Predication and propagation : a method for analyzing evaluative meanings in technology policy

In this article I outline and demonstrate a synthesis of the methods developed by Lemke (1998) and Martin (2000) for analyzing evaluations in English. I demonstrate the synthesis using examples from a 1.3-million-word technology policy corpus drawn from institutions at the local, state, national, and supranational levels. Lemke's (1998) critical model is organized around the broad 'evaluative dimensions' that are deployed to evaluate propositions and proposals in English. Martin's (2000) model is organized with a more overtly systemic-functional orientation around the concept of 'encoded feeling'. In applying both these models at different times, whilst recognizing their individual usefulness and complementarity, I found specific limitations that led me to work towards a synthesis of the two approaches. I also argue for the need to consider genre, media, and institutional aspects more explicitly when claiming intertextual and heteroglossic relations as the basis for inferred evaluations. A basic assertion made in this article is that the perceived Desirability of a process, person, circumstance, or thing is identical to its 'value'. But the Desirability of anything is a socially and thus historically conditioned attribution that requires significant amounts of institutional inculcation of other 'types' of value-appropriateness, importance, beauty, power, and so on. I therefore propose a method informed by critical discourse analysis (CDA) that sees evaluation as happening on at least four interdependent levels of abstraction.

Product placement in US and New Zealand television soap operas : an exploratory study

Although the soap opera as a television genre has consistently captured the imagination of millions of people around the world, surprisingly little has been written about it in the marketing literature. Understanding the consumption imagery in soaps may allow marketers to assess the relevance of product placement for their promotion strategy better, as well as providing valuable insight into the consumption habits of their considerable viewing audiences. Data were collected through content analysis from two soap operas, one in the USA and one in New Zealand. The results indicated a high level of consumption imagery, including brand references. Furthermore significant differences in the types of product and the emotional outcome of product use were found between the countries.

‘Storyline patents’: are plots patentable?

The most interesting questions that arise in patent law are the ones that test the boundaries of patentable subject matter. One of those questions has been put forward recently in the United States in an argument in favour of patenting the plots of fictional stories. United States attorney Andrew F Knight has claimed that storylines are patentable subject matter and should be recognised as such. What he claims is patentable is not the copyrightable expression of a written story or even a written outline of a plot but the underlying plot of a story itself. The commercial application of ‘storyline patents’, as he describes them, is said to be their exclusive use in books and movies. This article analyses the claims made and argues that storylines are not patentable subject matter under Australian law. It also contends that policy considerations, as well as the very nature of creative works, weigh against recognition of ‘storyline patents’.

Whither culture? Australian horror films and the limitations of cultural policy

Cultural policy that attempts to foster the Australian film industry’s growth and development in an era of globalisation is coming under increasing pressure. Throughout the 2000s, there has been a substantial boom in Australian horror films led by ‘runaway’ horror film Saw (2004), Wolf Creek (2005), and Undead (2003), achieving varying levels of popularity and commercial success worldwide. However, emerging within a national cinema driven by public subsidy and valuing ‘quality’ and ‘cultural content’ over ‘entertainment’ and ‘commercialism’, horror films have generally been antithetical to these objectives. Consequently, the recent boom in horror films has occurred largely outside the purview and subvention of cultural policy. This paper argues that global forces and emerging production and distribution models are challenging the ‘narrowness’ of cultural policy – a narrowness that mandates a particular film culture, circumscribes certain notions of value and limits the variety of films produced domestically. Despite their low-culture status, horror films have been well suited to the Australian film industry’s financial limitations, they are a growth strategy for producers, and a training ground for emerging filmmakers.

The missing puzzle : birth of a format

The art of storytelling is one of the oldest forms of creative discourse. Apart from finding stories, the most important job in television is the construction of stories to have a broad audience appeal. This first-hand review of Missing Persons Unit, hereafter referred to as MPU, a prime time program on the Nine Network in Australia with immense audience appeal, is an original work by the executive producer (development and series producer Series One, executive producer Series Two and Three) based on an overview of two-and-a-half years of production on three series. Through a case study approach, this Masters project explores how story is constructed into a television format. The thesis comprises two parts: the creative component (weighted 50%) is demonstrated through two programs of MPU (one program for evaluation) and the academic component through a written exegesis (50%). This case study aims to demonstrate how observational hybrid series such as MPU can be managed to quick turn-around schedules with precise skill sets that cut across a number of traditional genre styles. With the advent of radio and then television, storytelling found a home and a series of labels called genres to help place them in a schedule for listeners and viewers to choose. Over recent years, with the advent of digital technology and the rush to collect the masses of content required to feed the growing television slate, storytelling has often been replaced by story gathering. Today even in factual series where a clear story construct is important, third party ‘quick fix’ specialists are hired to shape raw content shot by a field team, who never put their own work together and may never come into the edit suite during a project. This thesis explores the art of storytelling in fast turn-around television. In particular it explores the layer cake approach used in the production process of MPU, that enables producers of fast turn-around television to shepherd their own stories from field through to post-production. While each new hybrid series will require its own particular sets of skills, the exploration of the genesis of MPU will demonstrate the building blocks required to successfully produce this type of factual series. This study is also intended as a ‘road map’ for producers who wish to develop similar series.

Restrung New Chamber Festival : Bridging the Gap Between High Art Music and Popular Sensibilities

The Restrung New Chamber Festival was a practice-led research project which explored the intricacies of musical relationships. Specifically, it investigated the relationships between new music ensembles and pop-oriented bands inspired by the new music genre. The festival, held at the Brisbane Powerhouse (28 February-2 March 2009) comprised 17 diverse groups including the Brodsky Quartet, Topology, Wood, Fourplay and CODA. Restrung used a new and distinctive model which presented new music and syncretic musical genres within an immersive environment. Restrung brought together approaches used in both contemporary classical and popular music festivals, using musical, visual and spatial aspects to engage audiences. Interactivity was encouraged through video and sound installations, workshops and forums. This paper will investigate some of the issues surrounding the conception and design of the Restrung model, within the context of an overview of European new music trends. It includes a discussion of curating such an event in a musically sensitive and effective way, and approaches to identifying new and receptive audiences. As a guide to programming Restrung, I formulated a working definition of new music, further developed by interviews with specialists in Australia and Europe, and this will be outlined below.

Is there something quantum-like about the human mental lexicon?

This talk proceeds from the premise that IR should engage in a more substantial dialogue with cognitive science. After all, how users decide relevance, or how they chose terms to modify a query are processes rooted in human cognition. Recently, there has been a growing literature applying quantum theory (QT) to model cognitive phenomena. This talk will survey recent research, in particular, modelling interference effects in human decision making. One aspect of QT will be illustrated - how quantum entanglement can be used to model word associations in human memory. The implications of this will be briefly discussed in terms of a new approach for modelling concept combinations. Tentative links to human adductive reasoning will also be drawn. The basic theme behind this talk is QT can potentially provide a new genre of information processing models (including search) more aligned with human cognition.

Introducing Mr Perky : subverting the fantasy trope of immortality in contemporary speculative fiction

The Tide Lords series of fantasy novels set out to examine the issue of immortality. Its purpose was to look at the desirability of immortality, specifically why people actively seek it. It was meant to examine the practicality of immortality, specifically — having got there, what does one do to pass the time with eternity to fill? I also wished to examine the notion of true immortality — immortals who could not be killed. What I did not anticipate when embarking upon this series, and what did not become apparent until after the series had been sold to two major publishing houses in Australia and the US, was the strength of the immortality tropes. This series was intended to fly in the face of these tropes, but confronted with the reality of such a work, the Australian publishers baulked at the ideas presented, requesting the series be re-written with the tropes taken into consideration. They wanted immortals who could die, mortals who wanted to be immortal. And a hero with a sense of humour. This exegesis aims to explore where these tropes originated. It will also discuss the ways I negotiated a way around the tropes, and was eventually able to please the publishers by appearing to adhere to the tropes, while still staying true to the story I wanted to tell. As such, this discussion is, in part, an analysis of how an author negotiates the tensions around writing within a genre while trying to innovate within it.

Just Relations : Indigenous families in Australian lifestyle media

This paper argues that the increasing visibility of Indigenous families in the mainstream Australian media over the past ten years has produced new opportunities for addressing national injustices of the Stolen Generations. It shows how, as certain celebrities like Ernie Dingo, Nova Peris and Cathy Freeman, have become popular household names, a concurrent public interest in their family backgrounds has grown. Descriptive accounts of relationships and shared histories – propelled by the expansion of the lifestyle television genre in this context – has enabled some stories of the ‘Stolen Generations’ to be seen as ‘ordinary’, and part of a broader sense of everyday Australian life for the first time. With the aid of recent sexual citizenship research, the article illustrates that such middle-class representations give voice to new embodiments of citizenship in the post-apology era, making Indigenous justice more subjectively interconnected with life in the white Australian public sphere.

Investigating Texts

The first chapter called 'Investigating texts' asks students to investigate the concept of text and what it might mean to 'behave like a reader'. After reading and comparing two short stories, the question, 'what is a story?' is posed. Students are then asked to distinguish a fiction text from a number of non-fiction texts and to identify the sources of the latter. It is suggested that although it is quite easy to perform these tasks, it is not so easy to describe texts in terms only of their features or ingredients; that it is necessary to talk about how texts are read, and what is more, how they are read on particular occasions. 'Making texts', the second chapter, asks students via a series of activities to consider what they expect of texts, and to investigate the conventions of fiction and non-fiction. They are given the opportunity to manipulate the 'ingredients' of texts, to read in terms of commonalities and to speculate about the rules by which both the composition and consumption of texts are organised. The ways in which particular kinds of reading and writing activities assume the text as a certain kind of object - as a model, for example, or as an object of criticism or as an occasion for self-questioning - is made explicit, and students are encouraged to investigate a range of uses of texts and the implications of these for reading and writing. Chapter three, 'Changing texts' asks students to consider, through a number of fascinating examples, how both fiction and non-fiction texts have changed over time, and how the ways in which readers read texts can change too. The 'retelling' of texts in terms of changing norms is considered via an 'updated' version of 'Scheherazade'; a student's feminist adaptation of her own text (initially written using a romance as a model), and an encyclopedia entry. 'Reading practices', the fourth chapter, poses further questions about different ways of reading. Through reading a number of didactic texts alongside three stories from a genre that is not usually read for morally improving lessons, students are asked to consider how different their reading practices can be.

Inertial motion capture and live performance (with a focus on dance)

3D Motion capture is a fast evolving field and recent inertial technology may expand the artistic possibilities for its use in live performance. Inertial motion capture has three attributes that make it suitable for use with live performance; it is portable, easy to use and can operate in real-time. Using four projects, this paper discusses the suitability of inertial motion capture to live performance with a particular emphasis on dance. Dance is an artistic application of human movement and motion capture is the means to record human movement as digital data. As such, dance is clearly a field in which the use of real-time motion capture is likely to become more common, particularly as projected visual effects including real-time video are already often used in dance performances. Understandably, animation generated in real-time using motion capture is not as extensive or as clean as the highly mediated animation used in movies and games, but the quality is still impressive and the ‘liveness’ of the animation has compensating features that offer new ways of communicating with an audience.

Filled pauses

An installation of sculptural works that continues the artist's exploration of self-portraiture. Comprising a series of triadic structures (bust, socle and plaster residue) the works propose a formal and conceptual equivalence between the portrait bust and traces of its technical and historical origins. Arranged haphazardly in the space, the resultant works speak of the exhaustion of portraiture as a genre while simultaneously attesting to an autogenic notion of practice in which portraiture acts as a vital catalyst.

Art and the sublime : the paradox of indeterminacy unknowing and (dis)orientation in the presentation of the unpresentable

the (dis)orientation of thought in its encounter with art can be understood as the direct result of an encounter with indeterminacy as a lack in meaning. As an artist I am aware of how this indeterminacy impacts on the perceived value and authority of the artistic voice and in particular its value as a research voice. This paper explores this indeterminacy of meaning, as a profound and disturbing unknowing characteristic of the sublime and argues its value to advanced thought and for any methodological understanding of practice-led research. Lyotard described the sublime as an ‘understanding’ through which art and its associated practices may be able to resist an all too easy assimilation by the public as just a consumer commodity. His thought represents an attempt to both politically and philosophically understand art’s, and particularly abstract painting’s, affect as a state of profound and positive unknowing. To talk of the sublime in art is to speak of the suspension of any comfortable certainty in being and instead to engage with the real as a limit to meaning and knowing. It is to talk of the presentation of the unpresentable as a momentary but significant dissolution of representation. This understanding of the sublime is then further explored through the cultural phenomena of the monochrome painting and applied to the work of the two contemporary artists, Franz Erhard Walter and Günter Umberg. Initially the monochrome was understood as an attempt to go beyond traditional representation and present the unpresentable. In the one hundred years or so since that initial move this understanding has broadened. The monochrome now presents itself as a genre or even project within visual art but it still has much to teach us. In the concretely abstract and performative artworks of Franz Erhard Walter and Günter Umberg, traces of this ambition remain and their work can be seen to pose questions probing our understandings and experiences of artistic meaning, its value and the real.

Independent television production, TV formats and media diversity in China

Beginning around 2003, television studies has seen the growth of interest in the genre of reality shows. However, concentrating on this genre has tended to sideline the even more significant emergence of the program format as a central mode of business and culture in the new television landscape. "Localizing Global TV" redresses this balance, and heralds the emergence of an important, exciting and challenging area of television studies. Topics explored include reality TV, makeover programs, sitcoms, talent shows and fiction serials, as well as broadcaster management policies, production decision chains and audience participation processes. This seminal work will be of considerable interest to media scholars internationally.

Australian cinema’s dark sun : the boom in Australian horror film production

There has been a boom in Australian horror movie production in recent years. Daybreakers (2010), Wolf Creek (2005), Rogue (2007), Undead (2003), Black Water (2008), and Storm Warning (2006) among others, have all experienced varying degrees of popularity, mainstream visibility, and cult success in worldwide horror markets. While Aussie horror’s renaissance is widely acknowledged in industry literature, there is limited research into the extent of the boom and the dynamics of production. Consequently, there are few explanations for why and how this surge has occurred. This paper argues that the recent growth in Australian horror films has been driven by intersecting international market forces, domestic financing factors, and technological change. In so doing, it identifies two distinct tiers of Australian horror film production: ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’ production; though overlap between these two tiers results in ‘high-end indie’ films capable of cinema release. Each tier represents the high and low-ends of Australian horror film production, each with different financing, production, and distribution models.