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Although cultural heritage is all around us and an inseparable part of us, yet receiving funding to its preservation remains as a challenge for some of the organizations conserving it. The Foundation of Petäjävesi Old Church in co-operation with the National Land Survey of Finland is pursuing to build a World Heritage Center of Central Finland which would retain the cultural legacy of Central Finland for future generations. This project requires funding in order to executed. The main objective was to discover what type of online and offline communications encourages potential donators to provide financial support for the construction project. Qualitative research method was utilized by conducting semi-structured interviews with themes of cultural heritage, responsibility communications and fundraising for cultural heritage. A thematic analysis under these themes was performed. The process led to a discovery where the educational and overall value of cultural heritage and communication methods, such as different events and activities and media content with emotive, concrete and storytelling content should be implemented. The results revealed different fundraising methods where easiness and events played a key role. These methods were included in the communications plan and provided concrete actions which the Foundation of Petäjävesi Old Church can utilize in the pursuit of receiving funding for their cause and create a personal attachment of the potential donators to their cause.

Choice is an important factor in video games. Narrative driven games continuously offer choices to the player in different ways. Through narrative decisions, gameplay style and character creation players get encouraged to make an array of choices. These choices increase the replay value of games. This study aimed to deconstruct the structure of narrative driven games to properly examine how replay value can be increased by choice. Choices come in many forms; some offer more value to the player than others. Case studies of the three games: Detroit: Become Human (2018), Disco Elysium (2019) and Monster Prom (2018), examined how choice is implemented. A quantitative survey was conducted in Spring 2022 to research the likes and dislikes of players in a wide range of age groups. The survey provided valuable information on the importance of choice to the player, and discovered which types of choice are more popular. It also showcased the likelihood of replay value from the players depending on the choices available in a video game. Future research about replay value benefits companies and consumers alike. By adding replay value the consumer will be rewarded and the company can increase the satisfaction of its customers.

In the present work, an artistic mediation project has been carried out with a group of adolescents with functional diversity, using the Service-Learning methodology as a basis. Through this methodology, it has been possible to put into practice the knowledge and skills acquired during a university career in community service. This work aims to address social inclusion, one of the contemporary problems of our society, from an artistic perspective. For this, a series of artistic workshops have been carried out with the chosen group, in which it has been possible to see how art has acted as therapy for adolescents, developing their social and communication skills, the expression of their feelings and emotions, etc., and, as a mediator in the environment in which they live. Finally, after the workshops, artistic work was performed in collaboration with the students to make social inclusion more visible and real. Throughout this work, we will be able to see the development of the project, from an investigation of the social inclusion of people with functional diversity and the means to deal with this problem, to the implementation of an inclusive project, through the art of seven adolescents with special educational needs.

My thesis explores a sensual relationship between humans and plants and how it could change our mindset towards ourselves, nature, and the planet. I use my own experiences and my artistic journey to explore this subject. I also go through examples of interspecies relationships and explore plant intelligence. In my artistic journey I also study my subject through the media of porn and explore the fantasy aspects.

This thesis began as a way to understand current visual cultures in the context of consumerism. To establish future visual cultures, we must know the past. The thesis analyzed nostalgia’s relevance in contemporary culture. As consumed nostalgia is the current state of nostalgia, the methods of subverting, reflecting, or transforming consumed nostalgia were investigated in order to subvert capitalist realism as a visual culture. This can be achieved through exploring groups especially noted as capable of resisting consumer capitalism such as queer activists and post-modern artists. The goal was to investigate the methods in which art is able to subvert these structures in order to create future cultures. From research as well as the artistic project a part of the thesis, the thesis then progressed as developing an understanding for becoming queer nomad. The characteristics of subverting capitalist realism within artistic works were analyzed and resulted in the exhibited thesis project Remembering Queer Nomad (2023). Remembering Queer Nomad is a six-part series containing sculptural works, sound & video installations, community-based art, and recycled found objects. The findings of the artistic research derived the framework of becoming queer nomad. This distinguishes itself from being a queer person and coming from an international, or nomadic, background, into the role of a person capable of transforming visual, ontological, and physical spaces. As a case study, the results and process are documented and evaluated. The work is intended to inspire people to develop their own frameworks for creating alternative futures to capitalist realism.

The purpose of this thesis was to gather information on oneironautics as a potential tool for visionary artists. Contemporary visionary art aims to see the unseen and depict it in a visual form that is clear to our ordinary perception. Contemporary visionary artists depict realms that cannot be observed in physical reality. The theoretical part of this study explored the history and importance of visionary art, and the research section suggested practical exercises that can broaden the perception of the mind. The aim of the case study presented in the theoretical part was to investigate one of the first contemporary visionary artists Ernst Fuchs, contemporary visionary artist Yayoi Kusama, and contemporary artist Dave Green. The key results suggested that oneironautics, a form of lucid dreaming, indeed, can be used as a potential booster for visionary experience and visual enhancements of an artist. The goal of the practical part was to showcase an installation in the gallery Himmelblau. This installation consisted of four visionary paintings based on the personal experiences of the author, miniature sculptures, and ambient music. The findings based on the research in the theoretical part and on personal art practice indicated that oneironautics is an efficient method of broadening the perception of a visionary artist.

This thesis and the multidimensional artwork were to examine whether it is possible to develop and create environmentally friendly art from the environmental waste. With my working group, we chose to try to convert the zero fibre of Näsijärvi in Tampere into biochar. In the summer of 2022, we investigated the possibility of converting and pyrolyzing zero fibre into biochar as energy-efficiently as possible and further pro-cessing it into an environmental artwork for the Pispala’s Contemporary Art Centre Hirvitalo’s sculpture park. A large artwork complex "Hiilinielu" (Eng. Car-bon Sink) was born. The environmental artwork acts as a carbon sink from the power of zero-fiber pyrolyzed and fed biochar in the sculpture park of the contemporary art center of Pispala. The artwork includes an art video with a spell-like spoken word, a photographic work and a still life. The body of work was presented at the RAW exhibition in March 2023 at Grafiikanpaja Himmelblau. In this thesis, we went through the pyrolysis process of zero fiber into biochar and the different stages of each work in the ensemble from the beginning to the gallery space.

This thesis investigated the effects of repetitive tropes and shorthand in media, by using the corset as a case-study. The aim was to reveal how choices made during media productions, especially period films, often forgo historical richness for either artistic liberty or heavily opinionated social commentary. Methods of research included watching and reading interviews with costume designers, examining the historical accuracies of the films discussed, drawing direct lines between the social beliefs of the creators involved and the product they have released. The historical research about the corset was done through reading professional texts, listening to content by experts in their fields, and by examining historical photographs. The results showcase that today's abundance of media makes it more difficult for us to filter all the information given to us when much of it is shrouded in shorthand and our modern lives are so attached to said media. The thesis concludes that the best way to combat this type of propaganda is to demand better from media productions, and to educate yourself on the rich history behind the content you consume.

Such techniques of Natural Language Processing as information extraction and semantic text labelling had been widely utilised in recruitment sphere to decrease the labour and time resources needed to analyse CVs or labour market’s trends. However, the application of such techniques and establishing link between demand for the workforce and education providing organizations is yet to be established. In the current thesis the ideas on processing educational courses descriptions texts is provided in attempt to facilitate the information exchange between the needs of the labour market and skills supply from the educational establishments. In the literature review the analysis of the most recent methods in natural language processing methods is provided (Word2Vec, NER, Sentence Transformers) as well as commentary on their current implementations in labour market related spheres. In the empirical section state-of-the-art SBERT language model is applied to the collected open university courses’ descriptions in order to extract concrete skills from the and then the performance of the SBERT model is accessed through such metrics as precision, recall and f-score, yielding the F-score of 70.4%. As a result, an example of comparison between the skills supplies as identified by Finnish open universities educational courses and demand as identified by the job descriptions data is provided. In conclusion, research paper’s possible managerial applications and theoretical contribution are included.

This thesis examines Japanese castle reconstructions in the Heisei (1989–2019) and Reiwa eras (2019–) and links them to the ideas of cultural heritage and authenticity in traditional architecture. Japanese castles are opportune for examining the development of the role of architecture in cultural heritage throughout history. The role of castles as symbols of authority and later as symbols of local culture and history has changed according to the fluctuations of time and the needs of the contemporary people and thoughts. After majority of the feudal castles were demolished during Japan’s modernization, there have been three distinctive “booms” during which castles have been reconstructed. In the post-war era, dozens of ahistorical concrete replicas of castles were rebuilt concrete as local town symbols, and to many they symbolized the rebuilding of post-war Japan. From the early 1990s, however, a new castle boom has taken place, with the reconstructions emphasizing on using wood and historical evidence. Most notable of these reconstruction projects is the Nagoya Castle reconstruction project, in which the post-war concrete castle tower is to be demolished and rebuilt from wood using original methods and historical plans. This thesis examines these reconstructions in contemporary Japan, aiming to understand how authenticity and cultural heritage are related to this ongoing boom. In this study, a country-wide visitor survey on 10 Japanese castle sites was conducted, supported by two expert interviews from supervisors of two Heisei era castle reconstructions in Ōzu and Kakegawa cities. The findings supported the hypothesis, which suggested that the current appeal of castles is linked not only to their symbolic value to the castle towns, but also their value as objects of cultural heritage. This is why “authentic”, wooden reconstructions are preferred, which was evident from the visitor surveys, as all the respondents favored wooden reconstructions over concrete ones. Furthermore, majority of the respondents wished for more authentic castle reconstructions to be built.