The Visual Novel: Fictional Space and Print After 1900

My dissertation, The Visual Novel: Fictional Space and Print After 1900, examines how and why the novel has assimilated visual mediums—film, art, and the digital—into the genre as a means of adapting to the proliferation of mass media and technology. This project connects a history of the novel (genre) with a history of the book (the genre’s physical form), thereby theorizing and narrating a history of the visual novel. I demonstrate that through fictional space, a critical term used by narratologists and textual studies scholars, visual writing emerges as a hybridized mode of creative composition where we can see most vividly the relationship between author, text, and reader. Characterized by the use of eccentric typography, nonstandard design, and experimental layout, the visual novel relies on text as image by defamiliarizing readerly expectations of print, type, and page space by assimilating composition techniques from the visual arts such as montage and collage. I argue that the visual novel’s multimodality expands definitions of “novel” and “narrative” through a discussion of British and American writers—A. S. Byatt, John Dos Passos, Steven Hall, and James Joyce, as well as contemporary small press editions of works by Laurence Sterne and Oscar Wilde. At times when screen culture advances print’s obsolescence, both historically and more recently, visual writing makes print predominant in the media ecology once again by drawing upon the very technologies that threaten it, and my dissertation responds to this recurrent milieu by arguing that these novelists utilize self-reflexive techniques to create works that actualize print’s potential and the novel’s flexibility

The Interplay of Experience and Social Structure: Adaptation through Media

In this investigation, I explore the tensions which self-referentially emerge within our constructed ‘nature’. I begin by exploring the origins of our contemporary media environment as discussed by McLuhan. I then interrogate the challenges of digital life through a close reading of the work of technology critic Giles Slade. I then conclude by situating these seemingly competing views of mediated existence within the framework of social systems theory. Through the lens of social systems theory, I reframe our contemporary technologies as adaptations to past challenges which also shape our experience of the potential choices and challenges of the future

positions of place: converging viewpoints in visual communication

This thesis includes a body of work that explores our visual relationship to the physical spaces and places we inhabit in our everyday lives. Today we live in a complex world where we are bombarded with fragments of information and inundated with distractions. As designers, we are equipped with tools and methods that allow us to experience and interpret our environment through multi-faceted perspectives and from different viewpoints. My approach to graphic design adopts techniques and practices from a mix of different disciplines. The work focuses on a design process that alternates between the parallel depiction of first-person and third-person vantage points mediated through contemporary technologies

Towards a Phenomenological Theory of the Visceral in the Interactive Arts

This is a digitised version of a thesis that was deposited in the University Library. If you are the author and you have a query about this item please contact PEARL Admin ([email protected])Metadata merged with duplicate record (http://hdl.handle.net/10026.1/2319) on 20.12.2016 by CS (TIS).This thesis explores the ways in which certain forms of interactive art may and do elicit visceral responses. The term "visceral" refers to the cardiovascular, respiratory, uro-genital and especially excretory systems that affect mind and body on a continuum of awareness. The "visceral" is mentioned in the field of interactive arts, but it remains systematically unexplored and undefined. Further, interactive artworks predominantly focus on the exteroceptive (stimuli from outside) rather than the interoceptive (stimuli arising within the body, especially the viscera) senses. The existentialist phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty forms the basis for explorations of the visceral dimension of mind/body. New approaches to understanding interactive art, design and the mind/body include: attunements to the world; intertwinings of mind/body, technology and world; and of being in the world. Each artwork within utilizes a variation of the phenomenological methods derived from Merl eau-Ponty's; these are discussed primarily in Chapters One and Three. Because subjective, first-person, experiences are a major aspect of a phenomenological approach, the academic writing is interspersed with subjective experiences of the author and others. This thesis balances facets of knowledge from diverse disciplines that account for visceral phenomena and subjective experience. Along with the textual exegesis, one major work of design and two major works of art were created. These are documented on the compact disc (CDROM) bound within. As an essential component of each artwork, new technological systems were created or co-created by the author. User surveys comprise Appendices Two, Three and Four, and are also online at: www. sfu. ca/-dgromala/thesis. To access the URL: login as , and use the password . Numerous talks, exhibitions and publications that directly relate to the thesis work is in Appendix One. This work begins with an introduction to Merleau-Ponty's ideas of flesh and reversibility. Chapter Two is the review of the literature, while Chapter Three is an explication of the hypothesis, an overview of the field, and a framing of the problem. Discussions of each artwork are in Chapter Four (The Meditation Chamber), Chapter Five (BioMorphic Typography) and Chapter Six (The MeatBook). Chapter Seven forms the conclusion. References to the documentation on the CD are found throughout the thesis, and italicized paragraphs provide an artistic context for each chapter

Material Literacy: Alphabets, Bodies, and Consumer Culture

This dissertation posits that a new form of material literacy emerged in the United States between 1890 and 1925, in tandem with the modern advertising profession. A nation recalibrating the way it valued economic and cultural mass consumption demanded, among other things, new signage – new ways to announce, and through those announcements, to produce its commitment to consumer society. What I call material literacy emerged as a set of interpretive skills wielded by both the creators and audiences of advertising material, whose paths crossed via representations of goods. These historically situated ways of reading and writing not only invited Americans to interpret a world full of representations of products, but also to understand – to read – themselves within that context. Commercial texts became sites for posing questions about reading behavior more generally, and they connected members of various professions who stood to benefit from that knowledge. In this dissertation, I explore how reading and consumption converged for advertising experts, printers, typographers, and experimental psychologists. Despite their different occupational vantage points, their work intersected around efforts to understand how modern Americans decoded printed texts, and how this behavior might be known and guided. To establish their professional reputations, the authors I study positioned themselves as being uniquely capable of observing and interpreting the behavior of readers. The body served as a key site, and metaphor, for their inquiries – a means of making both literacy and legibility material

Print, Performance, and the European Avant-gardes, 1905-1948

Early twentieth-century Europe witnessed a particularly intense moment in the long debate concerning the relationship between the dramatic text and performance. Modernists asserted the predominance of the text, which is easily assimilated to the printed page and incorporated into the institution of literature. The avant-gardes proclaimed the primacy of the live theatrical event, and they worked to liberate performance from its association with literature. At stake was the definition of the theatre as a medium--and its power to re-enchant the modern world. This dissertation reveals that even as the avant-gardes rejected the print genre of drama, they fiercely embraced print, producing some of the century's most extraordinary publications. Focusing on the material aspects of performance-related texts from Symbolism to Surrealism, I show that the avant-gardes not only maintained but amplified the centuries-old relationship between the theatre and print. They did so in ways that profoundly altered the conventions of performance and of the visual and graphic arts, expanding our sense of what is possible onstage and on the page. Under pressure from the insurgent cinema and also from a pervasive print culture that had absorbed, and been absorbed by, realist and naturalist drama, the theatre was a medium particularly in need of formal reassessment. In response to these conditions, the avant-gardes declared (to varying degrees) that literary plays should give way to ultra-physical performance; print-friendly playwrights to stage-steeped directors; dialogue to dance, song, or non-verbal sound. Because print was still the mass medium of the early twentieth century, the avant-gardes also produced performance texts--texts which embodied their theatricalist agendas through typography, page design, and illustration. In chapters on Edward Gordon Craig, Francesco Cangiullo, Lothar Schreyer, and Antonin Artaud, I argue that print was crucial to the avant-garde attempt to redefine, renew, and revolutionize the theatre

Back to the Future. The Future in the Past. Conference Proceedings Book

ICDHS is the acronym of the International Committee of De­sign History and Design Studies, an organisation that brings together scholars from Spain, Cuba, Turkey, Mexico, Finland, Japan, Belgium, the Netherlands, Brazil, Portugal, the US, Tai­wan, Canada and the UK. Since 1999, when the Design and Art History departments of the University of Barcelona organised the first edition of the ICDHS, a conference has been held every two years at a different venue around the world. These conferences have had two dis­tinct aims: first, to present original research in the fields of Design History and Design Studies and, second, to include contributions in these fields from non-hegemonic countries, offering a speaking platform to many scientific communities that are already active or are forming and developing. For that reason, the structure of the conferences combines many paral­lel strands, including poster presentations and keynote speak­ers who lecture on the conferences’ main themes. The 2018 event is rather special. The Taipei 2016 conference was the 10th edition and a commemoration of the ten celebrations to date. Returning to Barcelona in 2018 marks the end of one stage and the beginning of a new one for the Committee. The numbering chosen—“10+1”—also means that Barcelona 2018 is both an end and a beginning in the ICDHS’s own history. The book brings together 137 papers delivered at the ICDHS 10th+1 Conference held in Barcelona on 29–31 October 2018. The papers are preceded by texts of the four keynote lectures and a written tribute from the ICDHS Board to its founder and figurehead, Anna Calvera (1954–2018). The Conference, and the book, are dedicated to her memory