Digital Commons Network^™

Bound To Rise, Morgan P. H. Bielawski

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

Bound to Rise is a collection of short stories about people who discover themselves in the “fine drizzly rain” (or smirr, in Scottish lingo) of everyday life. They orient themselves and find some way forward, or they realize they have to. Thematically, it addresses a carnival (the carnivalesque), a demolition derby, multiple fires, photography, drinking, music, an eating disorder, and a birthday cake. It includes one original children’s story written in Russian and translated into English by the author.

The Invention Of Lying: Ways Of Looking At And Believing In Images, Violet Mary Saxon

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.

The Zone, Jordon W. Soper

Senior Projects Spring 2019

There are places, soft spots, in our world where the membrane between realities and possibilities is thinner. Here the familiar constant fundamentals described by natural science to order our understanding of the world are inconsistent. Natural laws are stretched, warped, and refracted in chimeric distortions. To enter is to encounter the unreal and the unknowable, to comprehend the incomprehensible. The familiar and the unfamiliar intertwine and overlap. In the zone we see in circles, sensory experience expands, and minute details become revelations. At the fringes of consciousness and perception we meet with the shimmer of simultaneous wonder and terror.

Within …

I Become A Beam Of Light., Leor Miller

Senior Projects Spring 2019

Who am I and what do I do about it? I come to a clearing in my mind. It is a landscape, constantly in flux: people running in and out, feelings swelling and crashing down, understanding moving in and out of focus. I am confused. I watch people and the ways they move, engage with each other, engage with the world, and wonder: how do I engage with myself, my surroundings, and the people who exist within them? Do I do it normally? Probably not. Maybe I should be asking if I do it well, or if the way I …

I Was Looking For You, Keegan Isaac Holden

Senior Projects Spring 2019

I wasn’t sure if I would find You when I started looking.
but chance has led me to You. and You to me.
and here we Are.

I give You something of me and
sometimes,
I receive something of You.

now there is a photograph,
a record of our moment together.
our moment with You.

--

I Was Looking for You is comprised of encounters, a yearning for connection, and a deference to the will of chance. It is a search for familiarity in the unfamiliar and unplanned.

A photograph is not one-sided; a portrait is more than the corollary …

Opticks:, Fyodor Andreievich Shiryaev

Senior Projects Spring 2019

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

Dead Flowers // I, Daphne C. Fitzpatrick

Senior Projects Spring 2019

In the essay In Plato’s Cave, Susan Sontag makes a point of illustrating how in the moment a photographic image is captured its subject becomes ephemeral. Unable to interact with the world from behind a two-dimensional plane, the subject is forever frozen eliminating all agency that would exist within the frame of time that it takes the camera’s shutter to open and close. This agency death is then repeated each time the image is reproduced, multiplying the silence of the subject exponentially with each new viewer.

Thanks to Instagram we don’t have to worry about this! Any morsel of agency …