Fluid Morphing for 2D Animations

Professionaalsel tasemel animeerimine on aeganõudev ja kulukas tegevus. Seda eriti sõltumatule arvutimängude tegijale. Siit tulenevalt osutub kasulikuks leida meetodeid, mis võimaldaks programmaatiliselt suurendada kaadrite arvu igas kahemõõtmelises raster animatsioonis. Vedeliku simulaatoriga eksperimenteerimine andis käesoleva töö autoritele idee, kuidas saavutada visuaalselt meeldiv kaadrite üleminek, kasutades selleks vedeliku dünaamikat. Tulemusena valmis programm, mis võib animaatori efektiivsust tõsta lausa mitmeid kordi. Autorid usuvad, et see avastus võib viia kahemõõtmeliste animatsioonide uuele võidukäigule — näiteks kaasaegsete arvutimängude kontekstis.Creation of professional animations is expensive and time-consuming, especially for the independent game developers. Therefore, it is rewarding to find a method that would programmatically increase the frame rate of any two-dimensional raster animation. Experimenting with a fluid simulator gave the authors an insight that to achieve visually pleasant and smooth animations, elements from fluid dynamics can be used. As a result, fluid image morphing was developed, allowing the animators to produce more significant frames than they would with the classic methods. The authors believe that this discovery could reintroduce hand drawn animations to modern computer games

About Telling: Ghosts and Hauntings in Contemporary Drama and Poetry

It is difficult to think of something as formally resistant to definition as a ghost. What is more ambiguous than something described as “haunting”? Few currents in literature have been as prominent – and as comparatively unremarked – as the current critical and literary dependence on the language of spectrality. While ghost stories in prose have gained substantial attention, in drama and poetry ghosts and hauntings have found less critical purchase. In response, this dissertation takes up a selection of drama and poetry from Ireland, South Africa, and the Caribbean to illustrate the theoretical and critical potential of ghosts and ghost stories in twentieth-century Anglophone world literatures. Selections are picked for their illustrative potential and thematic richness. The constellation of texts articulate a dazzling range of ghosts and ghost stories used creatively to reflect deep investigations and critical awarenesses of metaphors of haunting in epistemological and literary discourses. The first half of “About Telling” examines ghost stories as performances on the theatrical stage to ask questions of relation and narrative (in Conor McPherson’s The Weir), nation and song (in Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats…), globalizing technologies and economic change (in Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s Sizwe Banzi is Dead), theatre as technology (in Samuel Beckett’s Shades trilogy) and, finally, mourning and the lament (in J.M. Synge’s Riders to the Sea and Derek Walcott’s The Sea at Dauphin). Each chapter takes up a re-envisioned relationship between drama, narrative, and ghosts. The second half of “About Telling” turns to poetry and questions of lyric theory: tradition and spectropoetics (in Eavan Boland), gothic prosopopoeia (in Breyten Breytenbach), lyric experimentation (in Samuel Beckett), and ekphrastic addresses (in the discrete responses of David Dabydeen and NourbeSe Philip) to the history of the Zong. Once decreated, poetry’s intense pressure on meaning-making in language reveals not stories but ghosts themselves. Refusing transcendental definitions of ghosts and hauntings, this dissertation suggests that the manifold significance of terms such as “ghosts” and “haunting” can organize formal readings of poetry and drama in a recognizable heuristic. In short, language affords the resources for ghosts to enter and survive in our world

The politics of body and language in the writing of Margaret Atwood.

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:DXN042040 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Putting the Video Back in Video Games: Opportunities and Challenges for Visual Studies Approaches to Video Game Analysis

I argue for the application of visual studies in video game analysis. This approach presents opportunities for the intersectional analysis of video game visuals as games are brought into dialogue with other visual media like film and painting. This approach also presents challenges due to ontological distinctions between different media as well as due to academic divisions regarding the study of different art and media objects. Despite the challenges presented, a visual studies approach is particularly useful as a critical window into contemporary visual culture at large. I outline the fields of game studies and visual studies, marking their distinctions as well as the areas in which they overlap. I provide examples of visual studies approaches to video game analysis through an emphasis on the visual characteristics of video games. As visual studies is generally considered an interdisciplinary endeavor, I contextualize my analyses through comparisons with other visual media, in particular finding intersections with art history and film studies. Specifically, I argue that perspective is an integral visual trait of many video games, relating the use of linear perspective and isometric perspective, used in some genres of games, with the development of perspective in painting. I examine various cinematic techniques used in video games and discuss their ideological potency. I also cover ways in which video games subvert conventional norms, such as through self-reflexivity, to open up novel avenues for visual expression

El animal interno : una lectura ecocrítica del monstruo híbrido en el gótico finisecular inglés

Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Filología, leída el 27-09-2021This thesis approaches the fin de siècle supernatural hybrid from an ecocritical perspective, focusing on the role that the binary human/animal plays in the construction of monstrosity. It demonstrates that not all turn-of-the-century Gothic narratives portray the hybrid from an ecophobic angle of fear and rejection of the animal-other and the animal-self. Just the opposite, this dissertation shows that there are proto-ecocritical renditions of all types of Gothic hybrids that query the negative connotations associated with animality, ranging from external, abject monsters to invisible inner ones. To prove this hypothesis, the dissertation studies four main supernatural agents: the monster, the pagan god, the ghost and the double.This thesis also argues that the story’s overall visual angle greatly determines the ecocritical view from which the hybrid, the normative character, and their interactions are portrayed. The narratives that tend to hold sight as the only trustworthy epistemological human sense adhere to a Cartesian perspective of identity. They regard sight and reason as ‘human’, and the body and its senses as animal, and present the possession of a ‘rational soul’ or ecophobic ‘moral compass’ as the key element that distinguishes humans from non-human animals. Finally, the influence of the supernatural hybrid is presented as an all-pervasive phenomenon that reduces protagonists to animal behaviour. Presenting the influence of the hybrid as forced and inevitable frees the influenced subject from any sort of guilt, and successfully displaces the threat of the animal within out into an external other...Esta tesis estudia la figura del híbrido finisecular desde un punto de vista ecocrítico ya que se centra en el papel que juega el binarismo humano/animal en la construcción de la monstruosidad. Su principal objetivo es demostrar que no todas las narrativas góticas de finales de siglo representan al híbrido desde el miedo y el rechazo a la animalidad ajena y propia. Al contrario, este trabajo prueba que hay todo tipo de híbridos góticos que cuestionan las connotaciones negativas asociadas con la animalidad. Para probar esta hipótesis, analizo cuatro agentes sobrenaturales: el monstruo, el dios pagano, el fantasma y el doble. Así pues, la perspectiva visual que adopta cada historia contribuye a definir el ángulo ecocrítico desde el que se representa tanto al híbrido como al personaje normativo y las interacciones entre ambos. Aquellas narrativas que suelen definir el sentido de la vista como el único epistemológicamente fiable tienden a representar la identidad desde una perspectiva cartesiana y ecofóbica. Por tanto, mientras que la vista y la razón son considerados humanos, el cuerpo y el resto de sentidos son animales, y por ende, inferiores. En estas historias, la posesión de un ‘alma racional’ o brújula ecofóbica se considera clave para distinguir a los seres humanos de los degenerados. Finalmente, la influencia del híbrido se presenta como una fuerza imparable que reduce al protagonista a un comportamiento animal. Esta representación de la influencia como un fenómeno inevitable libera al sujeto influenciado de cualquier tipo de responsabilidad sobre sus actos, por lo que se desplaza la amenaza de la animalidad propia hacia un agente externo...Fac. de FilologíaTRUEunpu

Bastard or playmate? Adapting theatre, mutating media and the contemporary performing arts

Artistic media seem to be in a permanent condition of mutation and transformation. Contemporary artists often investigate the limits and possibilities of the media they use and experiment with the crossing, upgrading and mutilation of media. Others explicitly explore the unknown intermedial space between existing media, searching for the hybrid beings that occupy these in-betweens. This publication explores the theme of mutating and adapting media in its relation with theatre and performance

The Twenty-Frist Century Pantagruel: The Function of Grotesque Aesthetics in the Contemporary World

This dissertation examines whether the grotesque, an aesthetic form associated with the carnivalesque literary mode and commonly seen as aesthetically and politically subversive, can resume its function within the contemporary context in which carnivalisation of everyday life is a frequently noted aspect of capitalist culture. Locating as its primary image the human body in the process of often-violent deformation, this study explores this problem by theorising the grotesque as Janus-faced: existing on the boundary between the Symbolic and the Real. As such, I argue that the grotesque is: a) deeply related to cultural attempts to challenge hegemonic structures, even as these challenges become themselves implicated in the power structures they oppose (Chapters 1, 2, and 3); and b) a concept that reveals the realm of the Real as independent of human consciousness while also being of profound interest for this consciousness and the subjectivity which it underpins (Chapters 3 and 4). In outlining this argument, this study deploys the theories of Gilles Deleuze, Slavoj Žižek, and Alain Badiou, as well as the work of Jacques Rancière, Henri Lefebvre, Thomas Metzinger, Catherine Malabou, Quentin Meillassoux, and Ray Brassier. It, furthermore, works its way backwards from the Anglo-American cultural scene of the late 1990s and early 2000s (Sarah Kane’s Cleansed and Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds), through elaborations of punk anti-Thatcherite London(s) of the late 1970s/early 1980s (Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell, and Iain Sinclair White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings), to post-1968 attempts to reinvigorate a progressive vision of the USA and write it (back) into existence through Gonzo autobiography and journalism (Oscar Zeta Acosta’s The Revolt of the Cockroach People and The Autobiography of a Brown Buffalo, and Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas). In this way, the argument of this work tries to find a path – through a deformed human body in works of literature, film, and comics – toward a non-human world that can be deployed in the service of a progressive political vision, even while the autonomy of this non-human world is recognised

Metaphor and Metanoia: Linguistic Transfer and Cognitive Transformation in British and Irish Modernism

This dissertation contributes to the critical expansions that Douglas Mao and Rebecca L. Walkowitz identify as New Modernist Studies. This expansion is temporal, spatial, and vertical. I engage with the effects Modernist texts have “above” the page: lived experience. I examine the structural similarity of linguistic metaphor and the mind as considered by cognitive scientists. Identifying the human mind as linguistic and language as an artifact of the human mind, my research extrapolates upon what I call the “psycho-ecology” of reading, a self-representational knot between text and mind that constitutes lived experience. Far from being an abstraction, psycho-ecology is concrete: atypical textual engagement is equated with a transformation in perception. The prologue traces a lineage between Modernism, phenomenology, and the cognitive sciences. The first chapter considers the relationship between two narrative levels in Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The second chapter considers temporal experimentation in Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse (1927) in relation to Martin Heidegger’s formulation of being as that which discloses our experience with language as temporal and finite. The third chapter examines the “sentimental information” of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939) from a phenomenological approach to information theory. The final chapter analyzes Samuel Beckett’s Endgame (1957) as a zero-player game that discloses the limits of agency in psycho-ecology. The dissertation follows a trajectory beginning with the intimacy a reader has with alphanumeric text towards the increasing experience of illiteracy when encountering new languages such as digital code