Dissertation
Uncanny Valley graph
I am continuing to organize (and also re-write) the projects which are going to become a part of the practice portfolio of the PhD. The Uncanny Valley/Avatar was the first big self-observational thing which I did in SL, almost 4 years ago. For this I applied Masahiro Mori’s robotics theory from 1970 to avatar appearance. So, the graph above is an adaptation of Mori’s original graph. At the bottom are his examples and at the top are the corresponding ones which I came up with.
alpha.tribe tales
http://issuu.com/elifayiter/docs/alphatribe-tales
When I submit my dissertation I will also have to show creative output since mine is a practice based PhD. (And yes – unfortunately I blew the December 31 deadline, so the new one is now March 30…).
For the default documentation I will be handing in straightforward DVDs with images/videos inside folders so that the examiners can find the stuff easily. However I also want to make some other stuff – that I will actually enjoy putting together. One idea that I have is to make real, that is laser printed and bound, books out of material that goes together. I am thinking that I will make 3 of them and here is the first one:
Obviously alpha.tribe is a very large portion of the final chapter in which I talk about the actual stuff that I made for the practice part of the thesis. The first part of what I say about alpha.tribe concerns the actual “business” itself, how it all came about, the 5 alternative selves as independent fashion designers and so forth. And then a second part however are what (for lack of a better word) I am calling the alpha.tribe tales, which I concocted out of the outfits which were made for alpha.tribe. So, this book holds 4 of these tales – ‘the abject’, ‘the encounter’, ‘text’, and ‘uranometria’.
Aside from the fact that I like making them anyway, in this case I made the flipbook on issuu also to see how the whole thing works when it is actually put into a book format. This is the reason why there are page numbers on this, normally I would not be putting them into something like a virtual flipbook. And issuu is really great for testing purposes, I am sure editorial designers must be using it to no end to proof their publications. Used to be such a hassle before all this, basically the only way to do it back then was to construct a whole dummy book. Which was expensive and time consuming, of course.
“entre loup et chien”
Abstract
This paper attempts to examine the workings of the unconscious, specifically in the sense in which it was defined by Sigmund Freud as the dream-work, the joke-work and the image-work. Freud’s findings and theories related to the unconscious image-work were put into practice by the surrealist artists of the early 20th century and may also come into play in contemporary computer based image creation, not only through the associative processes which are inherently embedded into the medium of hypertextuality, but also through the non-linear nature of the digital work environment itself, which provides the ability to traverse the creative journey backwards and forwards through commands such as undo, redo, copy, cut and paste which are brought about by the seeming indestructibility embedded into the very essence of its building blocks, the bits.
entre loup et chien
Words were originally magic, and the word retains much of its old magical power even to-day. With words one man can make another blessed, or drive him to despair; by words the teacher transfers his knowledge to the pupil; by words the speaker sweeps his audience with him and determines its judgments and decisions. Words call forth effects and are the universal means of influencing human beings. Therefore let us not underestimate the use of words… [1]
Sigmund Freud
1.1 Flashback: entre loup et chien
… Within clouds reminiscent of ancient seas
floated rocks, gnawed down with your blood.
What a pity! You vanished in great numbers as if coexistent with a time that never was. I bent and picked up the sky from the ground, the sky you had carelessly dropped.
Oktay Rifat [2]
He is my ageing uncle. We are sitting in the garden of his house by the Aegean sea. I am 19 years old, and as ever mesmerised by him. It is twilight hour in late August. We are surrounded by wide open, darkening summer skies, the blurring outlines of trees and shrubs and the far off sounds of encroaching night. And then he says: entre loup et chien… That is all he says and in that one sentence I know what I must do. I have just been given a mission: I must seek that creature, the one that stands between the day and night; neither wolf nor dog. I must seek it with images and not words, although maybe words as well, or words that transform into images, narrative condensed into image: The transformation of the dream thought by way of the dream work into the image work.
Donald Kuspit
Quotes from an interview which he gave in 2004 and which I may use later: › Continue reading