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Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), a generative modelling technique most commonly used for image generation, have recently been applied to the task of fine art generation. Wasserstein GANs and GANHack techniques have not been applied in GANs that generate fine art, despite their showing improved GAN results in other applications. This thesis investigates whether Wasserstein GANs and GANHack extensions to DCGANs can improve the quality of DCGAN-based fine art generation. There is also no accepted method of evaluating or comparing GANs for fine art generation. DCGAN's, Wasserstein GANs' and GANHack techniques' outputs on a modest computational budget were quantitatively and qualitatively compared to see which techniques showed improvement over DCGAN. A method for evaluating computer-generated fine art, HEART, is proposed to cover both the qualities of good human-created fine art and the shortcomings of computer-created fine art, and to include the cognitive and emotional impact as well as the visual appearance. Prominent GAN quantitative evaluation techniques were used to compare sample images these GANs produced on the MNIST, CIFAR-10 and Imagenet-1K image data sets. These results were compared with sample images these GANs produced on the above data sets, as well as on art data sets. A pilot study of HEART was performed with 20 users. Wasserstein GANs achieved higher visual quality outputs than the baseline DCGAN, as did the use of GANHacks, on all the fine art data sets and are thus recommended for use in future work on GAN-based fine art generation. The study also demonstrated that HEART can be used for the evaluation and comparison of art GANs, providing comprehensive, objective quality assessments which can be substantiated in terms of emotional and cognitive impact as well as visual appearance.

This dissertation is about the intellectual reception of TV in 1980s China. While Chinese media have often been a topic within studies of globalization and global political economy, Chinese TV history still has not gained enough scholarly attention. Chinese scholars' extant studies of TV history have provided valuable knowledge, but a more extensive and critical view of the interaction between TV and culture is still lacking. This dissertation aims to explore Chinese TV history in the pivotal decade of the 1980s from the viewpoint of cultural studies. Using theories of media technology, globalization and gender studies, this dissertation reexamines how a western technology was introduced to and then embedded in Chinese culture. This study of the popularization of TV in 1980s China is historical-critical supplemented with oral history interviews. Well-known Chinese periodicals were studied whose goals were not just to educate people, as was the normal role of media under socialism, but also to entertain them. These magazines include Life Out of 8 Hours, Popular TV, Popular Cinema, Modern Family, and Chinese Advertising. The dissertation also analyzes TV dramas produced in China or imported from other nations in order to examine the interaction between various ideologies of Chinese society and those of international media. It explores how the hybridity between western TV culture and Chinese traditions was represented in popular Chinese visual media. The confusions and ambitions of modernization appeared in the representations of visual media. The intellectual reception of TV in China was a negotiation between tradition and modernity, nationalism and internationalism. Chapter one examines how the Chinese media introduced and represented TV in the 1980s. Chapter two investigates how TV was presented by 1980s Chinese media as a symbol of modern life, wealth and higher social status. In chapter three, I examine how TV, a modern medium, was linked media to nature. Chapter four concentrates on the relationship between TV and other media technologies, such as film and print media. Chapter five focuses on gender representation in discourse and images promoting TV, its dramas, and related media such as TV and film magazines. The epilogue provides a brief review of the general situation of Chinese TV since the 1990s.

The development of new Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) has influenced all aspects of communication and representation, altering the ways in which humans interact on a daily basis. Within politics and rights activism, where many issues overlap and representational needs develop and change from one day to the next, these changes are particularly noteworthy. The use of ICTs, particularly social media and mobile technologies, has been widespread in popular protests around the world, and has become an effective aid in the organizing and implementing of large-scale rights campaigns. Indigenous organizations in Ecuador, like those in other parts of the world, have actively adopted new ICTs as they have become available, utilizing websites, social media and mobile applications to connect with members and supporters. Using these technologies requires careful consideration of a wide range of issues, however, such as best practices to ensure inclusive representation, how to overcome infrastructure challenges, how to develop skills for creating high quality media, and how to control and shape messaging through social media. This dissertation analyzes the example of two of these organizations, La Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE) and La Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas de la Amazonía Ecuatoriana (CONFENIAE), each of which represents a large number of Indigenous peoples through a carefully developed communications plan. While firmly based in anthropological literature on representation and media sovereignty, this work pulls from a wide range of disciplines, including Latin American organizational and communications scholars. Drawing from two fieldwork trips to Ecuador from September 2016 to February 2017 and October to December 2017, as well as data collection conducted online throughout that time period, this research takes a broad approach that combines traditional ethnographic, participatory, visual and digital methodologies. These diverse methods led to the development of a broad work with many interwoven layers, which includes chapters examining online communication structure, the example of a social media campaign, discussion of networking, and the relationship between online and on-the-ground actions. The visual and participatory methodologies led to a chapter discussing the development of a series of photovoice workshops with CONFENIAE, which provided an opportunity for the organization to increase the photography skills of their members and begin the creation of an online communication team. Through these various threads, this dissertation broadly examines the representational choices that CONAIE and CONFENIAE make in the course of developing their communication plans, including the ways that websites and social media can be used to supplement campaigns while remaining anchored in on-the-ground actions. / Graduate

This project examines the articulation of Mexican identities in digital narratives through a variety of genres, bringing into conversation various disciplines to present more comprehensive studies on the construction of representational paradigms, their consumption and social impact and their association with other cultural and literary texts. Deploying a multidisciplinary approach, this work articulates a theoretical framework that incorporates the fields of semiology, postcolonial theory, visual culture, urban studies, ludology, linguistic anthropology and border studies. This project analyzes the processes through which the identities of Mexican subjects and the depiction of Mexican spaces are articulated in new digital narratives in the form video games as mass culture objects, which are conceived from hegemonic loci of production, are globally consumed and have the potential to transmit deeply rooted social knowledge. Furthermore, the lack of spaces in which represented minorities may counter the stereotypical images projected forecloses dialogic processes. Through the agglomeration of different representational modules (visual units, narrative elements and linguistic portrayals) different genres impose predisposed rhetorical framework and found that the vast majority share a predetermined collection of elements that create a representational mosaic of how "Mexicanness" should be depicted and perceived. Furthermore, said digital subject representations enact cultural ideological frameworks that are imposed onto the audience, influencing meaning-formation processes. This work also analyzes the dynamics between the production, representation and consumption of videogames and traces tangents with the social and historical contexts of earlier visual media in Latin America.

Das Projektposter stellt die Einbindung hochqualitativer audiovisueller Medien zur Lernunterstützung im Kontakt- und Selbststudium einiger theoriegeleiteter, sportpraktischer Veranstaltungen im Bachelorstudium dar. Im Modul Turnen, Schwimmen, Leichtathletik werden komplexe Bewegungselemente sportartübergreifend und theoriegeleitet vermittelt. Die umfangreichen Bewegungskompetenzen werden u.a. mittels bestehender Bewegungsverwandtschaften, aber auch anhand erkennbarer Divergenzen in den Modul sportartenverstärkend bzw. kontrastrierend erfahrbar gemacht. Der Qualitätsanspruch an lernförderliche Medien sowie differenzierte Zugänge für diesen speziellen Kompetenzerwerb werden im Projektposter deutlich.

Anthropomorphic portrayals of insects in popular culture reflect ongoing debates and uncertainties about the nature of human beings and their place within the environment. This thesis examines anthropomorphic portrayals of insects in popular media from the early nineteenth century to the present day. It shows how the codes of anthropomorphic representation that developed in conjunction with popular microscopy during the nineteenth century have continued to shape the portrayal of insects in popular culture. Nineteenth-century books about insects refined a literary style conducive to the description of settings and events existing outside the normal perceptual parameters of the reader. The popularity and descriptive limits of this style, along with advances in printing methods and photography, led to an increase in production and distribution of insect imagery. The public fascination with insect imagery inspired many cinematic portrayals of insects that, continuing into the twentieth century, advanced the codes of anthropomorphism already established by preceding texts. Central to these anthropomorphic portrayals is the ‘otherworldly’ status of the insect, a status ensured by its location in the so-called ‘insect world.’ Hence, insects have come to inspire a range of otherworldly beings, from the nineteenth-century fairy to contemporary representations of extraterrestrial beings. The popularity of these figures, in turn, has shaped conceptions of insects themselves. Studying these figures provides an opportunity to better understand how human-insect relations are shaped by culture, and thus to interrogate how human identity itself arises from, and is guided by, cultural practices that seek to engage with the natural world. By foregrounding the ways in which the insect has come to represent the otherworldly and the imaginal, it becomes possible to begin to alleviate psychological barriers to ecological realities, and in particular, the ecological reality of the insect’s place as the most biologically prolific species on Earth.

Anthropomorphic portrayals of insects in popular culture reflect ongoing debates and uncertainties about the nature of human beings and their place within the environment. This thesis examines anthropomorphic portrayals of insects in popular media from the early nineteenth century to the present day. It shows how the codes of anthropomorphic representation that developed in conjunction with popular microscopy during the nineteenth century have continued to shape the portrayal of insects in popular culture. Nineteenth-century books about insects refined a literary style conducive to the description of settings and events existing outside the normal perceptual parameters of the reader. The popularity and descriptive limits of this style, along with advances in printing methods and photography, led to an increase in production and distribution of insect imagery. The public fascination with insect imagery inspired many cinematic portrayals of insects that, continuing into the twentieth century, advanced the codes of anthropomorphism already established by preceding texts. Central to these anthropomorphic portrayals is the ‘otherworldly’ status of the insect, a status ensured by its location in the so-called ‘insect world.’ Hence, insects have come to inspire a range of otherworldly beings, from the nineteenth-century fairy to contemporary representations of extraterrestrial beings. The popularity of these figures, in turn, has shaped conceptions of insects themselves. Studying these figures provides an opportunity to better understand how human-insect relations are shaped by culture, and thus to interrogate how human identity itself arises from, and is guided by, cultural practices that seek to engage with the natural world. By foregrounding the ways in which the insect has come to represent the otherworldly and the imaginal, it becomes possible to begin to alleviate psychological barriers to ecological realities, and in particular, the ecological reality of the insect’s place as the most biologically prolific species on Earth.

Jaques Ranciére (2009b) argues that if there is a political question in contemporary art, ‘…it will be grasped through the analysis of the metamorphoses of the political ‘third’, the politics founded on the play of exchanges and displacements between the art world and that of non art’ (2009b:51). Looking at graffiti and street art in Barcelona as ‘textures’, which stimulate the mind, body and senses. I have investigated what public space means for its inhabitants through the material nature of the surfaces by which it is contained and by applying media devices. This has led me to develop an ethnography of encounters, perceptions and sensibilities linked to political practices and different modes of participation in the everyday life of the city. Following Jacques Ranciére’s (2004) conception of ‘political aesthetics’, I argue that the aesthetic of graffiti and street art can be embodied according to different sensible orders in the city. The public space is key in this process and I see it as an interface between graffiti artists, the general public and the institutions of the city. Graffiti activate the urban landscape through visual and tactile transformations of space through surfaces. These interactions, as De Certeau (1985) claims about everyday practices, may articulate narratives, which became the main source of information for this thesis. Thinking about the graffiti works in Barcelona in terms of Bakhtin’s (1981) idea of ‘the chronotope’, I have recounted the stories, which make the transformation of public space indicative of the everyday life of the city applying practices of collaboration, dialogue and intervention. These practices connected me to different surfaces of the city so as to explore how their material qualities are permeated with social relations and artistically inscribed with historical and political meanings. Here, graffiti and the city formed a compound of images in which I have studied the ‘visuality’ of graffiti in Barcelona. This, as Hal Foster (1988) argues, encloses at the same time social facts and physical operations (body and psyche) and moves, as I will show throughout this thesis, between dominant and resistance cultures. In short, I have materialized these ideas and images in the graffiti texture of Barcelona, seeing it as a mutable surface, which mediates between different ways of seeing and living in this city.

Das Projektposter stellt die Einbindung hochqualitativer audiovisueller Medien zur Lernunterstützung im Kontakt- und Selbststudium einiger theoriegeleiteter, sportpraktischer Veranstaltungen im Bachelorstudium dar. Im Modul Turnen, Schwimmen, Leichtathletik werden komplexe Bewegungselemente sportartübergreifend und theoriegeleitet vermittelt. Die umfangreichen Bewegungskompetenzen werden u.a. mittels bestehender Bewegungsverwandtschaften, aber auch anhand erkennbarer Divergenzen in den Modul sportartenverstärkend bzw. kontrastrierend erfahrbar gemacht. Der Qualitätsanspruch an lernförderliche Medien sowie differenzierte Zugänge für diesen speziellen Kompetenzerwerb werden im Projektposter deutlich.