Theses and Dissertations (Arts)

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Browsing Theses and Dissertations (Arts) by Faculty "Faculty of Humanities"

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    "Don't Put Words in My Mouth!" To what extent does socio-institutional accessibility create a divide amongst black, female practitioners within the South African Theatre industry?
    (2021) Van Tonder, Hannah
    The research seeks to critically engage with the power structures that have a circular flow within the South African Theatre Industry. The work seeks to highlight the dualism of age and accessibility and how this has created unequal power relations amongst black, female theatre practitioners. This research draws on two South African National Theatre Award Shows hosted annually in South Africa: the Naledi Theatre Awards hosted in Johannesburg and the Fleur Du Cap Awards hosted in Cape Town. The research interrogates how award-winning and award nominations bring societal validation and credibility that allows for personal reflection and socio-institutional accessibility to manifest.The aim is to find out whether black, female, theatre practitioners 'feel' the need to excavate these power relations for a different construct to be built; that asks for a shift in the subject to be at the forefront. The research seeks to reveal if the responsibility for change sits in the power and agency of the systemic structures that mediate theatre award spaces as well as the individuals that micro-manage these theatre spaces. This work focuses on Cape Town and Johannesburg based practitioners as these are the only two cities in which theatre awards, on a national level, currently take place. However, every province within South Africa has their own theatres and awards, including Durban, where the voices of Durban based practitioners are still a crucial part of the study. Who gets access to credibility within these socio-institutional spaces will help uncover who gets to speak and how they get to express themselves through such platforms. This work refuses to keep black women separate from the rest of the industry, but instead requests the platform for black women to stand on an even playing field alongside their counterparts when looking at systematic credibility
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    Investigating interactions between machines: a case study using facial expression recognition and virtual avatars
    (2022) van Rooyen, Keenan Halliday
    Computer vision is a field of artificial intelligence which revolves around enabling machines to derive meaningful information from visual inputs (Zafeiriou, Zhang, and Zhang, 2015: 1). Researchers have shown a focused interest on using computer vision to develop a machine which can both interpret and classify human behaviour, movements, and emotions through only visual information (Zafeiriou et al., 2015: 2). What was found through a literature review was that there is a gap in knowledge in computer vision for studies which do not rely heavily on human analysis. The presented research study aimed to work towards filling this gap by investigating an interaction between the goals of computer vision through using virtual avatars from the Animaze library to imitate human emotional expressions that were then analysed by FaceReader’s expression recognition component. This study created a machine-based interaction which analysed how changes of the facial features on a virtual avatar could alter the analysis of a computer vision program interpreting emotional expressions in the face. The results of this experiment were separated into three sections to answer three guiding research questions and to provide a wider scope of analysis. An analysis of FaceReader’s results presented several findings surrounding computer vision and virtual avatar interactions, with the most notable finding being that even slight changes in the shape and size of facial features on a virtual avatar can produce vastly different emotional expression readings. It was also found that it is possible to influence FaceReader’s expression analysis to produce higher, or lower, intensity averages of the emotional expressions through the use of specific facial features. Overall, the presented research found information that one could argue was already proven for human facial recognition, but value was provided in this research being potentially used as a steppingstone towards further development in the use of facial recognition on virtual avatars.
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    Popular African language art literature(s): cinematic perceptions on Black African middleclassness in South African television series – a myth or reality?
    (2021) Mxokozeli, Sive
    The aim of the study is to examine South African soap opera narratives as sites for the construction and negotiation of black African middleclass representations in South Africa. The research focuses on South African soap opera texts: Generations (1994); Scandal! (2008); The Queen (2017); Legacy (2020). The study draws from these popular television series cinematic perceptions that have been produced to be consumed by the racially black South African community. Moreover, it evaluates, across time, the ways in which black African middleclassness has been portrayed in the soaps. The study examines the constructions of femininity, masculinity and their positionalities as characterizations in the context of South Africa in the post- apartheid dispensation. Arguably, televisual texts presenting black images do not align themselves to key liberal modes that symbolize an African renaissance that is free from the affirmation of underlying racist motives of representation. Where these texts are guarded by white capital supremacist unchanging structural ideologies of imperialism, soap opera narratives, too, assume an important role around black African middleclassness in South African representations, which serves to construct and reinforce questionable black African middleclass stereotypes and prejudices in the ‘new’ democratic dispensation.