Philosophical Inquiry: How can film be art?

Writing Sample III Ottley James.pdf

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Simply put, we have all used our imagination and our interests and passions have all been reflected upon the big screen of the cinema. Why do we get such a lucrative sensation from films and narratives invoking adventure, loss, trials, and hard fought victories all the while remaining glued to a seat watching the images flow? It is because, as St. Augustine notes himself, this is no mere act of the senses. When we watch fictional films and receive that aw-inspring imaginative pull away from reality, it is, in a sense, creating a new reality within our own experience. I explore Gregory Currie's Anne Brontë and the Uses of Imagination to explain how fictional films create content, routed in our imagination, supplemented by our sensory experience.

E-Property - How we no longer own ourselves

Writing Sample I Ottley James.pdf

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Using John Locke and his 2nd Treatise of Government, Donna Dickenson and her Property in the Body: A Feminist Perspective, Leigh Phillips & Michal Rozworksi and their People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundations for Socialism, and Karl Marx I explore how the application of property and ownership has morphed into what it is today; a now neoliberal logic which commodifies user information, behavior, patterns, and activity to streamline manufacturing and distribution to accurately reflect, to an incredible degree, instantaneous demand. I conclude users produce property (viz. information, behavior, etc.) which was, in part, inherently owned by the users themselves, but is now owned by corporations. The electronic property is commodified with new technology harvesting it from user activity online. My argument is, essentially, that we no longer own our electronic identity, and thereby, are subject to commodifying ourselves in daily life.