find the conflation of pornography and everyday life more acceptable. In sharp contrast to the sordid, sad life stories of Linda Lovelace, the Mitchell brothers and organized crime that are stitched into the history of pornography, Adam Glasser is presented as a respectable public figure, a free speech activist with a solid moral foundation. The morality or immorality of adult entertainment is not questioned here: inherent in Family Business is the idea that “they” have rendered sexual expression immoral where “we” (the characters in the series and the viewers at home) are accepting of, and even committed to, the pleasures of sex. As presented on Family Business, Glasser’s lifestyle is rather morally sound. There is no drug use, not even cigarette smoking, and although a pack of Merits appears occasionally in the pocket of Cousin Stevie’s stylish shirt, he does not smoke on camera. Safe sex is a priority, and the actors are presented as celebrating and enjoying their sexuality. The viewer is encouraged to do the same. The everyday behavior of the cast of Family Business is far from extraordinary, as Glasser takes pains to point out. Comparing Family Business to The Osbournes, he says “they are outrageous people in a normal world, and we’re normal people in an outrageous world” (Hooper). We’ve come to tolerate the Osbournes, perhaps even pitying them at times as if they have no control over their own outrageousness. Can viewers accept the outrageous in Family Business? Certainly the mundane lives of Adam and Lila—a nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn and his dear, doting mom—indicate that normal people can accept the outrageous world of pornography, so why should we not accept it as well? Tolerating Family Business is, essentially, tolerating pornography. Bringing the backstage of the adult entertainment industry into the frontstage of cable television programming marks a desire to shift the uses of pornography. Rather than being an underground outlet for sexual deviance, Family Business works to make porn a reflection of our everyday personal and sexual lives. Kipnis notes there is “virtually no discussion of pornography as an expressive medium in the positive sense—the only expressing it’s presumed to do is of misogyny or social decay.” Viewers can openly chat about Family Business and the glimpse it offers into the world of pornography, without the shame or embarrassment that would run alongside a discussion of porn itself. When sexual pleasure enters the public discourse through mainstream entertainment, there is power for those who fight against conservative voices wishing to suppress not just pornography but also sexual pleasure. References Bell, Elizabeth. “Weddings and Pornography: The Cultural Performance of Sex.” Text and Performance Quarterly 19 (1999): 173-195. Brioux, Bill. “A Family Affair: New Show Takes a Peek Behind Adam Glasser’s Porn Business.” The Toronto Sun. 3 October 2003, final ed.: E11. Gergen, Kenneth J. The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books, 2000. Haffenreffer, David. “Reality Imitates Art: When the ‘Family Business’ is in the Sex Industry.” CNN.com. 13 January 2004. Hooper, Barrett. “‘Normal people in an outrageous world’: Adam Glasser, star of the reality TV show Family Business, is just a regular guy who also happens to be a porn producer.” National Post. 5 December 2003: B4. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/porn/special/eloquence.html MLA Style Levitt, Linda. "Searching for the Real: “Family Business,” Pornography, and Reality Television." M/C Journal 7.4 (2004). 10 October 2004 <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/04_searching.php> APA Style Levitt, L. (2004 Oct 11). Searching for the Real: “Family Business,” Pornography, and Reality Television, M/C Journal 7(4). Retrieved Oct 10 2004 from <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0410/04_searching.php>

How much do you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight? (Fight Club) …The fabric of the rhizome is the conjunction, “and…and…and…” This conjunction carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb “to be.” Where are you going? Where are you coming from…These are totally useless questions. (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari 25) Fight Club (1999) depicts the struggle of Jack (Edward Norton) to determine a sense of identity in late capitalism, under which discipline gives way to control (Deleuze 177-182), and consumer culture feminises men. Within this social structure, people no longer occupy singular subjectivities, but instead are compelled to slide between infinite subject positions, always in a state of becoming, never arriving. Jack’s sense of identity, gleaned from shiny, new possessions, is exemplary of the postmodern subject who is all malleable surface and no depth, or, to use Jean Baudrillard’s lexicon, a schizophrenic “pure screen, a switching center [sic] for all the networks of influence” (a 133). As an alternative to this hollow and meaningless subjectivity, Fight Club suggests that there is a connection between pain and aggression and ‘knowing yourself’. Confronting and engaging with the primal feelings of pain and oblivion, it is implied, will bring Jack closer to a more authentic sense of identity than he could ever buy for himself from Ikea. Jack begins to attend support groups for the ill, in search of “real pain.” The crying and sense of oblivion experienced at these groups prove cathartic for Jack. These early scenes anticipate the idea that it is not through external things that one can attain an authentic sense of identity; rather, that the quest for authentic identity has become redundant and the only way out is to aspire to something less inauthentic. The way to do this, Fight Club suggests, is to embrace hopelessness, to return to degree zero and proceed in a simpler way. Jack’s apartment and the objects it contains are metonymic for his personality: recall the scene depicting his condo complete with descriptive captions and mood music, as if it were an advertisement. This is a visual enactment of Baudrillard’s theorisation of hyperreality, defined as the kind of reality that has resulted from an ideology that no longer represents real conditions of existence, because there are no longer any real objective truths to represent (b 6, 25). By extension, Jack’s personality is a piecemeal construct of these superficial objects: “I loved that condo. I loved every stick of furniture. That was not just a bunch of stuff that got destroyed; it was me.” After destroying Jack’s apartment, Tyler (Brad Pitt) confronts Jack with a critique of the consumer ideology by which he has lived his life. Confounding distrust of women and contempt for consumerism, Tyler points out that things “could be worse. A woman could cut off your penis while you’re asleep and toss it out of the window of a moving car,” before launching into an assault on Jack’s consumerist lifestyle asking why Is a duvet essential to our survival in the hunter-gatherer sense of the word…We’re consumers, we are by-products of the life-style obsession. Murder, crime, poverty: these things don’t concern me: celebrity magazines, television with five hundred channels, some guy’s name on my underwear…I say, “never be complete.” I say, “stop being perfect.” I say, “let’s evolve.” It is curious that Tyler carries out this tirade while consuming mass-produced beer and cigarettes. Fight Club overtly criticises ‘feminine’ modes of consumption—agonising over which ruffled valance to buy; taking pride in one’s home wares and condiments. However, this is undercut by its complicity with more ‘masculine’ modes of consumption—smoking and drinking - which are contingent on the rugged mode of masculinity it promotes. Fight Club does not only depict postmodern subjectivity in general as in crisis; rather, the suggestion is that in the postmodern era masculine subjectivity in particular is in trouble. Jack’s struggle to recuperate a sense of authentic masculine identity involves two different types of conflict: physical and political. Through physical violence we see fighting enacted in its arguably rawest sense: hyperreal violence with no coherent objective. Political conflict in this film includes but is not limited to physical brutality, propaganda, and acts of terrorism. The two different types of struggle in this film conduct themselves under the auspices of ‘Fight Club’ and ‘Project Mayhem’, respectively. Superficially, it would appear that Fight Club and Project Mayhem are two different things: Fight Club is for the sole purpose of men engaging in physical violence and an ensuing sense of abandon, while Project Mayhem is a tightly regimented organisation devoted to resisting and attacking the capitalist system and consumer culture. While considering the two different types of conflict in isolation would make it easier to unpack the complex set of ideas which the narrative device of fighting acts as a vehicle for in this film, this would be to ignore the fact that according to Fight Club the struggle for authentic subjectivity under late capitalism is a dubious objective to begin with, that “maybe it’s a mistake to believe in the existence of things, persons, or subjects” (Deleuze 26). Fight Club is represented as a way for Jack to subvert the ideology of late capitalism and its inherent consumerism that has, up to this point, defined his subjectivity. Fight Club potentially subverts the ideology of late capitalism in two ways: first, it provides a space where class hierarchy does not apply and allows lower-class workers to be momentarily “like gods” (this inversion proves, however, to be a hierarchical structure). Secondly, the evidence of physical violence can be read as subverting the ideology of respectable presentation in the bureaucratic work place. As Jack explains: “I got right in everyone’s hostile little face. Yes, these are bruises from fighting. Yes, I’m comfortable with that. I am enlightened.” Exactly what it is that is enlightening about fighting in this film is worth consideration. In the article ‘Fuck you Hero’ in Face magazine, Edward Norton describes the point of Fight Club as “needing the punch in the face to wake yourself up.” I think it’s about more than this. Notice that Jack continues to attend Fight Club long after he proclaims, “I am enlightened.” So, it’s safe to say it’s about more than simply ‘waking yourself up’. Jack describes how fighting makes him feel saved from the emptiness of his life, that it is “not about words.” An understanding of the explicit bodily violence depicted in Fight Club can be enhanced when considered with reference to John Fiske’s ‘Offensive Bodies and Carnival Pleasures’ (1989). Developing Michel de Certeau’s thesis that “there is no law that is not inscribed on bodies” (139), Fiske asserts the primacy of the body in ideological struggles, arguing “the body is where the social is most convincingly represented as the individual and where politics can best disguise itself as human nature” (70). In actively damaging the external façade of their bodies, therefore, the members of Fight Club reject the conservative politics that inscribe themselves on the neatly presented bodies of obedient workers. Fiske also makes reference to the psychoanalytic concept ‘jouissance’ defined as “a moment of pleasure when the body breaks free from social control” (94). Given that Jack describes the experience of Fight Club as defying words, fighting could be read as an experience of jouissance which allows members to escape the dominant system of signification and that momentarily transports these men, if not closer to the ‘truth’, at least further from social constraints. While Fight Club implicates other factors as being responsible for the contemporary demise of masculinity—including the breakdown of the family unit and absentee fathers—Tyler’s address to Fight Club foreshadowing Project Mayhem is perhaps the clearest articulation in Fight Club of the disaffection felt by these men and its alleged cause: I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who have ever lived—an entire generation pumping gas and waiting tables; or they’re slaves with white collars…Advertisements have them chasing cars and clothes, working jobs they hate so they can buy shit they don’t need. We are the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no Great War, or great depression. The great war is a spiritual war. The great depression is our lives. We were raised by television to believe that we’d be millionaires and movie gods and rock stars—but we won’t. And we’re learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off. Following this speech, Tyler hands out homework assignments. Tasks include the incitement of violence in the wider community, and the calculated vandalism of billboards, car-yards and public art. Tyler completes his own homework assignment, threatening a convenience store attendant with death unless he takes steps immediately to return to college and pursue his dream. This scene is exemplary of the ideology of ‘following your dream’, a perversion of the capitalist ethos, that pervades Fight Club. While threatening to drive the car they are both in into oncoming traffic, Tyler urges Jack to decide what it is he wants to accomplish before he dies. This appeal to individual fulfilment contradicts the hyper-collective mentality of Project Mayhem, which dictates that members renounce their names, shave their heads, wear identical black clothing and immerse themselves in dogma: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” Tyler’s appeal to Jack to “stop trying to control everything and just let go” is dissonant with the tightly regimented structure of Project Mayhem, complete with teams and committees. The notion of pain as a portal to ‘your true self’ is recalled when Tyler gives Jack a chemical burn. Tyler expounds: Without pain…we’d have nothing…what you’re feeling is premature enlightenment. This is the greatest moment of your life…It’s only after you’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything. This ideology of abandon, of ‘losing it all,’ is contradicted throughout Fight Club by Tyler’s equal appeal to rules and structure. Furthermore, Jack’s description of the feelings he experienced after fighting—“when the fight was over, nothing was solved, but nothing mattered”—seems to be embracing the converse: if nothing was solved and nothing mattered, surely ‘finding yourself’ is not important. Slavoj Zizek’s consideration of the postmodern individual can stand as a summary of the depiction of subjectivity in Fight Club. Zizek posits a subjectivity that knows no limits, when [t]he inherent obverse of ‘Be your true Self!’ is…the injunction to cultivate permanent refashioning, in accordance with the postmodern postulate of the subject’s indefinite plasticity…in short, extreme individualism reverts to its opposite, leading to the ultimate identity crisis: subjects experience themselves as radically unsure, with no ‘proper face’, changing from one imposed mask to another, since what is behind that mask is ultimately nothing, a horrifying void they are frantically trying to fill in with their compulsive activity… (373) In this sense, the narrative on subjectivity in Fight Club becomes extremely complicated, conflating extreme individualism (“follow your dream”), extreme collectivism (“you are not special”), and an endless shifting from mask to mask to mask (Cornelius—Jack—Tyler…) where no mask is privileged as more authentic than another. Fight Club is fundamentally ambivalent towards all of the issues it would explore. It promotes a discourse of ‘finding yourself’ while simultaneously insisting “you are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.” Does it all simply dissolve into postmodern irony, or does a kernel of significance remain? Beneath the contradictions the message regarding subjectivity seems to be this: the only ‘authentic’ thing about contemporary subjectivity is that at its heart lies a void. Embracing this void, while a bleak prospect, rather than frantically trying to compensate for its absence, is the only authentic gesture that remains. Works Cited Baudrillard, Jean. ‘The Ecstasy of Communication’. 1983. Trans. John Johnston. Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. London: Pluto Press, 1990. . Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984. Trans. Stephen Rendall. London: University of California Press, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. 1987. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations: 1972-1990. New York: Columbia UP, 1995. Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Twentieth Century Fox, 1999. Fiske, John. ‘Offensive Bodies and Carnival Pleasures’. Understanding Popular Culture. 1989. London: Routledge, 1996. McLean, Craig. ‘Fuck you Hero.’ Face. #35, December 1999. Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject: the Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso, 1999. Citation reference for this article Substitute your date of access for Dn Month Year etc... MLA Style Greenwood, Kate. "“You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” " M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture 6.1 (2003). Dn Month Year < http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/09-snowflake.php>. APA Style Greenwood, K., (2003, Feb 26). “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake” . M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 6,(1). Retrieved Month Dn, Year, from http://www.media-culture.org.au/0302/09-snowflake.html

To the unrefined or under-bred person, the visiting-card is but a trifling and insignificant piece of paper; but to the cultured disciple of social law it conveys a subtle and unmistakable intelligence. Its texture, style of engraving, and even the hour of leaving it, combine to place the stranger whose name it bears in a pleasant or disagreeable attitude, even before his manners, conversation, and face have been able to explain his social position (1920 etiquette manual quoted in Curtin 138). There’s a scene in the ‘90s TV series Ab Fab where Eddy, stumbling from her car, fresh from Harvey Nicks and tipsy on Bolly, shouts into her mobile ‘it’s ok Bubbles, I’m coming into the office now’ as she enters the office. When it first aired this was a wry comment on the vacuous, superfluous nature of new communication technologies. Now, it’s like ‘so what?’ Why not attempt to convey constantly the banal minutiae of the every day? Indeed, what troubles the technological verisimilitude is not that Eddy desires absolute proximity but that she’s not texting. In these days of ‘intensive propinquity’ (Kang 2002), however, it is easy to overlook the fact that telepresence—text’s uncanny power to stand in for the corporeal body—has a long history. Indeed, one such precursor to today’s technologies of telepresence would undoubtedly appeal to Eddy and Pats. In this paper, I want to consider the extent to which the British eighteenth-century visiting card conceptually, culturally and materially anticipates a range of contemporary technologies of propinquity. Acting as complex cultural avatars, these visiting cards conveyed the desires of class and gender in the construction of identity. The British pictorial visiting card of the early eighteenth century developed from the practice of using playing cards as visiting cards, the caller’s name being inscribed on the back of the playing card. In the mid eighteenth century the custom of using playing cards as visiting cards was replaced by cards manufactured for the express purpose of notifying those with whom one wished to make contact. At first these cards, printed on ‘stout paper or thin card’, were relatively plain, except for ‘an ornamental frame of tasteful design’ that surrounded the edge thus leaving the centre blank so that the caller could write their name. Soon, however, visiting cards were being printed with illustrations. These cards commonly left room for a short message in addition to the caller’s name (Staff 10). By the latter part of the eighteenth century, most visiting cards carried elaborate designs which varied according to the taste, hobbies or professional interests of the intended consumers. For those connected to the military, for example, there were cards illustrated with swords, cannons, flags or a person in uniform was depicted. Cards left by recent callers were commonly displayed in special receptacles on mantelpieces or small tables so that visitors ‘had a chance to see whom the family numbered among its social circle and be suitably impressed’ (Pool 66). At the close of the eighteenth century, the highly illustrated visiting card gave way to an understated and smaller format. No longer pictorial, visiting cards of the nineteenth-century, as Maurice Rickards notes, were ‘reticent’ in style and ‘espoused sobriety’ in typography and design. Victorian culture took seriously the materialities of visiting card practice as the exchange and expression of symbolic capital. As Rickards explains: In Britain, the etiquette of typographic style and layout was rigorously observed: the wording was engraved; printing was in black, card colour was white. A man’s town address appeared in the lower left-hand corner, his club on the right …. Unmarried daughters living at home did not have cards of their own. They appeared compendiously on their mother's cards (351). Visiting cards demonstrate the rich prehistory of contemporary technologies of telepresence in terms of the imaginative, symbolic and rhetorical functions they performed. Telepresence can be defined as the degree to which geographically dispersed agents experience a sense of physical and/or psychological proximity through the use of particular communication technologies. Like many of the media forms they anticipate, visiting cards were used to stand in for the corporeal presence of their author. As a late nineteenth-century etiquette manual explained: ‘the stress laid by Society upon the correct usage of these magic bits of paste-board, will not seem unnecessary, when it is remembered that the visiting card … frequently is made to take the place of one’s self’ (quoted in Davidoff 42). Visiting cards functioned as avatars of presence and identity, a complex language system which allowed the discursive agents to mediate social relations according to the varying degrees of intimacy that were desired. As long as all parties could read the codes and conventions, the level of acquaintanceship could be increased, maintained or decreased. For example, if one wanted to ‘put an end to an unsatisfactory acquaintanceship’, help was, literally, at hand. Instead of the ‘intolerable’ practice of ‘cutting’ – the procedure of pointedly refusing to recognise a person with whom one formerly had been in close contact – one would slowly reduce the time spent calling to the minimum length required. ‘After this’, advises an 1897 guide called Manners for Men, the gentleman ‘may leave cards once more without asking if the ladies of the family are at home. In this way he can gradually and with perfect courtesy break off the intimacy’ (quoted in Curtin 144). But communication might sometimes break down inadvertently. A participant’s failure to interpret the signs correctly could have unpleasant consequences. Because of this, etiquette manuals warned that servants be instructed on how to observe the difference between calling and card leaving. The intricacy inherent in the semiotics of ‘speaking by the card’ is demonstrated by the role servants were expected to play. Protocol demanded that a call was answered with a call and a card by a card. Returning a call with a card could be interpreted as a snub. In some cases that was the intention of one of the participants; leaving a card instead of calling in person was an easily understood gesture intended to scale down a particular acquaintanceship. However, it might just be a mistake. One of the many complications adhering to the practice of calling and leaving cards was that one could not assume the person to whom a card belonged had, in fact, ‘called’ upon one. As Michael Curtin explains: In practice, cards very often substituted for calls since the person receiving the call was not at home. In this case, a card equalled a call, though there was a complication. Since … cards were delivered in person, one who meant to leave cards was easily confused with another who called but merely left cards because no one was at home (141). The first problem, then, is how the caller deploys the card and how the receiver interprets this action; to what degree does the card stand for the physical presence of the caller? Even in the pre-Barthesian era, authorial intention was problematic: did the caller intend to see the person on whom they called or did the card stand for a less intimate mode of communication? Further complicating matters were the servants. Unlike Wilkie Collins’ depiction of a passive and neutral butler bearing a visiting card—‘waiting not like a human being who took an interest in the proceedings but … like an article of furniture’ (85)—many etiquette manuals warned that servants were actively involved in the chain of communication. Servants, as Curtin outlines, often went to call in place of their ‘mistresses’ and ‘therefore should be exactly instructed as to their mistress’s wishes, whether to call or to leave a card’. Likewise, ‘those servants who answered the door should be made to understand this distinction, to inquire into the caller’s intention’ and record this in writing (141). Visiting cards reproduced divisions of class by regulating the public and the private. The finely nuanced signifying system of these cards addressed only middle-class and aristocratic participants. For the middle classes and the aristocracy, privacy was the inherited right which visiting cards sought to protect. Those of the working class, as Davidoff argues, had to accept that their homes could be entered at any time by members of the ‘superior’ class, who would walk in and ‘at once become involved in the life of the family by asking questions, dispensing charity or giving orders’ (46). If the visiting card was significant as a medium of telepresence, enabling subjects to imagine, desire, fear or forestall each other’s presence, in 1854 this function was enhanced with the addition of a photographic image. The carte-de-visite reworked and conflated the technical, formal and social uses of both portraiture and the visiting card. Distinguished from the older types of visiting card by being smaller in dimension, usually measuring 4½ x 2½ inches, the carte-de-visite also carried a photographic print which was affixed to the cardboard of which it was made. Mediating the performance of identity in new ways, cards now visually depicted their bearers: Thus for a ceremonial visit, the print would represent the visitor with his hands imprisoned in spotless gloves, his head slightly inclined, as for a greeting, his hat resting graciously on his right thigh. According to etiquette, if the weather were bad, an umbrella faithfully reproduced under the arm of a visitor would eloquently declare the merit of his walk (quoted in McCauley 28). The role played by the carte-de-visite in the performance of gender is emphasised by an 1862 article on ‘flirting’ which warned that a woman would be so branded ‘if she be lavish in the distribution of her carte-de-visite’ (‘Flirts’ 163). The carte-de-visite was also an important element in the production of celebrity and the emerging commodity culture. While functioning as a visiting card, the particular topics and scenes represented on the carte-de-visite meant that it became a popular object to collect and display. Often depicting royalty, politicians or military leaders, this new mode of portraiture, as an 1862 newspaper put it, made ‘the public thoroughly acquainted with all its remarkable men’ to the extent that ‘we know their personality long before we see them’ (Wynter 673). The carte-de-visite familiarised the famous and made famous the familiar: The commercial value of the human face was never tested to such an extent as it is at the present moment in these handy photographs. No man, or woman either knows but that some accident may elevate them to the position of the hero of the hour (Wynter 673). Although invented to modernise the existing visiting card, the carte-de-visite neither replaced the older version nor was it used solely for calling. For the bourgeoisie, argues McCauley, the carte-de-visite album became a ‘faddish parlour amusement’ (48). As an enabler of telepresence, the carte-de-visite seemed to promise future generations an intimate knowledge of their distant ancestors. It would collapse time, bringing history into the present. As one nineteenth century journalist remarked, ‘it is very pleasing to have one’s relatives and acquaintances reunited in an album … you converse with them, it seems as if they were there beside you’ (quoted in McCauley 48). In general, the literature on presence, virtual presence and telepresence limits its historiography to an examination of electronic media (for example, Goldberg, Sconce, and Sobchack). As this paper has suggested, what’s needed is research that focuses on those forms of analogue textual culture that, functioning as avatars of corporeality and presence, might be regarded as fabulous. Works Cited Kang, Kathy. ‘Intensive Propinquity and ::fc:: Style’, paper delivered at the Fibreculture Conference, November 22 - 24, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, 2002. Collins, Wilkie. The New Magdalen. 1873. Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 1995. Curtin, Michael. Propriety and Position: A Study of Victorian Manners, London: Garland, 1987. Davidoff, Leonore. The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season, London: Croom, 1973. ‘Flirts,’ The Living Age. 74 (1862). Goldberg, Ken, ed. The Robot in the Garden: Telerobotics and Telepistemology in the Age of the Internet, Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 2000. McCauley, Elizabeth Anne, A. A. E. Disderi and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph, New Haven: Yale U P, 1985. Pool, Daniel. What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: From Fox Hunting to Whist: The Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth-Century, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993. Rickards, Maurice. The Encyclopedia of Ephemera: A Guide to the Fragmentary Documents of Everyday Life for the Collector, Curator, and Historian, ed. Michael Twyman, New York: Routledge, 2000. Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television, Durham: Duke UP, 2000. Sobchack, Vivian. ‘The Scene of the Screen: Envisioning Cinematic and Electronic “Presence”’. Materialities of Communication. Ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer, trans. William Whobrey. Stanford: Stanford U P. 83 - 106. Staff, Frank. The Picture Postcard and its Origins, London: Lutterworth, 1979. Wynter A. ‘Cartes De Visite,’ The Living Age. 72 (1862). Citation reference for this article MLA Style Milne, Esther. "‘Magic Bits of Paste-board’" M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/02-milne.php>. APA Style Milne, E. (2004, Jan 12). ‘Magic Bits of Paste-board’. M/C: A Journal of Media and Culture, 7, <http://www.media-culture.org.au/0401/02-milne.php>

Ways of Seeing"Images … define our experiences more precisely in areas where words are inadequate." (Berger 33)"Different skins, you know, different ways of seeing the world." (Morrison)The research question animating this article is: 'How does an individual creative worker re-present themselves as a contemporary - and evolving - brand?' Berger notes that the "principal aim has been to start a process of questioning" (5), and the raw material energising this exploration is the life's work of Richard Morrison, the creative director and artist who is the key moving force behind The Morrison Studio collective of designers, film makers and visual effects artists, working globally but based in London. The challenge of maintaining currency in this visually creative marketplace includes seeing what is unique about your potential contribution to a larger project, and communicating it in such a way that this forms an integral part of an evolving brand - on trend, bleeding edge, but reliably professional. One of the classic outputs of Morrison's oeuvre, for example, is the title sequence for Terry Gilliam's Brazil.Passion cannot be seen yet Morrison conceives it as the central engine that harnesses skills, information and innovative ways of working to deliver the unexpected and the unforgettable. Morrison's perception is that the design itself can come after the creative artist has really seen and understood the client's perspective. As he says: "What some clients are interested in is 'How can we make money from what we're doing?'" Seeing the client, and the client's motivating needs, is central to Morrison's presentation of self as a brand: "the broader your outlook as a creative, the more chance you have of getting it right". Jones and Warren draw attention to one aspect of this dynamic: "Wealthy and private actors, both private and state, historically saw creative practice as something that money was spent on - commissioning a painting or a sculpture, giving salaries to composers to produce new works and so forth. Today, creativity has been reimagined as something that should directly or indirectly make money" (293). As Berger notes, "We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves…The world-as-it-is is more than pure objective fact, it includes consciousness" (9, 11). What is our consciousness around the creative image?Individuality is central to Berger's vision of the image in the "specific vision of the image-maker…the result of an increasing consciousness of individuality, accompanying an increasing awareness of history" (10). Yet, as Berger argues "although every image embodies a way of seeing, our perception or appreciation of an image depends also upon our own way of seeing" (10). Later, Berger links the meanings viewers attribute to images as indicating the "historical experience of our relation to the past…the experience of seeking to give meaning to our lives" (33). The seeing and the seeking go hand in hand, and constitute a key reason for Berger's assertion that "the entire art of the past has now become a political issue" (33). This partly reflects the ways in which it is seen, and in which it is presented for view, by whom, where and in which circumstances.The creation of stand-out images in the visually-saturated 21st century demands a nuanced understanding of ways in which an idea can be re-presented for consumption in a manner that makes it fresh and arresting. The focus on the individual also entails an understanding of the ways in which others are valuable, or vital, in completing a coherent package of skills to address the creative challenge to hand. It is self-evident that other people see things differently, and can thus enrich the broadened outlook identified as important for "getting it right". Morrison talks about "little core teams, there's four or five of you in a hub… [sometimes] spread all round the world, but because of the Internet and the way things work you can still all be connected". Team work and members' individual personalities are consequently combined, in Morrison's view, with the core requirement of passion. As Morrison argues, "personality will carry you a long way in the creative field".Morrison's key collaborator, senior designer and creative partner/art director Dean Wares lives in Valencia, Spain whereas Morrison is London-based and their clients are globally-dispersed. Although Morrison sees the Internet as a key technology for collaboratively visualising the ways in which to make a visual impact, Berger points to the role of the camera in relation to the quintessential pre-mechanical image: the painting. It is worth acknowledging here that Berger explicitly credits Walter Benjamin, including the use of his image (34), as the foundation for many of Berger's ideas, specifically referencing Benjamin's essay "The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction". Noting that, prior to the invention of the camera, a painting could never be seen in more than one place at a time, Berger suggests that the camera foments a revolutionary transformation: "its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings" (19). This disruption is further fractured once that camera-facilitated image is viewed on a screen, ubiquitous to Morrison's stock in trade, but in Berger's day (1972) particularly associated with the television:The painting enters each viewer's house. There it is surrounded by his wallpaper, his furniture, his mementoes. It enters the atmosphere of his family. It becomes their talking point. It lends its meaning to their meaning. At the same time it enters a million other houses and, in each of them, is seen in a different context. Because of the camera, the painting now travels to the spectator, rather than the spectator to the painting. In its travels, its meaning is diversified. (Berger, 19-20)Even so, that image, travelling through space and time is seen on the screen in a sequential and temporal context: "because a film unfolds in time and a painting does not. In a film the way one image follows another, their succession constructs an argument which becomes irreversible. In a painting all its elements are there to be seen simultaneously." Both these dynamics, the still and the sequence, are key to the work of a visual artist such as Morrison responsible for branding a film, television series or event. But the works also create an unfolding sequence which tells a different story to each recipient according to the perceptions of the viewer/reader. For example, instead of valorising Gilliam's Brazil, Morrison's studio could have been tagged with Annaud's Enemy at the Gates or, even, the contemporary Sky series, Niel Jordan's Riviera. Knowing this sequence, and that the back catalogue begins with The Who's Quadrophenia (1979), changes the way we see what the Morrison Studio is doing now.Ways of WorkingRichard Morrison harnesses an evolutionary metaphor to explain his continuing contribution to the industry: "I've adapted, and not been a dinosaur who's just sunk in the mud". He argues that there is a need to explore where "the next niche is and be prepared for change 'cause the only constant thing in life is change. So as a creative you need to have that known." Effectively, adaptation and embracing innovation has become a key part of the Morrison Studio's brand. It is trumpeted in the decision that Morrison and Ware made when they decided to continue their work together, even after Ware moved to Spain. This demonstrated, in an age of faxes and landlines, that the Morrison Studio could make cross country collaboration work: the multiple locations championed the fact that they were open for business "without boundaries".There was travel, too, and in those early pre-Internet days of remote location Morrison was a frequent visitor to the United States. "I'd be working in Los Angeles and he'd be wherever he was […] we'd use snail mail to actually get stuff across, literally post it by FedEx […]." The intercontinental (as opposed to inter-Europe) collaboration had the added value of offering interlocking working days: "I'd go to sleep, he wakes up […] We were actually doubling our capacity." If anything, these dynamics are more entrenched with better communications. Currah argues that Hollywood attempts to manage the disruptive potential of the internet by "seeking to create a 'closed' sphere of innovation on a global scale […] legitimated, enacted and performed within relational networks" (359). The Morrison Studio's own dispersed existence is one element of these relational networks.The specific challenge of technological vulnerability was always present, however, long before the Internet: "We'd have a case full of D1 tapes" - the professional standard video tape (1986-96) - "and we'd carefully make sure they'd go through the airport so they don't get rubbed […] what we were doing is we were fitting ourselves up for the new change". At the same time, although the communication technologies change, there are constants in the ways that people use them. Throughout Morrison's career, "when I'm working for Americans, which I'm doing a lot, they expect me to be on the telephone at midnight [because of time zones]. […] They think 'Oh I want to speak to Richard now. Oh it's midnight, so what?' They still phone up. That's constant, that never goes away." He argues that American clients are more complex to communicate with than his Scandinavian clients, giving the example that people assume a UK-US consistency because they share the English language. But "although you think they're talking in a tongue that's the same, their meaning and understanding can sometimes be quite a bit different." He uses the example of the A4 sheet of paper. It has different dimensions in the US than in the UK, illustrating those different ways of seeing.Morrison believes that there are four key constants in his company's continuing success: deadlines; the capacity to scope a job so that you know who and how many people to pull in to it to meet the deadline; librarian skills; and insecurity. The deadlines have always been imposed on creative organisations by their clients, but being able to deliver to deadlines involves networks and self-knowledge: "If you can't do it yourself find a friend, find somebody that's good at adding up, find somebody that's good at admin. You know, don't try and take on what you can't do. Put your hand up straight away, call in somebody that can help you". Chapain and Comunian's work on creative and cultural industries (CCIs) also highlights the importance of "a new centrality to the role of individuals and their social networks in understanding the practice of CCIs" (718).Franklin et al. suggest that this approach, adopted by The Morrison Studio, is a microcosm of the independent film sector as a whole. They argue that "the lifecycle of a film is segmented into sequential stages, moving through development, financing, production, sales, distribution and exhibition stages to final consumption. Different companies, each with specialized project tasks, take on responsibility and relative financial risk and reward at each stage" (323). The importance that Morrison places on social networks, however, highlights the importance of flexibility within relationships of trust - to the point where it might be as valid to engage someone on the basis of a history of working with that person as on the basis of that person's prior experience. As Cristopherson notes, "many creative workers are in vaguely defined and rapidly changing fields, seemingly making up their careers as they go along" (543).The skills underlying Morrison's approach to creative collaboration, however, include a clear understanding of one's own strength and weaknesses and a cool evaluation of others, "just quietly research people". This people-based research includes both the capabilities of potential colleagues, in order to deliver the required product in the specified time frame, along with research into creative people whose work is admired and who might provide a blueprint for how to arrive at an individual's dream role. Morrison gives the example of Quentin Tarantino's trajectory to directing: "he started in a video rental and all he did is watch lots and lots of films, particularly westerns and Japanese samurai films and decided 'I can do that'". One of his great pleasures now is to mentor young designers to help them find their way in the industry. That's a strategy that may pay dividends into the future, via Storper and Scott's "traded and untraded interdependencies" which are, according to Gornostaeva, "expressed as the multiple economic and social transactions that the participants ought to conduct if they wish to perpetuate their existence" (39).As for the library skills, he says that they are crucial but a bit comical:It's a bit like being a constant librarian in old-fashioned terms, you know, 'Where is that stuff stored?' Because it's not stored in a plan chest anymore where you open the drawer and there it is. It's now stored in, you know, big computers, in a cloud. 'Where did we put that file? Did we dump it down? Have we marked it up? […] Where's it gone? What did we do it on?'While juggling the demands of technology, people and product The Morrison brand involves both huge confidence and chronic insecurity. The confidence is evident in the low opinion Morrison has of the opportunities offered by professional disruptor sites such as 99designs: "I can't bear anything like that. I can see why it's happening but I think what you're doing is devaluing yourself even before you start […] it would destroy your self-belief in what you're doing". At the same time, Morrison says, his security is his own insecurity: "I'm always out hunting to see what could be next […] the job you finish could be your last job."Ways of BrandingChristopherson argues that there is "considerable variation in the occupational identities of new media workers among advanced economies. In some economies, new media work is evolving in a form that is closer to that of the professional [in contrast to economies where it is] an entrepreneurial activity in which new media workers sell skills and services in a market" (543). For The Morrison Studio, its breadth, history and experience supports their desire to be branded as professional, but their working patterns entirely resonate with, and are integrated within, the entrepreneurial. Seeing their activity in this way is a juxtaposition with the proposition advanced by Berger that:The existing social conditions make the individual feel powerless. He lives in the contradiction between what he is and what he would like to be. Either he then becomes fully conscious of the contradiction and its causes, and so joins the political struggle for a full democracy which entails, among other things, the overthrow of capitalism; or else he lives, continually subject to an envy which, compounded with his sense of powerlessness, dissolves into recurrent day-dreams (148).The role of the brand, and its publicity, is implicated by Berger in both the tension between what an individual is and what s/he would like to be; and in the creation of an envy that subjugates people. For Berger, the brand is about publicity and the commodifying of the future. Referring to publicity images, Berger argues that "they never speak of the present. Often they refer to the past and always they speak of the future". Brands are created and marketed by such publicity images that are often, these days, incorporated within social media and websites. At the same time, Berger argues that "Publicity is about social relationships, not objects [or experiences]. Its promise is not of pleasure, but of happiness: happiness as judged from the outside by others. The happiness of being envied is glamour." It is the dual pressure from the perception of the gap between the individual's actual and potential life, and the daydreaming and envy of that future, that helps construct Berger's powerless individual.Morrison's view, fashioned in part by his success at adapting, at not being a dinosaur that sinks into the mud, is that the authenticity lies in the congruence of the brand and the belief. "A personal brand can help you straight away but as long as you believe it […] You have to be true to what you're about and then it works. And then the thing becomes you [… you] just go for it and, you know, don't worry about failure. Failure will happen anyway".Berger's commentary on publicity is partially divergent from branding. Publicity is generally a managed message, on that is paid for and promoted by the person or entity concerned. A brand is a more holistic construction and is implicated in ways of seeing in that different people will have very different perceptions of the same brand. Morrison's view of his personal brand, and the brand of the Morrison Studio, is that it encompasses much more than design expertise and technical know-how. He lionises the role of passion and talks about the importance of ways of managing deadlines, interlocking skills sets, creative elements and the insecurity of uncertainty.For the producers who hire Morrison, and help build his brand, Berger's observation of the importance of history and the promise for the future remains key to their hiring decisions. Although carefully crafted, creative images are central to the Morrison Studio's work, it is not the surface presentation of those images that determines the way their work is perceived by people in the film industry, it is the labour and networks that underpin those images. While Morrison's outputs form part of the visual environment critiqued in Ways of Seeing, it is informed by the dynamics of international capitalism via global networks and mobility. Although one of myriad small businesses that help make the film industry the complex and productive creative sphere that it is, Morrison Studios does not so much seek to create a public brand as to be known and valued by the small group of industry players upon whom the Studio relies for its existence. Their continued future depends upon the ways in which they are seen.ReferencesBenjamin, Walter. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. United States of America, 1969.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Brazil. Dir. Terry Gilliam. Universal Pictures. 1985. Film. Chapain, Caroline, and Roberta Comunian. "Enabling and Inhibiting the Creative Economy: The Role of the Local and Regional Dimensions in England." Regional Studies 44.6 (2010): 717-734. Christopherson, Susan. "The Divergent Worlds of New Media: How Policy Shapes Work in the Creative Economy." Review of Policy Research 21.4 (2004): 543-558. Currah, Andrew. "Hollywood, the Internet and the World: A Geography of Disruptive Innovation." Industry and Innovation 14.4 (2007): 359-384. Enemies at the Gates. Dir. Jean-Jacques Annaud. Paramount. 2001. FilmFranklin, Michael, et al. "Innovation in the Application of Digital Tools for Managing Uncertainty: The Case of UK Independent Film." Creativity and Innovation Management 22.3 (2013): 320-333. Gornostaeva, Galina. "The Wolves and Lambs of the Creative City: The Sustainability of Film and Television Producers in London." Geographical Review (2009): 37-60. Jones, Phil, and Saskia Warren. "Time, Rhythm and the Creative Economy." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 41.3 (2016): 286-296. Morrison, Richard. Personal Interview. 13 Oct 2016.The Morrison Studio. The Morrison Studio, 2017. 16 June 2017 <https://themorrisonstudio.com/>.Quadrophenia. Dir. Franc Roddam. Brent Walker Film Distributing. 1979. Film.Riviera. Dir. Neil Jordan. Sky Atlantic HD. 2017. Film.Storper, Michael, and Scott, Allen. "The Geographical Foundations and Social Regulation of Flexible Production Complexes". The Power of Geography: How Territory Shapes Social Life. Eds. Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear. New York: Routledge, 1989. 21-40.