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Three years after the Wounded Knee massacre in December 1890, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous conference on the Frontier in American history. This historical myth illustrates the progress of civilization over nature, and, at the twilight of the XIXth century, the end of a long epic warfare and the closure of the vast Indian open spaces in North America. Then comes the period of denial, or at least the general idea that this affair belongs to the past, as if history were not grounded in time past which only gives a tragic dimension to the present awareness. To hide this conscious oblivion, everything has been planned in order to turn history into archeoogy, in the perspective of a recent nation delimiting Indian reserves and building museums used as an official sanctuary for the Indian people inheritage and art. Therefore the question is here to give the right place to this community, beyond the mere status of minority, to avoid the effects of a scheduled genocid through a new model of intellectual colonization in our approach of the wide-open spaces in North America.

Il s’agit d’une réflexion autour du motif de la guerre présente et future sur le mode de l’uchronie selon un schéma habituel dans les romans de Jules Verne. Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum correspondent dans la fiction à l’héritage miraculeux d’une grand-tante éloignée, ladite Bégum, épouse en secondes noces d’un lointain parent commun aux deux héros selon une généalogie fictive. L’héritage fabuleux se trouve partagé entre deux ennemis, parents par le hasard d’un autre mariage : d’une part Herr Schultze, professeur allemand passionné de chimie, d’autre part François Sarrasin, docteur français préoccupé par les problèmes de santé et d’hygiène. Et c’est à l’occasion d’un Congrès international d’Hygiène à Londres en 1871 que le docteur français lance le projet philanthropique d’une Cité modèle. L’histoire, comme intrigue romanesque, est une transposition de l’Histoire, du conflit franco-prussien, sous forme d’une uchronie projetée vers la marge nord-ouest des États-Unis, une utopie située géographiquement mais en une sorte de non-lieu produit par l’éloignement. Dans la fiction, l’héritier allemand riposte en annonçant au même Congrès devoir fonder une Place forte, Stahlstadt, la Cité de l’Acier. Mais cette dialectique manichéenne structurant le roman serait faussée par une absence, cette fonction vacante révélée par le chaos du conflit entre la Cité de l’Acier et ladite Cité de la Paix.

This article evokes the Tangerine dream related to the port of Tangier, Morocco, located on the straits of Gibraltar - a privileged position where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean. Many writers have become infatuated with it for half a century, like the three disciples of the Beat Generation - Burroughs, Ginsberg and Kerouac who lived there, in the wake of another American writer, Paul Bowles - a composer and traveler who became a forerunner by settling down in Tangier after the Second World War. These meetings in Tangier, where expatriates dealt with art, literature and drugs, gave birth to Burrough’s avant-garde masterpiece, The Naked Lunch, in which Tangier reflects the author’s inner experience. Paul Bowles translated into English Mohamed Choukri’s For Bread Alone, a major work of classical Moroccan literature, which depicts the port after the manner of traditional, realistic, autobiographical novels. Both novels were censored when published in their author’s country of origin for their transgressive aspects, revealing the darker side of life in Tangier, not unknown to the demons of American counterculture as well as to experiences of misery in Morocco, as shown in Choukri’s novel (translated into French by Ben Jelloun).

Depuis l’Evangile de la beat generation avec la publication en 1957 d’On the Road de Jack Kerouac à l’Apocalypse figurée par la mise en fiction d’un fait divers tragique avec le Voyage au bout de la solitude paru sous le titre original d’Into the Wild en 1996 sous la plume du journaliste écrivain Jon Krakauer, relatant l’histoire vraie d’un jeune homme ayant trouvé la mort pour avoir abandonné la civilisation pour la nature sauvage du Grand Nord, c’est toute une parabole du désenchantement qui s’inscrit dans un demi-siècle de littérature et de cinéma américains. Après le rêve d’une fuite hors de la société matérielle par le recours à des spiritualités autres ou des paradis artificiels, tentés par les trois apôtres de la beat generation, Kerouac, Ginsberg et Burroughs, le désenchantement au sens fort d’éloignement des dieux même illusoires de la précédente génération se concrétise par la mort dans la nature hostile de l’Alaska et par le symbole fort d’un bus rouillé transformé en abri puis en sépulcre.

Cet article présente l’œuvre de l'écrivain, poète et pamphlétaire est-allemand, Ernst Fischer qui réécrit l'Exil et l'Histoire sur la ruse des prétendues Élégies posthumes d'Ovide pour énoncer sur le mode à la fois ironique et élégiaque le parallèle entre la figure antique d'Auguste ayant imposé au poète latin son exil dans la région encore barbare de l'ancienne Dacie, l'actuelle Roumanie, et l'ombre de Staline qui n'a jamais cessé de planer sur les pays de l'Est. Cela nous conduit à redéfinir l'élégie comme chant funèbre exprimant depuis l'antiquité une plainte douloureuse et des sentiments mêlant mélancolie et nostalgie mais à laquelle s'ajoutent désormais une ironie et une distance de soi à soi, comme de soi au monde, qui marquent l'avènement d'un exil non plus seulement politique mais pour ainsi dire intérieur et métaphysique. On peut lire ainsi les Élégies posthumes comme le chant du cygne de l'Homme chantant par delà le danger de l'aliénation idéologique, la menace de sa propre disparition derrière les murs désormais invisibles du totalitarisme.

This in-depth analysis of the structural law which shapes the literary myth is based on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s works, and shows that there exists a fruitful tension between the notions of structure and literary myth, a tension which becomes an abundant source of polyphonic meanings.

Due to their low cost and portability, using entertainment devices for indoor mapping applications has become a hot research topic. However, the impact of user behavior on indoor mapping evaluation with entertainment devices is often overlooked in previous studies. This article aims to assess the indoor mapping performance of entertainment devices under different mapping strategies. We chose two entertainment devices, the HoloLens 2 and iPhone 14 Pro, for our evaluation work. Based on our previous mapping experience and user habits, we defined four simplified indoor mapping strategies: straight-forward mapping (SFM), left–right alternating mapping (LRAM), round-trip straight-forward mapping (RT-SFM), and round-trip left–right alternating mapping (RT-LRAM). First, we acquired triangle mesh data under each strategy with the HoloLens 2 and iPhone 14 Pro. Then, we compared the changes in data completeness and accuracy between the different devices and indoor mapping applications. Our findings show that compared to the iPhone 14 Pro, the triangle mesh accuracy acquired by the HoloLens 2 has more stable performance under different strategies. Notably, the triangle mesh data acquired by the HoloLens 2 under the RT-LRAM strategy can effectively compensate for missing wall and floor surfaces, mainly caused by furniture occlusion and the low frame rate of the depth-sensing camera. However, the iPhone 14 Pro is more efficient in terms of mapping completeness and can acquire a complete triangle mesh more quickly than the HoloLens 2. In summary, choosing an entertainment device for indoor mapping requires a combination of specific needs and scenes. If accuracy and stability are important, the HoloLens 2 is more suitable; if efficiency and completeness are important, the iPhone 14 Pro is better.

Due to their great potential for a variety of applications, digital building models are well established in all phases of building projects. Older stock buildings however frequently lack digital representations, and creating these manually is a tedious and time-consuming endeavor. For this reason, the automated reconstruction of building models from indoor mapping data has arisen as an active field of research. In this context, many approaches rely on simplifying suppositions about the structure of buildings to be reconstructed such as, e.g., the well-known Manhattan World assumption. This however not only presupposes that a given building structure itself is compliant with this assumption, but also that the respective indoor mapping dataset is aligned with the coordinate axes. Indoor mapping systems, on the other hand, typically initialize the coordinate system arbitrarily by the sensor pose at the beginning of the mapping process. Thus, indoor mapping data need to be transformed from the local coordinate system, resulting from the mapping process, to a local coordinate system where the coordinate axes are aligned with the Manhattan World structure of the building. This necessary preprocessing step for many indoor reconstruction approaches is also frequently known as pose normalization. In this paper, we present a novel pose-normalization method for indoor mapping point clouds and triangle meshes that is robust against large portions of the indoor mapping geometries deviating from an ideal Manhattan World structure. In the case of building structures that contain multiple Manhattan World systems, the dominant Manhattan World structure supported by the largest fraction of geometries was determined and used for alignment. In a first step, a vertical alignment orienting a chosen axis to be orthogonal to horizontal floor and ceiling surfaces was conducted. Subsequently, a rotation around the resulting vertical axis was determined that aligned the dataset horizontally with the axes of the local coordinate system. The performance of the proposed method was evaluated quantitatively on several publicly available indoor mapping datasets of different complexity. The achieved results clearly revealed that our method is able to consistently produce correct poses for the considered datasets for different input rotations with high accuracy. The implementation of our method along with the code for reproducing the evaluation is made available to the public.

The Microsoft HoloLens is a head-worn mobile augmented reality device that is capable of mapping its direct environment in real-time as triangle meshes and localize itself within these three-dimensional meshes simultaneously. The device is equipped with a variety of sensors including four tracking cameras and a time-of-flight (ToF) range camera. Sensor images and their poses estimated by the built-in tracking system can be accessed by the user. This makes the HoloLens potentially interesting as an indoor mapping device. In this paper, we introduce the different sensors of the device and evaluate the complete system in respect of the task of mapping indoor environments. The overall quality of such a system depends mainly on the quality of the depth sensor together with its associated pose derived from the tracking system. For this purpose, we first evaluate the performance of the HoloLens depth sensor and its tracking system separately. Finally, we evaluate the overall system regarding its capability for mapping multi-room environments.