Portmanteau worlds: hosting multiple worldviews in virtual environments.

Intending to persuade (or sell), conventional architectural representation often hides conflicting opinions, discourages participation and culls possible futures. Dissatisfied with this situation, I consider an approach that aims to emphasize co-presence of multiple voices, disclose power relationships, demonstrate lines of resistance and present existing or possible places as politically charged networks of enacted relationships. Motivated by the capabilities of interactive narrative, the paper considers polyphonic potentials of virtual environments. In spite of their interactive characteristics, virtual environments can impose preconceived worldviews as forcefully as any others. However, generative capabilities of computational media can also support construction of multiple interpretations that emerge simultaneously

Portmanteau worlds: hosting multiple worldviews in virtual environments.

Intending to persuade (or sell), conventional architectural representation often hides conflicting opinions, discourages participation and culls possible futures. Dissatisfied with this situation, I consider an approach that aims to emphasize co-presence of multiple voices, disclose power relationships, demonstrate lines of resistance and present existing or possible places as politically charged networks of enacted relationships. Motivated by the capabilities of interactive narrative, the paper considers polyphonic potentials of virtual environments. In spite of their interactive characteristics, virtual environments can impose preconceived worldviews as forcefully as any others. However, generative capabilities of computational media can also support construction of multiple interpretations that emerge simultaneously

Assessing the impact of emotion in dual pathway models of sensory processing.

In our daily environment, we are constantly encountering an endless stream of information which we must be able to sort and prioritize. Some of the features that influence this are the emotional nature of stimuli and the emotional context of events. Emotional information is often given preferential access to neurocognitive resources, including within sensory processing systems. Interestingly, both auditory and visual systems are divided into dual processing streams; a ventral object identity/perception stream and a dorsal object location/action stream. While effects of emotion on the ventral streams are relatively well defined, its effect on dorsal stream processes remains unclear. The present thesis aimed to investigate the impact of emotion on sensory systems within a dual pathway framework of sensory processing. Study I investigated the role of emotion during auditory localization. While undergoing fMRI, participants indicated the location of an emotional or non-emotional sound within an auditory virtual environment. This revealed that the neurocognitive structures displaying activation modulated by emotion were not the same as those modulated by sound location. Emotion was represented in regions associated with the putative auditory ‘what’ but not ‘where’ stream. Study II examined the impact of emotion on ostensibly similar localization behaviours mediated differentially by the dorsal versus ventral visual processing stream. Ventrally-mediated behaviours were demonstrated to be impacted by the emotional context of a trial, while dorsally-mediated behaviours were not. For Study III, a motion-aftereffect paradigm was used to investigate the impact of emotion on visual area V5/MT+. This area, traditionally believed to be involved in dorsal stream processing, has a number of characteristics similar to a ventral stream structure. It was discovered that V5/MT+ activity was modulated both by presence of perceptual motion and emotional content of an image. In addition, this region displayed patterns of functional connectivity with the amygdala that were significantly modulated by emotion. Together, these results suggest that emotional information modulates neural processing within ventral sensory processing streams, but not dorsal processing streams. These findings are discussed with respect to current models of emotional and sensory processing, including amygdala connections to sensory cortices and emotional effects on cognition and behaviour

Quantities and Qualities: Embodied Encounters with Genetic Disorder

This research investigates the possibility of communicating human experience from, through and to the body. While investigating the experience of my own genetic disorder I will examine the dominant discourse on the subject and how it might be subverted, shifted or avoided as required in order to grasp this ineffable phenomenon as a patient. Methods of movement observation and embodied filmmaking will be used to explore the clinical environment during the course of my own treatment. If we put aside discussions of probability and risk, cause and effect, how can we characterize genetic disorder? What is the nature of the experience and how does it relate to the body? How can art, and specifically physical practices of film and movement, establish a fruitful interdisciplinary exchange with medicine on the subject of patient experiences

Crash

Artists, writers, and filmmakers from Andy Warhol and J. G. Ballard to Alejandro González Iñárritu and Ousmane Sembène have repeatedly used representations of immobilized and crashed cars to wrestle with the conundrums of modernity. In Crash, Karen Beckman argues that representations of the crash parallel the encounter of film with other media, and that these collisions between media offer useful ways to think about alterity, politics, and desire. Examining the significance of automobile collisions in film genres including the “cinema of attractions,” slapstick comedies, and industrial-safety movies, Beckman reveals how the car crash gives visual form to fantasies and anxieties regarding speed and stasis, risk and safety, immunity and contamination, and impermeability and penetration

Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature

In Women’s Friendship in Medieval Literature, Karma Lochrie and Usha Vishnuvajjala bring together established scholars and new voices to illuminate a previously understudied but consequential element of life in the Middle Ages. Contributors focus on representations of women’s friendships in medieval European literature and their afterlives both to historicize them and draw out the finer nuances of the multitude of forms, affects, values, and ethics that emerge within those friendships. This volume examines works by Chaucer, Gower, Malory, Marie de France, female saints, and late–Middle Scots poets alongside lesser-known late medieval lyrics and Middle English romances to chart women’s friendships and their many and sometimes conflicting affinities with the cultural categories of gender, religion, politics, and sexuality. In addition to exploring the parameters of female friendship across a range of texts and historical contexts, contributors evaluate the political, religious, and civic structures negotiated in public and private and engage with the long history of theory and philosophy on friendship. The result is a theoretical and historical rubric for the future study of women’s friendships in medieval texts and beyond