Digital Commons Network^™

The Life You've Seen: The Search For Feminine Identity Ruined My Life, Cambry Lace Pierce

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Life You've Seen: The Search For Feminine Identity Ruined My Life is a video installation created through the exploration for the search for identity, specifically female, in my personal work and in the art world for over sixty years. The videos, depicting myself in costume, display twenty different personas and scenarios created to expose the futility of this ongoing search through exposing the traditional ways in which forces such as nature, biology, heredity, and cultural constructs have been used in attempts to define "self." The installation format of the work, a wall of decades old television sets, and the …

Way Of The Butterfly: A Journey Towards Transformation Through Self-Portraits In-Between, Masami Koshikawa

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

It has not been easy for me to talk about myself or describe my feelings or thoughts. Coming from Japan, a collective society, we typically are not raised to do so. Throughout the MFA program at UCF, I have shared my feelings and thoughts through my work. It is important to discuss and inform others of our cultural similarities and differences so that we may gain a better understanding of each other. This process has helped me grow not only on an artistic level, but also on a personal level. My journey towards integration has led me to a meaningful …

Walls Have Ears But They Also Speak –A Comparative Study Of Two Playgrounds, Anna Hirson-Sagalyn

Senior Projects Spring 2015

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Polycultural Interactions: Fuzzy Identity, Xi Lu

Theses and Dissertations

“Robin D.G. Kelley coined the term polyculturalism as an alternative to multiculturalism, ‘since the latter often implies that cultures are fixed, discrete entities that exist side by side—a kind of zoological approach to culture.’ ”

Polyculturalism assumes the whole world’s cultures are interactive and fluid instead of independent and static, and individuals’ relationship to cultures are complex and cannot be categorized. Yet an individual constitutes multiple cultures, and individual identity embraces the various forms of culture in all aspects of one’s life.

My research examines how polyculturalism affects aspects of communications among people who hold a multiplicity of voices. It …

Avatar, Cyborg, Icevorg: Simulacra’S Scion, Guido E. Alvarez

Theses and Dissertations

I propose a theoretical framework that describes how avatars incorporate media as an inherent part of their nature and find a hosting body in cyborgs to navigate and spawn in media. I propose the birth of a new scion that combines avatar, medium and cyborg into a conceptual being that I call “ICEVORG.”

The ICEVORG expands beyond representation into the actual physical world by means of media transgression—more specifically, by the use of the Strange Loop also known as Metalepsis ICEVORG find an effective soil to thrive and interrogate our ideas of reality by means of iteration, expansion, fragmentation and …