Manga Vision

Manga Vision examines cultural and communicative aspects of Japanese comics, drawing together scholars from Japan, Australia and Europe working in areas as diverse as cultural studies, linguistics, education, music, art, anthropology, and translation, to explore the influence of manga in Japan and worldwide via translation, OEL manga and fan engagement. This volume includes a mix of theoretical, methodological, empirical and professional practice-based chapters, examining manga from both academic and artistic perspectives. Manga Vision also provides the reader with a multimedia experience, featuring original artwork by Australian manga artist Queenie Chan, cosplay photographs, and an online supplement offering musical compositions inspired by manga, and downloadable manga-related teaching resources

Manga Vision

Manga Vision examines cultural and communicative aspects of Japanese comics, drawing together scholars from Japan, Australia and Europe working in areas as diverse as cultural studies, linguistics, education, music, art, anthropology, and translation, to explore the influence of manga in Japan and worldwide via translation, OEL manga and fan engagement. This volume includes a mix of theoretical, methodological, empirical and professional practice-based chapters, examining manga from both academic and artistic perspectives. Manga Vision also provides the reader with a multimedia experience, featuring original artwork by Australian manga artist Queenie Chan, cosplay photographs, and an online supplement offering musical compositions inspired by manga, and downloadable manga-related teaching resources

Animators of Atlanta: Layering Authenticity in the Creative Industries

This dissertation explores post-authentic neoliberal animation production culture, tracing the ways authenticity is used as a resource to garner professional autonomy and security during precarious times. Animators engage in two modes of production, the first in creating animated content, and the other in constructing a professional identity. Analyzing animator discourse allows for a nuanced exploration of how these processes interact and congeal into common sense. The use of digital software impacts the animator’s capacity to legitimize themselves as creatives and experts, traditional tools become vital for signifying creative authenticity in a professional environment. The practice of decorating one’s desk functions as a tactic to layer creative authenticity, but the meaning of this ritual is changing now that studios shift to open spaces while many animators work from home. Layering authenticity on-screen often requires blending techniques from classical Hollywood cinema into animated performance, concomitant with a bid to legitimate the role of the authentic interlocutor for the character. Increasingly animators feel pressure to layer authenticity online, establishing an audience as a means to hedge against precarity. The recombined self must balance the many methods for layering creative and professional authenticity with the constraints and affordances of their tools, along with the demands of the studio, to yield cultural capital vital for an animator’s survival in an industry defined at once by its limitless expressive potential and economic uncertainty

I Am Error

I Am Error is a platform study of the Nintendo Family Computer (or Famicom), a videogame console first released in Japan in July 1983 and later exported to the rest of the world as the Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES). The book investigates the underlying computational architecture of the console and its effects on the creative works (e.g. videogames) produced for the platform. I Am Error advances the concept of platform as a shifting configuration of hardware and software that extends even beyond its ‘native’ material construction. The book provides a deep technical understanding of how the platform was programmed and engineered, from code to silicon, including the design decisions that shaped both the expressive capabilities of the machine and the perception of videogames in general. The book also considers the platform beyond the console proper, including cartridges, controllers, peripherals, packaging, marketing, licensing, and play environments. Likewise, it analyzes the NES’s extension and afterlife in emulation and hacking, birthing new genres of creative expression such as ROM hacks and tool-assisted speed runs. I Am Error considers videogames and their platforms to be important objects of cultural expression, alongside cinema, dance, painting, theater and other media. It joins the discussion taking place in similar burgeoning disciplines—code studies, game studies, computational theory—that engage digital media with critical rigor and descriptive depth. But platform studies is not simply a technical discussion—it also keeps a keen eye on the cultural, social, and economic forces that influence videogames. No platform exists in a vacuum: circuits, code, and console alike are shaped by the currents of history, politics, economics, and culture—just as those currents are shaped in kind

The Art of Movies

Movie is considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as — in metonymy — the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures or “picture”), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies

Conflicts, integration, hybridization of subcultures: An ecological approach to the case of queercore

This paper investigates the case study of queercore, providing a socio-historical analysis of its subcultural production, in the terms of what Michel Foucault has called archaeology of knowledge (1969). In particular, we will focus on: the self-definition of the movement; the conflicts between the two merged worlds of punk and queer culture; the \u201cinternal-subcultural\u201d conflicts between both queercore and punk, and between queercore and gay\lesbian music culture; the political aspects of differentiation. In the conclusion, we will offer an innovative theoretical proposal about the interpretation of subcultures in ecological and semiotic terms, combining the contribution of the American sociologist Andrew Abbot and of the Russian semiologist Jurij Michajlovi\u10d Lotma

Multimedia Forensics

This book is open access. Media forensics has never been more relevant to societal life. Not only media content represents an ever-increasing share of the data traveling on the net and the preferred communications means for most users, it has also become integral part of most innovative applications in the digital information ecosystem that serves various sectors of society, from the entertainment, to journalism, to politics. Undoubtedly, the advances in deep learning and computational imaging contributed significantly to this outcome. The underlying technologies that drive this trend, however, also pose a profound challenge in establishing trust in what we see, hear, and read, and make media content the preferred target of malicious attacks. In this new threat landscape powered by innovative imaging technologies and sophisticated tools, based on autoencoders and generative adversarial networks, this book fills an important gap. It presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art forensics capabilities that relate to media attribution, integrity and authenticity verification, and counter forensics. Its content is developed to provide practitioners, researchers, photo and video enthusiasts, and students a holistic view of the field

Multimedia Forensics

This book is open access. Media forensics has never been more relevant to societal life. Not only media content represents an ever-increasing share of the data traveling on the net and the preferred communications means for most users, it has also become integral part of most innovative applications in the digital information ecosystem that serves various sectors of society, from the entertainment, to journalism, to politics. Undoubtedly, the advances in deep learning and computational imaging contributed significantly to this outcome. The underlying technologies that drive this trend, however, also pose a profound challenge in establishing trust in what we see, hear, and read, and make media content the preferred target of malicious attacks. In this new threat landscape powered by innovative imaging technologies and sophisticated tools, based on autoencoders and generative adversarial networks, this book fills an important gap. It presents a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art forensics capabilities that relate to media attribution, integrity and authenticity verification, and counter forensics. Its content is developed to provide practitioners, researchers, photo and video enthusiasts, and students a holistic view of the field

Craptacular science and the worst audience ever : memetic proliferation and fan participation in The Simpsons

The objective of this thesis is to establish meme theory as an analytical paradigm within the fields of screen and fan studies. Meme theory is an emerging framework founded upon the broad concept of a “meme”, a unit of culture that, if successful, proliferates among a given group of people. Created as a cultural analogue to genetics, memetics has developed into a cultural theory and, as the concept of memes is increasingly applied to online behaviours and activities, its relevance to the area of media studies materialises. The landscapes of media production and spectatorship are in constant fluctuation in response to rapid technological progress. The internet provides global citizens with unprecedented access to media texts (and their producers), information, and other individuals and collectives who share similar knowledge and interests. The unprecedented speed with (and extent to) which information and media content spread among individuals and communities warrants the consideration of a modern analytical paradigm that can accommodate and keep up with developments. Meme theory fills this gap as it is compatible with existing frameworks and offers researchers a new perspective on the factors driving the popularity and spread (or lack of popular engagement with) a given media text and its audience.Following overviews of meme theory and fan studies, this thesis synthesises methods from both fields to analyse one of this generation’s most notable televisual fan-texts, The Simpsons, and its fandom. The memetic analysis thereof, integrated with the works of fan theorists including John Fiske and Henry Jenkins, reveals the implications of the fan-text’s memetic content in the economic, cultural and social capital interests of its creators, distributors, and fans. The revelations credited to the memetic aspect of the analysis support the conjecture that it is a suitable analytical framework for the fields of fan and screen studies