Browsing by Subject "Transmedia"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6

An exercise in resilience
(2023-04-21) Freyre Cuza, Alex; Lucas, Kristin, 1968-; Smith, Michael; Perzynski, Bogdan; Garcia, Scherezade; Mccarthy, Kathryn; McMaster, Eric
This report reflects on a body of work that discusses the current migratory circumstances of Cubans. It analyzes the socioeconomic, bureaucratic, and emotional realities associated with migration. This research materializes in four interdisciplinary digital media projects that merge stereoscopic videos, interactive applications, and virtual reality. Seen together, the project creates a looping, immersive, interactive landscape that uses contemporary aesthetics and 3D simulations to trigger a psychophysical dialogue about current migratory events related to Cuba.
Media hacking
(2011-05) Stanley, Jeffrey Charles; Petersen, Bradley; Perzynski, Bogdan
Jeffrey Charles Stanley is an M.F.A. Candidate in Transmedia in the Department of Art and Art History. The Artist, Jeff Stanley, Works as a cultural “hacker” and critical “terrorist” with the aid of video and the internet. The character, Jeff Stanley, plays the role of a 2010 Max Headroom, the popular 80s anti-corporate TV personality/talking head and seller of Pepsi. Media delivers people. A few deliver media. The audience is the product. Media hacking is a technique that allows an artist, or anti-artist, to change the game and fight back. An artist practice can be open to technology, yet remain powerful, and culturally and socially relevant. Jeff Stanley is a virtual AI, a person, and a corporate entity. With this new holy trinity, the combined efforts as a person, a virtual AI, and a corporation will provide the enhancement an artist needs today. Art and its methods must evolve as the playing field evolves. Technology defines the 21st century artist.
Much assembly required : cartoons, comics, and the transmedia quarantining of queer women of color
(2019-07-26) Moffett, Chantaelle Lavonne; Scott, Suzanne, 1979-
This project analyses the use of transmedia storytelling by two cartoons, The Legend of Korra and Adventure Time. These two cartoons use transmedia comic book expansions to separate the queer aspects of certain characters’ identities away from the television show and into the transmedia supplements. In examining this separation of queerness between mediums, I argue for the emergence of transmedia quarantining, where queer women of color in these shows have their queerness removed from the television screen for exposition in a secondary medium. First, this project situates these two shows within the post-network era and recognizes multicasting as a method by which the shows’ parent networks navigated the challenges posed by era-specific changes in television. In multicasting, adults are incorporated into the audiences of these cartoons through the hyperdiegetic appeal of transmedia storytelling. Within multicasting, however, there is an implicit prioritization of one audience over the other. Children take precedence over adults in this dynamic, and queer women of color are subsumed by the monolithic adult audience. These shows use comic books to develop the queer aspect of these characters’ identities. Taking into account the low thresholds for success in comics, particularly those based on preexisting properties, I propose that these shows are able to reap the advantages of multicasting to loyal comic readers without engendering financial risk. However, the prioritizing dynamics of multicasting are recreated in comics. The medium’s associations with white, heterosexual men remarginalizes queer women of color as devalued audiences, despite the fact that they are pushed to comics in search of representation. The final component of this thesis is a textual analysis of the shows in question; by conducting an analysis of the narrative construction of these characters as queer women of color, I demonstrate that their identities are already obscured prior to moments of transmedia quarantine. By separating the queer component of these characters into a different medium, these cartoons are able to claim representational diversity. In doing so, the queer women of color seeking out this representation are disproportionately affected by these storytelling strategies.
Playing in licensed storyworlds : games, franchises, and fans
(2019-08-15) Bestor, Nicholas Charles Lyon; Scott, Suzanne, 1979-; Perren, Alisa H; Schatz, Thomas G; Booth, Paul
Licensed games—analog or digital games that are made under contract using pre-existing intellectual properties—bring together the narrative trajectories of their storyworld, the production histories of their creation, the affective traces of their fandoms, and the interpersonal dynamics of their play. This dissertation examines the intersection of the industrial practices of licensing, the textual properties of transmediality, and the creative process of worldbuilding through the lens of licensed games. Licensed games have frequently been dismissed as derivative and overly commercial; my aim is to embrace the redundancies and contradictions of licensed games. Licensing, in which owners of intellectual property sell the rights for use of an IP for a limited period, provides the framework but not the boundaries of these ludic paratexts that stage a complex negotiation of popular storyworlds and fannish affect. In this dissertation, I explore how three different popular storyworlds are built and shared, explored and negotiated, experienced and felt. The first chapter examines how games have contributed to the growth and continuation of the Star Wars universe. In the second chapter, I survey how the design of rules in games based on the A Song of Ice and Fire / Game of Thrones franchise inflects and influences engagement with Westeros. And in my final chapter, I explore what I call a post-licensed game, Warhammer 40,000: Conquest, and the frequently fraught communal process of supporting a card game once its licensing and production have ended. These licensed games provide richly textured case studies of the negotiation between industrial stakeholders, texts, and fans. Utilizing a combination of textual analysis, participant observation and interviews with players, I argue that licensed games are a fertile medium through which popular brands, franchises, and storyworlds are productively transmediated. How these games draw upon the subjective and affective dimensions of our investment in popular storyworlds reveals much about game design, media franchising, and the creative processes of worldbuilding inherent to both. Licensed games allow us to play in a storyworld, and their modes of engagements foreground the playful ways we experience and understand the transmedially expansive franchises that dominate popular culture.
Rite of passage : developing emergent systems for transmedia design
(2023-04-21) Randall, Benjamin Gardner; Gionfriddo, Erica L.; Freer, Katherine; Smith, Matthew
Transmedia design is a vital and growing practice in digital entertainment. In transmedia storytelling, a narrative is told across multiple physical and digital platforms. By taking inspiration from the interactive stories and emergent systems found in video games, I hypothesize that well-designed visual art, music, and interaction can deliver a compelling transmedia narrative. As a case study, I recount and analyze the conception, design, development, execution, and iteration of an original transmedia franchise, Rite of Passage. By drawing comparisons between pixel and ASCII art, trance music, the philosophy of the microcosm, and the dynamics of community gathering, I describe a personal process of worldbuilding for transmedia design. My collaborators and I then reveal the world of Rite of Passage through a cassette release, various forms of graphic design, and the production of an immersive audiovisual event. In order to develop the visual content for this production, I explore a media design workflow consisting of intertwined technical development and aesthetic curation. In this workflow, the technical development of generative visual systems and the curation of those systems result in a dialogue between the designer and the computer. A cohesive narrative is thus devised retroactively in accordance with the established worldbuilding. I consider this an emergent system, which is a system that experiences unique properties and behaviors that arise from the interactions of its individual elements.
T0WARD CY83RGN0S1S
(2016-05) Stuckey, Rachel Meredith; Williams, Jeff, M.F.A.; Henderson, Linda
Can we experience enchantment with cyberspace as we can with outer space? Can late-night web browsing provide unexpected encounters equivalent to those had in the space between radio frequencies? These questions drive my art and research. What I am pursuing is cybergnosis, or intuitive experiences of mysterious spiritual realities on the cyberplane. My goal is to question traditionally held divisions between technology and the human, and to explore marginal views of technologies. My research involves embedding myself in outlier online communities, some composed of people who feel afflicted by computers, and others who are collaborating with them in unusually empowered ways, be they spiritual, psychological, political or otherwise. I use video based performance, net-based projects, and multimedia installations to evoke empathetic yet critical renderings of these experiences. In this report, I write about five of my artworks: Estrin Tide is Fresh, Everyone Else is Tired (2016), Hello Nebula? It’s me, Margaret. (2015), Innernet Addict (2015), T0WARD CY83RGN0S1S(2015), and Welcome to my Homepage! (2014).