Semiotic machines : software in discourse

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references (p. 245-259).This study develops new theoretical and methodological approaches to the study of software as a medium of communication. This study analyses voting software, educational software, search engines, and combat and narrative in digital games. In each case it investigates how proprietary software affords discourse, and suggests a way of characterising users’ experience of this discourse. These affordances constitute the rules of communication, or ‘rules of speaking’, ‘rules of seeing’, and ‘writing-rights’ which proprietary software makes available to users, situating them within specific power-relations in the process

'Schizomorphic visions': visuality and dissenting subjectivities in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia

This dissertation examines the role of literary visuality in the construction of cultural categories of madness, delirium, schizophrenia, and trauma in the poetry of the Italian neoavanguardia. In addition to exploring configurations of madness and delirium in theoretical and critical writings produced by members of various interrelated literary movements in the 1960s, this dissertation centres on close readings of a selection of lesser known ekphrastic, visual, concrete, and collage poetic works, produced between 1961-1977, by Giulia Niccolai, Edoardo Sanguineti, Adriano Spatola, and Patrizia Vicinelli. I look also to more recent thought outside of the immediate historical Italian-language context in order to illuminate and inform my readings of the strategies of these literary figures. As part of my analysis of the renegotiation of these fraught themes in the experimental poetry of the neoavanguardia, I investigate how the theoretical category of schizomorfismo as described by Alfredo Giuliani, a key figure in the literary group known as the Novissimi, provides an illuminating paradigm for reading the discontinuous, discordant and febrile literary forms found within this poetry. I draw attention to the underexamined visual dynamics at play in both theoretical and poetic writings of this period, expanding on the fluid relations between visuality and madness, and their invocation as dissenting, countercultural literary entities. As examples of a scrittura altra, invocations of ‘other’ subjectivities are, I argue, embedded in these mostly non-representational texts, which draw on the rich capacities of visual, typographic and concrete experimental forms to raise questions of normativity, marginalisation, and subjugation, as well as interrogate epistemologies of logic and logocentrism. Accordingly, this dissertation interrogates what it means to invoke cultural-clinical categories in the context of poetic experimentation and as literary tools of social critique at a historical moment, in Italy and beyond, when the relationship between clinical and cultural understandings of non-normative mental states were being fundamentally renegotiated

Video Vortex reader : responses to Youtube

The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media. After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives

The wider KwaZulu-Natal region circa 1700 to the onset of colonialism: a critical essay on sources and historiography

This dissertation is an extended essay dealing with historical productions on the late independent era (the late “pre-colonial” epoch) of the wider KwaZulu-Natal region. The project pays particular attention to the development of the historiography and examines how it has shaped and in turn been shaped by the source material over time. Attention is also drawn to issues with terminology and disciplinary convention, including the distinction which is traditionally made between ‘primary' and ‘secondary' sources. The dissertation's scope extends beyond the discipline of history to interrogate how influences from the fields of anthropology, art history, archaeology, and literary criticism have shaped the production of history. It also examines the productions of African intellectuals whose works were excluded from the discipline of history during the late colonial and apartheid eras. Among other things, this essay draws attention to historiographical breaks in the literature and considerers where paradigm shifts and epistemic ruptures can be discerned