Interacting with an inferred world: The challenge of machine learning for humane computer interaction

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><span>Classic theories of user interaction have been framed in relation to symbolic models of planning and problem solving, responding in part to the cognitive theories associated with AI research. However, the behavior of modern machine-learning systems is determined by statistical models of the world rather than explicit symbolic descriptions. Users increasingly interact with the world and with others in ways that are mediated by such models. This paper explores the way in which this new generation of technology raises fresh challenges for the critical evaluation of interactive systems. It closes with some proposed measures for the design of inference-based systems that are more open to humane design and use. </span></p></div></div></div>This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the Association for Computing Machinery via http://dx.doi.org/10.7146/aahcc.v1i1.2119

Smutty Little Movies: The Creation and Regulation of Adult Video, 1976-1986.

This dissertation examines the cultural and legal efforts to regulate, contain, limit, or eradicate pornography as the adult film industry transitioned from celluloid to home video. Beginning with the Panoram visual jukebox of the 1940s, through the peep show booths of the 1960s, and into the adult motels of the 1970s with their closed-circuit television systems, I trace the pre-history of privacy in terms of pornography and spectatorship, and then identify the key people, companies, and films involved in the early period of adult video in the late 1970s. The regulatory efforts against pornography signal larger cultural anxieties surrounding “appropriate” gendered and sexual behaviors for women. The industry self-regulated by appealing to narrative as a marker of “quality” and “respectability,” values that are central to the cultural battles over pornography and women’s sexuality. I explore how this historical struggle played itself out in a number of key texts and moments, including "Adult Video News," the first adult video trade journal, the formation of Femme Productions by former adult film performer Candida Royalle, and the establishment and consequences of the Meese Commission in 1986, which attempted to shift the national discourse on pornography. Drawing on a wide variety of material, including newspapers, mainstream and adult magazines, industry publications, trade journals, interviews, and other discourses to locate this somewhat liminal history, I de-center the film text in favor of industrial histories and contexts. In doing so, this dissertation argues that the struggles to contain and regulate pleasure represent a primary entry point for situating adult video’s place in a larger history, not just of pornography, but media history as a whole.PhDScreen Arts & CulturesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/99760/1/alilunas_1.pd

Deviant domesticity: an exploration of the spatial arrangement of erotic spaces of webcam models

The advancement of technological devices and ‘Web 2.0' has allowed users the opportunity to consume and produce content in different ways. Despite the growing significance of the internet, and its increased use for erotic purpose, research on webcamming is lacking, specifically regarding the relationship between the performer and how they construct and interact with their space. By taking an ethnographic approach to research, this thesis contributes to the understanding of the relationship between domestic space and sexual performance. From the data gathered in this research, I coined the term ‘constructed authenticity’ to show how performers carefully construct their performances spaces to appear authentic to their viewers, demonstrating the interplay between 'real' and 'reel'. Throughout this research, I argue how the interconnectivity that webcamming provides creates a more fluid idea of how surveillance and visibility in the domestic space can be understood, moving past the binary concept of the private and public realms. This thesis provides a contribution to the criminological understanding of erotic spaces of webcam performers and how these spaces can be linked to gender performativity

Between the Gothic and Surveillance: Gay (Male) Identity, Fiction Film, and Pornography (1970-2015)

In this thesis I make the case for rethinking fictional and explicit queer representation as a form of surveillance. I put recent research in surveillance studies, particularly work on informational doubling, in conversation with the concepts of the uncanny and the doppelgänger to reconsider the legacy of screen theory and cinematic discipline in relation to the ongoing ideological struggle between normativity and queerness. I begin my investigation in and around the Stonewall era examining the gothic roots and incarnation of gay identity. I then trace the formation and development of identity through cinematic and pornographic representation taking critical snapshots of four identifiable epochs organized around a seismic socio-political disjuncture: after Anita Bryant’s “Save Our Children” campaign in the late 70s and early 80s; during the AIDS crisis between the mid-80s and mid-90s; after the AIDS crisis in the late 90s when family politics took centre stage; and in the midst of the “bareback crisis” in the new millennium. I argue that in order to understand the crisis in contemporary queer cultural politics heavily influenced by the rupture in uniform safer-sex practices we must trace the lineage of figurative identity through fiction and hard core film back to its post-Stonewall incarnation. It is my ultimate contention that the strategic deployment of homogeneous identity via social, personal, and sexual identification with the image double became a way to control the streets without having to be on the streets. Mainstream(ed) representation became, and remains, a brilliantly insidious form of social engineering and not a path toward liberation and freedom. Homosexuality exists outside the field of the visible, but the gay and queer do not. I argue that through film and porn metaphysical identities were strategically manufactured which queer individuals were and are compelled and convinced to identify with and mimic, culminating in an ideological and representational schism in the twenty-first century whose effect on lived experience has had significant consequences

Whole Issue 2020

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO LEGAL FORUM VOLUME 202

Dying in Full Detail

In 'Dying in Full Detail' Jennifer Malkowski explores digital media's impact on one of documentary film's greatest taboos: the recording of death. Despite technological advances that allow for the easy creation and distribution of death footage, digital media often fail to live up to their promise to reveal the world in greater fidelity. Malkowski analyzes a wide range of death footage, from feature films about the terminally ill (Dying, Silverlake Life, Sick), to surreptitiously recorded suicides (The Bridge), to #BlackLivesMatter YouTube videos and their precursors. Contextualizing these recordings in the long history of attempts to capture the moment of death in American culture, Malkowski shows how digital media are unable to deliver death "in full detail," as its metaphysical truth remains beyond representation