My degree project has been developed through my research on the topics of originality, consumption, vanitas and consumer culture. It referneces the politics of consumption, desire, pollution, waste, the passing of time, the effect of decay, and death. The scene is a reconstruction of a "still life" scene, referencing Baroque painting. The light-box installation comprises coloured sculptures which are emblems of consumerism. The hanmade and the organic are joined in composition, as if united in ruin and decay. The sculptures resemble the still life genre and allude to memento-mori. The project also addresses the industrial food system. It emphasises efficiency, profit and power in ways that are narrowly constructed, sometimes at the expense of other environmental and social values. It consist of a glass-cast modern cornucopia. The glass captures decomposing traces and makes them solid and everlasting. Even with something so fragile and temporary as life, the material can freeze it in time. The glass captures life.

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A picture is worth 1000 words. Great visuals can enhance, dramatize and even bend the narrative. From historical photos to modern-day digital images made of millions of pixels, images have always been instrumental in shaping our visual understanding of the world around us. As much as they have been instrumental in shaping reality, easy access to image manipulation has also resulted in wide spread misinformation. When anything can befaked, honest representation of reality in images has become a hard problem to crack. After multiple design explorations, I realized a need for a fundamental change in our interaction with images. The thesis resulted in building an alternate landscape for digital imagery called SHIFT, where images are connected entities that become an access point to multiple perspectives and alternate realities. It is not an attempt to challenge image manipulation technology but to use images as a means to develop a more informed understanding of the reality they represent.

Thesis (Ph.D. (Psychology)) -- University of Limpopo, 2022 / The psychological impact of perinatal death in the form of bereavement has been widely researched especially from the western perspective. The aim of this study was to establish the help-seeking pathways by mothers bereaved through perinatal death from the African perspective. The qualitative research paradigm in particular the phenomenological approach was adopted for the study. Phenomenology is described as an approach that focuses on the study of the lived experiences of individuals within their world. The application of this approach included personal interviews of 20 mothers who have experienced perinatal death at Doctor George Mukhari hospital in Gauteng province. The aim was to establish the help-seeking pathways they adopted to relief their distress, in terms of how they managed their bereavement and the help that they sought to relief their emotional distress. The findings of the study indicated that mothers lacked knowledge about what precipitated the onset of sudden symptoms such as early rupture of membrane, bleeding, lack of foetal movement which finally led to perinatal death. This lack of knowledge led mothers to attribute the cause of perinatal death to various reasons and conclusions such as distance decay, bad roads that delayed their arrival timeously at the hospital for their babies to be saved. Some cited lack of sense of urgency from the medical personnel and shortage of staff, especially doctors. However, they perceived positive social support from their families, spouses and medical professionals as one of the factors that contributed to their level of calmness and ability to bear the pain of loss. However, participants sought alternative help to facilitate clear understanding about what could have caused their babies to die, also how to manage their grief and how to deal with their subsequent pregnancies. Most of the participants benefited from the various healing pathways they chose. There is a need for healthcare system and community support to be more responsive to the plight of bereaved mothers, in reducing the stigma and the self-blame by bereaved mothers by offering support through counseling center. The findings reaffirm that despite the great studies taken in reducing perinatal deaths, there is a need for collaboration between the modern healthcare system and the traditional healthcare practitioners. Furthermore, emphasis v is needed on the preventative measures and training of healthcare practitioners within the maternal and child healthcare system to further reduce the alarming increase of prenatal deaths

This work shows the results of modeling and optimizing pentahedron-shaped covers for application on a passive solar still. While modeling under the assumption of clear weather in Provo, Utah, United States of America, it was found that two main geometries resulted: A single slope still with fully vertical back and sidewalls and a south face tilted at 37.1°, absorbing a total of 8.98 megajoules of direct solar radiation. A half-pyramid shaped cover with vertical backwall, sidewalls tilted in at 60.6°, and a south face tilted in at 41.5°, absorbing 9.34 megajoules of direct solar radiation.With improved covers, solar radiation absorbed by the basin can be maximized. Maximum radiation absorbed will generally indicate maximum still output.In addition, the internal convection of a passive solar still was modeled in order to compare with existing correlations to find the best convection correlation. The convection was modeled using Fluent 12 (CFD software package) and simulations were run for various geometries and temperatures. It was found that Shruti's correlation agreed the best with the CFD results. However, another possible correlation is suggested here which accommodates a higher range of Grashof numbers. For a correlation of the form Nu=C•(Ra)^n, it was found that C = 1.02, 0.56, and 0.66, and n = 0.19, 0.24, and 0.24 for cover tilt angles of 15°, 30°, and 45° respectively. Also, Grashof number ranges are 4.0 x 10^3 < Gr < 1.9 x 10^7, 4.0 x 10^4 < Gr < 1.9 x 10^8, and 2.1 x 10^5 < Gr < 1.0 x 10^9 respectively.

With the increasing pervasiveness of digital cameras, the Internet, and social networking, there is a growing need to catalog and analyze large collections of photos and videos. In this dissertation, we explore unconstrained still-image and video-based face recognition in real-world scenarios, e.g. social photo sharing and movie trailers, where people of interest are recognized and all others are ignored. In such a scenario, we must obtain high precision in recognizing the known identities, while accurately rejecting those of no interest. Recent advancements in face recognition research has seen Sparse Representation-based Classification (SRC) advance to the forefront of competing methods. However, its drawbacks, slow speed and sensitivity to variations in pose, illumination, and occlusion, have hindered its wide-spread applicability. The contributions of this dissertation are three-fold: 1. For still-image data, we propose a novel Linearly Approximated Sparse Representation-based Classification (LASRC) algorithm that uses linear regression to perform sample selection for l1-minimization, thus harnessing the speed of least-squares and the robustness of SRC. On our large dataset collected from Facebook, LASRC performs equally to standard SRC with a speedup of 100-250x. 2. For video, applying the popular l1-minimization for face recognition on a frame-by-frame basis is prohibitively expensive computationally, so we propose a new algorithm Mean Sequence SRC (MSSRC) that performs video face recognition using a joint optimization leveraging all of the available video data and employing the knowledge that the face track frames belong to the same individual. Employing MSSRC results in a speedup of 5x on average over SRC on a frame-by-frame basis. 3. Finally, we make the observation that MSSRC sometimes assigns inconsistent identities to the same individual in a scene that could be corrected based on their visual similarity. Therefore, we construct a probabilistic affinity graph combining appearance and co-occurrence similarities to model the relationship between face tracks in a video. Using this relationship graph, we employ random walk analysis to propagate strong class predictions among similar face tracks, while dampening weak predictions. Our method results in a performance gain of 15.8% in average precision over using MSSRC alone.

My dissertation contributes to the material and sensorial interest in the humanities by focusing on the beholder’s phenomenological experience of multi-panel paintings by Gerrit Dou (1613-1675), Rembrandt’s first and most financially successful pupil. Dou has long been hailed as the founder of the Leiden fijnschilders (fine painters), who brought mimesis to the height of artistic achievement around mid-century. Archival documents reveal that at least eight of Dou’s paintings were once fitted within cases that featured highly illusionistic still life paintings on the outer surfaces of their hinged doors or sliding lids. While only two of the recorded covers survive, they feature both common and luxury objects with varied surface textures and lighting effects that exhibit a level of artifice true to the goal of painting professed by Philips Angel: schijn zonder sijn (“semblance without being”). Projecting out of the darkness of false shallow niches, the objects addressed the viewer in a trompe l’oeil mode and with a startling mimetic force that invited closer scrutiny. Yet, Dou’s still life works are rarely the subject of critical analysis and remain on the periphery of seventeenth-century Dutch art historical scholarship, overshadowed by his novel achievements in genre painting. Scholars most often interpret Dou’s still lifes as protective mechanisms for and allegorical glosses on the paintings they concealed. Instead, I argue that these approaches have limited our understanding of their significance. The disassembly and loss of most of these painted covers has further obscured their functions and meanings. My phenomenological approach underscores the ways in which these painted still life covers fostered an embodied relationship with the beholder in the context of the art collections for which they were destined. In Chapter 1, I gather evidence of Dou’s extant and lost still life covers and quantify this practice and consider these paintings together as an understudied corpus in concert with the paintings they covered. In Chapter 2 and 3, I provide historical and theoretical contexts for Dou’s nested paintings to ground them in pictorial and material traditions of concealment and revelation that permeated early modern culture (Netherlandish, German, and Italian) from the fourteenth- to the late seventeenth century. I consider them modern adaptations of the illusionistic images on the exterior of devotional diptychs and triptychs, insisting on their presence in the liminal space that connects the painted and real world. In Chapter 4, I analyze Dou’s painted still life covers as “meta-paintings,” characterizing them as theoretical objects charged with their own agency and the ability to invite the beholder to “think” with both their mind and body. Ultimately, I explore the ways in which Dou’s still life covers and René Descartes’s natural philosophy exhibit a shared and contemporaneous distrust of the senses through an epistemology of doubt and deceit, a premise that expanded the horizons of their respective fields in the seventeenth century. / 2025-09-21T00:00:00Z

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Objective 1: To examine the influence of maternal depression and/ or anxiety on infant, maternal and dyadic FFSF task performance Objective 2: To investigate the changes in infant and maternal FFSF task performance before and after Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) treatment of maternal depression / Background: Research suggests that postpartum depression (PPD) and postpartum anxiety (PPA) impact both mothers and their infants, leading to adverse behavioural outcomes across the lifespan. The face-to-face still-face (FFSF) task is a validated observational tool used to measure the quality of mother-infant interactions. This thesis aimed to investigate the differences in responses to the FFSF task between dyads consisting of mothers with PPD and/or PPA and healthy dyads. Another goal was to examine whether PPD treatment could improve mother and infant FFSF outcomes. Methods: A systematic search was performed in PubMed/MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, PsycINFO and Web of Science. Meta-analyses were conducted to examine the differences in infant, maternal and dyadic FFSF outcomes in mothers with PPD, PPA or comorbid PPD and PPA in comparison to healthy control dyads. Second, we examined whether group cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for PPD could help improve infant and maternal FFSF outcomes. A case-control design study was conducted with three different assessment points (i.e., pre-CBT treatment, immediately after CBT and three months post-CBT). Results: Meta-analyses suggested that the infants of mothers with PPD display lower levels of positive affect during the play and reunion phases compared to the infants of healthy non-depressed mothers. Also, mothers with PPD may engage less positively with their infants at the reunion phase, and mother-infant dyads affected by PPD show less positive interactive matching during the play phase compared to healthy control dyads. Finally, object/environment engagement was higher in infants of PPA mothers compared to healthy controls at still-face. Conclusion: The results suggest that mothers with PPD and/or PPD (and their infants) may exhibit different interaction patterns compared to healthy dyads. Also, it appears that the benefits of CBT for maternal PPD may extend to their infants through reductions in maladaptive infant withdrawn behaviours to normal, healthy levels. / Thesis / Master of Science (MSc) / Maternal postpartum depression (PPD) and postpartum anxiety (PPA) are the most common mental health complications of birth. Apart from unfavourable effects PPD and PPA have on mothers, it may also impact the mother-infant relationship, leading to adverse infant outcomes. Given the relatively high prevalence of maternal PPD, PPA, and comorbid PPD and PPA, this thesis aimed to examine the differences in how mothers suffering from PPD and/or PPA and their infants coordinate their behaviour, in comparison to healthy mothers and their infants using a validated observational task (face-to-face still-face [FFSF] task). Another goal of this thesis was to investigate whether the benefits of maternal treatment for PPD with cognitive behavioural therapy may extend to infants and improve mother, as well as infant behaviour. These investigations may provide new insights on how maternal PPD and/or PPA affects mother-infant interactions, and consequently, infant socio-emotional development.