Performance Projections

Film does far more than document performance—it actively recreates the time and space of performance and overhauls its rapport with the viewer’s eye and body. The first book to look in-depth at the intersection of film and performance in relation to issues and theories of space, Performance Projections travels from the origins of film in Europe and the United States to the world of digital media today, exploring the dynamic relationship between these vitally connected ideas. Drawing from a wide range of examples—including filmic depictions of German and Japanese and Chinese performance art and street cultures—Stephen Barber argues that the act of filming has the power to draw distinctively performative dimensions out of unruly human gatherings, such as riots and political protests, while also accentuating the outlandish and aberrant aspects of performance. Spanning the history of film, Barber moves from performance in film’s formative years, such as Edward Muybridge’s work in the 1880s, to contemporary performance artworks—for example, Rabih Mroué’s investigations of the often lethal camera phone filming of snipers in Syrian cities. Proposing that the future conception of filmed performance needs to be radically expanded in response to the transformations of digital film cultures, Performance Projections is a critical addition to the literature on both film and art history.

This book presents current and anticipated quantitative values for a wide range of cirtical figures of merit which characterize technological capabilities in the major discipline areas of space technology. The projections are based on historical data and the considered opinions of knowledgable experts in government and industry who are active contributors in their respective fields.

Analyzing Elizabethan and Jacobean playtexts for their spatial implications, this innovative study discloses the extent to which the resources and constraints of public playhouse buildings affected the construction of the fictional worlds of early modern plays. The study argues that playwrights were writing with foresight, inscribing the constraints and resources of the stages into their texts. It goes further, to posit that Shakespeare and his playwright-contemporaries adhered to a set of generic conventions, rather than specific local company practices, about how space and place were to be related in performance: the playwrights constituted thus an overarching virtual 'company' producing playtexts that shared features across the acting companies and playhouses. By clarifying a sixteenth- to seventeenth-century conception of theatrical place, Tim Fitzpatrick adds a new layer of meaning to our understanding of the plays. His approach adds a new dimension to these particular documents which - though many of them are considered of great literary worth - were not originally generated for any other reason than to be performed within a specific performance context. The fact that the playwrights were aware of the features of this performance tradition makes their texts a potential mine of performance information, and casts light back on the texts themselves: if some of their meanings are 'spatial', these will have been missed by purely literary tools of analysis.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on High-Performance Computing, HiPC 2008, held in Bangalore, India, in December 2008. The 46 revised full papers presented together with the abstracts of 5 keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 317 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications performance optimizazion, parallel algorithms and applications, scheduling and resource management, sensor networks, energy-aware computing, distributed algorithms, communication networks as well as architecture.

Enterprise Risk Management: Advances on its Foundation and Practice relates the fundamental enterprise risk management (ERM) concepts and current generic risk assessment and management principles that have been influential in redefining the risk field over the last decade. It defines ERM with a particular focus on understanding the nexus between risk, uncertainty, knowledge and performance. The book argues that there is critical need for ERM concepts, principles and methods to adapt to the latest and most influential risk management developments, as there are several issues with outdated ERM theories and practices; problems include the inability to effectively and systematically balance both opportunity and downside performance, or relying too much on narrow probability-based perspectives for risk assessment and decision-making. It expands traditional loss-based risk principles into new and innovative performance-risk frameworks, and presents fundamental risk principles that have recently been developed by the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA). All relevant statistical and risk concepts are clearly explained and interpreted using minimal mathematical notation. The focus of the book is centered around ideas and principles, more than technicalities. The book is primarily intended for risk professionals, researchers and graduate students in the fields of engineering and business, and should also be of interest to executive managers and policy makers with some background in quantitative methods such as statistics.