En väl fungerande visuell identitet är av största vikt för att skapa ett framgångsrikt varumärke med hög efterfrågan. Därför är det viktigt att varumärken uppdateras och anpassas efter rådande förhållanden då det visuella/grafiska uttrycket kontinuerligt förändras i dagens samhälle. Logotypen är den tydligaste ingångspunkten i varumärkeskommunikationen och därmed är studiens syfte att utforma en logotyp som kommunicerar teföretaget Song tea’s varumärke. Studien haren kvalitativ fallstudieansats och empiri i form av intervjuer redogör för respondenternas åsikter om logotypförslagen och berör teorier som: varumärkesidentitet, positionering, logotyp, färger och typografi. Utifrån dessa teorier och insamlad data, där trerespondenter och en testperson intervjuades, analyserades materialet för att besvara studiens syfte. Slutsatserna av denna studie visar att Song tea bör utforma väldesignade förpackningar som anpassas efter den nya kontexten och blir hållbar över avsedd tid. Oavsett storlek på företaget så indikerar en välgjord design kvalitet och värde för konsumenten vilket leder till en större attraktionskraft. Vidare visar studien att färger är viktiga kommunikativa element men att konsumenterna har olika åsikter om färgval. Detta leder till att Song tea via varumärkeskommunikation bör skapa en stark identitet som med upprepad exponering av logotyp och färg kan göra att varumärkesassociationer skapas och förknippas med företaget. Dessutom är förpackningsdesignen avgörande vid köpbeslutet och tillsammans med en innovativ design kan det öppna upp nya marknader för företaget där varumärkeskännedomen blir av vikt för att skapa en ökad attraktionskraft. / A well-functioning visual identity is paramount for creating a successful brand in high demand. Therefore, it is essential that brands are updated and accommodated to the current demands when the visual/graphic expressions are continuously changing in modern society. The logotype is the most apparent point of entry in brand communication. The purpose of this study is to design a logotype that communicates the tea company Song tea’s brand. The study is a qualitative case study and empirical data in form of interviews describes the respondents' opinions about the logotype suggestions and concerns theories such as: brand identity, positioning, logotype, colors and typography. Based on these theories and acquired data, interviews with three respondents and one test person, the material was analyzed to answer the purpose of the study. The findings show that Song tea should shape well-designed packages adapted to the new context, and sustainable over the desired time. Whatever the size of the company, a well-designed brand indicates quality and consumer value, leading to a greater appeal. The study also shows that colors are important communicative elements, but consumers have different opinions about choice of colors. This leads to the conclusion that Song tea should create a strong identity through brand communication with repeated exposure of the logo and color, which can create brand associations that is tied to the brand. Also the packaging design is crucial in purchasing decisions and together with an innovative design, it can open up new markets for the company where brand recognition is of great importance to create increased appeal.

This dissertation investigates undersea cinema from its origins to the present. Addressing a range of documentaries, narrative fiction films, and sound recordings made undersea, this project emphasizes ocean cinema’s ties to the histories of ocean exploration, conquest, and conservation—contexts from which undersea films cannot be extricated. For over a century, undersea films have brought the distant world of the deep up close to the eyes and ears of a broad public; they have been a major influence on popular understanding of the ocean, which today is of great environmental significance and a powerful symbol of a fragile global ecology. This project aims to show how the ocean as a cinematic site of ecological consciousness is, as a condition of its production, intimately linked to environmentally unfriendly histories of technology. The often-dazzling images of marine life shown on film can increase viewers’ sensitivity to the other forms of life with which they share the planet. At the same time, producing these images has historically relied on exploratory technologies built for the purpose of better exploiting the marine environment economically and militarily. This contradiction between films’ meanings and their conditions of possibility is not limited to ocean cinema; it characterizes a wide range of environmental films. By focusing on ocean cinema, a particularly rich case of unseen worlds, environmental consciousness, and destructive techno-scientific commitments coming together, this dissertation aims to illuminate a tension that pervades environmental cinema in general.

This dissertation argues that a critical anti-war cinema emerged with the birth of the so-called war documentary during World War I. Focusing on Leon Caverly, the first official war cinematographer of the United States military, I that argue America’s first war propaganda films gave birth to America’s first anti-war cinema. Military-produced images of World War I are available in various archives such as the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and the Marine Corps History Center. In addition to unedited reels of war related footage, the archives hold propaganda films such as Pershing’s Crusaders (1918), America’s Answer (1918) and Under Four Flags (1918). These feature films were shot by cameramen in the Marines or the Signal Corps and then edited into works of propaganda by the United States Government’s Committee on Public Information. Caverly was the first cameraman to join the effort of filming at the front. While he was a Marine and an instrumental player in America’s propaganda program, he also completed a cinematic history of the Great War through his creative nonfiction camerawork that was more subtle and critical than conventional war documentaries would suggest. Previous studies of World War I propaganda provide context for America’s cinematic efforts or profiles of individual cameramen. But little or no attention has been paid to formal analysis of the films themselves. Furthermore, scholars have not yet regarded these films as anything other than examples of early documentary or government propaganda. The same holds true concerning Leon Caverly. Not only was Caverly the first United States war cinematographer, but the most significant work of propaganda made during the war was composed of footage shot entirely by him. Released in 1918, America’s Answer captivated audiences in America and Europe, providing inspiration for the home front to support the war. However, a striking discrepancy exists between the content of Caverly’s shots and the rhetorical editing structure of the film. In contrast to the pro-war sentiment articulated by the editing and its intertitles, America’s Answer’s individual shots reveal a practice of camera-writing that represents an aesthetics of anti-war cinema at odds with pro-war propaganda. Caverly’s work does not show the horrors of war with documentary realism. Nor does his work openly critique America’s war effort. Rather, Caverly aspires to be a camera-historian whose moving images and photographic work demonstrate a preoccupation with writing history steeped in the temporal aesthetics of the camera arts. This dissertation considers still and moving image practices that “write with time” such as double-exposures, shots that emphasize duration, moving camera shots that evoke temporal relationships, and framing that gives metaphorical expression to time. The fact that these practices appear in Caverly’s wartime work indicates that World War I footage has a greater significance for film history than simply exemplifying documentary realism or propaganda. This dissertation shows that, while the most harrowing aspects of World War I combat remain unseen in Caverly’s work, his creative camera-writing approaches war and the fragility of life in unconventional ways.

This study examines the collaborative work of the filmmakers Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (1962-2006) in respect to current and future formations of political avant-garde filmmaking. Throughout their joint career the Marxist filmmakers understood their work as part of an ongoing effort to participate in the class struggle, despite of an overall decline in faith regarding revolutionary politics. Straub-Huillet pursued this desire for radical, social and political change not simply on the level of filmic content, but rather by employing distinct cinematic practices. This study is, at the same time, an effort to combat the political inertia that affected film theory as part of larger disciplinary shifts in the humanities. In order to do so, I am engaging, first and foremost, in poststructuralist discourses that will be discussed on the basis of traditional forms of Marxist-oriented critical theories. Reason for this is an attempt to replace metaphysical paradigms with an aporetic structure that is affirmative of difference, rather than identity. Based on the notion of an elective affinity Straub-Huillet's film adaptations challenged traditional forms of cinematic authorship and collaboration. Instead of simply referencing other authors, Straub-Huillet allow the author as an other to enter and intervene with the film-text. This creative relationship is as much characterized by an act of resistance that is maintained through an overt formal use of direct quotations. This introduces a principle of repetition and reproduction into the films that defines the couple's filmmaking process as a practice of creative labor. The textual figure of the border draws out further how this practice gives rise to new understandings of cinema in regard to nation, culture, and history. Figurations of ruins outline, in addition, how these issues pertain at once to necessity and the limits of representation. This points, in conclusion, to a central dilemma affecting all political film practices: the difficulty of reinventing images that are not already clichés or corporate entities. Straub-Huillet address this problem in a specific way; they aim at the production of an image that pertains to a (future) revolutionary event on the basis of an already existing classical genealogy.

My thesis work explores the visual space of the screen by taking the form of the Sierpinski Sieve, providing a cinematic work that works to be the experience of itself.

Disciplines arrive at moments of crisis. So do those who labor within and at the margins, intersections, outskirts, and centers of those disciplines. This written thesis draws together these moments of both disciplinary and individual crisis, at the intersection of anthropology, nonfiction filmmaking, and film studies. In response to existential, representational, and ethical anxieties, these writings and videos affirm life, within and between the disciplines, myself, and my collaborators — each of whom has experienced or is recovering from an eating disorder. Through navigating the representation of these experiences, the work interrogates the limits and potentials of representation in nonfiction film and video more broadly, and how it relates to anthropology, activism, and pedagogy. It asks: what is a good (ethical) representation of another individual’s experience, especially of something as seemingly private or vulnerable as an eating disorder and the recovery from it? This thesis approaches this question from technological, methodological, ethical, philosophical, and practical perspectives, and in doing so, aims not so much to resolve these disciplinary and personal crises, but to move through and with them, towards a theory and a practice of embodied ethical representation.

Inventing Authors draws on a diverse strand of methodologies from literary, book, and media studies to rethink the practice of authorship in the context of media history, specifically during the founding age of technological invention in the United States between 1870 and 1920. The Age of Edison witnessed an unprecedented explosion of new media that threw into relief traditional ideas about writing, literature, and authorship. By moving beyond economic narratives of authorial history, Inventing Authors radically disperses the practice and profession of authorship across the cultural techniques that mark it up. To rethink authorship in the midst of nineteenth-century media history, this project surrenders abstract concepts like "representation," "literature," and "culture" for the materialist rigor of what contemporary German media theorists call "cultural techniques" (Kulturtechnik), a term that combines an attention to media technologies with a focus on elementary techniques, skills, and practices, especially reading, writing, and counting. Drawing on material histories of inscription by Friedrich Kittler, James Beniger, and Lisa Gitelman, it engages authors not as artists, workers, or professionals in the market - the usual approach for studies of this period - but rather in mutually constitutive relationships with the skills, objects, and techniques that shaped the conditions of their possibility. Like Edison at Menlo Park, authors in the second half of the nineteenth century inaugurate a future in which technical expertise and ingenuity, not originality and inspiration, control the field of representation. Each chapter excavates the technical training of an author to demonstrate how authors capitalize on available materials to engineer new methods for inventing and marking up reality. My introduction and chapters are focalized around four authors - Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Theodore Dreiser - and the cultural techniques that shaped their methods, writing practices, and literature. In this period of American history, authors began to register how their literary inventions were not merely disembodied experiments in style, but rather technical operations that processed language through different markup strategies. They were not just artists making art; they were editors and engineers processing bits of culture in ways correlate with the cultural techniques trained into them.

This written thesis serves as a public record for the production of Jesse Kreitzer's MFA thesis film Black Canaries, a 1900s coal mining folktale inspired by his Iowan heritage. The thesis includes Mr. Kreitzer's genealogical and historical research as it pertains to his maternal ancestry and coal mining in south-central Iowa. The thesis also accounts for the conceptual, personal, and practical considerations for the production of Black Canaries. Additional materials include the film's production packet, reference guide, production storyboards, and screenplay.

Since its inception in 1897, the annual Cheyenne Frontier Days has drawn hundreds of thousands of visitors to Wyoming for a 10-day celebration of "Western roots," culminating in the world's largest outdoor rodeo nicknamed "The Daddy of 'Em All." Shot during the 2018 Frontier Days, Daddy of 'Em All tracks the proliferation of settler colonial narratives that the event seeks to ossify through its signs, symbols, and sets. Through dislocated images and interviews with past and present Frontier Days volunteers and attendees including my mother, a then-resident of Cheyenne, the film grapples with heritage, ideology, violence, and borders in a time of growing nationalism.

Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2018 / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 95-99). / Science concepts lie at the heart of our everyday experiences, yet people feel disconnected from science because of the abstract way it is taught in schools. We wanted people to learn science concepts in the real world in playful ways, and used Mixed Reality (MR) to allow people to visualize and play with science concepts in the real world. We focused on Newtonian physics as our first science concept in Wonderland because Newtonian physics is commonly experienced by people in their everyday lives, especially in playful contexts, e.g., when they throw a ball. We created simple Newtonian physics tools, which served as building blocks of Newtonian physics systems to allow learners to build their own Newtonian physics models and puzzles for constructionist learning. We include different types of custom visualizations, e.g., graphs, velocity and acceleration vectors, etc, to allow the users to visualize the underlying physics of objects in scientifically accurate, yet intuitive ways. Our rewinding interface also enables users to play, pause, rewind, replay, speed up and slow down physics so that users can learn from repeated physics experimentation. We created two versions of Wonderland: a Hololens version for an immersive head-worn MR experience, and an ARKit version for a more widely accessible MR experience on iOS devices. Our experiments show that users enjoy solving Newtonian physics puzzles in Wonderland, and find the visuals and simulations helpful in understanding Newtonian physics concepts. We aim to further develop and deploy Wonderland to promote science learning and exploration in the real world. / by Mina Khan. / S.M. / S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences