ImaginaryWorldsSymposium

ISBN: 0-646-45239-8

A Home for Heroes: The Incredibles Domestic Design.
Dr Michael Hill (University of Technology, Sydney)

"No Capes!" Uber Fashion and How "Luck Favours the Prepared". Constructing Contemporary Superhero Identities in American Popular Culture.
Dr Vicki Karaminas (University of Technology, Sydney)

Representing Traumatic Space
Dirk de Bruyn (Deakin University, Victoria)

Composing Space: Cinema and Computer Gaming – The Macro-Mise en Scene and Spatial Composition.
Mike Jones (The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney)

Imaging Gameplay – The Design and Construction of Spatial Worlds
Bernadette Flynn (Griffith University, Queensland)

Reading Space in Watchmen
Dr Spiros Xenos (Independent Scholar)

Tactual Comic Books for Children with Vision Impairment
Michael Sutjiadi (Independent Scholar)

Fantastic Architecture and the Building of Europe in Valerio Evangelisti’s Eymerich Fiction
Dr Maja Mikula (University of Technology, Sydney)

A Home for Heroes: The Incredibles Domestic Design.
Dr Michael Hill (University of Technology, Sydney)

Abstract
In the animated film The Incredibles (2004) a dysfunctional family of superheroes is forced to go undercover and to refrain from practising heroic deeds and demonstrating their special powers. In an attempt to give it the image of normalcy this fictional family is placed within a stylishly designed modernist home filled with 1950s furniture, futuristic appliances and pastel colours and located in suburbia somewhere in North America. Deprived of doing what they really love this imposed lifestyle becomes quite frustrating for them. Inevitably, behind closed doors, in this fashionably designed domestic environment their special powers are occasionally expressed in mundane situations such as doing the housework, attending school or participating in the family dinner. This paper examines the design and animation process involved in the construction of this private living space and its links to the imaginary world of comic books and superheroes. The thinking on animation and design theorists such as Cholodenko, Clark, Furniss, Buchanan, Margolin and Csikszentmihalyi is applied to this scenario in particular and to animation in general and a wider argument for the placement of animation within Film Studies is also enunciated.

Read the full paper (pdf, 52kb)

"No Capes!" Uber Fashion and How "Luck Favours the Prepared". Constructing Contemporary Superhero Identities in American Popular Culture.
Dr Vicki Karaminas (University of Technology, Sydney)

Abstract
Fashion speaks a distinct language, which emblematises the essence of its social and cultural context. Whether local or global, historical or contemporary, dress acts as a confessional that offers evidence of the practices and ideals of a given time. Fashion in this sense is not merely a passive reflection on society, but serves as a vehicle for circulating patterns of consumption and ideology that are tied to notions of the body and the self.

The superhero wardrobe operates within such a language. It speaks of the identity of the wearer and serves to highlight the supernatural abilities and attributes of their heroic status. As part of an iconic signifier, the über garment separates those with superhuman strength from mere mortals. In colour, in design, in patterns of nationhood, in nanotechnological distinctiveness, one can argue that the superhero outfit is more than the character itself; that once depleted of the garb, the hero is merely an action figure, of course, without style.

This paper draws on cultural and design theorists to look at the functional persuasions of lycra and microfibre on superheroes of contemporary popular culture. The mask, the cape, the tight-fitting, muscle-revealing garment historically viewed as incidental to a character, is given focus as this paper examines the fabrics used, the practicality of the garment itself and the unique identifiers that make a superhero outfit a stylish accompaniment to any superhero.

In uncertain times, where it is trendy to examine fictional characters from a cultural perspective, this paper brings the superhero down to the level of the clothes horse, and raises them up again to being better identified as a bird, a plane, but moreso than that: as someone who is privileged with a great wardrobe.

Read the full paper (pdf, 79kb)

Representing Traumatic Space
Dirk de Bruyn (Deakin University, Victoria)

Abstract
This presentation will begin by the screening of Traum a Dream (2003, 7 mins, Digital Video, Sound)

A representation of traumatised space, depicting a person who is consumed by a body of pain, consumed by fire. Slowly something is remembered (Festival Catalogue: Transmediale.03. February 2003).

The screening will allow a discussion of some of the material embedded in and ideas used in the film’s construction. This includes Atwood’s view of the colony as victim, Peter pan and never-never-land, Kroker’s concept of the panicked body as it relates to the cinema of Mike Hoolboom’s hyper-collage and also the use of the abstract and repetition to depict the process of remembering, re-ordering and forgetting. It is also suggested that Random Access Memory as a method of information storage in Digital Media can provide a model for the architecture of traumatised space and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Read the full paper (pdf, 75kb)

Composing Space: Cinema and Computer Gaming – The Macro-Mise en Scene and Spatial Composition.
Mike Jones (The Powerhouse Museum, Sydney)

Abstract
For some time the influence of cinema on computer gaming has been immediately recognizable but recent years have seen a reversal of this movement.

Through its short history cinema has presented little notion of an imagined space beyond the defined borders of the cinematic frame. Frames capture a composed image in totality, complete unto itself. Cuts shift between wholly framed spaces. Tracking and panning moves through a series of successive frames, each complete. There is an unvoiced acceptance on the part of viewers that all that is important in a scene will take place within the screen’s frame.

But in the 21st century, many of the key aesthetics of audience acceptance and visual understanding of a broader cinematic space derive not from cinema but from computer gaming. A larger, more complex imaginary world composed by an auteur in-space rather than in-frame.

The process of designing and producing a 3D game is both aesthetically and practically that of creating a macro-mise en scene containing the entire imaginary world. During game play individual frames will be ’composed’ by the camera/player but the larger macro-mise en scene remains fully intact and the player/viewer’s awareness of it as a composition is never diminished.

This presentation will look at the changing notion of the cinematic imaginary space based on multi-channel sound and computer gaming aesthetics. It will examine sound design in films such as Gus Van Sant’s Elephant under the influence of Doom3 and Half Life 2 games as a key example of a new compositional sensibility that privileges a macro-mise en scene space above the specifics of the individual frame and, moreover, constructs for an audience a functional acceptance of a larger directorial composition; one that stretches far beyond the borders of the TV screen.

Read the full paper (pdf, 75kb)

Imaging Gameplay – The Design and Construction of Spatial Worlds
Bernadette Flynn (Griffith University, Queensland)

Abstract
From the two-dimensional mazes of early game design, to the simulation games of emergent behaviour, and the complex societies of massive multiplayer games, players interact in environments that are spatially represented and configured. In game studies there has been a tendency to associate the spatial in computer games with older forms of media such as film and television (Bolter 1999, Jenkins 2004, Murray 1997). This has resulted in a misplaced focus on narrative structures, art direction and audience reception, that excludes the broader range of spatial practices encountered in gameplay.

This paper proposes that an understanding of game space must take into account not only the representational form of space on screen, but also the movement in and around spaces performed by the player. The confluence of screen design elements, player navigation, spatial perception and game agency presents a hybrid form of spatiality initially structured by the game designers and then reconstituted by the player during the processes gameplay.

The paper firstly explores a number of spatial design strategies used in games such as the panorama (Exile) the 3D Cartesian grid (Splinter Cell) and the orthogonal (The Sims). It addresses how these spatial geometries produce a plurality of perceptions that provisionally shape player engagement. It considers how this shaping of player engagement is reworked by the spatial praxis or performance of the player. Here spatial praxis is understood as the player’s engagement in game challenges, on-screen action and navigation. Such a focus on spatial praxis is concerned with changes and dynamics, involving as it does, the reconfiguration of space through the apparatus of the player’s body. As such, the paper argues for a move away from a static model of point and click interaction represented by a series of static objects bounded by empty space towards a more phenomenologically informed concept of the player’s engagement in space. It suggests that in order to take account of the complexity of gameplay, the player’s experience of space might more usefully be considered as a form of spatial practice that takes account of the complexity of gameplay and the players embodied experience of space.

Read the full paper (pdf, 49kb)

Reading Space in Watchmen
Dr Spiros Xenos (Independent Scholar)

Abstract
In this paper I argue that the grammar of Watchmen is a spatial grammar, a place of constituent elements transformed into practised space. Watchmen provokes a modernist strategy of estrangement in its representation and problematisation of the postmodern by employing the rational grid of the orderly mode of modernity, and disabling its instinct towards compartmentalisation and containment.

Read the full paper (pdf, 95kb)

Tactual Comic Books for Children with Vision Impairment
Michael Sutjiadi (Independent Scholar)

Abstract
The aim of tactual comic books is for children who are blind to become independent and integrated within the community, by preventing the delayed development of visually impaired children. It is a learning process. Establishing the concept of reality through imaginary cues, rather than visual cues, that sighted children would develop their concepts and social skills from.

There has not been any development or research on this particular medium before.

While visually impaired children enjoy reading tactual comic books, it nourishes their cognition and perception, e.g. sense of distance; notion of perspective and angle; flexibility; significances; stimulating their touch receptors (tactual sensory), as they will be exposed to tactual graphics in daily routine, such as diagrams in maths, science, geography, and to read the manual for ATM machines; city maps to locate toilets or audible supported traffic signs; to locate emergency exits.

Comic books have been proven as an appealing powerful media, combining images and text, and have positive potential to impact on children’s lives as well as adults, and can be very useful for classroom teaching or academic purpose, e.g. to introduce new things in life; to stimulate children’s ability and passion to read; to conceive colours; shapes; animals; etc. They are considered as "children’s literature".

Semiotic theory is an important element in producing tactile comic books, to conceive knowledge of designing tactual graphic representations, creating characters and objects in the story, writing the comic script all through to the production process, e.g. page layout, sequential tactual images and text. It is a linguistic study of sign, symbol and icon. Communication is the central concern of semiotics.

The conclusion, based on conducted user tests and the design/production process, is that tactual comic books are a learning process, a potential medium to educate children who are blind and at the same time are a fun recreational/leisure time activity for them that ultimately will increase their independency and integration within the community.

Read the full paper (pdf, 103kb)

Fantastic Architecture and the Building of Europe in Valerio Evangelisti’s Eymerich Fiction
Dr Maja Mikula (University of Technology, Sydney)

Abstract
Concomitant with the horizontal expansion of EU territory through physical and political enlargement is a genealogy narrative, which emphasizes the ostensible roots of Europeanness in classical antiquity and Christianity. In the face of this sanitized genealogy, which lies at the heart of the European constitutional project, a range of alternative and more inclusive narratives circulate in contemporary European popular fiction. This paper focuses on a series of fantasy novels by the Italian author Valerio Evangelisti, featuring Inquisitor Eymerich as hero-investigator. In his highly popular novels, Evangelisti seeks to uncover layers of shared historical memory untainted with post-Enlightenment rhetoric. The central architectural tropes of Evangelisti’s imaginary world are those of a castle and a convent, epitomizing the temporal and sacral power in European history. Each isolated from its outside environment and built on layer upon layer of subterranean chambers and corridors, the castle and the convent conceal a past quite different from the one championed in the official European genealogy. Memories of pagan worship and Islamic or Judaic learning - banished from the official rhetoric - continue to thrive, dark and threatening, in the subterranean strata of Evangelisti’s European edifice. Evangelisti thus provides an incisive critique of the official European story of origin, which threatens to suppress any alternative visions of European history or unorthodox avenues for European identity formation.

Read the full paper (pdf, 79kb)