Art and Design

David Lynch, the director of "Blue Velvet",  is aware that as the audience we are too often placed in a passive role of just viewing a movie. We are comfortable inside the third person camera, omnipresent and all knowing. He constructs segments in this film to turn that idea on its head, and remove us from the innocent moviegoer role.

This paper focuses on the segment of the movie when Jeffery is hiding in the closet and is watching Dorothy through the slats. This scene created outspoken hatred for the film by critics and moviegoers. On a narrative level the next segment is used to introduce us to the real dark side of Lumberton.

In the previous segment we are rewarded, along with Jeffery, for watching, as Dorothy disrobes. Lynch then turns us, the audience, into the lone voyeur as Dorothy takes sexual advantage of Jeffery at knife point. The knock on the door disrupts this and Dorothy tells Jeffery to hide. Jeffery and the viewing audience are now returned to a position which is very familiar, observing from the dark closet. Moments ago, when we were here, we got to gaze upon the vulnerable and beautiful Dorothy. What happens after the knock parallels the previous segment, but we are now shown a different side of Dorothy and life. And this time we are not rewarded for staring.

Jeffery, like us, the audience, wants to be able to walk in and just observe. He is looking to gain an experience, not get involved. This quickly changes for him. The scene asks the question "can you just observe?,” or “is there some responsibility that comes with being an 'innocent' voyeur?” Jeffery's desire to be a passive observer mirrors our desire to sit back and watch a movie. Lynch shoots the scene in a way that removes us from that role.

The triangle between Jeffery, Dorothy, and Frank sets us up for the next disturbing twist in the movie - once caught in an abusive relationship is it possible for the stress and the anxiety to begin to feel normal? Blue Velvet shows us that this new normal can cloud our vision, confuse pleasure with pain, and suppress our desire to run.

Released in 1976 and directed by Nicolas Roeg, "The Man Who Fell to Earth", has many of the semantic elements of a science fiction film. There are scenes from far-off worlds, a visiting alien, and technology that could only come from a society more advanced than ours (King and Krywinska 9). In an interview about the film, Roeg states:

"[science fiction] is an extraordinary thing, because you have total freedom of the imagination" (Gregory).

This paper explores the definition and conventions of the science fiction genre in film and how it is used and subverted in the film "The Man Who Fell to Earth" starring David Bowie and Directed by Nicholas Roeg.

Science fiction often misses its chance to create a message with any impact because it is caught in a framework that forces it to explain things scientifically (Leach 373). Roeg systematically omits explanations of vital details that are crucial to the suspension of disbelief, he alters the flow of time and forces the audience to keep asking questions, and reminds us that we are watching a film by breaking the continuity of the story with Brectian devices. Roeg, by refusing to allow the audience to get lost in the film, subverts the genre of science fiction and succeeds where most science fiction fails, in conveying a human story where we can learn from an alternate reality.

Any animation student can tell you the right way to produce an animated short. Books like The Animator's Workbook (White), Animation from Concept to Production (Rall), and others spell out the process from storyboarding to final render. Following this template will get you to final production, but this process is meant for a big studio or large team, not for an independent or student animator. Additionally, these books focus heavily on the technical side of animation emphasizing production. Students learning to be animators need to learn both story and production if they are going to make animated films. The focus of this paper is to find ways to help students produce better-animated films. This is achieved by focusing on storytelling and by defining a process for students that better suits the timelines and compromises they make to complete a film. Looking through the lens of independent animation production and my last animated film Sheltering Sky (2019) we discover new processes for creating a story and how the processes of the giant studios can be reworked for students and independent artists and teams.

Comics have a standard grid structure. For most of the 100-year history of comic books, the underlying structure of each page has been the 3x3 grid. Jack Kirby showed us the endless iterations of this structure in the 60s and 70s on the pages of Marvel and DC comics.

The proliferation of virtual museums, on line and built inside a museum's collections, stimulates new challenges for research and public education. This happens through multimodal applications and methods, such as augmented reality, virtual storytelling, virtual reality, computer graphics and haptic applications. This paper discusses a haptic approach with a hybrid solution, able to virtualize tangible objects in a physical space and digital models in a cyber space. The main goal of this approach is to propose alternative ways to experience an object, an artifact, a site or an entire collection. In particular, the hands-on experience is very important, for having tangible feedback from objects and to generate a visual narrative, by touching and combining physical/virtual interaction simultaneously, to customize the visit according to the experience and empathy generated by the unique artifacts. The Tangible Interactive Table for Archeology (TITA) is a open-source prototype of a digital-haptic device, designed for museums and in general for the digital communication of archaeological artifacts, monuments and sites. The intention is to lower the bar of entry for this type of technology in the cultural heritage community, to enable further research and exploration of its affordances, by initiating a community open design project, which provides the digital fabrication files and specifications to produce, test, extend and hybridize such a device, and mechanisms for sharing mutual hardware and software development projects. Such efforts to combine virtual reality and tangible 3d printed artifacts, also entails a rethinking of the production pipeline of digitally reconstructing 3d environments and their constituent elements, where 3d digital models need to be at turns both " lightweight " , visually accurate yet low-poly for real-time, game engine applications, and high-fidelity and well formed as 3d printed artifacts.

It is a challenge to introduce and practice computational modes of visual narrative in art and design and computer science classroom environments. Students need to learn, practice and synthesize a collection of multidisciplinary skills when they develop projects (software development, art production, animation, interactivity, game design, electronics, among others), and such efforts often require collaborative work in team-based environments. These challenges are especially acute in domains such as augmented, mixed and virtual reality, where teams are also tasked to innovate in emerging platforms, as standards, affordances and potentials are open-ended and changing rapidly. As students address such design problems with creativity, they practice divergent thinking, and ingenuity, solving problems in inventive ways-such skills are difficult to teach. Emerging curricular strategies sometimes focus on fostering collaborative spaces and challenges that require multidisciplinary problem solving for unorthodox scenarios and the interplay of technology, arts, and design thinking. That is the focus of this paper. We present a project and technology platform called Story-Go-Round. The particulars of the platform are evolving-it was developed over the course of an academic semester, as a studio assignment for art and design students. The project involves a collection of technologies and a flexible, open-source design-a depth camera, actuated physical stage, basic electronics, digitally fabricated cabinet, computer and game controller controls, and a series of software templates and development environments. The students are asked to consider the affordances of the system and consider its potential to be modified, hacked and hybridized, towards the goal of creating a novel, cyclical storytelling experience. Story-Go-Round is a mythotrope, meaning "story turning", a term coined by the authors as a reference to a zoetrope, a historically significant cylindrical pre-film animation device developed in the 19 th century. It is an experimental physical development platform for producing augmented digital experiences. Students physically construct dioramas in an actuated carousel, modify the hardware platform, and then integrate the hand-crafted sets and engineered technical system with digital content, animation, interactivity, gameplay and effects. The platform has a low barrier to entry, it first involves crafting using methods familiar from childhood. It then introduces foundational skills, allowing the students to show off expert skills while at the same time crossing discipline domains into new areas. Along the way students consider the history of animation, video game consoles and digital media. As educators in this highly virtualized era, we are tempted to shift the focus exclusively to digital tools; however, this limits the design that students produce to choices and levels of complexity offered by software, and the results become alike and repetitive. We wanted to create an assignment that functions by combining two made-up worlds: one that is physically produced and another that is digitally animated and controlled. When students try to develop a multi-faceted project like this, which crosses multiple technical and artistic domains, and try to quickly learn the skills they need to implement their vision, they get to experience the remixing, mashup, open-source making culture, which is so prominent in the way we work today. How else can young designers best learn the duct-tape and jerry-rigging skills which will allow them to see potential opportunities in disparate things, and find new ways of hacking them together to create something new, playful and whimsical, even if what they create is also "absurd", and often not practical?

There is a crisis in our communities about the tributes to a shared civic life represented in existing public artwork and monuments. Culture wars are being waged herein and appear increasingly unreconcilable. This paper discusses this moment and describes the range of strategies artists and designers have used to remediate these works. It presents a project description of an interactive artwork that suggests innovative approaches in this realm. The author introduces a conceptual model which served as inspiration for the piece that may be useful when discussing and designing such interventions.