Affecting reality

This essay examines how digital games shape human affective repertoires and envisioned dynamics with nonhuman agents such as robots. Entanglements among humans, machines, and technologies impact essential issues in the historical present: from surveillance, climate change, cultural heritage, art, to the elicitation, habituation, and capturing of feelings. Approaching digital games as frontiers of such entanglements, this essay expounds dynamics among gameplay, affects, and gamic materiality through a case analysis of Nevermind (Flying Mollusk), a trauma-themed independent psychological thriller game with affect-sensing technologies. Discussion explores how the game can generatively engage with lived experiences and discourses of grief and trauma; and the relationality among individuals, structures of feelings, and stigmatization. Anchoring the essay is an argument that digital games represent and operate with fundamental tenets of posthumanism, communicating meaning across affective and semiotic dimensions, bodies, machines, and sociocultural contexts. This essay emerged from an ongoing project on affective semiotics and social impact game design, in connection with a transnational research project on human-robot interaction supported by the European Research Council

Reducing and removing barriers to spatial audio : applications of capital as a critical framework to promote inclusion in spatial audio : a thesis submitted to Massey University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctorate of Philosophy in Music at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand

The research within this thesis aims to address the question of whether barriers of capital to the field of spatial audio can be reduced or removed. Spatial audio is the musical utilization of space, where spatialization is the salient feature of the musical work. As a field, it primarily exists within academic and art institutions. Because of this, there are numerous barriers that prohibit people from engaging with the field. These barriers include significant technical requirements, the need for education, the expense of large spatial audio systems, amongst others. These barriers mean that those who are excluded have little to no pathway to engage with the field. This thesis explores the barriers in spatial audio through the lens of capital. Viewed as one’s level of resource, a lack of economic, social, symbolic, cultural, and physical capital can exclude many from engaging with spatial audio. The research within this thesis identifies barriers of capital that exist within the field through qualitative and quantitative survey analysis as well as literature review. The identified barriers are then addressed through practice-led and practice-based research with the creation of new spatial audio works and compositional strategies, alongside user surveys to ascertain the efficacy of the research

Exploring Past, Present and Future

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Teaching/Learning Physics: Integrating Research into Practice

The GIREP-MPTL International conference on Teaching/Learning Physics: Integrating Research into Practice [GIREP-MPTL 2014] was held from 7 to 12 July 2014 at the University of Palermo, Italy. The conference has been organised by the Groupe International de Recherche sur l’Enseignement de la Physique [GIREP] and the Multimedia in Physics Teaching and Learning [MPTL] group and it has been sponsored by the International Commission on Physics Education [ICPE] – Commission 14 of the International Union for Pure and Applied Physics [IUPAP], the European Physical Society – Physics Education Division [EPS-PED], the Latin American Physics Education Network [LAPEN] and the Società Italiana di Fisica [SIF]. The theme of the conference, Teaching/Learning Physics: Integrating Research into Practice, underlines aspects of great relevance in contemporary science education. In fact, during the last few years, evidence based Physics Education Research provided results concerning the ways and strategies to improve student conceptual understanding, interest in Physics, epistemological awareness and insights for the construction of a scientific citizenship. However, Physics teaching practice seems resistant to adopting adapting these findings to their own situation and new research based curricula find difficulty in affirming and spread, both at school and university levels. The conference offered an opportunity for in-depth discussions of this apparently wide-spread tension in order to find ways to do better. The purpose of the GIREP-MPTL 2014 was to bring together people working in physics education research and in physics education at schools from all over the world to allow them to share research results and exchange their experience. About 300 teachers, educators, and researchers, from all continents and 45 countries have attended the Conference contributing with 177 oral presentations, 15 workshops, 11 symposia, and around 60 poster presentations, together with 11 keynote addresses (general talks). After the conference, 147 papers have been submitted for the GIREP-MPTL 2014 International Conference proceedings. Each paper has been reviewed by at least two reviewers, from countries that are different to those of the authors and on the basis of criteria described on the Conference web site. Papers were subsequently revised by authors according to reviewers’ comments and the accepted papers are reported in this book, divided in 8 Sections on the basis of the keywords suggested by authors. The other book section (actually, the first one) contains the papers that six of the keynote talkers sent for publication in this Proceedings Book. We would like to thank all the authors that contributed with their papers to the realization of this book and all the referees that with their criticism helped authors to improve the quality of the papers