A Framework for Creativity Enhancement of Painterly Rendering

東京電機大学201

Image to Infinity: Rethinking Description and Detail in the Cinema

In the late 1980s, historian Hayden White suggested the possibility of forms of historical thought unique to filmed history. White proposed the study of "historiophoty," an imagistic alternative to written history. Subsequently, much scholarly attention has been paid to the category of History Film. Yet popular concerns for historical re-presentation and heritage have not fully addressed aesthetic effects of prior history films and emergent imagistic-historiographic practices. This dissertation identifies and elaborates one such alternative historiographic practice on film, via inter-medial study attending to British and American history films, an instance of multi-platform digital historiography, and an animated film - a category of film often overlooked in history film studies. Central to this dissertation is Gilles Deleuze's development of varieties of the Movement Image. Deleuze's Movement Image includes the "discursive image," a form which has not yet broken the coherence of sensori-motor connections between the object perceived and the affective response of the viewer. Related to the "discursive image," I propose that the "descriptive image" can capture what the larger category "representation" and the cinema-specific "spectacle" cannot. Drawing from literary and art-historical conceptions of the differences between "descriptive" and "narrative" forms, I propose that in the history film, the "descriptive image" functions as a meta-critical aesthetic, insisting that viewers perceive naturalized relationships as instead contingent. I argue that, rather than a "mature form" of realism, the "descriptive image" is a form of critical realism. Descriptive images are characterized by: long takes of long shots; the co-presence and co-equivalence of objects; a point of view neither neutral nor attributable to a character; and expressions of scope or forms for framing that assert that the given view is only one view from the set of possible views. Thus I examine exemplary texts that demonstrate a difference between "narrative understanding" and "descriptive understanding." These texts, despite their material differences, similarly present mixed historiographic forms, and enable us to see what studies of history on film, in their interest in re-presentation over presentation, have often missed: "descriptive images" allow us to differentiate the event of the film from an inadequate copy of an historical event

Internet Explorer: The Creative Administration of Digital Geography

This thesis is a creative response to the widespread uptake of Google Maps, Earth and Street View and their impact on the future of landscape as a cultural concept. ‘Creative administration’ is introduced as an idiosyncratic system for collecting and interpreting ideas about landscape. The artist’s virtual journeys through digital landscapes are revealed in a series of miniature paintings. Cultural geography contextualises these artworks and other artists’ responses within a broader understanding of contemporary landscape

Robert Smithson: writings, sculptures, earthworks.

The thesis examines the writings, sculptures and earthworks of the American artist Robert Smithson (1938 - 1973). Its aim is to reconstruct and analyse the major theoretical concerns that informed his practice. Various critical and theoretical aspects of his writings are examined in order to show how each was developed in relation to his reading. After demonstrating the relations between his library and his critical concerns, it then analyses the ways in which these concerns informed his artistic practice. These reconstructions and analyses also build up a broader picture of the ways in which Smithson's work changed in its underlying concerns over the course of his career. The thesis traces Smithson's concerns over six different areas of intellectual enquiry. The first chapter is concerned with religion, and focuses on his early work of the period 1959-63. This includes a detailed reconstruction of the influence of Catholicism and the English Imagist movement on his conception of art and art history. The second chapter traces his sources and arguments as an art critic, specifically his use of Mannerism as an interpretative critical paradigm for Minimalism. It also examines his rejection of formalist criticism, showing how his differences with the critic Michael Fried were pursued using a form of deconstruction different from the methods of Jacques Derrida. The third chapter addresses his concern with philosophy, particularly his use of the dialectics of materialism / idealism and mind / matter. It then examines his understanding of phenomenology to show how his conception of the' Site / Non-site' provided an alternative philosophical basis to that of Conceptual art. The fourth chapter concerns linguistics, showing how Smithson utilised the work of Wittgenstein, Carnap and communications theory in developing his own physicalist theory of language. It discusses how he adapted these analytic theories of language to suit his materialist and phenomenological concerns. The fifth area of concern to be traced is that of psychoanalysis. In order to analyse Smithson's psychoanalytic understanding of vision, an early sculpture is interpreted in terms of Jacques Lacan's theory of the mirror stage and the objet (petit) a. After discussing Smithson's reading in psychoanalytic theory, it is shown how this theory was played out in his conception of the earthwork sculpture Spiral Jetty. The sixth and final chapter traces his preoccupation with making a socially engaged earthwork art. An examination of his general political views leads to a discussion of how Smithson developed a politically oriented conception of earthwork art that drew eh1ensively on his understanding of psychoanalysis and structuralist anthropology. It is shown how he tried to develop a general theory for the arts in which they acted to mediate in social conflicts

Inequality in digital personas - e-portfolio curricula, cultural repertoires and social media

Digital and electronic learning portfolios (e-portfolios) are playing a growing role in supporting admission to tertiary study and employment by visual creatives. Despite the growing importance of digital portfolios, we know very little about how professionals or students use theirs. This thesis contributes to knowledge by describing how South African high school students curated varied e-portfolio styles while developing disciplinary personas as visual artists. The study documents the technological and material inequalities between these students at two schools in Cape Town. By contrast to many celebratory accounts of contemporary new media literacies, it provides cautionary case studies of how young people’s privileged or marginalized circumstances shape their digital portfolios as well. A four-year longitudinal action research project (2009-2013) enabled the recording and analysis of students’ development as visual artists via e-portfolios at an independent (2009-2012) and a government school (2012-2013). Each school represented one of the two types of secondary schooling recognised by the South African government. All student e-portfolios were analysed along with producers’ dissimilar contexts. Teachers often promoted highbrow cultural norms entrenched by white, English medium schooling. The predominance of such norms could disadvantage socially marginalized youths and those developing repertoires in creative industry, crafts or fan art. Furthermore, major technological inequalities caused further exclusion. Differences in connectivity and infrastructure between the two research sites and individuals’ home environments were apparent. While the project supported the development of new literacies, the intervention nonetheless inadvertently reproduced the symbolic advantages of privileged youths. Important distinctions existed between participants’ use of media technologies. Resourceintensive communications proved gatekeepers to under-resourced students and stopped them fully articulating their abilities in their e-portfolios. Non-connected students had the most limited exposure to developing a digital hexis while remediating artworks, presenting personas and benefiting from online affinity spaces. By contrast, well-connected students created comprehensive showcases curating links to their productions in varied affinity groups. Male teens from affluent homes were better positioned to negotiate their classroom identities, as well as their entrepreneurial and other personas. Cultural capital acquired in their homes, such as media production skills, needed to resonate with the broader ethos of the school in its class and cultural dimensions. By contrast, certain creative industry, fan art and craft productions seemed precluded by assimilationist assumptions. At the same time, young women grappled with the risks and benefits of online visibility. An important side effect of validating media produced outside school is that privileged teens may amplify their symbolic advantages by easily adding distinctive personas. Under-resourced students must contend with the dual challenges of media ecologies as gatekeepers and an exclusionary cultural environment. Black teens from working class homes were faced with many hidden infrastructural and cultural challenges that contributed to their individual achievements falling short of similarly motivated peers. Equitable digital portfolio education must address both infrastructural inequality and decolonisation

Creative Metamorphoses: Early Experimentation with Digital Technology in the Works of Sarah Jackson and Elizabeth Vander Zaag

This thesis looks at key themes in the works of two Canadian artists, Elizabeth Vander Zaag and Sarah Jackson, who began experimenting with digital technologies beginning in the mid-1970s, before the advent of personal computing. Focusing on shared themes of development and transformation in their works, the author shows how their ideas reflect a particular attitude towards early digital media, as well as biological life more generally, that contradicts what was generally thought to be the trajectory and ethos of simulating technologies as they developed in academic environments in the 1960s and 70s and trickled out into the art world. Grounded in a methodology that considers feminist responses to the ideology put forward by the discourse of cybernetics that privileges the status of information, this thesis positions Jackson and Vander Zaag as significant figures in Canada’s first wave of digital artists, centering critical issues of gender, literacy, and access as read through the context and content of each artist’s practice. What the author finds is that the emphasis in digital media scholarship on programming as the site of critical interventions trivializes the other ways artists who were women were engaging with technology as it was emerging. Contrary to extant histories of Canadian media art that favour legible distinguishing features such as interactivity, early digital media makes its way into certain artistic practices as hybrids between digital and traditional media, as artists sought ways to translate its radical difference into vocabularies that were harmonious and accessible to existing practices in video, sculpture and drawing. Ultimately, Jackson and Vander Zaag’s use of digital media as expressive tools gave them a vantage point from which to reflect on the medium without getting caught up in the technicalities of the coding process, and their work reflects a radical openness to its potentialities. The author argues for a feminist reading of this orientation that counteracts the tendency to locate agency in the act of programming at the expense of excluding other forms of engagement with digital media

Distributed Cinema: Interactive, Networked Spectatorship In The Age Of Digital Media

Digital media has changed much of how people watch, consume and interact with digital media. The loss of indexicality, or the potential infidelity between an image and its source, contributes to a distrust of images. The ubiquity of interactive media changes aesthetics of images, as viewers begin to expect interactivity. Networked media changes not only the ways in which viewers access media, but also how they communicate with each other about this media. The Tulse Luper Suitcases encapsulates all of these phenomena

Distributed Cinema: Interactive, Networked Spectatorship In The Age Of Digital Media

Digital media has changed much of how people watch, consume and interact with digital media. The loss of indexicality, or the potential infidelity between an image and its source, contributes to a distrust of images. The ubiquity of interactive media changes aesthetics of images, as viewers begin to expect interactivity. Networked media changes not only the ways in which viewers access media, but also how they communicate with each other about this media. The Tulse Luper Suitcases encapsulates all of these phenomena

Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts. EVA 2015 Florence

Information Technologies of interest for Culture Heritage are presented: multimedia systems, data-bases, data protection, access to digital content, Virtual Galleries. Particular reference is reserved to digital images (Electronic Imaging & the Visual Arts), regarding Cultural Institutions (Museums, Libraries, Palace – Monuments, Archaeological Sites). The International Conference includes the following Sessions: Strategic Issues; New Technologies & Applications; New 2D-3D Technical Developments & Applications; Virtual Galleries – Museums and Related Initiatives; Access to the Culture Information. Two Workshops regard: International Cooperation; Innovation and Enterprise