Witches and pagans have long faced historical persecution from the Catholic church and other patriarchal systems of power. In the eyes of mainstream society, they have been reduced to fragments of ancient history and entertaining media stereotypes. Real practitioners of witchcraft and paganism have remained fairly marginalized and trapped in the shadows, but this is starting to change. Witches and pagans have begun to involve themselves in large-scale political movements, combining spiritual power with direct action. While this phenomenon has a longer track record in the United States, in France it is extremely new. France is a country that has an even deeper history of pagan origins and Inquisition witch trials, wih a currently conflicted religious dynamic of being both secular and Catholic. Therefore, the reclamation and practice of witchcraft within an activist setting has even more revolutionary significance. Because the basic tenets of most witch and pagan spiritualities emphasizes fighting oppression, witchcraft has attracted marginalized groups, especially the LGBT community. The occult offers valuable new ways of examining activism and social justice using spirituality and magic.

Increased chip size and reduced feature size has helped following Moores law for long decades. This has an impact on interconnect length, which is resulting in chip performance degradation. Despite the introduction of new materials with Low-K dielectrics for interconnects, their delay is expected to substantially limit the chip performance. To overcome this problem the need for new technology has arrived. One such promising technology is the three-dimensional Integrated chips (3D ICs) with multiple silicon layers. In this thesis, three dimensional integrated chip (3D IC) technology has been implemented on programmable logic arrays (PLAs). The two-dimensional PLAs are converted to three-dimensional PLAs to realize the advantages of the third dimension. Two novel approaches for partitioning of PLAs are introduced for topological optimization. Greedy algorithm is implemented on the partitioned PLAs to utilize the third dimension for further enhancement in scalability factors. This concept has been implemented on MPLA (Magic Programmable Logic Array) tool. The 3D PLA has been tested on MCNC91 benchmark suite and the results are presented. The experimental results are compared with the 2D-PLA on the same benchmark set. The results obtained indicate the efficacy of the proposed synthesis approach.

'The Artist Will Be Present' explores objects as traces that stem from performed actions, and my body in performance. Part-sculptural objects, video and sound act as performance documents that expand on notions of the ‘live’ encounter. Interest lies in how we get to objects: process in variance to product or closure. And the question of how the body/s of the audience becomes participatory is at the forefront of these operations. From this viewpoint the exegesis aims to broaden existing scholarship on performativity, liveness and the part-sculptural object, exploring the manners in which various cultural practices act to animate objects. I reconsider the Euro-American genealogies of performance/body art (Bruce Nauman, Lygia Clark, Ann Hamilton et al.) in relationship to contemporary art practices in Australia and New Zealand (Alicia Frankvich, Carolyn Eskdale et al.) through the lens of late 19th-and early 20th-century writing on sympathetic magical action. A legacy of cultural anthropology dealing with magic (that was privileged in establishing grounding aspects of structural linguistics) circulates around the British anthropologist Stanley J. Tambiah whose thinking on persuasive analogy in ritual performance draws a crucial link between J. L. Austin’s performative utterance and James George Frazer’s notion of sympathetic magic. From such a perspective the operations of sympathetic mimesis—involving ambivalent similitude and contagion—are discussed in terms of performative and persuasive illocutionary force. This offers another model for articulating an authentic performative document as an encounter with the ‘live.’ A phenomenological method of enquiry, including Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the chiasm,—along with notions of mimetic incongruence—crucially tease out relationships between the live and the performance document and aim at resisting subject/object dichotomies whereby concepts of embodiment and indeterminate play between artist, objects and audiences are activated. Applied to contemporary debates on performance and ‘objects out of action,’ part objects and images are transformed as partial ‘subjects’: metonymically part of larger wholes as trace (substitution) and contagious contact (liveness). What is lacking in the operations of sympathetic mimesis is precisely what ‘draws out’ the body/s of the audience as they desire closure in object and duration. As these questions turn on the body of the artist/self and the audience/participant in performative installation practice, I offer an analysis of bodies in ritual exchange (donor/donee); subjects and objects as transformers: relations of force over form—liminal, reversible and redolent of lack—that emphasise encounter in difference to recognition. This is to speak of, in the words of Lygia Clark: “Tactile shocks to liberate the body.”

Overhead and Behind is an ongoing learning exercise in three parts: Working Conditions, The Refusal of Objects and Disturbing Distribution (forthcoming). Through learning by doing, it unfolds new episodes as an attempt to look at the act of orientating different standpoints. The different parts of Overhead and Behind are examined in series of episodes and an ongoing glossary that expands words connected to the learning exercise. The purpose of Overhead and Behind is (a) to see how structures over-ones-head conceals value systems which conforms working conditions and (b) to practice the method of “being behind”, i.e. to slow-down and counterpose progress. The third aim (c) is to see how these standpoints can be practiced and how this act can insert a new valorization-system.

A repeated theme in the fiction of Angela Carter and Jeanette Winterson is the use of domestic space as a tool for defining socially acceptable versions of female sexuality. Four novels that crystallize this theme are the focus of this dissertation: Winterson??s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985) and Art and Lies (1994) and Carter??s The Magic Toyshop (1967) and Nights at the Circus (1984). Each chapter examines both authors?? treatments of a specific room in the house. Chapter II, "Parlor Games: Spatial Literacy in Formal Rooms," discusses how rooms used for formal occasions project a desirable public image of a family. More insidiously, however, the rooms protect the sexual order of the household, which often privileges male sexuality. Using the term spatial literacy to describe how characters interpret rooms, the chapter argues that characters with a high spatial literacy can detect not only the overt messages of these formal rooms, but also what underlies those messages. Chapter III, "Making Meals, Breaking Deals: Mothers, Daughters, and Kitchens," discusses the kitchen as the site of the production of domestic comfort. An analysis of who has primary responsibility for the production of comfort and whose comfort is privileged often reveals the power hierarchy of a given household. The chapter also examines the kitchen as a volatile space that can erupt with violence and the expression of repressed emotions and repressed sexuality. Finally, the kitchen is analyzed as a space of intimacy between mothers and daughters. Chapter IV, "Bedtime Stories: Assaulting Sexuality in the Bedroom," argues that the privacy of the adolescent bedroom is often disrupted by the surveillance of family members trying to control the sexual identity of the room??s occupant. The chapter also examines how social prescriptions encourage women to tolerate the interruption of their privacy. Each of the protagonists from these four novels has opportunities to learn about subverting the discursive constructions of domestic space, and several characters enact that subversion. This ability for subversion suggests the possibility for agency, a possibility that postmodernist thought often rejects, but one that Carter and Winterson allow.

Originally presented as the author's Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Heidelberg, 1983. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-208).

Thèse (M.A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland, 2000. / Comprend des réf. bibliogr.

Thesis (doctoral)--Uppsala universitet, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 399-435).

This thesis examines the ways in which popular culture reveals, and shapes, religious thinking in contemporary Japan. Through an investigation of popular culture including animated films (anime) and graphic novels (manga), and the cultural processes related to their production and consumption, it explores how and why popular culture in Japan is acting as a repository for ideas and images relating to religion, the supernatural, and the human and non-human agents who mediate them. Popular culture is important not only for the ways it discloses contemporaneous cultural trends, but because it acts in dialogic tension with them. In Japan, where society has grown increasingly secularized since at least the middle of the twentieth century, an overwhelming majority of citizens consider themselves non-religious. Surveys have consistently indicated that only a small percentage of respondents identify as actively Shintō, Buddhist, Christian or some other religious affiliation. At the same time, depictions of religious images and themes have grown exponentially in popular culture such that a recent internet search on “anime” plus “kami” (a Shintō deity) produced an astounding 20,100,000 hits. Clearly, religion continues to play a crucial role in the popular imagination. This juncture of popular culture and personal religious identity in contemporary Japan raises a number of questions discussed in the following chapters. What benefits do consumers derive from the treatment of religious themes in anime and manga? What do depictions of religion in popular media indicate about the construction of religious identity in Japan? Why the disparity between religious identification survey results and cultural consumption of religious themes and images? In short, what are the ways in which popular culture in Japan reveals ideas about religion and the supernatural, and in what ways does popular culture actively shape those conceptions? / text

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