Performing Science And The Virtual

This text looks at how science has been performed throughout history, tracing a line from 11th century alchemy to the 21st century virtual avatar.

From Faust and Edison, to John Cage and Lara Croft, this inspiring book reviews classical plays to contemporary issues and examines how science has been performed throughout history.

A computer scientist and a performance and new media theorist define and document the emerging field of mixed reality performance. Working at the cutting edge of live performance, an emerging generation of artists is employing digital technologies to create distinctive forms of interactive, distributed, and often deeply subjective theatrical performance. The work of these artists is not only fundamentally transforming the experience of theater, it is also reshaping the nature of human interaction with computers. In this book, Steve Benford and Gabriella Giannachi offer a new theoretical framework for understanding these experiences—which they term mixed reality performances—and document a series of landmark performances and installations that mix the real and the virtual, live performance and interactivity. Benford and Giannachi draw on a number of works that have been developed at the University of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Laboratory, describing collaborations with artists (most notably the group Blast Theory) that have gradually evolved a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to combining practice with research. They offer detailed and extended accounts of these works from different perspectives, including interviews with the artists and Mixed Reality Laboratory researchers. The authors develop an overarching theory to guide the study and design of mixed reality performances based on the approach of interleaved trajectories through hybrid structures of space, time, interfaces, and roles. Combinations of canonical, participant, and historic trajectories show how such performances establish complex configurations of real and virtual, local and global, factual and fictional, and personal and social.

Aimed at engineers and scientists who require a thorough grounding in the new generation of Computer Interface, this unique book draws together previously inaccessible technical information into a single source. It provides the first comprehensive reference to Virtual Reality. Includes a detailed explanation of the underlying principles of Virtual Reality, including its current limitations.

High Performance Scientific And Engineering Computing: Hardware/Software Support contains selected chapters on hardware/software support for high performance scientific and engineering computing from prestigious workshops in the fields such as PACT-SHPSEC, IPDPS-PDSECA and ICPP-HPSECA. This edited volume is basically divided into six main sections which include invited material from prominent researchers around the world. We believe all of these contributed chapters and topics not only provide novel ideas, new results and state-of-the-art techniques in this field, but also stimulate the future research activities in the area of high performance computing for science and engineering applications. High Performance Scientific And Engineering Computing: Hardware/Software Support is designed for a professional audience, composed of researchers and practitioners in industry. This book is also suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level students in computer science and engineering.

This collection interrogates the interaction between new technologies and performance practice, linking the sensuous contact that must exist between the physical and virtual, together with the resultant corporeal transformation. It features writings from international contributors who specialize in digital art and performance practices.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th European PVM/MPI Users' Group Meeting held in Dublin, Ireland, in September 2008. The 29 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of 7 invited contributions, 1 tutorial paper and 8 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 55 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on applications, collective operations, library internals, message passing for multi-core and mutlithreaded architectures, MPI datatypes, MPI I/O, synchronisation issues in point-to-point and one-sided communications, tools, and verification of message passing programs. The volume is rounded off with 4 contributions to the special ParSim session on current trends in numerical simulation for parallel engineering environments.

With contributions from a collection of authors consisting of many recognizable experts in the field of virtual and adaptive environments, as well as many up and coming young researchers, this book illustrates the many ways in which psychological science contributes to and benefits from the increased development and application of these nascent systems. Discussing issues from both a user- and technology-based standpoint, the volume examins the use of human perception, cognition, and behavior. The book builds a foundation on the assumption that these systems are first and foremost human-centered technologies, in that their purpose is to complement and extend human capabilities across a wide variety of domains.