Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2007. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MA (Visual Arts))-University of Pretoria, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

This research comprises interrelated elements of video works and a thesis. The philosophy and aesthetics of nature are explored through light and motion in the time- based image. Framed within selected aspects of G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy, I explore digital aesthetics, nature and dialectics, bringing new perspectives to the poetics of the image and a different understanding of the formative influences of nineteenth century aesthetics and twentieth century modernism on contemporary film and video. I approach these questions from the position of practice, of which the project has two components. Firstly, the representation of natural phenomena is discussed in a number of experimental films and videos, examining selected works in Europe and North America across the last century. The practices focused upon are those where techniques and processes of moving image technologies are brought into critical reflection in the representation of nature (and interests in motion and form). This includes the ways in which photosensitive silver halide crystals on film, electronic signals or pixels are engaged in the material process of the work’s making. Secondly, the works that I have made focus on the constituent technologies of the videographic image; the progressive scan, pixel, properties of digital colour, compression and display technologies. The technologically mediated image of nature is foregrounded with recordings of the sky, sea and terrain explored through system-based processes. The outcomes reflect a dialectical theory of knowledge in the experience of landscape and the human relation to nature. The video works have made present, in sensuous form, the transient ideas accorded to nature in the theories and concepts defined. The relations of practice (video works) and theory (the thesis) are dialectical, where both components interrelate, reflect and determine one another.

The main purpose of a logotype is to harmonize with a company’s business concept and culture. This study is based on the receiver’s attitudes about three different logotypes - Volvo, Telia and Mcdonald's. It informs the reader about the importance of a logotype as a mean of communication and if the perceptions of the logotype harmonize with the profile of the company. The study also discusses whether the visual aspects of a logotype make any difference in this process. This is a qualitative study that has been conducted through interviews and the purpose is to collect and analyze the receiver’s attitudes regarding the logotypes. The theories of this study are based on visual communication, interpretation and semiotics. Our study shows that the receiver’s attitudes against the logotypes are mostly negative, mainly because the receiver’s were unable to understand the meaning of the logotypes. This study also shows that the receiver’s interpretation of the logotypes depended on a specific context and prejudice.

An interior design project was completed by the researcher on the campus of Oregon State University. The purpose of the project was to participate in, direct and record the design process of an interior design project with an emphasis on the use of graphic communication methods. A chronology detailed the entire project and the various graphic communication methods used during the design process. An evaluation of the project compared the graphic communication methods used during the project with a previously developed model which outlined various stages of the design process and the graphic communication methods appropriate to each stage in the process. In most cases the design project followed the model closely. / Graduation date: 1991

Thesis (M.Nurs.)--Murdoch University. / Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Health Sciences. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 99-108)

Thesis (M.A.)--Texas State University--San Marcos, 2009. / Vita. Reproduction permission applies to print copy: Blanket permission granted per author to reproduce. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 67-68).

After languishing for many years in the periphery of the field as a tacitly closed off concept, visuality is back on the agenda of Visual Culture Studies and, with it, the issue of power. In contrast to its informal use as a term to describe the ‘social fact’ of the visual, Nicholas Mirzoeff’s full scale reappraisal of visuality has revealed its strategic, military genealogy. However, in this and other revisionist accounts, the theory of twenty-first century power remains a predominantly hegemonic one, with visuality operating as an outside force, a power that structures and defines the reality of a world to which we remain subject. In this essay, by identifying emergent tendencies in the logic of capitalism, I present an alternate account of the present. I expose a post-hegemonic visuality which operates by co-opting the radical and experimental energies of digital culture, a visuality which no longer defines a fixed world but exploits the distributed social powers of ‘worlding’, a visuality which taps into and mediates our collective potential to make and remake new worlds. I situate this worlding visuality in the science-fictional context of what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘control society’. In so doing, I attend to the principal lacunae of the field – capital and labour – and examine how social and cultural activities previously identified with ‘resistance’ are increasingly integrated within a dynamic, complex system of power. By focusing on this ‘media ecology’, and taking into consideration the broader cultural implications of network technologies, I dispute the popular rhetoric of the digital and challenge conventional definitions of ‘the visual’. Indeed, I contend that a newly intense visuality necessitates a transformation in current attitudes toward the aesthetic, and that we must examine more closely the realm of bodily affect. I emphasize, throughout, a new temporality of control, insisting that it is crucial we now recognize an immanent, ontological visuality, a power which utilizes the ‘always-on’ communicational relations of a culture associated with cloud computing. To undertake such a study, I employ and adapt a set of tools which (though largely unfamiliar to the field formally identified with visual culture) stimulate the energies expressed in several realms of contemporary thought, particularly those assembled as ‘Non-Representational Theory’. My explicit contribution to the field is formulated around an argument for the need to go beyond representation, and, moreover, that to achieve any critical purchase on digital culture, theories of visuality must attend to the realm of the virtual, as outlined by Henri Bergson, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others. For examples, I turn to some apparently familiar places: advertising, television, film and gaming. But, in making transversal intersections across divergent disciplines, I also find expressions of this emergent visuality in less conventional spheres: in twenty-first century literature, in software procedures, in socio-biological experiments. Rather than images to be ‘read’ or interpreted, I take the relations and disjunctions between such examples to be symptoms of a new capitalist visuality, one that manipulates and exploits the multiple, paradoxical nature of the real.

The thesis presents an analytic work of the MDA-framework and the promotional art of Halo 4 and Mass Effect 2 and how the two areas correlate with each other. The aim for the thesis is to investigate how the art style of the promotional art uses the elements of art to communicate the different gameplay of Halo 4 and Mass Effect 2, both set in a science fiction world, to their respective audiences in order to find how the elements of art can help to emphasize communication of gameplay information to the audience. This is reached by analyzing the gameplay of both games with the help of the MDA-framework by Hunicke, LeBlanc and Zubek enabling the analyses to reach a more comprehensive breakdown of the games. The analyses of the promotional artwork for both games are weighed against categories in the elements of art, the reason to find a more comprehensive breakdown of the promotional art. The data from both analyses are later compared with each other to find how the elements of art communicate information of the gameplay to the audience. In addition, it presents what categories of the elements of art in this analysis seems to be the most common for communicating gameplay information of the chosen promotional artworks. The conclusion is that the use of elements of art in promotional art in Halo 4 and Mass Effect 2 seems to carry more information that communicates to the audience than what might be the first to meet the eye. This leads to an understanding that the analysis of a broader sample size of promotional art from the games can open an opportunity of a better understanding how the use of elements of art in promotional art can communicate gameplay to the audience. Additionally this could also be applied to a larger range of games in order to find how different genres use the elements of art to communicate to their respective audience.

I am fascinated by the men who visit the strip clubs of Hindley Street in Adelaide. In other words, I observe male spectators who look at naked women performing an alluring act for their pleasure. Such a scene represents sexual difference at an extreme level particularly as the night progresses and the men get drunker becoming themselves a part of the performance. Strippers manipulate mens desires and fantasies and parody, through their routine, the male in the act of sex. And as men watch men watching women perform, I suggest men are actually sharing their sexual experiences with each other, raising questions about assumptions of ???heterosexual??? desire associated with why men go to strip clubs, as gender boundaries blur and become ambiguous. / The focus of my research has involved positioning myself as a member of the audience in three strip clubs along Hindley Street a clothed woman in a male dominated space dedicated to the representation of nudity and sex. In conducting my research, I have relied upon a methodological approach loosely based both on ethnographic and the action research models with the aim of using the understandings gained through this to inform my visual art practice, which includes photographic images, staged settings and installation. I consider my artwork to be a form of experimentation through which I explore issues of sexuality, power, sexual transgression and gender difference within strip clubs creating provocative scenes which position viewers as voyeurs. / My thesis as the totality of the artefacts and exegesis which form the outcomes of this research draws on critical and cultural theory concerned to explore pornography, with particular reference to masculine fantasy and desire. I also make reference to a number of contemporary visual artists who question these same issues through their works. / My project questions why men go to strip clubs, and involves speculation as to whether this choice actually entails a rejection by such men of aspects of their own masculine identity, or reflects a need to detach themselves from the physical act of sex with women, or perhaps simply reveals their reliance upon fantasy, titillation and suspense as a form of sexual pleasure. Using a play of gender roles based on a reversal of performative aspects of the scenario of the strip club, I hope the artefacts created in the course of this research will provoke viewers into exploring unsettling questions and issues and reflect an image of men as being both complex and vulnerable, rather than dominant and in control. Through constructed installation spaces involving photographic images of empty strip clubs, men and women, along with smell, lighting and sound I attempt to set the stage for a performance upon and about sexual desire and difference. / Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, n.d.