Gone to Earth: Cinematic Encounters with the British Rural Landscape

Through a synthesis of critical and practical research, this thesis looks beyond semiotic approaches to film landscape which consistently view the representation of countryside in film as a metonym for the national. My research is concerned instead with an interaction with land which is experiential, embodied and felt. Considering the ways in which landscape imprints itself upon our physical and spiritual selves, the thesis investigates rural space through the sensorium of the body, engaging with both the elemental properties of soil and stone and the substrata of myth, memory and dream to formulate a model for an embodied and enchanted British landscape cinema. Within a framework of film phenomenology, the thesis questions aesthetic readings of film landscape borrowed from art history and looks instead to anthropological conceptions of landscape as dwelt space, the result of a persistent communion between occupant and land. Considering landscape and the natural sublime from gendered perspectives, as products of a male gaze reinforcing men’s domination over women and nature, the thesis proposes an alternative conception of landscape and sublimity which are rooted in material immanence rather than transcendental distance. Through this process, the work advocates a new kind of occupation of the British countryside which challenges human sovereignty over nature and resists the colonial hegemonies of ownership and possession. My practical enquiry into landscape and rurality is informed by my work as cinematographer, sound recordist and sound editor. Through this multidisciplinary approach, the research questions the primacy of vision in cinema’s representation of countryside. Contributing to discourse on soundscape, film sound and field recording, the thesis contends that ocularcentric interpretations of landscape often estrange and exile us from the land whilst sound-led filmmaking approaches invite us towards it. The thesis enquires about cinematic rural space from perspectives of film realism and proposes an alternative, hybridised model of realism to account for our occupancy of the countryside. Drawing from diverse magical realist film texts as well as existing discourse on magical realism, my work speculates that the imbrication of realism and fable grants access to long repressed systems of thought within the countryside and, crucially, places human creative imagination at the centre of our sensorial engagement with rural space. In their different approaches to sounding and visualising the countryside, the two films which comprise my practical research enable us, as filmmaker and viewer, to consider how imaginary, non-naturalistic representations of the rural help to reclaim the British countryside for ourselves

Voicing Kinship with Machines: Diffractive Empathetic Listening to Synthetic Voices in Performance.

This thesis contributes to the field of voice studies by analyzing the design and production of synthetic voices in performance. The work explores six case studies, consisting of different performative experiences of the last decade (2010- 2020) that featured synthetic voice design. It focusses on the political and social impact of synthetic voices, starting from yet challenging the concepts of voice in the machine and voice of the machine. The synthetic voices explored are often playing the role of simulated artificial intelligences, therefore this thesis expands its questions towards technology at large. The analysis of the case studies follows new materialist and posthumanist premises, yet it tries to confute the patriarchal and neoliberal approach towards technological development through feminist and de-colonial approaches, developing a taxonomy for synthetic voices in performance. Chapter 1 introduces terms and explains the taxonomy. Chapter 2 looks at familiar representations of fictional AI. Chapter 3 introduces headphone theatre exploring immersive practices. Chapters 4 and 5 engage with chatbots. Chapter 6 goes in depth exploring Human and Artificial Intelligence interaction, whereas chapter 7 moves slightly towards music production and live art. The body of the thesis includes the work of Pipeline Theatre, Rimini Protokoll, Annie Dorsen, Begüm Erciyas, and Holly Herndon. The analysis is informed by posthumanism, feminism, and performance studies, starting from my own practice as sound designer and singer, looking at aesthetics of reproduction, audience engagement, and voice composition. This thesis has been designed to inspire and provoke practitioners and scholars to explore synthetic voices further, question predominant biases of binarism and acknowledge their importance in redefining technology

Stylistic atructures: a computational approach to text classification

The problem of authorship attribution has received attention both in the academic world (e.g. did Shakespeare or Marlowe write Edward III?) and outside (e.g. is this confession really the words of the accused or was it made up by someone else?). Previous studies by statisticians and literary scholars have sought "verbal habits" that characterize particular authors consistently. By and large, this has meant looking for distinctive rates of usage of specific marker words -- as in the classic study by Mosteller and Wallace of the Federalist Papers. The present study is based on the premiss that authorship attribution is just one type of text classification and that advances in this area can be made by applying and adapting techniques from the field of machine learning. Five different trainable text-classification systems are described, which differ from current stylometric practice in a number of ways, in particular by using a wider variety of marker patterns than customary and by seeking such markers automatically, without being told what to look for. A comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of these systems, when tested on a representative range of text-classification problems, confirms the importance of paying more attention than usual to alternative methods of representing distinctive differences between types of text. The thesis concludes with suggestions on how to make further progress towards the goal of a fully automatic, trainable text-classification system

Stylistic atructures: a computational approach to text classification

The problem of authorship attribution has received attention both in the academic world (e.g. did Shakespeare or Marlowe write Edward III?) and outside (e.g. is this confession really the words of the accused or was it made up by someone else?). Previous studies by statisticians and literary scholars have sought "verbal habits" that characterize particular authors consistently. By and large, this has meant looking for distinctive rates of usage of specific marker words -- as in the classic study by Mosteller and Wallace of the Federalist Papers. The present study is based on the premiss that authorship attribution is just one type of text classification and that advances in this area can be made by applying and adapting techniques from the field of machine learning. Five different trainable text-classification systems are described, which differ from current stylometric practice in a number of ways, in particular by using a wider variety of marker patterns than customary and by seeking such markers automatically, without being told what to look for. A comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of these systems, when tested on a representative range of text-classification problems, confirms the importance of paying more attention than usual to alternative methods of representing distinctive differences between types of text. The thesis concludes with suggestions on how to make further progress towards the goal of a fully automatic, trainable text-classification system

2012 GREAT Day Program

SUNY Geneseo’s Sixth Annual GREAT Day.https://knightscholar.geneseo.edu/program-2007/1006/thumbnail.jp

Altering urbanscapes: South African writers re-imagining Johannesburg, with specific reference to Lauren Beukes, K. Sello Duiker, Nadine Gordimer and Phaswane Mpe

The following dissertation considers the ways in which we have come to perceive of our post-apartheid South African urban spaces. It focusses on the representation of our contemporary urban spaces as I posit that they are re-imagined in the works of Phaswane Mpe, K.Sello Duiker, Nadine Gordimer and Lauren Beukes. In particular, it is concerned with the representation of Johannesburg, and specifically Hillbrow, in relation to the space of the rural, the suburban enclave and the city of Cape Town. I argue that while so-called urban ‘slums’ such as Hillbrow have been denigrated in the local imaginary, the texts that I have selected draw attention to the potentialities of such spaces. Rather than aspiring to ‘First World’ aesthetics of modernity then, we might come to see such spaces as Hillbrow anew, and even to learn from them as models, so as to better create more fully integrated and dynamic African cities

Women and queer British South Asian Instagrammers

The following thesis centers the socio-digital lives of women and queer members from the British South Asian digital diaspora, providing an account of the ambivalent nature of digital identity work. More specifically, it is invested in engaging participants in reflecting on their own engagements and the engagements of others on Instagram. I then critically analyse how they simultaneously resist and reproduce neoliberal logics of social media platforms. I involve participants in reflective interviews related to their digital usage. This approach is a tool underpinned by three theoretical strands that make fluid diaspora experience and digital experience, as well as centering the affective dimensions of social media platforms through the method of in-depth interviews. Practically, I argue that it serves as an animated space within which to analyse data and imaginatively build a community for research purposes. Unlike digital counterpublics like Black Twitter, my participants are individual users and I therefore have created an analytical space through which I can define them as a particular set of users who will have different as well as similar behaviours and opinions. In contextualising participant perceptions within discourses concerning South Asian digital diasporas, I explore how the intersections of race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality and caste are centered and obscured and what this tells us about contemporary configurations of British South Asian identities nationally and globally. Further contextualising these perceptions within wider discourses of neoliberal logics of social media and platform capitalism, I analyse how this technological social mode shapes and is shaped by its users