Who are the Real Insiders? Ambivalent Dynamics between a Korean Man and Immigrant Labourers in 'He’s on Duty'

This article explores the possibilities and the limits of immigrant workers’ struggle for coexistence by analysing the ambivalent representation of migrant workers in the Korean film, He’s on Duty (2010), about Taesik Bang, a Korean man who pretends to be an illegal worker from Bhutan to get a job. While many media representations of immigrant labourers reinforce stereotypical concepts of them, this film captures the dynamics between the domestic poor and the migrant labour force with more complexity than previously displayed. The article shows how the film asks the audience to redefine Korean identity and multicultural society by focusing on the struggles of the Korean protagonist as well as immigrant labourers

Segmentation sémantique des contenus audio-visuels

Dans ce travail, nous avons mis au point une méthode de segmentation des contenus audiovisuels applicable aux appareils de stockage domestiques pour cela nous avons expérimenté un système distribué pour l’analyse du contenu composé de modules individuels d’analyse : les Service Unit. L’un d’entre eux a été dédié à la caractérisation des éléments hors contenu, i.e. les publicités, et offre de bonnes performances. Parallèlement, nous avons testé différents détecteurs de changement de plans afin de retenir le meilleur d’entre eux pour la suite. Puis, nous avons proposé une étude des règles de production des films, i.e. grammaire de films, qui a permis de définir les séquences de Parallel Shot. Nous avons, ainsi, testé quatre méthodes de regroupement basées similarité afin de retenir la meilleure d’entre elles pour la suite. Finalement, nous avons recherché différentes méthodes de détection des frontières de scènes et avons obtenu les meilleurs résultats en combinant une méthode basée couleur avec un critère de longueur de plan. Ce dernier offre des performances justifiant son intégration dans les appareils de stockage grand public.In this work we elaborated a method for semantic segmentation of audiovisual content applicable for consumer electronics storage devices. For the specific solution we researched first a service-oriented distributed multimedia content analysis framework composed of individual content analysis modules, i.e. Service Units. One of the latter was dedicated to identify non-content related inserts, i.e. commercials blocks, which reached high performance results. In a subsequent step we researched and benchmarked various Shot Boundary Detectors and implement the best performing one as Service Unit. Here after, our study of production rules, i.e. film grammar, provided insights of Parallel Shot sequences, i.e. Cross-Cuttings and Shot-Reverse-Shots. We researched and benchmarked four similarity-based clustering methods, two colour- and two feature-point-based ones, in order to retain the best one for our final solution. Finally, we researched several audiovisual Scene Boundary Detector methods and achieved best results combining a colour-based method with a shot length based criteria. This Scene Boundary Detector identified semantic scene boundaries with a robustness of 66% for movies and 80% for series, which proofed to be sufficient for our envisioned application Advanced Content Navigation

Representations of Visual Motion Information: Interpretation of Background Visual Motion in the Motion-Induced Blindness Phenomenon

This thesis investigates different interpretations of visual background motion with regards to the visual awareness of objects. Motion-induced blindness (MIB) is a phenomenon in which stimuli superimposed on a moving background spontaneously disappear. Does MIB depend on how background motion is interpreted? York Universitys Tumbling Room is a full-size room that rotates around an observer. Within this room, the disappearance of static targets (MIB) was measured under two interpretations of background motion: 1) perceived self-motion 2) external motion. The speed of the room, eccentricity of targets, and physical self-motion were also manipulated. Visual background motion that induced the sensation of self-motion, regardless of whether it was illusory or physical rotation unlike when background motion was perceived as external did not generate MIB. I conclude that MIB depends on the way the brain processes visual motion information

Silence for Orchestra: Incorporating Silence in Musical Language through Theories of Expectation

The purpose of Silence: for Orchestra is to incorporate silence as a captivating source of musical language. Silence\u27s goal is to encourage the audience to appreciate silence as musch as music. David Huron\u27s research in musical expectations served as a guide to create a piece that develops, contradicts, and conforms to a listener\u27s expectations. Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis\u27s work describes five functions of silence found in music. These functions can be applied to the silences used in my piece in order to further conform to the listener\u27s expectations

Uncanny Movement through Virtual Spaces: Michael Pisaro’s fields have ears

Michael Pisaro’s fields have ears is a series of ten pieces that embody an ecological approach to composition. The guiding idea behind the series is that the location of a sound is as (or more) important than its timing, and that how a listener understands a sound is affected by both the listener’s and the sound’s position in space. This paper uses the series as an exemplary example of James Gibson’s ecological thought in composition through its foregrounding of motion and space, and its creation of uncanny virtual worlds combining musical sounds, noise, and field recordings. It also explores the idea that Gibsonian perception has significant affinities with Kyoto School aesthetics, and analyzes Pisaro’s music utilizing methodologies from both disciplines.L’oeuvre fields have ears, de Michael Pisaro, est une série de dix morceaux qui incarnent une approche écologique de la composition. L’idée maîtresse de cette oeuvre est que la localisation d’un son est aussi importante (voire davantage) que sa situation temporelle, et que la façon dont un auditeur comprend un son est affectée par la position dans l’espace à la fois de l’auditeur et du son. Cet article considère cette oeuvre comme exemplaire et représentative de la pensée écologique de James Gibson au sujet de la composition, car elle met au premier plan le mouvement et l’espace, et crée d’étranges mondes virtuels en combinant des sons musicaux, des bruits et des enregistrements de terrain. Il explore également l’idée que la perception gibsonienne présentait des affinités significatives avec l’École esthétique de Kyoto, et analyse la musique de Pisaro en utilisant des méthodologies issues des deux disciplines

The Beloved: A documentary film on the history and aftermath of Fremantle’s Rajneesh sannyasin community – and – Hidden Realities: Transcendental Structures in Documentary Film: An exegesis

This creative work and its associated exegesis examines the concept of what I have termed a ‘transcendental structure’ in relation to a documentary film form, and what outcomes, specific to a non-fiction mode of representation, result from the application of this structure. A transcendental structure in film has a long history of investigation and interpretation in narrative fiction film theory and practice, but is substantially absent from documentary scholarship. The topic appears, in different forms, in the critical writings of Zavattini (1940), Bazin (1946), Pasolini (1965), Schrader (1972), Deleuze (1985), and more recently, Perez (1998) and Minghelli (2016). All of these theorists have identified a cinema of a double nature: on one level, explicit in its narrative programme and engagement, while on another level, simultaneously registering a spatial and temporal ‘beyond’ that invites an alternative experience based on a formal engagement. This aesthetic or non-narrative dimension is made perceivable through cinematic strategies that aim to interrupt or suspend the narrative flow and foreground elements external to the narrative programme. It is for this reason that landscape holds particular importance to a transcendental structure; in its physical interaction with and set-apartness from the human narrative, and through this, in its contrasting temporality to the narrative and less tangible level of registration. This research will proceed by testing this structure through my own creative practice: a documentary feature on Fremantle’s Rajneesh sannyasin community, titled The Beloved. This is an ongoing community in Fremantle, which in the eighties, experienced a dramatic and public rise and fall as a movement. It is also a community with which I have an enduring personal relationship. This has allowed me to address not only their public history, but also the troubled memory that survives within the community. This documentary will be accompanied by the exegesis which will identify the concept of a transcendental structure within fiction film scholarship and, in the absence of critical writings that relate to this concept in documentary, will examine documentaries that are able to be discussed in these terms. The key films that I examine in the exegesis include Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985), which brings the incomprehensibility of the Holocaust into the realm of present experience by rejecting archival imagery in favour of landscapes from the concentration camps in their contemporary state; and sleep furiously (Koppel, 2008), in which the unprocessed trauma of community disintegration is registered through affect-based experience rather than the narrative or representational programme. From the sum of this research, I argue that the interview based historical documentary is particularly suitable as a platform for a transcendental structure, and useful to historical subjects of a sensitive, troubled, and unresolved nature. The double nature of the structure, exhibited in the dissociation of the voice recounting the historical narrative from imagery of present-day settings, opens up new communicative possibilities and spaces for the contemplation and processing of incomprehensible, repressed, or traumatic experience

Silence in Sri Lankan cinema from 1990 to 2010

This thesis explores the characteristic silence that dominates the new wave of Sri Lankan cinema after 1990 in a socio-cultural approach. The central concern of this study is to examine the phenomenon of silence in relation to Sri Lanka’s social, political and cultural history and contemporary trends in national cinema. This is an in-depth study of the underlying theories exemplified in the characters in the films, their expressions of silence and the whole concept of silence. The silence in the films selected for this study reflects the forces of Sinhala-Buddhist nationalism that trigger the civil war, youth unrest, social and systemic imbalance in the socio-political landscape of Sri Lanka. The thesis’s arguments are validated by relevant characters, the visual texts, narrative and the socio-cultural setting of the films studied. Further, based on the theoretical concepts of silence the thesis proposes the idea of ‘silence as a weapon’ seen from a two-fold perspective: silence safeguards personal and cultural identities and creates space for a ‘shield’ to ward off the violence directed at the self, to make an appropriate counter response to the hegemonic authority that seeks to control personal identities. The weapon of silence employed by the characters in the films lays bare their internal monologues while the silence in the setting of the film crystallizes the weapon of silence to pinpoint the common space that it inhabits. The thesis finally purports that the recent oppression of freedom of expression of filmmakers and cinema by the formal and informal organs of hegemonic authority are nothing but its own state of panic and the fear of this weapon

Overcoming Form: reflections on immersive listening

This short collection of essays focuses on four areas of immersive sound environments: repetition, sustained tones, performed installations and approaches to extended forms. Through in depth exploration of the experiential nature of these subjects, the authors offer reflections upon the materials used for these environments, how they are organised, and the consequences of this on how we listen.Publishe