A Performance Cosmology


Book Description

Exploring thirty years of work by The Centre for Performance Research (CPR), A Performance Cosmology explores the future challenges of performance and theatre through a diverse and fascinating series of interviews, testimonies and perspectives from leading international theatre practitioners and academics. Contributors include: Philip Auslander, Rustom Bharucha, Tim Etchells, Jane Goodall, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Jon Mckenzie, Claire MacDonald, Susan Melrose, Alphonso Lingis, Richard Schechner, Rebecca Schneider, Edward Scheer, and Freddie Rokem. A Performance Cosmology is structured as a travelogue through a matrix of strategic, imaginary, interdisciplinary field stations. This innovative framework enables readings which disrupt linearity and afford different forms of thematic engagement. The resulting volume opens entirely new vistas on the old, new, and as yet unimagined, worlds of performance.




Transformers for Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision


Book Description

The definitive guide to LLMs, from architectures, pretraining, and fine-tuning to Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), multimodal Generative AI, risks, and implementations with ChatGPT Plus with GPT-4, Hugging Face, and Vertex AI Key Features Compare and contrast 20+ models (including GPT-4, BERT, and Llama 2) and multiple platforms and libraries to find the right solution for your project Apply RAG with LLMs using customized texts and embeddings Mitigate LLM risks, such as hallucinations, using moderation models and knowledge bases Purchase of the print or Kindle book includes a free eBook in PDF format Book DescriptionTransformers for Natural Language Processing and Computer Vision, Third Edition, explores Large Language Model (LLM) architectures, applications, and various platforms (Hugging Face, OpenAI, and Google Vertex AI) used for Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). The book guides you through different transformer architectures to the latest Foundation Models and Generative AI. You’ll pretrain and fine-tune LLMs and work through different use cases, from summarization to implementing question-answering systems with embedding-based search techniques. You will also learn the risks of LLMs, from hallucinations and memorization to privacy, and how to mitigate such risks using moderation models with rule and knowledge bases. You’ll implement Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) with LLMs to improve the accuracy of your models and gain greater control over LLM outputs. Dive into generative vision transformers and multimodal model architectures and build applications, such as image and video-to-text classifiers. Go further by combining different models and platforms and learning about AI agent replication. This book provides you with an understanding of transformer architectures, pretraining, fine-tuning, LLM use cases, and best practices.What you will learn Breakdown and understand the architectures of the Original Transformer, BERT, GPT models, T5, PaLM, ViT, CLIP, and DALL-E Fine-tune BERT, GPT, and PaLM 2 models Learn about different tokenizers and the best practices for preprocessing language data Pretrain a RoBERTa model from scratch Implement retrieval augmented generation and rules bases to mitigate hallucinations Visualize transformer model activity for deeper insights using BertViz, LIME, and SHAP Go in-depth into vision transformers with CLIP, DALL-E 2, DALL-E 3, and GPT-4V Who this book is for This book is ideal for NLP and CV engineers, software developers, data scientists, machine learning engineers, and technical leaders looking to advance their LLMs and generative AI skills or explore the latest trends in the field. Knowledge of Python and machine learning concepts is required to fully understand the use cases and code examples. However, with examples using LLM user interfaces, prompt engineering, and no-code model building, this book is great for anyone curious about the AI revolution.




Wreading


Book Description

"Jed Rasula is a preeminent scholar of avant-garde poetics, noted for his erudition, intellectual range, and critical independence. He's also a gifted writer-his recent books have won praise for their entertaining, clear prose in addition to their scholarship. He is also an alumnus of UAP's distinguished Modern and Contemporary Poetics series, which published his Syncopations fifteen years ago. Rasula returns to the MCP series with Wreading, A collection of essays, interviews and occasional writings that reflects the breadth and diversity of his curiosity. One of the referees likened Wreading to a "victory lap, but one that sets its own further record in the taking." This is a collection of highlights from Rasula's shorter critical pieces, but also a carefully assembled and revised intellectual autobiography. Wreading consists of two parts: an assortment of Rasula's solo criticism, and selected interviews and conversations with other critics and scholars (Evelyn Reilly, Leonard Schwartz, Tony Tost, Mike Chasar, Joel Bettridge, and Ming-Qian Ma). The collection opens with a trio of essays that complicate the idea of a "poet." By interrogating the selection of poets for anthologies in the 20th century, Rasula identifies a host of "forgotten" poets, once prominent but now forgotten. Another essay on the state of the poetry anthology reveals how much influence literary gatekeepers have, and what a reimagination of the anthology form could make possible. In subsequent chapters, Rasula finds surprising overlap between Dada and Ralph Waldo Emerson, charts the deep links between image and poetic inspiration, and reckons with Ron Silliman's The Alphabet, a UAP classic. In the book's second half, Rasula engages in detailed conversations with a roster of fellow critics. Their exchanges confront ecopoetics, the corporate university, the sheer volume of contemporary poetry, and more. This substantial set of dialogues gives readers a glimpse inside a master critic's deeply informed critical practice, and lists his intellectual touchstones. The balance between essay and interview achieves a distillation of Rasula's long-established idea of "wreading." In his original use, the term denotes how any act of criticism inherently adds to the body of writing that it purports to read- how Rasula "couldn't help but participate" in his favorite poems. In this latest form, Wreading captures a critical perception that sparks insight and imagination, no matter what it sees"--




AMAIRA


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"The story of a girl who ran away from everything just to find everything"




The New Laokoon


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Think, Pig!


Book Description

This book examines Samuel Beckett’s unique lesson in courage in the wake of humanism’s postwar crisis—the courage to go on living even after experiencing life as a series of catastrophes. Rabaté, a former president of the Samuel Beckett Society and a leading scholar of modernism, explores the whole range of Beckett’s plays, novels, and essays. He places Beckett in a vital philosophical conversation that runs from Bataille to Adorno, from Kant and Sade to Badiou. At the same time, he stresses Beckett’s inimitable sense of metaphysical comedy. Foregrounding Beckett’s decision to write in French, Rabaté inscribes him in a continental context marked by a “writing degree zero” while showing the prescience and ethical import of Beckett’s tendency to subvert the “human” through the theme of the animal. Beckett’s “declaration of inhuman rights,” he argues, offers the funniest mode of expression available to us today.







Current Opinion


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Current Literature


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Beckett and Joyce


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