A wall might appear as basic, a clean surface without an identity of its own, nothing but a clean slate upon which to leave any impression. Though the walls surrounding us are all but anonymous. They are built with a structure making them stand tall and strong. They are filled with insulation to keep us warm and sheltered. They are hard and they are soft. They can allow us to isolate ourselves from each other or they are fragile enough to let us know someone is on the other side. They cover the basic necessities of our houses, and we in return cover them to make our spaces less anonymous. There is softness hidden in your walls mainly aims to highlight the textile components of architecture which we usually never see. While we tend to view textiles mostly as decoration, they constantly perform in a lot of various ways all around us. In this project I have worked with prefabricated building materials that according to me have textile qualities, but they aren’t viewed as textile. Or I have tried to adapt textile techniques to non-textile materials to test them in new ways. The wall as the leading actor has first and foremost been used as a conversation partner for the material exploration and contextualization. The main material used is wool sheep insulation though many other materials have been put to the test throughout the process.

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This essay identifies a type of narrative dissonance in the depictions of working-class conditions within Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life and George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. In this thesis, the dissonance is argued in part to be the effect created when an author belonging to one social class attempts to portray a class separate from their own. According to Marxist views, class constructs are well-defined and exist in opposition to one another. As such, there is a distinction between describing circumstances while viewing from outside and portraying conditions from within a class consciousness one does not share. The contrast between these perspectives introduces a discordant element into the narrative which interferes with a reader’s immersion. Furthermore, instances of both intranarrational and extratextual unreliability exacerbate the peculiar sense of dissonance when those elements conflict with the experiences of the reader. Understanding and sympathizing with the experiences of the Other, while beneficial in many regards, should not be conflated with knowledge of their lived experience. In order to establish this distinction, a close reading of the books, highlighting examples, is utilized. Additionally, by way of further explanation, Althusser’s concept of “internal distantiation” is used to define conflicting class viewpoints as a contributing factor to the dissonance perceived.

Thèse en recherche-création Cette version de la thèse a été tronquée des éléments de composition originale. Une version plus complète est disponible en ligne pour les membres de la communauté de l’Université de Montréal et peut aussi être consultée dans une des bibliothèques UdeM. / Cette recherche-création est issue de ce questionnement : qu’est-ce qui est en jeu dès lors qu’il s’agit d’intégrer et d’imbriquer l’improvisation (l’écoute active, corps agissant et réagissant au son en devenir) et la composition (écoute répétée, traitements fins, auscultation de la matière) dans une pratique électroacoustique ? Pour y répondre, j’ai développé un dispositif d’improvisation multipiste — intitulé le projet MissTake — axé sur des technologies hybrides (analogiques et numériques), l’instabilité et la non-linéarité dans une approche morphologique et ondulatoire des flux sonores. Trois compositions sont issues de ce questionnement. Mes pièces Volt_#1, Volt_#3 et Dancing on the Edge of Darkness, créées avec les matériaux sonores du dispositif, ont généré un processus de délestage dans les gestes compositionnels et les mouvements de spatialisation. L’analyse de ces œuvres utilise les concepts puisés dans le nouveau matérialisme et la philosophie de Deleuze et Guattari. Le projet MissTake, conçu autour d’un magnétophone à cassettes quatre pistes configurées en sans-entrée, est l’aboutissement de cette recherche-création. Le choix du multipiste, des sonorités bruiteuses et de l’improvisation libre a apporté un changement de visée fondamental dans ma pratique et donné lieu à un processus de décélération sur le plan temporel. En me concentrant sur le matériau sonore évacué du signifié, dans la perception et l’abstraction, j’ai pu développer une pensée de la musique comme ouverture sur l’indéfini, dans le sensible et l’inachèvement de la forme. / This research-creation begins with this questioning : what is at stake when it comes to integrating and coalescing improvisation (active listening, embodied gestures, acting and reacting to the sound in the making) and composition (repeated listening, refine and detailed treatments, auscultation of the material) to an electroacoustic practice? To answer this, I developed a multichannel improvisation device – called the MissTake project – focused on hybrid technologies (analogue and digital), instability and non-linearity in a morphological and undulatory approach to sound flows. Three compositions come from this questioning and device. My pieces Volt_#1, Volt_#3 and Dancing on the Edge of Darkness have generated a process of step-down compositional gestures and spatialization movements. The analysis of the works is based on concepts drawn from the new materialism and philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. The MissTake performance, designed around a four-track cassette recorder configured in no-input is the culmination of this research-creation. The choice of the multichannel, noise aesthetics and free improvisation brought a fundamental change of focus in my practice and gave rise to a deceleration process at the temporal level of sound. By focusing on the sound material evacuated from any meaning, in perception and abstraction, I was able to develop a thought of music as an opening on the indefinite, in the sensible and the incompleteness of the form.

Walter Benjamin warned in 1940 of a certain inconspicuous threat to political thinking, not least of all to materialism, that takes progress as an historical norm. Implicit in this conception is what he describes as an empty continuum of time along which the prevailing tradition chronicles its own mythic development and drains everyday life of genuine historical experience. The myth of progressive history advances insidiously today in consumeristic and technocratic attempts at reconciling cultural imagery with organic nature. In this dissertation, I pursue the contradictions of such images as they crystallize around the natural history of twenty-first century commodity society, where promises of ecological remediation, sustainable urban development, and climate change mitigation have yet to introduce a true crisis of historical experience to the ongoing environmental crisis of capitalism. A more radical way of seeing the cultural representation of nature would, I argue, penetrate its mythic determination by market forces and bear witness to the natural-historical ruins and traces that constitute, in Benjamin's terms, a single "catastrophe" where others perceive historical continuity. I argue that Benjamin's critique of progress is instructive to interpreting those utopian dreams, ablaze in consumer life and technological fantasy, that recent decades of growing environmental concern have channeled into the recovery of an experience of the natural world. His dialectics of nature and alienated history confront the wish-image of organic abundance with the transience of its appropriated expression in the commodity-form. Drawing together this confrontation with a varied literature on collective memory, nature, and the city, I suggest that our poverty of experience is more than simply a technical, economic, or even ecological problem, but rather follows from the commodification of history itself. The goal of this work is to reflect upon the potentiality of communal politics that subsist not in rushing headlong into a progressive future but, as Benjamin urges, in reaching for the emergency brake on the runaway train of progress.

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After a short introduction concerning the problem of "Artificial Intelligence" (AI) the work continues with a summary of the state of the art.Thereafter, it goes on to profile four different basic scientific views of human beings and AI: symbolism, connectionism, biologism and physicalism. The emphasis is on the elucidation of anthropologically relevant statements to intelligence, spirit, thinking, perception, will, consciousness, self-consciousness, feelings and life.It is demonstrated that the basic views referred to represent greatly abbreviated and distorted pictures of human beings. Theories that do not go beyond the quantifiable level cannot adequately encompass the nature of relevant concepts and capabilities. That is above all because of the fact that generally a philosophical materialism is advocated, which considers the existence of intellectual substances impossible. For this reason a philosophical critique is necessary. The position of moderate and critical realism is advocated, whose anthropological statements are secured by epistemological and metaphysical investigations.The work comes to the conclusion that human beings cannot be understood symbolistically, connectionistically, biologistically or physicalistically. Man is a physical-intellectual entity, endowed with reason, a living social being. He is formed and led by his intellectual and therefore immortal soul, which gives him uniqueness, irreplaceability and the value of personhood. He is capable of thinking and thus of objective, abstract perception, and therefore is intelligent. Humans have an unfettered will, which, led by mental perception, is to be directed toward the good. They are moreover, through reflection, self-conscious. Humans live an intellectually determined life, which essentially differs, despite biological similarity, from that of animals and cannot possibly, due to its substantial superiority, have developed from animal life.All substantial anthropological abilities (such as intelligence, will, consciousness etc.) presuppose spirit. Because it is not within the power of human beings to create a simple substance such as spirit, a thinking, perceptive, intelligent, willing, self-conscious, sentient living being can at best be only technically imitated, modelled or simulated but never be reproduced, copied or created. The relationship of humans to AI is thus determined by an insuperable difference between their natures.

In a world with an ever-changing economic landscape, the concept of financial stability can function as a buffer against the negative effects financial crises have on consumers' well-being and finances. Parallel to this, researchers are pushing marketers to move away from traditional marketing and instead focus on psychological well-being (PWB) and mindful consumption since this will grow efforts towards sustainability. Studies suggest that mindless consumption leads to financial stress, debt, and decreased well-being. Therefore, it is suggested that mindful consumption has a positive relationship with PWB and financial stability. However, there is currently a gap in the theoretical understanding regarding the impact of mindful consumption on PWB. The purpose of this thesis is to study the relationship between mindful consumption and PWB with a particular focus on how financial stability can explain this relationship. Drawing on a comprehensive review of existing literature, the following research questions were developed: RQ1: “How do the dimensions of mindful consumption (awareness, caring, and temperance) affect psychological well-being?” RQ2: “To what extent does financial stability contribute to the connection between the dimensionsof mindful consumption and psychological well-being?” This study uses a deductive approach with a quantitative internet survey strategy. The study had a total of 218 responses where the findings suggest that financial stability does not function as a bridge or link between mindful consumption and PWB. However, it was found that mindful consumption positively influences both financial stability and psychological well-being. / I en värld med ett ständigt föränderligt ekonomiskt landskap kan begreppet finansiell stabilitet fungera som en buffert mot de negativa effekter finansiella kriser har på konsumenternas välbefinnande och ekonomi. Parallellt med detta driver forskare marknadsförare att gå bort från traditionell marknadsföring och istället fokusera på psykologiskt välbefinnande (PWB) och medveten konsumtion eftersom detta kommer att öka ansträngningarna mot hållbarhet. Studier tyder på att tanklös konsumtion leder till ekonomisk stress, skuldsättning och minskat välbefinnande. Därför föreslås det att medveten konsumtion har ett positivt samband med PWB och finansiell stabilitet. Emellertid finns det för närvarande en lucka i den teoretiska förståelsen angående effekten av medveten konsumtion på PWB. Syftet med denna avhandling är att studera sambandet mellan medveten konsumtion och PWB med särskilt fokus på hur finansiell stabilitet kan förklara detta samband. Med utgångspunkt i en omfattande genomgång av befintlig litteratur utvecklades följande forskningsfrågor: RQ1: "Hur påverkar dimensionerna av medveten konsumtion (medvetenhet, omtanke ochnykterhet) det psykiska välbefinnandet?" RQ2: "I vilken utsträckning bidrar finansiell stabilitet till sambandet mellan dimensionerna avmedveten konsumtion och psykiskt välbefinnande?" Denna studie använder en deduktiv metod med en kvantitativ internetundersökningsstrategi. Studien hade totalt 218 svar där resultaten tyder på att finansiell stabilitet inte fungerar som en bro eller länk mellan medveten konsumtion och PWB. Däremot visade det sig att medveten konsumtion har en positiv påverkan på både finansiell stabilitet och psykiskt välbefinnande.