This dissertation charts another path for Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) by generating institutional and creative research practices working against logics of integration and extraction. Drawing on activist, psychoanalyst, and philosopherFélix Guattari, I use institutional analysis to model how MAS came to inherit legacies of 1970s cyberlibertarianism and digital utopianism, which disavow politics in favor of technocratic interventions. I also identify the homogenizing and reactionary political and disciplinary consequences of MAS’s embrace of integrative modes of interdisciplinarity. Responding to integrative and technocratic MAS, I argue for reconsideration of politics in MAS through an approach to research, creation, and practice informed by Guattari’s concept of diagrammatics. Diagrammatics emphasizes the centrality of subjectivity in crises of mental, social, and environmental ecology. Through creative practice with computational media, art and technology, and social design, I work towards a practice-driven notion of diagrammatic media. I outline media diagrammatics as an intertwining of extensive engineering of concrete machines (artmaking, systems building, bookmaking, event making) and a speculative engineering of abstract machines (dreaming, conceptualizing, modeling, critiquing, analyzing, actualizing, virtualizing). In this sense, diagrammatics mediates mental and social individuations between a preindividual and an individuation. Diagrammatic media objects (e.g., a radiophonic aberrance in the electromagnetic field, a book, an autumn leaf) are lures for thinking-feeling embedded into a diagram. Diagrammatic media proposes we stop thinking in terms of computational media systems altogether and begin thinking about diagrammatic assemblages of concrete and abstract machines. A prototype of a tangible media-rich operating system called diagrammatic elucidates the complexities of the relationship between lateral thinking, moving, and feeling in learning and writing. I outline ways the prototype could be brought into a slow network that speculates on new modes of collaborative writing. Portacular Resonances, a radiophonic media installation, drives a Sci-Phi endeavor orbiting contemporary anxiety differently: as a clue for cosmic becoming spiraling out of the reactive affect of alienations and emotional capitalistic exploitation and into a potential collectivizing force. Finally, through the Guattarian concept of the machine, I ask how potential becomings are embedded through gathering events such as SloMoCo, a slow conference for artist researchers.

Human movement is a complex process influenced by physiological and psychological factors. The execution of movement is varied from person to person, and the number of possible strategies for completing a specific movement task is almost infinite. Different choices of strategies can be perceived by humans as having different degrees of quality, and the quality can be defined with regard to aesthetic, athletic, or health-related ratings. It is useful to measure and track the quality of a person's movements, for various applications, especially with the prevalence of low-cost and portable cameras and sensors today. Furthermore, based on such measurements, feedback systems can be designed for people to practice their movements towards certain goals. In this dissertation, I introduce symmetry as a family of measures for movement quality, and utilize recent advances in computer vision and differential geometry to model and analyze different types of symmetry in human movements. Movements are modeled as trajectories on different types of manifolds, according to the representations of movements from sensor data. The benefit of such a universal framework is that it can accommodate different existing and future features that describe human movements. The theory and tools developed in this dissertation will also be useful in other scientific areas to analyze symmetry from high-dimensional signals.

Modern technologies have allowed for new ways to tell stories. Specifically, interactive film is a medium that has existed for quite some time, but has never really been a widely used or accepted means of conveying narratives in an engaging and effective way. After reviewing some of the most popular interactive films to date, I sought to create an interactive film that takes some of the most effective tools implemented by these works of art. I ultimately created If: an Interactive Film with the knowledge I gained. If follows a date between a couple and gives a single audience member the ability to choose the way the narrative progresses at key moments in the narrative. Cycling ‘74’s Max object-oriented programming environment facilitates this interactive film through an audio-driven video feedback system.

The human motion is defined as an amalgamation of several physical traits such as bipedal locomotion, posture and manual dexterity, and mental expectation. In addition to the “positive” body form defined by these traits, casting light on the body produces a “negative” of the body: its shadow. We often interchangeably use with silhouettes in the place of shadow to emphasize indifference to interior features. In a manner of speaking, the shadow is an alter ego that imitates the individual.

The principal value of shadow is its non-invasive behaviour of reflecting precisely the actions of the individual it is attached to. Nonetheless we can still think of the body’s shadow not as the body but its alter ego.

Based on this premise, my thesis creates an experiential system that extracts the data related to the contour of your human shape and gives it a texture and life of its own, so as to emulate your movements and postures, and to be your extension. In technical terms, my thesis extracts abstraction from a pre-indexed database that could be generated from an offline data set or in real time to complement these actions of a user in front of a low-cost optical motion capture device like the Microsoft Kinect. This notion could be the system’s interpretation of the action which creates modularized art through the abstraction’s ‘similarity’ to the live action.

Through my research, I have developed a stable system that tackles various connotations associated with shadows and the need to determine the ideal features that contribute to the relevance of the actions performed. The implication of Factor Oracle [3] pattern interpretation is tested with a feature bin of videos. The system also is flexible towards several methods of Nearest Neighbours searches and a machine learning module to derive the same output. The overall purpose is to establish this in real time and provide a constant feedback to the user. This can be expanded to handle larger dynamic data.

In addition to estimating human actions, my thesis best tries to test various Nearest Neighbour search methods in real time depending upon the data stream. This provides a basis to understand varying parameters that complement human activity recognition and feature matching in real time.