This study explores the possible contribution of art, specifically of classical music as high art, to the constitutional ideal of creating a society based on freedom and dignity. Although the government publically exhibits a keen interest in the arts there seems to be no constitutional right to art or duty to financially support it in any way. This results in a lack of urgency from government’s side to make good on undertakings to fund and financially assist the arts and consequently forces most western art forms into financial adversity. Art and entertainment differ inherently from each other and require different financial contributions from government. Hannah Arendt proposes a two-fold test to ascertain what constitutes high art and what amounts to ‘vulgamusik’ as suggested by Theodore Adorno. Where low art wallows in the ‘mundaneness’ of everyday life, high art offers a promise of longevity and of transformation with every encounter. Traditionally government support for high art is justified as contributing to an overall ‘upliftment’ of the general community, but as South Africa is already in the compromised position of not providing in the basic needs of its citizens funding for the arts needs to be re-visited. When exploring the nature of the fundamental rights to freedom and dignity it becomes apparent that the system of rights constitutes, similar to high art, a complex system and that exposure to complex systems will develop the imagination and a level of creativity when attempting to understand something of their intricate nature. In order to improve our perspective on what constitutes a better future an enhanced imagination is needed. The notion of complex systems and developing the imagination comes from an article by Mark Antaki and Paul Celliers and links with Arendt’s notion of understanding also the other with an ‘enlarged mentality’. It is through Drucilla Cornell’s concept of the imaginary domain as a space wherein one is constantly conceptualizing the ‘becoming’ of a better self, a better world and better future that the right to freedom and dignity can be realized. The encounter with high art makes it possible to integrate and ‘dream up’ that which seemed impossible into becoming a reality. F / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / gm2014 / Jurisprudence / unrestricted

[pt] Nessa dissertação propomos investigar as razões pelas quais as personalidades públicas, sobretudo oriundas da esfera do entretenimento, adquiriram um papel tão central em nossas vidas, vale dizer, como se construiu historicamente nossa demanda e fascínio por celebridades e, ainda, de que maneira, e por que, elas permanecem sendo construídas hoje. A Revolução Burguesa, os meios de comunicação de massa, a cultura do indivíduo precipitaram-nos na Era das Celebridades, onde reinam os heróis dos novos tempos, midiáticos e, em sua maioria, vazios de glória, mas que, quer queiramos quer não, estão cada vez mais onipresentes em nossos cotidianos; personagens que corporificam nossos sonhos, anseios e angústias e que talvez julguemos desprezíveis, mas que, indubitavelmente, já não podemos ignorar. / [en] This dissertation proposes to investigate the reasons why public personalities, specially those coming from the enternainment industry, have become so important to our lives, that is, how was our demand and fascination towards celebrities historicly built and how, and why, they are still proliferating today. The Bourgeois Revolution, the mass midia communication system, the culture of the individual have led us to the Era of Celebrities, where the new heroes, although mediatic and, in many cases, empty of glory, prevails ; characters that incarnate our dreams, wishes and anguishes and whom we may judge despicable but that we can´t ignore.

[pt] A renderização de pele humana é um tópico de pesquisa fundamental para a indústria de entretenimento digital. Obter resultados realistas é bastante desafiador, ainda mais quando o objetivo do uso se destina a aplicações em tempo real. Nessa dissertação são estudadas e implementadas duas técnicas para simular o comportamento da luz através da pele humana. Ambas são baseadas em modelos físicos e empíricos e utilizam o espaço da textura na GPU para reproduzir a iluminação difusa e espalhamento transluminoso (subsurface scattering) em tempo real. Essa dissertação compara estas duas técnicas e dá orientações para a implementação de um módulo de renderização de pele humana em motores de jogos 3D. / [en] Skin rendering is a fundamental research topic for the digital entertainment industry. Realistic results are very challenge to obtain, especially for real time applications. In this dissertation, two skin rendering techniques are studied and developed to simulate light behavior through human skin. Both techniques are based on physic and empiric models and use texture space in GPU to reproduce diffuse illumination and subsurface scattering in real time. This dissertation compares these two techniques and gives guidelines for the implementation of a skin rendering module in 3D game engines.

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Ce travail consiste à comprendre le phénomène de l'ennui. L'ennui sera perçu comme un élément indissociable de la condition humaine. L'homme est un être qui s'ennuie, parce qu'il est doté d'une conscience, et que cette conscience l'inscrit dans un rapport particulier au temps. Mais nous constatons, en Occident, et à partir de l'époque moderne, que l'homme s'attache par toutes ses activités à fuir l'ennui. Tromper l'ennui c'est tromper sa condition, c'est, en tant qu'homme, se tromper soi-même. Toute la question est de comprendre comment cela est possible. Partant du divertissement comme moyen général de tromper l'ennui, nous irons jusqu'à la possibilité de ne pas tromper l'ennui, ce faisant nous serons amenés à étudier un aspect de la pathologie humaine à travers l'affection mélancolique. L'ennui doit être trompé, et cela pose une difficulté : comment un être conscient peut-il se tromper lui-même ? Mais l'ennui qui ne serait pas trompé mènerait l'homme vers un état pathologique. Pourquoi l'homme doit-il alors tromper l'ennui ? Notre travail se scinde en trois parties. Il s'agira d'abord de comprendre pourquoi l'homme trompe l'ennui. Il s'agira ensuite de comprendre comment il peut s'y prendre pour cela. Enfin nous envisagerons des possibilités pour ne pas tromper l'ennui. Notre étude s'attache à comprendre l'enjeu d'un ennui fondamental, et à travers lui, la condition humaine avec ses contradictions et ses questions / The aim of that work is to understand the boredom phenomenon. The boredom is here understood as an indivisible aspect of the human condition. A human being is a person who get bored because he has a conscience, and that conscience place himself in a particular relation with the time. But we see that from the modern age in the occident that human being strives through all its activities to escape boredom. Cheating boredom is cheating his condition, it is, as a human being, to cheat to yourself. The question is to understand how this is possible. Starting from the entertainment as a general way to run rings around boredom, we will get to the possibility of not cheating boredom, in doing so we will go through a facet of the human pathology through the melancholic affliction. Boredom shall be cheated and here comes a complication : how a conscious human being can cheat himself? But boredom that would not be overcame would leads man to a pathological condition. Why then shall human being run rings around boredom? Our work is divided into three chapters. First part will consider the reason why human being cheat boredom. The next step is to understand how he can do so. Finally we will consider opportunities for not cheating boredom. Our study aims to understand the concern of a fundamental boredom, and through hit the human condition with its contradictions and questions.

Today’s converging entertainment industry creates ‘transmedial’ brand worlds in which consumers are expected to become immersed. Integrated marketing campaigns connected to these worlds encourage various kinds of consumer productivity and invite consumers to partake in brand-building processes. Consumers, thus, are increasingly counted on to act as co-producers of contemporary entertainment. While such an altered consumer identity has been taken as evidence of enhanced consumer agency, it has also been recognized as a source of consumer exploitation.  This thesis aims to further our understanding of the increasingly ambivalent power-relationship that exists between agents in the entertainment industry and their most dedicated customers – the fans. The study employs a multiperspectival theoretical framework, in that cultural studies theory is enriched with perspectives from political economy. This integrated approach to the object of study yields a better understanding of the values of consumer activity, and fan productivity in particular, to industry and consumers respectively. The study applies existing theory on transmedial textuality, branding, and fandom to one particular franchise, Hasbro’s Transformers. This brand world, home of both industrial and fan-based creativity, is studied through analyses of official and unofficial contents, and through interviews with professionals and fans. The focus is on the brand environment established around the first live action film ever made within the franchise. Special attention is given to the all-encompassing film marketing campaign that contributed to forming this environment and to fan productivity taking place in relation to it.  The case study shows that companies and fans contribute to the building and promotion of the Transformers brand world – in collaboration and in conflict. While fan productivity occasionally takes place without direct encouragement from the companies involved, it is also largely anticipated and desired by marketing campaigns. The findings suggest that consumer enjoyment potentially translates into industrial benefits, including free brand promotion. Ultimately, the thesis acknowledges transmedial worlds of entertainment as concurrent sites of pleasure, resistance, and exploitation.

This thesis is a critical comparative study of the ways in which music is being used as an educational tool for HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, Brazil, India, China, the U.S., and Canada. Music for education is an aspect of a number of academic disciplines. I introduce the principles of Entertainment-Education and Participatory Communication, which are two methods of conveying education through entertainment. Music cognition, music philosophy, ethnomusicology, sociomusicology, and communication theory offer perspectives on why music is persuasive, emotive, and mnemonic. I present analyses of music HIV/AIDS education efforts from many different regions that employ different methods of music transmission and different musical genres. Some are grassroots interventions, whereas others are large-scale, mass media efforts. I identify a number of high-level themes that emerge from the case studies: music involves the audience, music engages the emotions, music is culturally relevant, music is therapeutic and empowering, and music enhances memory. The case studies highlight a number of specific elements that significantly enhance HIV/AIDS education efforts, elements that should be applied to Canadian efforts. The initiatives that are currently taking place are remarkable, but more efforts are needed to effectively combat the AIDS pandemic. / Arts, Faculty of / Music, School of / Graduate

This thesis aims to shed light on the cultural and aesthetic implications of the relationship between Italy and India on and off the screens of Italy, following the expansion of Bollywood in Europe during the 90s. Bollywood's propagation abroad affected the identity of the South Asian diaspora, urban spaces and aesthetics which generated what Le Guellec - describing the arrival of Indians and Bollywood cinema to Paris - named as Bollywood/India mania. The study began with the exploration of the historical meaning of the term aesthetic in order to offer a contextualization on the sense of the aesthetic as a philosophy of art; furthermore, it established a background for further theoretical debate on South Asian diasporic identity formations within the entertainment industry of Italy. The research methods that predominated throughout this work were those of textual argumentation, aesthetic analysis, quantitative and qualitative questionnaires and interview data. The reasons for using different and interdisciplinary methods and approaches to offer an account on diasporic cultures, resided in the attempt to reveal the multiplicities of the "cultural and social" visible. The theoretical frame that this research intends to follow is through two quite distinct disciplines: aesthetic and cultural studies. The aim is to capitalise on the productive intersection of these two disciplines to analyse parts of the South Asian cultural text on the screen and beyond it as producers of transnational images imbued with melancholic memories and melancholically conceived spaces. This work will attempt to individuate the existence of representational patterns based on the aesthetic of melancholy with its nuances and metamorphoses, which represents, narrates and constructs South Asian and/or fused identities socially and culturally on the screens of Italy. The notion of semiosphere as elaborated by Jury Lotman, was utilised to define the cultural and dialogic dynamics of mainstream products that move constantly closer to each other generating original "formats" characterised by novel transnational and multiple identities. Throughout this thesis, the emphasis was placed on the "encounters", the "journeys" and the "sharing" of cultures, hence highlighting the possible conditions of belonging contemporaneously through multiple modalities: mentally, psychologically and experientially to multiplicities of cultures. In addition, the notion of "world culture" was contemplated in an attempt to practically support what Gilroy, in Black Atlantic, shaped as "inter-cultural" and translational formations.

Submitted by Fabio Sobreira Campos da Costa (fabio.sobreira@ufpe.br) on 2017-06-22T14:39:05Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Versão_Final_Dissert_JulianaSouto.pdf: 4558781 bytes, checksum: 7a1b5013b1bf3e235d62ddfae6a2ee02 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-06-22T14:39:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 811 bytes, checksum: e39d27027a6cc9cb039ad269a5db8e34 (MD5) Versão_Final_Dissert_JulianaSouto.pdf: 4558781 bytes, checksum: 7a1b5013b1bf3e235d62ddfae6a2ee02 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-04-08 / Esta pesquisa objetiva entender as dinâmicas da comunicação atual e como as grandes marcas estão se relacionando com o consumidor na contemporaneidade. Busca-se analisar as práticas que surgem no campo da comunicação a partir da intersecção entre publicidade, música e entretenimento. Procura-se compreender a experimentação do Branded Content, em que o engajamento afetivo do consumidor fomenta uma intensa relação emocional no universo simbólico criado pelas marcas. Neste trabalho, serão analisados os filmes publicitários musicais integrantes da campanha da marca de telefonia Vivo, observando como as músicas se materializam no videoclipe e como esses audiovisuais utilizam a retórica afetiva das canções para o posicionamento da marca. A partir da análise dos três vídeos: ―Eduardo e Mônica‖, ―Metamorfose Ambulante‖ e ―Exagerado‖, faremos um estudo observando as materialidades da música nesses filmes publicitários. Utilizando como trilha músicas de artistas já falecidos, que fizeram muito sucesso na cena musical brasileira nas décadas de 1970, 1980 e 1990, a campanha da Vivo deixa de ser um mero ―expositor‖ das benesses do produto anunciado para criar uma teia de consumo que situa a discussão em torno de uma memória afetiva dessas canções, e de como essas memórias são materializadas nesses filmes publicitários, atreladas a uma estética da canção. Utilizam-se, desta forma, pesquisas acerca da publicidade e do entretenimento a partir de autores como: Scott Donaton (2004), Henry Jenkins (2008) e Rogério Covaleski (2010, 2014); estudos sobre a relação entre cultura do consumo e a mídia por meio de Zygmunt Bauman (2001, 2008), Jean Baudrillard (2011), Everardo Rocha (2006), Karla Patriota (2008) e João Anzanello Carrascoza (2008); sobre música, gênero e audiovisual com Jeder Janotti Jr. (2003, 2004), Massimo Canevacci (2001), Thiago Soares (2011, 2013), Oliver Sacks (2011), David Hesmondhalgh (2013) e Zanna (2015). / This research aims to understand the dynamics of the current communication and how the big brands are relating to the consumer nowadays. It analyzes the practices that arise in the communication field from the intersection of advertising, music and entertainment. Seeks to understand the trial of Branded Content where the consumer's emotional engagement fosters an intense emotional relationship in the symbolic universe created by the brands. In this work, the musical commercials members of Vivo‘s brand campaign will be analyzed, observing how the songs materialize in the video and how these audiovisual use the emotional rhetoric of songs for brand positioning. From the analysis of this three videos: ―Eduardo and Monica‖, ―Walking Metamorphosis‖ and ―Exaggerated‖, will do a study observing the materialities music in these commercials. Using as track songs of deceased artists, who enjoyed great success in the Brazilian music scene in the 70s, 80s and 90s, Vivo's campaign stops being a mere ―exhibitor‖ of the benefits of the advertised product to create a consumer web that situates discussion around an affective memory of these songs, and how these memories are materialized in these commercials, linked to an aesthetic of the song. Is used in this way, research on the advertising and entertainment from authors such as Scott Donaton (2004), Henry Jenkins (2008) and Rogério Covaleski (2010, 2014); studies on the relationship between consumer culture and media by Zygmunt Bauman (2008), Jean Baudrillard (2011), Everardo Rocha (2006), Karla Patriota (2008) and John Anzanello Carrascoza (2008); on music, gender and audiovisual with Jeder Janotti Jr. (2003, 2004), Massimo Canevacci (2001), Thiago Soares (2011, 2013), Oliver Sacks (2011) and Zanna (2015).

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