PhD Thesis Title

Flourishing in Physical Space: A New Perspective on Visual Music

This thesis holds the view that the greatest charm of Visual Music artworks lies in its inheritance and development of music’s ability of affecting people’s feeling and emotion. Studies on the concept of “seeing the music” should not only stay on the level of making visual representations of the musical attributes and elements, but to value the emotional expression and evocation that Visual Music can be on a par with music.
The current study serves as an experiment of an artistic approach in which Visual Music is combined with the utilization of physical space to enhance the emotion expression and evocation. Instead of treating the physical space as merely containers, the current study considers the features of physical space as compositional elements, which can be composed musically according to the artistic emotion that needs to be conveyed. In this thesis, the author would like to propose a concept called “Spatial Visual Music” as a sub-genre of Visual Music. With the emphasis on the qualifier “spatial”, this term refers to a particular type of Visual Music creation in which the artists compose not only the sounds and visuals, but also the physical space. The term “Spatial Visual Music” is thus defined as a type of artistic expression, which requires the act of using various compositional elements to process and compose a physical space as a three-dimensional musical score.

Research Areas:

• Visual Music and “Spatial Visual Music”
  
  • Approaches to enhance emotion expression and evocation
  • New compositional element and new musical vocabulary
  • Three-dimensional musical score
  • Virtual and physical 3D Visual Music performance
• Interactive Art and Architectural Installation
  
• Web-Based Experimental Animation
  
• The Utilization of Space in Art
  
  • Perception of space (through different sensory systems)
  • Composing and reconstructing space (physical & virtual space)
  • The relationship between space and human’s feeling and emotion
  • Space consciousness in traditional Chinese art, architecture, aesthetics and ideology (Taoism)

Brief introduction ​

Lea Vidakovic is a media artist, scholar and educator working in the field of animated installations, utilizing traditional stop motion and puppet animation techniques. Her research interests include alternative narrative approaches for animated installations, visual storytelling, spatial storytelling, fragmented narratives, expanded animation and immersive environments. She has exhibited internationally on solo and group exhibitions, animation festivals, and conferences, and is a winner of numerous art and animation film awards. She is a member of SAS (Society for animation studies), HDLU (Croatian association of artists) and SULUV (Association of artists from Vojvodina).

PhD Thesis Title

Fragmented Narratives in Space: Exploring Storytelling Approaches for Animated Installations

This research is about exploring the possibilities and consequences of presenting animated films outside their usual venues and examining how the narrative adopts to these changes. I will study how breaking the linear narrative of animated films along with displacing these films from usual venues affects the animation spectatorship.

Research Area(s)

• Animation
  
• Non-linear narratives
  
• Expanded animation

PhD Thesis Title

Re-Imaging the Essay Form in Wayang Kulit and Film

The essay film has a long and diverse history with a literary heritage that of the essay form. The term ‘essay’ often signifies a range of remarkably different types of writing – from the literary writings to the academic essay. Due to its flexibility and its wide-ranging nature, defining what constitutes an essay remains an elusive task. Essays continue to be defined and redefined, often being repositioned or reordered for specific contexts. The question of what is an essay film will be central to this dissertation. What are the elements of the essay form and can it be defined in other cultural forms, say the wayang or shadow puppet theatre?

Research Interests

• The Essay Film
  
• Digital Humanities
  
• Feminist Film Studies

PhD Thesis Title

Data Driven Drawings: An Approach to Autobiographical Animation

Research interests:

·       Experimental/Hand-Drawn Animation

·       Web Technology

·       Database Cinema

·       Autobiography

·       Data Visualization

What are you working on at the moment?

I am an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Universidad de los Andes, in Colombia.​