‘Hardy's Creatures' examines the human and nonhuman animals who walk and crawl and twine and fly and trot across and around the pages of Thomas Hardy's novels: figures on two feet and on four, some with hands, all with faces. Specifically, the thesis traces the appearances of the term ‘creature' in Hardy's works as a way of levelling the ground between humans and animals and of reconfiguring traditional boundaries between the two. Hardy firmly believed in a ‘shifted [...] centre of altruism' after Darwin that extended ethical consideration to include animals. In moments of encounter between humans and animals in his texts—encounters often highlighted by the word ‘creature'—Hardy seems to test the boundaries that were being debated by the Victorian scientific and philosophical communities: boundaries based on moral sense or moral agency (as discussed in chapter two), language and reason (chapter three), the possession of a face (chapter four), and the capacity to suffer and perceive pain (chapter five). His use of ‘creature', a word that can have both distinctly human and uniquely animal meanings, draws upon the multiple (and at times contradictory) connotations embedded in it, complicating attempts to delineate decisively between two realms and offering instead ambiguity and irony. Hardy's focus on the material world and on embodiment, complemented by his willingness to shift perspective and scale and to imagine the worlds of other creatures, gestures towards empathy and compassion while recognizing the unknowability of the individual. His approach seems a precursor to the kind of thinking about and with animals being done by animal studies today. Encountering Hardy's creatures offers a new way of wandering through Wessex, inviting readers to reconsider their own perspectives on what it means to be a creature.

Creature design and sculpture is about representing life with three dimensions. To begin designing a creature, the process begins by looking at real life. Studies of existing wildlife and anatomy reference provided the foundation for the creation process. The goal of this project was to study creature design and attempt creating feasible results. The background and location origin of these creatures are based on the environmental location of Arizona. The goal was creating and rendering four creatures with the attempt of achieving fantasy realism.

My aim in this case study has been to create a method for creature design to test this method in a production and evaluate the results. To achieve this I studied and analyzed the methods of three concept artists and illustrators named James Gurney, Neville Page and Iain McCaig. From the analysis of these artist´s methods, combined with my own personal experience, a new method was formed. To test this method a creature was designed based on directives given by a game design group in the process of creating a table top role playing game in a fictitious world. These directives where given for the creature´s role and its living conditions. When the production was completed I received feedback from the game design group and conducted an analysis of the method, based on their feedback and my own conclusions, to further improve upon this method.

One of the main modern school’s striving – the education of creative personality. The creature stimulates person to look carefully to himself, perceive his addictions and abilities more, educate ability originally, flexible think and operate. This highly valuable person’s feature should be educated from the childhood in the family, kinder garden, at primary school. The art and technologies lessons, floristic’s bunches are suitable in order to educate pupil’s creature, on the strength of floristic, although exactly for this activities area hasn’t got a lot of attention: missing methodical recommendations, decrease of educational hours for design of natural materials, low schools’ material facilities, all this restricts teacher, who tries realize education’s purposes. Area of phytodesign, in pursuance of development floristic culture, is relevant for teachers, because it is poorly researched, are lacking in efficient, methodical literature, in designed activities descriptions, examples. Floristic isn’t used enough for pupils’ creative. Therefore it’s necessary to constitute right educational conditions to educate pupils’ creature with the help of floristic. Object of research - possibilities of floristic in order to educate creature in primary school. Purpose of research – uncover possibilities of floristic in order to educate creature. Problems of research: 1) to analyze psychological, educational and scientific - methodical literature about creature’s education and floristic... [to full text]

I denna uppsats undersöks creature design samt narrativ teori kring skräckfilmer för att ta reda på hur man kan skapa filmmonster vars utseende kan berätta och föra fram en fängslande historia. Ett väldesignat monster lever kvar i publikens minnen, och skapar ikoner för sin tidsperiod eller sin genre. Uppsatsen använder sig av en semiotisk metod för att analysera monstren i filmerna Alien, The Thing och Rovdjuret. För att designa monster till science fiction kan man kombinera zoologi, anatomiska studier samt mänsklig psykologi och fobier för att skapa ett visuellt fascinerande monster som skrämmer publiken och lever kvar i det allmänna medvetandet.

The motive of this work is to illustrate and visualize the socio-political objectification of the female body, in order to suggest explanations as to how female body standards are derived as a result of this objectification. The objective was obtained by exploring cut and assembling designs with powerful visual expressions, with sustainability as a point of emphasis. As the result 8 shapes were created out of one single pattern formula, the formula that would probably never be discovered if the starting point were not a fragile cork material.

This project seeks opportunities to dissolve identity boundaries between the human and nonhuman by speculating into alternative scenarios of a ‘Border Creature’s life in a human-fabricated world. I took advantage of my newly acquired nonhuman identity, the Novel Coronavirus (SARS-COV2-19), which is known for causing a global pandemic (Covid-19) in the year 2020, and ‘transferred’ myself into a Border Creature. Via designed tangible facial devices and speculative scenarios built by photography and ‘dairy’ writing, the project is to highlight the shared identity a human has with Coronavirus in Växjö city, Sweden, and to confront the inhuman status Border Creature is undertaking due to social stigmatization in order to raise questions and reflections around our prefigured definition of what is human.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a prelude to the Anatomy Act of 1832, which indulged the anatomists’ scientific ambition, granting a legitimate and sufficient source of cadavers to dissect legally. When read in concert with the history of anatomy and the historical record of body snatching, including case law and anatomy legislation, Frankenstein exemplifies the issues in medico-legal history at the turn of the nineteenth century, for Victor Frankenstein and the Creature’s stories are set amid the context of anatomical study, grave-robbery, crime, punishment and the illicit relationship between medicine and murder. This thesis accordingly addresses the medico-legal history of anatomy, the anatomist’s ambition and complex inhumanity, and the mingled identity of the anatomical subject as illegitimate and criminal. This analysis demonstrates that Frankenstein sheds light upon the anatomist’s ambition, the identity of the human cadaver, and the bioethical consequences of meddling with nature.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a prelude to the Anatomy Act of 1832, which indulged the anatomists’ scientific ambition, granting a legitimate and sufficient source of cadavers to dissect legally. When read in concert with the history of anatomy and the historical record of body snatching, including case law and anatomy legislation, Frankenstein exemplifies the issues in medico-legal history at the turn of the nineteenth century, for Victor Frankenstein and the Creature’s stories are set amid the context of anatomical study, grave-robbery, crime, punishment and the illicit relationship between medicine and murder. This thesis accordingly addresses the medico-legal history of anatomy, the anatomist’s ambition and complex inhumanity, and the mingled identity of the anatomical subject as illegitimate and criminal. This analysis demonstrates that Frankenstein sheds light upon the anatomist’s ambition, the identity of the human cadaver, and the bioethical consequences of meddling with nature.

Voices reveal information about the speaker, such as their age, what they are feeling and how they look. Vocal modulation is sometimes used by role-players, mostly game masters, in a tabletop role-playing context, to portray non-playable characters. This study investigated whether signal processing software could be used to enhance the vocal qualities of the speaker so that they represent different creatures with certain attributes. A listening test was conducted in which 24 participants evaluated different processings for physical attributes related to Dungeons & Dragons depiction of the creatures orc and elf with the purpose of finding design approaches for a vocal modulation software. The results showed that none of the processings were perceived to be very much like the suggested creature, but it was found that some processings were more effective than others to create desirable attributes. It was also shown that the same processings does not work equally well for different voice inputs.