Ph.D. DISSERTATIONS

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	The Screen as Boundary Object in the Realm of Imagination(2009) Ph.D. Dissertation by Hyun-Jean Lee Expected defense: May 2009 PDF file will be available soon.
[10 MB]	Emboding Comics: Reinventing Comics and Animation for a Digital Performance.(2009) Ph.D. Dissertation by Ozge Samanci In the digital era, the comics medium has been transported from print to computer screen, and thus its evolution takes place in digital performances based on full-body interaction technologies. The major implication of this process is that the conventions of comics will be merging with those of performance, film, and animation. In a comics story implemented with full-body interaction technologies, representational space shifts from two to three dimensions. Physical elements can now easily be combined with virtual ones. The participants' contribution to the experience now includes a larger set of kinesthetic choices. Earlier media offer the readers the opportunity to read the story with their eyes, turn pages, and click a mouse. Instead of one or perhaps two readers of print and screen-based comics, a digital performance can be experienced by a group of viewers positioned in space in various ways. By utilizing the tools of computer vision, the projection of a participant can be made the main character of the comics story. Consequently, the comics and animation frame changes when moved to digital performance spaces. The frame becomes embodied, nested, elastic, and dynamic. The first two qualities relate to the physicality of the medium, where performers and viewers are simultaneously present in both the real and fictional spaces. The second two qualities relate to the procedurality of the medium and the potential for computational manipulation within the frame based on changing relationships across space (distance) and time (story).
[3 MB]	Intentionality and the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Hermeneutic Circle: Expressive Intentional System and Design(2009) Ph.D. Dissertation by Jichen Zhu Human interaction with technical artifacts is often mediated by treating them as if they are alive. We exclaim "my car doesn't want to start," or "my computer loves to crash." Of increasing cultural importance are software systems designed explicitly to perform tasks and/or exhibit complex behaviors usually deemed as intentional human phenomena, including creating, improvising, and learning. Compared to the instrumental programs (e.g., Adobe Photoshop), these intentional systems (e.g., George Lewis' musical system Voyager) seem to produce output that is "about" certain things in the world rather than the mere execution of algorithmic rules. This dissertation investigates such phenomena with two central research questions: (1) How is system intentionality formed? and (2) What are the design implications for building systems that utilize such intentionality as an expressive resource. In the discourse of artificial intelligence (AI) practice, system intentionality is typically seen as a technical and ontological property of a computer program, emerging from its underlying algorithms and knowledge engineering. Distilling from the areas of hermeneutics, actor-network theory, cognitive semantics theory, and philosophy of mind, this dissertation proposes a humanistic and interpretive framework called the AI hermeneutic network. It accentuates that system intentionality is narrated and interpreted by its human creators and users in their socio-cultural settings. Special attention is paid to system authors' discursive strategies, a constitutive component of AI, embedded in their source code and technical literature. The utility of the framework is demonstrated by a close analytical reading of a full-scale AI system, Copycat. The theoretical discovery leads to new design strategies, namely scale of intentionality and agency play. They provide insights for using system intentionality and agency as expressive resources that can be used to convey meanings and express ideas. The fruits of these insights are illustrated by a stream of consciousness literature inspired interactive narrative project Memory, Reverie Machine, co-developed using Harrell's GRIOT system. It portrays a protagonist whose intentionality and agency vary dynamically in service of narrative needs.
[1 MB]	The tribulations of adventure games:integrating story into simulation through performance(2009) Ph.D. Dissertation by Clara Fernandez-Vara This dissertation aims at positioning adventure games in game studies, by describing their formal aspects and how they have integrated game design with stories. The adventure game genre includes text adventures (also known as interactive fiction), graphical text adventures, and graphic adventures, also referred to as point-and-click adventure games. Adventure games have been the first videogames to evidence the difficulty of reconciling games and stories, an already controversial topic in game studies. An adventure game is a simulation, the intersection between the rule system of the game and its fictional world. The simulation becomes a performance space for the player. The simulation establishes how the player can interact with the world of the game. The simulated world integrates a series of concatenated puzzles, which structure the performance of the player. Solving the puzzles thus means advancing in the story of the game. The integration of the story with the simulation is done through the performance of the player. The game design establishes a specific set of actions necessary to complete both the game and the story, and this set of actions constitutes a behavior that must be restored through performance. The player can also explore the world and its workings, which is necessary to solve the puzzles. By solving the puzzles, the player restores this pre-set behavior. The simulation in adventure games may not be evident because of a historical shift in the level of abstraction, which determines how the world is implemented in the game mechanics. Adventure games have increasingly curbed the agency of the player in the world, in order to facilitate completing the story of the game. This move to a less fine-grained interaction has affected different aspects of game design, from reducing the number of possible actions to limiting the interactivity of non-player characters. The dissertation discusses how adventure games have integrated story with the performance in the simulated world of the game. This integration is further evidenced by how they apply to the four basic elements that bridge story and game design: space, player character, non-player character and time. The qualities of these elements help us understand how the player performs in the simulation, and how that performance is designed. Analyzing the properties of the simulation in adventure games helps draw comparisons with other videogame genres. The rich history of adventure games can inform the game design of other videogames, particularly in relation to the creation of fictional worlds, strategies to script the interactor, and design of non-player characters.
[5 MB]	The screen as boundary object in the realm of imagination(2009) Ph.D. Dissertation by Hyun-Jean Lee As an object at the boundary between virtual and physical reality, the screen exists both as a displayer and as a thing displayed, thus functioning as a mediator. The screen's virtual imagery produces a sense of immersion in its viewer, yet at the same time the materiality of the screen produces a sense of rejection from the viewer's complete involvement in the virtual world. The experience of the screen is thus an oscillation between these two states of immersion and rejection. Nowadays, as interactivity becomes a central component of the relationship between viewers and many artworks, the viewer experience of the screen is changing. Unlike the screen experience in non-interactive artworks, such as the traditional static screen of painting or the moving screen of video art in the 1970s, interactive media screen experiences can provide viewers with a more immersive, immediate, and therefore, more intense experience. For example, many digital media artworks provide an interactive experience for viewers by capturing their face or body though real-time computer vision techniques. In this situation, as the camera and the monitor in the artwork encapsulate the interactor's body in an instant feedback loop, the interactor becomes a part of the interface mechanism and responds to the artwork as the system leads or even provokes them. This thesis claims that this kind of direct mirroring in interactive screen-based media artworks does not allow the viewer the critical distance or time needed for self-reflection. The thesis examines the previous aesthetics of spatial and temporal perception, such as presentness and instantaneousness, and the notions of passage and of psychological perception such as reflection, reflexiveness and auratic experience, looking at how these aesthetics can be integrated into new media screen experiences. Based on this theoretical research, the thesis claims that interactive screen spaces can act as a site for expression and representation, both through a doubling effect between the physical and virtual worlds, and through manifold spatial and temporal mappings with the screen experience. These claims are further supported through exploration of screen-based media installations created by the author since 2003.
[2 MB]	The digital absurd(2010) Ph.D. Dissertation by Steven Hodges I believe that the concept of the absurd, as described in philosophy and reflected in works of drama and literature, provides an unusual and helpful perspective from which to view the emerging field of digital media. In my opinion, absurd principles can help us understand the mixed feelings we may have when engaging with digital media: joy and frustration, play and despair, significance and nonsense. I intend to explore the concept of the absurd through a handful of authors and works, including the philosophy of Camus and the literature and drama of Pinter, Beckett, Roussel, and the Oulipo. I will use these works to analyze characteristics of absurdist works and then extend this analysis to characteristics and theory of digital media. I believe an absurdist analysis may bring a new vantage point to the study of digital media, from which we can see not only the advantages and liberation it offers but also the ever-present threat of nonsense it entails.
[4 MB]	Ambivalent animal(2010) Ph.D. Dissertation by Geoffrey Thomas The Ambivalent Animal project explores the interactions of animals, culture and technology. The project employs both artistic practice and critical theory, each in ways that inspire the other. My creative practice centers around two projects that focus on domestic pets. These projects highlight the animal's uncertain status as they explore the overlapping ontologies of animal, human and machine. They provide concrete artifacts that engage with theoretical issues of anthropocentrism, animality and alterity. My theoretical work navigates between the fields of animal studies, art and design, media and culture studies, and philosophy. My dissertation explores animality through four real and imagined animal roles: cyborg, clone, chimera and shapeshifter. Each animal role is considered in relation to three dialectics: irreducibility and procedurality, autonomy and integration, aura and abjection. These dialectics do not seek full synthesis but instead embrace the oscillations of irresolvable debates and desires. The dialectics bring into focus issues of epistemology, ontology, corporeality and subjectivity. When the four animal roles engage the three dialectics, connected yet varied themes emerge. The cyborgian animal is simultaneously liberated and regulated, assisted and restricted, integrated and isolated. The cloned animal is an emblem of renewal and loss; she is both idealized code and material flesh and finds herself caught in the battles of nature and nurture. The chimera is both rebel and conformist; his unusual juxtapositions pioneer radical corporeal transgressions but also conform to the mechanisms of global capital. And the shapeshifter explores the thrill and anxiety of an altered phenomenology; she gains new perceptions though unstable subjectivity. These roles reveal corporeal adjustments and unfamiliar subjectivities that inspire the creative practice. Both my writing and making employ an ambivalent aesthetic--an aesthetic approach that evokes two or more incompatible sensibilities. The animal's uncertain status contributes to this aesthetic: some animals enjoy remarkable care and attention, while others are routinely exploited, abused and discarded. Ambivalence acknowledges the complexity of lived experience, philosophical and political debate, and academic inquiry. My approach recognizes the light and dark of these complex ambivalences--it privileges paradox and embraces the confusion and wonder of creative research. Rather than erase, conceal or resolve ambiguity, an ambivalent aesthetic foregrounds the limits of language and representation and highlights contradiction and irresolution.
[19 MB]	Reframing interactive digital narrative: toward an inclusive open-ended iterative process for research and practice(2010) Ph.D. Dissertation by Hartmut Koenitz In more than two decades of research and practical experiments in interactive digital narrative (IDN), much insight about the relationship of narrative and digital media has been gained and many successful experiments have been undertaken, as a survey of the field illustrates. However, current approaches also limit the scope of experimentation and constrain theory in interactive narrative forms original to digital media. After reviewing the "interactivisation" of legacy theory (neo-Aristotelian poetics for interactive drama, poststructuralism for hyperfiction, 20th century narratology for interactive fiction and as a general theory for IDN), the thesis introduces a theoretical framework that changes the focus from the product-centered view of legacy media towards system and the process of instantiation. The terms protostory describing the overall space of potential narratives in an IDN system, narrative design for the concrete assemblage of elements and narrative vectors as substructures that enable authorial control are introduced to supersede legacy terms like story and plot. On the practical side, the thesis identifies limitations of existing approaches (e.g. legacy metaphors like the timeline, and authoring tools that support only particular traditions) To overcome these limitations a software toolset built on the principles of robustness, modularity, and extensibility is introduced and some early results are evaluated. Finally, the thesis proposes an inclusive, open-ended iterative process as a structure for future IDN research in which practical implementations and research co-exist in a tightly coupled mutual relationship that allows changes on one side to be integrated on the other.