Creative Endeavors
Listening in Action: Modeling Digital Music Listening and Simultaneous Activities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Rebecca Rinsema
Since the introduction of the iPod in 2001 handheld electronics that store or stream compressed music files have steadily become the standard devices used for listening to music. A growing body of research investigates listening experiences as they are mediated by these devices (Bickford 2011; Bull 2008). I contribute to this body of research by introducing the "Integration in Consciousness" (IC) model as a way to characterize the experiences. Resulting from a grounded theory study, the IC model details the interaction among the musical sounds, simultaneous listener activities, and the nature of listener engagements. In the study ten college students from three institutions underwent iterative interviews; questions were developed from McCarthy and Wright’s (2004) Deweyan method for investigating user experiences with technology. Analysis yielded four axial codes as well as the IC model. I provide comparisons between the IC model and general models of music listening derived from other disciplines and methodologies (e.g. Dunn’s and Stockfelt’s). An important difference between the IC model and general models of music listening is the role played by simultaneous activities in the IC model. I explore possible explanations for this difference along the lines of methodology, scope of the study, and disciplinary perspective.
Expressionist Dramaturgy as a Template for Intermedial Performance: Adapting Strindberg’s "To Damascus" for Creative Media Applications and Pedagogy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Pellegrini, Kristen Morgan
Because of the many opportunities for staging and design innovations, August Strindberg’s “proto-expressionist” dramas have appealed to theatre practitioners for over a century. The earliest experiments in dramaturgical formalism, plays such as "The Keys of Heaven" and "A Dream Play" are packed with dense imagery and intertextual references that need to be realized across aural, pictorial, and imagistic elements that don’t merely serve the narratives, but actualize them. At the same time the structural elements of these plays harken back to medieval station and pageant dramas, when narrative “cycles” were enacted in site-specific locales and embodied by players and spectators in constant motion. New digital technologies combined with an emphasis on immersion and interactivity in contemporary performance expand the interpretive possibilities for such works, and within a university setting, for applied student learning of media technologies. Collaborators David Pellegrini and Kristen Morgan have adapted, condensed, and designed Strindberg’s rarely performed "To Damascus" trilogy as both an intermedial production and a template for training students to operate and design with online/augmented reality systems, performance capture technology, media server systems, and other media technologies. They will present their dramaturgical and design process, including storyboards, media mapping, and pedagogical templates for this production.
From Propaganda to Guided Communication: Cartooning Political Communication in Digital China
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lei Qin
This study looks into the recent boom of animated cartoons for political communication in China since late 2013. The series of political cartoons are examined against the background of a comprehensive media revolution designed by top following the Chinese Communist Party’s (hereafter CCP) new understanding of the role of media and public opinion. I argue, by looking closely at the creative use of political cartoons, that the CCP adjusted the role of media in the digital age from a propaganda mouth piece, to a guiding opinion unifier to popularize the Party. Their efforts and success in eliciting bottom-up responses with animated cartoons have suggested a transformation of communication model from top-down to bottom-up as well as reflecting the CCP’s changing understanding of the public from “target audience of propaganda” to guided audience, and then to central actors for popularizing the Party. The major media reform since Xi came to power in early 2013 has laid institutional, managerial and editorial foundation to practically sustain such a conceptual change, and the boom of political cartoons is the most prominent result of it.
