Digital Commons Network^™

Healing Through The Photographic Murals Of James "Chip" "Jetsonorama" Thomas, Mandolen Sanchez

Art & Art History ETDs

James “Chip” “Jetsonorama” Thomas is an Indian Health Services physician who moved to the Navajo Nation in 1987. Although he is not culturally Native American, Thomas depicts Navajo in large-scale black and white photographic murals. His work has been discussed in online articles and books about street art in terms of their relationship to street art, specifically the art of JR, as well as their role as activist art on the Navajo Nation. There has been a lack of substantial research, though, into the way in which his photographic murals respond to or engage with nineteenth and twentieth-century photographs of …

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 …

Recipe For Disaster, Zac Travis

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

Today’s rapid advances in algorithmic processes are creating and generating predictions through common applications, including speech recognition, natural language (text) generation, search engine prediction, social media personalization, and product recommendations. These algorithmic processes rapidly sort through streams of computational calculations and personal digital footprints to predict, make decisions, translate, and attempt to mimic human cognitive function as closely as possible. This is known as machine learning.

The project Recipe for Disaster was developed by exploring automation in technology, specifically through the use of machine learning and recurrent neural networks. These algorithmic models feed on large amounts of data as a …

(Disambiguation), Amy Johnson

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

disambiguation, means to make something clear. I want to make a few things clear. I also want to give a few things the ambiguity they deserve.

Porous Time And Space In Contemporary Photography: How Social Constructions Of Space And Reenactment Produce Alternative Histories, Emma Brooke Lehrer Stein

Art & Art History ETDs

This dissertation examines how the photograph can exceed the long-rooted debate around medium specific notions of photographic truth, since all realisms are historical and constantly changing. Applying theories of socially constructed space and porous time to analysis of these case studies presents alternative photographic histories that show past and present together. Boris Mikhailov, as a dissident artist and post-Soviet documentarian of new Russian capitalism, presents histories of visual culture that compete and overlap during the Soviet era and afterward. Mikhailov refers to the multiplicity of voices found in his photographic practice as a state of “coexistence.” Looking at photographs of …

Francis Bedford, 1816-1894: English Landscape Photographer Of The Wet-Plate Period, Bill Jay

Art & Art History ETDs

This dissertation examines Francis Bedford's ancestry, his early careers in architecture and lithography, and the growth of his reputation as a landscape and architectural photographer; it explores his photographic techniques and concepts, reflected in the views of exhibition notices and society discussions; it reviews Bedford's photographs in the form of single prints, cartes-de-visite, stereographs and tipped-in book illustrations; it describes the circumstances and achievements of his Royal tour; it traces his influence through the work of his son, William, and his other known associates.

American Family Memorial Imagery, The Photograph, And The Search For Immortality, Daniel Gyger Snyder

Art & Art History ETDs

In this dissertation I trace the development of family (as opposed to public) memorial imagery and note the unique contribution of photography. I examine attitudes toward photography during its early years. These attitudes reveal that the medium was uniquely appropriate for the continuation and extension of the tradition of memorial imagery in America.

I suggest that America holds expectations for the Machine and for the power of Science that have at various times (the mid-nineteenth century and today) led some to assume that death is not inevitable and that physical Immortality is possible. From Puritan times, when death was accepted, …