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ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATIONAt the Intersection of American Sign Languageand the Performer-Percussionist: A Hybrid PracticebyChristopher Richard ClarinoDoctor of Musical Arts in Contemporary Music PerformanceUniversity of California San Diego, 2019Professor Steven Schick, chairThis dissertation investigates the shared spaces between American Sign Language (ASL), percussion and performance art and addresses the following questions: Does my work successfully merge these disciplines into a singular practice? In this hybridized practice, is corporeality fundamentally relatable? For example, might a layperson relate to the playing of a drum more deeply on an emotional and physical level than the playing of a viola harmonic? Similarly, in ASL; are inherent qualities of the language – facial expression, non-manual markers, personification, and explicitly visual referents – also relatable to the layperson in the same way? Do these build a bridge to the middle ground of my practice? These topics and questions will be addressed in the context of the following works: Carolyn Chen’s Threads (2012), Lydia Winsor Brindamour’s early morning (dew, spiderweb) (2016), Tiange Zhou’s Me/Monologue (2018), Larry Polansky’s VEDITZ (2018), Yiheng Yvonne Wu’s Your Hat (2018), and my adaptation of Franz Schubert’s Erlkönig (1821). Through musical analysis and deconstruction of the works mentioned, I have attempted to answer the technical and cultural questions that have risen through preparation and performance.

The following essays are the collected statements from the past three years. They describe methods, materials, themes, and analysis of my work at various intervals in my progression through the Studio Art MFA program.

This paper makes a comparison between Leonardo Polo’s philosophy of mental limit and Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of differance. As result one can notice (i.) the difficulties about the intentionality in the philosophies of Brentano, Husserl and Zubiri which are solved by Polo. (ii.) the intentionality of the lingüistic sign according to Polo and (iii.) the mental limit as non-difference or constancy.

My dissertation will investigate South Korean urbanism through the phenomenon of commercial signs, one of the most prominent but understudied aspects of the cityscape in the country. Known as kanp'an in Korean, commercial signage refers to the prolific and often dense array of advertisements, generally consisting of billboards and neon-signs with store names and announcements hung on the exteriors of commercial buildings. From its first appearance in Korean public space in the early 20th century, commercial signage has prompted vigorous criticism, which sees it as a disruption of ideal and top-down government planning, a primary example of urban degeneration and alienation, and evidence of the complete loss of critical and public space.Although commercial signs are often seen as a corruption of public space due to the inundation of consumerism and capital, I argue that these environments are a crucial part of everyday urban experience, where people can find new ways of being in common and making sense, which cannot be simply reduced to our general rubrics of spectacle, private consumption, or the culture industry. Instead of describing commercial signage as a given, objective entity, I focus on the diverse modes of interaction between urban populations and the affective dimensions of commercial signage, thus fostering a reconsideration of the relationship between urbanism and everyday life in South Korea. My goal is to reveal another way of thinking about Korean urbanism in the postwar period, which locates some of the more ethically and politically challenging models of urbanism and community in these commercially saturated environments. In doing so, I offer a much more complex interpretation of urban space, and suggest new ways of looking at the interlocking realms of public, private, and commercial space in East Asian cities in general, and in postwar Korea in particular.

Little is known about stuttering in signed languages. Although disfluencies are known to occur in deaf users of signed languages, there has been little research suggesting that these disfluencies can be termed "stuttering". Because signed language studies is an emerging field and there are many answers that remain unknown, debate over the appropriate terminology for disfluencies in signed languages persists. While one argument is that stuttering is characterized by disfluencies in oral speech alone, a second argument is that the "stuttering" label can be extended to deaf signed language users as a result of similar neurological activations associated with oral speech and sign. Although not the primary purpose of this report, labeling disfluencies in signed languages as "stuttering" could have several advantages, such that the stuttering label could help individuals qualify for services, and determine the most appropriate ways to go about treating the disorder, clinically. There are several neuropsycholingustic theories which attempt to explain the etiology of stuttering. In this report, I will analyze each of these and suggest ways in which they can be adapted to stuttering in signed languages. The purpose of this report is to explore the idea of stuttering in signed languages and provide a framework and rationale for future studies of similar interest and intent. An examination of stuttering in signed languages will increase our general knowledge and awareness of stuttering, and suggest an alternative modality for which stuttering can be treated clinically.

Secondary World: The Limits of Ludonarrative is a series of short narrative animations that are a theoretical treatise on the limitations of western storytelling in video games. The series covers specific topics relating to film theory, game design and art theory: specifically those associated with Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, Jay Bolter, Richard Grusin and Andy Clark. The use of imagery, editing and presentation is intended to physically represent an extension of myself and my thinking process and which are united through the common thread of my personal feelings, thoughts and experiences in the digital age.

The arts’ place in the university is changing in response to the demands of the creative economy. Universities will be responsible for producing creative human capital in their graduates. The 2004 American Assembly provided campus-based practitioners with new language to pursue these goals when it introduced the “Creative Campus” terminology. This comparative case study explores the value of this naming language during policy formulation and implementation of two Creative Campus projects. Qualitative interviews, document analysis, and autoethnography are used to assess the value of a common naming strategy. A critical framework that crosses semiotics and the policy cycle is used to analyze the data from each of the cases. The findings suggest that a symbolically isomorphic naming strategy can be very effective in formulating and implementing a Creative Campus program because the name label provides cultural entrepreneurs with a tool to contextualize their work, frame the issue on the institutional agenda, define their work in juxtaposition to a prototypical schema, and gain legitimacy, understanding, consensus, and control of resources. This thesis concludes by suggesting that the shared signifier also offers an opportunity for a more formalized network of Creative Campus practitioners to learn from and engage in the labeling contests that shape the sign.

An alternating treatment design was used to systematically evaluate the communication response forms, picture exchange communication system (PECS) or sign language, selection for a child with pervasive developmental disorder-not otherwise specified, profound hearing loss, and cochlear implants. The child had a limited pool of high preference items and very few functional skills. Key factors for this child included a structured environment that created a verbal community and contingent access to high preference items. No preference in communication response form was observed. The child successfully used four response forms to communicate: gestures, PECS, sign language, and vocalization. The results are discussed in terms of decision making factors in the selection of response forms.

In Japan, the basics of living are described as three main elements; clothing, food, and shelter. These elements involve simple daily activities such as changing clothes in the morning, eating lunch, and sleeping at night. It may easily become a mundane topic since they are woven into our daily routines. Nevertheless, a moment in one's day may become joyful when we reconsider and play with the ordinary. The first trace of a dwelling in Japan is a pit shelter. People dug a circular pit in the ground, placed sticks vertically at the perimeter of the pit, and covered it with straws to make a roof. The dwelling protected people from the weather, animals and other tribes. The function of architecture may be as simple as that. Today, the purpose of making architecture is not dramatically different from the ancient times, yet the technology in our profession as well as in our daily routines have developed over thousands of years and changed the way of life. Today, one may easily get trapped in the graphical or stylish looks of architecture and ignore the fundamental reason to make architecture. Making architecture is quite an ordinary act. My intention for this thesis is to examine my daily activities and concerns and extract the essence of the Architecture that beautifully fulfills the function. I believe Architecture strongly influences people's experiences and feelings, and goal as a designer is to orchestrate spaces which will make one's ordinary day into an extraordinary one.

This exploratory study aims to elucidate the mental processes of wayfinding in an outdoor area and the effects of map contour representations, map color, individual differences of users (gender, brain dominance, experience level, and cultural differences), and environmental cues using a field study in an established trail network in Jefferson National Forest. Six maps with three different contour representations (contour lines, shaded relief, and schematic) and two color codes (color and black-and-white) were tested for wayfinding performance. Thirty-six participants of different nationalities (Locals versus Internationals), experience in map usage (experienced versus novice), handedness, and gender took part in the study. Three out of ten junctions on the test route had directional signs while the rest had no sign. The participants performed wayfinding tasks in a national forest trail park, using the think aloud and retrospective protocols to obtain the information processes used by the participants during wayfinding. Subjective feedback was also obtained to find out users' map preferences and opinions on their experience during the experiment. Multiple regression analyses were used to predict the relationship of the predictor variables to wayfinding performance. It was found that cultural differences and signage presence were significant predictors of decision-making accuracy at trail junctions. The rest of the predictors were not significant in predicting total time of completion, time for decision-making at junction, accuracy of decision-making, and time deviated from route due to choosing a wrong path at junction. Cultural differences were also significant in the prediction of the time deviated from route. It was also found that the participants were using maps to derived route information for wayfinding. They utilized structural matching of the map with the terrain, by orientation principle, to continuously check the current position on the map. There was some evidence of participants gaining survey knowledge from the map during wayfinding but this could not be confirmed by the study. A set of design guidelines were given for map and trail design to improve the wayfinding performance of recreational users.

The first part of this thesis explores the performance of the adaptive beamformer in the pseudo-noise signal systems. We consider a receiver consisting of an adaptive beamformer and matched filter. The purpose of this study is to find how the order of processing affect the adaptive beamforming performance and the receiver performance under finite observations. The asymptotic assumption for adaptive beamformer is removed by the computation of the Bayes-optimal beamformer performance under finite observations. The results of Monte Carlo simulation indicate that the system where matched filtering precedes adaptive beamforming has lower signal-to-noise ratio threshold. In the second part of the study, the measured data from the Greenland Sea MST'88 experiment were processed to construct a picture of the ownship noise and the multipath transmission structure of the ocean acoustic channel in the experiment. Our study shows that the ownship noise can be treated as a single broadband plane wave in array processing. In processing the signal arrival, a sub-optimal method is introduced to suppress the inter-code interference when the transmissions from different sources are overlapped at the receiver. The processing for multipath identification is also discussed.

Teaching is not reduced to a simple transmission of knowledge; we must refer it to the promotion of a formative learning. The problem of educational communication and the possibility of same has been frequently discussed The opening to the pragmatie dimension is essential in communicatlon. Agustin of Hipona in his dialogue the Schoolmaster offers an adequate argument in this respect, in terms of the possibility of teaching by means of the language, or in a more general sense by means of the sings whieh Plato's Menon brings to mind.