Toronto Metropolitan University Open Journals
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Co-creating Transmedia Learning: A Hierarchical Shared Universe Approach
No full textThe way the world moves forward forces us to prepare ourselves through 21st-century educational processes: those that are active, realistic, systemic, and cross-disciplinary. However, facilitating such processes is not trivial as they require skills and resources that educators can seldom possess. Narratives, primarily in the form of interactive digital narratives (IDNs), are potent tools for 21st-century education, but they too require significant resources from educators. Transmedia learning, which is the use of educational media revolving around a story universe, can potentially support educators in applying IDNs, primarily if it lets them and their students add new narratives to a shared story universe, thus freeing them from having to create narratives from scratch. However, how to conduct this co-creation process is underexplored. Through a theoretical investigation of the literature on 21st-century education, IDNs, transmedia learning, narrative co-creation, and shared universes, we propose a framework for co-designing a transmedia learning ecosystem. The framework divides a transmedia learning ecosystem into learning content, narrative, and interactivity aspects, to be handled collaboratively by educators, narrative experts, and interactivity experts. Furthermore, each aspect is systemic and hierarchical, which allows for designing educational IDNs that expand upon each other, thus letting each educator work on one that suits their expertise while ensuring that the end products provide a comprehensive learning experience. We applied the framework in a case study of co-designing a transmedia learning ecosystem for 21st-century informatics education. The case study’s preliminary result is a general design of the ecosystem, which shows how co-design tasks can be delegated efficiently to produce IDN media that deliver informatics subjects hierarchically and engagingly. We also discuss our future research directions, including developing the ecosystem further to produce actual IDN media and expanding the framework to support other IDN creation activities, such as design implementation and IDN media validation.
The Age of Visible Machines is Over: Navigating the Simulated Image, Epistemological Uncertainty and the Waning of the Index in the Late Digital Works of Harun Farocki
No full textIn this paper, I explore how the Harun Farocki’s late cinematic essays engage with a variety of computer-synthesised images to critically interrogate cultural anxieties regarding the waning of the index and the ostensible ‘loss’ of the real in the era of digital filmmaking. Applying close textual analysis to the projects Serious Games (2009-2010) and Parallel I-IV (2012-2014), I demonstrate that Farocki’s sustained engagement with ex nihilo images extends the filmmaker’s career-long interest in deconstructing the technical, ideological and economic aspects of ‘operational’ imagery to the specific context of advanced digital animation. In these cinematic essays, I argue, Farocki repurposes a range of digitally simulated images extracted from different sources, including footage extracted from popular video games, 3D architectural models, and military training programs, to investigate both the aesthetic qualities of computer animation and the role they play in wider social and institutional processes.
Before I examine Farocki’s late work in depth, I first address the scholarly discourse surrounding the development of digital filmmaking, which treats the split between analogue and new media in terms of a straightforward conflict between the inherent trustworthiness of the former and the unreliability of the latter. According to such a viewpoint, the fact that analogue media is based on pro-filmic light values being physically imprinted onto a photochemical surface creates an immediate isomorphic link between the referent and its cinematic record, which means that analogue footage can be relied on to function as a ‘trace’ of the real.
Having established this as background, I then examine the essayistic strategies mobilized by Farocki in his late digital works to challenge the ‘truth status’ of cinematic images and encourage the viewer to think carefully about the process of production which created the image and the social context in which it was circulated. Applying close textual analysis of the projects Serious Games and Parallel I-IV, I illustrate that Farocki’s late cinematic essays offer a sophisticated examination of the nature of realism, materiality and epistemological uncertainty in the digital era. It is my contention that, instead of communicating a single, objective ‘truth’ to the viewer, Farocki’s cinematic essays reflexively call into question the truth status of the images they place under scrutiny, therefore pointing to the ways in which images may be manipulated, falsified and inflected with bias. Farocki, therefore, mobilizes essayistic strategies to realize the epistemological potential of synthesized images which hold no direct indexical connection to pro-filmic events by subjecting them to a rigorous process of critical reframing. In exploring the function, formal design, and technological constitution of contemporary simulated images, Farocki expands and reconfigures classical notions of ‘truth value’ in nonfiction cinema based on the values on transparency, objectivity and photographic indexicality.
The New Virtuality : A Creative Website on the Disappearing Differences Between Real and Unreal
No full textOur multimedia website project, “The New Virtuality”, explores the implications of highly realistic images that interact and socialise with human users, often seemingly “live” in real‑time. Created with imaging technologies such as holographic projection or virtual reality (VR) and usually boosted by AI and machine learning, we argue that these images present unprecedented directions in understanding how reality, liveness and presence are discerned and believed. Radically breaking down differences between real and unreal, they point to an era of blurred boundaries, dematerialization and limbic spaces which converges visual media with twenty-first century politics of dis/misinformation, post-truth and deep fakery. In this project, we discuss this era as “the new virtuality.”
These developments underpin the project’s research questions: how to understand this media that so freely and near-seamlessly mix virtual and actual realities? How to place this phenomenon in media’s long history of blurred environments, while still appreciating their distinctive newness and challenges? What are the impacts of the new virtuality on our apprehensions and constructions of realities? How might this mediated reality relate – as code, as language, as consciousness – to the wider contexts of information that colour contemporary times?
In our methodology, we interwove theory, multimedia expression and fiction as multiple voices to articulate the project’s arguments across three frameworks of distinct approaches, media elements and genre features. The first framework is a historical context with which to understand the continuities and divergences of virtuality. The second is the connection of theory – particularly from film, screen and media studies – with textual readings drawn across multiple media, including paintings, cinema, performance, VR, apps and architecture. The third is the employment of fiction and multimedia. Inspired by the “scientific fiction” work of Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan (Lee and Chen, 2021), we intertwined a fictional story through the project for greater animation and accessibility – a creative warp to the academic weft. Multimedia via the essays’ image margins and a 33‑minute video essay function as audiovisual “mood boards” to provide elaboration, illustration, colour and setting for conveying the new virtuality’s poetics of fudged and adrift unsettling across this new reality.
The result is a work of multiple voices and hybridity which identifies a new framework of reality through contemporary mixed media. This new virtuality is no longer about the questions of realism or illusion (e.g. Friedberg 2009; Grau 2003) from computer‑generated imagery (CGI) or even deepfakes. They are about new technical codes and information which give rise to revised conceptions of ontology, anthropology, epistemology, literacy, time and space. They are new systems of complex linkages between media, codes, expressions, consciousness, change and history. These ideas not only impact understanding of our world. They also revise orientations of truth values and identifications of moral spaces.
Polyphonic Documentary: Interactive Practices
No full textThis research creation presentation aims to showcase and stimulate discussion on our last round of creative practice interactive interventions developed within the ongoing collaborative and co creative project called: “Polyphonic Documentary” (www.polyphonicdocumentary.com).
Working as practice-based researchers and through creative practices, we argue that self-reflexivity is a key requirement for decolonizing the mind and the way in which we construct and tell stories (Aston, Odorico 2022). Our interest here is in considering how the interactive documentary form, through the use of interactive storytelling authoring tools, can facilitate this process.
Our project looks at the factual digital storytelling practice of interactive documentary through the lens of polyphony. We use the concept of polyphony as a research approach and method which encourages us to embrace complexity and plurality, and to respect different perspectives and points of view within a context of care
Navigating Urban Spaces Through the Use of Interactive Visual Storytelling Methods: Leeds as a Case Study
No full textThe city of Leeds is a large urban conglomerate in the North of England that embodies the aspects of contemporary development. The social and anthropological organisation of the city are the focus of our interactive visual research. In particular, we focus on the concept of \u27borders,\u27 their materiality, and their role within the urban context (Simmel 1997).
Thus, Leeds and its social and anthropological issues will become our interactive visual research case study. In particular, the focus of this project will be on the concept of \u27walls,\u27 their materiality and their role within the urban context. The term \u27walls\u27 is often used to define a large variety of artefacts that create and embody some sort of boundaries. These artefacts often include fences, embankments, roads, and gated communities, structures that divide or enclose spaces.
In a psychogeographical gesture, this interactive portrait of Leeds will help to reflect on the extent to which these artefacts could hamper or facilitate the movement of individuals through space. At the same time, this variety of \u27walls/boundaries’ become territories themselves. Hence, this visual project aims to be a territorial study of urban barriers. At the same time, it considers the convergence of the cultural, the performative and the socio-political within the city\u27s social fabric.
The theoretical framework of our views may be placed within the anthropology of visual communication as conceived by Worth (1981), Ruby (1981, 2005), Canevacci (1997), and Pink (2013). Hence, we undertake an interpretative visual search that stresses communication dynamics and modes of visual representation.
Leeds, with its spaces and borders, is narrated through interactive microhistories. This interactive audiovisual portrait highlights whether these artefacts could hamper or facilitate the movement of individuals through space
Ephemera to Excess: How Fatness Lingered and Queerness Emerged Right on Time
No full textThis article highlights the ways that heteropatriarchal norms and family traditions around fatness and queerness in the American South create an unwanted, lingering presence on and in the bodies of those who suppress their natural, non-normative identities. Drawing upon a cultural rhetorics framework that centers storytelling, and utilizing elements of both affect theory and theories of embodiment to understand the emotional entanglements that cultural pressure encourages, I will discuss my own story of fatness and queerness, focusing specifically on how various people “welcomed” me into the harmful communities of self-hate and queer-suppression. Using Deborah Brandt’s (1998) concept, I draw the conclusion that these people acted as “literacy sponsors” by teaching me the norms, discourses, and practices about communities/spaces that both expressed love and hate for the body and identity that I inhabit. In doing this, I ask: If I was never “welcomed” into these communities/spaces, would the effects/affects of fatphobia and queer shame linger on/in my body? Might I have embraced my fatness and queerness earlier in life rather than coming out in my late 30s? And, finally, in trying to articulate it, have I embraced my full, embodied potential?
Using story as theory (Powell et al., 2014) and drawing on Ahmed’s (2014) and Micciche’s (2007) ideas that emotions leave a sticky residue–an ephemera, if you will–in their wake, I will trace the moments of self-discovery where and when my body rejected and, eventually, embraced non-normative physical, emotional, and sexual identities. Told in a series of nonfiction vignettes and interwoven with scholarly research, I seek to engage with my audience through personal stories of vulnerability in an attempt to destigmatize how embracing fatness and queerness in midlife encourages an exploration of the lingering emotional ephemera embodied in us all.
References
Ahmed, S. (2014). The cultural politics of emotion. Routledge.
Brandt, D. (1998). Sponsors of literacy. CCC, 49(2), 165-185.
Micciche, L. (2007). Doing emotion: Rhetoric, writing, teaching. Boynton/Cook.
Powell, M., Levy. D., Riley-Mukavetz, A., Brooks-Gillies, M., Novotny, M., & Fisch-Ferguson, J. (2014). Our story begins here: Constellating cultural rhetorics. Enculturation. Retrieved November 3, 2022, from https://www.enculturation.net/our-story-begins-her
Comparing the Performance of PCM Macroencapsulated Capsules and Prisms of Different Shapes
No full textPhase change materials (PCMs) have been utilized in various applications for thermal energy storage, with macroencapsulation and microencapsulation being the two main methods for their encapsulation. Spheres and cylinders are commonly used as macroencapsulation shapes. This study aimed to investigate the impact of macroencapsulation shape on the performance of a macroencapsulated PCM (sodium acetate trihydrate) in terms of its charging and discharging processes. Numerical simulations were conducted on 3.7615E -4 m3 stainless steel PCM macrocapsules of different shapes classified as compact and long. The macrocapsules were subjected to a constant temperature of 85 °C for 2600 s, followed by energy discharge by applying a 30 °C boundary condition for additional 2600 s. The results indicated that long shapes outperformed compact shapes. Furthermore, the long shape with a triangular cross-section also performed best among the samples. Based on these findings, it was concluded that the macrocapsule\u27s shape impacts the charging and discharging process and should be considered when designing thermal energy storages that employ PCMs
Effect of Iinclination Angle on Flow Boiling in Micro-Sized Channels
No full textIn the present study, the effect of inclination angle on micro-channel flow boiling was experimentally investigated. Two different types of micro channel heat sinks, namely, parallel channel (PW-HS) and expanding channel (EC-HS) were used. The test section was mounted on a special angular mechanism being able to be arranged between 0° and 60°. In this regard, five different angles (0°, 15°, 30°, 45° and 60°) were studied. Deionized water entered the heat sink with the mass flux of 225 kg m-2 s-1, and in the experiments inlet temperature of water was nearly 75 °C. Heating power was applied to the heat sinks with 10 W increments between 130 W to 200 W. It is concluded that inclination angle had no significant influence on the heat transfer coefficients obtained for PW-HS. However, effect of inclination angle was significant for the EC-HS. The angle of 45° provided the highest heat transfer coefficients for EC-HS. For the present heat load range, at the angle of 45°, compared to horizontal position (0°), improvements of 101.25% and 20.56% were obtained, respectively, as maximum and minimum
Thermodynamic Investigation of R1234 AND R134A Gas in Vapour Copmpression Refrigeration Cycle
No full textIn this study, a vapor compression refrigeration cycle using R1234yf and R134A refrigerants for air dehumidification has been designed. The air temperature is lowered by the refrigeration cycle and heating is provided by an electric heater in this air dehumidification system. The thermodynamic analysis of the system has been conducted, and the results have been presented in this study. R1234yf is a low GWP refrigerant and its environmental impact is significantly lower than R134A. The use of R1234yf in this system offers environmental benefits and provides an alternative to R134A
Heat, Mass Transfer and Diffusion Problems: Sturm-Liouville Problems with Boundary Conditions Containing Eigenparameter Linearly and Quadratically
No full textIn this extended abstract, we look first at various classical equations of Mathematical Physics. We then show, on an example, how an eigenparameter can appear in a boundary condition of a Sturm-Liouville boundary value problem. We consider quadratical and linear dependence on the eigenparameter. We present operator theoretic treatment of the Sturm-Liouville problem. The ontained results can be interesting both for pure and applied mathematicians