Browsing by Author "Olson, Mark"

During WWII, Japan forced women from China, Korea, and other countries in Asia to become military sex slaves. They were called ianfu (慰安婦) in Japanese, or comfort women. The comfort women's history was neglected in post-war society until the early 1990s; with support from scholars, feminist groups, and human rights groups, the public began to know more about comfort women. The shared stories of comfort women's history are constructed in a representation of the past by the relevant testimonies, historical studies, and coverage, where the media narrative has contributed to the public awareness and collective memories of comfort women. This project investigates the interaction between news media coverage and the word "comfort women": how does Mainland China news media cover comfort women? The research corpus developed for this project contains 3173 newspaper articles in Mainland China from 2016 to 2021. This period starts with a Japan–South Korea Comfort Women Agreement announced at the end of 2015, which sparks coverage of this agreement and Japan-South Korea relations in Chinese news media. Building on previous work on the topic of Chinese news media representations of comfort women, this project explores the news in the following six years, points out the changes from the previous years. It also furthers research comparing central state media and local media. The method of this project incorporates content analysis and textual analysis of the corpus, diction, and relevant news events. The technological intervention includes data crawling, data visualization, and web development. The research finds that the coverage uses the word "comfort women" in both political and humanities contexts; the former means that comfort women can refer to the barrier to Japan-South Korea relations and the war crime, and the latter means comfort women are considered the victims in a documentary and the victims themselves. Although Mainland China media in this period had a particular focus on the Japan-South Korea relation, the fundamental goal was to criticize Japan's right-wing stance on the comfort women issue, demonstrating China's national discourse. Meanwhile, the national discourse has also contributed to the widespread dissemination of comfort women's stories and the success of relevant documentaries. Additionally, the lack of humanistic focus in the coverage may be due to the limited social activities about comfort women in China's society. Regarding the comparison between central state media and local media, this study reveals some similarities, but local media tend to focus more on the domestic news that has the potential to attract the public. The study predicts that the political factor may continue to dominate the comfort women topic in future coverage.

This thesis explores the way digital technologies inflect experiences with and meanings of art historical objects. Specifically, it addresses the way digital technologies can change the archiving, exhibiting, and experience of ephemeral art. It does so by 1) providing a discussion of archival theory, museum practices, and the use of photography as a primary means of archiving ephemeral art, and by 2) creating three digital visualizations that focus on the same problematic but leverage different technologies: Palladio, Neatline, and Unity 3d, respectively. These archival exhibits highlight spatial, temporal, and relational details that are often lost in the photographic documentation of ephemeral art. Alone, the archives highlight specific aspects of ephemera, but collectively in the exhibit, a more comprehensive record of ephemera is achieved. This emphasizes digital technologies ability to create widely accessible archives, educational resources, and different archival processes that add meaning to the records.

This dissertation is a theoretical and art/archival practice-based exploration of aesthetic-affective resistance to neoliberal recuperation of urban space that not only constitutes a physical manifestation of capitalist accumulation by dispossession, but also serves to aesthetically valorize affluent middle-class normativity. Through archival research, I discuss the rise of aesthetic-political dissidence against the rent-seeking displacement of the minoritized in Istanbul, and follow its trajectory from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Using visual analyses, I theorize the aesthetic strategies of cultural-political dis-identification from the presiding logics and affectations of neoliberalism. These aesthetic strategies include satire, valorization of the obsolete, discarded, devalued and superfluous, and the fragmental provocation of memory to keep the lived history of Istanbul active against neoliberal erasure without monumentalizing a particular historical narrative. The art practice component of this dissertation provides self-reflection on my art works that draws upon aesthetic-political developments in Istanbul. In my discussion, I also put my art practice in conversation with queer temporality, utopian realism, and a queer-feminist ethic-erotic that orient us to social practices of production, reproduction, and subjectivization based on relational principles driven from sensuous reciprocity that go beyond the familial and the naturalized, and that the dominant political-economic order renders unfeasible.

In this thesis, I discussed video game players’ relationships with their avatars, and how further differentiations can be made from the existing categories using fanfiction as an avenue. Past studies on player-avatar relationships and fanfiction surrounding the questions of identity and the process of identification have been examined. Among those studies, the player-avatar categories proposed by Jaime Banks and Nicholas David Bowman in their 2021 article served as the baseline for this project's development. Drawing upon Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin’s concept of “self-involving fictions,” or SIF, I proposed a new type of player-avatar relationship, “avatar-as-SIF.” This relationship emerges when players decide to embark on a journey with their avatar relationships beyond the original scope provided by the game, through fanfiction. This relationship manifests that which was previously digital into products that have impacts in the real world, for both the players and the audiences. This project then provides an actualization example of the “player-as-SIF” relationship through two videos composed of animated composited photographs between the avatars and the real world, featuring a narrative aligned with fanfiction.

Between the 1880s and the First World War, the French public exhibited a broad interest in crime. New forms of crime coverage in the popular press and new scientific practices of criminal investigation were both concerned with the authentic representation of true crime and both claimed their representations would allow jurists, police, or readers to “directly observe” reality. In this dissertation, I examine the iconographies of crime mobilized by French journalists, police, and jurists during this time period, putting them into conversation with emergent notions of objectivity, realism, and verisimilitude. I base my conclusions, in part, upon the formal analysis of images from illustrated newspapers, the French Police Archives, and the archives of the Assizes court of the former Seine department.In the first half of my dissertation, I trace the emergence of certain proto-objective values (non-partisanship, facts over opinion, moral value of distance) in the prospectuses of the major newspapers of the mass press and examine the simultaneous development of sensationalist news coverage. I argue that although French crime coverage was characterized by the emotional tone and lurid language of faits divers, it traded off interests in indexicality, transparency, lifelikeness, and legibility, complementing French editors’ commitments to non-partisanship, informational content, and the empowerment of readership. This reflection is complemented by an analysis of 757 crime-related illustrations published by the illustrated weekly supplements of the Petit Parisien and the Petit Journal. I argue that it was specifically through the iconic medium of engraving and the visual conventions of melodrama that the supplements could reconcile the didactic and editorial aims of prior generations of the illustrated press with the informational news focus of modern journalism. Moreover, I demonstrate that this medium and style could provide a certain lifelikeness and legibility that photo-mechanical prints could not. In the second half of my dissertation, I turn from the field of the French press to the French criminal justice system where concerns about objectivity and representation were also on the rise. Here, I introduce the term “trace objectivity” to refer to the use of indices and measurements to correct for the fallible nature of human memory. Movements of trace objectivity included the professionalization of legal experts and expertise, the rise of forensic analysis of material evidence, the development of the mug shot and other scientific representations of criminals, and a wave of psychology studies which cast doubt upon verbal testimony. I draw upon historiographical research to demonstrate that such practices hit significant obstacles in their implementation. Trace objective representations were, to some degree, neglected in favor of traditional methods like conventional portraiture and vernacular description because they did not align with the aesthetics of memory, which, despite the efforts of scientists, remain essential to the project of criminal justice. In my final chapter, I analyze the images of criminals in the police and court archives. These archives hold souvenirs and reconstitutions which reproduce similar representational strategies to trace objectivity and sensationalism. I notably remark that collectors, and the archives, value souvenirs for their physical connection to the crime event and the relational history that links the final possessor with the original collector - precisely the indexicality and chains of custody that legal reformers like Binet and Garraud valued in material evidence. In other words, souvenir collection draws from the same desire that undergirded trace objectivity: to have an objective, inhuman witness to past events. Reconstitutions, like staged photographs and sketches reproducing violent crimes, provide a foil to the representational strategy of the souvenir or trace. The presence of reconstitutions in the archives indicates that criminal justice actors needed to bring the crime back to life in the present, since the trace was always partial and past. This dissertation thus serves to re-evaluate the power and pervasiveness of iconicity in representations of crime. Iconicity, lifelikeness, and legibility play a key role in the practice and understanding of criminal justice systems and, accordingly, it is our duty to interrogate the aesthetics of representations of crime.

In my thesis, I explore the potential of projection mapping for storytelling by using Duke Chapel interior as an example. Through the investigation of what filmmaker Frederick Backer calls “Projectionism,” I focus on the “projectile” (image) and “receiver” (surface) of contemporary projection mapping and analyze two case studies. Additionally, I consider the relationship between memory and architecture. Drawing on the Duke University Archives, I selected Duke's West Campus style as the basis for the construction of a storyline for my digital project.

Duke Chapel’s crossing serves as the project’s main canvas and to the thesis outlines the process of constructing a scale model of the Chapel’s crossing through photogrammetry, 3D modeling, and 3D printing technologies. Finally, I discuss the various strategies I used to tell the story of the choice of Collegiate Gothic for the architectural style of Duke’s West Campus and argue for projection-mapping as a powerful method of showing and telling.

The release of ChatGPT-4 has led to the prevalent use of a new term in the field of artificial intelligence (AI): generative AI. This paper aims to understand generative AI more thoroughly and place it within a broader framework of models and their relationship with knowledge. By closely examining AI’s historical development, this paper will first introduce the concept of emergence to distinguish generative AI from other forms of AI. Second, by theorizing generative AI as models, this paper will evaluate their significance in human knowledge production. Third, by classifying generative AI specifically as generative models, this paper will demonstrate their unique potential, especially for art creation.

In recent years, discussions about immersive experiences have become ubiquitous, but there have been vague definitions of immersion. This thesis aims to explore multiple possibilities to realize immersive worlds and conduct user experience research to think about the diverse dimensions of immersion. As a result, I created two projects—a digital project named “A VR Trip to a Chinese Courtyard in Mid-Autumn Festival” and an art installation called “Land of Idyllic Beauty”—and I gathered audience feedback on how audiences perceived immersive experiences. The findings indicate that users’ perceptions of immersion are highly overlapping, but there is still opportunity for both digital and physical initiatives to improve users’ immersive experiences, therefore further research is worthwhile.

The archivolt of Alife being exhibited as a part of the Brummer Collect in the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University is an enigmatic artifact with many unknown elements. Specifically, the iconography, one of the aspects of the archivolt that has not been explored by many scholars, has several possible interpretations to each of the animals depicted. Despite the amount of information that can be presented as interesting knowledge, scholarly discourse and research involving an artifact is generally not presented to the public due to the complexity of the information. Therefore, by using augmented reality and object recognition technology, this thesis aims to present the multiple iconographic theories regarding the key animals on the archivolt of Alife in a dynamic manner, giving users insight on how to view the iconography by making scholarly information more accessible. The digital component of this thesis uses the newest object recognition algorithm provided by ARKit to build an interactive app that allows the viewers to see “info cards” directly overlaid on top of the iconography. Although the current state of AR technology still has limitations regarding buildability and malleability, the usable prototype of this application was successfully produced and is subject to future expansions and experiments.

The project aims to analyze, archive, and enable the powerful ways that contemporary Latinx intersectional queer activists, located in sites as disparate as Oakland (U.S.) and Santiago (Chile), use YouTube, Facebook, and other globally popular media platforms to disseminate their activist-oriented cultural productions and connect with other activists. Envisioning and theorizing liberation from intersecting oppressions, Latinx activists across our hemisphere make important contributions to queer and transgender culture that are unevenly visible because they occur in ephemeral digital spaces and are incoherent from the standpoint of the most massively circulated, received ideas about gender, race, and sexuality. My project consists of the present essay, which analyzes formations of sexual dissidence in relation to the disciplining and extractivism of academic institutions, as well as a multi-modal website. Grounded in virtual and IRL community-based participatory research methods, the digital resource accompanies the creators of Latinx sexual dissidence by using the technologies and funding I have access to in order to offer a multilingual, semi-public digital resource that supports the archiving, production, translation, and intra-community circulation of Latinx sexual dissident culture, thought, and activism.