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The digital age has dramatically reshaped archival practices, requiring novel approaches to preserve and provide access to born digital materials. The opportunities and challenges of the digital age are not only technical, but also ethical. This thesis explores the ethical archiving of artists’ digital records through a case study of the records of Scott Leroux, whose digital archive was entrusted to the University of Manitoba Archives and Special Collections (UMASC). Leroux’s extensive digital footprint, spanning many devices and social media platforms, presented distinct challenges and opportunities in archival work. Ethical considerations in digital preservation are paramount, particularly regarding the management of sensitive content and intellectual property rights. By implementing technical strategies alongside participatory appraisal and arrangement strategies, within a larger feminist ethics of care framework, the integrity and relevance of Leroux’s records are maintained. My study underscores the pivotal role of metadata in making digital records discoverable and usable. Comprehensive metadata was crucial in offering context and ensuring appropriate access to Scott Leroux’s artistic legacy. This thesis promotes the adoption of feminist and decolonial approaches to digital archiving, highlighting the importance of community engagement and radical empathy in archival work.

As a Lighting Designer, I will be adapting Western lighting design techniques to be impactful, appealing, and cohesive for the entirely online performance of Random with a Purpose XXIX: Continuum. This project includes using at-home and accessible lighting tools available to the dancers, as well as natural outdoor lighting, to create a space that feels like a stage for the dancers and builds connections between people, audiences and company. The inspiration and connections are built from studying site-specific, screen and stage dances; as I work with dancers to create a variety of designs I will also analyze their responses to my questionnaire to find if a shift in lighting can re-center their personal spaces as a performative stage space. Through analysis of the responses, I found that communication and connection begin with acknowledgement of the tools and space to then allow creativity to stretch and grow as a community.

In this thesis, I analyze the effectiveness of using communication as a tool to educate the theater practitioner in UCSC’s Barnstorm Theater Company. I continue past research of Barnstorm’s laboratory from previous Barn Directors to study student improvement through questionnaire’s, feedback, and the more casual channels. The continued research led to new course designs implemented in the 2021 Winter Quarter syllabus. By using communication as theatrical tool for students, the education goal of Barnstorm Theater, collaboration, can flourish. Using research collected, I aim to find a clear correlation between the Barnstorm course content and perceived student improvement as theater practitioners.

One company, one program, one class, one barn, has been such a huge inspiration to many students at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and continues to be a focal point for projects and performances. Despite being the subject of multiple individual research projects, the Barn Theater endures an evident lack of consistency in leadership execution and vision. The Barnstorm Directors sign on for one year and one year only. Although this salutes new visions and skill sets each year, it can contribute to the inconsistency. As a Barnstorm Director, I asked myself, “what can I achieve in a timely manner that will leave a lasting, beneficial impact on Barnstorm that will aid both the future barn directors and the undergraduate students enrolled?” By analyzing previous Barnstorm theses, including Leah Gardner (2004), Paul Rossi (2015), and Benjamin Chau-Chiu (2019), I synthesized their conclusions and put together an updated Barnstorm handbook that can be accessed digitally by future directors. Updating and adding new information to the handbook gives the next Barn directors a tangible tool to help guide them on their journey in this student-ran theatre company. As the final for the 2020 winter quarter of Barnstorm, I re-administered a refined version of the survey that Chau-Chiu created for the 2019 winter quarter; I was able to compare my results with Chau-Chiu’s and see where the consistencies and inconsistencies lie just one year later. This survey gathered input from the students involved in Barnstorm about their experience and personal development as theatrical practitioners. The idea is to maintain the educational aspect of Barnstorm and to use past Barnstorm programs and features to shape future ones. This included changing the syllabus from fall quarter to winter quarter to better reflect our current goals. Two changes we implemented were bringing back workshops and slightly adjusting the requirements, which tied into my goal of making the Barn more organized

Barnstorm is an opportunity unique to the University of California, Santa Cruz, and few universities elsewhere offer a similar program. Functioning as both an independent theater company and a university course, it offers a practical and diverse education for its participants. Through my four years as an undergraduate in Barnstorm, I felt that the educational aspect had been slowly deteriorating. Many of the students seemed to be uninterested in learning about the different aspects of theater and were only putting in effort towards their specific productions. This led to a group of students not realizing the potential Barnstorm provides. As a student, and now manager, I believe it is one of the manager’s responsibilities to ensure that Barnstorm continues to provide an interdisciplinary education, in which the students learn about the different aspects of theater and understand the connection between them.In this thesis, I analyze previous Barnstorm managers’ work as I believe it is important to use traditions and the past as a foundation for new ideas. Using their findings, I made specific changes to management styles and to the course, in the hopes that students would realize the education Barnstorm provides. To encourage an interdisciplinary education, I follow the work of previous Barn managers, Adrian Centeno and Alyssa Glenn. I started to use digital resources to make information more accessible to the students, and assigned a self-assessment to allow students to critically assess their own learning practices. After implementing these changes, I created a questionnaire to learn whether or not the students themselves found value to these changes and to Barnstorm as a whole. Upon analyzing the student responses, I conclude that my efforts were effective in promoting an interdisciplinary education and helping students realize the potential of Barnstorm.

The nature of “liveness” is the subject of much theoretical debate as our culture plunges deeper into the act of recording and reproducing performance. Theorists like Philip Auslander and Peggy Phelan have tried to define liveness as it opposes this “mediatized” condition, but as a millenial who has experienced a digital as well as physical existence, I ask why can’t liveness encompass both worlds? I turn to renowned scenic designer Robert Edmond Jones to explain the theoretical lens I employed in my design capstone project Random with a Purpose XXVI: Multiverse (RWAP). Using projected camera feeds, layered projection surfaces, and a system of live video mixing I sought to illustrate the multiplicity of self as it spans the live and mediatized. Regarding the sole performer as multiple allowed the audience to connect with them on a deeper level and experience a truly “live” event.

BarnStorm Theater is a student-run theater company at The University of California, Santa Cruz. The theater functions as a community space where students support one another’s production in return for support on theirs. The undergraduate students who participate in BarnStorm are accustomed to the resources readily available in an educational setting. As the Managing Director for the 2017-2018 Season, I implemented a post-academic model for the majority of the productions, moving theory into practical action, so that participants experience the struggles they will face in future projects after graduating.

Political Tyranny & Artistic Metacognition is an investigative analysis concerning experimentation with a curatorial approach to artistic direction in education. With The BarnStorm Theater Company at the University of California, Santa Cruz as an exploratory platform, I will compare artistic ideology used within the professional industry to communicate my personal findings, successes and failures, apropos the abandonment of a traditional directing style in place of one aimed for curation.

In this thesis, I will clarify and examine the networking opportunities integrated into BarnStorm, UCSC’s student produced Theater Company, both for BarnStorm students and the BarnStorm community at large in the 2016-2017 season. These networking opportunities focus primarily on professional and community development. I define networking as both an occasion for professional development on an individual level, and an opportunity to establish a stronger BarnStorm community; it is a tool for BarnStorm students, audiences and community members to connect with one another. Networking in the context of BarnStorm straddles the worlds of professional development, community building and personal growth. It provides students with opportunities to grow as theater practitioners and active community members. I intend to establish the necessity of social and professional networking in the context of BarnStorm. In exerting BarnStorm as both a professional and social network, students gain an opportunity to grow as artists and citizens. I will utilize Shane Dawson’s "A study of the relationship between student social networks and sense of community as the framework to explain and define the BarnStorm and UCSC Theater Arts Department networks.

This thesis examines the implications for archival theory of sound recording as a documentary medium. Over the last three decades, archivists have devoted considerable energy to exploring the challenges associated with records in media other than ink and paper. Yet, while the theoretical and methodological problems fostered by digital and photographic records have been subject to vigourous debate, comparatively little attention has been devoted to audio records. When archival sound recordings are discussed, the focus is almost exclusively on the formidable task of preserving the sonic signals captured in degraded or obsolete formats. Preserving and enhancing the accessibility of audio records remains an indispensable endeavour, but this thesis argues that other long neglected aspects of archival activity with sound recording now require much greater attention. Sound recordings are welcome additions to the documentary heritage and transactional evidence preserved by archives, but they are seldom viewed as anything more than adjuncts to the archival enterprise as a whole. The medium-specific value of audio-based records—as opposed to whatever content they may contain—is rarely articulated beyond an affirmation of the powerful allure of listening to noises, music or voices brought forward from the past. Occasionally, these endorsements are supplemented by appeals to sound’s ability to convey the immediacy of a particular moment or to trigger involuntary sense-memories. In recent years, a wide-ranging body of scholarship has established sound as a focus for historical and interdisciplinary investigation. Audio records undoubtedly amplify the range of documented experience, but this thesis argues that archivists must resist the association of sound with simply a more immediate or “immersive” record of the past. The provenance of sound recordings must be carefully situated in relation not only to the technical means by which they were recorded, stored, and preserved, but

The managing of a theatrical company is as much an art as any performance or design, and yet one which receives the least attention. The reasons why a company works are often ethereal and fleeting, even for the most well-established theater, but in the case of UC Santa Cruz’s Barn Theater or other high-turnover theaters, that ungraspable working method is a yearly struggle for each new generation of managers.In this thesis, I hope to clarify the practices by which a student-run company interacts with both the student body and bureaucratic machine, which is the University, in order to illustrate the importance of easily accessible information inherited from previous generations of managers. I will also outline a process by which our knowledge may be easily passed from generation to generation without the difficulty of re-learning the managerial lessons previous managers had already discovered. I also aim to have the reader understand that a lack of information drives down the quality of theater, and taking previous knowledge and expanding upon it is a better learning process than struggling to rediscover lost informationDrawing on all the previous material, I will transpose it into a framework which can be used by independent theater companies outside of the collegiate environment, which will assist companies with high managerial turnover improve or maintain the quality of their productions during the transitional process. This general improvement of quality will also allow the possibility of transformation from “poor theater” into a more professional form.

This paper serves to examine the running of a small theater company, and the issues that can arise. These issues can bring work to a halt if not approached with a calm, clearheaded mind. Though the theater in which I worked was shut down due to multiple issues at the most inconvenient time, my production team and I were able to produce a successful season. In order to accomplish this, we made many compromises, but still managed to create work of which we will be forever proud.

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 1994., Includes bibliographical references (leaves 295-302)., by David S. Cuthbert., M.S.