1,823 research outputs found
Architects of time: Labouring on digital futures
Drawing on critical analyses of the internet inspired by Gilles Deleuze and the Marxist autonomia movement, this paper suggests a way of understanding the impact of the internet and digital culture on identity and social forms through a consideration of the relationship between controls exercised through the internet, new subjectivities constituted through its use and new labour practices enabled by it. Following Castells, we can see that the distinction between user, consumer and producer is becoming blurred and free labour is being provided by users to corporations. The relationship between digital technologies and sense of community, through their relationship to the future, is considered for its dangers and potentials. It is proposed that the internet may be a useful tool for highlighting and enabling social connections if certain dangers can be traversed. Notably, current remedies for the lack of trust on the internet are questioned with an alternative, drawing on Zygmunt Bauman and Georg Simmel, proposed which is built on community through a vision of a âshared networkâ
Conversations : computer mediated dialogue, multilogue, and learning
The purpose of this dissertation is to argue in favor of a "pedagogy of textual conversation," a pedagogy made possible in large part by electronic technology, by computer mediated communication. Informing the argument is a deep philosophical commitment to conversation itself as the primary mode of meaning-making in both social and personal life. Material presented in support of the main argument is drawn from current and past pedagogical and communications theory as well as from ethnographic research conducted in the fall semester of 1994 in which students in an English composition class were linked to students in an education class via a single VAX electronic conference. Actual experiences in the electronic medium are forwarded to suggest that those who engage in extensive textual conversation with one another benefit from improved rhetorical skills, understanding of course content, the ability to make connections between ideas, and a liberalization of ideological views
PERSUASIVE PACKAGING: AN EYE-TRACKING APPROACH TO DESIGN
This dissertation details the development of a consensus-centered strategy for managing packaging design projects that enables designers from various fields to participate (seriously play) in the development process. The Work/Flow developed was quantified though a series of empirical eye-tracking experiments to determine if objects produced through the system resulted in longer fixation durations than the control. It was determined that packages developed through the Work/Flow were significantly more persuasive than the control (P \u3c 0.0005). The second experiment observed the effectiveness of designs produced through the Work/Flow in respect to the competitive retail array. Out of three product categories tested, one package was developed which garnered significantly different total fixation duration than the competition (P \u3c 0.0005). The remaining two packages failed to significantly attract attention more than the competitive array. However, the results showed that the designs developed did not differ, and thus all designs produced through the Work/Flow were as equally as persuasive against the competition. The dissertation details an intensive review of literature on three areas of study: serious design and play, participatory strategies, and rhetorical persuasion and seduction. The last chapter provides a detailed analysis and description of implementing the teaching and communicating the Work/Flow to professional packaging engineers, designers from various backgrounds, and academia
The argumentational texture of transaction cost economics
Transaction Costs;Deconstruction Method;economic theory
Architecture and the creation of worlds
This thesis is an enquiry by creative practice into the academic and aesthetic
(avant-garde) practice of architecture. It explores the notion of the virtual as
pure potentiality following an event, and defines architecture as the site of such
potentiality. (Alain Badiou names event as the moment /encounter which initiates
a radical break from a given situation /state of affairs. There are four types of
event: artistic, political, scientific and amorous).The thesis follows two parallel strands of enquiry. One, into the material
production of the architectural object and topological space, this is titled the
actual; and the other, an investigation into the philosophical and antagonistic
nature of the virtual, this is titled the virtual. The actual deals with the literature
review, methodology, context of study and proposal for (the site of) actual
engagement with theory, including a design element (House of the Chinese
Mantis); while the virtual explores (through a series of five international and
interdisciplinary conference papers) the philosophical problems of emergence.
The 'context of study' in the actual centres around the move from the fetish of
commodities to seduction and concludes with eroticism, while the body of work
in the virtual concentrates on the notions of sovereignty, becoming, and concrete
subjectivity.Following the technological practices of the avant-garde between hypersurface
theory and catalytic formations in architecture, the thesis rejects the claims of
virtual space as the digital space of computer -based design, and of emergence as
mimetic and /or algorithm based design. It argues that the virtual is the
intangible space of creative unfolding following Bergson and Deleuze, but
resists the claim in Deleuze that event is a chance occurring. Also, it resists the
claim in Baudrillard that seduction and /or enchanted simulation are event and
abandons them to focus on the amorous (one of the four events in Badiou). This
creates an inflection in the enquiry, moving the thesis towards Plato and the
Renaissance, and a contemporary resurrection in architecture, of the tragic, as
concrete manifestation of the amorous encounter.The method of inquiry is structured after the nomadic logic of the War Machine
in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, and of the revolutionary nature of
fidelity to the scientific event in Badiou, which argues that new knowledge is
created by 'revolutions' and from the anomalies and collaborations which arise
as a result of such 'detours'; it is a strategy justified by the science historians
Feyerabend, Kuhn and Lakatos.The thesis takes the form of two books (the actual and the virtual), and concludes
that the avant-garde practice of architecture, with its infinite potentialities is
distinct from the bureaucratic or State apparatus of building, and that the
commonplace appropriation of the avant-garde by the State, as seen in the
institutional recourse to parametrics, appears unproductive and uncreative with
regard to knowledge
UNCAGED: a novel, âtelesymbioticâ approach to bridge the divide between the physical world and the virtual world of computers?
The main subject of this thesis is my artistic project UNCAGED, which explores interrelationships and transitions between computer-based virtual environments and their immediate physical surroundings. The underlying motivation behind my approach was to âuncageâ screen-based realities from the confines of their digital existence and to bring the remote computer world closer to our human experience. In particular, my work was opposed to the notion of immersive âvirtual realityâ where the physical world is more or less excluded from the participants, but instead attempted to situate the virtual domain within the physical world.
Initially, I will discuss the theoretical framework behind UNCAGED, ranging from
aesthetic considerations, the particular role of sound, human computer interaction (HCI)
to technical issues, and afterwards describe the creation process of UNCAGED. Based on
a study of audience behaviour with UNCAGED at a major London museum, I will claim
that the workâs popularity seems to relate to its perceptually intriguing fusion between the
virtual domain and the physical world, and in this respect my project can be deemed
successful. Furthermore, on the basis of an extended review and analysis of related work
in the broad area of âmixed realityâ, I will suggest that my own approachcan indeed be viewed as a novel way to bridge the divide between the physical world and the virtual world of computers. The innovation relates, in particular, to its unique balance of formal simplicity and technical sophistication. In the last chapter, I will provide a more critical evaluation of UNCAGED, largely informed by Jean Baudrillardâs conception of the ârealâ and the âvirtualâ, which raises questions about the very idea of integrating digital technology in our lives in a meaningful and satisfying way. Finally, I will present my subsequent practical work, which strongly engages with my critical reflections on UNCAGED. In particular, it is informed by a new heightened sensitivity regarding the role of digital technology in my artistic practice
Personal effects : education in the age of personal-industry technology
This work explains and models a "personal" way of doing education in the current era of personal-industry electronic technology represented by the computer. Seeing how powerful the now-fading mass-industry technological paradigm (represented by the factory) has been in terms of promulgating a one-size-fits-all, quasi-personal and quasi-social education, this work explicates and models a way of doing education which is instead highly-personal and highly-social, in accord with the potential of the new technological paradigm of personal-industry. The question of whether or not this new personal mode of education will promulgate itself as successfully as the former mass-industry model did is addressed, and resistances to the explicit and implicit changes the new paradigm represents are outlined and discussed
Touch-sensitive : cybernetic images and replicant bodies in the post-industrial age
This thesis uses Deleuzian cybernetics to advance upon post-modern accounts of the
contemporary image economy. It begins with the hypothesis that the schizophrenic
behaviours of late capitalism have induced an irreparable crisis in the inherited `specular
economy' (Irigaray). This is manifested as the breakdown of the laws of generalised
equivalence between truth, value and meaning and the end of a stable signifier-signified
relationship - theorised as the escape of reality into 'hyperreality', or the world become
simulation according to Baudrillard.
It will expose the insufficiency of post-modern accounts which theorise this crisis in
representation via methods which fail to escape their own always already representational
terms and it will then rigorously follow through the implications of an image economy
which is constituted by simulations which are `genuinely' sourceless, which do not
imitate a prior reality but which rather synthesise forces and relations. To escape the
closed loop of representationalism, it will divert attention away from the signifier and
will concentrate on the sub-representational power of images to re-engineer reality and to
re-invent the limits of the body. Using the theory and practice of Deleuze, Spinoza,
Bergson, Benjamin and Virilio, it will treat images as planes of corporeal becoming - as
material entities, virtual avatars, possessional states and conductors of pre-personal affect.
Post-modem accounts which cite the overwhelming predominance of images sit
uncomfortably with the theories of French anti-ocularcentrism - accessed here via
Irigaray and Lyotard - which mark the demise of vision and its attached representational
order. This paradox requires that a new perceptual relation be mapped - figured here as
entirely corporeal, as tactile and synesthetic (Mcluhan) and therefore immersive. Both
'affect' and 'intensity', as modes of pre-personal perception, will be treated as tactile
interactions for these responses to images demand that a body be always 'in touch' with
its environment, always anorganically altering its perceptual capacities by rules of
feedback. It will be argued that in this reality studio, the body no longer perceives via a
specular light source, solid form and assumed phallocentric meaning.
The proposed synthesis between cybernetic imaging technologies, immanent perceptual
criteria and the ever-changing state of the body requires an engagement with the female
since she bears a privileged relation to this scenario. In the specular economy, women
have been assumed, like faithful images, to secondarily reproduce an underlying,
phallocentric truth. However, it will be shown that just as images can work nonrepresentationally,
so too can female bodies; on the one hand appearing representational
but on the other conducting radically subversive effects. Where bodies and images are
such simulatory becomings it will be shown how the female is neither representationally
ordered (social constructivism) nor essentially defined (biological reductivism) but is
rather cybernetically engineered. Throughout, her privileged access to the virtual realm
beyond language will be used to substantiate the major claim of this thesis that cybernetic
simulation is more concerned with the material alteration of an environment rather than
with the implementation of linguistic obligation
Digital Embodiment in Contemporary Abstract Painting
This thesis re-investigates Clement Greenbergâs discredited abstract expressionist claim that painting should seek its own purity through the acknowledgment of its material. I argue that Greenbergâs physical, bodily determination of painting (but not its purity) is re-located as a criticality in contemporary practice because of the changes brought about by the simulacrum and the digital. By utilizing the particularities of âpainterlyâ issues such as materiality, depth and opticality into the virtual, this claim responds to Arthur C. Dantoâs âend of historyâ theories where he argues that artists are no longer bound to the dictates of grand master narratives of art. For Danto, contemporary art has irrevocably deviated from the narrative discourses which define it such as Greenbergâs.
Not satisfied with either postmodern strategies of parody in painting that claim a linear end to the modernist canon, or with recent claims that contemporary painting is beyond postmodernism, I convert Greenbergâs physical determinism using Andrew Benjaminâs notion that contemporary abstract painters, through making, accept and transform the historical/modernist premise of the yet-to-be-resolved object/painting by staging a repetition of abstraction as an event of becoming.
This âre-stylingâ of abstract painting is then examined as an ontological conjoining of Greenberg with Merleau-Pontyâs claim that the painter transforms the relationship between the body and a painting by overlapping the interior sense of self with the world of external objects. I argue that contemporary painting can offer a philosophical dialogue between the painterâs subjectivity as a mirroring of the painterâs personal style through objective ornamental materiality. This dialogue is developed through Stephen Perrellaâs Hypersurface theory which proposes a non-subjective, deterritorialised, architectural parallel of the digital as a transparent, fluid system of multi-dimensional signs in which the contemporary subject traverses. Consequently, I suggest, the symbolic virtual changes the bodyâs sensuous relation to time and space and is central to contemporary paintingâs criticality
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