The Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theatre (CROMT) at the University of Sussex has been invited by the projet Dramaturgie Musicale Contemporaine en Europe (DMCE) of the University of Paris 8, to present a staging of Stefano Gervasoni's short music-theatre work 'Pas si' (1998/revised 2008), based on a Samuel Beckett text, at the fourth annual DMCE symposium in Paris in November 2008. \n\nDMCE was established at the University of Paris in 2005 to bring together European musicians, theatre practitioners and academics working in the field of contemporary opera and music theatre to engage with the specific problematic of musical dramaturgy. CROMT has been a partner in the project since its inception.\n\nThe primary research issue for the DMCE is the question of what are the dramaturgies that are specific to music-based theatre, considering the specific dramaturgical implications of different musical styles and forms, of musical time and space, of the singing voice, etc. A secondary set of research questions for this application relate to the specific issue of Samuel Beckett's relationship to music, and in particular the ways in which composers have approached the challenge of setting his texts. \n\nThe Research Questions for the project are :\n1. What is the dramaturgy of Gervasoni's setting of a non-theatrical text by Samuel Beckett.? In what way is it theatrical/dramatic (or perhaps post-dramatic)? \n2. How do the specific characteristics of Gervasoni's musical language translate into dramatic/theatrical forms? \n3. What dramaturgical forms are created by musical spatiality? \n4. How can a staging of 'Pas si' in real time and space convey the textual and musical negations and erasures of the work?\n5. What relationships are there between Beckett's work and music more generally? \n6. How does Gervasoni's approach to Beckett's text compare and contrast to other musical settings of Beckett?\n\nAlthough Beckett was extremely interested in music, he entered into few musical collaborations, and explictly disliked opera. However, Beckett engaged with the relationship between words and music in a number of works, including his radio drama 'Words and Music' (1962), and he frequently used musical analogies in relation to the staging of his works. \n\nIt has been said that Beckett's theatre demonstrates that, if you remove all aspects of conventional dramatic action the one thing left is theatrical space. The spatiality of music for the theatre, on the other hand, has often been overlooked. In this project I want to test the thesis that the relationship between musical and theatrical space lies at the heart of any successful musical engagement with Beckett's texts, and that musical space has its own dramaturgical imperatives. \n\nBeckett's writings also involve negation and erasure, and he once specifically bemoaned that literature couldn't be 'dissolved, like, for example the sound surface, torn by enormous pauses, of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony'. Stefano Gervasoni (b.1960) is a younger member of a group of composers that include Luigi Nono (with whom Gervasoni studied) Helmut Lachenmann and Salvatore Sciarrino whose music could also be said to foreground such dissolutions of the musical sound surface, effecting different kinds of negation of conventional musical expression or form. The project will also examine therefore the musico-dramatic poetics of negation through its staging of 'Pas si'. \n\nIn addition to the DMCE symposium, the production will also be shown at a conference on Beckett and Music to be organised by the departments of Music, English and Drama, and Media at the University of Sussex in October. The conference will address the following key issues:1. Beckett's ideas on music; 2. Beckett's use of music in his work; 3. The 'musicality' of Beckett's language, and quasi-musical processes of 'composition' in his work; 4. How composers have responded to Beckett's work.

In this project, we specify and design error correction codes suitable for an efficient protection of sensitive information in the context of Internet of Things (IoT) and connected objects. Such codes mitigate passive attacks, like memory disclosure, and active attacks, like stack smashing. The innovation of this project is to leverage these codes for protecting against both cyber and physical attacks. The main advantage is a 360° coverage of attacks of the connected embedded systems, which is considered as a smart connected device and also a physical device. The outcome of the project is first a method to generate and execute cyber-resilient software, and second to protect data and its manipulation from physical threats like side-channel attacks. Theses results are demonstrated by using a smart sensor application with hardened embedded firmware and tamper-proof hardware platform.

The Data PACT project aims at analysing and fostering data culture through the development of two main activities: the creation of a database about data practices and initiatives in involved European countries and the analyse of publics and practices in a “datafied society”. These two activities will settle the basis of the H2020 proposal : coproduction of new activities with citizens and cocreation of knowledge about and with data. First we think that data culture takes plural form in different social and cultural contexts and is reflected in many practices : mediatic, routine, associative, militant, etc. Second we are convinced that a critical approach is necessary and we strongly disagree with an universalizing and homogenizing conception of data publics and practices. We advance the hypothesis that there are data cultures as a new field of scientific culture and it could be enhancing by establishing links between scientific vulgarization and media literacy. Our goal is to move beyond traditional data literacy endeavours by taking into account activities emerging in societies. Moreover, we firmly believe that, in order to go further on this topic, researchers have to cross their expertise, create new interdisciplinary methods with and for citizens and document their observations and processes. The Data PACT project has configured an academic network from 8 countries in Europe (Belgium, England, France, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Italy). Several disciplines are represented as the network will working in an interdisciplinarity way: information science, media and communication studies, computer science, design, data science, citizen science. This variety of perspectives is strengthened by different methodological approaches: data analysis, sociological inquiry, visualization techniques, living labs etc. Network members experiment and set up different actions to define, transmit and coproduce data culture: citizen workshop, educational program, data camp, analysis tools, etc. As we explore different fields, it allows us to deal with people practices and to analyze and compare their differences and similarities in regard to established new initiatives. Citizens interact, produce or engage in data-oriented activities in an everyday pace. However, we aim at identifying the different processus ways data cultures are emerging in society. We foresee mainly five fields at this phase: 1) data of everyday things and life (ordinary use of data) 2) retro-engineering (opening the black box and understanding logics of data); 3) data activism (participatory and debate with data); 4) participatory science (citizen as producer and analyst of data with the support of researchers); 5) media data and data art (the use of data from an aesthetic and artistic perspective). Our network targets "Integrating Society in Science and Innovation – An approach to co-creation" H2020. The main goal is to build documentation about practical activities to forther replication, improvement, sharing. The Data PACT project has the intention to, first, conduct a situational analysis of data culture initiatives and events in each involved country. The outcome of this phase takes the form of an opendatabase, which is conceived and configured collectively from its basic structure. In a second and larger phase, the project confronts people to their practices. It is about fostering a reflective thinking on data culture, to unveil contrasts between established practices and emerging ones. Data culture, considered as a new scientific culture, addresses problems of specifications, objectives and methods that propel everyday practices and try to formalize them in order to communicate with other initiatives. The purpose is not strictly to develop a data-driven education or evangelization of data-based methods. We rather describe and understand empirical methods that increase public engagement and encourage the dissemination of data culture.