The principal research question of this study is framed as: Do prevailing, industrially and politically sourced definitions of Digital Exhibition faithfully represent the phenomenon¿s position within the contemporary media theory framework? Within this work Digital Exhibition is defined as: The practice of presenting moving images, either live or pre-recorded, to paying audiences, in public spaces, by means of digital distribution and projection. The majority of established literatures concerning Digital Exhibition are aimed at producing categorical definitions of the phenomenon. These ¿meaning making¿ discourses commonly stem from potentially ideologically affected sources. To address this issue, the author has investigated the political economy of key commentators, and Digital Exhibition has been impartially researched following a ¿case studies¿ methodology; with an analytical framework based upon a series of ¿plausible rival hypotheses¿. These hypotheses include that Digital Exhibition isM ¿ a form of the cinema ¿ a form of television ¿ a new (new media) medium ¿ multiple media ¿ not a medium It is presented that each investigated hypothesis can be argued to be legitimate when employing established media theories as the means of rationalisation. Nevertheless, the author concludes that individual industrially / politically charged definitions still do not provide an adequately comprehensive account as to the wealth of interpretations that can be drawn for Digital Exhibition. The author also presents his own perspective as to the subjective nature of contemporary media taxonomies, and ultimately proposes that Digital Exhibition is not a medium, but is a designation offered to a subjectively defined collection of events made possible through the transmission of computational binary pulse signals.

The thesis investigates in what way the scholarly edition performs bibliographic functions as it manages and positions other documents. This is where the study differs from previous research on scholarly editing and bibliography. It aims to trace the boundary between scholarly editing and bibliography by comparing crucial objectives, problems and conflicts in each field. This is accomplished by identifying the argumentation, assumptions and conceptual frameworks that form the rationale for the fields, and subjecting them to qualitative critical and historical analysis. The main empirical material is editorial theory literature, with scholarly editions serving as illustrating examples. Key questions concern the way scholarly editors and bibliographers identify, define and reproduce their respective source material; the reasons for conflicts between editors’ varying expectations of the reproductive force in printed and digital editions; and the connections and demarcations between scholarly editing and bibliography and between scholarly editions and reference works such as bibliographies. Bibliographic and media theory form the basis for the theoretical framework, with additional input from book history, literary theory, genre studies and scholarly communication studies. The thesis suggests a distinction between the two activities of clustering and transposition, and the distortion the latter brings about. These concepts are employed to detect, group and explain activities and problems in scholarly editing and bibliography, who both manage sets of documents by clustering them to one another and transposing their contents by producing new documents. There is a noticeable division of labour between the two tasks, and they also correspond to different types of editions. The study also ties the dominant editorial strategies and edition types to respective bibliographic foci, and argues that central conflict areas are primarily accentuated and only secondarily introduced with digital editing. An idealistic strand treats editing as unbiased delivery of disambiguable and reproducible content, while to a hermeneutical strand the edition is an argumentative and content constraining filter, its editor being a kind of biased author. In a third strand, editions are content circulating ecosystems with a division of labour between collaborating media types. In particular the view of editions as constitutive arguments is related to analogue observations in LIS and genre and scholarly communication studies. On the one hand, editing is supposed to be a dynamic research area, ready to respond to new findings and scholarly ideals. On the other, several arenas demand the edition to serve as a conservative force, static and confirmatory. The potential of digital media points to a distinction between edition and archive, where the former but not the latter explicitly takes an interpretative stand. Digital editing also boosts the idealistic strand by the seeming promise to separate facts from interpretation and to enhance maximum exhaustiveness and reproductivity. Although the thesis identifies many commonalities between editions and reference works and the way these are structured, there is a crucial difference. The edition is simultaneously a work’s reference and referent. Bibliographies and reference works cannot make that claim. / <p>Akademisk avhandling som med tillstånd av samhällsvetenskapliga fakulteten vid</p><p>Göteborgs universitet för vinnande av filosofie doktorsexamen</p><p>framläggs till offentlig granskning kl. 13.15 lördagen den 9 december 2006</p><p>i Stora Hörsalen (C 203), Högskolan i Borås, Allégatan 1, Borås.</p>

This thesis explores the re-photography of contemporary artist, Richard Prince. Using Lacanian theories of the gaze and of the drive cycle, it attempts to establish desire as the central theme of Prince's work. It looks primarily at the Cowboys, Girlfriends, and New Portraits, in order to combat the dominant perception of Prince's work as critical commentary on contemporary consumer culture.

As citizens of the Arabian Gulf states struggle to maintain identity and heritage in a swarm of economic boom and social modernization and mobilization, they are bombarded with media messages which conflict with the essential tenets of modernization and development: individualism, economic independence, freedom of expression, and elevated social status for women. The largely popular Gulf Arabic television miniseries genre is an important vehicle for those conflicting media messages, presenting stereotypical and simplistic representations of family life, the divide between good and evil, and prescribed gender dichotomies. Those messages which idealize traditionalism and conservative belief systems are crafted and informed by those who dominate the media apparatus in the Arabian Gulf: the ruling, male, Muslim, hegemonic elite. The miniseries genre keeps audiences glued to the television in the month of Ramadan, a time at which Muslims throughout the world are at a heightened sense of religiosity and devotion to family and are thus more susceptible to the persuasion of media messages related to religion, faith, virtues, and morals. This research examines the themes of patriarchy, gender dichotomies, family values, and the omnipresence of Islam in the genre and the relationship of all of these themes to the value and belief systems of the ruling hegemonic elite and audience members alike. The research is based on a data pool which includes 152 episodes, totaling roughly 101.5 televised hours. The data also include the results of a survey about audience interaction and interpretation of the genre. The survey is comprised of 35 questions to which 56 participants responded. It discusses the implications of the messages contained within the genre and communicated through the aforementioned themes, and examines the potential for them to influence audience members’ outlook on society as seen through the lens of relevant media theories. / text

The listener’s experience as an embodied subject is at the centre of this work. Embodied experience forms the basis for analyses of three contemporary compositions that sample bodily sound, in order to question how such works represent and mediate the body. The possible applications of this embodied methodology are illustrated through three case studies: Crackers by Christof Migone (2001), A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure by Matmos (2001) and Ground Techniques (2009) by Neil Luck. The findings of each analysis are placed within discussion of critical and theoretical concerns related to the (re)presentation, mediation and manipulation of the body both as materiality and as social construct, using, in particular, work by Hansen (2004) and Wegenstein (2006). The sampling practices of these works lead to the fragmentation of the represented bodies, in which margins between bodily interiors and exteriors are frequently crossed, bringing about a reconfiguration of the musical subject. Furthermore, the celebration of the bodily origins of these works complicates notions of recorded sound as disembodied. The analytical methodology developed in this thesis derives from a consideration of approaches in a number of fields: feminist musicology, music psychology, embodied cognition, phenomenology, music and gesture and new media theory. The sensations and affective responses of the listening body are discussed alongside an examination of how listening is shaped by processes of technological mediation. This thesis attends to both the body that is listening and the body that is listened to. I argue that it is not adequate to understand the works studied as merely representing the body, but suggest it would be more appropriate to understand the relationship between work and body as multi-faceted, conceptualising the body and recorded sound as mutually framing. This uncovers not only technology as mediation, but also the body as mediation. Finally, the case studies are used to reflect upon the limits of the embodied analysis methodology and its potential for wider application.

"What is cinema? The emergent digital era poses this question in a new and interesting way because for the first time in the history of film theory the photographic processes is challenged as the basis of cinematic representation. If the discipline of cinema studies is anchored to a specific material object a real conundrum emerges with the arrival of digital technologies as a dominant aesthetic and social force" (D.N. Rodowick 2007: 9). Over the past twenty-five years or more there has been a paradigm shift occurring in the manner in which moving images are conceived, acquired, produced, disseminated and consumed. This transformation of the modus operandi of production can be attributed to the overwhelming expansion and rapid advance of digital technologies. Through both critical reflection and creative practice this thesis will explore the extent to which there might be a discontinuity between analogue and digital cinematography; whether cinema itself and the basis of photographic representation have been changed, as Rodowick infers. It will draw on debates of realism, the index, and of the medium in relation to the seminal theories of new media. The thesis will introduce the term Digital Fluidity. This is the central concept that has emerged out of my research that describes how technologies utilised in production and post-production function together to enable a fluid process or mode of filmmaking, based on a logic of hybridity and technological convergence. Digital Fluidity engages with two key arguments in new media theory, namely that of ‘re-mediation’ (Bolter and Grusin, 2000), and the ‘computerisation of culture’ (Manovich, 2001). The thesis comprises of a 30 000 word dissertation and a portfolio of practical work of three films. Firstly there are two documentary shorts Grasp the Words Which Sing (2010), and Picnic Pilgrimage (2012), which deal with themes such as the perception of art in the case of the former and the mobility of both the camera and the subject in the latter. In the documentary productions the reflective focus is concentrated on the digital camera as capture device, re-appropriation of technology, and continuity with analogue production techniques. The films are produced on a modified DSLR camera with 35mm lenses and demonstrate a progression in visual style from a static camera in the case of the first film to a necessarily more mobile camera in the second and third. A longer dramatic production Not For Human Consumption (2013) is a tragic love story that explores the emotive social issue of legal high substance misuse. This film uses improvisation and experimental camera systems as well as some conventions that hold their lineage in the silent era, such as the long take and frontal framing. Here the theoretical analysis explores the integration of analogue and digital techniques and equipment by looking at the processes involved and relating these practices with the concept of Digital Fluidity. The improvised narrative was created as the film was in production – a choice that was facilitated largely by the decision to shoot digitally. The three films, although very different, are related by the connection between the processes of filmmaking undergone in each case and the thesis’ core definition of Digital Fluidity. The central research question poised within this thesis will therefore be: ‘Do digital technologies offer the filmmaker enhanced opportunity for creating new cinematic language and a more fluid mode of production than previous forms?

<p>Dwelling with the alterity of the deep sea, my dissertation, "Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater," considers how the ocean environment produces cognitively estranging conditions for conceptualizing media and media theory. Concepts in media theory have thus far exhibited what I call a "terrestrial bias," theorizing primarily dry technologies through a language whose metaphorics have developed through human lives lived on land, rather than in the volume of the sea. In order to better understand the "terrestrial bias" in media theory, I develop a critical method of "conceptual displacement" that involves submerging key concepts in media theory underwater, engaging both literary texts and digital media. Specifically, I turn to Vilém Flusser's speculative fiction text "Vampyroteuthis Infernalis" to rethink "inscription"; ocean data visualizations to rethink "database"; and Jacques Cousteau's diving narratives to rethink "interface." Focusing on the ocean expands the critical discussion of the relation between embodiment and knowledge taken up by feminist science studies, and necessitates the inclusion of the environmental conditions for knowing; our milieu determines the possibilities of our media, and the way that we theorize our media in language. The ocean thus serves as an epistemic environment for thought that estranges us from our terrestrial habits of perception and ways of speaking about media, providing an important check on the limits of theory and terrestrial knowledge production, compelling us to have the humility to continually try to see--and describe--differently. </p><p>Turning to the ocean to rethink concepts in media theory makes apparent the interrelation between technology, desire, ecology, and the survival of human communities. While media theory has long been oriented toward preservation and culture contexts of recording, studying media in ocean contexts requires that we consider conditions that are necessarily but contingently ephemeral. Yet to engage with the ephemeral is also to engage with issues of mortality and the desire towards preservation--of what we want to remain--a question that especially haunts coastal communities vulnerable to sea-level rise. What the ocean teaches us, then, is to reflect on what we want our media technologies to do, as well as the epistemological question of how we are habituated to see and perceive. By considering the ocean as a medium and as an estranging milieu for reconsidering media concepts, I argue for an expanded definition of "media" that accounts for the technicity of natural elements, considering how media futures are not only a matter of new digital innovations, but fundamentally imbricated with the archaic materiality of the analog.</p> / Dissertation

<p>Confronting the rapidly increasing, worldwide reliance on biometric technologies to surveil, manage, and police human beings, my dissertation <italic>Informatic Opacity: Biometric Facial Recognition and the Aesthetics and Politics of Defacement</italic> charts a series of queer, feminist, and anti-racist concepts and artworks that favor opacity as a means of political struggle against surveillance and capture technologies in the 21st century. Utilizing biometric facial recognition as a paradigmatic example, I argue that today's surveillance requires persons to be informatically visible in order to control them, and such visibility relies upon the production of technical standardizations of identification to operate globally, which most vehemently impact non- normative, minoritarian populations. Thus, as biometric technologies turn exposures of the face into sites of governance, activists and artists strive to make the face biometrically illegible and refuse the political recognition biometrics promises through acts of masking, escape, and imperceptibility. Although I specifically describe tactics of making the face unrecognizable as "defacement," I broadly theorize refusals to visually cohere to digital surveillance and capture technologies' gaze as "informatic opacity," an aesthetic-political theory and practice of anti- normativity at a global, technical scale whose goal is maintaining the autonomous determination of alterity and difference by evading the quantification, standardization, and regulation of identity imposed by biometrics and the state. My dissertation also features two artworks: <italic>Facial Weaponization Suite</italic>, a series of masks and public actions, and <italic>Face Cages</italic>, a critical, dystopic installation that investigates the abstract violence of biometric facial diagramming and analysis. I develop an interdisciplinary, practice-based method that pulls from contemporary art and aesthetic theory, media theory and surveillance studies, political and continental philosophy, queer and feminist theory, transgender studies, postcolonial theory, and critical race studies.</p> / Dissertation

Submitted by Filipe dos Santos (fsantos@pucsp.br) on 2016-09-26T14:27:19Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Tiago da Mota e Silva.pdf: 2540597 bytes, checksum: a905a2384ca64b8c4b8b720f29ea0fbe (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2016-09-26T14:27:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Tiago da Mota e Silva.pdf: 2540597 bytes, checksum: a905a2384ca64b8c4b8b720f29ea0fbe (MD5) Previous issue date: 2016-05-18 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / This dissertation studies the means of appropriation created by children of ages 6 to 7 of their tablet computers in the educational environment, specifically in the space and time of the classrooms of a private school in the city of São Paulo. For that purpose, the research observed the daily routine of the classrooms aiming to ascertain how the insertion of the apparatus modifies the communicational environment in constitution and which are the characteristics, peculiarities and elements of the referred appropriation. As a result, it was noted that the appropriation is rooted in a profound cultural structure, the structure of play. The children and their use of the apparatus create around themselves magic circles (Huizinga) thanks to efforts of imagination, suspension and transmutation. This ludic structure turns the presence of the tablet into an ambiguous play which, at times, tends to dressage the children to the virtual, and, at times, tends to a resistance performed by the children against its effects. The formation of an entomic imagery and a reduction of corporeity are the main risks of this use. In order to come to these results, the research evokes the conception of Media Theory as formulated by Harry Pross, the concept of iconophagy, as formulated by Norval Baitello Jr., concepts of abstraction and of the apparatus as a toy, by Vilém Flusser, and the understanding of virtuality as developed by Dietmar Kamper. Ivan Bystrina, Johan Huizinga and Roger Caillois are also thinkers evoked because of their work on culture, play and games. Analyzing the tablet computer through the ludic bias, the understanding of the toy as guided by Walter Benjamin is fundamental, as well as the understanding of play as a complex mimetic behavior, as the Historic Anthropology argues / O presente trabalho estuda as apropriações de tablets engendradas por crianças do primeiro ano do Ensino Fundamental, entre os seis e sete anos de idade, no ambiente escolar, mais especificamente no espaço-tempo das salas de aula de uma escola particular de São Paulo. Para tanto, a pesquisa se debruçou em observações do cotidiano das salas com o objetivo de averiguar como a inserção do aparelho altera o ambiente comunicacional ali em constituição e quais são as características peculiares e os elementos fundamentais das apropriações criadas pelas crianças do hardware e dos softwares. Averiguou-se que a apropriação se encontra calcada em raízes profundas da cultura, em especial a raiz lúdica. As crianças e o uso do aparelho formam em torno de si círculos mágicos (Huizinga) graças a esforços de suspensão, imaginação e transmutação envolvidos neste processo. Esta raiz lúdica faz da presença do aparelho em sala um jogo ambíguo, que ora tende ao adestramento ao virtual, e ora tende à resistência contra os seus efeitos. Destacamse como riscos destes usos a formação de um imaginário entômico e uma redução da corporeidade pelas vias dos sentidos (visão, audição e tato). Para chegar a estes resultados, parte-se da concepção de Teoria da Mídia de Harry Pross, tendo o corpo como mídia primária da comunicação, do conceito de iconofagia, de Norval Baitello Jr., dos conceitos de escalada da abstração e do aparelho como brinquedo, conforme desenvolvidos por Vilém Flusser, e do entendimento de virtual proposto por Dietmar Kamper. Recorre-se, também, aos filósofos e pensadores da cultura Ivan Bystrina, Johan Huizinga e Roger Caillois. Analisando o tablet pelo viés do lúdico, evoca-se o entendimento de brinquedo, apresentado por Walter Benjamin, e o entendimento da brincadeira como comportamento mimético complexo, segundo a argumentação da Antropologia Histórica

This study provides a new account of the evolution of the eighteenth-century British novel by reading it as a response to contemporary interest in, and self-consciousness about, print communication. During the eighteenth century, print went from being a marginal technology to being one with an increasingly wide circulation and a diverse range of applications. The pervasive adoption of print generated anxiety about its positive and negative effects, prompting a series of responses from writers. Examining the work of five British novelists from across the long eighteenth century, this dissertation investigates the influence of eighteenth-century philosophical thinking about human understanding and social interaction on the assumptions that these novelists made about the way their work would be received. In particular, this thesis explores the ways in which these novelists respond to contemporary philosophical ideas about the cognitive functions of the imagination by experimenting with the form of their work in order to generate new kinds of reception. But this study also shows that, while these five novelists drew on the tenets of eighteenth-century moral philosophy, their work exposed a number of the limitations of that philosophy by putting it into practice. Each chapter in this study focuses on a different aspect of the intersection of mediation and imagination. Chapter One considers the ways in which Locke's understanding of probability informed Richardson's attempts to promote specific affective reading practices with his epistolary fictions and editorial commentary. Chapter Two reads Sterne's manipulations of the material page in Tristram Shandy as an attempt to expose the limitations of print communication and to suggest new ways of reading that could overcome those limitations. Chapter Three examines the writing of Smith, Kames, Mackenzie, Reeve and Godwin in order to illustrate both the promise and the danger that these authors attribute to imaginative sympathy and to the reading practices that promote sympathetic reactions. Chapter Four explores Scott's experiments with a form of fiction that could collapse the distance between writing and orality in order to force readers to reevaluate the complex relationship of sound and writing in the establishment of communities in an age of print.