Massey Documents by Type
Permanent URI for this communityhttps://mro.massey.ac.nz/handle/10179/294
Browse
3 results
Search Results
Item How does widespread copyright violation, as facilitated by networked telecommunications, impact upon artistic practice and industry in New Zealand? : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies at Massey University, Manawatū, New Zealand(Massey University, 2016) Jurgens, Timothy CarlThe culture of artistic content creation is changing. Once upon a time cultural products, and the ability to dictate how they were used and consumed, could be easily controlled via virtue of the difficulty of working with analogue formats in regards to modification, mass duplication or sampling. The widespread adoption of digital technologies, and the Internet serving as a global vector of seemingly endless information exchange, has rendered these hindrances to content duplication, distribution, and manipulation irrelevant in the wake of a globally distributed network of techno-cosmopolitan media content consumers. With the widespread normalisation of illegal online file-sharing, consumers of entertainment can essentially source anything they desire at a non-existent cost, whilst simultaneously excluding themselves from traditional economic channels of distribution. This research, partially presented as a documentary, investigates the opinions of artists (photographers, filmmakers, and musicians) working and living in New Zealand regarding the prevalence and impact of online copyright infringement. How has this new digital ecosphere impacted their work/practice as an artist and the industry generally? Is the fact that content gains far greater proliferation via these networks an advantage to media creators? Or does the reduction in scarcity and/or effort to obtain said art remove much of the associated value and thus the need to pay? A consumer can steal art considerably more easily now, but an artist can also source material for inspiration or reappropriation in ways largely unavailable in the past. In what ways (and with how much success) have content creators adapted to this new paradigm? How do these viewpoints correlate with variables such as medium, time spend in the industry and level of professional/economic involvement? And, indeed, how should both the creators, and the consumers, of media content think about art in a new world where it can be digitised so easily?Item The interior cinematic : beauties and horrors from the strange loop of self : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Design, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2010) Benson, FrancesWhen we are buffeted by extreme external or internal forces, the self may splinter and spiral in a psychological maze of disengagement and lost sovereignty. This trans-disciplinary design project responds – operating between fashion, performance and film – and acts out Elaine Scarry’s contention that pain can be constructively re-made. Functioning as a metaphorical problem-solving space where the textures of inner experience are explored, this project employs fragmented narrative and theatrical re-fashioning of the environment and body to attain greater social relevance. It asks how can we reconnect with the ‘sovereign self’ when our constitutional confidence has been eroded and how do we re-engage with the outside world once we have become psychologically estranged from it? The Interior Cinematic utilises cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter’s formulation of the self as a ‘strange loop’, and Louis A. Sass’ explanation of the dissociative and recursive features of schizophrenia as a point of poetic departure for understanding the damaged and dissociated self. The lost self may seem like an end - a horrific freefall out of normal life into madness and estrangement. But it is also a beginning; the pinnacle of sensory ascendency - a beautiful, lateral, life affirming state. Through The Interior Cinematic I construct an aesthetics of reengagement: an affective pathway between these contradictory and overlapping existential poles, contending that the lost self can, in part, be recovered through a rediscovery of sensation. This work is informed by Julia Kristeva’s assertion that alienation is the kernel for empathetic re-engagement with others, as well as by Arthur Frank’s theory of narrative as a strategy to reconnect with the damaged self.Item Lives unremembered : the Holocaust and strategies of its representation : an exegesis presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Fine Arts at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand(Massey University, 2008) Rajala, Tero MarkusThe Holocaust is a subject that seems to defy artistic representation by way of its sheer scale of tragedy and subsequent trauma. As I will demonstrate in this paper, it is hard to restore visibility – pictorial links between past and present realities – to crimes that have been deliberately submerged by its perpetrators. I will examine some of the common strategies used in representation of the victims of the Holocaust since the end of the Second World War, in the mediums of film and photography. As my main method of enquiry, I will examine three films from different eras, and of very different approaches in terms of their processing of the proposed original evidence, as examples to illustrate my arguments. In the second chapter Alain Resnais's documentary film Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) is analyzed as a birthplace of the so-called iconography of the Holocaust. Chapter three examines workings of memory through the aesthetic form that was soon to follow; the role and testimony of the survivors is considered through Claude Lanzmann's Shoah. In the fourth chapter a new player is introduced: the second generation witness of postmemory, works of transmitted but unexperienced realities. In this chapter I will closer examine the workings of art in the game of reprocessing the evidence of the Holocaust, and through Dariusz Jablonski's film Fotoamator I aim to critique how the previously discussed approaches serve to further lock the Holocaust in an inaccessible canon. Moreover, the generalization implied – a drive toward universalization of the Holocaust as an idiom or even a metaphor for the dark sides of human history/character – derives from problems of representation; mainly that of anonymity in face of the proposed beauty of the spectacle, of tragedy and suffering in mass-media. A key problem is that any historical document, however we define one, is considered transparent and unmediated, whereas art is clearly something where a degree of mediation is necessarily recognized. In the face of this dichotomy it seems that all the collected "proof" of the Holocaust – witness accounts" photographs" films" material remains – achieves, is to stregthen the prevailing version of history.