FRINGE

THIS IS A PRE-PUBLICATION COPY; PLEASE DO NOT CITE -- CITE THE PUBLISHED VERSION INSTEAD, WHICH CAN BE FOUND IN: _Poetics of Politics.Textuality and Social Relevance in Contemporary American Literature and Culture._ Eds. Sebastian M. Herrmann, Carolin Alice Hofmann, Katja Kanzler, Stefan Schubert, Frank Usbeck. Heidelberg: Winter, 2015. MORE INFORMATION HERE: https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-7517-1/Herrmann_ea_Eds_Poetics_of_Politics_PDF/

This article suggests a perspective for the study of the formal politics of what Jason Mittell calls ‘narratively complex television series.’ To do so, it draws on recent conceptions of popular seriality that consider serial texts as constellations of interaction between producers, authors, media technologies, institutions, audiences, and the serial material itself. Within these concatenations of interaction, serial texts employ historically and medially specific formal strategies to bring audience practices in line with the commercial logics that undergird their production and circulation. In the case of narratively complex television series, this paper argues, such strategies of ‘audience management’—which structure and organize the reception practices of viewers and suggest a preferred way of watching television—come to the fore in moments of operational self-reflexivity, i.e., in scenes that thematize and demonstrate the logics of serial unfolding. The article finally discusses some instances of operational self-reflexivity in Fox’s Fringe (2008-2012) and Showtime’s Homeland (2011-) to suggest that their formal politics become manifest in the way in which these shows articulate demands for hyper-attentive, time-consuming, and textually productive reception practices that chime well with the economic logics of media convergence and the larger context of contemporary capitalism.

This thesis explores the current pervasiveness of conspiracy-themed shows on American television. It argues that such shows should not simply be regarded as symptomatic expressions of widely shared cultural anxieties in post-9/11 America, but circulate because of a shared narrative structure which provides unique appeals and invites 'forensic' audiences practices. Discussing prominent examples like The X-Files, Lost, Fringe, and Homeland, this thesis sketches the narrative logics of what I call 'the conspiratorial mode of storytelling' and the audience practices it invites - arguing that these shows encourage their audiences to engage with their narrative material in a manner that parallels the paranoid hermeneutics of conspiracy theorists. As such, they provide audiences with a pop-cultural playground to engage with conspiracy theory - and allow them to 'try out' the paranoid interpretive logics of conspiracy theorists in the attempt to unravel their central narrative enigmas. These shows thus become culturally 'productive' by promoting conspiratorial thought. My thesis furthermore offers an overview of recent work on conspiracy theory (as ideology, as a mode of interpretation, and as a narrative structure),  relates the latter to popular television series and engages critically with recent academic appraisals of narratively complex television and participatory culture.
In developing its argument, it tries to offer some answers to the question how increasingly complex television series maintain their accessibility and audiences' active engagement despite increasingly dense narrative developments and their stories' tendency to careen towards incoherence. Accordingly, this thesis relates their current prominence to the media environment of the post-television (or convergence) era, and its digital fora that allow for the discussion, interpretation, and analysis of TV texts. It furthermore reads the increasing complexity of television series as indicating a further permeation of the boundaries between work and leisure under advanced capitalism.

Discourse surrounding remake television largely focuses on the outright remaking of a series or the adaptation of a property from another medium. In such discourse a series which is not identified as a remake or adaptation is usually labelled an original. Taking terms such as ‘original’ and ‘remake’ at face value suggests an unbalanced distribution of creative agency and overlooks the similarity of intertextual influences in both cases. An entire show need not be subject to remaking. Several originals utilise basic narrative elements such as a premise from earlier texts, thus remaking only aspects of their predecessors. This chapter analyses the concept of the remaking of a premise to illustrate the complexity of the remake phenomenon which extends beyond new and more-or-less explicit productions of older properties. It does this through the examination of a succession of originals centred on The X-Files (1993-2002).

Implementation of a repeat-pass differential interferometric SAR (D-InSAR) processing facility is a challenging task, involving among other things a precise coregistration of two (or more) complex SAR images, removal of the contribution from topography using a Digital Elevation Model (DEM), and band-pass filtering of common bandwidth to reduce out-of-band noise. Other useful functionality includes multi-looking, identification of layover and shadow areas, and geocoding. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of a flexible and fully automatic D-InSAR processing facility. The design is generic, in the sense that the only part that depends on the actual SAR mission is the data reader. The data readers are designed to implement a generic interface to data, as well as necessary metadata retrieved from data headers or auxiliary metadata files. We will also present examples from different applications based on the processing system, including use of the ubiquitous ASAR dat...

We demonstrate a new type of spatial phase-shifting, dynamic interferometer that can acquire phase-shifted interferograms in a single camera frame. The interferometer is constructed with a pixelated phase-mask aligned to a detector array. The phase-mask encodes a high-frequency spatial interference pattern on two collinear and orthogonally polarized reference and test beams. The phase-difference between the two beams can be calculated using conventional N-bucket algorithms or by spatial convolution. The wide spectral response of the mask and true common-path design permits operation with a wide variety of interferometer front ends, and with virtually any light source including white-light.

Despite the popular employment of objective lenses as focusing devices, parabolic mirror (PM) is intensively used in quite different scopes of science. For instances, mirrors with a small numerical aperture (NA) are normally used in astronomic telescopes and in telecommunications. Some groups also use high NA PMs in single molecule optics as efficient light collecting element [1-5]. In principle PMs are the perfect focusing elements: a parallel incoming beam along the optical axis of the PM can be focused to one point without any aberration. Furthermore by choosing proper deflecting coating material, PM is free from chromatic aberrations and can be used over wide optical frequencies. Nevertheless they are seldom used in imaging applications because of their bad off-axis properties. A small deviation from parallelism of the incoming beam or from the optical axis leads to tremendous aberrations and results in a small field of view. In confocal microscopy the sample is imaged point by point and thus is the perfect optical arrangement for a PM. Especially when combined with a scanning stage, so that the mirror stays perfect aligned with respect to the incident beam. Based on our experiences in the last years, we will demonstrate the integration of a PM in confocal and super resolution optical imaging systems. Applications in single molecule and particle imaging, as well as Raman scattering mapping of molecular monolayer will be shown.

... Simonetta Grilli, Pietro Ferraro, Domenico Alfieri, Melania Paturzo, Lucia Sansone, Sergio De Nicola, and Paolo De Natale Istituto Nazionale di Ottica Applicata ... and Science Technology 13: R85-R101 7. Grilli, S, Ferraro, P, De Nicola, S, Finizio, A, Pierattini, G, Meucci, R (2001 ...

The use of supervised neural networks for the estimation of seismic source parameters from SAR interferometric data is presented in this paper. The RNGCHN software allowed the generation of the input-output pairs necessary for the learning phase of the net. After being trained, ...

Contemporary Hollywood films exhibit a set of stylistic changes which David Bordwell has called "intensified continuity": more rapid cutting, extremes of lens lengths, free-ranging cameras and predominance of close-ups. While according to Bordwell the changes intensify traditional techniques but the directors still depict coherent worlds, other scholars claim that spatiotemporal continuity has been fragmented in the fast-paced cinema, whose main goal is now to deliver a series of adrenaline shocks. The sped-up pace of cinema and television is a response to the viewer's attention deficit common, in the climate of general social acceleration. While high-speed action cinema is usually assessed as lacking artistic value, a category of feature films described as complex narratives or "puzzle films," characterized by elaborate narrative maneuvers, twists, and time contortions, allows room for philosophical reflection. In experimental television the trend has a counterpart in "narrative complexity" which refers to an interconnected network of events and characters in serialized plots within episodic television, with mini-stories concluded in each episode and a story arc unfolding across the season(s). The American television show Fringe (written by J. J. Abrams, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, 2008-2013) is a perfect example of narrative complexity, as it combines unprecedented temporal complexity with the accelerated pace of the narrative, reflected in the psychic fragmentation of the characters. The paper analyzes the show's techniques of temporal displacement which enact the juxtaposition of multiple temporalities and contribute to the multidirectionality of the story. The analysis then moves on to Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv), one of the characters who navigate a variety of temporal scales. Her shifts between the parallel universes, between the plural timelines, and between herself and her double lead to disruptions in her psychological continuity, which problematizes the traditional notions of identity that assume a continued sense of memory over (linear) time. Ultimately, the example of Olivia serves to illustrate the thesis that th e culture of acceleration has disintegrated temporal horizons, and, as a result, has brought about a situation where identity lacks a point of reference.

During that talk, I presented some of the results of this experiment ( http://anomalyxb-6473876.tumblr.com ) : reblogging 24 hours of user reactions following the broadcast of the series finale of Fringe (Fox, 2008-2013). I focused on fanart, given that Tumblr is a highly "visual" kind of social network, and on the construction of meaning and thematic sense of closure by the users of the network.