This thesis presents a method for combining GPU programming with traditional programming to create a fluid simulation based watercolor tool for artists. This application provides a graphical interface and a canvas upon which artists can create simulated watercolors in real time. The GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, is an effcient and highly parallel processor located on the graphics card of a computer; GPU programming is touted as a way to improve performance in graphics and non–graphics applications. The effectiveness of this method in speeding up large, general purpose programs, however, is found here to be disappointing. In a small application with minimal CPU/GPU interaction, theoretical speedups of 10 times maybe achieved, but with the limitations of communication speed between the GPU and the CPU, gains are slight when this method is used in conjunction with traditional programming.

This thesis presents a method for combining GPU programming with traditional programming to create a fluid simulation based watercolor tool for artists. This application provides a graphical interface and a canvas upon which artists can create simulated watercolors in real time. The GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, is an effcient and highly parallel processor located on the graphics card of a computer; GPU programming is touted as a way to improve performance in graphics and non–graphics applications. The effectiveness of this method in speeding up large, general purpose programs, however, is found here to be disappointing. In a small application with minimal CPU/GPU interaction, theoretical speedups of 10 times maybe achieved, but with the limitations of communication speed between the GPU and the CPU, gains are slight when this method is used in conjunction with traditional programming.

This dissertation contends with the diverse corpus of Gothic ivory grooming implements carved in France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Employing feminist, queer, posthumanist, and ecocritical methodologies, it explores these objects as tools in gender and identity formation. Attending to the complexity of medieval attitudes to grooming and women and to the polysemy of these objects’ iconographies, this dissertation argues for the inherent ambiguity of the bodies that constitute and were constituted by these tools. It participates in a broader project of revealing the inherent ambiguity of medieval gender and its deep enmeshment with the nonhuman animal world by presenting ivory beauty implements as nexuses of excess and resistance to feminine ideals. Calling attention to the body of the elephant as the source of the grooming tools’ materiality, its analysis demonstrates how the subjugation of the nonhuman animal reverberates through objects created to give order to human animal bodies, in particular the bestial female body. The material, iconographical, functional, and textual strands wound together in ivory grooming tools reveal the women of flesh and ivory to be far more multilayered and subversive, resourceful and complex, than scholarship has hitherto recognized. At once tools of subjugation and instruments to assert agency, in the hands of their users, ivory grooming tools become sites of identity expression and self-transformation.