PAISAJE DESPUÉS DE LA PANDEMIA

La pandemia generada por la COVID-19 está teniendo una incidencia global inusitada, y se puede suponer que nada después de ella va a seguir siendo exactamente igual. La lengua está acogiendo nuevos términos para designarla, y revitalizando otros que estaban en desuso. Y en el lenguaje de los políticos se introducen términos bélicos inconfundibles para referirse a esta nueva peste. Las prácticas sociales utilizadas para expresar las relaciones humanas se están viendo extremadamente condicionadas. Y como emblema de la situación emerge la máscara, cuyos orígenes materiales están en el teatro griego y a partir de esta lengua dio lugar al concepto semióticamente muy interesante de persona. En cuanto a las bellas artes, la literatura no sufre el condicionamiento pandémico de la distancia social que perjudica la realización de las actividades teatrales y musicales. Si bien, lo que Benjamin denominaba “la época de la reproductibilidad técnica” ofrece algunas soluciones al respecto. Abstract: The pandemic generated by COVID-19 is having an unusual global incidence, and it can be assumed that nothing after it will remain exactly the same. The language is accepting new terms to designate it, and revitalizing others that were in disuse. And in the language of politicians, unmistakable warlike terms are introduced to refer to this new plague. The social practices used to express human relationships are being extremely conditioned. And as an emblem of the situation emerges the mask, whose material origins are in the Greek theater and from this language gave rise to the semiotically very interesting concept of person. As for the fine arts, literature does not suffer from the pandemic conditioning of social distance that impairs the performance of theatrical and musical activities. But what Benjamin called “the era of technical reproducibility” offers some solutions in this regard.

Best Practices for Technical Reproducibility Assessment of Multiplex Immunofluorescence

Multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) tyramide signal amplification is a new and useful tool for the study of cancer that combines the staining of multiple markers in a single slide. Several technical requirements are important to performing high-quality staining and analysis and to obtaining high internal and external reproducibility of the results. This review manuscript aimed to describe the mIF panel workflow and discuss the challenges and solutions for ensuring that mIF panels have the highest reproducibility possible. Although this platform has shown high flexibility in cancer studies, it presents several challenges in pre-analytic, analytic, and post-analytic evaluation, as well as with external comparisons. Adequate antibody selection, antibody optimization and validation, panel design, staining optimization and validation, analysis strategies, and correct data generation are important for reproducibility and to minimize or identify possible issues during the mIF staining process that sometimes are not completely under our control, such as the tissue fixation process, storage, and cutting procedures.

Reproducible Lipid Alterations in Patient-Derived Breast Cancer Xenograft FFPE Tissue Identified with MALDI MSI for Pre-Clinical and Clinical Application

The association between lipid metabolism and long-term outcomes is relevant for tumor diagnosis and therapy. Archival material such as formalin-fixed and paraffin embedded (FFPE) tissues is a highly valuable resource for this aim as it is linked to long-term clinical follow-up. Therefore, there is a need to develop robust methodologies able to detect lipids in FFPE material and correlate them with clinical outcomes. In this work, lipidic alterations were investigated in patient-derived xenograft of breast cancer by using a matrix-assisted laser desorption ionization mass spectrometry (MALDI MSI) based workflow that included antigen retrieval as a sample preparation step. We evaluated technical reproducibility, spatial metabolic differentiation within tissue compartments, and treatment response induced by a glutaminase inhibitor (CB-839). This protocol shows a good inter-day robustness (CV = 26 ± 12%). Several lipids could reliably distinguish necrotic and tumor regions across the technical replicates. Moreover, this protocol identified distinct alterations in the tissue lipidome of xenograft treated with glutaminase inhibitors. In conclusion, lipidic alterations in FFPE tissue of breast cancer xenograft observed in this study are a step-forward to a robust and reproducible MALDI-MSI based workflow for pre-clinical and clinical applications.

Presença e morte: o carácter efémero das artes do corpo.

This paper aims to reflect on a hypothetical threshold-space between contemporary dance and performance art, questioning at the same time the prevalence of too strict a boundary between them. To this end, a range of works involving hybridization of artistic languages ​​were selected and analyzed, from Signals (1970) by American dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham to Café Müller (1978) by German choreographer Pina Bausch. Both dance and performance art are ephemeral arts or, according to the classical system, arts of time as opposed to the arts of space - painting, sculpture and architecture. They have also been called allographic arts, performative arts or, perhaps more specifically, arts of the body (Ribeiro, 1997). Unlike traditional fine arts, which materialize in a physical object other than the body, unlike video-art and cinema, arts without originals, mediated by the process of “technical reproducibility” (Benjamin, 1992), performative arts require the presence of a human body - and the duration of the present - as a fundamental instrument for their realization. In that sense, the paper also focuses on the ephemerality factor associated with dance and performing arts, and the consequent devaluation these have suffered vis-à-vis other artistic practices, considered to be academic and socially more significant.

Shoe Reels

Shoe Reels examines the special relationship between shoes and cinema. The book considers the narrative and aesthetic functions of shoes, asking why they are so memorable, and what their wider cultural resonance might be. Written by experts from a range of disciplines, including film and television studies, philosophy, history, and fashion, this collection covers cinema from its origins to the present day, and spans a global range of films from the United States, Europe, Africa and Asia. Besides protecting the feet, shoes contribute to the performance of gender; they indicate aspects of personality, sexuality, race, ethnicity and social class; and they serve as tools of seduction. As objects designed for the body, shoes also affirm the materiality of individual bodies and the endurance of the human body itself when physical presence has been progressively de-emphasised, first with the advent of technical reproducibility (printing, photography, cinema, radio and the like), and now with the rise of digital technology in the virtual era. The very materiality of shoes—the fact that they are things—is what makes them ripe for analysis. Shoes humanise, setting people apart from non-human animals, but they can also serve to dehumanise. Objects par excellence of hyper-consumption, shoes are situated at the crossroads of sexual fetishism and commodity fetishism. Shoes are clearly more than just good to wear, then: to paraphrase Claude Lévi-Strauss, they are also good to think.

Critique of Flowers: The Exigency of Life in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility

Need, as an epigenetic concept, originated with Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, for whom it referred to the pressure of circumstances that compel animals to develop new organs in the course of evolution. It reappeared in twentieth-century science as the somatic disequilibrium that Sigmund Freud, following Psycho-Lamarckian biologists, first called “the need of life” (die Not des Lebens) and then “the drives” (Trieb). The invention of time-lapse cinematography around 1900, initially as an optical instrument in the experimental study of plant physiology, visibly enlarged the epigenetic paradigm: Plants were suddenly perceived as agential beings, attached to the physical environment not by their roots, but rather by their needs and activities. The disquieting impression of responsive behavior became the selling point of the BASF-commissioned nitrogen-fertilizer commercial Miracle of Flowers (1926), a film celebrated by Rudolf Arnheim as “the most fantastic, thrilling, and beautiful picture ever made.” This article interrogates the sovereignty of need in epigenesis, using Miracle of Flowers as a case study. Through a close reading of the animal-like organisms in this film and the emotional reactions they elicited, need is reimagined as a maladaptive force embodied in technical media that tethers unhappy individuals to punishing environments.

Shibboleth

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. Building on Jacques Derrida’s Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, but following its own itinerary, this book interprets the episode in Judges together with texts by Celan, passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern, pursuing the track of a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers Celan a locus of poetico-political affirmation.

Shibboleth

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The word thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. It is therefore useful to examine closely the inherited meaning of shibboleth as test-word. A relatively rare word, it figures powerfully at a crucial moment in William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom! and above all in poems by Paul Celan and in Jacques Derrida’s study of Celan. Subsequent chapters will read these texts carefully, together with the Biblical narrative.

Unbiased identification of nanoparticle cell uptake mechanism via a genome-wide CRISPR/Cas9 knockout screen

A major bottleneck in nanocarrier and macromolecule development for therapeutic delivery is our limited understanding of the processes involved in their uptake into target cells. This includes their active interactions with membrane transporters that co-ordinate cellular uptake and processing. Current strategies to elucidate the mechanism of uptake, such as painstaking manipulation of individual effectors with pharmacological inhibitors or specific genetic knockdowns, are limited in scope and biased towards previously studied pathways or the intuition of the investigators. Furthermore, each of these approaches present significant off-target effects, clouding the outcomes. We set out to develop and examine an unbiased whole-genome screening approach using pooled CRISPR/Cas9 libraries for its ability to provide a robust and rapid approach to identify novel effectors of material uptake. Enabling this, we developed a methodology termed fast-library of inserts (FLI)-seq for library preparation and quantitative readout of pooled screens that shows improved technical reproducibility and is easier to perform than existing methods. In this proof-of-concept study we use FLI-seq to identify a solute carrier protein family member, SLC18B1, as a transporter for polymeric micellar nanoparticles, confirming the viability for this approach to yield novel insights into uptake mechanisms.

Critical’ Philosophy of Culture: Actual Contexts and Assemblage Point

The annual outbursts of controversy surrounding the presentation of the main film awards of the planet in the last few years (primarily around the Oscars) are important for cultural philosophy because they are indicators of tectonic shifts in the paradigm of modern cultural knowledge. The concept of ‘high’ culture is increasingly losing its ontological significance. Criticism fell upon this concept almost a hundred years ago, but so far this has been a fact of ‘high’ theory. Today, the denial of a ‘high’ culture has become the reality of mass communication. The pressure, which used to be a problem only for academic classrooms, has become an order of magnitude greater. This is the line on which we need a clear accounting of the results, the balance of pro et contra. The answer of the ‘critical’ philosophy is understandable in principle: the contradictions between the ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures are not an insoluble conflict. The axiom of the death of a ‘high’ culture is incorrect. The modern theory of ‘high’ culture is possible. But its construction is cumbersome and not fast. You need to start by protecting the ‘high’ culture from reproach for violence. The assemblage point of radical criticism of the ‘high’ culture is W. Benjamin’s treatise “A Work of Art in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility”. Therefore, the defense of ‘high’ culture cannot but begin with an answer to W. Benjamin. At the same time, thinking specifically about this small treatise, we need a careful analysis of the whole structure, the words of Benjamin as a whole. And this word is peculiar. It is thoroughly public and political. Benjamin’s treatise is not a theoretical reflection. This is a manifesto, more precisely, two manifestos. The first is the manifesto of the new Marxism. The second is the manifesto of the artistic avant-garde. Benjamin saw the possibility of synthesizing these two ideologies and gave his model. It turned out, firstly, unfounded, and secondly, it was dangerous. It is dangerous because culture is the main barrier that holds back the advent of utopia. Having destroyed this barrier, we find ourselves defenseless against utopia.