Music video's performing bodies: Floria Sigismondi as gestural animator and puppeteer

Auteur music video director Floria Sigismondi has a reputation for creating beautifully macabre imagery that has been described as surreal and uncanny. Less obvious is the way in which she uses animation and gesture to estrange the movement of performing bodies. While pixilation and stop motion animation are used together to invert the agency of humans and objects, Sigismondi’s use of gesture extends this manipulation of agency beyond technical processes. This dialectic of cinematic agency is discussed through an examination of three music videos directed by Sigismondi: End of the World (2004) for The Cure, Montauk Fling (2013) for Lawrence Rothman and The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013) for David Bowie. Considering these videos in relation to puppet animation, live-action film and the cultural and historical migration of gesture, the author argues that Sigismondi puppetises humans and animates gesture as a means of transgression

Critical enchantments: reading fictionality in the contemporary novel

This thesis examines the resurgence of an enchanted idiom in the contemporary novel and shows how it frames questions about the type of enchantment that reading fiction can lay claim to, ranging from unresolved mysteries to authors who call themselves mediums. With reference to novels by J. M. Coetzee, Toni Morrison and Ali Smith, Critical Enchantments makes an intervention into the study of contemporary writing by reinstating the importance of the distinction between ‘the novel’ and ‘fiction’ at a time when the critical and political function of fictionality is deeply contested. In the introduction I delineate the logic that enchantment and fictionality share – their invitation to recognise artifice and yet maintain a readerly investment in the artwork. The project is then organised around three lines of enquiry. Chapter one surveys the recent re-enchantment of literary reading practices: through a discussion of the recent work of critics such as Rita Felski and Timothy Bewes (and their Ricourean, Lukácian forbears), I locate an idiom of mystery and magic that structures Smith’s experiments with the idea of too-close reading as surveillance. The second chapter appraises the construction of fictional ‘belief’ that figures centrally both in Coetzee’s late fiction and, with recourse to novel and narrative theories of fictionality (particularly Catherine Gallagher’s), illustrates how concerns about belief find articulation in Coetzee’s recurring figure of the secretarial reader. The final chapter reads Morrison’s fiction alongside the reflexive critical trends that have formed in response to her creative and critical corpus; reversing my previous focus on fictional readers, I demonstrate the enchanting effects that Morrison’s extra-fictional anticipation of being read has on her readers. Taken together, these scenes of critical enchantment tell a story about how the contemporary novel trades on the genre’s tradition of engaging with the mystifying effects of fiction on both readers and writers, and reveals how this mystification is indexical to a performance of authorship that anticipates critically adept readers

The Pacifican February 10, 2005

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Exploring the Concussion Experience Within Sport: An Authoethnographic Study

Concussions are a highly individualized experience, with different profiles of expression encapsulating a diverse range of symptom sequalae. However, the lived through experience of those who have sustained a concussion oftentimes takes a backseat to the more standardized quantitative medical approach to healing. The purpose of this thesis is to engage and address gaps in literature and document the necessity and benefit of qualitative research to understand the nuances of the concussion experience by utilizing an autoethnographic approach and a Critical Disability Studies (CDS) method of writing termed “Disability Life Writing.” Additionally, this thesis attempts to remove a barrier to concussion information by presenting concussion knowledge in accessible terminology and language, aiming to make concussion awareness available to those without knowledge of medical terminology or discourse. Regarding concussions in sport, this thesis aims to illuminate hidden values and ideologies within a sporting culture that ultimately work to socialize an athlete to play through pain and hide/not disclose injuries such as a concussion to peers, coaches, or other members of the sporting culture. The author analyzed all the aims listed above through a CDS lens using core CDS concepts such as stigma, stereotyping, normalcy, and invisible disabilities as analytic touchstones

The Stretch-Engine: A Method for Creating Exaggeration in Animation Through Squash and Stretch

Animators exaggerate character motion to emphasize personality and actions. Exaggeration is expressed by pushing a character’s pose, changing the action’s timing, or by changing a character’s form. This last method, referred to as squash and stretch, creates the most noticeable change in exaggeration. However, without practice, squash and stretch can adversely affect the animation. This work introduces a method to create exaggeration in motion by focusing solely on squash and stretch to control changes in a character’s form. It does this by displaying a limbs' path of motion and altering the shape of that path to create a change in the limb’s form. This paper provides information on tools that exist to create animation and exaggeration, then discusses the functionality and effectiveness of these tools and how they influenced the design of the Stretch-Engine. The Stretch-Engine is a prototype tool developed to demonstrate this approach and is designed to be integrated into an existing animation software, Maya. The Stretch-Engine contains a bipedal-humanoid rig with controls necessary for animation and the ability to squash and stretch. It can be accessed through a user interface that allows the animator to control squash and stretch by changing the shape of generated paths of motion. This method is then evaluated by comparing animations of realistic motion to versions created with the Stretch-Engine. These stretched versions displayed exaggerated results for their realistic counterparts, creating similar effects to Looney Tunes animation. This method fits within the animator’s workflow and helps new artists visualize and control squash and stretch to create exaggeration

Reading Playfully: A New Branch of Criticism for The Digital Age

This senior project applies the tools of traditional literary analysis to video games. Through this frame, it seek to foster a type of video game literacy amongst its readers. Each chapter corresponds to what it’s author sees as a foundational aspect of literature. The first chapter, ‘Perspective’, puts Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into contact with The Last of Us (2013), and explores how each work uses medium specific mechanisms to alienate their protagonists. The second chapter, ‘Setting’, surveys the relationship between Thief (1999) and Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’. The final chapter, ‘Characterization’, investigates the unique potential offered by the video game Firewatch (2016) as an example of this interactive medium’s ability to collaboratively build verisimilar characters. It concludes by making an argument for two separate, but connected, fields of video game study

The Ticker, February 3, 1987

The Ticker is the student newspaper of Baruch College. It has been published continuously since 1932, when the Baruch College campus was the School of Business and Civic Administration of the City College of New York