The concept of the Zone of Intensive Mural Experience (ZIME) refers to an intensive experience people could feel when they are exposed to visual communication artefacts such as murals. Previous research adopted a cultural ecological approach to examine whether murals showed dynamics between murals, local, and national histories in generating the audience’s experiences. Few have explored whether these subjective analyses can be validated in a more objective manner through machine-generated narratives. Our study employed AI-assisted image analysis techniques to examine murals as an important visual communication element in Hollywood movies that could evoke audience’s ZIME. We selected a total of 13 mural scenes from three representative Hollywood movies: “Sister Act”, “Artificial Intelligence”, and “Blood In, Blood Out” that included mural images representing different cultural and ethnic backgrounds in the movies. We text-mined these AI-generated analytical narratives from image analysis prompts to identify extracted keywords, key phrases, and topics to support our proposition. Discussions and implications were provided.
- Open Access
- Article
Using AI-Assisted Image Analysis Techniques to Examine Hollywood Movie Murals: A Zone of Intensive Mural Experience (ZIME) Perspective
Author Information
Received: 15 Nov 2025 | Revised: 08 Dec 2025 | Accepted: 17 Dec 2025 | Published: 27 Jan 2026
Abstract
Keywords
artificial intelligence (AI) | mural | image analysis | text mining | visual communication | Zone of Intensive Mural Experience (ZIME)
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