Screen Space Reconfigured

Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they move from the margins to the centre of contemporary media practice.Recent years have seen a marked scholarly interest in spatial dimensions and conceptions of moving image culture, with some theorists claiming that a 'spatial turn' has taken place in media studies and screen practices alike. Yet this is the first book-length study dedicated to on-screen spatiality as such.Spanning mainstream cinema, experimental film, video art, mobile screens, and stadium entertainment, the volume includes contributions from such acclaimed authors as Giuliana Bruno and Tom Gunning as well as a younger generation of scholars

Viatopias: Exploring the experience of urban travel space

The title of this research is constructed from: `via' - route and töp(os) -a place. Viatopias are urban spaces of continual travel or flux that incorporate multiple forms of perception and inscriptions of meaning. My aim has been to define and describe the increasingly important fluid perceptual spaces that have developed between static nineteenth century destinations. Viatopias such as passageways, underground tunnels, train tracks, and the North Circular escape a sense of destination, operating as ever-changing experiences or events. The practice has sought to produce digital representations of these urban travel spaces that exist in constant flux, to communicate the experience of Viatopias. The research explores themes such as: The North Circular as a Deleuzian Route exploring driving as performance; Plica, Replica, Explica an unfolding of experience through digital media; The Making of Baroque Videos, using Baroque architectures of viewing; Mobilizing Perception treating human vision as an artifact; Mirrors For Un-Recognition disassembling nineteenth century controlled vision; Sound as an Urban Compass considering urban audio experience; Narrative Practice in New Media Space analysing contemporary approaches in digital media; and Convergent Languages, Digital Poiesis investigating the dislocation of representation in different digital languages. These conceptual frameworks developed in symbiosis with the practice. The visual practice presents a collection of digital videos that extend and complicate these concepts through experimental visual and audio techniques such as layering, repetition, anamorphic distortion, and mirroring to produce visual immersion and the fracturing of space. The concluding digital works incorporate video with audio and text resulting in integrated visual statements that attempt to stretch the viewer's perception, in the process offering a glimpse of a new experience within urban space

Dress-scape: wearing the sound of fashion

Can a sound itself be a garment? This practice-led research explores the sound of garments and fashion, which is unheard, unspoken or overheard, to suggest a new perspective for reconsidering garments and fashion. Through experiments with making, wearing and displaying, the research examines the sound, voice or silence embedded in garments and fashion and affective experiences aroused from garments as atmospheric spaces. A new term, ‘dress-scape’, is introduced and discussed through a series of practical and theoretical approaches to the concept. The research suggests that the dress-scape of a garment emerges as the resonance of sound, voice, noise or silence from the interplay between the garment and the maker, the wearer or the viewer. As the research attempts to locate fashion in a new place, the practice varies significantly from that in conventional garments. The maker rather explores non-wearable garments, other artefacts, installation, film and sound-making using diverse mediums. The practice, in turn, oscillates between fashion and art practice. The journal entries exist as a documentation of the maker’s reflections on the research journey and contribute to the development of both practical and theoretical renderings of the research. Inspired by the notion of ‘tacet’ (broadly, ‘silence’) as used in John Cage’s work, 4’33”, the research aims to invite the reader, the viewer and the listener to be silent and to ‘listen’ to the research, together with the maker, who also acts as the author and the composer. Thus, rather than acting as a series of problem-solving investigations for knowledge acquisition, the research is essentially the journey of the investigation of the maker’s tacit awareness of other related issues including modernist artists, film, architecture, the relationship between fashion and art, and curatorial display. This, in turn, adds to the value of the practice-led research, elevating it to an interdisciplinary study

THE VARIETIES OF USER EXPERIENCE BRIDGING EMBODIED METHODOLOGIES FROM SOMATICS AND PERFORMANCE TO HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION

Embodied Interaction continues to gain significance within the field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI). Its growing recognition and value is evidenced in part by a remarkable increase in systems design and publication focusing on various aspects of Embodiment. The enduring need to interact through experience has spawned a variety of interdisciplinary bridging strategies in the hope of gaining deeper understanding of human experience. Along with phenomenology, cognitive science, psychology and the arts, recent interdisciplinary contributions to HCI include the knowledge-rich domains of Somatics and Performance that carry long-standing traditions of embodied practice. The common ground between HCI and the fields of Somatics and Performance is based on the need to understand and model human experience. Yet, Somatics and Performance differ from normative HCI in their epistemological frameworks of embodiment. This is particularly evident in their histories of knowledge construction and representation. The contributions of Somatics and Performance to the history of embodiment are not yet fully understood within HCI. Differing epistemologies and their resulting approaches to experience identify an under-theorized area of research and an opportunity to develop a richer knowledge and practice base. This is examined by comparing theories and practices of embodied experience between HCI and Somatics (Performance) and analyzing influences, values and assumptions underlying epistemological frameworks. The analysis results in a set of design strategies based in embodied practices within Somatics and Performance. The subsequent application of these strategies is examined through a series of interactive art installations that employ embodied interaction as a central expression of technology. Case Studies provide evidence in the form of rigorously documented design processes that illustrate these strategies. This research exemplifies 'Research through Art' applied in the context of experience design for tangible, wearable and social interaction

Video Screen as Matrix of Sensations. A Multisensory Approach to the Artistic Development of Responsive Video Membranes

The immateriality of moving images is manifest on a plethora of surfaces, shapes, and formats. Artists have access to a cornucopia of tools and medium to develop different forms of interactivity between the body and media, space, and time. Thus, since the 1960s artists have been pushing the limits of both the virtual and the physical worlds, expanding and transforming the static, two-dimensional frame while utterly, attempting to escape its tangibility. But, what if the video screens evolve into a responsive video membrane specifically designed for chosen moving images? How could this catalyst of sensations push creativity forward? And how would people embrace this innovative form of visualization as it moves them even closer to its subjects? In addition to involving an transdisciplinary inquiry into the artistic development of two responsive video membranes for projected moving images, this doctoral research comprised the ethnographic investigations on how the video display’s materiality, spatiality, and interactivity are key factors in altering perception and augmenting sensory, affective, and cognitive responses to a moving image. Finally, I propose a multisensory approach to the design of responsive video membranes where an emphasis is placed on the interplay among sensory modalities, sensory memories, associations and the sensory imagination. This realization emerges from studies in the fields of fine arts, anthropology of the senses, computer science, and mechanical engineering

Haptics: Science, Technology, Applications

This open access book constitutes the proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Human Haptic Sensing and Touch Enabled Computer Applications, EuroHaptics 2022, held in Hamburg, Germany, in May 2022. The 36 regular papers included in this book were carefully reviewed and selected from 129 submissions. They were organized in topical sections as follows: haptic science; haptic technology; and haptic applications

Body Perception and Emotion within Clinical Eating Disorders and Non-Clinical Eating Disorder Psychopathology

Discontent towards one’s own body has become increasingly prevalent within Western culture, with greater body dissatisfaction implicated with higher risk of disordered eating. Specifically, aberrant eating attitudes and behaviours are associated with disturbances in one’s body image, which comprises the conscious representation of the body based on its perceptual, cognitive and affective evaluations. The present thesis investigates the role of sensory signals within body perception and its relationship with bodily emotions in the context of body image. This is investigated within clinical eating disorder populations, and in relation to eating disorder psychopathology within the non-clinical population. Chapter 2 investigates the role of perceptual and cognitive-affective components of body image within eating disorder groups, revealing an increased malleability of body perception accompanied by lower explicit and implicit body satisfaction compared with healthy controls. Chapter 3 explores how bodies are represented neurally in the Extrastriate Body Area amongst healthy females, in which patterns of response within this region were modulated by the interactive effect of visual perspective and body morphology. Chapter 4 further highlights the importance of visual perspective within body representation, showing that subjective embodiment towards a whole mannequin body can be induced from mere visual capture of congruent visuoproprioceptive signals when viewed from a first-person visual perspective. Chapter 5 explores the role of affective touch towards whole body ownership, with no enhancing effect of embodiment shown due to the interoceptive properties of affective touch. Finally, Chapter 6 assesses the psychometric properties of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire in the non-clinical population, to suggest that this measure may require reassessment in accordance with updated symptomology. Together, the present thesis uses diverse experimental methods to explore the perceptual and cognitive-affective components of body image, providing new insights into the way in which such components are investigated which can be used to inform future work within this research topic

Materialising the Unseen: The Multisensory Cinema of the Invisible Body

The long century of western cinema has produced numerous depictions of invisible bodies – those bodies that function as any other, save for the distinctive feature of their invisibility. The invisible body challenges conventions of cinematic production, presentation and reception, suggesting an ‘extra-visual’ cinema. But, as well as this, the invisible body also challenges conceptions of the limits and categorisation of the human sensorium. In tracing a sensory history of invisible bodies, this thesis is concerned with how such depictions connect with and contribute to constructions of the senses in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This thesis thus makes an original contribution to knowledge by asking: What kind of history of the senses can be found in the onscreen invisible body? In doing so, this thesis engages a film theory of the senses that asks what the depiction of the invisible body – itself a delicate cultural construction that has no direct equivalent in nature – brings to a cultural understanding of the modern sensorium. Chapter One introduces the sensualities of the invisible body in Die Nibelungen: Siegfried (1924). Chapter Two connects the imagery of The Invisible Man cycle (1933–1951) with a tendency towards sensory reconfiguration. Chapter Three addresses a Cold War phase of invisible extraterrestrials in terms of technologised sensory extension. Chapter Four identifies the late twentieth-century onscreen invisible body as representative of a reconstituted social sensorium. Finally, Chapter Five analyses sequences from The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–2003), interpreting invisible embodiment in relation to the disorientations of both pain and intersensoriality. Through my approach, I connect the multisensory with the multidisciplinary, identifying the unsettling character of the onscreen invisible body as a consequence of its taxonomical unsettling of sensory and media boundaries

Early Silk Road Photography: An Analysis of Dr. Maynard Owen Williams’ Photographs taken during the Citroën-Haardt Trans-Asiatic Expedition (1931-1932)

This thesis provides the first overview of the genre of Early Silk Road Photography and the first in-depth study of a key figure who contributed to it, Maynard Owen Williams. It analyses Williams’ photographs taken during the Citroën-Haardt Trans-Asiatic Expedition of 1931-32. The expedition sought to retrace and document the route taken by Marco Polo, whose travels are synonymous with the Silk Road. Williams’ photographs taken during the expedition were published in the US-based National Geographic Magazine (NGM), which was a pioneer in the field of photojournalism. Williams was the Head of NGM’s International Division at the time of the expedition. Research for the dissertation was undertaken at the Citroën archives in France, the NGM archives in Washington D.C. and at the Kalamazoo College archives in Michigan. The first part of the thesis analyses the factors that shaped Williams’ decisions about what objects and people to photograph on the expedition, and how he chose to photograph them. These involve influences that were common to the whole genre of Early Silk Road Photography (ch.1), including pre-photographic visual imagery, literary output relating to the Silk Road, perceptions of the Silk Road in popular culture, the impact of mass circulation magazines using photographs, the emergence of the ‘science’ of ethnography, and the growth of the ‘salvage’ concept in representations of the non-Western world. They also involve influences that were specific to Williams and his photographs on the Citroën-Haardt Expedition, including Williams’ relationship with his employer, the NGM and the objectives that the parties involved had for the expedition (ch. 2). Moreover, they involve his own and the NGM’s interactions with the interests and objectives of Citroën, as well as Williams’ relationship with the members of the expedition (ch. 3). The factors examined in chs.1-3 combined to shape the photo-journalistic outcome of the expedition and thus the NGM’s presentation of Asia and the Silk Road to its audience. They provide the analytical framework for the detailed examination undertaken in the second part of the dissertation of Williams’ photographs taken during the Citroën-Haardt Expedition. The photographs are examined around a set of themes: iconic images of the Silk Road, including means of transport, landscapes and commercial activity (ch,4); photographs that emphasise the difference between ‘them and us’, including photographs of religion and festivities, different “ethnic types” and the closely-related subject of their clothing and headdress (ch. 5); and photographs concerning the difficult subjects of opium and childhood (ch.6). This dissertation provides the first in depth examination of Early Silk Road Photography. It contributes to a deeper understanding of Western conceptions and photographic representations of the Silk Road and the West’s relationship with the region. Early Silk Road Photography helped to perpetuate and promote to a wide audience notions of Asia which had been created in previous centuries through non-photographic imagery. Unlike other visual media, photographs could be replicated on an infinite scale and distributed to a mass audience through numerous channels. Very few late 19th and early 20th century Westerners had travelled along the Silk Road. The wide availability of photographic material helped to shape Western perceptions of the Silk Road long after the era of Early Silk Road Photography ended in the 1940