During the late 19th century, arts and literature had a surge of sensory awareness, made manifest through sensory analogy, intersensory metaphor, and synaesthesia. This dissertation explores this phenomenon through a study of five poets and artists: Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Barlas, and Julia Margaret Cameron. Using imaginative sensing, these artists transformed the relationship between artist and observer, assigning greater responsibility to their audience while simultaneously asserting artistic control of their work. Their fascination with sensory mixing and multisensory awareness demonstrates unique ideas about perception and embodiment, ideas that have sparked both controversy and imitation. I begin with a brief history of the condition known as synaesthesia, considering its position as an “abnormal” clinical condition, a desired artistic state of transcendence, and a simple transfer of metaphor. Chapter 1 describes how two French poems brought synaesthesia to public consciousness and prompted a literary movement. In Chapter 2, I explore how poet-painter Dante Rossetti used “acts of attention” and unheard music to demand viewers’ embodied participation. Chapter 3 introduces John Barlas, a relatively obscure British poet who crafted exotic, sensory-laden environments that hovered between the actual and imagined, insisting that the reader use his sensory imagination to participate. Moving to the realm of photography in Chapter 4, I consider Julia Margaret Cameron, whose “out-of-focus” pictures changed photography from a mechanistic technology to high art by incorporating the sense of touch. Historically, the senses have been ranked and separated, with priority given to vision, the sense most associated with reason. I argue that considering the senses as bundles of interconnected experiences and through imagination rather than as isolated methods of physical perception can show how the senses function culturally and give us a much greater understanding of how we process the world. While no time period has regarded the senses with the intensity of the late 19th century, the embodied approach of the era can be applied to our current “sensory revolution” and can impact how we regard technology, cultural studies, and interdisciplinarity. Evaluating how 19th century artists blended the senses through imaginative constructs gives a more thorough explanation of the characteristic sensuality of the period and provides a model for how sensing can function more fully in current endeavors.

The topic of this dissertation is the anatomical, psychological, and cultural examination of a human face in order to effectively construct an anatomy-driven 3D virtual face customization and action model. In order to gain a broad perspective of all aspects of a face, theories and methodology from the fields of art, engineering, anatomy, psychology, and cultural studies have been analyzed and implemented. The computer generated facial customization and action model were designed based on the collected data. Using this customization system, culturally-specific attractive face in Korean popular culture, “kot-mi-nam (flower-like beautiful guy),” was modeled and analyzed as a case study. The “kot-mi-nam” phenomenon is overviewed in textual, visual, and contextual aspects, which reveals the gender- and sexuality-fluidity of its masculinity. The analysis and the actual development of the model organically co-construct each other requiring an interwoven process. Chapter 1 introduces anatomical studies of a human face, psychological theories of face recognition and an attractive face, and state-of-the-art face construction projects in the various fields. Chapter 2 and 3 present the Bezier curve-based 3D facial customization (BCFC) and Multi-layered Facial Action Model (MFAF) based on the analysis of human anatomy, to achieve a cost-effective yet realistic quality of facial animation without using 3D scanned data. In the experiments, results for the facial customization for gender, race, fat, and age showed that BCFC achieved enhanced performance of 25.20% compared to existing program Facegen , and 44.12% compared to Facial Studio. The experimental results also proved the realistic quality and effectiveness of MFAM compared with blend shape technique by enhancing 2.87% and 0.03% of facial area for happiness and anger expressions per second, respectively. In Chapter 4, according to the analysis based on BCFC, the 3D face of an average kot-mi-nam is close to gender neutral (male: 50.38%, female: 49.62%), and Caucasian (66.42-66.40%). Culturally-specific images can be misinterpreted in different cultures, due to their different languages, histories, and contexts. This research demonstrates that facial images can be affected by the cultural tastes of the makers and can also be interpreted differently by viewers in different cultures.

Since its development, critics of electronic literature have touted all that is “new” about the field, commenting on how these works make revolutionary use of non-linear structure, hyperlinks, and user interaction. Scholars of digital narrative have most often focused their critiques within the paradigms of either the text-centric structuralist model of narrativity or post-structuralist models that implicate the text as fundamentally fluid and dependent upon its reader for meaning. But neither of these approaches can account completely for the unique modes in which digital narratives prompt readerly progression, yet still exist as independent creative artifacts marked by purposive design. I argue that, in both practice and theory, we must approach digital-born narratives as belonging to a third, hybrid paradigm. In contrast to standard critical approaches, I interrogate the presumed “newness” of digital narratives to reveal many aspects of these works that hearken to print predecessors and thus confirm classical narratological theories of structure and authorship. Simultaneously, though, I demonstrate that narrative theory must be revised and expanded to account for some of the innovative techniques inherent to digital-born narrative. Across media formats, theories of narrative beginnings, endings, and authorship contribute to understanding of readerly progress and comprehension. My analysis of Leishman’s electronically animated work Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw shows how digital narratives extend theories of narrative beginnings, confirming theoretical suitability of existing rules of notice, expectations for mouseover actions, and the role of institutional and authorial antetexts. My close study of Jackson’s hypertext my body: a Wunderkammer likewise informs scholarship on narrative endings, as my body does not provide a neatly linear plot, and thus does not cleanly correspond to theories of endings that revolve around conceptions of instabilities or tensions. Yet I argue that there is still compelling reason to read for narrative closure, and thus narrative coherence, within this and other digital works. Finally, my inquiry into Pullinger and Joseph’s collaboratively written Flight Paths: A Networked Novel firmly justifies the theory of implied authorship in both print and digital environments and confirms the suitability of this construct to a range of texts.

This dissertation expands upon the definition of eco-visualization artwork. EV was originally defined in 2006 by Tiffany Holmes as a way to display the real time consumption statistics of key environmental resources for the goal of promoting ecological literacy. I assert that the final forms of EV artworks are not necessarily dependent on technology, and can differ in terms of media used, in that they can be sculptural, video-based, or static two-dimensional forms that communicate interpreted environmental information. There are two main categories of EV: one that is predominantly screen-based and another that employs a variety of modes of representation to visualize environmental information. EVs are political acts, situated in a charged climate of rising awareness, operating within the context of environmentalism and sustainability. I discuss a variety of EV works within the frame of ecopsychology, including EcoArtTech’s Eclipse and Keith Deverell’s Building Run; Andrea Polli’s Cloud Car and Particle Falls; Nathalie Miebach’s series, The Sandy Rides; and Natalie Jeremijenko’s Mussel Choir. The range of EV works provided models for my creative project, Sculpting Corn Production, and a foundation from which I developed a creative methodology. Working to defeat my experience of solastalgia, Sculpting Corn Production is a series of discrete paper sculptures focusing on American industrial corn farming. This EV also functions as a way for me to understand our devastated monoculture landscapes and the politics, economics, and related areas of ecology of our food production.

As a passing glance at the popular texts of any given period reveals, the subject of vengeance is nearly inescapable; on billboards, websites, and year end lists, revenge represents a curious constant even amid disparate media. This study explores the cultural commonalities that align revenge texts of the English Renaissance and exploitation films of late 20th century America. As in-depth inquiry reveals, numerous ideas and narrative tropes popularized during the Early Modern period are pushed to their logical extremes in these films. The central factor that aligns London during the Renaissance and New York at the cusp of the 1990s relates to traumatic, far-reaching changes in the urban landscape and its uses. There is an observable preoccupation, on the part of playwrights and filmmakers, with the subject of vengeance as tied to notions of locality, space, and rightful ownership.

The focus of this thesis is to explore the automation technology used in the modern entertainment industry. Upon completion of my thesis, I will deliver a working prototype of the chosen technology and present its capabilities in a choreographed show.

Digital forms of media are monopolizing individuals' attention spans, utilizing visual strategies that demand our interactions. Throughout the history of media technology, mediums have become increasingly immersive, presenting more information than ever before. The user interface designs of digital platforms can damage our ability to focus and distribute attention in meaningful ways. Through analysis of our digital media consumption, this capstone project ultimately proposes mindful practices that help us lead more balanced lives and thrive in the digital age. The second half of this capstone project is a digital zine with digital illustrations, animations, and editorial-style articles. The digital zine emphasizes and subverts the elements of digital platforms that are specifically damaging to users’ patterns of behavior.

When people go online and leave their mark in bytes, how do their traces get preserved, shared, or lost? In the early 2000’s through about 2012, communities of millennial girl web developers and bloggers flourished on the English-speaking Internet. They would write about their intimate lives, code their website designs from scratch, create portfolios of graphics, and forge friendships with fellow bloggers that lasted through years. Most of these blogs are now gone; only patches remain as screenshots on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. For my senior project, I explored how techniques used in glitch art, normally used for destroying image files for purely aesthetic effects, could also be used to embed texts that could be read by humans inside digital photos. I excavated photos and self-portraits of individual bloggers whose old content has since been erased from their original domains as of 2018. Then, I overrode pieces of each image file with the respective bloggers’ journal entries extracted from https://web.archive.org. The result is a picture irreversibly corroded by the loss of its original data, akin to the state of their bloggers' archived websites. It still functions like any image file in that the picture can be copied, shared, and viewed on another computer. However, unlike a typical image file, it also hides a patchwork of legible English text; one can “dig” into the image’s encoding and uncover nuggets of letters from a past Internet presence--specifically, that of a millennial girl's thoughts on identity, life, and the joys and struggles of coding and managing her own website.

Of the Crickets imagines the overlapping worlds of ethical ecological solutions to climate changed sustenance and the potential for collective excellence in female exclusive environments. Using garments, furniture, site-specific installation and directed performance, the project harnesses social and material sensitivity to mine solutions for idealized living.

The What If Collection is a visual narrative that confronts white supremacy, the social, economic, and political ideology used to subjugate black civilization via colonial rule and enslavement in history and via structural racism today. Many white people have been socialized into a racial illiteracy that fosters white supremacy. This racial illiteracy fails to realize and understand the destructive effects of Western dominance on the rest of the world, particularly on past and present Africa and her diaspora. In response, utilizing discursive design, the collection constructs a counter-story that depicts a shift in the power structure in which the white oppressor is placed in the historical experience of the black oppressed. Moving forward from the past, a contemporary society is visualized where black people are the dominant force.