While theatricality is a medium with a long and extensive history the study of digital games is relatively new, yet there are many parallels between the two that are both inherent and fundamental. This research aims to produce a theoretical synthesis between the two media by providing an analysis of the ontology and process of meaning making in both media. The role of the player in a digital game is a complex and ambiguous one where they perform a dual function as both audience and performer. The creation of narrative and meaning for the game’s player and the theatrical audience is often similar, relying on the creation of fully established and functioning fictional worlds to engage with. Primarily this is done through design and mise-en-scene strategies. Drawing from existing texts as examples, this research aims to explore the extent to which games adopt and have evolved from theatrical conventions of storytelling and aesthetics.

This research looks at the Hotel Yeoville (2010) public digital art project and offers an analysis towards understanding how through this creative intervention a public discourse can be inclusive of marginalised African immigrant groups living in South Africa. The marginal status of African immigrant groups in South Africa, is consistently similar in the digital arts field where there is no evident critique of the public art methods employed by art practitioners in engaging these marginalised groups. The agenda of Hotel Yeoville was particularly an attempt to counter the marginalising brutal and muted representations of these groups in mainstream media. In order for this creative intervention to effect such change, its public element needed to display a public vibrancy that was inclusive of the pluralistic opinions and voices of the African immigrant groups. However this public art project revealed paradoxes and complexities that are at the core of public art practise, and also highlighted the ambivalence of a strong creative product with an uncertain public‐ness.

Jaclyn Christine Rawls

Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes special report study entitled: Intelligent envelope. Includes bibliographical references.

The written component of this thesis is presented in accompaniment with an experimental hyperimage documentary artefact entitled Bridging Adelaide 2001. It is a hermeneutic text reflecting on practice that incorporates digital image capture, electronic image editing, human-computer interface design and hypermedia content development. Bridging Adelaide 2001 incorporates a photographic documentary that was produced by a collaborator and myself and first exhibited in 1981. That earlier work has been supplemented with digital imagery that I have produced as part of this research. In part, the thesis is a commentary comparing my practice as a photographer who has in the past used analogical techniques to produce documentary work for exhibition in public spaces and galleries and, my practice as a contemporary, digital image-maker and designer producing work using HTML for dissemination, in this case, via CD-ROM. I describe my experimental approach and call it ontological design after Winograd and Flores. I propose that Pickering's metaphor of the “dance of agency” arising from observation of scientific experimental practice, that theorises material agency, is also apt. My thesis explores the ontological implications of computer mediation and manipulation. An historical analysis of the development of software tools for graphics and artefacts of mediation in the form of trademarks is presented. A co-determined process, of tools making manifest desire in their capabilities and, of tools conditioning creative output is observed. The role of virtuality in relation to understanding the nature of tools is discussed. Three ontological models - one from Levy, one from Haraway and, one from Hayles - are overlaid with the intention of conveying a contemporary understanding of nature of virtuality, and of mediation and manipulation as a condition is described. The contemporary, networked computer mediation paradigm is contrasted with the mass media paradigm. The latter is associated with a dilution of photography's documentary authority, the former with re-establishing that authority. This differs from the common assumption that the transience of the digital image undermines its representational reliability. Phenomenological argument of Merleau-Ponty is presented in support of my claim that computer-mediation is corporeal. The actor-network theory of Latour and Callon provides means to argue for the social, political and cultural relevance of Bridging Adelaide 2001. / Thesis (PhD)--University of South Australia, 2004.

Thesis (Ed.D.)--Teachers College, Columbia University, 2007. / Adviser: John Baldacchino. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.V.A.)--University of Sydney, 2005. / Title from title screen (viewed 27 March 2008). Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Visual Arts to the Sydney College of the Arts. Degree awarded 2005; thesis submitted 2004. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print form.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes special report study entitled : Intelligent envelope. Includes bibliographical references. Also available in print.

archives@tulane.edu / 1 / Joris P Lindhout

This dissertation explores the implications of new photographic and computer technologies that offer the transduction of modalities. The fundamental argument, here, is that such technologies ‘change’ the process of sense-making resulting in a new asymmetry that informs the visual language of the creative work. I argue that the processes of language analysis can assist us in the interpretation of multimodal texts and that a digital illustration can be analysed via the theoretical framework ‘built’ from the first linguistic concepts such as those to be found in the texts of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine and Locke. A semiotic method applied in the context of digital artwork, and developed from the linguistic-semiotic stand-point, is well suited for an examination of the intermodal relations (the relations between layers in a multi-layered image file). By examining the layered structures of my images I demonstrate the evident similarity between the disconnection of the components of the linguistic sign on the one hand and the visual sign on the other hand. The analysis of a digital image, especially created for this purpose, is expanded by an investigation that offers a partial reading from an insider’s point of view that involves an image being analysed on the conceptual level. This involves the examination of the primary internal relations between the layers of the image, and on the level of expression, the examination of the primary external relations between the layers and the narrative of the image. In its deployment the semiotic method I use investigates the existence and the conditions of a space in which the individual readings from the perspective of outsider and insider might be conceptualized and presents a partial reading derived from an outsider’s interpretation of the same image. After comparing both readings I arrive at the conclusion that the different texts’ modalities have an impact on the degree of the sign components’ disconnection. My conclusion, then, is that an outsider who cannot view the image in its multimodal form assigns sign components in a higher degree of disconnection than an insider who has access to the intermodal relations of the image file.