239 research outputs found
Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries
This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Letâs Plays. I build on Michael Rothbergâs theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant âothersâ and, on the other, simulate oneâs own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up oneâs offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique.
This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the userâs individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention.
Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben FlĂŒchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the userâs political inaction and surveillant modes of looking.
Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmatesâ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming âoutsideâ places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the userâs supposed distance from this mode of state regulation.
Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be ânormalâ people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of oneâs individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets.
Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (JoĂ«l Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Ămilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligentâą (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance
Complexity Science in Human Change
This reprint encompasses fourteen contributions that offer avenues towards a better understanding of complex systems in human behavior. The phenomena studied here are generally pattern formation processes that originate in social interaction and psychotherapy. Several accounts are also given of the coordination in body movements and in physiological, neuronal and linguistic processes. A common denominator of such pattern formation is that complexity and entropy of the respective systems become reduced spontaneously, which is the hallmark of self-organization. The various methodological approaches of how to model such processes are presented in some detail. Results from the various methods are systematically compared and discussed. Among these approaches are algorithms for the quantification of synchrony by cross-correlational statistics, surrogate control procedures, recurrence mapping and network models.This volume offers an informative and sophisticated resource for scholars of human change, and as well for students at advanced levels, from graduate to post-doctoral. The reprint is multidisciplinary in nature, binding together the fields of medicine, psychology, physics, and neuroscience
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Sonic heritage: listening to the past
History is so often told through objects, images and photographs, but the potential of sounds to reveal place and space is often neglected. Our research project âSonic Palimpsestâ1 explores the potential of sound to evoke impressions and new understandings of the past, to embrace the sonic as a tool to understand what was, in a way that can complement and add to our predominant visual understandings. Our work includes the expansion of the Oral History archives held at Chatham Dockyard to include womenâs voices and experiences, and the creation of sonic works to engage the public with their heritage. Our research highlights the social and cultural value of oral history and field recordings in the transmission of knowledge to both researchers and the public. Together these recordings document how buildings and spaces within the dockyard were used and experienced by those who worked there. We can begin to understand the social and cultural roles of these buildings within the community, both past and present
Computed tomography-based imaging biomarker identifies coal workersâ pneumoconiosis
Rationale: The increase in the incidence and the diagnostic limitations of pneumoconiosis have emerged as a public health concern. This study aimed to conduct a computed tomography (CT)- based quantitative analysis to understand differences in imaging results of pneumoconiosis according to disease severity.Methods: According to the International Labor Organization (ILO) guidelines, coal workersâ pneumoconiosis (CWP) are classified into five categories. CT images were obtained only at full inspiration and were quantitatively evaluated for airway structural variables such as bifurcation angle (Ξ), hydraulic diameter (Dh), wall thickness (WT), and circularity (Cr). Parenchymal functional variables include abnormal regions (emphysema, groundâglass opacities, consolidation, semi consolidation, and fibrosis) and blood vessel volume. Through the propensity score matching method, the confounding effects were decreased.Results: Category 4 demonstrated a reduced Ξ in TriLUL, a thicker airway wall in both the Trachea and Bronint compared to Category 0, and a decreased Cr in Bronint. Category 4 presented with higher abnormal regions except for groundâglass opacity and a narrower pulmonary blood vessel volume. A negative correlation was found between abnormal areas with lower Hounsfield units (HU) than the normal lung and the ratio of forced expiratory volume in 1 s/forced vital capacity, with narrowed pulmonary blood vessel volume which is positively correlated with abnormal areas with upper HU than the normal lung.Conclusion: This study provided valuable insight into pneumoconiosis progression through a comparison of quantitative CT images based on severity. Furthermore, as there has been paucity of studies on the pulmonary blood vessel volume of the CWP, in this study, a correlation between reduced pulmonary blood vessel volume and regions with low HU values holds significant importance
Locating gender in space: Emily Dickinson's conception of gender
In her poems, Emily Dickinson defines, locates, reshapes, and forms new concepts of gender. She achieves this by employing spatial metaphors and images that locate female identity in a new territory. Her poetry overcomes gendered dualisms and dichotomies by unmasking opposites as constructs and by accommodating them within the same sphere. As the spaces in Dickinsonâs poems are abstract, strangely limitless, and ambiguous in their dimensions, her new female subjects have to reside in a paradoxical space. This paradoxical mapping allows for conceptualizations of identity as being simultaneously at the center and at the margin of a certain space, being at once inside and outside. In Dickinsonâs nineteenth-century New England, the spaces of nature, the house, and the grave or afterlife are highly saturated with cultural and ideological meaning. Therefore, the transgression of boundaries between nature and culture, the public and the private, and life and death bestows Dickinsonâs speakers with power, freedom, and a sense of the arbitrariness of the concepts attached to these boundaries. Through the exploitation of marginal spaces such as swamps, closets, the space within walls, and the dead body, Dickinson relocates desire and relationships between men and women. By reorganizing the asymmetrical attributions of power and gender to which her speakers are subjected, Dickinson carves out space for unconventional identities and rebellious acts
METROPOLITAN ENCHANTMENT AND DISENCHANTMENT. METROPOLITAN ANTHROPOLOGY FOR THE CONTEMPORARY LIVING MAP CONSTRUCTION
We can no longer interpret the contemporary metropolis as we did in the last century. The thought of civil economy regarding the contemporary Metropolis conflicts more or less radically with the merely acquisitive dimension of the behaviour of its citizens. What is needed is therefore a new capacity for
imagining the economic-productive future of the city: hybrid social enterprises, economically sustainable, structured and capable of using technologies, could be a solution for producing value and distributing it fairly and inclusively.
Metropolitan Urbanity is another issue to establish. Metropolis needs new spaces where inclusion can occur, and where a repository of the imagery can be recreated. What is the ontology behind the technique of metropolitan planning and management, its vision and its symbols? Competitiveness,
speed, and meritocracy are political words, not technical ones. Metropolitan Urbanity is the characteristic of a polis that expresses itself in its public places. Today, however, public places are private ones that are destined for public use. The Common Good has always had a space of representation in the city, which was the public space. Today, the Green-Grey Infrastructure is the metropolitan city's monument that communicates a value for future generations and must therefore be recognised and imagined; it is the production of the metropolitan symbolic imagery, the new magic of the city
Sensitive and Makeable Computational Materials for the Creation of Smart Everyday Objects
The vision of computational materials is to create smart everyday objects using the materi- als that have sensing and computational capabilities embedded into them. However, todayâs development of computational materials is limited because its interfaces (i.e. sensors) are unable to support wide ranges of human interactions , and withstand the fabrication meth- ods of everyday objects (e.g. cutting and assembling). These barriers hinder citizens from creating smart every day objects using computational materials on a large scale.
To overcome the barriers, this dissertation presents the approaches to develop compu- tational materials to be 1) sensitive to a wide variety of user interactions, including explicit interactions (e.g. user inputs) and implicit interactions (e.g. user contexts), and 2) makeable against a wide range of fabrication operations, such cutting and assembling. I exemplify the approaches through five research projects on two common materials, textile and wood. For each project, I explore how a material interface can be made to sense user inputs or activities, and how it can be optimized to balance sensitivity and fabrication complexity. I discuss the sensing algorithms and machine learning model to interpret the sensor data as high-level abstraction and interaction. I show the practical applications of developed computational materials. I demonstrate the evaluation study to validate their performance and robustness.
In the end of this dissertation, I summarize the contributions of my thesis and discuss future directions for the vision of computational materials
Qualification and acoustical improvement of Germanyâs first municipal theatre
Lâacustica Ăš un elemento spesso trascurato ma profondamente influente sulla qualitĂ degli ambienti. La sua presenza in ogni ambiente Ăš tra i fattori che piĂč condizionano lâesperienza umana. Questa tesi si concentra sulla riqualificazione acustica del Teatro di Freiberg, il piĂč antico teatro municipale della Germania. Il progetto, avviato nel settembre 2022, si Ăš avvalso dellâesperienza della Hochschule di Mittweida e dellâUniversitĂ di Bologna che attraverso un fruttuoso progetto di tesi allâestero, hanno guidato lâAutore verso il completamento dei suoi studi. Il lavoro inizia con lâesplorazione dei principi fondamentali dellâacustica architettonica, seguito da unâanalisi del contesto storico e architettonico del Teatro di Freiberg. Una fase cruciale coinvolge la campagna di misurazioni allâinterno del teatro al fine di ottenere i parametri necessari ad una valutazione oggettiva delle carattteristiche acustiche dello spazio. Successivamente il processo di virtualizzazione del teatro, ossia la creazione di un modello virtuale calibrato, costituisce la base per proporre una strategia di intervento rispettosa del pregio storico dellâedificio e in linea con i risultati della ricerca.
La tesi si conclude con unâanalisi comparativa dei risultati ottenuti da alcuni tra i principali software nellâambito della previsione acustica
Where there are no Footprints: An Ethnography of Contemporary Art in Kolkata
This dissertation is an ethnographic exploration of contemporary art in Kolkata. It closely follows several individual artists and art groups who endeavour to defy established conventions and create new works of art. Yet, confronted with a new work of art, a doubt sets in. Wasnât this made before? Can we be sure that itâs not a copy? The doubt of novelty and originality has always troubled the visual arts, and was particularly pronounced in (post)colonial Calcutta, where works were condemned by some as belated repetitions of European modern art. Convictions of belatedness have been successfully debunked, but with the emergence of âcontemporaryâ art the doubt of novelty emerges yet again. To understand the predicament of artistic novelty this dissertation unfolds a cyclical ritual theory of contemporary art that includes the practices surrounding the artwork, while not forgetting the artwork itself â an analysis that involves the entire set of practices implicated in the production, exhibition, circulation, and preservation of art. This theory is subsequently applied to the field of contemporary art in Kolkata. The ethnographic chapters focus on the tension between artistic attempts to make new works of art and the various limitations that artists encounter; artists are not just caught up in artistic conventions, but are simultaneously impeded by limited economic means and trapped in a peripheral position where they always seem to lag behind, caught up in a city that doesnât seem to live up to its own history. Yet, by making ambiguous works that resonate with the city in various ways, artists defy conventions, bypass limitations, and offer moments in which the world can be experienced anew
Ludotopia
Where do computer games »happen«? The articles collected in this pioneering volume explore the categories of »space«, »place« and »territory« featuring in most general theories of space to lay the groundwork for the study of spatiality in games. Shifting the focus away from earlier debates on, e.g., the narrative nature of games, this collection proposes, instead, that thorough attention be given to the tension between experienced spaces and narrated places as well as to the mapping of both of these
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