“I opened my mouth to say both Yes and No. A fly had time to go in and out of it.”1 One way of imagining the concerns of this thesis would draw reference to the preposition. Prepositions are words that denote relative positions. Gertrude Stein favoured them over all other types of word. This writing, itself positioned in a wider body of work, employs and reflects on gestures of appropriation and positioning familiar from the practice of collage, and common to curation, writing and magic as well as art-making practices. In, for example, magical practices such as Temurah and Notarikon in the Kabbalah, or the narrative Pathworking rituals of contemporary Witchcraft, items of text and/or imagery are appropriated and reiterated in varying combination. This PhD project mimics these practices, here appropriating its constituent materials to the space of writing (and thereby to what magicians term the Astral Plane), there to move them around in order to become sensitive to their communications. This results in the ravelling of a complex and somewhat nebulous body. What the nature of this body – that is, the body of the artwork – might be, becomes the fugal question around which this writing attempts to orient itself.2 Confusion and intoxication inevitably result, and their Brownian dynamic is found more representative of the encounter with artworks that this writing seeks to address than linear approaches seeking resolution, conclusion or definition. Constructions of division are necessarily tested throughout this undertaking. As an element of a ‘two-part submission’, this writing acknowledges the necessity to operate across an arbitrarily imposed writing/practice fissure, and finds it urgent to address the encounter with artworks not as an external commentary but as a work among, within, around, by, against, through and with works.

Design drawings mediate between the world of ideas and the world of things, spanning the intangible and tangible.  However, contemporary technical architectural drawings, in establishing a direct relationship between the drawing and its object, tend to base this relationship on a visual paradigm that authenticates the visible physical world over the conceptual invisible world, including that of the designer's imagination. The result is that the drawing may become a reduced utilitarian tool for documentation, devoid of any meaningful value in terms of a kind of knowledge that could potentially link the visible and invisible. The imaginal drawing, assuming mundus imaginalis, is an ontological third world mediating between the invisible and visible worlds.  As such, it offers an alternative view of the architectural drawing. Inhabitants of this domain are subtle bodies that hold physical attributes (e.g. form, proportion, color), highly evocative, yet with no matter. Representing a world of similitudes, the imaginal is fundamental to the field of architectural representation, as it introduces a perspective in which the architectural drawing finds an ontological home, wherein the drawing becomes a true in-between territory, mediating between the invisible and visible. In this realm, the drawing becomes a subtle architecture in itself. Prevalent Islamic geometric architectural drawings, namely girih, which lend themselves to the imaginal, provide clues by which the drawing is recognized as an in-between. The geometric interlocking patterns they feature, the girih mode, represent a creative agent by which the built transcends the physical world and penetrates realm of spirituality. An examination the girih mode in its intellectual, imaginative, and physical contexts re-identifies these geometric drawings as a productive realm of consciousness. As an aperture to the imaginal, these architectural drawings open the door to a world of its own, wherein the drawing has a true subtle existence. In this view, the drawing starts from the domain of human imagination with the possibility of ascending to the realm of the intellect, while at the same time descending to the realm of the senses to guide the architect toward a built object. Seen this way, the imaginal drawing can offer an in-between state of being and becoming, a subtle matter, lighter than the building and denser than the idea"essentially representing a mode of consciousness involving the conscious imagination. / Ph. D.

This essay examines the ideology or value system implicit in Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter series. Many of the images in the series, despite being fantastic or empirically unprecedented, are minor transformations of popular books and of our very common physical and cultural reality. However, these imaginative transformations of mundane reality actually imitate, reiterate, and conserve common and contemporary secular values. On a third level the thesis will show that this conservation of contemporary secular values is undermined by a cynical and very subtle transformative element of satire, parody, and criticism. Depending on the theme explored by the particular chapter, a different level of meaning might be evident. Chapter One discusses Rowling's parody of popular secular values. Chapter Two focuses on her parody of Christianity. Chapter Three focuses on Rowling's representations of nature and technology and on her parodic reversal of their traditional representation in similar literature. Chapter Four discusses how Rowling has made a critical appropriation of popular culture's reliance on thoughtless and 'instant' solutions, and discusses how she has made a mockery of her own hero, Harry Potter. The conclusion discusses the value of literary devices that transform literal meanings and verbal images into new meanings and images, and concludes that Harry Potter should be read cautiously. A second conclusion is that the author's claim the series is incomplete is a hoax. This argument is defended with a demonstration that the existing four Harry Potter books form a complete unit, and with a reminder that an element of hoax pervades Rowling's entire series.

The thesis investigates the methods used in the contemporary crowdsourcing of creative crowdwork and in particular the succession of conflicting ideas and concepts that led to the development of dedi- cated, profit-oriented, online platforms after 2005 for the outsourcing of cognitive tasks and creative labour to a large and unspecified group of people via open calls on the internet. It traces the historic trajectory of the notion of the crowd as well as the development of tech- nologies for online collaboration, with a focus on the accompanying narratives in the form of a dis- course analysis. One focus of the thesis is the clash between the narrative of the empowerment of the individual user through digital tools and the reinvention of the concept of the crowd as a way to refer to users of online platforms in their aggregate form. The thesis argues that the revivification of the notion of the crowd is indicative of a power shift that has diminished the agency of the individual user and empowered the commercial platform providers who, in turn, take unfair advantage of the crowdworker. The thesis examines the workings and the rhetoric of these platforms by comparing the way they address the masses today with historic notions of the crowd, formed by authors like Gustave Le Bon, Sigmund Freud and Elias Canetti. Today’s practice of crowdwork is also juxtaposed with older, arguably more humanist, visions of distributed online collaboration, collective intelligence, free soft- ware and commons-based peer production. The study is a history of ideas, taking some of the utopian concepts of early online history as a vantage point from which to view current and, at times, dystopian applications of crowdsourced creative labour online. The goal is to better understand the social mech- anisms employed by the platforms to motivate and control the crowds they gather, and to uncover the parameters that define their structure as well as the scope for their potential redesign. At its core, the thesis offers a comparison of Amazon Mechanical Turk (2005), the most prominent and infamous example for so-called microtasking or cognitive piecework, with the design of platforms for contest-based creative crowdwork, in particular with Jovoto (2007) and 99designs (2008). The crowdsourcing of design work is organised in decidedly differently ways to other forms of digital labour and the question is why should that be so? What does this tell us about changes in the practice and commissioning of design and what are its effects on design as a profession? However, the thesis is not just about the crowdsourcing of design work: it is also about the design of crowdsourcing as a system. It is about the ethics of these human-made, contingent social systems that are promoted as the future of work. The question underlying the entire thesis is: can crowdsourcing be designed in a way that is fair and sustainable to all stakeholders? The analysis is based on an extensive study of literature from Design Studies, Media and Cul- ture Studies, Business Studies and Human-Computer Interaction, combined with participant observa- tion within several crowdsourcing platforms for design and a series of interviews with different stake- holders.

The thesis deals with the Imaginative Biblical Interpretation and its dispositions for grasp- ing the biblical text particularly on the personal level, but also for the scientific use. Meth- od, which has been shaped by the historical need for adaptation for people who lived in the conditions of slavery in America. Also, attention is paid to the key element of imagination, in terms of the ability to recieve and construct mental images, which then act as stimulus for empathy and then deeper understanding of the text. There are three interpretations of the Biblical Book of Jonah in the text, where these facts were demonstrated. Two cases were based on very first confrontation with the text.

Thesis advisor: Julia Fisher / The future of imaginative playtime in the lives of children today is at great risk. Currently, 40% of schools are considering eliminating- or have already eliminated- recess from the school day. The goal of this essay is to argue the irreplaceable value that imaginative play has in contributing to the cognitive, emotional, and social growth of a child. In making a case for the importance of play in child development, all three of these areas of potential growth will collectively be considered as true development of the child. To lay the foundation for these specific categories of benefits, it is necessary to understand the general biological background supporting the innate importance of play, as well as the previous work of those who have researched this subject. Once this information is presented, the cognitive, emotional, and social benefits of imaginative play will be explored in more detail, and the effects of play deprivation and play reintroduction will be discussed. In this manner, it is the aim of this presentation to demonstrate the exceptional importance of imaginative play. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2007. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

This essay examines the ideology or value system implicit in Joanne Rowling's Harry Potter series. Many of the images in the series, despite being fantastic or empirically unprecedented, are minor transformations of popular books and of our very common physical and cultural reality. However, these imaginative transformations of mundane reality actually imitate, reiterate, and conserve common and contemporary secular values. On a third level the thesis will show that this conservation of contemporary secular values is undermined by a cynical and very subtle transformative element of satire, parody, and criticism. Depending on the theme explored by the particular chapter, a different level of meaning might be evident. Chapter One discusses Rowling's parody of popular secular values. Chapter Two focuses on her parody of Christianity. Chapter Three focuses on Rowling's representations of nature and technology and on her parodic reversal of their traditional representation in similar literature. Chapter Four discusses how Rowling has made a critical appropriation of popular culture's reliance on thoughtless and 'instant' solutions, and discusses how she has made a mockery of her own hero, Harry Potter. The conclusion discusses the value of literary devices that transform literal meanings and verbal images into new meanings and images, and concludes that Harry Potter should be read cautiously. A second conclusion is that the author's claim the series is incomplete is a hoax. This argument is defended with a demonstration that the existing four Harry Potter books form a complete unit, and with a reminder that an element of hoax pervades Rowling's entire series.

Beginning with Montaigne’s essayistic dictum Que sais je? — ‘What do I know?’ — this PhD thesis examines the literary history, formal qualities, and theoretical underpinnings of the personal essay to both investigate and to practice its relevance as an approach to writing about art. The thesis proposes the essay as intrinsically linked to research, critical writing, and art making; it is a literary method that embodies the real experience of attempting to answer a question. The essay is a processual and reflexive mode of enquiry: a form that conveys not just the essayist’s thought, but the sense and texture of its movement as it attempts to understand its object. It is often invoked, across disciplines, in reference to the possibility of a more liberal sense of creative practice — one that conceptually and stylistically privileges collage, fragmentation, hybridity, chance, open-endedness, and the meander. Within this question of the essay as form, the thesis contains two distinct and parallel strands of analysis — subject matter and essay writing as research. At the core of the study lie two close-readings: Ana Mendieta’s Labyrinth of Venus (1982) and Le Couvent de la Tourette (1959) by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis. In each case, the writing draws, in its tone and texture, on a range of literary influences, weaving together different voices, discussions, and approaches to enquiry. The practice of essay writing is presented alongside, part and party to, research: a method of interrogation that embraces risk and uncertainty, and simultaneously enacts its own findings as a critical-creative mode of study-via-form, and form-via-study. The thesis is presented as a book-length essay, in which the art in question is equal and intimately connected to the writing used to address it. Method and form are designed to respond to the oft-cited challenge of the essay as fundamentally unmethodical, ranging, and diverse. Research, critical study, writerly description, and storytelling are combined to elucidate and expose each other based not on surface continuity, but on a deep interconnection among ideas that, through language, cohere and become related — imbued with an affinity for one another. The consummate product is the argument, as it works across genres, disciplines, descriptive and critical models, to challenge the narrative structure and language used within contemporary writing about art.

This thesis is focused on American gay male comics and queer alternative comics. I argue that the field of gay male comics production is dominated by two key genres: gay porno comics and gay ghetto comics. The conventions and characteristics of these genres help to construct and reinforce a dominant gay male habitus that is both sexual and social. Drawing on interviews as well as close readings of a number of case studies, I discuss the ways in which alternative queer cartoonists respond to the conventions of these genres, and create alternative representations of gay identity, community, and sex. I argue ultimately that the field of gay male comics production is not entirely homogenous, and that the queer male alternative comics that appear from roughly 1990 onwards are distinctive. The gay male comics of the First Wave (from the 1970s to 1990) are concerned with constructing and consolidating a sense of gay identity and community as relatively unified and stable. While sometimes critical of gay culture, as a whole they ultimately affirm the ideal of a unified gay community. In contrast, the queer male alternative comics that emerged as part of the Second Wave (starting around 1990) are far more concerned with questioning the normative, dominant values of mainstream gay culture, and challenging the identities, tastes and practices associated with the dominant gay habitus. Nevertheless because the gay ghetto and gay porno genres have been so dominant, queer alternative cartoonists position themselves in various different relationships to one or other genre. While some do abandon the genre conventions of gay porno and gay ghetto comics, more often queer alternative cartoonists take up some of these genre conventions and adapt, challenge, or subvert them in subtle ways.

As the climate crisis continues unabated, documentary films have become an increasingly popular medium through which to communicate its causes and impacts. Such films are an easily accessible form of mass media that has the potential to reach wide-ranging and large audiences, and often star popular celebrities. However, few academic studies have examined climate change documentaries and considered the ‘story’ of climate change that such films create. The lack of critical engagement with climate change documentaries is significant as it suggests the narratives of such films have been left largely unexamined despite their importance as a form of popular environmental communication. In this thesis, I use content analysis and narrative analysis to examine how 10 popular climate change documentaries tell the ‘story’ of climate change and produce specific ‘imaginative geographies’ about regions that are particularly vulnerable to climate change. Though I note throughout my analysis that there are several moments of rupture in which counter-narratives emerge, the dominant discourse throughout these 10 films is one that generally reinforces Western science and technocratic modernity as the solution to climate change, and racialized ‘Others’ as its passive victims. Understanding how climate change documentaries construct their narratives and select their specific topics of focus provides important insight into how popular ‘imaginaries’ regarding the climate crisis have been produced. / Graduate