Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence

Directed by D. W. Griffith Produced by D. W. Griffith Harry Aitken[1] Screenplay by D. W. Griffith Frank E. Woods Based on The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots by T. F. Dixon Jr. Starring Lillian Gish Mae Marsh Henry B. Walthall Miriam Cooper Ralph Lewis George Siegmann Walter Long Music by Joseph Carl Breil Cinematography G. W. Bitzer Edited by D. W. Griffith Production company David W. Griffith Corp. The Birth of a Nation

The Birth of a Nation

Joseph D. Anderson. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1996. 200 pp. $29.95. Recently there has been growth of scientific interest in film and video. This interest has coalesced into cognitive film theory. Unlike psychoanalytic, Marxist, and feminist approaches, cognitive film theory neither offers nor seeks any analysis of cultural, historical, or political influences on film or on viewers. Instead, the central idea is that film succeeds because it meshes with our perceptual and cognitive endowment. From this view follows interest in such things as why flicker and flickerless images occur, how form and motion are perceived stripped of their meaning, how color and lighting work stripped of their effects on mood, how lens effects and shot angles affect perceived space, and how continuity and the juxtaposition of shots and cuts imply narrative structure. These topics and more are addressed with considerable clarity in Joseph Anderson's The Reality of Illusion. But Anderson's book is not simply about cognitive film theory. Its subtitle, An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory, allies it with a particular approach within the cognitive sciences, that of James J. Gibson.1Gibson looked to match the constraints of evolutionary biology to everyday human tasks and activities. Thus, Anderson's book is about the evolutionary constraints on human eyes and minds and how these have shaped film. Before Anderson's book, there was no systematic ecological approach to film.2 Anderson begins (I) with two questions: "Why [in a film] do the spokes of a wheel turn backward?" and "Why does a movie seem so real?" The answer to the first is straightforward, and is typical of the focus of his first five chapters. Backward wagon wheels refer to two phenomena, stroboscopic motion and structure-from-motion. The discrete presentation of frames in film (at 72 frames per second) is generally above the temporal resolving capacity of the human visual system. Thus, most motion is seen as smooth and correct. But these discrete frames also make separate images of adjacent spokes closer together than those of the same spoke. The visual system then assigns identity to these adjacent spokes, and the wheel looks as if it turns, often smoothly, backward.] Attempts at partial answers to the second question-about the "reality" of film-run throughout Anderson's book. The question runs deep. Part of an answer, not addressed by Anderson, concerns projected size-the larger (in terms of visual angle) and the better the resolution, the more a viewer feels like he or she is "in" the display.4 The effect of wide screens is that, while we focus more locally on characters and content, the layout and motion presented to our peripheral visual systems surrounding that focus very much control our visceral responses. Anderson's introductory chapter outlines differences between cognitive film theory and other approaches, and the second builds an understanding of the ecology of cinema-that is, the manner in which film has adapted to the auditory and visual systems of humans. It also contains a theoretical aside on the places of illusion (a term Anderson uses a bit more broadly than in the cognitive sciences) and computation in perceptual and cognitive theory. The third chapter concerns capacities and strategies of the cognitive system, with particular attention to the resolution of ambiguity and the categorization of natural objects around us. Traditionally and currently, these are wellresearched topics in cognitive science about the mental activity of building coherence from the world around us. The fourth chapter is the lengthiest and dives into specifics of flicker, motion, form, color, and depth perception. Anderson reviews the evidence for the generally separable parts of the human visual system that process form, color, and motion and depth. That is, the form system cares little about color or motion, the color system cares little about location and motion, and the motion and depth system cares little about form or color. …

The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory

Review(s) of: Learning theory and online technologies, by Harasim, L. (2012), New York/London: Routledge (pp. 198).

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Learning theory and online technologies

Creating or arranging objects at runtime is needed in many virtual reality applications, but such changes are noticed when they occur inside the user's field of view. We present Mise-Unseen, a software system that applies such scene changes covertly inside the user's field of view. Mise-Unseen leverages gaze tracking to create models of user attention, intention, and spatial memory to determine if and when to inject a change. We present seven applications of Mise-Unseen to unnoticeably modify the scene within view (i) to hide that task difficulty is adapted to the user, (ii) to adapt the experience to the user's preferences, (iii) to time the use of low fidelity effects, (iv) to detect user choice for passive haptics even when lacking physical props, (v) to sustain physical locomotion despite a lack of physical space, (vi) to reduce motion sickness during virtual locomotion, and (vii) to verify user understanding during story progression. We evaluated Mise-Unseen and our applications in a user study with 15 participants and find that while gaze data indeed supports obfuscating changes inside the field of view, a change is rendered unnoticeably by using gaze in combination with common masking techniques.

Mise-Unseen: Using Eye Tracking to Hide Virtual Reality Scene Changes in Plain Sight

Fright, attention, and joy while killing zombies in Virtual Reality: A psychophysiological analysis of VR user experience

Eyetracking studies of traditional movies have shown that although viewers are free to look at any part of a film or television clip, the gaze behaviours of viewers predominantly cluster ar...

Headset attentional synchrony: tracking the gaze of viewers watching narrative virtual reality

The LudoVico UX Machine -- A FREELY AVAILABLE SOFTWARE FOR USABILITY TESTING. Gathering and the interpretation of usability data is a rather challenging task. We implemented a new tool for recording, archiving, and interpreting sensor data from user-experience (UX) experiments. The tool is capable of handling any type of sensor data. The current version of the tool named "The LudoVico UX Machine" is contributed as freely available tool to the UX community. It shall assist user experience designers in managing their experimental data. The current version is capable of handling medical and biofeedback data, which can be archived, analyzed, and visualized. Future implementations will include generic sensor data via a plug-in concept, and provide data-analysis capability to get deeper insights into gathered data. The tool shall contribute with a new technology to support the interaction design process across applications: smart cities, smart living, smart interaction, urban informatics, health, sustainable living, audience response, or biofeedback. The tool will be made available in mid-2016 and can be found on: http://www.artur-lugmayr.com.

Free UX Testing Tool: The LudoVico UX Machine for Physiological Sensor Data Recording, Analysis, and Visualization for User Experience Design Experiments

This paper uses the online threats of violence to Roosh V and Return of Kings — blogs relating to pick-up artist culture and “neo-masculinity” — as a case study to examine the ways in which people use social media as a technology of the self. In early 2016, groups mobilized online using the Facebook platform to protest meet-ups that had been planned by Roosh V for his supporters. Some of the Facebook users responded with extreme suggestions to rape Roosh and the Return of Kings members themselves, violating them with sharp objects, as well as outright murder. In this paper I am interested in a specific question related to governmentality: what do these hateful, violent threats suggest about the way people use social media as a form of self-governance?

“Happy to provide the knives”: Governmentality and threats of violence via social media in the case of Roosh V and Return of Kings

This dissertation examines the style of films from the World War 2 combat genre, addressing films made during WW2 and in the following half century and focuses on major Hollywood productions. Using a theoretical framework derived from the work of David Bordwell and Ian Hunter, I show that existing film criticism has concentrated on the narratives of these texts, often using analytic practice as a stimulus for critical self-analysis. For this reason, academic cinema studies has a limited understanding of the stylistic attributes of these films and in some instances the knowledge that has been produced is demonstrably false.

 I analyze in detail the style of four films made during the 1942-1945 period, as well as four films produced in the 2000s. These primary texts are supplemented with analysis of a number of other films in order to identify the stylistic norms of cinematography, sound, editing, and performance of death in the WW2 infantry combat film. 

The thesis argues for an understanding of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) based upon Kristin Thompson’s approach of neoformalism. I use this approach to argue that Ryan’s hand-held cinematography, staging techniques, and sound design can best be understood as creating the effect of defamiliarization for viewers accustomed to existing cinematic representations of combat. Additionally, I argue that contemporary approaches to performance and mise-enscene suggest that the genre’s approach to realism has evolved to favor a significant increase in detail. Using cognitivist research into the imagination and mental simulations, I further argue that the increased audio-visual details enable the viewer’s imagination to more vividly render the scenario presented by the fiction. While these particular details may or may not have close(r) correlation to the real world, they produce an effect which I call “reported realism.” My conclusion shows that similar developments are apparent in first-person combat shooter video games.

Stuart Bender

Papers

Fright, attention, and joy while killing zombies in Virtual Reality: A psychophysiological analysis of VR user experience

Headset attentional synchrony: tracking the gaze of viewers watching narrative virtual reality

Free UX Testing Tool: The LudoVico UX Machine for Physiological Sensor Data Recording, Analysis, and Visualization for User Experience Design Experiments

“Happy to provide the knives”: Governmentality and threats of violence via social media in the case of Roosh V and Return of Kings

Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre