Digital Media

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/43126

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Now showing 1 - 4 of 4

Access status: Open Access ,
Hybrid Space, Hybrid Rhetoric: Spatial Rhetoric in Post-Technological Art
(2025-11-11) He, Xi; Wakefield, Graham
This inquiry investigates the Western-centric bias in spatial rhetoric, defined here as the study of how spatial arrangements construct persuasive arguments, within post-technological experimental art, art that engages with the cultural and material conditions after the initial novelty of techno-mediation has subsided. To counter this bias, I propose a cross-cultural theoretical framework that integrates East Asian artistic philosophies with Western critical perspectives. My analytical approach addresses a tendency within Western models to prioritise singular perspectives and linear temporal progressions when interpreting complex hybrid spatialities, which this dissertation defines as environments blending physical and techno-mediated elements, and layered temporalities. I incorporate East Asian spatial philosophies, such as Shanshui’s fluid temporalities and the “water-stone” dialectic, to analyse these specific artistic characteristics. I synthesise Eastern philosophies with Western critical perspectives into an analytical framework termed the deep-shanshui lens, which integrates the methodologies of chrono-topographic rhetoric and deep mapping. The proposed cross-cultural framework structures the convergence and iterative refinement of the study’s theoretical propositions and practice-based artistic explorations. I re-evaluate rhetoric as an embodied, universal spatial phenomenon and interrogate the “spatial turn,” an existing paradigm in the humanities. I iteratively forge and validate this cross-cultural framework for spatial rhetoric through a practice-led, abductive research methodology, which involves forming explanatory hypotheses from observation. Within this cross-cultural context, I introduce “chrono-topographic rhetoric” and “deep mapping” as analytical tools. These conceptual instruments dissect how post-technological systems reconfigure spatio-temporal experience and its connections to memory and cultural identity. My two artistic series, “Post-Bits Human Universe” and “Post-Lingnan School of Paintings,” provide sites for the cross-cultural framework’s practical application and iterative refinement. Analysis of the artworks demonstrates how the projects utilise East Asian logic to develop tools for making post-technological art. My iterative and reflective practice-based inquiry culminates in the proposed cross-cultural theoretical framework, now practice-informed and designed to foster a more inclusive and reflexive interpretation of hybrid art forms in contemporary artistic practices interacting with the nexus of space, technology, and cultural heritage.
Access status: Open Access ,
Patch Histories and Forking Paths: Version Control as Creative Practice in Modular Synthesis
(2025-11-11) Palumbo, Michael John Joseph; Wakefield, Graham
This dissertation addresses a gap in software for multiplayer modular synthesis, demonstrating how version control systems and web technologies are well-suited to closing it. The rationale rests on two observations. First, a modular synthesizer is, by definition, an interoperable system: individual modules can be recombined, swapped, or even distributed among several performers to create a shared instrument. Yet in practice most hardware and software setups are optimized for a single player, leaving little support for real-time, many-hands interaction. Second, a defining pleasure of modular synthesis is that the instrument can be rewired on the fly, transforming its topology mid-performance. Capturing those evolutions is notoriously difficult. Hardware musicians rely on photographs or handwritten patch notes, which rarely recreate a state with fidelity. Software modular synthesizers make it possible to save entire patches, but they record only the endpoints--full snapshots--without the in-between: the granular sequence of cable changes, button presses, and knob turns that give a performance its arc. As these incremental transformations are vital to how the instrument can be played, analyzed, and studied, the field needs tooling that treats patch histories as first-class data, editable and shareable across multiple players in real time. Drawing on the three established generations of version control systems, this dissertation also posits a fourth generation, defined by the emergence of platform-based social coding and real-time protocols that support live co-editing of documents. A new musical instrument named Forking Paths is introduced to address this gap: a system that integrates software version control architecture into a virtual modular synthesizer to document the entire process of patching--creating patch histories. This capability facilitates new techniques in digital music performance, such as analyzing differences between knob turns across histories, merging gestures, isolating and looping segments of history, and branching from specific points for further exploration. Moreover, a real-time version control system enables the instrument to support multiple players from the ground up, facilitating participatory and collective patching of a shared modular system.
Access status: Open Access ,
Perceiving Planetarity: Computation, Climate and the Emergence of Envirographic Art
(2025-11-11) Grothaus, Sarah Grace; Hosale, Mark-David
This dissertation proposes the term envirographic art to denote a new branch of data-driven digital media that utilizes environmental data as an artistic medium to interrogate and communicate the complex realities of planetary ecologies and the climate crisis. Whereas the history of digital media has often overlooked environmental imperatives, envirographic art transforms imperceptible ecological phenomena into sensory experiences, making them accessible to a broader audience. Grounded in the historical evolution of climatology and computational media, and informed by theoretical frameworks such as planetarity and the holobiont concept (which both emphasize the interconnectedness of organisms and ecosystems), this research-creation inquiry outlines three core methodologies: (1) translating raw environmental data into visual, auditory, and tactile forms; (2) engaging the public through citizen science and participatory practices; and (3) fostering transdisciplinary collaborations between artists, scientists, and creative technologists. The proposed approach is exemplified through the presentation and analysis of six artworks developed by the author be-tween 2021 and 2025, which demonstrate how digital mediation can render complex ecological processes both visible and experientially engaging. The findings underscore envirographic art as a replicable frame-work for generating environmental dialogue and advocacy. Future research will extend these methods to projects addressing air pollution, interspecies communication, and soil health visualization, further exploring the potential of art to serve as an empirical interface for understanding and responding to planetary-scale challenges.
Access status: Open Access ,
Lightning Artist Toolkit: A Hand-Drawn Volumetric Animation Pipeline
(2025-07-23) Fox-Gieg, Nicholas Allan; Wakefield, Graham
This research contributes a set of methods for freely integrating live-action volumetric video with hand-drawn volumetric animation. The Kinect, the first consumer depth camera, arrived in 2010; in 2016, the HTC Vive headset introduced the first mass-market 6DoF controllers. Combined, these two advances unlocked a new approach to creating frame-by-frame animation with 6DoF drawing tools, which my research has developed as the Lightning Artist Toolkit—a complete pipeline for hand-drawn volumetric animation; at the time of writing, the only open-source example of its kind. The goal of the project is to make creation in 3D as expressive and intuitive as creation in 2D, by retaining the human gesture from its origins in hand-drawn animation on paper. Importing and manipulating scanned photographic images alongside handmade drawings has been a core feature of 2D image editing and animation tools for over fifty years. Initially, applying raster editing capabilities to real-world animation production was impractical—so the earliest hand-drawn computer-animated short films used 2D vector strokes. Today, operating naïvely on 3D voxels similarly requires excessive computational resources to be scaled up for even a few minutes of high-resolution footage, and working with 3D vector graphics representations offers a promising solution. At this project’s core is a collection of applied machine learning systems that transform live-action volumetric video into a sequence of volumetric brushstroke vectors. Integrated into a conventional animation workflow, this is suitable for the practical production of hand-drawn 3D animated short films in an XR drawing system. The contribution is less a computer vision challenge with an objective goal, as with for example point cloud segmentation, than it is an attempt to approximate the aesthetics of human vision—to generate a collection of brushstrokes from a point cloud that resembles what an artist might draw from scratch in XR, in imitation of a drawing process that records as markings the information from a scene that was subjectively important to an individual artist. In addition to supporting animation production through this workflow, this project also contributes a large public dataset of 3D drawings that may be usable in new and unexpected ways.

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