The Cinematic Aesthetics of Digital Virtualism

This dissertation explores the cinematic ontology of digital virtualism in the context of the current trend to digitalisation. I define digital virtualism as the aesthetics of assemblage and configuration in the age of digital images. This definition implies that digital technology strengthens the complex tension between physical reality and imaginary illusion. Based on computer simulation and synthesis, the digital image intensifies the contradiction between cinematic materiality and immateriality. Digital virtualism is the aesthetics of historical hybridity and aesthetic complexity between the actual and the virtual, the indexical and the symbolic, the material and the immaterial, the real and the imaginary. In this context, this thesis examines the aesthetical relationship of filmic virtuality and the digital image. In particular, I assert that the digital image is the new form and expansion of filmic virtuality. While film is always the art of the virtual, that is, the aesthetic imbrication of actual indexicality and imaginary illusion, the digital image intensifies the contradiction of filmic virtuality between reality and illusion. On one hand, computer simulation reinforces the indexicality of film by the principle of perceptual realism. On the other hand, it attenuates the causality between the object and the image by digital manipulation. I argue that digital technology simultaneously intensifies both filmic reality and the manipulation of the imaginary. Thus, the digital image expands the expressive force and aesthetic potential of cinema. After examining the cinematic aesthetics of realism, modernism, postmodernism, and digital aesthetics after postmodernism, this dissertation investigates the aesthetical implications of Deleuzian virtuality in the age of the digital image. Deleuze presents the cinematic aesthetics of virtual conjunction in the monism of simulacra, which implies the indiscernible and inextricable imbrication of the actual and the virtual, original and copy, reality and image, and cinematic movement and time. Following the discussion of the aesthetical ontology of Deleuzian virtuality, this dissertation theorises the assemblage aesthetics of digital virtualism. Consequently, this dissertation proposes the subjective and practical task of digital ethics. Digital technology intensifies the spectacular attraction of images and the interactive participation of spectators in the cinematic process. In contrast, the digital image reveals technological fetishism and aesthetic commercialisation. Based on the ontological contradiction of the digital image, this dissertation articulates the configurative aesthetics and the subjective ethics of digital virtualism

The Cinematic Aesthetics of Digital Virtualism

This dissertation explores the cinematic ontology of digital virtualism in the context of the current trend to digitalisation. I define digital virtualism as the aesthetics of assemblage and configuration in the age of digital images. This definition implies that digital technology strengthens the complex tension between physical reality and imaginary illusion. Based on computer simulation and synthesis, the digital image intensifies the contradiction between cinematic materiality and immateriality. Digital virtualism is the aesthetics of historical hybridity and aesthetic complexity between the actual and the virtual, the indexical and the symbolic, the material and the immaterial, the real and the imaginary. In this context, this thesis examines the aesthetical relationship of filmic virtuality and the digital image. In particular, I assert that the digital image is the new form and expansion of filmic virtuality. While film is always the art of the virtual, that is, the aesthetic imbrication of actual indexicality and imaginary illusion, the digital image intensifies the contradiction of filmic virtuality between reality and illusion. On one hand, computer simulation reinforces the indexicality of film by the principle of perceptual realism. On the other hand, it attenuates the causality between the object and the image by digital manipulation. I argue that digital technology simultaneously intensifies both filmic reality and the manipulation of the imaginary. Thus, the digital image expands the expressive force and aesthetic potential of cinema. After examining the cinematic aesthetics of realism, modernism, postmodernism, and digital aesthetics after postmodernism, this dissertation investigates the aesthetical implications of Deleuzian virtuality in the age of the digital image. Deleuze presents the cinematic aesthetics of virtual conjunction in the monism of simulacra, which implies the indiscernible and inextricable imbrication of the actual and the virtual, original and copy, reality and image, and cinematic movement and time. Following the discussion of the aesthetical ontology of Deleuzian virtuality, this dissertation theorises the assemblage aesthetics of digital virtualism. Consequently, this dissertation proposes the subjective and practical task of digital ethics. Digital technology intensifies the spectacular attraction of images and the interactive participation of spectators in the cinematic process. In contrast, the digital image reveals technological fetishism and aesthetic commercialisation. Based on the ontological contradiction of the digital image, this dissertation articulates the configurative aesthetics and the subjective ethics of digital virtualism

Acoustic-based Smart Tactile Sensing in Social Robots

Mención Internacional en el título de doctorEl sentido del tacto es un componente crucial de la interacción social humana y es único entre los cinco sentidos. Como único sentido proximal, el tacto requiere un contacto físico cercano o directo para registrar la información. Este hecho convierte al tacto en una modalidad de interacción llena de posibilidades en cuanto a comunicación social. A través del tacto, podemos conocer la intención de la otra persona y comunicar emociones. De esta idea surge el concepto de social touch o tacto social como el acto de tocar a otra persona en un contexto social. Puede servir para diversos fines, como saludar, mostrar afecto, persuadir y regular el bienestar emocional y físico. Recientemente, el número de personas que interactúan con sistemas y agentes artificiales ha aumentado, principalmente debido al auge de los dispositivos tecnológicos, como los smartphones o los altavoces inteligentes. A pesar del auge de estos dispositivos, sus capacidades de interacción son limitadas. Para paliar este problema, los recientes avances en robótica social han mejorado las posibilidades de interacción para que los agentes funcionen de forma más fluida y sean más útiles. En este sentido, los robots sociales están diseñados para facilitar interacciones naturales entre humanos y agentes artificiales. El sentido del tacto en este contexto se revela como un vehículo natural que puede mejorar la Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) debido a su relevancia comunicativa en entornos sociales. Además de esto, para un robot social, la relación entre el tacto social y su aspecto es directa, al disponer de un cuerpo físico para aplicar o recibir toques. Desde un punto de vista técnico, los sistemas de detección táctil han sido objeto recientemente de nuevas investigaciones, sobre todo dedicado a comprender este sentido para crear sistemas inteligentes que puedan mejorar la vida de las personas. En este punto, los robots sociales se han convertido en dispositivos muy populares que incluyen tecnologías para la detección táctil. Esto está motivado por el hecho de que un robot puede esperada o inesperadamente tener contacto físico con una persona, lo que puede mejorar o interferir en la ejecución de sus comportamientos. Por tanto, el sentido del tacto se antoja necesario para el desarrollo de aplicaciones robóticas. Algunos métodos incluyen el reconocimiento de gestos táctiles, aunque a menudo exigen importantes despliegues de hardware que requieren de múltiples sensores. Además, la fiabilidad de estas tecnologías de detección es limitada, ya que la mayoría de ellas siguen teniendo problemas tales como falsos positivos o tasas de reconocimiento bajas. La detección acústica, en este sentido, puede proporcionar un conjunto de características capaces de paliar las deficiencias anteriores. A pesar de que se trata de una tecnología utilizada en diversos campos de investigación, aún no se ha integrado en la interacción táctil entre humanos y robots. Por ello, en este trabajo proponemos el sistema Acoustic Touch Recognition (ATR), un sistema inteligente de detección táctil (smart tactile sensing system) basado en la detección acústica y diseñado para mejorar la interacción social humano-robot. Nuestro sistema está desarrollado para clasificar gestos táctiles y localizar su origen. Además de esto, se ha integrado en plataformas robóticas sociales y se ha probado en aplicaciones reales con éxito. Nuestra propuesta se ha enfocado desde dos puntos de vista: uno técnico y otro relacionado con el tacto social. Por un lado, la propuesta tiene una motivación técnica centrada en conseguir un sistema táctil rentable, modular y portátil. Para ello, en este trabajo se ha explorado el campo de las tecnologías de detección táctil, los sistemas inteligentes de detección táctil y su aplicación en HRI. Por otro lado, parte de la investigación se centra en el impacto afectivo del tacto social durante la interacción humano-robot, lo que ha dado lugar a dos estudios que exploran esta idea.The sense of touch is a crucial component of human social interaction and is unique among the five senses. As the only proximal sense, touch requires close or direct physical contact to register information. This fact makes touch an interaction modality full of possibilities regarding social communication. Through touch, we are able to ascertain the other person’s intention and communicate emotions. From this idea emerges the concept of social touch as the act of touching another person in a social context. It can serve various purposes, such as greeting, showing affection, persuasion, and regulating emotional and physical well-being. Recently, the number of people interacting with artificial systems and agents has increased, mainly due to the rise of technological devices, such as smartphones or smart speakers. Still, these devices are limited in their interaction capabilities. To deal with this issue, recent developments in social robotics have improved the interaction possibilities to make agents more seamless and useful. In this sense, social robots are designed to facilitate natural interactions between humans and artificial agents. In this context, the sense of touch is revealed as a natural interaction vehicle that can improve HRI due to its communicative relevance. Moreover, for a social robot, the relationship between social touch and its embodiment is direct, having a physical body to apply or receive touches. From a technical standpoint, tactile sensing systems have recently been the subject of further research, mostly devoted to comprehending this sense to create intelligent systems that can improve people’s lives. Currently, social robots are popular devices that include technologies for touch sensing. This is motivated by the fact that robots may encounter expected or unexpected physical contact with humans, which can either enhance or interfere with the execution of their behaviours. There is, therefore, a need to detect human touch in robot applications. Some methods even include touch-gesture recognition, although they often require significant hardware deployments primarily that require multiple sensors. Additionally, the dependability of those sensing technologies is constrained because the majority of them still struggle with issues like false positives or poor recognition rates. Acoustic sensing, in this sense, can provide a set of features that can alleviate the aforementioned shortcomings. Even though it is a technology that has been utilised in various research fields, it has yet to be integrated into human-robot touch interaction. Therefore, in thiswork,we propose theATRsystem, a smart tactile sensing system based on acoustic sensing designed to improve human-robot social interaction. Our system is developed to classify touch gestures and locate their source. It is also integrated into real social robotic platforms and tested in real-world applications. Our proposal is approached from two standpoints, one technical and the other related to social touch. Firstly, the technical motivation of thiswork centred on achieving a cost-efficient, modular and portable tactile system. For that, we explore the fields of touch sensing technologies, smart tactile sensing systems and their application in HRI. On the other hand, part of the research is centred around the affective impact of touch during human-robot interaction, resulting in two studies exploring this idea.Programa de Doctorado en Ingeniería Eléctrica, Electrónica y Automática por la Universidad Carlos III de MadridPresidente: Pedro Manuel Urbano de Almeida Lima.- Secretaria: María Dolores Blanco Rojas.- Vocal: Antonio Fernández Caballer

Varieties of evolved forms of consciousness, including mathematical consciousness

I shall introduce a complex, apparently unique, cross-disciplinary approach to understanding consciousness, especially ancient forms of mathematical consciousness, based on joint work with Jackie Chappell (Birmingham Biosciences) on the Meta-Configured Genome (MCG) theory. All known forms of consciousness (apart from recent very simple AI forms) are products of biological evolution, in some cases augmented by products of social, or technological evolution. Forms of consciousness differ between organisms with different sensory mechanisms, needs and abilities; and in complex animals can vary across different stages of development before and after birth or hatching or pupation, and before or after sexual and other kinds of maturity (or senility). Those forms can differ across individuals with different natural talents and environments, some with and some without fully functional sense organs or motor control functions (in humans: hearing, sight, touch, taste, smell, proprioception and other senses), along with mechanisms supporting meta-cognitive functions such as recollection, expectation, foreboding, error correction, and so forth, and varying forms of conscious control differing partly because of physical differences, such as conjoined twins sharing body parts. Forms of consciousness can also differ across individuals in different cultures with different shared theories, and social practices (e.g., art-forms, musical traditions, religions, etc.). There are many unanswered questions about such varieties of consciousness in products of biological evolution. Most of the details are completely ignored by most philosophers and scientists who focus only on a small subset of types of human consciousness—resulting in shallow theories. Immanuel Kant was deeper than most, though his insights, especially insights into mathematical consciousness tend to be ignored by recent philosophers and scientists, for bad reasons. This paper, partly inspired by Turing’s 1952 paper on chemistry-based morphogenesis, supporting William James’ observation that all known forms of consciousness must have been products of biological evolution in combination with other influences, attempts to provide (still tentative and incomplete) foundations for a proper study of the variety of biological and non-biological forms of consciousness, including the types of mathematical consciousness identified by Kant in 1781

Animating Truth

Animating Truth examines the rise of animated documentary in the 21st century, and addresses how non-photorealistic animation is increasingly used to depict and shape reality

Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film industries like Bollywood and Nollywood aim to attain Hollywood's audience and profitability, while smaller, less commercial, and often state-funded enterprises support various cultural and political projects. The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an ethnographic and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries. They outline how modularity—the specialized filmmaking tasks that collectively produce a film—operates as a key feature in every film industry, independent of local context. Whether they are examining the process of dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi, virtual reality filmmaking in South Africa, or on-location shooting in Yemen, the contributors' anthropological methodology brings into relief the universal practices and the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities of film production. Contributors. Steven C. Caton, Jessica Dickson, Kevin Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Amrita Ibrahim, Sylvia J. Martin, Ramyar D. Rossouk

Never Seen Before--Again: Aesthetic Adaptation and Transmedia Storytelling Networks in the Age of Digital Cinema

The primary purpose of this study is to re-evaluate the theorization of the narrative/non-narrative divide in cinema because there is still far too much rich information that is being lost in the chasm left between these two positions, particularly when it comes to the study of spectacular imagery. Working beyond the binary construction of a narrative/non-narrative divide allows for a more nuanced and dynamic analysis of the information that is conveyed by the cinematic image and, more specifically, by way of its aesthetic design. By no means is this study championing image over story or any other such formulation; rather it aims to free both image and story from the constraints of narratological binary models and the binary language of narratology, because in practice cinema does not adhere to narrative/non-narrative narratological models. It is through an exploration of contemporary theories of visual effects that I launch my investigation. I argue that there are many agents (and agencies) that convey information in the cinema and that not all information will come in a form that is easily described by narratological terminology. Visual effects have become a focal point of the narrative/non-narrative divide and thus provide a constructive territory in which to interrogate: (1) how visual effects theory influences the theorization of contemporary film aesthetics; (2) how as film theorists we have arrived at this moment in which narrative disruptions occupy such an integral part of digital film theory; and (3), what we are missing if we maintain our current binaristic narrative/non-narrative rhetoric. Ultimately, the purpose of this study is to propose a dynamic, non-binary model to address the post-narrative/non-narrative nature of cinema: the theory of aesthetic adaptation

Unpresentable landscapes and the art of the index

This practice-led PhD determines an aesthetic approach through which a sense of the ‘unpresentable’ may be exposed within camera-based representations of the industrial landscape. Through an interrogation of contemporary lens-based media, it proposes ways in which experiences problematic to representation – such as the sublime, the uncanny and the traumatic – might be revealed within photographic/filmic images of such landscapes. The culmination of the practical element of the project is a 25-minute narrative-based, single channel video piece entitled Re: Flamingo, which combines HDV and Super-8 footage with digital and traditional still photography. The narrative structure of the work is based on E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story The Sandman (1816), which Freud cited in his essay The Uncanny (1919). Re: Flamingo is a semiautobiographical variation on that tale, consisting of an email conversation between the artist, his father and the fictional ‘Clara’. Through this correspondence, the piece reveals correlations between themes in The Sandman and Ridley Scott’s science fiction film Blade Runner (1982) (e.g. traumatic memory, a fascination with eyes/sight and each protagonist’s obsession with mechanized life). It reflects upon how the industrial landscape of Teesside – which inspired many of the visuals in Scott’s film – has been remembered in different photographic media by three generations of the artist's family. The practical submission is supported by a contextual written element, which consists of two parts. Part One is a theoretical review. Firstly it traces philosophical and aesthetic approaches to the sublime, its representation, its status as a subjective experience and its presence within the industrial landscape (Lyotard, Kant, Derrida, Nye). This is continued through an analysis of the related theories of the uncanny and the traumatic (Freud, Vidler, Luckhurst), their association with industrialization and relationship with lens-based media. The uncanny qualities of the photographic and cinematic image are examined alongside correlations of the indexical properties of such images with trauma (Mulvey, Barthes). Finally, an analysis of the camera image’s indexical status in the wake of digitization, and its consequent alignment with artforms such as painting (Gunning, Rodowick, Manovich), assesses its potential for expressing subjective experience. Part Two of the contextual element explores creative approaches to the themes outlined in Part One. Firstly, it examines Canadian artist Stan Douglas’s film piece Der Sandmann (1995), which exposes a sense of the uncanny in the landscape of pre- and post-reunification Germany. Secondly, it reflects upon Blade Runner’s significance to the practical element and its correlations with the Sandman narrative. The final section of Part Two details the development and formation of the studio research, documenting its distinctive approach to figuring a sense of the unpresentable within camera-based representations of the industrial landscape.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceArts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) : Newcastle UniversityGBUnited Kingdo

Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity

From Bangladesh and Hong Kong to Iran and South Africa, film industries around the world are rapidly growing at a time when new digital technologies are fundamentally changing how films are made and viewed. Larger film industries like Bollywood and Nollywood aim to attain Hollywood's audience and profitability, while smaller, less commercial, and often state-funded enterprises support various cultural and political projects. The contributors to Anthropology, Film Industries, Modularity take an ethnographic and comparative approach to capturing the diversity and growth of global film industries. They outline how modularity—the specialized filmmaking tasks that collectively produce a film—operates as a key feature in every film industry, independent of local context. Whether they are examining the process of dubbing Hollywood films into Hindi, virtual reality filmmaking in South Africa, or on-location shooting in Yemen, the contributors' anthropological methodology brings into relief the universal practices and the local contingencies and deeper cultural realities of film production. Contributors. Steven C. Caton, Jessica Dickson, Kevin Dwyer, Tejaswini Ganti, Lotte Hoek, Amrita Ibrahim, Sylvia J. Martin, Ramyar D. Rossouk