The Arena Spectacular from Ben Hur Live to Isles of Wonder: Adaptation, Post-cinema and the Postcivil

What is an ‘arena spectacular’ and why has this genre of live entertainment gained international popularity in the twenty-first century? This study looks at three arena spectaculars: Ben Hur Live, Batman Live and Walking with Dinosaurs Live – all adapted from film or TV productions and performed in London’s O2 Arena between 2007 and 2012. I contextualise the shows with the work of Cirque du Soleil, the Millennium Dome and the city of Las Vegas. However, I argue that the format reached its fullest expression in Britain with the opening ceremony to the London 2012 Olympics, Danny Boyle’s Isles of Wonder. This study proposes that there are specific affective and economic factors within neoliberal and post-cinematic society that make the spatialised, live and ‘unmediated’ performance of a known image or hypertext into an attractive commodity. The arena spectacular should be understood via post-cinematic image-making and the fluidity with which images move from screen, to site and back will be explored here as a commercial process of ‘remediation’. An aggregate of older devices and media that seems to be defined in heterotopic contradistinction to a digital media regime, this format can be explained through contemporaneous qualities of public space, immaterial labour, government and consumption. This analysis is an attempt at grasping the ‘offer’ of these products – through their advertising, merchandise and the shows themselves. What is their affordance; what experiences do they allow and how does this benefit both consumers and producers? Despite their economic and cultural marginality, perhaps these entertainment productions can be seen in some ways as archetypal products of the early twenty-first century

Exploring Place Attachment Theory in VR of a Rural Destination: The effect of VR Experience on domestic tourists’ attachment to places

Virtual Reality (VR) has the power to transform tourism experiences. VR can enhance the pre-, on-site, and post-travel stage by offering a range of new and innovative digital experiences. Place attachment (PA) theory can be described as people’s emotional bond to places. One of the key aspects of developing PA is due to positive place experiences. Hence, the tourist experience represents a critical factor in forming attachments to destinations. In the last decade, PA studies in tourism have increasingly examined how tourists form emotional bonds to places. The benefits of PA may lead to a range of positive outcomes for destinations such as sustainability, loyalty or place satisfaction. However, limited studies have explored how immersive experiences impact tourists’ attachment with destinations. Therefore, to address the gap, this doctoral thesis aimed to explore to what extent VR has an impact on tourists’ experience and attachment to a rural destination. For this purpose, an exploratory sequential mixed method research design was followed. The research was carried out at the biggest national park in the UK, Lake District National Park. The sample for both data collection stages involved repeated domestic tourists. Within the first qualitative stage, data was collected by using semi-structured interviews and analysed using thematic analysis to reveal new PA themes in a VR setting. The new identified themes were accessibility, aesthetics, presence, memories, increased place knowledge and Increased Intention to Revisit and Place Attachment. The second stage included a questionnaire and included a larger sample of repeat tourists to test the proposed model. For this purpose, the PA framework was tested by using the partial least square analysis. The findings found a significant impact of VR on tourists’ PA. However, the type of VR experience differed based on tourists’ existing PA level. The theoretical contribution of this thesis lies in proposing and validating the PA framework by integrating VR into PA. Furthermore, the thesis also presented methodological contribution and practical implications

The Arena Spectacular from Ben Hur Live to Isles of Wonder: Adaptation, Post-cinema and the Postcivil

What is an ‘arena spectacular’ and why has this genre of live entertainment gained international popularity in the twenty-first century? This study looks at three arena spectaculars: Ben Hur Live, Batman Live and Walking with Dinosaurs Live – all adapted from film or TV productions and performed in London’s O2 Arena between 2007 and 2012. I contextualise the shows with the work of Cirque du Soleil, the Millennium Dome and the city of Las Vegas. However, I argue that the format reached its fullest expression in Britain with the opening ceremony to the London 2012 Olympics, Danny Boyle’s Isles of Wonder. This study proposes that there are specific affective and economic factors within neoliberal and post-cinematic society that make the spatialised, live and ‘unmediated’ performance of a known image or hypertext into an attractive commodity. The arena spectacular should be understood via post-cinematic image-making and the fluidity with which images move from screen, to site and back will be explored here as a commercial process of ‘remediation’. An aggregate of older devices and media that seems to be defined in heterotopic contradistinction to a digital media regime, this format can be explained through contemporaneous qualities of public space, immaterial labour, government and consumption. This analysis is an attempt at grasping the ‘offer’ of these products – through their advertising, merchandise and the shows themselves. What is their affordance; what experiences do they allow and how does this benefit both consumers and producers? Despite their economic and cultural marginality, perhaps these entertainment productions can be seen in some ways as archetypal products of the early twenty-first century

The Arena Spectacular from Ben Hur Live to Isles of Wonder: Adaptation, Post-cinema and the Postcivil

What is an ‘arena spectacular’ and why has this genre of live entertainment gained international popularity in the twenty-first century? This study looks at three arena spectaculars: Ben Hur Live, Batman Live and Walking with Dinosaurs Live – all adapted from film or TV productions and performed in London’s O2 Arena between 2007 and 2012. I contextualise the shows with the work of Cirque du Soleil, the Millennium Dome and the city of Las Vegas. However, I argue that the format reached its fullest expression in Britain with the opening ceremony to the London 2012 Olympics, Danny Boyle’s Isles of Wonder. This study proposes that there are specific affective and economic factors within neoliberal and post-cinematic society that make the spatialised, live and ‘unmediated’ performance of a known image or hypertext into an attractive commodity. The arena spectacular should be understood via post-cinematic image-making and the fluidity with which images move from screen, to site and back will be explored here as a commercial process of ‘remediation’. An aggregate of older devices and media that seems to be defined in heterotopic contradistinction to a digital media regime, this format can be explained through contemporaneous qualities of public space, immaterial labour, government and consumption. This analysis is an attempt at grasping the ‘offer’ of these products – through their advertising, merchandise and the shows themselves. What is their affordance; what experiences do they allow and how does this benefit both consumers and producers? Despite their economic and cultural marginality, perhaps these entertainment productions can be seen in some ways as archetypal products of the early twenty-first century

Convivial Making: Power in Public Library Creative Places

In 2011, public libraries began to provide access to collaborative creative places, frequently called “makerspaces.” The professional literature portrays these as beneficial for communities and individuals through their support of creativity, innovation, learning, and access to high-tech tools such as 3D printers. As in longstanding “library faith” narratives, which pin the library’s existence to widely held values, makerspace rhetoric describes access to tools and skills as instrumental for a stronger economy or democracy, social justice, and/or individual happiness. The rhetoric generally frames these places as empowering. Yet the concept of power has been neither well-theorized within the library makerspace literature nor explored in previous studies. This study fills the gap between the rhetoric and the reality of power, as described by the stakeholders, including staff, trustees, and users of the library. Potentially, library creative places could be what Ivan Illich calls convivial tools: tools that manifest social relations involving equitable distributions of power and decision-making. A convivial tool ensures that users may decide to which end they would like to apply the tool, and thus are constitutive of human capabilities and social justice. However, the characterization of library makerspaces in the literature evokes a technologically deterministic entrepreneurialism that marginalizes many types of making, and reduces the power of individuals to choose the ends to which they put this tool. This multi-site ethnographic study seeks to unravel the currents of power within three public library creative places. Through participant observation, document analysis, and interviews, the study traces the mechanisms and processes by which power is distributed, as enacted by institutional practices—the spaces, policies, tools, and programs—or through individual practices. The study finds seven key tensions that coalesce around the concept of conviviality, and also reveals seven capabilities of convivial tools that the users and providers of these spaces identify as crucial to their successful and satisfying implementation. As a user-centered exploration of the interactions of power in a public institution, this study can benefit a range of organizations that aim to further inclusion, equity, and social justice

Mirror Affect: Interpersonal Spectatorship in Installation Art since the 1960s

This dissertation traces the genealogy of interpersonal spectatorship in contemporary installations that encourage viewers to affectively relate to one another by watching themselves seeing and acting individually or as a group. By incorporating reflective surfaces, live video feedback, or sensors in their works, contemporary artists around the world have been challenging what had come to be a binary relation between the beholder and the art object, thereby, heightening viewers' awareness of the social and spatial contexts of aesthetic experience. Starting with the 1960s there has been not only an increasingly sharp departure from the autonomy of the art object on the part of artists, but also a rejection of prevailing self-focused and private modes of art spectatorship on the part of viewers of art. Situated between theories of relational aesthetics and new media theories of interactivity, my dissertation examines the social, cultural, and technological factors that have contributed to the production of installations that act as affective interfaces between multiple viewers. I argue that contemporary artworks with mirroring properties have triggered a shift towards increasingly public and interpersonal forms of art spectatorship that are consonant with the emergence of new modes of perception and sociability shaped by enhanced surveillance, unavoidable multitasking, and online networking