Mediating Gesture in Theory and Practice

Editorial Article to the special issue "Mise en geste. Studies of Gesture in Cinema" (ed. by Ana Hedberg Olenina and Irina Schulzki) in journal "Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe" 5 (2017). 1. Gesture as a Figure of Speech. About this Issue 2. Liberated Gestures: Theories of Bodily Statements beyond the Sign. 2.1. Sergei Eisenstein: The Underlying Gesture 2.2. In Eisenstein’s Footsteps: Yuri Tsivian’s Carpalistics and Pia Tikka’s Enactive Cinema 2.3. Béla Balázs: Physiognomy 2.4. Julia Kristeva: Anaphora 2.5. Mikhail Iampolski: Deformations 2.6. Oksana Bulgakowa: The Factory of Gestures 2.7. Giorgio Agamben: Pure Gesture 2.8. Vilém Flusser: The Gesture of Filming. 3. Gesturology of Revolution: Petr Pavlenskii’s Mise en geste

Embodied creativity: a process continuum from artistic creation to creative participation

This thesis breaks new ground by attending to two contemporary developments in art and science. In art, computer-mediated interactive artworks comprise creative engagement between collaborating practitioners and a creatively participating audience, erasing all notions of a dividing line between them. The procedural character of this type of communicative real-time interaction replaces the concept of a finished artwork with a ‘field of artistic communication’. In science, the field of creativity research investigates creative thought as mental operations that combine and reorganise extant knowledge structures. A recent paradigm shift in cognition research acknowledges that cognition is embodied. Neither embodiment in cognition nor the ‘field of artistic communication’ in interactive art have been assimilated by creativity research. This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine the embodied cognitive processes in a ‘field of artistic communication’ using a media artwork called Sim-Suite as a case study research strategy. This interactive installation, created and exhibited in an authentic real-world context, engages three people to play on wobble-boards. The thesis argues that creative processes related to Sim-Suite operate within a continuum, encompassing collaborative artistic creation and cooperative creative participation. This continuum is investigated via mixed methods, conducting studies with qualitative and quantitative analysis. These are interpreted through a theoretical lens of embodied cognition principles, the 4E approaches. The results obtained demonstrate that embodied cognitive processes in Sim-Suite’s ‘field of artistic communication’ function on a continuum. We give an account of the creative process continuum relating our findings to the ‘embedded-extended-enactive lens’, empirical studies in embodied cognition and creativity research. Within this context a number of topics and sub-themes are identified. We discuss embodied communication, aspects of agency, forms of coordination, levels of evaluative processes and empathetic foundation. The thesis makes conceptual, empirical and methodological contributions to creativity research

Emotions in archetypal media content

Emotion is an intriguing and mysterious psychological phenomenon. While everyone seems to know what it is, researchers have not yet come to consensus on its definition, and many questions still remain unanswered. While the nature of emotion is yet to discover, the design community has noticed is importance, and poses the challenge of how emotion could inform design. We see the necessity to follow the state of the art in psychology and initiate the undertaking by exploring the emotional qualities in various types of media content. The first part of this thesis aims at constructing a theoretical framework. Recent years have seen empirical studies suggest that emotion could be unconscious. While this is to be further justified, scientists are motivated to reconsider current theories of emotion to account for this phenomenon. In light of this, we integrate these studies about unconscious emotion into our literature review. An overview from theory to practice is illustrated to provide a reference for viewing the current states in application domains, such as affective computing and emotional design. This review offers a holistic understanding about emotion from various perspectives, which allow us to look for new directions in future studies. Based on our review, we see a promising direction by applying psychoanalysis methods to analyze the media content as affective stimuli, and these stimuli can be evaluated by using quantitative measures to investigate the connection between the content and the corresponding emotions. The analysis on the media content is based on a psychoanalysis theory¿the theory of archetypes¿proposed by Carl Jung. He argues that there exists a universal pattern in humans¿ unconscious thoughts, which can be manifested as symbolic content in various forms of narratives, such as myth and fairy tales. Today, this archetypal symbolic content can be seen in modern media, particularly in movies. By applying the Jungian approach, we analyzed the symbolic meaning in movie scenes and edit these feature scenes into a collection of archetypal media content, which serve as the experimental materials for later explorations. In the second part of this thesis, we present three experimental studies that aim at determining if archetypal media content can be differentiated based on emotional responses. We adopted the psychoanalytical approach described earlier to collect feature scenes in movies as archetypal media content. Meanwhile, affective stimuli of explicit emotions are also included as benchmarks for comparison, such as sadness and joy. Self-reports and physiological signals are both adopted for measuring emotional responses. These three studies follow similar experimental design: presenting stimuli and measuring emotion concurrently. The results of these studies confirm that emotions induced by archetypal content are different from explicit emotions, and the statistical analysis further indicate that the predictive model obtained from physiological signals outperforms the model generated from self-reports while viewing archetypal media content. These results, however, are opposite to the results gained from affective stimuli of explicit emotions, leading us to the conclusion that archetypal media content might induce unconscious emotions, and physiological signals are more effective than self-reports for recognizing emotions induced by archetypal media content.La emoción es un fenómeno psicológico intrigante y misterioso. Aunque todo el mundo parece saber lo que es, los investigadores aún no han llegado a un consenso sobre su definición, y todavía quedan muchas preguntas sin respuesta. Si bien la naturaleza de las emociones está aún por descubrir, la comunidad de profesionales del diseño ha entendido su importancia, y se plantea el desafío de interrelacionar ambos mundos, explorando de las cualidades emocionales en diversos tipos de contenido en medios de comunicación. La primera parte de esta tesis tiene como objetivo la construcción de un marco teórico. Recientemente se han realizado estudios empíricos que sugieren que las emociones puede ser inconscientes. Si bien esto debe justificarse mejor, los científicos están motivados a reconsiderar las teorías actuales de la emoción para explicar este fenómeno. En vista de ello, integramos estos estudios sobre las emociones inconscientes en nuestra revisión de referencias bibliográficas incluyendo dominios de aplicación recientes, tales como la Computación Afectiva y el Diseño Emocional. Una dirección prometedora de investigación se basa en la aplicación de métodos del psicoanálisis para analizar contenidos multimedia como estímulos afectivos, y estos estímulos pueden ser evaluados mediante el uso de medidas cuantitativas para investigar la conexión entre el contenido y las emociones correspondientes. Este análisis se basa en la teoría de los arquetipos propuesto por el psicólogo Carl Jung. El autor sostiene que existe una patrón universal en los pensamientos inconscientes de los personas, que puede manifestarse como un símbolo contenido en las diversas formas de narrativas, como en los mitos y los cuentos de hadas. Hoy en día, estos arquetipos de contenido simbólico se puede ver frecuentemente en los contenidos multimedia modernos, sobre todo en las películas. Mediante la aplicación del enfoque de Jung, analizamos el significado simbólico en escenas de películas seleccionando las correspondientes a diversos arquetipos, que servirá como material experimental para exploraciones posteriores. En la segunda parte de esta tesis, se presentan tres estudios experimentales que apuntan a determinar si el contenido multimedia arquetípico puede diferenciarse en base a respuestas emocionales. Con el enfoque psicoanalítico descrito anteriormente para los arquetipos, también se incluye los estímulos afectivos de emociones explícitas son como puntos de referencia para la comparación, como la tristeza y la alegría. Se realizan auto-informes y se miden señales fisiológicas para la determinación de las respuestas emocionales en todos los experimentos realizados. Los resultados de estos estudios confirman que las emociones inducidas por arquetipos son diferentes de las emociones explícitas, y el análisis estadístico indica además que el modelo predictivo obtenido a partir de señales fisiológicas supera el modelo generado por los auto-informes durante la visualización de contenidos multimedia arquetípicos. Estos resultados, sin embargo, son opuestos a los resultados obtenidos a partir de los estímulos afectivos de emociones explícitas, llevándonos a la conclusión de que los contenidos de los medios arquetípicos podría inducir emociones inconscientes, y que las señales fisiológicas son más eficaces que los auto informes para el reconocimiento de las emociones inducidas por el contenido de medios arquetípico. En la tercera parte de esta tesis, exploramos cómo los contenidos arquetípicos podrían utilizarse para diseñar contenido multimedia mediante "mood boards". Se realizaron dos estudios con diseñadores para responder a la pregunta de investigación de si es posible generar contenido emocionalmente rico a través de la generación automática de contenido arquetípico por "mood boards" en comparación con el contenido multimedia no arquetípico

Harnessing non-modernity: a case study in artificial life

Artificial Life is a research field which has developed around the use of synthetic artificial systems, mostly robotic and virtual, to investigate the supposed characteristic features of life. The thesis presents a case study of Artificial Life, with the overall objective of understanding some of the cultural, disciplinary and epistemological developments that may be distinctive of research communities who ground their work on a collaborative involvement with non-human simulation models. The study examines the cultural identity of the Artificial Life research community and its knowledgemaking practices, as well as its sustainability strategies into existing institutional contexts. The study aims at being neither an over-localized laboratory micro-study nor an over general macro-study, but tries to situate itself in the mid-range by combining both approaches. It has been conducted through a combination of ethnographical fieldwork and of bibliographical analysis, and places a special focus on the Artificial Life research group at University of Sussex, which has been selected for its centrality in the global Artificial Life landscape

A statement on the arts for Australian schools

A joint project of the States, Territories and the Commonwealth of Australia initiated by the Australian Education Council

The mobility of facts

This thesis investigates the reductive abstraction of the digital and the physical immediacy of the sculptural, commonly perceived as an antagonistic relationship. Through a practical dialogue between virtual and tangible media I ask: what can digital technology tell us about the nature of sculpture as a contemporary art form? My practical experiments adapted a flexible methodology of digitising found objects through 3D scanning, digital modelling and CAD drawing; transforming them via a mix of contemporary software; and then reconstituting them as physical objects through 3D printing, analogue casting and hand tooling. This approach allowed the characteristics of tangible materials and processes to feedback against the affordances and constraints of digital operations. The research demonstrates that this feedback occurs in ways that are generative rather than antagonistic. By strategically deploying digital media to develop autonomous sculpture, I reconnect haptic perception with critical reflection upon that experience driven by analyses of current understandings of how digital mediation works. The first part of the written component involves a theoretical enquiry into the means applied to production. Drawing upon recent art historical, anthropological and philosophical arguments, I question tropes of digital immateriality, computational thinking, and the ‘fixed facticity’ of sculpture. The second part provides an account of new insights brought to light by the struggle to realise these artworks in physical matter and arrive at a cogent understanding of what is made present as a consequence of digital mediation in the finished works. My research shows how digital technology can emphasise rather than undermine what is particular to sculpture. It emerges that sculpture must rely on a tension between its tangible form and abstract mediation if it is to suspend reification. On the other hand, these sculptures problematize the tendency of digital technologies to efface aspects of their very real materiality. They could be seen as paradigmatic of our contradictory relations to objects in a world where the limits of what we think of as reality have become less clear. This research proposes that it is the sensuousness of the embodied encounter that makes the abstract anomalies of digital operations so incongruous. By calling attention to themselves as made things – digital artifices – the artworks produced in this research generate moments of ambivalence that oscillate between presentation and representation, cognition and recognition, when consciousness might take itself as its object. As concrete abstractions, they encapsulate how digital mediation alters the material fabric of the world