Thesis (M.F.A.)--West Virginia University, 2004. / Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains v, 35 p. : ill. (some col.). Vita. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 35).

This thesis examines how blogging is being deployed to disrupt institutional hegemony in Malta. The island state is an example of a hyperlocal context that includes strong political, ecclesiastical and media institutions, advanced take-up of social technologies and a popular culture adjusting to the promise of modernity represented by EU membership. Popular discourse is dominated by political partisanship and advocacy journalism, with Malta being the only European country that permits political parties to directly own broadcasting stations. The primary evidence in this study is derived from an analysis of online texts during an organic crisis that eventually led to a national referendum to consider the introduction of divorce legislation in Malta. Using netnography supplemented by critical discourse analysis, the research identifies a set of strategies bloggers used to resist, challenge and disrupt the discourse of a hegemonic alliance that included the ruling political party, the Roman Catholic Church and their media. The empirical results indicate that blogging in Malta is contributing to the erosion of the Church’s hegemony. Subjects that were previously marginalised as alternative are increasingly finding an online outlet in blog posts, social media networks and commentary on newspaper portals. Nevertheless, a culture of social surveillance together with the natural barriers of size and the permeability of the social web facilitates the appropriation of blogging by political blocs, who remain vigilant to the opportunity of extending their influence in new media to disrupt horizontal networks of information exchange. Blogging is increasingly operating as a component of a hybrid media ecosystem that thrives on reflexive cycles of entertainment: the independent newspaper media, for long an active partner in the hegemonic set up in Malta, are being transformed and rendered more permeable at the same time as their power and influence are being eroded. The study concludes that a new episteme is more likely to emerge through the symbiosis of hybrid media and reflexive waves of networked individualism than systemic, organised attempts at online political disruption.

How social media and Kickstarter are saving cult television shows like Arrested Development and Veronica Mars.

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Through investigating my installation, performance, video and collaborative practice, Honeymoons builds connections between timelessness in repetition, the sacred potentials of pop culture, the animation of matter and the relationship of the body to space. Central to these relationships are questions about the function of the erotic in a mediated world. How can a sensual experience help us to define what is real, what has value?

The Oval Office is the most iconic room in the White House and one of the most recognizable interiors in the United States. I have recreated the Oval Office as a three-dimensional, interactive environment for the purpose of studying 3D modeling, texturing, and environment creation. My recreation of the Oval Office contains more than 30 unique models which use over 100 high-quality texture maps. My goal was to study the creation of both organic and hard surface models as well as learning which workflows were best suited to each object within a scene. I also wanted to study how different textures might be created and what workflows resulted in the most efficient and effective results, especially when creating Normal maps. The final project is designed for the Unreal 3 Engine, and still image renders were created with the Mental Ray renderer from within Autodesk Maya. The software I used to complete this project included Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Mudbox, Adobe Photoshop, Quixel’s nDO2, XNormal, and the Unreal Development Kit 3 (UDK) by Epic Games.

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In the context of changes in British theatre theory and practice, in particular in the post-1968 Fringe, is it possible to consider playscripts as literary works,expressing the views of individual writers? The emphasis within the early Fringe was on collectively organized workshops and group creativity, and on the exploration of non-verbal expression on stage, something which had been anticipated by the pre-1968 avant-garde and which amounted to a challenge to the playwright's traditionally dominant position in the theatre. However, the playscript, as an example of written fictional narrative, dependent on the theatre for its realization but not its creation, still commands an independent status as a work, and the fiction enables the playwright to explore and evaluate reality in his own terms. Snoo Wilson's works illustrate his clear awareness on the power of fiction to posit the equal reality of the rational and the irrational in dramatic terms, as a metaphor for our way of understanding reality outside the theatre, where reality and fiction seem difficult to distinguish. David Hare focusses on the discrepancy between fiction and reality in the way we experience our lives and interpret history, and he seeks, as a conscious story-teller, to reveal, in imaginative terms, how that discrepancy leads to actual suffering. Howard Brenton's declared preference for content and fact, rather than form and fiction, and for the theatre as a democratic medium, cannot conceal his consistent endeavour to use fictional narrative as fantastic as Wilson's to oppose bourgeois versions of reality. In spite of their having learned to work with theatre companies and, hence, come to see themselves as parts of a larger, complex art, these playwrights, like their predecessors, continue to write fictions which express their personal vision in a form, print, that is accessible and analysable in isolation from actual performance.

I challenge quiet regulations within my own community, the Claremont University Consortium, by hosting two Silent Discos in culturally and explicitly quiet locations: the Honnold Mudd Library and the James Turrell Skyspace at Pomona College. Attempting to demonstrate Silent Disco’s ability to sonically adapt to quietly marked areas I recorded the sounds generated by these events and later amplified them in these culturally quiet locations. These Silent Discos embrace the given environment and sound limitations, while simultaneously accepting the popular modes of musical listening. By performing Silent Discos in the James Turrell Skyspace at Pomona College and the Honnold Mudd Library, I give the power to each individual to reduce noise pollution, while collectively listening to the same music as a group.

Instead of a Resolution explores the functions of narrative as an accumulative, simplified and indexed order of elements (events, persons, objects and times,) through personal or family histories. Each work in the exhibition, in its own way, locates and/or fabricates connections between inside/outside, private/public, and individual/collective.