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This thesis undertakes an excursion into the network of science, art, and popular culture at the end of the 19th century to examine the interrelations between these various strands in relation to the emerging cinema and its so-called spiritual dimension. Instead of an ontology of the image, or a cultural (metaphorical) analysis of spirits, phantoms or spectres as immaterial manifestations, this thesis proposes an ontology of the spectators' perception through which the spiritual dimension, frequently associated with audio-visual media, should be sought within the perceptual processes of the mind. It takes the cinema spectators' experience into the centre of this investigation and argues for their active participation in and understanding of the cinema as philosophical dispositive from the very beginnings of its inception. It looks into the interconnections between the various constituencies that shaped the projecting image technologies and their reception at the time. In particular the context of a broader intellectual framework and concerns about time, movement, memory and consciousness, reveal a thickness and complexity especially in the interrelations of the oeuvres of Jules-Etienne Marey and Aby Warburg. Henri Bergson's system of thought, germane to these concerns, will be elaborated in detail and used to build an onto logical/anthropological model of the cinema spectator in order to suggest how the contradictory forces of the rational and the 'irrational' can help us understand the spiritual dimension of the emerging cinema. The cinema dispositifm this approach appears as a paradigm to exemplify the productivity of this nexus and provides a platform for further research into issues such as consciousness, precognition, intuition and psychic phenomena. The spectator in this anthropological/ontological discussion treated in a conceptual way and grounded in a historical context appears in a fuller dimensionality that allows us to accommodate the so-called spiritual dimension beyond the dichotomy of the material and immaterial, the body and the mind. This model of the cinema spectator that this thesis proposes can be defined as an embodied, immanent and above all actively participant agent, which can be extended into a wider discussion of the perception, uses and interpretations of technology.

From Aristotle’s theory of tragic katharsis to Brecht’s formulation of the Verfremdungseffekt, theorists of the theatre have long engaged with the question of what spectatorship entails. Such question has, directly or indirectly, extended to the investigation of acting. In the wake of Brecht’s critique of conventional theatre, emphasis has been put on the study of spectatorship from the point of view of its cultural determinants and its conscious cognitive aspects, while unconscious processes have been mostly ignored. In this thesis I take a psychoanalytic perspective to analyse theories of the theatre that have investigated the process of identification of the spectator or the actor with the character. According to psychoanalysis, mechanisms of unconscious identification, such as projection and introjection, are fundamental to psychic development and to the construction of the self. By analysing Aristotle’s theory of tragic katharsis through Freud’s theory of transference, I propose a new understanding of spectatorship as transference dynamic. I then conduct an in-depth enquiry into eighteenth-century theories of acting which lead up to Diderot’s Paradoxe sur le comédien. I investigate the paradox of the actor, in its fruitful tension between sensibility and understanding, from the perspective of Melanie Klein’s concept of unconscious phantasy and Bion’s theory of alpha-function. I hence interpret the art of the actor as the performing of alpha-function on the spectator’s unconscious emotions. The new insights afforded by a psychoanalytic perspective of spectating and acting illuminate the moral function of theatre and resolve some of the controversial points brought forward by various theorists, including Brecht and Rousseau. The moral function of theatre can be construed as a transpersonal process in which unconscious identifications between spectator and actor promote the development of a reflective view of the self.

In this thesis I analyse the reporting and the reception of news about distant suffering in the light of John Howard Yoder‘s work on witness. Studies of news reporting about foreign wars, genocide and disasters commonly conclude that the practice of bearing witness to distant suffering contributes to a context where both journalists and spectators appear to have limited moral agency. I argue that the practice of bearing witness has ethical significance for those actively engaged in bearing witnessing. In his work on Christian witness, Yoder demonstrates how witness can be understood as a method for moral reasoning. I assert that Yoder‘s argument presents a fruitful approach for interdisciplinary consideration of the ethical significance found in the practice of bearing witness to distant human suffering. In chapter one, I lay the foundation of my investigation into the ethical agency involved in bearing witness. John Howard Yoder‘s theological approach to social ethics provides that foundation. Central to Yoder‘s claim that witness is a form of ethics, is the premise that presence testifies. Yoder calls this the 'phenomenology of social witness‘. Yoder‘s work opens new ways in which to ask questions about the practice of bearing witness as a form of social ethics. It is from this foundation that I begin to ask questions about the news media practice of bearing witness to distant suffering, the subject of chapter two. Media practices are social practices that involve a dense interaction of many layers of society. In the media practice of witnessing distant suffering, governments, charities, news media organisations, and audiences are all involved in what I call the social formation of the Global Samaritan. The foundational work on Yoder in chapter one allows me to ask the question: How is the Global Samaritan a presence, and to what does this presence testify? In chapters three and four, I focus on two of the prominent groups which contribute to the formation of the Global Samaritan: audiences and foreign correspondents. News audiences as moral agents already seem a problem for Yoder‘s claim that presence testifies. Do audiences who bear witness to distant suffering have moral agency? How can the amorphous and fleeting presence of television, internet, or twitter audiences testify? In the chapter on audiences, the initial claim regarding presence makes for an important investigation into how audiences can potentially move beyond mere spectatorship and towards participation in care for the suffering. Foreign correspondents bearing witness to distant suffering do not face the same obstacles to testifying as audiences do. After all, foreign correspondents are often live, on-the-scene of extraordinary circumstances of suffering. The danger and risks foreign correspondents face in order to report live from scenes of devastation and disaster testify to the fact that the situation is indeed dangerous and causing suffering. Yoder‘s claim that presence testifies is a claim strongly paralleled within the tradition of investigative journalism. In chapter four, I investigate the ethical function of foreign correspondent presence. I consider the foreign correspondent‘s dual role as the proxy 'eyes and ears‘ of the public and the proxy voice for those without a voice. Through these two roles, I explore major concepts involved in the practice of investigative journalism. One prominent issue I explore is the tension between the principles of a liberal democratic press and the practice of frontline reporters live, on-the-scene of extraordinary and extreme situations. In the final chapter, chapter five, I focus on the experience of three frontline reporters bearing witness to human suffering. BBC [British Broadcasting Company] reporter John Simpson‘s reflections on his coverage of the beginning of the Iraq War illustrate the importance of bearing witness as involving real presence on location. Norwegian freelance reporter Ǻsne Seierstad‘s reflections on covering the Iraq War from Baghdad further contributes to the concept of 'being there‘ as central to bearing witness. Focus on Seierstad also furthers discussion on women reporters bearing witness to war. The third reporter I highlight is BBC reporter Fergal Keane. I focus on his reflections covering the Rwandan genocide to illustrate how the claim to bearing witness involves more than spectatorship, but often involves participation. I conclude with an analysis of the media practice of bearing witness, involving the range of reporter presence to the quasi-presence of the audience, in the light of John Howard Yoder‘s claim that bearing witness is a form of social ethics.

Master of Arts / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / Spencer D. Wood / This thesis focuses on how citizens engage in the punishment of criminals in their everyday lives through means that seem neutral and largely invisible. It is at a distance that citizens are able to voyeuristically make sense of punishment, while using their position of privilege to engage in individualistic judgment. The consumption of punishment by everyday citizens is often experienced in a variety of forms, such as watching television, navigating the internet, playing video games, reading periodicals, and touring prisons. These experiences amount to a set of practices that tend to both exclude and punish. Each of these practices provide opportunities for the researcher interested in understanding penal spectatorship to observe the everyday consumption of punishment. The focus of this research project seeks to untangle the extent to which citizens engage in multiple forms of penal spectatorship in their everyday lives. One media form which encompasses aspects of the penal spectatorship theory is a mug shot newspaper called The Slammer. This project asks specific questions about The Slammer, in addition to more general questions about penal spectatorship. Specifically, I utilize content analysis to provide a descriptive context regarding the perceived gender and race among mug shots on the front cover of the magazine. Second, a survey was administered to 15,000 undergraduate students at Kansas State University for the purposes of measuring their exposure to mug shot newspapers, understanding of how citizens perceive the legitimacy of mug shot newspapers, their overall engagement in penal spectatorship avenues, whether the citizen feels punishment is justified and necessary for individuals who commit crimes, and finally citizen's opinions regarding the media portrayal of life in prisons and criminals and their crimes. In addition, the survey is comprised of three versions in order to conduct an experiment. Depending on the version of the survey, respondents were either given accurate, inaccurate, or no information pertaining to the mug shot individuals name and charged crime. The experiment seeks to measure respondents' perceptions of the individuals portrayed in The Slammer mug shots and the factors that may influence their perceptions. Furthermore, I work to develop composite indicators of key theoretical concepts developed among cultural criminologists. The results provide empirical evidence consistent with theorized overall growth in penal spectatorship.

It was paramount for the English-speaking Caribbean to host a successful 2007 Cricket World Cup and field an outstanding West Indian cricket team for the international sporting mega-event. For CARICOM and the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB), there were two principle goals – first, to exhibit regional Caribbean identity, and second, to be triumphant under the leadership of the West Indian cricket team’s captain, Trinidadian Brian Lara. Identities are multifaceted and intricate, negotiated and renegotiated, based on a history of economic, political and cultural forces. This thesis interrogates Caribbean identity through textual analysis of the broadcast of the opening ceremony and regional newspaper coverage of the spectacle as well as ensuing events that were held in eight of the Caribbean countries from 11 March to 28 April 2007. The thesis questions whether this mega-event served as a catalyst toward Caribbean identity construction.

“Malice in Wonderland: The Perverse Pleasure of the Revolting Child,” explores the place of “revolting child,” or the child-as-monster, in horror cinema using textual analysis, discourse analysis, and historical reception study. These figures, as seen in films such as The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and The Exorcist, “revolt” in two ways: they create feelings of unease due to their categorical perversion, and they also rebel against the family, the community, and the very notion of futurity. This work argues that the pleasure of these films vacillates between Othering the child to legitimate fantasies of child abuse and engaging an imagined rebellion against a heteronormative social order. As gays and lesbians have been culturally deemed “arrested” in their development, the revolting child functions as a potent metaphor for queerness, and the films provide a mise-en-scène of desire for queer spectators, as in the “masked child” who performs childhood innocence. This dissertation begins with concrete examples of queer reception, such as fan discourse, camp reiterations, and GLBT media production, and uses these responses to reinvestigate the films for sites of queer engagement. Interestingly, though child monsters appear centrally in several of the highest-grossing films in the horror genre, no critic has offered a comprehensive explanation as to what draws audiences this particular type of monstrosity. Further, this dissertation follows contemporary strains in queer theory that deconstruct notions of “development” and “maturity” as agents of heteronormative power, as seen in the work of Michael Moon, Lee Edelman, Ellis Hanson, Jose Esteban Muñez, and Kathryn Bond Stockton. / text

This practice-based thesis undertakes research into the contemporary aesthetic of interactive media art, in order to propose a useful practical model of interactivity founded on a critical approach to both existing theory and practice. It proceeds from the identification of a primary lack in contemporary aesthetics that arises from the predominantly materialistic comprehension of technologically-mediated artworks. The thesis establishes a new model for interactive art that offers an immaterial engagement with technology at a locus where cognition and the aesthetic intertwine. This model is constructed following a revision of both the theory and practice of interactive media art, which identifies a materialistic bias of technology-mediated art production caused by a confused concept of technology as both tool and medium. This investigation confines itself to the last forty years of interactive art and the new model of spectatorship that has accompanied it. The main objective of what follows from this investigation is an account of agency in the artist and spectator interrelationship. In the context of technologically based artworks various approaches to spectatorship have frequently remained within the constraints of the traditional model of art that inherently drew on a separation between body and mind. It is argued in this thesis that neither the technology nor the participation itself, but the cognitive interconnection between 'artist-artwork-spectator' produces the primary aesthetic dimension of interactive media art. In this respect, not the physical object creation but the aestheticisation of this triangle produces the here identified immaterial/cognitive experience of the spectators. This can be achieved when the technology is applied as a transparent medium one of the core concepts introduced in this thesis which can facilitate an aesthetic quality or meaning creation through technology. The 'transparent medium' enables the cognitive-based experience production, which is identified as the immersive flow of the spectator's aesthetic experience. As such, the re-evaluation of the artist- spectator interrelationship proposes a new immaterial model of art which is called the Transparent Act. The introduction of the Transparent Act leads to the main intervention of this thesis which lies in an effort to recover a lost dimension in interactive media art. A recovery of this dimension enables access to a knowledge practice which is not necessarily located in ordinary cognitive experiences but in unfamiliar conscious states that can be compared to accounts of so-called spiritual experiences. The model of the Transparent Act is concurrently applied as a practise-based intervention and proof-of-concept in a major installation, the Mind Cupola. This artistic and technological contextualisation of the original intervention of this thesis is exemplified as an affective environment which aims for an immediate cognitive affection of the spectator by generating mechanical and audio-visual effects in the spectator's 'mind'. The artistic system uses special face analysis techniques to close the feedback loop and affect the spectator through the analysis of her/his reactions. The installation is built upon a 'passive' modality of interaction in which the spectator contributes to the artwork with subtle, cognitive-based interactions which are fed back through a complex open response system. The implementation of cognitive feedback loops, also described as the fractal structure in the spectator's cognition, constitutes the essential transparent medium through which the previously lost immaterial dimension of a spiritual-like aesthetic experience in interactive media art is achieved. The thesis concludes with suggestions of further applications including the evaluation of technologically mediated artworks.

This thesis examines a widespread yet understudied tourism destination in Canada – the police museum. I visited and collected data at three police museums in the province of Ontario, Canada: the Toronto Police Museum and Discovery Centre in Toronto, the OPP Museum in Orillia, and the RCMP Musical Ride Centre in Ottawa. Engaging with Brown’s (2009) theory of “penal spectatorship”, I investigate how these sites (re)produce and circulate meanings about penality through their different representational practices. I identify three dominant themes and argue that the police museums foster social distance between visitors and those in conflict with the law. By sharing these findings, and along the way reconceptualizing the definition of police museum, identifying fifty-nine police museums in Canada, and presenting a Canadian police museum typology, this thesis lays some groundwork for expanding the horizons of penal spectatorship theory and penal tourism scholarship to the realm of policing.

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