GAYME: The development, design and testing of an auto-ethnographic, documentary game about quarely wandering urban/suburban spaces in Central Florida.

GAYME is a transmedia story-telling world that I have created to conceptually explore the dynamics of queering game design through the development of varying game prototypes. The final iteration of GAYME is @deadquarewalking\u27. It is a documentary game and a performance art installation that documents a carless, gay/queer/quare man\u27s journey on Halloween to get to and from one of Orlando\u27s most well-known gay clubs - the Parliament House Resort. The art of cruising city streets to seek out queer/quare companionship particularly amongst gay, male culture(s) is well-documented in densely, populated cities like New York, San Francisco and London, but not so much in car-centric, urban environments like Orlando that are less oriented towards pedestrians. Cruising has been and continues to be risky even in pedestrian-friendly cities but in Orlando cruising takes on a whole other dimension of danger. In 2011-2012, The Advocate magazine named Orlando one of the gayest cities in America (Breen, 2012). Transportation for America (2011) also named the Orlando metropolitan region the most dangerous city in the country for pedestrians. Living in Orlando without a car can be deadly as well as a significant barrier to connecting with other people, especially queer/quare people, because of Orlando\u27s car-centric design. In Orlando, cars are sexy. At the same time, the increasing prevalence in gay, male culture(s) of geo-social, mobile phone applications using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and location aware services, such as Grindr (Grindr, LLC., 2009) and even FourSquare (Crowley and Selvadurai, 2009) and Instagram (Systrom and Krieger, 2010), is shifting the way gay/queer/quare Orlandoans co-create social and sexual networks both online and offline. Urban and sub-urban landscapes have transformed into hybrid techno-scapes overlaying the electronic, the emotional and the social with the geographic and the physical (Hjorth, 2011). With or without a car, gay men can still geo-socially cruise Orlando\u27s car-centric, street life with mobile devices. As such emerging media has become more pervasive, it has created new opportunities to quarely visualize Orlando\u27s technoscape through phone photography and hashtag metadata while also blurring lines between the artist and the curator, the player and the game designer. This project particularly has evolved to employ game design as an exhibition tool for the visualization of geo-social photography through hashtag play. Using hashtags as a game mechanic generates metadata that potentially identifies patterns of play and ways of seeing across player experiences as they attempt to make meaning of the images they encounter in the game. @deadquarewalking also demonstrates the potential of game design and geo-social, photo-sharing applications to illuminate new ways of documenting and witnessing the urban landscapes that we both collectively and uniquely inhabit. \u27In Irish culture, quare can mean very or extremely or it can be a spelling of the rural or Southern pronunciation of the word queer. Living in the American Southeast, I personally relate more to the term quare versus queer. Cultural theorist E. Patrick Johnson (2001) also argues for quareness as a way to question the subjective bias of whiteness in queer studies that risks discounting the lived experiences and material realities of people of color. Though I do not identify as a person of color and would be categorized as white or European American, quareness has an important critical application for considering how Orlando\u27s urban design is intersectionally racialized, gendered and classed

Pedagogical and creative perspectives of handwriting, human heritage

In this article we are wondering if nowadays more than ever it is possible to consider as well-founded and emerging a pedagogy of the writing gesture, committed to recognise and support the creativity range of a complete educational process closely connected to certain dynamics that subtend the learning of handwriting, considered a common good and a human heritage.The increasingly widespread tendency to remove this educational significance, replacing the handwriting and its implicit complexity by using virtual technological instruments, apparently represents an unstoppable, not devoid of pedagogically relevant consequences

Technology-based Arabic calligraphy learning in a new era: study on the online khat learning community

This study aims to describe: (1) the concepts and strategies of technology-based Arabic calligraphy learning in the Online Khat Learning community, and (2) students’ opinions on learning Arabic calligraphy in this community. This research is a qualitative descriptive study. Data collection techniques are observation, interview, and documentation. Data analysis techniques are qualitative data analysis techniques in data reduction, data presentation, and conclusions. The results showed that: (1) the concept of Arabic calligraphy learning in the Online Khat Learning community was adapted from the Hamidy method, which consists of imitation (taqlidiyyah), stabilization exams, in-depth mastery, tamrin, and ijazah. Technology-based Arabic calligraphy learning in the Online Khat Learning community, in general, uses WhatsApp and email media. It can be seen in the following steps: (a) preparation, (b) material explanation, the material can be in the form of videos, pictures, and explanations shared in the WhatsApp group, (c) questions and answers, (d) students write and send their works to the teacher’s email, (e) the teacher provides feedback via email to each student. Because each student’s abilities are different, the teaching material at each meeting is different from one student to another. (2) Students think that this community is outstanding because it is an alternative for learning Arabic calligraphy online in a new era that does not allow face-to-face learning. They are happy to study in this community because, in addition to getting Arabic calligraphy material, they also get material on motivation and values to form a robust Islamic calligrapher character

The Image of Truth: Photographic Evidence and the Power of Analogy

Maxims that urge the power of images are cultural commonplaces with which we are all too familiar: a picture\u27s worth a thousand words, seeing is believing, and so forth. The photograph, in particular, has long been perceived to have a special power of persuasion, grounded both in the lifelike quality of its depictions and in its claim to mechanical objectivity. Seeing a photograph almost functions as a substitute for seeing the real thing. As Susan Sontag pointed out in her seminal musings on photography, Photography furnishes evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we\u27re shown a photograph of it. Though Sontag meant evidence in the general sense of proof or knowledge, her claim holds equally true in the specifically legal context. Indeed, the use of photographs and other kinds of machine-produced visual images has become a routine evidentiary technique in the American courtroom. Visual evidence has played a central role in several of the highest-profile legal cases of the last few years-think, for example, of the infamous videotape of the Los Angeles police officers\u27 beating of Rodney King, or of the damaging photographs admitted in the civil suit against O.J. Simpson showing him clad in Bruno Magli shoes. And it is by no means only in such sensational cases that photographs and other kinds of visual evidence are deployed; rather, they are a taken-for-granted form of proof in many civil and criminal cases. Given the power of the photograph to provide strong representations-- vivid displays that seem almost to compel belief-its frequent and growing use as evidence may not seem at all surprising. The origins of this significant form of evidence, however, have received almost no scholarly attention. A smattering of recent articles and notes have examined the evidentiary dilemmas raised by the emergence of new forms of visual evidence, such as day-in-the-life films and computer simulations. A few other pieces have analyzed the various doctrinal foundations that underlie the photograph\u27s admissibility. But despite more than 125 years of photography\u27s sustained legal use, the history of photographic evidence remains almost entirely untold. This Article takes a close look at the early use of photographic evidence in the American courtroom, providing a snapshot, if you will, of the legal use of photography in the second half of the nineteenth century. It reveals that photography was recognized, almost from the time of its invention, as a potentially powerful juridical tool - perhaps even a dangerously powerful tool. The meaning and epistemological status of the photograph were intensely contested, both inside and outside the courtroom. Furthermore, the history of the legal use of photography is intimately intertwined with the history of photographic technologies

Notes on Narrative as Medium and a Media Ecology Approach to the Study of Storytelling

Storytelling, as a distinctively human characteristic, is a product of our capacity for language and symbolic communication. Just as language is considered a medium within the field of media ecology, so too can narrative be understood as a medium of communication, as well as a kind of language, and as a fundamentally social phenomenon. As a medium, narrative interacts with and is modified by other media, undergoing significant change as it is expressed through oral tradition, dramatic performance, written documents, and audiovisual media. In particular, major changes in the nature of character and plot accompany the shift from orality to literacy, and writing and especially printing make possible new forms of tragedy as opposed to comedy, prose as opposed to poetry, and fiction as opposed to nonfiction. Storytelling continues to mutate through the introduction of new media, with increasingly greater emphasis on narrative as an environment, especially one associated with social interaction and gaming

The Transformative Power of the Copy

This volume offers a fresh perspective on the copy and the practice of copying, two topics that, while the focus of much academic discussion in recent decades, have been underrepresented in the discourse on transculturality. Here, experts from a wide range of academic disciplines present their views on the copy from a transcultural perspective, seeking not to define the copy uniformly, but to reveal its dynamic and transformative power. The copy and the practice of copying are thus presented as constituents of transculturality via thought-provoking contributions on topics spanning time periods from antiquity to the present, and regions from Asia to Europe. In so doing, these contributions aim to create the basis for a novel, interdisciplinary discourse on the copy and its transcultural impact throughout history

Utopic Bodies, Dystopic Subjects : Dialogues Between Literature and Theory

This dissertation examines the ways in which literary and theoretical texts respectively use the trope of the body to negotiate questions of subjectivity in utopic and dystopic discourse. By staging dialogues between theoretical and literary texts and examining the various body concepts each discourse produces, this dissertation argues that literature in the second half of the twentieth century has increasingly turned away from the utopian genre and has instead favored distinctly dystopian texts. Literary theory on the other hand, has not just become a forceful tool of social criticism but also of utopian discourse. In three chapters, this dissertation analyzes the body concepts of literary and theoretical texts and outlines the strategic claims on subjectivity they imply. The first chapter discusses the writings of Gilles Deleuze, particularly his notions of the “Body without Organs” (A Thousand Plateaus 1987) and the “Machinic body” (Anti-Oedipus 1972), and contextualizes them with William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959) and his “retroactive utopia” Cities of the Red Night (1981). Chapter II stages a dialogue between Donna Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and the Socialist Feminism in the 1980s” (1985) and William Gibson’s cyberpunk novel Neuromancer (1984). The third and final chapter examines Homi Bhabha’s postcolonial concepts of “mimicry” and “hybridity” and reads them against Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake (2003)

Understanding computer game culture: the cultural shaping of a new medium

In the past few decades, video games have developed from a marginal technological experiment into a mainstream medium. During this period they have gone through several transformations, from arcade machines offering a few minutes of solitary fun for a quarter to monthly subscription-based online MMOs in which thousands of players spend hundreds or even thousands of hours and lead a significant part of their social life as a fantasy character. But what is it that has driven video games? development? Is it technology? Indeed, with every new generation of hardware, game designers were given a broader set of tools for evoking exhilarating experiences. But is not culture at least as important? What would games look like if Tolkien never had written Lord of the Rings, or if Nintendo had not brought Japanese manga drawing styles to the new medium? This book looks at the theoretical challenges and foundations on which to base a cultural shaping approach towards the evolution of video games and proposes a set of concepts for analyzing and describing this process

Brand authenticity : meditating authentic experiences through brand communication

Brand authenticity is considered as a core element in the contemporary brand management, but its theory and practice are still surrounded with varying point of views and lack of consensus. In the previous academic research, it has been stated that brand authenticity has positive impact on brand equity and overall reputation as people have an innate desire for authenticity. At an increasing rate, consumers are seeking products that resonate with their desire of authenticity and opine that the existence for the real or genuine have been denied from them. Mezcal is a distilled alcoholic beverage produced from fermented agave juice. Mezcal forms a part of Mexican culture and has deeply entwined roots in the country’s history. By researching mezcal brands, the purpose of this study is to describe how brand authenticity can be mediated in brand communication. The purpose is subsequently divided into four sub-questions: 1. What are the strategical level requirements for brand authenticity? 2. What cues implicate brand authenticity? 3. What signs convey brand authenticity? and 4. How the different signs of authenticity can be interpreted? This study aims to arouse relevant and critical ideas about branding by exploring the actual and potential contributions of brand authenticity communication with semiotic perspective. The study was conducted with qualitative mixed method research by combining semiotic content analysis and poetic inquiry. In total of 49 mezcal brands were examined and both visual and textual authenticity cues are collected. Derived from the prior research on brand authenticity, four strategic level requirements are predominant in constructing and maintaining an authentic brand strategy; purpose, genuineness, consistency and product orientation and the cues that implicate brand authenticity are downplaying commercial motives, craftsmanship, heritage and history, artistry and appealing to lifestyle. By evaluating these cues that are communicated through varying signs, the viewer performs unconsciously an assessment of the brand thus either allowing or denying the authenticity. Based on the research, a brand authenticity syntagma-paradigm was formed to better understand the semiotic levels and practices of brand authenticity communication. Evidently, brand authenticity can be communicated in multiple ways in hidden subliminal messages or presented explicitly throughout brand communication. With different brand authenticity signs, it is possible to create rich, multi-dimensional experiences with consumers and resonate with them in deeper levels

Playing cards with Cézanne : how the contemporary artists of China copy and recreate

textMy dissertation investigates the concepts and techniques of “copying” and appropriation in contemporary Chinese art, which, despite its phenomenal growth, has seldom been credited as original. Critics either condemn the Chinese artists’ willingness to appropriate from others as a lack of individuality, or declare it as a peculiarly “Chinese” quality. This paper, instead, argues that the Chinese artists deliberately adopt such “copying” as a visual strategy, in order to reexamine the traditions they “borrowed”, to reflect on their own cultural status in the modern world, and to challenge the conventional concept of originality--namely, to show that originality is not created by irreducible individuality or mystified inspiration, but by the author’s choice as well as manipulation of contexts. This strategy, I argue, is essential to the proper evaluation and interpretation of contemporary Chinese artworks. The first two chapters of my dissertation focus on laying out the context from which this art grows. I review how the ideas, styles and institutional structures of western modern art were imitated, questioned and redefined by the Chinese artists, from 1978 to the present; I then examine the conceptual complexity of originality and “copying” in the theories of modernism, postmodernism, postcolonialism and in traditional Chinese art. The next two chapters focus on, respectively, calligraphy and photography in contemporary Chinese art, both of which contain the paradox between originality and “copying” in their very nature. The works of four artists, Xu Bing, Qiu Zhijie, Hong Hao and Zhao Bandi, are discussed in details. Xu's site-specific reproduction of “pseudo characters” manage to engage its targeted audiences, psychologically and physically; Qiu's obsessive yet futile copying of a canon of calligraphy returns the act of writing to its essence--a physical pursuit of one's spiritual state of being; Hong's photographic emulation of an ancient masterpiece suggests that painting may excel photography in its ability to portray a grand cityscape; Zhao’s simulacrum of pop culture paradigms enables him to evade political censorship, and to have an substantial yet ironic impact in a broader public sphere. Each of these works has made a unique contribution to the redefinition of artistic originality.Comparative Literatur