Gestures of Vibrating (Interruption) in Rudolf von Laban, Mary Wigman, and Walter Benjamin

This chapter compares Rudolf von Laban’s and Mary Wigman’s practices and theories of vibrant gestural flow with Walter Benjamin’s theory of gesture as vibrant or intervallic interruption. For Laban and Wigman, gesture mirrors a vitalist understanding of life that is based on the assumption of transhistorical continuities of vibratory exchange between human and cosmic energy. Benjamin’s Brechtian gestures, by contrast, address historical inscriptions and manipulations of bodies, which provide comment on the conditions of society by subjecting to critique aspects of the idea of flow that pertain to unquestioned political figurations of power. This chapter thus explores three gestural manipulations of vibrant energy, and shows what they engender: in Laban, a process of transmission between dancers and spectators; in Wigman, an “action mode” of movement, which she called “vibrato”; and, in Benjamin, a possibility for philosophical insight, but also a disruptive revolutionary charge.

A New Topological Method for Examining Historical Inscriptions

The article presents a new method developed to increase the efficiency of the identification algorithm for historical inscriptions of unknown origin. The authors extracted topological properties of the symbols containing different script relics, and analyzed them by using statistical tools. The considered topological properties are circular loop, oblique lines, vertical section, and crossing, among others. The article describes the use of the number of a three-circle grapheme intersection point vectors to identify unknown symbols. The number of intersections of the three circles and the examined symbol is stored in a feature vector. By supplementing the feature vectors with the circle vectors, the authors succeeded in improving the efficiency of the algorithm designed to decipher hard to read historical inscriptions.