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This paper will deal with the mythological figure of Narcissus in new media art. In visual arts in general, this myth is usually used to reflect on the relationship between the artist and his actual work. There are countless examples of artists from antiquity to the present age that deal with subjectivity in their work by recurring the Narcissus theme. But different to those adaptations, works of the New Media Art since the 1970s reflect more about the technology and subjectivity of the observer through the theme of Narcissus. The use of time-based media allows the artists to address the observer immediately through interaction and let him become a part of the work and therefore become a part of the cognitive process. The argument of this paper is that only through the use of time-based art could the self-awareness of the observer be discussed instead of only a reflecting on the work itself and the reception-process. Against this backdrop, the paper will focus on the use of AI as a 'material' in contemporary art and how it extends this cognitive process. In addition to other works from the history of new media art the work Narciss (2018) by the German art collective Waltz Binaire will be in the center of this discussion about AI in and as artistic practice.

This paper investigates the performance and efficiency of the public sector in 74 countries worldwide for the years 1985, 1990, 1995 and 2000. Similar to what is done in Afonso / Schuhknecht / Tanzi (2005, Public Choice), I calculate performance measures for various fields of government policy, including education, health, security or macroeconomic stability. These performance measures are then used as output variables in a non-parametric FDH (free disposable hull) and DEA (data envelopment analysis) approach for the calculation of efficiency scores. Government expenditure is used as input for the evaluation of efficiency. In the last step the efficiency scores are regressed upon variables that describe the environment of government policy. I find that smaller public sectors tend to be more efficient, but the effect is not very sizeable. The same is true for countries that are more globalised. The pattern of (in-)efficiency can be large explained by continent-dummies.

This paper addresses the question whether increased mobility of capital enhances public-sector modernisation. Public-sector modernisation is modelled as the accumulation of knowledge (or another accumulated production factor) that serves as an input in the government's production of a consumption good. The public-sector provides a direct transfer to households. The tax competition model in the background is a dynamic model in which capital flight induced by taxation is a process that takes time. The speed with which firms can relocate capital to other jurisdictions is taken as a measure of the degree of capital mobility. The main result of the paper is a contradiction of the idea that the competitive pressure caused by increased capital mobility enhances public sector modernisation.