This essay explores the colonial nature of the American road movie, specifically through the lens of how road movies treat the South according to Stuart Hall’s concepts of identity and Edward Said’s on Othering and the colonial gaze. To accomplish this, the essay analyzes the classic 1969 road movie, “Easy Rider”, and the more contemporary parody from 2008, “Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay.” The thrust of this paper becomes: if a progressive parody of road movies cannot escape the trappings of colonialism “Easy Rider” displays, perhaps the road movie itself is flawed.

With this study, the authors wish to highlight the way artificial intelligence, as a new form of media technology, seems to be ascribed gender, both in fiction and reality. These, by humans artificially developed beings, would not need to be gendered, but still are. Given these beings are human made and new phenomenas, an opportunity of preventing boundaries considering gender, class and etnicity to be reproduced would be possible and in favour. By analysing the Alex Garland 2015 film Ex Machina, the authors wish to discuss how and why the artificial intelligence becomes gendered, particularly feminised, and what this means from a wider perspective concerning the way we look at this new technlology not yet fully introduced in real life. By using post- and transhuman theory mixed with feminist theories such as Judith Butlers theory of perfomativity, Donna Haraways posthuman feminist theory and Laura Mulveys theory of The Male Gaze, this study results in a qualitative text analysis. The methodic tools used in this study contains elements from visual text methods and therefor also semiotics.   The authors reach to the conclusion that the depiction of artificial intelligence in the film Ex Machina (2015) reproduces stereotypic feminine gender acts and even intensifies these. When these ways of presenting new and futuristic technology seems to appear in ficiton, an assumption can be made that they origin from existing and deep gender acts in the western society. Researchers, such as Donna Haraway, wishes for these strong boundaries in gender, class and etnicity to not be reproduced in new technology, but in the fictional case of the film Ex Machina (2015), this wish has unfortunately not been fullfilled. If society would be able to rethink the sharp boundaries between nature and technology and succeed with this ontological change in the way we look at humanity, it would hopefully be easier to approach the new technology with an open mind. Perhaps then the reproduction of gender stereotypes in this new technology would cease in fiction, but also in reality.

Denna studie är en kvalitativ filmanalys av den populära tv-serien Bron, med fokus på huvudkaraktären Saga Norén. Studien utgår från teorier kring den manliga och kvinnliga blicken. Uppsatsens syfte är att belysa ämnet kring hur en kvinna förväntas uppträda utifrån de rådande normerna, men också hur hon uppfattas av andra. Uppbyggnaden av genus- och könsmaktsordning är ett ständigt relevant forskningsämne, där mediernas kraft att påverka publiken spelar en viktig roll.   Studien är baserad på könsteorier som relaterar till stereotyper, såväl som den manliga blicken. Till studiens analysdel skapades ett analysverktyg baserat på Selby och Cowderys trestegsmodell och mise-en-scén. De scener som valdes ut för analysen sorterades i fyra olika kategorier baserat på återkommande mönster. Varje kategori sammanfattades i en kort sektion, som samtliga diskuteras i det sista avsnittet. Resultatet av studien visar att Saga Norén avviker från hur en stereotyp kvinnlig karaktär förväntas uppträda. Hennes sätt att framträda, och det avvikande beteendemönstret bidrar också till att hon inte upplevs att synas i bild för att behaga någon. / This study is a qualitative film analysis focusing on the main character Saga Norén in the popular tv series Bron, based on the male and female gaze. The essay highlights the topic of how a woman is expected to behave based on the prevailing gender roles, but also how she is perceived by others. The construction of gender and gender roles is a constantly relevant research topic, where the media's power to influence the audience plays an important role.   The study is based on gender theories that relate to stereotypes, as well as the male gaze. For the analysis part of the study, an analysis tool was created based on Selby and Cowdery's three-stage model and mise-en-scène, using these theories as a foundation. The scenes selected for the analysis were sorted into four various categories based on recurring patterns. Each category was summarized in a short section, to be discussed in the final section.   The result of the study shows that Saga Norén departs from how the stereotype female character is expected to behave. Her way of appearing, and the deviant behavior pattern also contributes to her not being perceived to exist in a position to please.

I’m not a girl, not yet a woman, but I do have popular sensibilities. Pop music plucks ideas and symbols from where ever it pleases to create a new narrative. So do I. Reflecting on how I see women and how the gaze of others affects this. By mapping my magpie like collection of images, songs, paintings and films I tell the story of my girl gang. My ceramic sculptures are a physical manifestation of my research into different ways of looking at girls.

A project around loss and absence. This work is a reflection on tradition, mourning and the importance to remember. Based on how crafts relate to society in ceremonial contexts by being a tool to communicate with others. By having a reflective relation with tradition this fiber works intend to transfer the innate poetic language of symbolic materials used in rituals around death and commemoration in Mexico into new forms through specific repetitive actions in the making. Delving into the unique physical qualities of onion skin, sugar, beeswax, corn husks and paper. Seeking to evoke an emotion by diverting our perception of ordinary materials.

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder experience difficulties with reading comprehension and information processing, which affect their school performance, employability and social inclusion. The main goal of this work is to investigate new ways to evaluate and improve text and web accessibility for adults with autism. The first stage of this research involved using eye-tracking technology and comprehension testing to collect data from a group of participants with autism and a control group of participants without autism. This series of studies resulted in the development of the ASD corpus, which is the first multimodal corpus of text and gaze data obtained from participants with and without autism. We modelled text complexity and sentence complexity using sets of features matched to the reading difficulties people with autism experience. For document-level classification we trained a readability classifier on a generic corpus with known readability levels (easy, medium and difficult) and then used the ASD corpus to evaluate with unseen user-assessed data. For sentence-level classification, we used for the first time gaze data and comprehension testing to define a gold standard of easy and difficult sentences, which we then used as training and evaluation sets for sentence-level classification. The results showed that both classifiers outperformed other measures of complexity and were more accurate predictors of the comprehension of people with autism. We conducted a series of experiments evaluating easy-to-read documents for people with cognitive disabilities. Easy-to-read documents are written in an accessible way, following specific writing guidelines and containing both text and images. We focused mainly on the image component of these documents, a topic which has been significantly under-studied compared to the text component; we were also motivated by the fact that people with autism are very strong visual thinkers and that therefore image insertion could be a way to use their strengths in visual thinking to compensate for their difficulties in reading. We investigated the effects images in text have on attention, comprehension, memorisation and user preferences in people with autism (all of these phenomena were investigated both objectively and subjectively). The results of these experiments were synthesised in a set of guidelines for improving text accessibility for people with autism. Finally, we evaluated the accessibility of web pages with different levels of visual complexity. We provide evidence of existing barriers to finding relevant information on web pages that people with autism face and we explore their subjective experiences with searching the web through survey questions.

Driver's distraction is one of the main areas, which researchers are focusing on, in design of Advanced Drivers Assistance Systems (ADASs). Head pose and eye-gaze direction are two reliable indicators of a driver's gaze and the current focus of attention. Compared with other methods that make use of head pose only, methods that combine eye information can achieve higher accuracy. The naturalistic driving environment always presents unique challenges (e.g., unstable illumination, jolts, etc.) to video-based gaze estimation and tracking systems. Some methods can achieve relatively high proficiency in the stationary laboratory environment, but they may not be suitable for the unstable driving environment. In addition, performing in real time or near-real time is another consideration for gaze estimation in an ADAS. Therefore, these special challenges need to be overcome to design ADASs. In this thesis, we proposed a new driver's gaze zone estimation framework designed for the naturalistic driving environment. The framework combines head and eye information to estimate the gaze zone of the driver in both daytime and nighttime. The framework is composed of five main components: Facial Landmark Detection, Head Pose Estimation, Iris Center Detection, Upper Eyelid Information Extraction, and Gaze Zone Estimation. First, Constrained Local Neural Field (CLNF) is applied to obtain the facial landmarks in the image plane and the 3D model of the face in the object frame. In addition, extracting region of interest (ROI) is utilized as an optimization strategy for CLNF facial landmark detection. Second, head pose estimation can be regarded as a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem. Levenberg-Marquardt optimization method is used to solve the PnP problem based on the 2D landmark locations in the image plane and their corresponding 3D locations in the object frame. Third, a regression model-based method is employed to obtain the iris center from eye landmarks detected in the previous part. For upper eyelid information extraction, a quadratic function is utilized to model the upper eyelid, and the second-order coefficient is extracted. Finally, the head pose and the eye information are combined to form a feature vector, and Random Decision Forest classifier is utilized to estimate the current gaze zone of the driver from the feature vector extracted. The experiment is carried out in the realistic driving environment in both daytime and nighttime with three volunteers by Kinect sensor V2 for Windows that is put at the back of windshield. Weighted and unweighted accuracy are utilized as evaluation metrics in gaze zone estimation. Weighted accuracy evaluates gaze zones with different significance while unweighted accuracy treats each gaze zone equally. Experiment results show that the gaze zone estimation framework proposed in this work has better performance compared to the reference in the daytime. The weighted and unweighted accuracy of gaze zone estimation reach 96.6% and 95.0% for daytime, respectively. For nighttime, the weighted and unweighted accuracy can reach 96% and 91.4%.

Den här uppsatsen grundar sig i ett intresse för normkritisk pedagogik samt visuell kultur;vilka normer som görs i det visuella. I lärarutbildningen på Konstfack har vi många gångertalat om unga människors identitetsskapande processer, vilket har väckt frågan:Vilka subjektspositioner blir möjliga i förhållande till de visuella representationer som användssom exempel i bildundervisningen och vilka normer manifesteras i diskurserna?För att undersöka detta har material från tre bildlärare i grundskolan samlats och analyserats.Uppsatsen bygger på en socialkonstruktionistisk grundsyn, och först och främst användsMichel Foucaults diskursanalys som teori och metod. I utbildningen vid Institutionen förbildpedagogik brukas vetenskapliga och konstnärliga metoder parallellt och examensarbetetbestår av en skriftlig samt en gestaltande del. Den gestaltande delen i detta examensarbete harinspirerats av konstnären Marianne Lindberg de Geers bok ”Jag tänker på mig själv” och bestårav en bildserie som fått namnet ”Jag ser på mig själv”.Undersökningens främsta slutsats är att vi verkar behöva reflektera mer över vilka bilder,blickar och berättelser vi förmedlar. Kanske i synnerhet i skolan, som har vad Foucault skullekalla ett högt sanningsanspråk. Eftersom den kunskap, makt och mening som bilderna producerarär beroende på sin kontext; hur de presenteras och behandlas, borde de flesta bilder kunnaanvändas i undervisning så länge maktförhållanden synliggörs. Men vi måste också aktivtarbeta med att inkludera så många olika människor och synsätt som möjligt, i de bilder ochberättelser vi använder oss av, med vilka vi framställer och formar världen, oss själva ochandra.

This is a piece that engages with Laura Mulvey's idea of the 'male gaze.' It is meant to exaggerate, magnify, and therefore critique the mechanisms that the camera uses to objectify and dominate women's bodies.

This research project makes use of photographic art practice as an investigative tool, through which a variety of strategies have been employed in order to picture the traditional photographic portrait studio. The thesis provides both a context within which to understand this art practice and expands upon and develops the themes proposed by it. The history of the photographic studio is presented in traditional narrative form and as a discursive formation; being analysed at two specific junctures within this narrative. This historical and cultural contextualisation allows the studio to be viewed in terms of a space and apparatus that embody particular characteristics. It is suggested that whilst these characteristics are explicitly located within discourses relating to class and aesthetics they also incorporate an implicit psychical dimension. The studio as an apparatus is analysed as constituting particular subject positions. These are discussed in relation to ideas drawn from film theory that utilise Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts. The studio is considered as a space in which the presence of the Lacanian Gaze becomes suggested with particular prominence. As an architecture that embodies the presence of the gaze, the studio is discussed in relation to a number of theories around the nature of space and modernity. The possibility of transference as an element of the studio encounter is also posited. Four artists (Helmut Newton, Jemima Stehli, Broomberg and Chanarin and Christopher Williams) are identified as producing work that critically engages the space of the studio. Analysis of this work serves to develop the arguments made so far and provides an extended consideration of the particular subject object relationships that become played out in the studio. This becomes developed further in relation to commercial portrait practices and is demonstrated through analysis of portraits by Mike Disfarmer and Suresh Punjabi both of whom have been the subject of significant theoretical discussion. The thesis concludes with a reflection on how the practice produced for this research has both been conceived and executed in relation to theory but also on how it can be thought of as providing, in itself, a unique and valuable contribution to knowledge. It is argued that the practice not only makes visible a coercive discourse and psychic economy implicit within the studio but that it also promotes a particularly compelling and pertinent consideration of how the two might be related.