FrameShift: Shift Your Attention, Shift the Story

Attention is a limited resource that intrinsically dictates our perceptions, memories, and behaviors. Further, visuospatial attention correlates highly with user engagement, heart rate, and arousal. Artists and interactive game designers strive to capture and direct attention, yet even in the most carefully crafted graphic narratives viewer eye paths -- a proxy for attention -- vary up to 20 percent. Our aim is to use attentional measures to enrich graphic novel narratives.FrameShift uses eye tracking to measure reader attention and changes text and visual elements later on in the story accordingly. We have built an extensible framework for using attention to introduce perceptual changes in narratives. We use attention as an indirect method for interactions and introduce shiftable frame nodes that change readers\u27 belief states over time

The pedagogy and potential of educational comics

Fall/Winter 2020Aaron Humphre

"You give me a name that I cannot say": an investigation into the intelligibility of the criterial rules in the theoretical component of CAPS Grade 10-12 visual art

Previous work in the field of art education in South Africa has addressed the need to make explicit the requirements and valued criteria in the practical work (Bolton, 2006). However, systematic research into the theoretical component of the National Curriculum Statement Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement (CAPS) for Visual Arts in the Further Education and Training Phase has yet to be conducted. This study teases out the relationship between knowledge and skills that remains under-theorised in the expression of visual literacy in the curriculum. Developed in fields adjacent to Art History and Visual Culture Studies, the literature defines visual literacy in generic terms that describe what a visually literate person can do. Visual literacy requires consideration when translated into a method for a subject that has its roots in a disciplinary tradition, in this case, Art History. The literature on visual literacy places emphasis on the positionality of the viewer and the tacit nature of acquisition which differs from specialised knowledge about the artist's context of production that is studied in Art History. The framing of knowledge and skills in the curriculum requires careful theorisation to determine whether subjective or specialised communication is privileged and the nature of acquisition. I conducted a document analysis to show the type of communication valued in two questions of the Department of Basic Education National Senior Certificate Grade 12 Paper 1 examinations and memoranda over three years. I considered the knowledge and skills transmitted by the CAPS curriculum for Visual Art Grades 10-12 and whether they align with the expectations of the questions and memoranda. I make recommendations for the curriculum, assessment and memoranda based on these observations to contribute to the conversation about pupil performance in Visual Art at Grade 12 level

Pipers At The Gates of Dawn: Psychedelic Script Design and Posters From Haight-Ashbury’s Golden Age (1965-1969) How Artists From the Haight-Ashbury Psychedelic Community Created Wildly Avant Garde Art-Posters By Altering The Appearance And Function of Text

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

More than a Spasm, Less than a Sign: Queer Masculinity in American Visual Culture, 1915-1955

This research considers the contribution of visual culture to queer masculinity among white American men during a profound reorientation both in popular understandings and the practical conditions of eroticism between men. From about 1915 to 1955 a pragmatic libidinal economy centered on the theatrical effeminacy of “fairies” was displaced by one founded on the presumption of strongly delineated and relatively fixed hetero- and homo-sexual identities. Although medical discourses about queerness had been developing since the middle of the Nineteenth Century in Europe, what Americans of the opening decades of the twentieth century knew about queerness they learned unsystematically from hearsay, the observation of local people and practices, and visual culture. Photography and film built on existing representational conventions, such as those developed in painting, illustration, theatre and nightlife, but the voyeuristic position of the spectators of films and photographs provided a special liberty to look at men, fetishistically or critically, and imagine recreating their gestures in the medium of one’s own body. Gesture is understood here as the aestheticization of self-presence by means of the movement or disposition of the body and its props. Gestures articulate a selfhood that enjoys a conditional freedom in its relation to the social world while being subject to the structures of meaning it inherits and the operation of discipline. Through fine-grained analyses of queer gags in Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick comedy and nude figure studies by George Platt Lynes, this research argues that visual culture provided an apprenticeship in and theory of queer masculinity as a set of gestures. This study supplements the scholarly literature on Charlie Chaplin by foregrounding aspects of his star text that key audiences to recognize the masculinity of his signature Tramp as queer and cataloguing his use of dance, drag, and accident to provide a figure for homoeroticism in slapstick. It also significantly extends the existing critical literature on the photography of George Platt Lynes by considering camp, surrealism, and glamour as aspects of a decades-long engagement with the phenomenal texture of life as a middle-class queer American man

Transgressive Christian iconography in post-apartheid South African art

In this study I propose that transgressive interpretations of Christian iconography provide a valuable strategy for contemporary artists to engage with perceived social inequalities in postapartheid South Africa. Working in light of Michel Foucault’s idea of an “ontology of the present”, I investigate the ways in which religious iconography has been implicated in the regulation of society. Parodic reworking of Christian imagery in the selected examples is investigated as a strategy to expose these controls and offer a critique of mechanisms which produce normative ‘truths’. I also consider how such imagery has been received and the factors accounting for that reception. The study is contextualized by a brief, literary based, historical overview of Christian religious imagery to explain the strength of feeling evinced by religious images. This includes a review of the conflation of religion and state control of the masses, an analysis of the sovereign controls and disciplinary powers that they wield, and an explication of their illustration in religious iconography. I also identify reasons why such imagery may have seemed compelling to artists working in a post-apartheid context. By locating recent works in terms of those made elsewhere or South African examples prior to the period that is my focus, the works discussed are explored in terms of broader orientations in post-apartheid South African art. Artworks that respond to specific Christian iconography are discussed, including Adam and Eve, The Virgin Mary, Christ, and various saints and sinners. The selected artists whose works form the focus of this study are Diane Victor, Christine Dixie, Majak Bredell, Tracey Rose, Wim Botha, Conrad Botes, Johannes Phokela and Lawrence Lemaoana. Through transgressive depictions of Christian icons these artists address current inequalities in society. The content of their works analysed here includes (among others): the construction of both female and male identities; sexual roles, social roles, and racial identity; the social expectations of contemporary motherhood; repressive role models; Afrikaner heritage; political and social change and its effects; colonial power; sacrifice; murder, rape, and violence in South Africa; abuses of power by role models and politicians; rugby; heroism; and patricide. Christian iconography is a useful communicative tool because it has permeated many cultures over centuries, and the meanings it carries are thus accessible to large numbers of people. Religious imagery is often held sacred or is regarded with a degree of reverence, thus ensuring an emotive response when iconoclasm or transgression of any sort is identified. This study argues that by parodying sacred imagery these artists are able to disturb complacent viewing and encourage viewers to engage critically with some of its underlying implications

Anatomy of a Pin-Up: A Genealogy of Sexualized Femininity Since the Industrial Age

Pin-up images have played an important role in American culture, in both their illustrated and photographic configurations. The pin-up is viewed as a significant representational cultural artifact of idealistic and aspirational femininity and of consumerism and material wealth, especially reflective of the mid-twentieth century period in America spanning the 1930s to the 1960s. These images not only reflect great shifts in social mores and women’s social status, but also affected changes in both areas in turn. Furthermore, pin-up images internationally circulated in magazines, advertising and promotional material, contributed to the manner in which America was idealized in Europe and beyond. Crucially, they influenced how an eroticized and glamorous, yet unrealistic, example of femininity came to be generalized as a desirous model of femininity. In recent years there has been vital, though limited, scholarly research into the cultural and social impact of pin-up imagery, to which this thesis adds to. This thesis takes a genealogical approach, charting the development of popular female-centric “pin-up” imagery in America since the 1860s and up to the 1960s, and its resurgence since the 1980s onwards. In doing so this thesis aims to provide a social, political and cultural context to the emergence of a specific archetypal sexualized femininity, with the aim of challenging the tendency to dismiss sexualized imagery as “anti-feminist” or as trivial. Toward that end, I examine the complexity of intentions behind the production of “pin-up” images. In taking this revisionist approach I am better able to conclusively analyze the reasons for the resurgence and reappropriation of pin-up imagery in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century popular culture, and consider what the gendered cultural implications may be

Onomatopoeia: a relevance-based eye-tracking study of digital manga

This study is concerned with the reception of onomatopoeia in the English translation of digital manga. In manga, onomatopoeia is often presented as part of the aesthetics, being both verbal (meaning) and non-verbal (showing) simultaneously. Drawing on the relevance-theoretic notion of a showing-saying continuum (Sperber and Wilson 1995), this study aims to identify factors that affect reading behaviour including the translation strategies and the degree of the showing/meaning ness. We conducted an eye-tracking study to gain empirically supported insight into readers’ interaction with onomatopoeia in manga. Findings of this study show that full-textual substitution, which is the hybrid of showing-meaning, attracts most interest and is the area that receives most attention when compared with annotation or the Japanese original. This in turn indicates that the degree of showing-ness of onomatopoeia influences the way readers interact with onomatopoeia in manga. The conclusion is that separating the showing and meaning elements of onomatopoeia in manga could result in a loss of engagement potential with readers, and full-textual substitution would be the recommended translation strategy for the best level of attention

Foam Rainbow: where humour, disgust and failure mingle in contemporary art

This thesis explores the potent interconnections of humour, disgust and failure to understand their function in contemporary creative practices. Operating in shifty and nebulous terrains, the three experiences are under-researched, and rarely considered in combination. Fused together in certain creative practices, they operate on the threshold of pleasure, revulsion and fiasco. Such an intersection has the potential to produce surprisingly profound aesthetic experiences that fuse cognitive and emotional responses, momentarily disrupting the artifice in art and representation. Humour, disgust and failure are corporeally grounded experiences. Focusing on representational, embodied creative practices, the thesis relies on feminist and aesthetic critiques of representation and gendered subjectivities to position disgust and humour as critical mechanisms. The risks of failure are rethought as disruptive modes through which meaning is created and disturbed to generate new ways of thinking and making. Using my studio-based practice and key works by artists, comedians and filmmakers as examples where all three intersect, the thesis illuminates the peculiarities of gender in the formation of humour, disgust and failure in creative practices. With myself as image source I explore vulgarity, revulsion and representation within an ethical framework that places embodied subjectivity as vital for critiquing and messing-up gendered representation. Combining video projections with sculpture, installation, images and odour, the studio research invites the viewer to experience the work through multiple orifices. This thesis demonstrates the intertwined affectivity of humour, disgust and failure in creative works, how the power of revulsion to arrest merges with the rush to laugh in thresholds of experience that can at any moment collapse, wobble or explode. The interactions of humour, disgust and failure generate complex insights and potent affects which momentarily allow us to “enjoy” a sense of dissolution, to acknowledge our corporeality and aesthetic senses as unified and yet overflowing and intermingled with the world. When this occurs, the ridiculousness of gender, representation, fashion, codes of behaviour and the corporeal nature of ourselves can be revealed