Cinema & Media Studies

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/10315/30847

Browse

Now showing 1 - 17 of 17

Open Access
Volumetric Video and the Future of Virtual Reality
(2022-12-14) Ceperkovic, Slavica; Fisher, Caitlin
This multi-modal dissertation focuses on research creation of haptic cinema and new ways of designing immersive story experiences with volumetric video. Recent technical innovation of volumetric video allows new definitions of haptic cinema to include self-gaze by artists to be explored in an accessible way. The research creation developed were prototypes using volumetric video in virtual and extended reality (XR) environments. Various tools were considered during the research creation process including Unity, Unreal Engine, Depthkit, Mozilla Spoke Hubs, Ableton, and Radical.
Open Access
Nollywood Film Industry: Informal Film Practices and Their Cultural Formations
(2021-11-15) Akande, Olaniyi Joseph; Longfellow, Brenda
This dissertation further situates Nollywood practitioners informal understandings of their film industry within academic discourses around Nollywood conceptualizations. Local, grassroots knowledge and practices are essential in understanding the emergence, nature and perpetuation of Nollywood, and there exists no closer resource source to Nollywood than those who practice in the industry. In so doing, the role of informality as a local and indigenous system of practice becomes central to how Nollywood is understood among its practitioners, which is sometimes different from how scholars have looked at it. Largely employing ethnographic and discourse analysis methodologies, this dissertation brings these informal Nollywood knowledge forms in dialogue with theories in post-colonialism national cinema, vernacular modernism, media industry studies, and neorealist national cinema.
Open Access
"The Place of Imagination": Humphrey Jennings and the Biopoetics of Everyday Life
(2020-11-13) Birdwise, Scott William Douglas; Marchessault, Janine Michele
This dissertation seeks to reanimate discussion of British artist and documentary filmmaker Humphrey Jennings by reconsidering his body of work in light of the biopolitical transformations of modern life. While biopolitics is a familiar paradigm in the humanities and social sciences that understands how the category of life, in the figure of the population, became the primary object of political management and control, Jennings is famous for his poetic documentary films about the everyday life of resistance during the Second World War. Remembered as the cinematic poet of ordinary people, Jennings combined his concern with everyday life with his ongoing interest in Classical and Romantic traditions of poetry and painting modulated by the formative influence of Surrealism, to become one of the most significant British documentary filmmakers of the first half of the twentieth century. Bringing together a concern with everyday life with questions of poetic form and meaning, then, this dissertation uses the concept of biopoetics to examine how Jennings repeatedly returns to an animating tension between the poetic imagination of the people, on the one hand, and the management of the population on the other. In order to draw out how Jenningss oeuvre is animated by tensions within the people/population, this dissertation moves roughly chronologically through a selection of Jennings's projects, including his contributions to British Surrealism and the social research organization Mass-Observation in the 1930s; his unfinished imaginative history of the Industrial Revolution, Pandaemonium; and his documentary films made under the auspices of the Crown Film Unit during the war. In each case, this dissertation examines how Jenningss use of an array of poetic and cinematic techniques emerges from a biopoetic desire to at once document and transform the everyday life of the people.
Open Access
Magical Realism in Transnational Cinema
(2020-11-13) Lang, Cody Matthew; Forsyth, James Scott
This project is an analysis of the magical realist genre in cinema, specifically its multiple forms found in transnational cinema. The status of magical realism in film as a genre will be questioned and this project argues that the concept is best understand as a transgeneric critical category rather than a genre in the conventional understanding of the term. Magical realism as academic concept has been discussed in-depth in literary theory and this project extends those discussions into the field of cinema. The history of criticism of magical realism is summarized as it applies to studying film with special attention given towards the semiotic differences between literature and cinema. Furthermore, this project explicates the distinct ways that magical realism operates in cinema in contrast to literature while also noting the shared aesthetic strategies between each media. Each section covers a thematic topic observed in transnational magical realist cinema: metafiction in overt and covert forms; the representation of historicity; and the representation of marginalized subjectivities, specifically looking at how magical realist cinema presents issues of class, gender, race, and sexual identity. The final thematic discussion discusses the possibility of utopian discourses in magical realist cinema, the attempts to envision a less exploitative social collective according to a variety of cultural and national contexts in late-capitalism. Key films discussed in this project include: Death by Hanging (1968), Underground (1995), Naked Lunch (1991), Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), Miracle in Milan (1951), The Tin Drum (1979), Synecdoche, New York (2008), Tropical Malady (2004), Gozu (2003), Daughters of the Dust (1991) among many other works.
Open Access
Return to Form: Analyzing the Role of Media in Self-documenting Subcultures
(2020-11-13) Wood, Glen Paul; McCullough, John
This dissertation examines self-documenting subcultures and the role of media within them. The production and distribution of subcultural media is largely governed by intracultural industries. Elite practitioners and media-makers are incentivized to document performances that are deemed essential to the preservation of the status quo. This constructed dependency reflects and reproduces an ethos of conformity that pervades both social interactions and subcultural representations. The production of media and meaning is constrained by the presence of prescriptive formal conventions propagated by elite producers. These conditions, in part, result in the institutionalization of conformity. The inclusion of three case studies in this work illustrates the theoretical and methodological framework that classifies these formations under a new typology. Accordingly, this dissertation introduces an alternative approach to the study of subcultures.
Open Access
Virtual Reality Aesthetics and Boundaries in New Media Art Practices
(2020-05-11) Cam, Resat Fuat; Marchessault, Janine Michele
This dissertation maps out the epistemological and political coordinates of contemporary Virtual Reality (VR) aesthetics through a hybrid inquiry that combines conventional academic research practices with artistic experiments. Since its inception, both conceptually and technologically, VR has emerged as a model for a techno-utopic paradigm that seeks to construct an autonomous image not only from the mediation of artist, but also from the material, spatial, and by extension social and political determinations of reality. With the differences in the formal techniques and strategies of each instance of the media constellation that this teleological paradigm conglomerates such as cinema, early proto-cinematic devices, stereoscopic 3D, and cybernetics, the objective is always the same: to develop an immediate and autonomous interface shorn of limitations configured according to the subjective and bodily conditions of the viewer. In both practice and theory this dissertation attempts to problematize the question of autonomy and by extension heteronomy, which have been distributed in a binary opposition in 20th century artistic practices. I contend that aesthetic practices emerge within the dynamic and interlocked relation between heteronomy and autonomy. Neither artistic practices nor image technologies are autonomous from the political and historical context in which they became possible both technologically and conceptually. Moreover, I argue that artistic practices become critical insofar that the question of autonomy appears sensibly as a problem. Through a threefold inquiry on the question of autonomy and heteronomy, this dissertation has aimed to problematize the very context that made it possible. First, I problematized the autonomy of art purported to be the grounding gesture of the critical nature of research-creation; second, the autonomy purported to be inherent to VR as an immersive and interactive image technology was called into question; and third, as the extension of the second, I problematized the autonomy of the viewer and virtual images in the VR experience that constitutes the artistic experiment component of the dissertation.
Open Access
Dissertation in Which There Appear Lost Punchlines, Dreadful Puns, Low Resolution, etc.: On the Failure of Humour in Avant-garde Film and Video
(2019-11-22) Moneo, Cameron David; Zryd, Michael
This dissertation explores the overlooked functions that humour has served in American avant-garde film and video, arguing that humour is involved consistently in many of the key operations and philosophies that have energized these moving image practices. Taking humour as an alternative historical and interpretive lens, this dissertation conducts new readings of three major formations or moments in the discourse of the American avant-gardes. These are: underground film, structural film, and early feminist video art. A branching theme of these readings is failure, seen to carry complex meanings and humorous pleasures in various cases of avant-garde activity. The introductory chapter details the propagandization of failure in the 1960s underground cinema, and argues that a divisive brand of humour highlights the sense of the avant-garde in this cinema. Chapter 1 re-conceptualizes the humourless structural film movement of the 60s and 70s, arguing that, for filmmakers like Michael Snow, the idea of structure is not a dogmatic working principle but something of a ruse, one whose limits are meant to be teased, pushed, and exceeded. Moving to early feminist video art, Chapter 2 emphasizes the importance of humour in the project of articulating feminist political horizons. In videotapes by Susan Mogul and Martha Rosler, performative nonchalance and lack of preciousness about low-grade equipment can be seen as forms of humorous delivery, which stay utopically open to future re-articulations. Circling back to underground film, Chapter 3 locates humour in the failure to distinguish sharply between the avant-garde and popular culture. Through readings of humour in queer underground film, and then in more recent pop appropriation videos, this chapter illustrates the hilarity, critique, and utopian feeling that can result when the effects of pop and of the avant-garde are brought excessively close. This dissertation assembles conceptual scaffolding for understanding humorous failure as a variable avant-garde theme, drawing upon such scholars as Matei Calinescu, Jack Halberstam, and Jose Esteban Munoz. With failure in mind, this dissertation further reflects on the instability of humour itself as an object of study, and as a device, attitude, or value that might be put to work for us.
Open Access
The Poetry of Logical Ideas: Towards a Mathematical Genealogy of Media Art
(2019-11-22) Enns, Clint; Zryd, Michael
In this dissertation I chart a mathematical genealogy of media art, demonstrating that mathematical thought has had a significant influence on contemporary experimental moving image production. Rather than looking for direct cause and effect relationships between mathematics and the arts, I will instead examine how mathematical developments have acted as a cultural zeitgeist, an indirect, but significant, influence on the humanities and the arts. In particular, I will be narrowing the focus of this study to the influence mathematical thought has had on cinema (and by extension media art), given that mathematics lies comfortably between the humanities and sciences, and that cinema is the object par excellence of such a study, since cinema and media studies arrived at a time when the humanities and sciences were held by many to be mutually exclusive disciplines. It is also shown that many media scholars have been implicitly engaging with mathematical concepts without necessarily recognizing them as such. To demonstrate this, I examine many concepts from media studies that demonstrate or derive from mathematical concepts. For instance, Claude Shannon's mathematical model of communication is used to expand on Stuart Hall's cultural model, and the mathematical concept of the fractal is used to expand on Rosalind Krauss' argument that video is a medium that lends itself to narcissism. Given that the influence of mathematics on the humanities and the arts often occurs through a misuse or misinterpretation of mathematics, I mobilize the concept of a productive misinterpretation and argue that this type of misreading has the potential to lead to novel innovations within the humanities and the arts. In this dissertation, it is also established that there are many mathematical concepts that can be utilized by media scholars to better analyze experimental moving images. In particular, I explore the mathematical concepts of symmetry, infinity, fractals, permutations, the Axiom of Choice, and the algorithmic to moving images works by Hollis Frampton, Barbara Lattanzi, Dana Plays, T. Marie, and Isiah Medina, among others. It is my desire that this study appeal to scientists with an interest in cinema and media art, and to media theorists with an interest in experimental cinema and other contemporary moving image practices.
Open Access
Catastrophe Aesthetics: Affective Epistemologies of Climate Change in Experimental Media Art
(2019-03-05) Mulvogue, Jessica Siobhan; Marchessault, Janine Michele
Catastrophe is no longer an exception to the everyday. Anthropogenic (or capitalogenic) climate change is slowly but radically altering Earth. But climate catastrophe does not abide by conventional understandings of the catastrophic. Rather than a temporally and spatially bound rupture, climate change is slow-moving, vast, and in the everyday, imperceptible. This complicates its representation. My dissertation contributes to a growing conversation that asks: how do we effectively (and affectively) convey the slow warming of Earth, the accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere, or the geological imprint of the human species? These are crucial questions for making sense of a complex present and for exposing and resisting the structures and systems that have produced this present. I argue that the aesthetic realm is a privileged space in which climate change catastrophe can be made visible and, more broadly, sensible. I examine a diverse group of experimental media artworks: Buckminster Fullers expanded cinema environments, The Geoscope and World Game; the fossil-fuel themed interactive documentaries Offshore (Brenda Longfellow, 2013) and Fort McMoney (David Dufresne, 2013); and a collection of contemporary, geological experimental film and photography. While emerging from diverse contexts and focusing on different climate-related themes, these artworks provide a rich arena to explore what I am calling catastrophe aesthetics. Catastrophe aesthetics is a mode of critical art making that attempts to express the catastrophic nature of climate change. Not trying to provide solutions to climate change, my case studies instead offer fertile grounds for elucidating the indiscernible contours, interrelations, and violence that make up this quotidian catastrophe. They do so by employing innovative image technologies and experimental formal strategies, which engender affective encounters with various worlds and entities on screen. In producing novel experiences and modes of relation with a changing Earth new affective epistemologies of climate change can emerge.
Open Access
Smashed Typewriters and Sour Smoke: A Historical Poetics of the Screenplay
(2018-05-28) Verner, Caroline Suzanne; Trifonova, Temenuga D.
Screenplays typically provide the starting point for film development and production. They also draw on a rich history of literary conventions and aesthetic traditions that well exceed their technical blueprint function, as emergent attention being given to screenplays as reading matter by both casual and scholarly readers suggests. This dissertation proposes a historical poetics of screenwriting as a way of working through these conflicting ideas about the screenplay: what it is, how to read it, and how these concepts have evolved over time. It pursues an intensive analysisfrom the silent era scenario to the present-day master-scene scriptthrough several frames, including the historical implications of discourse for the screenplay concept, the linkages between screenwriting and earlier forms of lens-based prose, narrative voice and the rhetoric of the possible performance, and the closet, made-to-read screenplay as a class of literary fiction. Engaging theoretical traditions of narratology, authorship, and adaptation studies, the research illuminates how to read a screenplay aesthetically, invoking the fictional blueprint metaphor as a new interpretive strategy that views the script as independent and complete, outside any actual production reality.
Open Access
Film Noir as the Sovereign-Image of Empire: Cynicism, White Male Biopolitics, and the Neoliberal Cinematic Apparatus
(2018-03-01) Nagypal, Tamas; Trifonova, Temenuga D.
This dissertation develops a theory of film noir as sovereign-image, a meta-generic and meta-cinematic discourse that confronts the viewer with the biopolitical ambivalence of the cinematic apparatus but enjoins her to nonetheless affirm its normative use. I argue that classical American noir deploys a proto-neoliberal ideology to turn the indeterminacy at its core into a spectacle of victimized white men, offering emphatically gendered and racialized images of a pathological entrepreneur of the self who is not ashamed to exhibit his wounded private life as the source of his singular market value. I claim, however, that even in his fully developed contemporary form in which his classical predecessors trauma induced shamelessness turns into a cynically calculated affective display, noirs neoliberal hero is not the self-made man he appears to be but remains delegated by a homosocial group to be the sovereign arbiter of their lifes value for them, instead of them. As an individual whonot unlike the film vieweris temporarily isolated from his peers he is in the exceptional position to freely decide what kind of life to consider productive for the process of capital accumulation, turning his body into the arbitrary link between what Agamben calls bare life and a qualified form of lifea link I call the sovereign-image. I track the evolution of film noirs sovereign function alongside the expansion and transformation of the United States from a territorialized nation state to a deterritorialized global financial network (what Hardt and Negri call Empire) to shed light on how Hollywoods anomalous noir crisis, its war trauma induced state of exception, became the expression of the governing paradigm of unbridled global biocapitalism in the age of North Atlantic unilateralism. In contemporary neo-noirs like The Usual Suspects (1995), Trainspotting (1996), Inception (2010), Fight Club (1999), or Drive (2011) becoming a self-made neoliberal subject coincides with gaining membership in a hybrid and flexible white male bios, the old-new flesh of Empire now cynically framed as the condition of possibility for autonomous selfhood as such. In critiquing neo-noirs cynical paradigm I demonstrate that its reactionary force can be mobilized only if the films first construct a biopolitical zone of indistinction where the inevitability of the western capitalo-patriarchal status quo is questioned and the equality of all forms of life is posited.
Open Access
In the Name of the People: Yugoslav Cinema and the Fall of the Yugoslav Dream
(2017-07-27) Maric, Zoran; Forsyth, James Scott
This dissertation outlines the trajectory of Yugoslavias decline through an examination of select works of Yugoslav cinema from the late 1960s to the late 1980s which cogently commented on their sociopolitical context. It brings together various interpretive perspectives and utilizes film studies, cultural studies, political history, and postcolonial studies to discuss how the Yugoslav society and its political system are scrutinized through allegory, satire, and genre revisionism, for instance, and to elucidate what the films contribute to discourse on the origins of Yugoslavias violent breakup. Through a discussion of cinema, arguably the most politically subversive form of expression in the Yugoslav public sphere, this dissertation offers insight not only into why the country broke up but also, and perhaps more importantly, into what was lost when it broke up. Although it revolves around Yugoslavias failure, the dissertation validates the egalitarian, anti-imperialist Yugoslav idea and offers a take on the countrys demise that is free of Balkanist stereotypes and anti-communist paranoia common to most discussions of Yugoslavias end. It counters the view of Yugoslavia as a dictatorship which disintegrated when dormant ethnic antagonisms of its peoples were inexplicably reawakened, and ties the emergence of ethnic nationalism to Yugoslavias economic collapse of the 1970s and 1980s caused by the grasping reach of Western economic liberalism.
Open Access
The Dynamic Story Mosaic: Defining Narrative Strategies in Transmedia Environments
(2016-11-25) Schneidmueller, Brigit Maria; Fisher, Caitlin
Transmedia storytelling became one of the most prevalent buzzwords in the mid- 2000s used to describe a wide array of storytelling forms ranging from entertainment franchises to alternate reality games to any project that told stories across more than one medium. Over time, the term had been diluted so significantly that it has lost most of its meaning, and the opaque discourse has left practitioners, scholars, and audiences alike confused about its true meaning. The Dynamic Story Mosaic: Defining Narrative Strategies in Transmedia Environments charts this development and offers a typology to identify and explain narrative strategies in multi-platform environments. The typology anchors on the two dimensions of narrative deviation and the number of release events over time; these dimensions are constitutive for the production, reception and marketing and branding of transmedia projects, and provide a stable basis for analysis and interpretation. Through a blend of analytic, comparative, and descriptive approaches, paired with a number of case studies, this dissertation is a historical analysis of the emergence of transmedia storytelling and transmedia discourse, and provides a direction in the analysis of transmedia projects by providing a typology that remains stable regardless of the future of storytelling in this area.
Open Access
Transitioning Publics
(2016-11-25) Joynt, Chase Ryan; Longfellow, Brenda
TRANSITIONING PUBLICS engages two forms of transitioning simultaneously: the shifting political landscape of transgender media representation in North America, and the technological shifts that impact forms of representation and information dissemination such as movements from film to video and the Internet. Through critical engagement with moving-image work made by and about transgender people outside of and often in spite of the mainstream, each section of the project considers various aesthetic, formal, and political impulses that contribute to the construction of transgender as both identity category and socio-political event. While transgender studies was originally articulated as a movement to locate and legitimize transgender subject matter, identities, authors, and politics in the academic mainstream, TRANSITIONING PUBLICS aligns with the call made by Susan Stryker, Paisley Currah, and Lisa Jean Moore to move beyond discussions of trans- centered exclusively on gender (2008). To that end, the written components of the project are accompanied by a short film, Between You and Me. Employing home video scholarship alongside canonical sexuality studies theory, Between You and Me expands upon the aforementioned theoretical charge in trans studies by critically and creatively interrogating the intersectional relationship between moral panics, desire, and identity through alternative digital modes; namely a 10 minute film with 2 additional video components, scheduled for online release with CBC Short Docs in July 2016.
Open Access
Seeing the Spell: Baroque, Decadence, and a Cinema of Digital-Animated Liberation
(2016-09-20) Morton, Malcolm David; Trifonova, Temenuga D.
This dissertation draws on the artistic traditions of seventeenth-century Baroque and nineteenth-century Decadence in seeking to formulate an analytical vocabulary for the aesthetics of digitally-animated spectacle in contemporary cinema. The dissertation seeks to critique binary antinomies of narrative vs. spectacle, and instead propose a concept of narrativized spectacle whereby digital visual effects have brought about a profound liberation in cinemas capacity to envision narrative story-worlds, and depict their workings. It takes the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster as its chief subject for this inquiry, insofar as this is the filmmaking idiom most given to the embrace and deployment of digitally-liberated spectacle, and one which is frequently assumed to be largely bereft of formal and narrative sophistication. This dissertation argues, on the contrary, that the Hollywood blockbusters spectacular nature in fact bears complex utopian implications, and that the crudities which occasionally mar the form in practice are more the result of not being imaginatively hyperbolic enough, rather than being too much so. The dissertations invocation of Baroque and Decadent aesthetics provides a conceptual apparatus for describing this contemporary cinematic idiom of digitized blockbuster spectacle. It identifies a Baroque aesthetic in such stylistic traits as verticality, profusion, and the sublime, as well as narrative themes of transgression of limits, reverence before imposing scale and grandeur, and refusal to ennoble passivity and martyrdom. Likewise, it identifies Decadent aesthetics in stylistics which privilege the gaze, the enclosed and aestheticized space, and formal ritual, as well as narratives ordered around principles of perversity, self-consciousness, and interconnectedness. The ultimate intervention which this dissertation seeks to make, however, is to demonstrate the centrality rather than marginality of animation to cinema, insofar as cel animation has always possessed the graphic freedom to realize any imaginative vision, which digital effects have only recently extended to live-action cinema. All of the aesthetics of Baroque and Decadent blockbuster spectacle that the dissertation traces could be and, the dissertation seeks to show, were deployed in the animated feature years in advance of the liberation of representation that digital effects would bring to live-action.
Open Access
"Inventories of Limbo": Post-Minimal Aesthetics in Cinema From the Readymade to Institutional Critique
(2016-09-20) Horwatt, Elijah Saul; Zryd, Michael
This dissertation charts the philosophical premises of post-minimalism in the practices of experimental filmmakers and video artists, exploring specific reorientations of cinematic works since the late 1960s. Post-minimalism refers to a myriad of aesthetic transformations initiated by the conceptual art movement, interrogating the ontology of art from a perspective outside its historical bonds to medium, style, and Kantian aesthetic judgment. I examine three strategies in the progression of post-minimal aesthetic practice: the readymade, institutional critique, and seriality. A central goal of this research is to remap entrenched language and ideas in the spheres of the arts and cinema to point to a profound reciprocity between cinematic technology and post-minimal aesthetic intelligence, perception, and judgment. This research moves away from the problems raised by artificially constructed movements and prescriptive categories which inevitably produce important sites of exception, and look instead to the aesthetic engines of post-minimal artmaking offering opportunities for constant renewal, evolution, and refinement. I follow these aesthetic engines like a knights tour in chess, jumping through history, appearing in unexpected places and at unexpected times to draw continuities in the approach to the heretical breaks from modernism found in post-minimal aesthetic intelligence. I will primarily focus on four objects: William E. Jones Tearoom, Robert Smithsons Underground Cinema, Lis Rhodes collaborative intervention into the Film as Film exhibition, and Christian Marclays The Clock. Examining the use of Marcel Duchamps concept of the readymade, and its profound assault on both medium specificity and authorship, I illustrate radical new ethical imperatives in the presentation of found footage filmmaking. My two core chapters grapple with ontological and locative explorations of cinematic architectures and sites. The two projects discussed engage with institutional critique, a philosophical model of artmaking which directly engages the sites, economic infrastructures, administrative imperatives, and power dynamics of the cinema, museum, and gallery. Finally, I examine a case study in contemporary post-minimal practice through Christian Marclays 24-hour installation The Clock, and will explore its relationship to archival projects engaging in the collection, ordering, and hermeneutic approach to 20th century media. I will explore this installation as symptomatic of both a technologically determined grammar of collection for the now immense digital archive, and an archeological inclination for artists to thematize film history.
Open Access
Trolling Aesthetics: The Lulz as Creative Practice
(2015-12-16) Knuttila, Lee Gabriel; Marchessault, Janine Michele
“The LULZ” became common Internet parlance in the mid-2000s to describe a wide array of online phenomena, from childish pranks, to the peculiar discourse of anonymous message boards, to a shadowy and subversive ideology. By the end of the decade, the canon of images and icons associated with the LULZ entered into artistic practice and along with it a certain dark understanding of the “digital condition” of online mediation. “Trolling Aesthetics: the LULZ as Creative Practice” charts how the LULZ began as an aesthetic sense and sensibility on the notorious message board 4chan. Akin to most online content, it quickly morphed into a multitude of new forms, including, for example, the video remix practice YouTube Poop, which takes the aesthetic logic of 4chan but changes its creative systems and output. The result is both a discordant bric-a-brac of absurd digital art and an example of how the LULZ functions, beyond idle message boards, as a purposeful creative work. The final chapter follows this trajectory into direct artistic practices. Unlike many of the earlier iterations that sputter rather than comment fully on what such digital culture means, artist projects like Brad Troemel’s The Jogging mobilizes the LULZ to reflect on a network of technology obsessed with speed, time, identity, and representations. Through a blend of material, expressive, and aesthetic approaches, this dissertation is both a historical analysis of the emergence of the LULZ as well as a socio-historical critique of an online world willing to foster, participate, and partake in such an ethos.

Browse

Recent Submissions