Visual Studies Commons^™

Cat & Mouse, Leah Flook

Art Theses and Dissertations

An early and pervasive paranormal experience cements my interest in the invisible link between predator, prey, and bait. My sculptural installations and drawings create spaces to evade, lure, misdirect, and trap my elusive phantom. I divide my research into three sections; The Stadium, The Players, and The Game. The Stadium is a separate world, one that holds different laws and physics. Here, I explore the correlation between Slapstick Comedy and Horror genres and their ability to bend reality in order to create a story arch. The Players references tropes played out within these genres, Ophelia and the Final Girl, and …

Simulating Destruction Effects In Sidefx Houdini, Ethan B. Elkins

Undergraduate Honors Theses

As movies, television shows, and other forms of media have progressed over the last century, the use of destruction sequences as a form of entertainment have seemingly grown exponentially. From ginormous explosions to cities collapsing, more destruction sequences have drawn people’s attention in ways that are quite captivating. However, as content producers continue to push the limit of what is possible, the reliance on practical effects starts to dwindle in comparison to the usage of computer generated scenes. This thesis acknowledges the trend and dissects the entire process of how a general destruction sequence is made, from the research and …

Creating A Short Animated Film With Cloth Characters, Elizaveta Kochan

Undergraduate Honors Theses

This creative thesis involved making an animated short film from scratch, dubbed “Laundry Day” for the time being. The film follows two sentient clothing characters, a hoodie and a pair of pants, who need to get out of their owner’s room to get to the laundry room after accidentally being left behind. Please watch the short here and use the password “goodiehoodie”:

https://vimeo.com/415387205

This was a time consuming, challenging, and multifaceted project, but provided an accurate glimpse into how feature animation is made. The process of making any project like this is commonly called a pipeline, and can be simplified …

Dunidedcudigunadie, Lawrence Reid

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses his Master of Fine Arts exhibit, titled DUNIDEDCUDIGUNADIE. The exhibit is to be held at the Tipton Gallery in downtown Johnson City, TN, from April 2nd to April 10th, 2020. A live reception will be held the evening of April 3rd, featuring a performance with the work, titled Look at You!

The following thesis explores the artist’s formative years – investigating how childhood experiences combine with artistic and theoretical influences to inform his art-making process.

Metaphors And Emotions In Advertising: A Rhetorical Analysis Of Audi’S Online Video Commercials, Richard Opoku Amoako

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advertising often employs metaphor because of its rhetorical utility. By drawing on analogous imagery and language, metaphor has the potential to elicit emotional responses. As the digital age is increasingly saturated with commercial messaging, advertising experts leverage the persuasive power of metaphor and emotion to produce creative, compelling, and memorable commercials. German automobile company Audi employs metaphorical language and imagery in their video advertisements to arouse consumer emotions. In this study, I conduct rhetorical analyses of Audi’s online video commercials in order to: identify instances in their ads that employ metaphorical language and imagery; investigate how those metaphors function rhetorically; …

El Quijote En Alcalá De Henares: Graffiti, Arte Urbano Y Autorrepresentación, Juan Fernandez Cantero

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

En el presente trabajo se realizará un estudio de los procesos culturales existentes en la ciudad de Alcalá de Henares en la actualidad a través del arte urbano. Concretamente, se analizarán las representaciones del Quijote, personaje universal de Miguel de Cervantes, en el casco antiguo y en los barrios periféricos de la urbe. Se demostrará cómo la figura del Quijote es un medio para la autorrepresentación de la ciudad. Más allá de las decisiones políticas sobre el arte urbano en el centro histórico de la ciudad, se verá cómo la iconografía del Quijote se consolida como un elemento cohesivo para …

Remixing The Archives: Indigenous Interpretations Of History And The Future, Marcella Ernest

American Studies ETDs

This dissertation examines how Native art makes critical interventions that are aesthetically and intellectually arranged with the intention of displacing the master narratives. The project tracks how film and photography—historically used by non-Native people as a tool of colonialism—are being reclaimed by the visual and sonic scholarship of contemporary Native artists. The project shows how multidisciplinary artists use technology to remix audiovisual archives from a specific time in American history: portrait photography and ethnographic filmmaking at the turn of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s frontier representations of Indianness in twentieth-century motion pictures, social guidance classroom films from the 1950s, and digital …

Spring 2020, The Gist

The Gist

Spring 2020 issue of The Gist.

Drawing Under Construction, Nathalie V. Alfonso

Art Theses and Dissertations

Abstract

The thesis, Drawing Under Construction navigates notions of invisible labor, repetition, and endurance. I explore aspects of labor and movement through the use of drawing, installation, performance, and video. Unseen work, an exercise of emotional control, is central to this investigation, transforming notions of invisibility and visibility into tools to explore three concepts; "Unfolding the Line,", "The Line Under Construction," and "Locating the Line." It is through these three areas of study that I further analyze “my hand” versus “the universal hand” and “my body” versus “the universal body” and create a system where my body and work live …

Pathos, Spring 2020, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Claire Miller

Living Stillness, Nunzio Paci

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

The artist-in-residence in the Fall of 2019-2020 was Mr Nunzio Paci, an Italian artist whose paintings and drawings bring out unexpected connections between human or animal anatomy on the one hand, and plants and flowers on the other hand. The intertwining of the human form with other natural forms is a motif in Art Nouveau art, but Paci’s drawing style seems to owe more to Renaissance anatomical and botanical drawings such as Leonardo da Vinci’s.

Moreover, like Leonardo, Paci relies on close observation, for example, of anatomical wax models and even genuine human corpses. In other words, he draws from …

The Exchange Happens Here: Net Art's Alternative Currencies, April Riddle

Art History Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines three installation pieces from the New Museum and Rhizome’s 2019 exhibition “The Art Happens Here: Net Art’s Archival Poetics.” Throughout, I question if net art can act as an alternative currency itself, if different projects can interfere with existing economic systems, and, if so, what they can reveal about changing economic structures.

Ultimately, I explore how Cory Arcangel’s Arcangel Surfware, a lifestyle brand offering products for web-surfing, is representative of works that play with accessibility and inaccessibility and alternative patronage systems in relation to social currency; how Shu Lea Cheang’s Garlic=Rich Air, a browser-based and physical garlic …

Apocalypse And Eschatology In John Ford's The Grapes Of Wrath (1940), Nancy Wright

Journal of Religion & Film

John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) visualizes conventions of the apocalypse genre to represent not simply a particular historical setting, the Great Depression, but also a vision of history to be interpreted in terms of eschatology. Expressionistic photography transforms the characters’ experiences into enigmatic visions that invite and guide interpretation. A comparison of montage sequences in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke The Plains (1936), a Farm Security Administration documentary, clarifies how Ford’s narrative film aligns spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène.

The Gaze And A Sufi Ethics Of Vision In Majidi’S The Willow Tree: Form, Meaning, And The Real, Cyrus A. Zargar

Journal of Religion & Film

In his 2005 film The Willow Tree (Bīd-i Majnūn), Majid Majidi offers a complex moral commentary on the faculty of sight. To do so, the filmmaker draws from Sufi theories of gazing, in which desire must be for ultimate meaning (maʿnā), as conveyed through the vehicle of perceivable form (ṣūra), a distinction with both metaphysical and ethical implications. Majidi presents sight, when devoid of contemplation, as a sort of voyeurism, especially in contrast to the privacy and immediacy of speech and especially within the context of the modern city. Moreover, his use of a …

Review Of Aesthetics, Ethics And Trauma In The Cinema Of Pedro Almodóvar, Kelli Fuery

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

A book review of Julián Daniel Gutiérrez-Albilla's Aesthetics, Ethics and Trauma in the Cinema of Pedro Almodóvar.

Terre Brûlée : Une Éco-Poétique Du Vide, Pierre Taminiaux

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Au XXIe siècle, les sociétés occidentales sont confrontées à de nouvelles formes de chaos. Celui-ci comporte plusieurs dimensions, à la fois sociales, culturelles et écologiques. L’art doit dès lors prendre en considération cette situation d’une manière ou d’une autre. C’est ce qui m’autorise à parler ici de mes images photographiques rassemblées sous le titre de Terre brûlée.

Celles-ci ont été prises à l’automne 2017, au Portugal, près de la ville de Leiria, dans une forêt de bord de mer (une pinède, plus exactement) qui fut longtemps considérée dans l’histoire de ce pays comme un domaine royal. Cette saison fut …

La Strada, Federico Pacchioni

World Languages and Cultures Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"Released in 1954, La strada was the third solo directorial work of Federico Fellini and followed the critical and commercial success of I vitelloni (1953). Together with the films that preceded La dolce vita (1960), La strada represented a more traditional narrative and sober visual style that contrasted with Fellini's later experimental work. It is also an important film for understanding Fellini's reputation and evolution as an auteur director, especially in the light of the debate that it triggered among the Italian and French critics of the time regarding the true 'calling' of Italian neorealism. The idea for La strada …

Simultaneous Intersectionality In The Comics Of Catel And Sabrina Jones: Understanding Women’S Life Stories, Jeorg Ellen Hornsby

Theses and Dissertations--Gender and Women's Studies

The project examines how the theories of simultaneity and intersectionality are useful in analyzing the lived experiences of the authors and their subjects. Specifically, this dissertation analyzes how French comic artist Catel and American comics artist Sabrina Jones use the medium of comics to recount their autobiographical stories within and alongside their biographical stories of Benoîte Groult and Margaret Sanger, respectively.

Fall 2020, The Gist

The Gist

No abstract provided.

Annual Report 2019-2020, Depaul University College Of Computing And Digital Media

CDM Annual Reports

LETTER FROM THE DEAN

As I write this letter wrapping up the 2019-20 academic year, we remain in a global pandemic that has profoundly altered our lives. While many things have changed, some stayed the same: our CDM community worked hard, showed up for one another, and continued to advance their respective fields. A year that began like many others changed swiftly on March 11th when the University announced that spring classes would run remotely. By March 28th, the first day of spring quarter, we had moved 500 CDM courses online thanks to the diligent work of our faculty, staff, …