Romantic comedy: a critical and creative enactment

This research looks at aspects of romantic comedy across time and form by parodying the work of three writers: the French playwright Molière, the English novelist Jane Austen and the American screenwriter Nora Ephron. It examines the role that gender plays in the way romantic comedy has been defined

The Lensmaker's Equation: Tracing a History of Visual Culture through Richard Powers' Three Farmer's on Their Way to a Dance and Plowing the Dark.

Master'sMASTER OF ART

Supporting Multi-User Interaction in Co-Located and Remote Augmented Reality by Improving Reference Performance and Decreasing Physical Interference

One of the most fundamental components of our daily lives is social interaction, ranging from simple activities, such as purchasing a donut in a bakery on the way to work, to complex ones, such as instructing a remote colleague how to repair a broken automobile. While we interact with others, various challenges may arise, such as miscommunication or physical interference. In a bakery, a clerk may misunderstand the donut at which a customer was pointing due to the uncertainty of their finger direction. In a repair task, a technician may remove the wrong bolt and accidentally hit another user while replacing broken parts due to unclear instructions and lack of attention while communicating with a remote advisor. This dissertation explores techniques for supporting multi-user 3D interaction in augmented reality in a way that addresses these challenges. Augmented Reality (AR) refers to interactively overlaying geometrically registered virtual media on the real world. In particular, we address how an AR system can use overlaid graphics to assist users in referencing local objects accurately and remote objects efficiently, and prevent co-located users from physically interfering with each other. My thesis is that our techniques can provide more accurate referencing for co-located and efficient referencing for remote users and lessen interference among users. First, we present and evaluate an AR referencing technique for shared environments that is designed to improve the accuracy with which one user (the indicator) can point out a real physical object to another user (the recipient). Our technique is intended for use in otherwise unmodeled environments in which objects in the environment, and the hand of the indicator, are interactively observed by a depth camera, and both users wear tracked see-through displays. This technique allows the indicator to bring a copy of a portion of the physical environment closer and indicate a selection in the copy. At the same time, the recipient gets to see the indicator's live interaction represented virtually in another copy that is brought closer to the recipient, and is also shown the mapping between their copy and the actual portion of the physical environment. A formal user study confirms that our technique performs significantly more accurately than comparison techniques in situations in which the participating users have sufficiently different views of the scene. Second, we extend the idea of using a copy (virtual replica) of physical object to help a remote expert assist a local user in performing a task in the local user's environment. We develop an approach that uses Virtual Reality (VR) or AR for the remote expert, and AR for the local user. It allows the expert to create and manipulate virtual replicas of physical objects in the local environment to refer to parts of those physical objects and to indicate actions on them. The expert demonstrates actions in 3D by manipulating virtual replicas, supported by constraints and annotations. We performed a user study of a 6DOF alignment task, a key operation in many physical task domains. We compared our approach with another 3D approach that also uses virtual replicas, in which the remote expert identifies corresponding pairs of points to align on a pair of objects, and a 2D approach in which the expert uses a 2D tablet-based drawing system similar to sketching systems developed for prior work by others on remote assistance. The study shows the 3D demonstration approach to be faster than the others. Third, we present an interference avoidance technique (Redirected Motion) intended to lessen the chance of physical interference among users with tracked hand-held displays, while minimizing their awareness that the technique is being applied. This interaction technique warps virtual space by shifting the virtual location of a user's hand-held display. We conducted a formal user study to evaluate Redirected Motion against other approaches that either modify what a user sees or hears, or restrict the interaction capabilities users have. Our study was performed using a game we developed, in which two players moved their hand-held displays rapidly in the space around a shared gameboard. Our analysis showed that Redirected Motion effectively and imperceptibly kept players further apart physically than the other techniques. These interaction techniques were implemented using an extensible programming framework we developed for supporting a broad range of multi-user immersive AR applications. This framework, Goblin XNA, integrates a 3D scene graph with support for 6DOF tracking, rigid body physics simulation, networking, shaders, particle systems, and 2D user interface primitives. In summary, we showed that our referencing approaches can enhance multi-user AR by improving accuracy for co-located users and increasing efficiency for remote users. In addition, we demonstrated that our interference-avoidance approach can lessen the chance of unwanted physical interference between co-located users, without their being aware of its use

Becoming I’x : Maya ontological decolonization and the turn to theater in postwar Guatemala

This dissertation examines theater’s capacity to communicate Maya ontologies and nurture cultural-political imaginaries among rural Mayas engaged in decolonization politics. In response to the highly exclusionary Guatemalan state and the 1980s genocide of Mayas, and coinciding with continent-wide Indigenous protests against quincentennial celebrations of Columbus’ arrival to the Americas in 1992, a vibrant Maya Kaqchikel movement emerged in Sololá, Guatemala. This rural grassroots movement of farmers and schoolteachers, which I call Tejido Social (Social Fabric), demonstrated an enormous capacity for mobilization around a range of issues including recovering ancestral land, expelling a military base, building a bilingual Kaqchikel community school, and revitalizing the practice of Maya customary law and governance. Beginning in 1999, a local political party sought to incorporate the Tejido Social movement, at times using tactics of intimidation and violence. In 2000, children of Tejido Social leaders, curious about aspects of Maya culture and ontology that had been repressed by genocide and colonization, took another approach. Turning away from broad grassroots organizing through village networks, they express a politics of reivindicación (cultural dignification and vindication) through theater. Through an ethnography of rehearsals, theater productions, and audience responses to the theater group Sotz’il, I analyze what Sotz’il’s theater performances do for performers and audiences. Extending Hirschkind’s concept of “ethical soundscapes,” I contend that Sotz’il shapes Maya worlds through theater. This research finds that Sotz’il’s theater performances evoke sensory memories of Maya ontology and lifeways. I contend that by awakening an emotional connection to everyday rural Maya experience, Sotz’il strengthens audiences’ ethicopolitical commitment to Maya reivindicación. Sotz’il’s project, however, stands in tension with the maintenance of the village networks that are central to Indigenous communities’ mobilizing power, leaving open questions about its future amidst repression. By exploring this tension I seek to rethink subaltern politics more generally, beyond social movements as a political formation, to conceptualize processes through which subaltern peoples internalize and emotionally attach to – and then mobilize around – identity-based causes and values.Anthropolog

The Constructive Use of Film Genre for the Screenwriter: Creating Film Genre's Mental Space

This practice-led PhD project consists of two sections: the first examines a breakdown of the components of film genre to be used as practical guideposts for my own creative practice as a screenwriter and (hopefully in the future) for other screenwriters; the second section contains my practical application – first acts of three screenplays that are constructed utilizing my research and subsequent assessments. Using a theoretic construct presented in the area of philosophy in the 1990s by cognitive theorist Gilles Fauconnier called ‘mental space’, a concept exploring a person’s natural inclination to construct a comprehensible idealized cognitive model (ICM) of any given situation in order to understand his or her role in it (Fauconnier 1994:8), I examine how Fauconnier’s concept can be applied to building a film narrative and specifically how it can be applied to a screenwriter’s understanding and breaking down of the components of film genre. I also employ the work of scholars focused on the audience’s reception, especially the reception of film genre. In the practical section of my practice-led PhD, the writing of the first acts of three screenplays that share location, similar core cast of characters and plot points but are constructed in three distinctly different film genres (western, horror, romantic comedy), I endeavor to apply elements I have termed the ‘mental space of film genre’ in order to determine the adjustments and changes necessary to move narrative from one genre to another in order to fulfill various genre perimeters and genre expectations. This work is meant to increase a screenwriter’s technical skills in the craft of screenwriting

Successful failures : undoing neoliberal representation through interpretations of clown

Neoliberalism is by now understood as both an approach to government and also the defining political movement of the last fifty years. In both instances, neoliberalism is built on the assumption that the state is not ideally placed to create economic growth or provide a social safety net, and that instead private companies, private individuals, and, most importantly, unhindered markets are best placed to generate economic growth and provide optimum conditions for social equality. Rather than delivering on these promises, however, neoliberalism has fused individual self-interest with the most devastating effects of capitalism, thereby increasing inequalities, creating newly excluded populations, generating widespread precarity and delivering mass unemployment. This thesis utilises the practices and traditions of clown, as a means of critiquing neoliberal hegemony. In so doing it brings a traditional popular performance mode into conversation with politics. In particular, by examining neoliberal logic from the point of view of the clown, in practice and in theory, its intention is to rescue failure from its current condition as always and everywhere to be avoided. It argues that since neoliberalism celebrates only success, failure has been robbed of its productive potential in both social and political terms. The clown is ideally positioned to redeem failure, because of his expert skill in this area. Finally, this thesis maps the relationships between different discourses — politics and popular performance — with the aim of generating insights that have not yet been articulated

A cost and utility analysis of NIM/CAMAC standards and equipment for shuttle payload data acquisition and control systems. Volume 2: Tasks 1 and 2

A representative set of payloads for both science and applications disciplines were selected that would ensure a realistic and statistically significant estimate of equipment utilization. The selected payloads were analyzed to determine the applicability of Nuclear Instrumentation Modular (NIM)/Computer Automated Measurement Control (CAMAC) equipment in satisfying their data acquisition and control requirements. The analyses results were combined with the comparable results from related studies to arrive at an overall assessment of the applicability and commonality of NIM/CAMAC equipment usage across the spectrum of payloads

SPICA:revealing the hearts of galaxies and forming planetary systems : approach and US contributions

How did the diversity of galaxies we see in the modern Universe come to be? When and where did stars within them forge the heavy elements that give rise to the complex chemistry of life? How do planetary systems, the Universe's home for life, emerge from interstellar material? Answering these questions requires techniques that penetrate dust to reveal the detailed contents and processes in obscured regions. The ESA-JAXA Space Infrared Telescope for Cosmology and Astrophysics (SPICA) mission is designed for this, with a focus on sensitive spectroscopy in the 12 to 230 micron range. SPICA offers massive sensitivity improvements with its 2.5-meter primary mirror actively cooled to below 8 K. SPICA one of 3 candidates for the ESA's Cosmic Visions M5 mission, and JAXA has is committed to their portion of the collaboration. ESA will provide the silicon-carbide telescope, science instrument assembly, satellite integration and testing, and the spacecraft bus. JAXA will provide the passive and active cooling system (supporting the