Recent developments in network culture suggest a weakening of hierarchical narratives of power and representation. Online technologies of distributed authorship appear to nurture a complex, speculative, contradictory and contingent realism. Yet there is a continuing deficit where the moving image is concerned, its very form appearing resistant to the dynamic throughputs and change models of real-time interaction. If the task is not to suspend but encourage disbelief as a condition in the user, how can this be approached as a design problem? In the attempt to build a series of design projects suggesting open architectures for the moving image, might a variety of (pre-digital) precursors from the worlds of art, architecture and film offer the designer models for inspiration or adaptation? A series of projects have been undertaken. Each investigates the composite moving image, specifically in the context of real-time computation and interaction. This arose from a desire to interrogate the qualia of the moving image within interactive systems, relative to a range of behaviours and/or observer positions, which attempt to situate users as conscious compositors. This is explored in the thesis through reflecting on a series of experimental interfaces designed for real time composition in performance, exhibition and online contexts.

A potentially rich source of curricular material for the development of a Deaf Studies curriculum lies in the category of feature films. The case of minority status of films produced by the American Deaf community is presented based on a comparison with the African-American independent film industry. An ethnographic study formulates an understanding of the contributions made by deaf independent filmmaker, Ernest Marshall. Marshall's personal background, his film business and perspectives on the value of film and signed language are discussed. A description of Marshall's film collection also provides an excellent historical resource for signed language use and for cross-cultural comparison purposes. Film studies are stressed as a viable teaching approach where the film medium providing cultural insights into the lives of deaf people and serving as a primary source for the documentation and preservation of American Sign Language.

Novel Incest: Negotiating Narrative Paradox, investigates how representations of incest disrupt not only family relationships but narrative conventions as well. The conventions governing a narrative's structural movement from beginning to end are upset in ways that often mimic the destruction of family lineage that incest causes. Each narrative instance of incest marks reconsideration not only of Western kinship systems and, more recently, the discourse of bourgeois family structures, but also of specific aspects of the rhetoric of fiction. This history of family and narrative disruption is sketched in my analysis of such seemingly disparate texts as Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders; Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier; John Barth's novels and non-fiction, including The End of the Road, The Floating Opera, The Sot-Weed Factor, Giles Goat-Boy, Lost in the Funhouse, The Friday Book, Further Fridays, LETTERS, Sabbatical, The Tidewater Tales, The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, and Once Upon a Time ; David Lynch's films, including The Alphabet, The Grandmother, Eraserhead, The Elephant Man, Dune, Blue Velvet, and Wild at Heart, and the pornographic film series Taboo I--XVIII . My analysis focuses on author- and reader-centered interpretations and includes both formal and thematic analysis. Psychoanalytic and deconstructive reading strategies are employed to investigate the intersections formed between narrative, rhetoric, and desire. The common thread connecting these texts is their unraveling of conventions in order to restructure the possibilities for narrative fiction.

<p> The primary objectives of this thesis are to research the Conquest of Mexico and to integrate research to expand upon <i>Mexica</i>, a 125 page historical fiction screenplay that was started in 2008 about the 16th century invasion of Mexico by Hern&aacute;n Cort&eacute;s. Through quantifying and writing commentary on the revisions to reflect the integration of new research, the enhanced work is accompanied by a critical introduction essay that simultaneously serves as a literature review to determine how sources contributed to the dramatization. The critical introduction is in Spanish, the research was conducted in Spanish and English, and <i>Mexica</i> is in English, to better reach the target, mainstream American audience. The essay addresses schools of thought and theoretical frameworks on the conquest and how they have been accepted, rejected, dramatized and/or incorporated in the screenplay. By analyzing chronicles, literature, film and television relevant to the conquest, narrating experiences and creative license are demonstrated. The essay exhibits a historiographical review by examining myths, misconceptions and consensus on several themes relevant to this era of initial contact in the New World. The critical introduction of <i>Mexica</i> explains how the enhanced script better integrates the indigenous perspective through analysis of a variety of sources, with a non Euro-centric emphasis, to reflect compelling and multidimensional characters in the historical fiction genre. </p>

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