Ximena Alarcón - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Ximena Alarcón

Acervo, Aug 2, 2019

This paper describes a multidisciplinary encounter with oral testimony archives and their incorpo... more This paper describes a multidisciplinary encounter with oral testimony archives and their incorporation in the artistic research project INTIMAL. It explores ways in which to creatively listen to stories which might be emotionally challenging, and to create and sustain empathy with these disembodied voices, which contain a shared history as fissures of sixty years of violence.

Exploring healthy and effective prevention education responses to dangerous online challenges Par... more Exploring healthy and effective prevention education responses to dangerous online challenges Part 1-Understanding and exploring the issue Part 2-Analysis and insights from TVE's global survey Part 4-Effective approaches to preventative education Part 6-Recommendations Part 5-Prevention education: views from the panel on effective approaches and ways to improve our response Part 3-The role challenges play in adolescent development Executive Summary

The following paper has been published as part of Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies ... more The following paper has been published as part of Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 10 (2); a special issue based on a selection of papers and performances at Remote Encounters: Connecting bodies, collapsing spaces and temporal ubiquity in networked performance, a two-day international conference (11th-12th of April 2013) exploring the use of networks as a means to enhance or create a wide variety of performance arts. Abstract Two internet-based sonic performances, Letters and Bridges (between Leicester and Mexico City), and Migratory Dreams (between London and Bogotá), were developed by the artist with the leading question of what the 'in-between' space (Bhaba 1994; Ortega 2008) sounds like in the context of migration. Drawing on a Deep Listening (Oliveros 2005) practice, the artist undertook pre-performance workshops as a way to engage participants in the possibilities of travelling in time and space, and expressing through voice and other sounds feelings that...

Strategic Information Design is a framework where a sender designs information strategically to s... more Strategic Information Design is a framework where a sender designs information strategically to steer its receiver’s decision towards a desired choice. Traditionally, such frameworks have always assumed that the sender and the receiver comprehends the state of the choice environment, and that the receiver always trusts the sender’s signal. This paper deviates from these assumptions and re-investigates strategic information design in the presence of distrustful receiver and when both sender and receiver cannot observe/comprehend the environment state space. Specifically, we assume that both sender and receiver has access to non-identical beliefs about choice rewards (with sender’s belief being more accurate), but not the environment state that determines these rewards. Furthermore, given that the receiver does not trust the sender, we also assume that the receiver updates its prior in a non-Bayesian manner. We evaluate the Stackelberg equilibrium and investigate effects of informatio...

ArXiv, 2020

Recommender systems have relied on many intelligent technologies (e.g. machine learning) which ha... more Recommender systems have relied on many intelligent technologies (e.g. machine learning) which have procured credibility issues due to several concerns ranging from lack of privacy and accountability, biases and their inherent design complexity. Given this lack of understanding of how recommender systems work, users strategically interact with such systems via accepting any information with a grain of salt. Furthermore, the recommender system evaluates choices based on a different utilitarian framework, which can be fundamentally different from the user's rationality. Therefore, in this paper, we model such an interaction between the recommender system and a human user as a Stackelberg signaling game, where both the agents are modeled as expected-utility maximizers with non-identical prior beliefs about the choice rewards. We compute the equilibrium strategies at both the system and the user, and investigate conditions under which (i) the recommender system reveals manipulated i...

Journal of Nutritional Science, 2021

The current COVID-19 pandemic has generated a series of changes in the daily routines of people, ... more The current COVID-19 pandemic has generated a series of changes in the daily routines of people, including children and teenagers, in an unprecedented way, which constitutes a global challenge in public health. Social isolation has been a prophylactic measure to prevent the spread of the virus; however, it has generated negative impacts on the physical and emotional health of parents, caregivers, children and teenagers around the world. The objective of the present study was to evaluate the effects of confinement caused by the COVID-19 pandemic at the level of nutritional status, dietary and behavioural patterns of elementary school children and teenagers in a small town of Colombia. Anthropometric parameters such as BMI Z-score, waist circumference and waist/height ratio were evaluated in 266 school children and teenagers. A questionnaire with socio-demographic, clinical and lifestyle characteristics and the KIDMED were applied to learn about nutritional aspects. A total of 102 stu...

Revista Mexicana de Pediatría, 2020

Resonancias: Revista de investigación musical, 2018

A partir de las memorias sonoras de los pasajeros del transporte público subterráneo en Londres, ... more A partir de las memorias sonoras de los pasajeros del transporte público subterráneo en Londres, México y París, creé el sitio interactivo en internet Sounding Underground. Esta interfaz articula estructural y aleatoriamente la esencia de una memoria sónica subterránea. Partiendo de la propuesta de Pauline Oliveros de escuchar profundamente como una práctica que incluye todas las sensaciones corporales, he considerado los sistemas físicos de transporte subterráneo y el entorno sonoro virtual que he creado, como "utopías" y "heterotopías" del sueño humano de movilidad. En este documento, sugiero que Sounding Underground actúa como una interfaz incorpórea que transforma potencialmente la memoria corporal, involucrando sentimientos asociados a lo "sublime", como un legado de la Revolución Industrial. Palabras clave: espacio sonoro interactivo en red, metro subterráneo, memoria corporal, escucha profunda, movilidad.

This thesis aims to analyze the discourses, practices and attitudes regarding old age in "elderly... more This thesis aims to analyze the discourses, practices and attitudes regarding old age in "elderly middle-class women" in Buenos Aires. It aims to explore and understand how they define, interpret and negotiate their age with their image of themselves and how they live their belonging to old age, in light of the social expectations associated with this stage of life, in a context that tends to value youth and stigmatizes the old. As new models of aging involving an active control of oneself arise, this work will examine how women negotiate with them. The findings will be discussed in light of the literature on ageism, body, self-understanding and the construction of symbolic boundaries inside sociocultural categories.

Journal of Science and Technology of the Arts, 2011

This paper analyses the experience of the networked off-line improvisation 'Listening and Remembe... more This paper analyses the experience of the networked off-line improvisation 'Listening and Remembering', a performance for four commuters using voices and sounds from the Mexico City and Paris metros. It addresses the question: how can an act of collective remembering, inspired by listening to metro soundscapes, lead to the creation of networked voice-and sound-based narratives about the urban commuting experience? The networked experience is seen here from the structural perspective (telematic setting), the sonic underground context, the ethnographic process that led to the performance, the narratives that are created in the electro-acoustic setting, the shared acoustic environments that those creations suggest, and the technical features and participants' responses that prevent or facilitate interaction. Emphasis is placed on the participants' status as non-performers, and on their familiarity with the sonic environment, as a context that allows the participation of non-musicians in the making of music through telematically shared interfaces, using soundscape and real-time voice. Participants re-enact their routine experience through a dialogical relationship with the sounds, the other participants, themselves, and the experience of sharing: a collective memory.

Springer Series on Cultural Computing, 2014

This paper discusses evaluation in the context of public art and specifically of interactive digi... more This paper discusses evaluation in the context of public art and specifically of interactive digital art. The study reported is of 'Light Logic', an exhibition of retrospective and current drawings, paintings and interactive digital works by the second author. The study was conducted by Site Gallery Sheffield in association with UK and Australian researchers. A survey of evaluation practice amongst artists and groups working in digital art is described briefly.

Digital Creativity, 2013

Sounding Underground is an online interactive sonic environment that links sound excerpts from th... more Sounding Underground is an online interactive sonic environment that links sound excerpts from the metros of London, Paris and Mexico City, as selected by commuters, as meaningful moments of sound from their commuting routine. Designed as a navigation structure, the environment draws on identifiable architectonic spaces such as entrances and corridors, but also incorporates more abstract ‘spaces’ based on memorable sounds that passengers had in common. The creation of the environment focused on the perception of social, political and symbolic experiences, and was derived from an iterative ethnographic and artistic practice which involved self-reflection, interviews, recordings of and listening to the journeys, and commuters' selections of sounds. This article describes the process of creation through the abstraction of a physical space, as well as the responses the work has evoked in the users and the academic community. It exemplifies the transdisciplinary nature of practice-based research involving the creative use of digital technologies.