Browsing by Subject "Multimedia communications"

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.

The term “unknown” no longer merely refers to a subjective judgment indicating a stable and conceivable fact or object “in the world.” Nor does it only describe a mathematical or scientific variable that can be calculated and predicted in relation to the consistent properties or timeless truths about reality. This dissertation investigates the multiple and contested meanings of the term in ecology, security, and computational design which taken together, are suggestive of an ontological and epistemological transformation in conceiving of the relation between the environment and technology already initiated with mid-20th century cybernetic and information theories. At the heart of this reconfiguration: “life itself” is mobilized as a post-human form of computational knowledge that can be stretched to embrace indeterminacy and the unknown, fueled by a planetary nomos. As with 21st century media like accelerated computing and artificial intelligence, the environment is no longer merely modified with technologies, but is increasingly constituted by future-oriented forms of algorithmic mediation that are explored here in the larger scope of the material and environmental impacts of technology.

Instead of following the work of a specific thinker, the project undertakes an interdisciplinary reevaluation of Cold War cybernetic ontologies in the literary post-humanities, new media art and design, affect theory, and media ecology, tracing how the passage of cybernetic metaphors into the global cultural imaginary is symptomatic of an ecological reconfiguration in the way technology is accumulated as power, knowledge, and capital. Specifically, it describes how the becoming environmental of computation also entails the remediation of a history of colonial extraction and subjugation in more reticular and algorithmic forms like neural networks and intelligent design, proffering mutations as technics that redeploy the Enlightenment political and metaphysical project of the Anthropos as relational ontologies and vitalist ecological politics. The project reevaluates the rejection of the anthropos in totalizing theoretical ecologism, given the resonances of the discourse with both neoliberal political ecology and the American and European far Right where the production of life is used legitimate techno-cybernetic extraction and violence.

Against the dominant themes of new materialist media theory and affect theory, the project develops a critique of media ecology. It draws on feminist materialist and postcolonial understandings of subjectivity and sovereignty to argue that the “unknown” is no longer a technological problem to be overcome, but rather, is primarily an aesthetic phenomenon that operates at the level of material affect and environmental sense-making. Using both theoretical inquiry and case studies drawn from new media art practices and digital culture, I draw two implications of this shift for political thought: first, it is necessary to address how changes in sociality and politics in the era of accelerated and planetary computing technologies relate to transformations to the subjective characteristics of race, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity beyond the individual body, population, or nation-state; second, such reconsiderations of subjectivity may help to politicize the role of contingency and unknowability in digital environments and in the speculation of technological futures.

This thesis discusses the subject and media of Dmitri Karamazov an interactive graphic novel with Augmented Reality component. Dmitri Karamazov is adapted from Dostoevsky’s novel the Brothers Karamazov. The author uses a fannish, feminine reading strategy to interpret Dostoevsky's character Mitya, transforms the original narrative and retells the story with the assistance of AR technology. The use of AR in Dmitri Karamazov highlights the fanfiction nature of this interactive graphic novel. It shows how a reader can actively participate in literary interpretation, criticism, writing, rewriting, adapting and creating in a new layer of reality. In terms of literature appreciation and consumption, AR encourages people to break away from their traditional passive-reader roles, and provides a virtual space for people to assume authorship of the materials they encounter.

Technics Before Time: Experiencing Rationalism and the Techno-Aesthetics of Speculation proposes a philosophy of technicity, or a theory of what it means for tools, techniques, and technologies—or simply technics—to be technical. Logically anterior to the everyday utility of technical objects as well as to the notion of technics as prosthetics for human faculties, technicity is a category that allows me to elaborate diverse and creative participations in technical existences without presupposing an essentialist or techno-determinist ideology. Whereas other philosophies of technics delimit technicity to a presupposed range of what a technical object can be, I attend to the structures and processes that define a technical reinvention of reality. This opens the technical, including the human’s participation in it, well beyond both extensions of physical laws of nature (à la Gilbert Simondon) and consciously liveable memories (à la Bernard Stiegler).

The dissertation has eight chapters organized into three parts, each with their own case study from popular culture that both exemplifies and challenges the theoretical arguments. Part One examines how effects pedals used by electric guitarists, known as “stomp boxes,” mediate sound across layered orders of magnitude and otherwise incommensurable domains of phenomena. This clarifies the superpositional structure of intentional acts in Stiegler’s underdeveloped notion of technics as “organized inorganic matter”; and it undermines Simondon’s exclusion of human and cultural aesthetic values from the physico-chemical functioning intrinsic to technics. Part Two moves to the domain of technical subjects, specifically the creative thought process by which transcendental phenomenology linguistically constructs concepts to explain worldly genesis anterior to all objectification. German philosopher Eugen Fink’s speculative critique of phenomenology foregrounds the written performance of conceptualizing the pre-conscious creation of horizons of experience, which finds a pop cultural analogy in the rules systems, instruments of play, and collective world building in tabletop role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Pushing Stiegler’s technical critique of phenomenology to its logical denouement, I convert transcendental subjectivity into a transcendental technicity that integrates human thought into a broader, distributed field of technical cognition. Part Three finalizes the formulation of technicity proper, not just its objective and subjective forms, with a speculative theory of invention that pertains to material processes at a general, neutral level anterior to their sociocultural and conscious integration. On the theoretical side, I deploy Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy to fill out the systematic categorization of technicity so that it obtains maximum applicability to actually existing technics. On the techno-aesthetic side, I levy my novel perspective against the intuitive interpretation that blood and gore in computer games represent violence. Instead, analyzed according to the technical form of the game, gore functions first and foremost as a non-mimetic operator of a computational structure that exists through a human player’s participation.

The dissertation therefore intervenes into two broadly conceived trajectories of media theory: the prosthetic interpretation of technical media and the media-specific analysis of nonhuman phenomena. My elaboration of technicity provides an explanation of how each trajectory correctly understands its target phenomena according to its presupposed domain of abstraction. Understanding technicity as a generic process of material invention offers a productive alternative to recent speculative philosophies that oppose the human to the nonhuman. Instead, it specifies the idea of technics in relation to the more general notion of the medium as a ground for particular existences, and it recognizes the inseparability of rational concept and the sensible particularities of experience. To the extent that the human, in its experience and social organization, is technically constituted, grasping technics at such a philosophically general level can expand the disciplinary range and creative potential of the humanities.

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.

Today, humans must rely on technical operations that exceed their perceptual threshold and control. The increasingly complex and abstract, algorithmically mediated operations of global capital have only deepened the gap between the social order as a whole and its lived experience. Yet, Fredric Jameson’s notion of cognitive mapping acts as a model for how we might begin to articulate the relationship between the psychic and social realms, as well as the local and global scales. Jameson’s attentiveness to the conflicting tendencies of capitalist operations is still helpful for us to map the local instantiations of capital’s expanding frontiers – where its differential impacts are felt and negotiated strongly.

This dialectical move, unifying and differentiating at once, is crucial for my project of situating the Middle East within the imperial operations of global capital, thereby overcoming its peripherical reading. In contrast to the post-oil spectacles of the Arabian Gulf, such as Dubai, I look at the war-torn and toxic cities that are spreading in the rest of the region, such as Beirut, due to the violent operations of militarized states as well as the ever-growing economic and ecological deterioration. Hence, these cities constitute two sides of the same coin, bounded by more extensive structures of wealth accumulation and class formation in the region underlying the dominance of the Gulf and US imperialism. Consequently, we can unpack the spatial-temporal reconfigurations of global capital from the vantage point of the Middle East, especially along with the entangled trajectories of oil, finance, militarism, logistics, and computation.

Expanding on Jonathan Beller’s idea of computational capital, I argue that computational media are instrumentalized as an imperial apparatus within the matrix of racial capitalism. In other words, computational media are operationalized within a capitalist society that preys on the continuous reproduction of imperial divisions, techniques, institutions, and rights while obscuring their historicity. Thus, we need to bring back the historicity of those forms as well as the totality they are actively part of in the present, including from material conditions (labor) to ethico-legal systems (law). Consequently, Jameson’s cognitive mapping needs to be reconfigured not only due to the shifts in the granularity and scale of capitalist extraction but also due its embeddedness within the histories of modern thought and colonialism.

My aim is to revive the utopian project of envisioning alternatives to capitalism while reformulating the image of historicity and globality today. To this end, I examine countervisual practices in Nicholas Mirzoeff’s terms, intervening in the economic, legal, and symbolic systems that animate computational media in the Middle Eastern context, ranging from smart weapons to smart cities. My analyses show that artistic practice could allow us some insights about the economic and social structures that govern our immediate and situated experience, whereas media studies could help us to navigate through the convoluted cartographies of computational capital today.

As my project demonstrates, there is no privileged position or method of cognitive mapping, which ultimately corresponds to an active negotiation of urban space. Those urban struggles will persist, always exceeding the bounds of our theories. My project affirms an aesthetic that does not exist yet, not because it is impossible but, rather, it cannot be encapsulated in a formula since it is always already in the process of making on the streets.