MelbourneDAC, the 5th International Digital Arts and Culture Conference.
May 19 - 23, 2003

Ph. D. Panel Session

The main advice from the experienced Doctorate Candidates:

. don't mess up your life just before you submit the thesis. (keep your boyfriend or husband around until after you have submitted.)
. write about something you like.
. spend time on preparing your work.
. focus on theory - whether you want to use it or develop it.
. write, write, write, present and publish.
. get a good supervisor.

EMOTION and FILM

. Film Structure and the Emotion System by Greg M. Smith

. Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion by Carl Plantinga (Editor), Greg M. Smith (Editor)

. Emotion and the Structure of Narrative Film: Film as an Emotion Machine by Ed S. Tan

. Engaging characters : fiction, emotion, and the cinema by Murray Smith

. The Photoplay a Psychological Study by Hugo Munsterberg

. Understanding Cinema: A Psychological Theory of Moving Imagery by Per Persson

. The Reality of Illusion: An Ecological Approach to Cognitive Film Theory by Joseph D. Anderson

INTERACTIVE CINEMA RESEARCH CENTERS WORLD WIDE

[USA] Interactive Cinema Group - http://ic.media.mit.edu/

[AU] Centre for Interactive Cinema Research - http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/

[NORWAY] Nordic Interactive Cinema Network - http://www.intermedia.uib.no/nicn/


[GERMANY] Future Cinema - http://www.zkm.de/futurecinema/index_e.html

[IRELAND] Media Lab Europe - STORYNETWORKS - http://storynetworks.mle.ie/

More Than a Game: The Computer Game as Fictional Form by Barry Atkins

«The author suggests to use the term "fantastic realism", which is meant to signify the game-world's internal coherence as the crucial factor in the player's suspension of disbelief»

"The text we read watches us over time, it presents the illusion of 'knowing' us as we come to 'know' it, of 'reading's us as we 'read' it" (147).

«Atkins even goes so far as to suggest that interactivity re-invests the work of art with something that it has lost, according to Walter Benjamin, in the age of its mechanical reproduction: its aura. Since players can change the text through their playing, the game becomes unique for each player and is not reproducible in this form.»
review at http://www.game-research.com/art_rev_atkins.asp

Presented paper

"Stereotypes in the Narrative Entertainment Forms"

at International Conference: The Power and Persistence of Stereotyping", Aveiro, Portugal, 27-28 November, 2003

Presented paper

“From the Necessity of Film Closure to Inherent VR Wideness”

at 2nd International Conference on Virtual Storytelling, Published in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Vol. 2897, 2003

Mental Simulation

Simulation is often conceived in cognitive-scientific terms: one's own behavior control system is employed as a manipulable model of other such systems. The system is first taken off-line, so that the output is not actual behavior but only predictions or anticipations of behavior, and inputs and system parameters are accordingly not limited to those that would regulate one's own behavior. Many proponents hold that, because one human behavior control system is being used to model others, general information about such systems is unnecessary. The simulation is thus said to be process-driven rather than theory-driven (Goldman, A.).

In the areas of Empirical Investigation, may have relevance to the debate quetions, like:

Does film narrative create emotional and motivational effects by the same processes that create them in real-life situations?

What do I really want?
What questions do i have?
What am i trying to argument?
How do I give support to my questions and arguments?

Learning Theories

The basic distinction in constructivism is that while behaviorists view knowledge as something that happens in response to external factors, and cognitivists view knowledge as abstract symbolic representations inside the learner's head, constructivists view knowledge as constructed internally by each individual

In Cognitive theories knowledge is viewed as symbolic, mental constructions in the minds of individuals, and learning becomes the process of comitting these symbolic representations to memory where they may be processed.

Cognitive theories emerged as a new perspective employing "information-processing ideas" rather than the behavioristic assumptions that the learner is determined by his environments and so passively adapts to the circumstances