▼ This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of authentic art in cyberspace. The focus is the existence and spatial transformation of authentic art in the digital era, rather than art created by digital technology. The dissertation proclaims that the spectator exists in a unified world of physicality and virtuality; also, the existence of art in the real world and cyberspace cannot be simply split into a physical space and a non-physical one. By applying an interdisciplinary methodology including Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Existential Phenomenology, Walter Benjamin’s Critical Theory, Wolfgang Iser’s Reception Theory, and modern Museology, this dissertation examines the phenomenon of art in cyberspace, through an inclusive study of the phenomenon of spatial transformations of the existence of art. I examine the embodied relations of art-technology-Lebenswelt by focusing on the relationship between technological transformation and the existence of art. The discussion logically leads to the concept of technological embodiment. Under this circumstance, I claim that authentic artworks from the past currently coexist with images produced and reproduced by modern technology. The boundaries between the spheres of the body and of technology have begun to transgress, overlap, and blur in the digital world of cyberspace. Moreover, this project also points out that the phenomenological temporal aspect of viewing digitized art in cyberspace is twofold, and both are related to the body-subject. The temporality of a spectator’s viewing experience is unique because the experience of one’s own temporal flow is quite different from the experience of others; one can only grasp his/her own temporal flow in reflection and, therefore, as already past, whereas one grasps the alter-ego in the simultaneity of a present now. Finally, this dissertation discovers the significance of digitized art in cyberspace by stating that this new space and place for human sensory perception is the place for the everyday exploitive power relations to be challenged through the new effect of art-and-technology embodied relationships. They are filled in their circumstantial links with capitalism and with fundamentalist politics. The experience of looking at digitized artworks in cyberspace, such as on museum sites, eventually has its own power and politics of display. This dissertation eventually concludes that the digitized art images do not lose the context of their original artworks, but maintain an embodied relationship with the physical existence of their artworks. We therefore cannot easily separate them as physical/virtual or real/unreal. Rather, the boundaries between these concepts need to be abandoned. Only with the boundaries blurred can the meaning of art be returned to the originals, and the authenticity of the artwork then returns back to the physical part of the artwork’s existence. Advisors/Committee Members: Harris, Keith M.

▼ My thesis is a series of eight projects that demonstrate many of the skills I have developed and refined during the course of my graduate studies. This document is a supplement to the eight projects. These projects range from composing a musical score to producing an entire video, including production, motion graphic design, scoring, editing, and DVD authoring. Advisors/Committee Members: Phillips, Mark W.

▼ Comedy is a mode of discourse that operates across many different genres, media, and styles. Just as there are comic films, there are comic plays, music, paintings, sculptures, and photographs. Comedy has its own aesthetic that is distinct from, but invariably related to, tragedy. It is as central to the human condition as any other aspect of human life, yet the amount of serious academic study it has received is relatively small. One of the advantages of using semiotics as a methodology for studying comedy is that it is versatile and interdisciplinary enough to explain how comedic meaning is created in a variety of art forms. This dissertation attempts to develop a semiotic theory of comedy by reconciling existing comedic theories with semiotic theory and to explore the nature of comedic meaning as a corruption, reversal, or undermining of conventional semiotic meaning. This theory is used to analyze various artworks to show how a semiotic analysis of the comedy in those works can be used to understand not only how the works produce comedy, but to provide insight into the nature of comedy itself. While this dissertation addresses comedy in a variety of art forms that have typically been under-represented in semiotic scholarship, it also pays specific attention to film, which is ideally suited to an interdisciplinary study of comedy. Comic film is inherently interdisciplinary, often includes verbal or linguistic humor, frequently has a comedic narrative structure, can include comedic music, and is a visual medium that has the most highly-developed forms of visual comedy. It is fertile ground for examining how comedy can function on a variety of levels and in a variety of formats. Because a semiotic approach to comedy has received limited attention in English-language discourse and a semiotic approach to comedy has not been fully integrated as a theoretical approach, this work opens a new avenue of study. It expands not only the field of semiotics, but also provides an alternative method for understanding why and how comedy functions in a variety of art forms, specifically addressing comedy as an aesthetic phenomenon. Advisors/Committee Members: Harris, Keith.