Virtually Being Lenin Enhances Presence and Engagement in a Scene From the Russian Revolution

Virtual Reality (VR) has been widely applied to cultural heritage such as the reconstruction of ancient sites and artifacts. It has hardly been applied to the reprise of specific important moments in history. On the other hand immersive journalism does attempt to recreate current events in VR, but such applications typically give the viewer a disembodied non-participatory role in the scene of interest. Here we show how VR was used to reconstruct a specific historical event, where a famous photograph was brought to life, showing Lenin, the leader of the 1917 October Russian Revolution, giving a speech to Red Army recruits in Moscow 1920. We carried out a between groups experimental study with three conditions: Embodied—where the participant was first embodied as Lenin and then later in the audience watching Lenin; Included—where the participant was not embodied as Lenin but was embodied as part of the audience; and Observing—where the participant mainly viewed the scene from a disembodied third person point of view. Twenty participants were assigned to each of the three conditions in a between-groups design. We found that the level of presence was greatest in the Embodied and Included conditions, and that participants were least likely to later follow up information about the Russian Revolution in the Observing condition. Our conclusion is that if the VR setup allows for a period of embodiment as a character in the scenario then this should be employed in order to maximize the chance of participant presence and engagement with the story

Alternative empires : Soviet montage cinema, the British documentary movement & colonialism

This is a study of Soviet montage cinema and the British documentary movement of the 1930s which brings together two usually divergent methodologies: postcolonial theory and "new" film history. The first chapter develops new insights into Eisenstein's October and Vertov's The Man With the Movie Camera, The second analyses two less well-known Vertov films, One Sixth of the Earth and Three Songs of Lenin, from the perspective of postcolonial theory, The third considers Pudovkin's Storm Over Asia and traces its reception in both the Soviet Union and England. The fourth and fifth chapters expand general issues and themes raised by the first two, and pursue specific questions raised by the third. These final chapters resituate the work of the British documentary movement in relation to the culture of British imperialism. This shift of focus entails the analysis of the production and contemporary critical reception of a number of films which have been marginalised in most retrospective historical accounts of the movement. By recontextualising these two groups of films, this study attempts to demonstrate how their various representations of the non-Western world are intertwined with and necessarily involve considering other issues, such as: periodisation within film history; the "influence" of Soviet montage on the British documentary movement; the construction of authorship; the division between "high" and "low" culture; the relationship between politics and film aesthetics; the postcolonial challenge to Marxism; cinematic internationalism. The first two chapters also integrate an ongoing critique of certain trends within post-1968 film theory and criticism, which developed in close association with a retrieval and revaluation of Soviet montage cinema and Soviet avant-garde culture of the 1920s, One of the aims of this thesis is to question some of the assumptions of this work, whilst at the same time demonstrating that historical research, even as it attempts to reconstruct former contexts, need not consign its objects of study to the past, but can be used instead to raise questions relevant to the present. In this respect, the thesis tries to remain closer to the spirit of post-1968 than does much of the more recent, "new" historical research into Soviet cinema and the British documentary movement, to which it is nevertheless greatly indebted

The Reception of Gerhart Hauptmann's Dramas in Russia

Submitted to the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Kansas in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.The reception of Gerhart Hauptmann's dramas in nineteenth-century Russia began in 1889 with the Russian review of Vor Sonnenaufgang as performed in Germany. Hanneles Himmelfahrt was the first play by Hauptmann to be staged in Russia (1895), performed by the troupe of the St. Petersburg Theater of the Literary Arts Circle; the play ran quite successfully, largely due to its social content, which appealed to both the progressive and reactionary factions of the intelligentsia. Hannele, followed by Die versunkene Glocke and Michael Kramer, was the most successful of the six Hauptmann plays performed by the St. Petersburg company. By 1901, Novoe Vremia had proclaimed Hauptmann as Germany's leading dramatist. Despite the early gains for Hauptmann's dramatic works at the St. Petersburg Theater, where there were serious deficiencies in directing and stage technique, the prominance of Hauptmann's plays would have been unthinkable without the main vehicle which conveyed them, the Moscow Art Theater, without the significant artistic support from Anton Chekhov or the repertory inclinations of Nemirovich- Danchenko, and most of all, without the inestimable talents and favor of Russia's greatest actor-director, Konstantin Stanislavsky. Approximately 1905-06 both a literary trend away from Naturalism and, more importantly, political considerations worked to the detriment of continued popularity for Hauptmann's plays. Following the end of World War I, Russian interest in Hauptmann's works increased significantly, as Die Weber drew considerable attention for possible use in promoting political ends; Lenin himself directed that this play be performed on Soviet stages. Russian interest in Hauptmann's works declined noticeably in the late 1920s, largely due to the disfavor of Stalin's Commissar of Education Lunacharsky, who greatly admired Hauptmann, but now viewed the vacillations and symbolism of the author as negative. The early 1930s saw a culmination of attention to, and publication of, Hauptmann's dramas, but, overall, a lengthy loss of interest ensued thereafter due to political hostilities with Germany. Soviet scholarship and dramatic representation mainly concerned Die Weber and Vor Sonnenuntergang after the war. Post-Soviet Russia continues to hold Hauptmann in high regard, as indicated by its foremost institution of higher learning, Moscow State University

The generation of Allende and Solidarność. Leftist dissidents, reform socialism and the intellectual elite in Moscow during the late Brezhnev era

This thesis presents a cultural history of the Young Socialists, a left-wing dissident circle that was active in Moscow at the end of the Brezhnev era. Mainly from highly placed intelligentsia and party nomenklatura families, the core of the Young Socialists first met as students in the Faculty of History of Moscow State University (MGU) in the early-1970s. At the time of their dissent (1977-1982) the circle’s leaders, Andrei Fadin and Pavel Kudiukin, were graduate students at the Institute of World Economy and International Relations (IMEMO). The wider circle, which numbered roughly fifty people, were mainly young left-wing intellectuals in Moscow linked by a mix of everyday life associations and underground conspiracy. The Young Socialists published the samizdat journal Varianty (Variants), an internally circulated theoretical almanac that was dedicated to the elaboration of a programme of reform for the Soviet Union. The circle’s undertakings were both domestic in scope and transnational through their efforts to establish connections with the Polish trade union Solidarność and the Italian Communist Party. Using oral history sources and archival materials from Russia and a number of European countries, I reconstruct how the Young Socialists’ worldviews and cultural practices formed under the influence of Soviet and transnational forces during late stagnation. Locating them at the intersection of reformist cultures in the Soviet political-intellectual establishment, the dissident movement and the social milieu of elite youth of the last Soviet generation, I view the Young Socialists as the second generation of socialist dissent. In doing so, I explore how they drew on the reformist intellectual heritage of the shestidesiatniki and used the samizdat networks and other communication channels developed by the first generation of dissidents. In particular, at a time when left-wing ideas had fallen out of fashion among wider society, I focus on the transmission of lived experience from older socialist intellectuals to these younger dissidents to explain the transfer of socialist dissent into the next generation. Against the backdrop of Soviet decline, the Young Socialists drew inspiration for their views from foreign leftist movements. Viewing the international landscape at the turn of the 1980s, they perceived the existence of a European reformist Left that was loosely linked in an internationalism that was sympathetic to Eastern Bloc dissent. While emphasising the advanced character of the Young Socialists’ understandings of the outside world relative to earlier generations of socialist dissent, my account also considers their limitations. Looking ahead to Perestroika, I consider how the experience of socialist dissent accelerated the former Young Socialists’ adoption of social democratic and new leftist identities. This thesis enhances understandings of socialist dissent. It introduces new perspectives on the reformist currents in the Soviet intellectual elite beyond Gorbachev’s network of reformers. Finally, it expands understandings of the forms of political engagement that occurred within the last Soviet generation

Disturbance and plausibility in a virtual rock concert: a pilot study

We present methods used to produce and study a first version of an attempt to reconstruct a 1983 live rock concert in virtual reality. An approximately 10 minute performance by the rock band Dire Straits was rendered in virtual reality, based on the use of computer vision techniques to extract the appearance and movements of the band, and crowd simulation for the audience. An online pilot study was conducted where participants experienced the scenario and freely wrote about their experience. The documents produced were analyzed using sentiment analysis, and groups of responses with similar sentiment scores were found and compared. The results showed that some participants were disturbed not by the band performance but by the accompanying virtual audience that surrounded them. The results point to a profound level of plausibility of the experience, though not in the way that the authors expected. The findings add to our understanding of plausibility of virtual environments.This work is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant Moments in Time in Immersive Virtual Environments (MoTIVE) #742989.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

The Rocketbox Library and the Utility of Freely Available Rigged Avatars

As part of the open sourcing of the Microsoft Rocketbox avatar library for research and academic purposes, here we discuss the importance of rigged avatars for the Virtual and Augmented Reality (VR, AR) research community. Avatars, virtual representations of humans, are widely used in VR applications. Furthermore many research areas ranging from crowd simulation to neuroscience, psychology, or sociology have used avatars to investigate new theories or to demonstrate how they influence human performance and interactions. We divide this paper in two main parts: the first one gives an overview of the different methods available to create and animate avatars. We cover the current main alternatives for face and body animation as well introduce upcoming capture methods. The second part presents the scientific evidence of the utility of using rigged avatars for embodiment but also for applications such as crowd simulation and entertainment. All in all this paper attempts to convey why rigged avatars will be key to the future of VR and its wide adoption

Khronika: Soviet Newsreel at the Dawn of the Information Age

This dissertation considers ten years in the life of one word. Between 1918 and 1928, khronika—the Russian word that describes newsreel filmmaking—became the site of extensive debates about the aesthetics and social responsibilities of the documentary film. Following the February revolution of 1917, khronika was promoted as the privileged record keeper of a new historical era, catalyzing a period of unprecedented formal innovation. During this period, Soviet documentarians transform the relationship between text and image, developing a film style that integrated verbal and visual material. In newsreel journal such as Kino-Pravda, images cease to be passive illustrations accompanying text and are for the first time treated as equally capable of delivering propositional content. Like other modernist art practices, khronika develops in dialogue with attempts to define its essence as a film genre and its medium specificity. Falling under the influence of competing strains within Constructivism, khronika is first conceived as a purely visual medium and then again as a purely factual one. Made up of seventeen variations on the social, political, and aesthetic aspects of khronika's evolution, the dissertation makes a crucial revision of documentary history. Rather than focus on the first instances of non-fiction films that adapt the narrative conventions of fiction film, Khronika examines the origins of documentary as an informational medium. Drawing on film theory, history of science, and philosophy, Khronika asks what it was that film learned to express during the first tumultuous decade when documentaries ceased to be windows onto a world and become the active interpreters of the reality captured by motion picture cameras.Slavic Languages and Literature

“Truth Behind Bars”

Just north of the Arctic Circle is the settlement of Vorkuta, a notorious camp in the Gulag internment system that witnessed three pivotal moments in Russian history. In the 1930s, a desperate hunger strike by socialist prisoners, victims of Joseph Stalin’s repressive regime, resulted in mass executions. In 1953, a strike by forced labourers sounded the death knell for the Stalinist forced labour system. And finally, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, a series of strikes by new, independent miners’ unions were central to overturning the Stalinist system. Paul Kellogg uses the story of Vorkuta as a frame with which to re-assess the Russian Revolution. In particular, he turns to the contributions of Iulii Martov, a contemporary of Lenin, and his analysis of the central role played in the revolution by a temporary class of peasants-in-uniform. Kellogg explores the persistence and creativity of workers’ resistance in even the darkest hours of authoritarian repression and offers new perspectives on the failure of democratic governance after the Russian Revolution.illustrato