Computing

The adoption of agent technologies and multi-agent systems constitutes an emerging area in bioinformatics. In this article, we report on the activity of the Working Group on Agents in Bioinformatics (BIOAGENTS) founded during the first AgentLink III Technical Forum meeting on the 2nd of July, 2004, in Rome. The meeting provided an opportunity for seeding collaborations between the agent and bioinformatics communities to develop a different (agent-based) approach of computational frameworks both for data analysis and ...

It is our belief that modelling the behaviour of stem cells in the adult human body as an agent-based system is the most appropriate way of understanding the process of self-organisation. We have undertaken several case studies where formal and/or computational models of stem cell systems, have been re-developed using an agent-based approach. This paper presents details of one of these case studies where we have used an agent-based approach as opposed to a cellular automata approach. A formalisation of the non-agent ...

The Procedural Reasoning System (PRS) is the best established agent architecture currently available. It has been deployed in many major industrial applications, ranging from fault diagnosis on the space shuttle to air traffic management and business process control. The theory of PRS-like systems has also been widely studied: within the intelligent agents research community, the belief-desire-intention (BDI) model of practical reasoning that underpins PRS is arguably the dominant force in the theoretical foundations of rational ...

This paper describes work in progress on the development of a social timeline that aims to enrich feedback for people learning music within an online community. This interface is novel because it uses multiple layers for group discussions rather than the single layer found in websites such as SoundCloud. Multilayered timelines are commonly used for audio and video editing, but have not been used for collaborative annotation of music recordings (to avoid confusion we refer to the timeline as multi-layered not multi-track which normally refers to multiple audio channels). We tabulate key features of 15 competing systems to justify our claim that the multi-layered social timeline is a novel design pattern for exchanging feedback about musical performances. 49 classical music students used a prototype of the system over five months to upload and discuss rehearsals of an ensemble piece which was then publicly performed. Data from this study is currently being analysed so only a preliminary indication of results is given.

Textiles have been essential to human life since pre-history, have been traded for millennia and -as the continuing focus of technological and artistic innovation -have a dynamic future in the form of e-textiles. The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of World Textiles will offer, in 700 articles, 3 million words, and 3,500 images, the definitive resource on textiles across cultures and time. Drawing upon archaeology, anthropology, history, art, design, and the social sciences as well as materials science and technology, the ten-volume set will present original articles which:

Textile Modernism: Transcultural Readings of Maryn Varbanov and Abstract Weaving from East to East, from Local to Global
Janis Jefferies
This essay focuses on abstract weaving as an expression of textile modernism. It discusses how the Bulgarian artist, Maryn Varbanov, in particular amongst other East European tapestry artists, pursued technical experimentation and challenged folk weaving tradi- tions by exploring abstract weaving as a form of conceptual textiles. Maryn Varbanov can be consid- ered the most influential Bulgarian artist since the Second World War. Arguably he contested gendered assumptions of weaving as a historically feminine handicraft and abstract weaving to the Academy of Fine Arts in Hangzhou as China explored its own moments of modernist, avant-garde experimentation.

Art, and increasingly the convergence of performance or live works, can act as a provocation; it operates as the conscience of a society, producing discomfort and bringing its audience into crisis (Barratt and Bolt 2010). For art- ists, this discomfort and crisis represents precisely art’s bene t, both to the participants and to the wider community. I am not so convinced, as I hope to explore in this chapter.

ED. Kat Jungnickel.
Researchers rethink tactics for inventing and disseminating research, examining the use of such unconventional forms as poetry, performance, catalogs, interactive machines, costume, and digital platforms.

The exhibition Sudo Reiko: Making NUNO Textiles took center stage this winter at the Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile in Hong Kong (CHAT). The exhibition was a multi-dimensional collaboration between Reiko Sudo, the internationally acclaimed textile designer and Design Director of NUNO in Japan, Saito Seiichi of Rhizomatiks Architecture, Tokyo, Adrien Gardère, Paris, scenography design and a network of Japanese factory managers, technicians and artisans and the curatorial expertise of CHAT’s Co-Director Mizuki Takahashi.

Sotheby's in London may best be known as an auction house, but its sister organization S|2, serves as a contemporary, research-based, critical exhibition space focusing on the edges of art history and those artists which may be under recognized by the market. S|2 operates separately from the auctions and the programme is laid out independently of the auction seasons. Where Were You at Night is the second part of a trilogy of group exhibitions where a work of literature underpins the conceptual framework for the show. The exhibition is always accompanied by a new edition and reprinting of the selected story. The exhibition is named after a collection of fourteen short stories by Brazilian author Clarice Lispector that were begun in 1951. For S|2's exhibition programmers Darren Leak and Bianca Chu, Lispector's stories and the exhibition are open to many interpretations as there is no prevailing narrative to link each story, nor a singular thread that unites the works on view. The works by explore ideas of materiality and their surfaces whether in clay, wood, metal or textiles. Where Were You at Night, as a collection of short stories, is both a wondering phantasmagoria of a raw writing style and an amalgam of language which is difficult to translate. This rawness stands out as a nexus between Lispector's writing and the major textile-based pieces on display by Olga de Amaral, Jagoda Buic and Françoise Grossen, who came to international prominence in the 1970s through the Lausanne International Tapestry Biennials in Switzerland. By transgressing boundaries with excess and ecstasy, they staked out a claim and positioned fiber more firmly and proximate to the explorations that have propelled abstract forms of art since the 1960s.

Anni Albers began her studies at the Bauhaus in 1922 before being invited along with her husband, the painter Josef Albers, to the United States by the architect Philip Johnson. The invite meant that they could escape the Nazi regime and Albers could make textiles without fear of being arrested.
During her  1st major retrospective in the UK, at TATE modern, the viewer is taken on a journey from the Bauhaus to Black Mountain College to Yale. In a stunningly and lovingly curated exhibition, the viewer is treated to some glorious examples of Albers textile designs, wall hangings, printmaking, drawings, and writings

Anni Albers is well known for two major publications that became something of a bible for many artists and designers across the Western world: On Designing (1959) and On Weaving (1965). Albers was keen to stake out a complex terrain of ideas, in uences and patterns of communication that would address a wide audience. In her introduction, she wrote,
“I hoped to include in my audience not only weavers but also those whose work in other  elds encompasses textile problems. This book, then, is an e ort in that direction. (2017:1x).”

In her most recent book, Fray: Art and Textile Politics, Julia Bryan-Wilson describes the terrain of contemporary textiles as materially embodied and entangled in the everyday world of art and politics. Part of a growing pluralism of contemporary visual and material culture, textile has been central to the contestation of social, historical and cultural boundaries since the 1960s and 1970s. Feminist theories have been instrumental in opening up a critical space for textile, providing the necessary methodological tools to the medium through the strategic negotiation of the ideological discourses by which it had been traditionally marginalized. Receiving renewed attention from historians and curators, textile has become a site for resistance, used tactically to undo stable identities and subvert dominant models of art’s autonomy. Bryan-Wilson is committed to that theoretical and methodological position, and develops it in important and interesting ways.

New forms of digital imaging such as GPS and satellite mapping have had signi cant
impact on our collective senses
of orientation in space and time. Similarly, digital software such
as that used for Jacquard weaving allow for new forms of collage, superimposing, combining, repetition, and fragmenting of imagery, which further disrupt a stable perspective. This article links concepts of global data circulation and collection with contemporary data visualization and materialization approaches in the  eld of digital humanities. Kelly Thompson’s multifaceted project Material Codes: Ephemeral Traces, established in 2014, translates various forms of data
through digitally assisted Jacquard weaving. With data visualization, the artist’s subjective process
of beauti cation can make an audience feel emotionally engaged by the rendering of phenomena that may otherwise be beyond the scale of human senses. What is beyond reach becomes tangible. In Thompson’s research-creation work, the intangible concept of digital data is both visualized and materialized into the literally tangible, as tactile cloth. This conversation between Janis Jefferies, (London, UK) and Kelly Thompson (Montreal, Canada) over a period of 10 months proposes questions around code, data, image, weaving, and research engagement.

Magdalena Abakanowicz, 1930‒2017

It is with great sadness that I learned of the death of Magdalena Abakanowicz on April 20, 2017.
A body breathes, smells, tastes, hears, touches, and is touched.
As we handle work with  ber we discover a language, we become our own storytellers. The pleasures of Abakanowicz’s work have been rich and ambiguous, contradictory and painful for me. She helped me  nd the unguarded spaces of de

The greatest concentration of textiles in a Western-based triennial was at the Arsenale Corderie as part of “Viva Arte Viva.” This was the main theme of the Venice Trienniale. Textiles were everywhere, in the form of embroi- dered sculptures, large-scale installa- tions, knitted dolls, and painted dresses.1 For example, Ernesto Neto presented a gigantic knitted bio- morphic architecture where viewers were welcome to hang out in the enclosure, though at the Trienniale opening it was occupied mainly by ceremonially dressed Amazonian Indians brought in to perform religious rituals. Their presence was disconcert- ing. It revived the “primitivism” debate of 30 years ago, its terms unchanged: people in the West con- tinue to import the “Other,” often for their pleasure, while remaining com- plicit in a global economy that is destroying the “Other’s” world. I take up this point in my review of the Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT9), Queensland Museum and Art Gallery (QAGOMA), which opened on November 23, 2018