Tutankhamen, Egyptomania, and Temporal Enchantment in Interwar Britain.

In 1923 or thereabouts, Britain fell under the ‘Tut-ankh-amen spell’. Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon’s discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in 1922 prompted a new wave of popular interest in ancient Egypt that suffused British culture, casting Tutankhamen’s ‘spell’ over movies, music, mummies, and more.2 Reinvigorated ‘Egyptian’ styles in architecture, interior design, and commodities capitalized upon the visual motifs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ‘Egyptomanias’. Though distinct for its mass commodification, interwar Egyptomania further developed Victorian Britain’s fascination with ancient curses, Egyptian mummies, the fourth dimension, and the Book of the Dead.3 It also catalysed a widespread interest in Egyptology that fuelled disputes over the continued ‘exploitation’ of Egyptian heritage by Western archaeologists, contributing to Egyptian nationalism, pharaonism (national pride in Egypt’s history), and Egypt’s domestic film industry.4 Yet reading the phenomenon through the framework of modernism produces a compellingly different narrative of Tutankhamen’s significance. Rather than speaking to imperialism, nationalism, or the politics of Egyptology, this interpretation offers new insight into the relationship between modernity, temporality, and modern enchantment

Cross-Platform Methods in Computer Graphics That Boost Experimental Film Making

Computer graphics arts such as animations, video games, and special effects in live-action movies have become essential for people seeking entertainment and education. This study aims to explore the potential for experimental film in presenting scientific theory as well as assessing different production strategies in 3D image creation. To invite people into some abstract or complicated scientific topics more readily, non-narrative film form is a viable method to relay this type of information. It\u27s crucial to look at how independent filmmakers employ various ways to fulfill their particular creative purposes. I’ll be demonstrating how these processes worked in making my film, Discontinuity, a short 3-D animated experimental work that attempts to illuminate some of the mysteries of quantum theory for an audience. I plan to use my analysis of the film’s production time, the overall quality and the feedback it received to build ideas for future research as well as an overall vision for computer graphics arts

Massikultuuri mütoloogia struktuuriühikud: kultuurisemiootiline lähenemine

Minu väitekiri keskendub tänapäeva massikultuuri tekstides ilmnevate müütide ja nende semiootiliste mehhanismide uurimisele. Ehkki müüte ja ka massikultuuri tervikuna on erinevate distsipliinide vaatenurkadest palju käsitletud, pole aga uurimusi, mis tegelevad massikultuuri mütoloogia süstematiseerimisega ja müütiliste markerite semiootilise määratlemisega. Käesoleva dissertatsiooni teema ei ole huvipakkuv üksnes üldteoreetilisest, filosoofilisest, antropoloogilisest ja semiootilisest vaatenurgast, vaid ka praktilistel põhjustel. Usun, et suudan oma töös veenvalt näidata, et massikultuuri müütide semiootiliste mehhanismide uurimine ja tuvastamine on rakendatav turundussemiootika ja sotsiaalse kommunikatsiooni valdkonnas. Oma dissertatsioonis võrdlen esmalt massikultuuri mütoloogiat sotsioloogilisest, filosoofilis-antropoloogilisest ja semiootilisest perspektiivist. See võimaldab mul kombineerida kaht peamist müüdiuurimise epistemoloogilist lähenemist ja käsitleda müüti ühelt poolt kui terviklikku meta-kontsepti, teiselt poolt aga läheneda müüdile kui kultuuritekstile. Lähtudes loodud raamistikust analüüsin oma töös erinevaid massikultuuri tekste ja keskendun massikultuuri mütoloogia kõige levinumate ja püsivamate struktuuriüksuste tuvastamisele. Kuidas määratleda müüdi väiksemat ühikut? Selle piiritlemisel tuginen müüdi kahele strukturaalsele printsiibile: eemilisele ühikule (ingl.k emic unit), mida tähistan mütologeemi mõistega ja hübriidsele ühikule (ingl.k hybrid unit), mida tähistan müteemi mõistega. Analüüsi käigus toon välja järgmised mütologeemid: Saatus, Teekond, Maailmakõiksus, Katastroof, Kuldajastu ja Emake Loodus ning müteemid: Transformatsioon ja Tagasitulek. Lisaks nimetatud mütologeemide ja müteemide eristamisele toon välja, mis on nende väärtus ja funktsioon mütoloogilises diskursuses. Saatus ja Teekond aitavad indiviidi elu integreerida tervikusse. Emake Looduse mütologeem seostub inimese eksistentsiaalse autentsuse- ja identiteediotsingu vajadusega. Maailmakõiksuse, Katastroofi ja Kuldajastu mütologeemid konstitueerivad aga inimese aeg-ruumilise mineviku-oleviku-tuleviku kolmiksuhte. Viimased seostuvad inimlike küsimustega maailma algupära, mineviku nostalgia ja tulevikuhirmude kohta. Trasformatsiooni müteem osutab aga ime ideele ja Tagasituleku müteem inimese semiosfääri aeg-ruumilisele teljele, korrastusele. Töö viimane peatükk rakendab dissertatsioonis arendatud teoreetilist raamistikku konkreetsetes juhtumiuuringutes. Esimene neist on pühendatud Ukraina poliitiku Darth Vaderi TV-poliitturunuduse analüüsile ning seal ma näitan, kuidas arhetüüpsed müüditähendused poliitilise narratiivi ülesehitusse kaasati. Teine juhtumuuring keskendub konkreetse brändi väljatöötamisele, mille ma tegin koostöös Venemaa tuntud popartisti Manizhaga ja kus ma rakendan Emake Loodus mütologeemi. Mütologeemide ja müteemide edasine uurimine võiks avada uusi semiootilisi markereid ja laiendada sellega semiootika rakendusvaldkonda ning aidata ühtlasi paremini mõista kultuuri mütoloogilist alust.This dissertation presents a semiotic study of myth revealing in contemporary mass cultural texts and exploration of its inner semiotic machinery. Although a variety of studies have been devoted to myth, and quite a few studies have tackled mass culture issues, less attention has been given to the systematic articulation of mass cultural mythology and its markers, which reveal its inner semiotic machinery. Those issues are relevant not only from a general theoretical philosophical, anthropological, and semiotic point of view, but also have concrete applicability in marketing semiotics and social communications. Firstly, I discuss mass culture under an emancipatory umbrella approach and explore mass culture mythology from the sociological, philosophical-anthropological and semiotic perspectives. Secondly, I combine two main epistemological attitudes of myth and integrate a holistic object of research – which appears as a meta-concept – from one side, and a text of culture – mass cultural narratives around brands conveying their main values – from the other side. Thirdly, I discuss the smallest units of mass culture mythology and explore its most widespread structural units. I classify the smallest units of myth by their structural principles: the emic units (mythologemes) and the hybrid ones (mythemes). There are the mythologemes of Fate, Course, Universe, Catastrophe, Golden Age, and Mother Nature, and the mythemes of Transformation and Backtracking considered in detail. The main existential values of those smallest mythological units are discussed. The mythologemes of Fate and Course help to understand individual life as a part of an integral whole. The mythologeme of Mother Nature relates to the existential search for inner authenticity and identity. The mythologemes of Universe, Catastrophe, and Golden Age constitute an integral triadic idea about time and space (past-present-future) and reflect the human existential quest for an explanation of the world origin, nostalgia for the past and fears about the future. The mytheme of Transformation represents the idea of mythological miracle, and the mytheme of Backtracking appeals to the idea of a mastered time and space. Fourthly, I extend the process to finding more minimal units of myth in cultural texts of different genres. The first case is dedicated to close analysis of the television communication of the Ukrainian politician Darth Vader. This case demonstrates the combination of archaic meanings and contemporary forms of myth within a narrative, producing new powerful connotations. The second case applies the Mother Nature mythologeme as a branding tool for building a coherent image of a musical artist. The further exploration of the mythologemes and mythemes and articulation of other semiotic markers of myth systematically enriches a profound understanding of human mind and culture.https://www.ester.ee/record=b527394

Simulacra : constructing narrative in the studio tableau

Bibliography: pages 61-63.The content and form of the work completed for this degree is intended as a narrative. This narrative is constructed to tell stories of my family, and of myself, in a way that openly stresses the playful, mythical, and fictional nature of such narratives in the family and in history. These narratives are not always easily recognisable, believable, or unified, and are read through an arrangement of details. Initially, I intended my tableaux to function as 'emblematic' portraits. In other words, I intended to describe the members of my family by distilling their essential characteristics into a descriptive arrangement of symbolic objects. Although I became aware of the limitations of symbolism, and became more interested in narrative and display, the content of my work has remained personal and descriptive, even though I have emphasised the fictional over the elegiac. My family is not really one of collectors - my grandmother tore up and burnt many of our family photographs when my grandfather died, before she went into an old-age home. She wanted to 'travel light'. What we have left are the stories, the anecdotes and the proverbs: an oral history, or a ·postmemory'. These inherited tales are told through the snapshots that did survive, as they are in all families who take pictures. I have retold and reconstructed my own narratives, because this is the nature of the family romance for everyone - it resides in a world of images, incidental details, and surfaces

Immediation|toward the selfless other?

One should hear the calling of two hyperbolic selfs within this questioning concerning what I would propose to call here the desire for panop-tech-clair-voyance: Selfless interpreted as an infinite reactivity (machinery) Selfless interpreted as an infinite responsibility (agency

The Contextualization of Myth: Identification of Myth in the Propagation of Narrative Across Generational Boundaries

This thesis demonstrates the unique correlation between myth and the propagation of narrative across generational boundaries. It argues that myth occurs in the intersection of belief, semiotics, and context, and further enables a way of re-encoding a narrative with a dual contextuality. This dual context preserves a narrative’s literal context while endowing it with a new or modified myth context and affords the audience a selection of choices for how to receive a narrative experienced as myth. To demonstrate this correlation a Myth Context Reception Model is designed for the purpose of identifying ascendent, obscure or emergent myths evident in an audience’s reception of narrative, as a result the paradoxical human beliefs and behaviors the audience imposes upon narratives appropriated as myth. Three over-arching narratives, classical myth, Santa Claus, and Batman are then evaluated as exemplars, using the procedures defined by the model, to demonstrate that myth can influence the propagation of a narrative across many generations and in ways we might not expect. And to show that myth is a powerful a rhetoric that is stealthily obscure, remarkably ubiquitous, and resilient. Even in the modern day

Excavating the Future

Well-known in science fiction for tomb-raiding and mummy-wrangling, the archaeologist has been a rich source for imagining ‘strange new worlds’ from ‘strange old worlds.’ But more than a well-spring for SF scenarios, the genre’s archaeological imaginary invites us to consider the ideological implications of digging up the past buried in the future. A cultural study of an array of very popular, though often critically-neglected, North American SF film and television texts–running the gamut of telefilms, pseudo-documentaries, teen serial drama and Hollywood blockbusters–Excavating the Future explores the popular archaeological imagination and the political uses to which it is being employed by the U.S. state and its adversaries. By treating SF texts as documents of archaeological experience circulating within and between scientific and popular culture communities and media, Excavating the Future develops critical strategies for analyzing SF film and television’s critical and adaptive responses to post 9/11 geopolitical concerns about the war on terror, homeland security, the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq, and the ongoing fight against ISIS

The documentary mind: In the subject of a practitioner’s perspective on changes in documentary concept and production

This autoethnographic study examines the influences of recent digital technology upon the practice and philosophy of documentary filmmaking. To assess the impact of new digital methodology on the film production process, The Musicians, a wholly-digital, 55-minute documentary film, was produced as an example. This music-based subject was chosen to specifically demonstrate the potential advantages of lightweight digital equipment and its extended recording capacity in orchestral documentation. The capability of non-linear digital editing to process large amounts of imagery, together with its ability to manage multiple image and audio streams concurrently, was also examined. This exegesis also reviews the impact of recently-emerged digital multimedia and multi-platform formats on perceptions of the more standard linear documentary format, all of which have been incorporated into a single documentary category by some researchers. For a traditional documentary such as The Musicians to be categorised with open-ended, multimedia constructions seems somewhat anomalous

Smuggling in theories and practices of contemporary visual culture

The term smuggling has, for the most part, functioned in critical theory and visual culture only as an arch-metaphor. It conveniently carries discourse unproblematically and invisibly across impasses and between bodies of incompatible work. Alternatively, it is all too visible and taken for granted as romantic stereotype. In the thesis, contraband and smuggling are examined for their complexity beyond these omissions and over-determinations in their theorization and circulation in literary and visual cultures. Secrecies, emergences and partial visibilities of smuggling are considered for how they disrupt dominant modes of vision, such as the scopic geometry of border checkpoints and simplistic representative mappings of territory that assign fixed cultural identities and positionalities. The thesis proposes that contraband subjectivities produce new ways of being-in-the-world, critical perspectives and modes of mobility, as well as providing a toolbox for examining ways that art practice negotiates between its visibility and its constitutive secrecy. The simplistic, unimpeded scopic structuring of the border drama between smuggler and customs/Law, that often becomes ensnared in systematic psychoanalytic and socio-anthropologic readings, is contested, and instead proposed as a site of variability; of partial visibilities, knowledges and meanings. Smuggling, rarely considered in postcolonial theory, is put forward as a mediating installation and subjective occupation of a space that began to be opened up through the oscillating veil theorized, by amongst others, Frantz Fanon. The argument attempts to move beyond the screening of contraband towards another form of mobility that is most subtly expressed through the baroque notion of the fold theorized by Gilles Deleuze (after Leibniz) and that suggests forms of dissimulation that go beyond surface and towards productive secrecy. In a case study that examines a very overt, literal form of smuggling in Colombia it is suggested that secrecy must be built back into conceptions of contrabanding for it to be, at least in part, visually comprehensible. New ways of thinking contraband, for instance in alliance with law and as public secrecy, are examined for how they form relational counter-cartographies and singular fields of operation that might be taken up by art practices. The capacity for critical theorists to get close to affective contraband milieu through visual material becomes a measure of how they themselves perform as smugglers

Viewpoint dependent imaging : an interactive stereoscopic display

Thesis (M.S.V.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1982.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.Bibliography: leaves 71-76.by Scott Stevens Fisher.M.S.V.S