Chatbots as Unwitting Actors

Chatbots are popular for both task-oriented conversations and unstructured conversations with web users. Several different approaches to creating comedy and art exist across the field of computational creativity. Despite the popularity and ease of use of chatbots, there have not been any attempts by artists or comedians to use these systems for comedy performances. We present two initial attempts to do so from our comedy podcast and call for future work toward both designing chatbots for performance and for performing alongside chatbots

Spartan Daily, December 4, 1981

Volume 77, Issue 64https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6840/thumbnail.jp

The Surprisingly Fantastic Script: Imaginative Immaterial Labor, "Multitudinous" Screenwriting, and Genre Innovation Within Peak TV.

Ph.D. Thesis. University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa 2018

The Japanese Art of Listening An ethnographic investigation into the role of the listener

This project investigates the art of listening in Japan through ethnographic observation of hostesses (escorts) and listening volunteers, and an analysis of self-help literature on listening. At night clubs in Tokyo, hostesses, who are famous for being good listeners, use listening as a streetwise skill. This enables them to stay in subordinate and supportive positions, and to help customers dominate a conversation. The customers can gain a sense of recognition, enhance intimate relationships with the hostesses or rebuild their masculinity. Hostesses’ listening is ‘an interactional weapon of the weak’, gaining money, business connections and prestige, but this, in turn, intensifies the gendered division of labour in interactions. By contrast, listening volunteers – who converse with elderly people using listening as a tool for reaching out – sometimes fall short in conversation, not realising that their listening functions as a gift. This forces clients to stay in helpee/subordinate positions and makes them feel obliged to reciprocate. Listening here can be ‘a mask for silent authority’. Superficially these two cases do not resemble each other; however, both deal with power dynamics. Their other common aspect is performing emotional labour. These listeners suppress or discard their feelings – such as disgust or boredom – and generate socially required emotions like respect or compassion, whilst displaying situationally expected listening behaviour. They hope to generate a certain state of mind in others to a greater or lesser extent, and so must perform emotional labour. Listening is therefore a subset of emotional labour. Self-help guides implicitly instruct emotional labour, and tacitly suggest dealing with power relations by introducing therapeutic listening for superiors and ‘zealous listening’ (my term) for subordinates. As my analyses show, listening is not simply a skill of hearing or understanding others, but also a way of associating with them. Therefore, listening is an ‘art’, which requires both fundamental skills, and a listener’s own personal way of relating to others.Honjo International Scholarship Foundation, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, Aoi Foundation, Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, International Soroptimist Kunitachi, Laura Bassi Scholarship, Department of Japanese studies at the University of Cambridge, and Downing College

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

Just a Buncha Clowns: Comedic-Anarchy and Racialized Performance in Black Vaudeville, the Chop Suey Circuit, and \u3ci\u3elas Carpas\u3c/i\u3e

While the practice of white musical variety clowns embodying stereotypes of African, Chinese, and Mexican Americans has been widely documented and theorized in scholarship on US American popular performance, it has been done largely in segregated studies that maintain the idea that racial impersonations in musical variety is a privilege of white performers. For instance, no study exists that focuses on more than one stereotype at a time, and the performer’s body is always either white or of the same “color” as the type being played. In addition, very little has been written about the tours and circuits run by the three groups under consideration and how the clowns on those stages also participated in such racialized and class-based comedy. What studies do exist on those tours certainly do not consider them in context of each other. As a result, the wide world of musical variety is often reduced to the domain of just white performers, and the presence of the large number of clowns and show managers who were not of European descent has been neglected. This dissertation sets out to address that process of “invisibilization,” to use Brenda Dixon Gottschild’s term, by focusing on the Black Vaudeville circuits, the Chinese American Chop Suey Circuit, and the Mexican American las carpas tours of the early twentieth century. In distinct chapters devoted to each circuit, I demonstrate some contemporary socio-political challenges (and victories) the comedians and their managers faced outside the theatre on tour throughout the United States. This establishes the historical contexts in which they existed and thrived despite the hostility they often met on the road, as well as the experiences these clowns often responded to on stage in their performances. In addition, I provide case studies of performers on those circuits and highlight their racial and class impersonations, which always included impersonations of blackness, Asianness, Mexicanness, and US Americanness, complicating the notion of who gets to ridicule whom in the name of comedy. In order to accomplish this, I use archival materials, such as business records, handwritten scripts, publicity and personal photographs, newspaper reviews, playbills, and personal oral accounts documented by historians and ethnographers. Provided together in one study, the research presented in this dissertation belies the myth that such performances and business management in the United States were the privileged domain of a so-called white culture. It also shows how the performers and managers on these three circuits productively worked to challenge dominant notions of Americanness, whiteness, and cultural belonging. This dissertation demonstrates that in the United States, racial and ethnic impersonations of and by people of African, Chinese, and Mexican descent coincided with those by comedians of European descent, and even pre-dated them in some cases. Ultimately, I argue for serious reconsideration of the notion that musical comedy is an entirely “white” art form as well as reconsidering questions regarding who belongs in US musical comedy history

Independent - Oct. 30, 2012

https://neiudc.neiu.edu/independent/1454/thumbnail.jp

Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio

The recent $3.4 billion purchase of Columbia Pictures by Sony Corporation focused attention on a studio that had survived one of Hollywood’s worst scandals under David Begelman, as well as ownership by Coca-Cola and David Puttnam’s misguided attempt to bring back the studio’s glory days. Columbia Pictures traces Columbia’s history from its beginnings as the CBC Film Sales Company (nicknamed “Corned Beef and Cabbage”) through the regimes of Harry Cohn and his successors, and concludes with a vivid portrait of today’s corporate Hollywood, with its investment bankers, entertainment lawyers, agents, and financiers. Bernard F. Dick’s highly readable studio chronicle is followed by thirteen original essays by leading film scholars, writing about the stars, films, genres, writers, producers, and directors responsible for Columbia’s emergence from Poverty Row status to world class. This is the first attempt to integrate film history with film criticism of a single studio. Both the historical introduction and the essays draw on previously untapped archival material—budgets that kept Columbia in the black during the 1930s and 1940s, letters that reveal the rapport between Depression audiences and director Frank Capra, and an interview with Oscar-winning screenwriter Daniel Taradash. The book also offers new perspectives on the careers of Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday, a discussion of Columbia’s unique brands of screwball comedy and film noir, and analyses of such classics as The Awful Truth, Born Yesterday, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Anatomy of a Murder, Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, The Big Chill, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Last Emperor. Amply illustrated with film stills and photos of stars and studio heads, Columbia Pictures includes a brief chronology and a complete 1920-1991 filmography. Designed for both the film lover and the film scholar, the book is ideal for film history courses. For anyone seeking a frank, readable history of the movie business, this ‘Portrait of a Studio’ sheds light on one part of a frenzied, fractious industry. —New York Times Book Review An excellent reading experience for movie buffs and historians. —West Coast Review of Bookshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_film_and_media_studies/1007/thumbnail.jp

Casco Bay Weekly : 2 May 1991

https://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/cbw_1991/1017/thumbnail.jp