This study examines the portrayal of the woman as monstrous in Daphne du Maurier’s short stories “The Apple Tree” and “The Blue Lenses” and investigates the abject emotions that female bodies induce within the main characters. The study also contrasts the habitual, objectifying gaze of the male focalizer with the reluctant gaze forced upon the female focalizer through a pair of lenses, argued here to represent the patriarchal suppression of woman, as the male gaze is key for mediating the abject in du Maurier’s stories. Additionally, the association of the natural world with the female body is discussed, as the subjugation of nature and women are closely connected in a patriarchal society, and these are both regarded as abject in du Maurier’s stories. It is concluded that gender is elemental to whether the main characters embrace or reject the abject feelings originating within themselves.

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This essay contains a discussion of my influences for making the choreographic work The Horrors of:, which was the practical part of an examination for the degree work of the bachelor’s Programme in Dance Performance at Stockholms Konstnärliga Högskola in the fall of 2022. The horrors of: is an exploration of women in horror and the potentiality of the monstrous feminine. Inspired by Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection, Barbara Creed’s concept of the monstrous-feminine as well as films in the body horror genre, a search to represent the subjectivity of the women depicted in horror through dance emerged. In the body horror genre, the female characters are neither villains nor heroes, but complex characters who possess the capacity to both do good and destroy.    The text is divided in two parts: The first part dissects how the process was generated from researching the topics of femininity and abjection into a staged choreographic work and the second part contains a collage of poems along with other material collected from the artistic research process.

Panoramic virtual reality is an emerging technology that has recently gained the attention of both the research community and regular consumers. It allows the users to immerse themselves in omnidirectional videos with the help of a virtual reality headset : thanks to an increasing amount of affordable head-mounted-displays, any recent smartphone can offer a decent panoramic virtual reality experience. However since omnidirectional videos are videos with a large field-of-view that covers the entire sphere around the camera, they require large resolutions and thus high bitrates. This master degree project conducted at RE’FLEKT GmbH is an exploratory work that seeks to reduce the panoramic video bitrate. Because of the nature of omnidirectional videos, the user can only see a subpart of each video frame, and thus some zones of the video can attract more attention than others. The purpose of this study is to introduce the concept of region-of-interest encoding in panoramic VR. The main contribution is a method to encode panoramic videos in an H.264 video format stream with a space-variant level of details depending on the zones that attract the most the viewers’ interest. First, the region-of-interest are detected through a head-tracking module combined with a Gaussian attention model. Then, the reference video is encoded with the open source x264 encoder, with a quantization step adjusted to the region-of-interest information. The International Telecommunications Union standard subjective tests show that this method can perform better than classic H.264 encoding only in specific cases. / Panoramisk virtuell verklighet (VR) är en kommande teknik som nyligen har mött intresse från forskarsamhället och vanliga konsumenter. Det gör det möjligt för användarna att fördjupa sig i videor upptagna från flera riktningar, med hjälp av ett VR-headset : tack vare ett växande antal billiga och huvudburna bildskärmar, erbjuder alla nya smarttelefoner en passande panoramisk VR-erfarenhet. Men på grund av den breda synvinkeln i flerriktade media behöver videor med 360 graders synfält stor upplösning och därför höga bithastigheter. Detta masterexamensarbete som utförts på RE’FLEKT GmbH är ett utforskande arbete som strävar efter att reducera panoramabildens bithastighet. I flerriktade videoklipp kan användaren bara se en del av varje bildruta, härigenom får somliga zoner mer uppmärksamhet än andra. Syftet med denna studie är att introducera begreppet region-av-intresse (ROI) kodning i panoramisk VR. Huvudbidraget är en metod för att koda panoramisk video i en H.264-ström med en varierande nivå av detaljer som beror på de zoner som får mest av tittarnas intresse. Först detekteras ROI genom en huvudspårningsmodul kombinerad med en gaussisk uppmärksamhetsmodell. Därefter kodas referensvideoen med x264-kodaren (öppen källkod) med hjälp av ROI-informationen. ITU-standardens subjektiva test visar att den här metoden kan fungera bättre än klassisk H.264-kodning i enskilda fall.

Gaze tracking is a field within computer vision that has a large number of possible areas of application. However, much of the software available for gaze tracking is locked to licenses and/or certain equipment that can be expensive, hard to get a hold of, intrusive for the user, or simply impractical. The research within gaze tracking typically focuses on the theoretical models used to perform the tracking, rather than the software implementation of it. The purpose of this report is to make real-time gaze tracking systems more easily available to the common user and developer. Hence, this thesis explores a possible implementation of gaze tracking using C# in Visual Studio, with the help of a number of different libraries, only using a simple web camera as hardware. Further, the system is analyzed and evaluated by the precision of the subject’s eye movements which is projected on the screen. The resulting system is heavily inaccurate and imprecise but changing and adding a few key software components such as estimating the user’s head pose could vastly improve the accuracy and precision of the system. / Blickspårning är ett fält inom datorseende som har ett stort antal möjliga tilläpmningsområden. Däremot så är mycket av den tillgängliga mjukvaran låst till licenser och/eller viss utrustning som kan vara dyr, svår att få tag på, påträngande, eller helt enkelt opraktisk. Forskningen inom blickspårning fokuserar typiskt sett på den teoretiska modellen som beskriver hur spårningen går till, snarare än hur det implementeras i mjukvara. Syftet med den här rapporten är att skapa ett blickspårningsprogram som körs i realtid för att underlätta och göra det mer tillgängligt för andra användare och utvecklare. Därför utforskar den här uppsatsen ett sätt att implementera blickspårning med C# i Visual Studio, med hjälp av ett antal olika kodbibliotek, och endast en enkel webbkamera som hårdvara. Systemet kommer även att bli analyserat och evaluerat med hänseende till träffsäkerheten i testpersoners ögonrörelse som projiceras på skärmen. Det resulterande systemet har en oerhört låg träffsäkerhet och exakthet, men genom att ändra några nyckelkomponenter i mjukvaran, så som att uppskatta hur användarens huvud är riktat, så kan systemets träffsäkerhet och precision ökas dramatiskt.

Figures who turn their heads frontally and gaze outwards from Archaic Greek artworks look back at the viewer and destabilize the typical relationship between viewing subject and viewed object. These frontal characters were especially effective for viewers who encountered them during the Archaic period, when the profile perspective was conventional and vision was understood to be a tactile sense. Frontal-facing figures have often been interpreted as carrying protective power or having the ability to threaten the viewer with their attention. While some frontal figures are intimidating, frontality and the represented gazes it engenders do not provoke a single, universal reaction. Instead, these images’ interactions with ancient viewers were shaped by the type of frontal figure represented, the figure’s representational context, and the real context in which the figure was originally encountered. This dissertation takes a contextual approach to the study of Archaic frontal figures to arrive at a more nuanced understanding of their functions and effects. The frontal figures that are represented on vases made between 700 and 480 BCE are comprehensively examined. Frontal-facing characters that decorated temples in the same period are also considered. By inspecting each individual type of frontal figure in turn, we can better comprehend the differing responses the figures elicit, which include humor and horror in addition to terror. This project also examines how frontality was employed by innovative vase painters to create images that directly engage viewers and shape their viewing experiences. While a few figures were conventionally frontal in the Archaic period, the majority were represented frontally only by the most experimental artisans who were eager to surprise their viewers and distinguish their work from that of their colleagues. This investigation of Archaic frontality in multiple media demonstrates the power of the perspective in its original context and the inventiveness of the craftsmen who used it.

This project follows a Research through Design approach and through autobiographical design explores the question of how Interaction Design can support Lipoedema patients, by helping them cope with their body image in everyday life. Building on the concept of self-management for people with chronic medical conditions and a conscious connection between body and mind, I created a set of artefacts. The set of artefacts was connected to specific a interaction for each artefact, giving them a more meaningful purpose. Through living with these three artefacts, I was able to identify tensions revolving around themes of self-acceptance, discomfort and vulnerability. These are important when designing, not only for people diagnosed with Lipoedema, but also for any user group struggling with similar issues, such as body image. / Detta projekt följer ett forskning-genom-design tillvägagångssätt och genom autobiografisk design utforskas frågan om hur interaktionsdesign kan stötta Lipödem patienter genom att hjälpa dom förbättra sin kroppsbild i vardagen. Genom att bygga på själv-hanterings konceptet för människor med kroniska sjukdomar och med en medveten koppling mellan kropp och sinne, skapade jag en uppsättning av artefakter. Vardera artefakt var kopplade till specifika interaktioner för att på så sätt ge dom en djupare betydelse. Genom att leva med dessa tre artefakter, kunde jag utforska teman rörandes självacceptans, obehag och sårbarhet. Dessa är framför allt viktiga när man designar för människor med Lipödem men också för andra grupper av människor som kämpar med liknande problem, såsom kroppsbild.

This essay explores and compares the depiction of the character Beverly Marsh in Stephen King’s novel IT and Andy Muschietti’s 2017 film adaptation. The literary analysis uses the theoretical concepts of Mulvey’s the Male Gaze, Bartky’s sexual objectification theory, and Kristeva’s abjection. The Male Gaze describes how women are constantly looked upon by an implicit male subject, whether it be characters within the narrative or the spectator outside of it. Sexual objectification refers to how the body can become fragmented into sexual parts when described in an oppressive way. Feelings of abjection can occur when the concepts of subject and object, cultural norms, or sexual differences are challenged. The initial hypothesis was that King’s novel would lean more on patriarchal structures in the way femininity is described. However, the results show that both the original novel and the film depict Beverly in a sexually objectifying way, although the methods differ.

”vivid and fiery”
  Carolina Müller as phenomenon at the Royal Theatre Carolina Müller is identical with the Royal Theatre and she was the first professional female opera singer in Sweden. The audience’s perception of her stage personality and her agency in her portrayal of the title role in C. W. Gluck’s opera Alceste at the Stockholm opera in 1781 will throw light on her quality; her singing and acting style according to the affect she created on stage linked to the age of sensibility. Carolina Müller’s agency constitutes a gap in Swedish theatre history which will be examined in order to reach a better understanding of the structures behind her position. Willmar Sauter’s concept of the theatrical event, but with a feministic perspective on the role of the actress, is used to analyze her performativity, which I characterize as both passionate and sentimental. I use historical descriptive sources to understand her stage personality, and I will look into her performance of Alceste from the perspective of late eighteenth century acting. Secondly, I look into the prescriptive sources linked to Alceste, to examine how her stage personality affected the production, she had a great impact on the creation of the opera characters written for her after her Alceste. Finally, I highlight how the European exchange allowed her to emerge as a phenomenon. Telling her story is a contribution to the history of the prima donnas of the north, and thereby to the field of feminist historiography.  Carolina Müller, Gluck, Alceste, actress, Royal Theatre, phenomenon, stage personality, agency, theatrical event, performativity, sensibility, gaze

The Nordic glass industry has its roots in 1742 in Glasriket (Kingdom of Crystals) in Småland county, Sweden, also known as the pioneer of the glass industry in the Nordic countries. The glass industry has faced many sustainability challenges, particularly related to the environmental pollution caused by the glass industry due to chemicals used in the glass manufacturing process that have leached into the surrounding environment, such as water and soil. On the other hand, glass tourism can be approached better way through creative tourism, which has potential from a sustainability perspective, as creativity is a source of sustainability and innovation.However, creative tourism is a relatively new form of tourism, and there are gaps in understanding creative tourism offerings. This research aims to gain a deeper understanding of creative tourists' motivations and tourists’ gaze through semi-structured interviews with nine creative tourists (demand side) and, on the other hand, also about sustainability for two glass studios in Finland and two glass studios in Sweden (supply side) as well as creative tourists. The study’s theoretical framework is based on the social psychological model of tourism developed by Iso-Ahola (1982) and tourists gaze by Urry (1990). In the narrative analysis of the data collected, this thesis will help highlight the tourists' motivations and gaze. Moreover, to understand sustainability, this study brings an understanding of other values that support glass tourism, such as social, cultural, and economical.