Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (v. 2, leaves 126-137). / Ambient street media are the media of our everyday lives in cities. Manifested in bits and fragments on the surfaces of the streetscape, these media often escape our notice - tuned out as visual clutter or dismissed as unimportant. Yet, attentive viewing and analysis reveal much about the local culture of communication and expression. This thesis blends empirical and theoretical methodologies in a year-long photographic study that takes a fresh look at the concepts and realities of "media," "the city," and "the everyday," and sets several disciplines in interaction with one another. Ambient street media include news racks, traffic and street signs, storefronts, sandwichboards, graffiti, stickers, murals, and flyers. This is in contrast to conventional notions of "the media" as one-to-many communication modalities consumed primarily in the domestic space, particularly television, radio, major newspapers, and the Internet. Studies of media in everyday life typically address these mass media, passing over ambient street media for any detailed examination. By examining both the explicit and implicit facets of street communications, this study elevates their importance in a number of disciplines, from cultural studies to urban design and planning. For example, we find much to counter postmodern anxieties about cities. / (cont.) While evidence of globalization and the prioritization of government and corporate interests over those of local entities and autonomous individuals are easily found, the ecology of street media includes a vibrant array of individual communications. Currently, much of the media made by individuals are unauthorized to appear where they do. But in the commercial area of Central Square, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, they are accorded a high degree of tolerance by local authorities, making this a unique laboratory in which to see what happens when streetscape surfaces are accessible to many. The streetscape can be viewed as a communication medium in itself, special for its direct accessibility and affordability as well as the immediacy with which messages posted there can be received. Urban planners who seek to design spaces that give people a sense of place are encouraged to more equitably apportion space among government, commercial, and individual interests and add surfaces that are more accommodating to a wider array of inscriptions. / by Rekha Murthy. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2006. / Leaf 77 blank. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 74-76). / On March 23rd 1969 Boston's public television station WGBH broadcast a program titled The Medium is the Medium. The program was a half-hour long compilation of short videos by six artists. The six pieces ranged from electronically manipulated imagery set to the music of the Beatles to an attempt at communication between four separate locations through audio-visual technology. As the narrator, David Oppenheim, the cultural executive producer for the Public Television Laboratory, intones at the beginning of the show, "what happens when artists explore television?" What happened was a program unlike anything seen before. The Medium is the Medium was the result of the pairing of artists with engineers. This pairing was the brainchild of the Rockefeller Foundation, which decided to bring these two together in what was the Artists-in-Television program. Founded in 1967 it gave seed grants to two public broadcasting stations, WGBH in Boston and KQED in San Francisco. These grants enabled the stations to begin residency programs matching artists with members of their production staffs. Several of the artists in the program had made films but most were coming to this type of time-based art work for the first time. The Artists-in Television program gave these artists the opportunity to expand their ideas into an art from involving television technologies. It offered those working in more traditional media the technology and expertise to try their hands at a nascent art form, video. / by James A. Nadeau. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2010. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 93-97). / Discussions of music reproduction technology have generally focused on what Jonathan Sterne calls "tympanic" reproduction: the recording and playback of sounds through microphones and speakers. While tympanic reproduction has been very successful, its success has limited the ways in which music reproduction is popularly imagined and discussed. This thesis explores the history of "re-performance," an alternative mode of reproduction epitomized by the early twentieth-century player piano. It begins with a discussion of nineteenth-century piano recorders and the historical role of material representation in the production of music. It continues with the advent of player pianos in the early twentieth century that allowed users to "interpret" prerecorded material, blurring the line between performance and reproduction and inspiring popular reflection on the role of the mechanical in music. It concludes with the founding of the American Piano Company laboratory in 1924 and the establishment of a mechanically founded rhetoric of fidelity. Bookending this history is an account of a performance and recording session organized by Zenph Studios, a company that processes historical tympanic recordings to produce high-resolution data files for modern player pianos. Zenph's project appears futuristic from the perspective of tympanic reproduction, but is more readily understood in terms of the history of re-performance, suggesting a need for renewing critical attention on re-performative technologies. Contemporary developments in music reproduction such as music video games and sampling may make new sense considered in the context of re-performance. This alternative history aims to provide a ground on which such analysis could be built. / by Nicholas Patrick Seaver. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-165). / This thesis is a study of the Fisher Price PXL 2000 camera and the artists and amateurs who make films and videos with this technology. The Pixelvision camera records video onto an audiocassette; its image is low-resolution, black and white. Fisher Price marketed the PXL 2000 to children in 1987, but withdrew the camera after one year. Despite its lack of commercial success, the camera became popular with avant-garde artists, amateur film- and videomakers and collectors, sparking a renewed interest in the obsolete camera. An online community has built up around the format, providing its members with information on how to modify the camera to make it compatible with contemporary digital equipment. Although Pixelvision garners little recognition from mainstream culture, the camera's hipster cachet and perceived rarity has driven up prices in the community and in auctions. This thesis examines the position of the PXL 2000 camera within the history of moving image technology, and in the context of today's digital video equipment. How has this obsolete video camera made the transition from analog to digital? The thesis also explores Pixelvision's position in the cultural hierarchy of media, as well as the motivations of artists and users who are creating with the camera today, as it moves further and further into its obsolescence. / by Andrea Nina McCarty. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-66). / What game design opportunities do we create when we extend massively multiplayer online games (MMOs) to cell phones? MMOs allow us to create representations of our own increasing mastery, and mobile gives us better access to this mastery and allows us to integrate it more fully into the ways we see ourselves. MMOs motivate mastery by making that mastery personally and socially relevant, and visibly showing it increase. Virtual worlds that make players feel physically and socially present increase motivation to achieve mastery. MMOs that convince players their avatars represent some aspect of their personalities increase motivation to invest in and experiment with different constructions of self. I apply these principles to an analysis of two games: Labyrinth, a game I helped create, and World of Warcraft, the current leading MMO. With Labyrinth, I explain the design decisions we made and their impact. With World of Warcraft, I described how altering the design could accommodate mobile play and better motivate increasing mastery. / by Daniel Roy. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 174-176). / An examination of the changing representation of male homosexuality in American superhero comics between the years 1986 and 2003. The thesis gives some theoretical attention to problems of epistemology, and the uses of connotative as opposed to denotative representation and reading. It traces the history of the discourse to the paranoia and anxiety generated by Fredric Wertham's 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which has led to an anxiety about "the gay-Batman reading" that has affected the shape of the genre's evolution. In Part One, the thesis examines the ways in which superhero comics have historically discussed homosexuality, using metaphors or symbolic "tropes," which variously imagine the superhero as a costume fetishist, as flamboyant, as sadomasochistic, as suspiciously homosocial, or as a pedophile. In Part Two, close readings of contemporary instances of gay characters in superhero texts offers insights into current trends in representation. The close readings examine Northstar, of the Marvel comics Alpha Flight and Uncanny X-Men; Apollo and the Midnighter, of the comics Stormwatch and The Authority, variously published by Wildstorm and DC Comics; and the character Terry Berg in Green Lantern, published by DC Comics. / by Susannah Mandel. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, February 2004. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 137-143). / The US Army developed multiplayer online First Person Shooter video game, America's Army, was examined as the first instance of an entirely state-produced and directed enterprise leveraging video game popular culture. Specifically, this study is concerned with the potential of the America's Army gamespace as a US civilian-military public sphere of the Information Age, as assessed through Habermasian theories of democratic communication. Interview fieldwork was carried out in several America's Army game communities including those of real-life military personnel, Christian Evangelicals, and hackers. The political activities of these exceptional game communities are considered for the ways they escape and transcend current critical theories of Internet-based public spheres. / by Zhan Li. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, September 2008. / "August 2008." / Includes bibliographical references (p. 150-153). / This thesis argues that slapstick is a mode of comedy that has become a tradition because its basic principles of physical violence and disruption, and its conventions of grotesque movement and of mockery and abuse of the body, have been developed across media, cultures, and eras. Accordingly, this thesis examines the comic routines or lazzi -independent and modular micronarratives- where the slapstick principles and conventions have been formalized, and explores their different reinterpretations: from Commedia dell'Arte to American Vaudeville to American live-action comedy to American animation. Since sound plays a major role inside the lazzi, the analysis focuses on the sound practices and technologies that have been used across media to produce comic effects. In addition, this thesis claims that the theatrical animated cartoons -Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies- made at Termite Terrace between 1937 and 1943 embody the slapstick tradition, reinvigorate it, and transform it. The thesis explains the production processes (technologies and practices) that led up to the creation of an energetic audiovisual rhythm and the sophisticated orchestration of all the sound elements (music, voices, sound-effects) in complex soundtracks. Finally, an audiovisual analysis of seven animated shorts reveals a sonic vocabulary for depicting the cartoon body and shows the schizophonic mimesis that takes place when using it. All in all, the study of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies of this time period reveals the interplay between convention and innovation that characterizes the slapstick style of Termite Terrace, a style that years later became the trademark of Warner Bros. animation. / by Andres Alberto Lombana Bermudez. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-202). / This thesis provides a critical analysis of the relation between Internet art and the traditional institution for contemporary art in the North American and West-European regions. Thirteen years after its inception as an art form, the Internet art world finds itself in a developmental stage and its relation to the traditional institution for contemporary art is accordingly. Through an elaborate discussion of the key players, institutions and discourses on aesthetics, economics and exhibition methodologies, this sociological analysis of the past and current situation hopes to offer a solid ground for extrapolation and predictions for Internet art's future as an art world in its relation to the traditional art institutions. / by Karen A. Verschooren. / S.M.

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Comparative Media Studies, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 97-105). / Thesis explores the broad appeal of narratives with adolescent protagonists across a variety of media, including literature, film, and video games. An analysis of key texts within their historical contexts reveals affinities between disparate genres and strong connections between fiction and the discourse of adolescence in psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Adolescence narratives illuminate both the transgressive boundaries of a given culture and the normative center, and make explicit what is usually considered natural or implicit. To discover the roots of contemporary adolescence narratives, prototypes for the picaresque novel, the school story, and the Bildungsroman are examined, and each are shown to contain narrative conventions that survive in recent works. A contemporary case study looks at the trilogy of female coming of age films by Sofia Coppola to show how they embody the ambiguities and contradictions of third wave feminism. Finally, the author explores the affinity between video games and adolescence, the implications of translating literary genres into an interactive medium, and uses examples from both science fiction literature and recent games to theorize how games might better address the themes of adolescence in both story and play mechanics. / by Neal A. Grigsby. / S.M.