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We Miss Each Other, As In We Are Missing Each Other, Lily L. Randall Dec 2021

We Miss Each Other, As In We Are Missing Each Other, Lily L. Randall

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in the way metaphors efface the terms of their comparison and what utility COVID-19 has when positioned within a metaphor. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, metaphors touch the subject, symbolized by the plus sign (+) or the crossing of the signifier into the signified. In the fall of 2019, I presented a performance in which three participants strategically shared saliva, nasal, ear, and vaginal swabs to therapeutically address my chronic illness. Currently in 2021, our conceptions of bodily sharing revolve around the extreme contagiousness of COVID-19. There is a demand to visualize this contagion as if “respiratory droplets” were …


The Curtain Fell, Opal M. Ong Dec 2021

The Curtain Fell, Opal M. Ong

Theses and Dissertations

Opal Ong’s paintings and drawings are rooted in but larger than memory. The work is flat and graphic. With this practice, Ong makes do with the living memories that haunt her. This process is not nostalgic or sentimental. Instead, it is a meditation on a kind of loss without resolve.


A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen Dec 2021

A Dumb Mouth From Which The Teeth Have Been Pulled, Anna Sofie Jespersen

Theses and Dissertations

This paper consists of a series of scenes in which various narratives with proximity to the truth plays out. within it I aim to articulate the dispersed subjectivity and forensic aspects to my work, as well looking at the perverseness in the desire for proximity to the fantasy, utilizing the self as a vehicle of desire.


Do You Feel Me? A Study On Synthetic Companionship And Digital Escapism, Camille S. Breslin Dec 2021

Do You Feel Me? A Study On Synthetic Companionship And Digital Escapism, Camille S. Breslin

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the human experience and the landscape surrounding atypical methods of connection within the doll community. First hand testimonies of loss, isolation, depression and how dolls, synthetic companionship, and AI technology might be the saving grace for emotional stability.


Influence For Change: Consumer Perceptions Of Social Media Influencer Engagement In Social Responsibility, Lauren Elizabeth Silva Nov 2021

Influence For Change: Consumer Perceptions Of Social Media Influencer Engagement In Social Responsibility, Lauren Elizabeth Silva

Theses and Dissertations

Social Media has become a place for Social Media Influencers (SMIs) and brands to interact with users. For decades, brands and companies have been engaging in Corporate Social Responsibility, which has recently become highly visible through social media. While not brands, SMIs have also started engaging in and creating social responsibility content on social media platforms, such as Instagram. An experimental design study of 421 participants was conducted to examine and compare consumer perceptions. Using self-presentation theory as a framework and experimental design, this study analyzes consumer perceptions of brand and SMI credibility and authenticity when engaging in social responsibility …


Exploring Mentions Of Pornography In Popular Television Shows, A. Lucia Pollock Nov 2021

Exploring Mentions Of Pornography In Popular Television Shows, A. Lucia Pollock

Theses and Dissertations

While pornography has become highly accessible, another way in which pornography is present in media is through discussion in movies and television shows, which is often framed through casual reference, by way of a joke, or in a teasing manner. A content analysis of 55 episodes that reference pornography—looking specifically at the framing of pornography in individual scenes—provides valuable insight into the media ecosystem surrounding pornography and its potential impact on adolescents. Using cultivation analysis and framing theory as a theoretical basis, this study analyzes the inclusion of the terms, “porn,” “porno,” and “pornography” in popular television shows.


Agenda Setting In The Digital Age: The Impact Of Mass Media And Social Media On The Topic Of Sexual Harassment, Melissa True Gibbs Nov 2021

Agenda Setting In The Digital Age: The Impact Of Mass Media And Social Media On The Topic Of Sexual Harassment, Melissa True Gibbs

Theses and Dissertations

The news media plays an important role in communication. The function of the media in a free society is to inform the public, be a watchdog of government, provide a voice for the voiceless, and help determine which issues should be discussed in the community. The power of the mass media to guide the social agenda and influence the public's perception of what issues are important has been questioned in the digital age. This study examines traditional agenda-setting in the digital era to understand how the theory functions in a computer mediated society. The #MeToo movement acts as a case …


Interview, Elizabeth Naiden Aug 2021

Interview, Elizabeth Naiden

Theses and Dissertations

An exploration of work by Liz Naiden in the form of a conversation discussing light and dark, attention and proprioception, and design and architectural theories of space in installation works. Addresses the role of voice, speech, and reading and speaking aloud, performing for oneself, and performing for others.


< Justice > And < Open Debate >: An Ideographic Analysis Of < Freedom Of Speech >, Emily Ann Spackman Jun 2021

< Justice > And < Open Debate >: An Ideographic Analysis Of < Freedom Of Speech >, Emily Ann Spackman

Theses and Dissertations

< Freedom of speech > is a foundational ideograph in the American and more broadly, Western, tradition. Yet this term is not static in its meanings or commitments to social action. The current debate around cancel culture is the site of renegotiation of < freedom of speech > in relation to other terms such as < open debate >, < justice >, < marginalized >, < tolerance >, < democracy >, and < power >. This study is an ideographic analysis of two artifacts that represent two sides of the < freedom of speech > discussion: “A Letter on Justice and Open Debate” and “A More Specific Letter on Justice and Open Debate.” Following McGee’s theory and method, this research examines the diachronic definition of < freedom of speech > through the U. …


Fractured Selves, Gearoid Dolan May 2021

Fractured Selves, Gearoid Dolan

Theses and Dissertations

Fractured Selves is a self-portrait that examines the histories and points of conflation and diversion of my four public personas. In the style of a Zoom meeting, they chat with a host against animated backgrounds. Interactivity creates non-linear consuming of the content and user directed navigation through four timelines


Signal To Noise: Harmonic Temperaments And Patterns Of Interference, Dylan A. Marcheschi May 2021

Signal To Noise: Harmonic Temperaments And Patterns Of Interference, Dylan A. Marcheschi

Theses and Dissertations

An audio/visual exploration of historical tuning systems. Most contemporary Western audiences will seldom if ever encounter harmony outside of post-Renaissance tuning conventions. This presentation highlights some of those pre-orthodox harmonic relationships which existed throughout most of history. The corresponding paper documents correlates in recent advances of acoustic ecology.


Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero May 2021

Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The absence of happiness, the absence of nature, the absence of justice, the absence of absence, which is presence. My desire is to make these voids visible and sensible by connecting to and with others, from our intimate and collective life experiences, with empathy, and by sharing. Through a hybrid of sculpture, installation, and performance, I move within this tense in-between space, asking myself about that void, if it is possible for it to be filled, or if it is perhaps too big, or if it is perhaps too late.


Sweet Spot, Kajin Kim May 2021

Sweet Spot, Kajin Kim

Theses and Dissertations

Disparate projections, transparent prints, iridescent screens resonate with each other in the installation Sweet Spot, creating an environment where images are touched and looked through. This overlap of images creates an imaginary coexistence of here and there - each one connected with the others, but also separate, on its own terms.


Creating Home, Ludovic Nkoth May 2021

Creating Home, Ludovic Nkoth

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores and conceptualizes the idea of a world where my people were never colonized, a world where we are still existing with our culture, our powers and the idea of voodoo. I place myself, friends, and family in positions of power, in spaces the world took away from us due to the color our skin. This is the world my practice aims to create.


Power Dressing: Feather Fans And The Visual Language Of Female Portraiture, Charlotte Svetkey May 2021

Power Dressing: Feather Fans And The Visual Language Of Female Portraiture, Charlotte Svetkey

Theses and Dissertations

Feather fans in sixteenth-century portraiture not only allowed the female sitter to express her own claims to wealth, status, and power but also acted as a visual indicator of changes that were occurring on the global stage. Both fans and sitters will be evaluated through ideas of gender and class.


Appropriation Of The Highest Order: A Study Of Harry Smith’S Master Work, Film No. 18 Mahagonny In Relation To The Brecht-Weill Opera The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny And Duchamp’S The Large Glass, Rose V. Marcus May 2021

Appropriation Of The Highest Order: A Study Of Harry Smith’S Master Work, Film No. 18 Mahagonny In Relation To The Brecht-Weill Opera The Rise And Fall Of The City Of Mahagonny And Duchamp’S The Large Glass, Rose V. Marcus

Theses and Dissertations

Harry Smith’s Film No. 18, Mahagonny, 1970 – 1980, is a transmutation of the original Brecht-Weill opera, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a 1930, into a feature-length experimental film. This paper shows how the original opera and Duchamp's The Large Glass prove inherent to Smith’s double-pronged homage to both original works of art. The failure in the opera narrative and the chance shattering of The Large Glass inform Smith’s complex methodology to approach and spatialize cinema. Harry Smith’s use of the tools of the screening apparatus are traced in order to study Mahagonny in detail. The …


An Infinite Horizon: Space, Time, & Mind In The American Imaginary From Thomas Cole To Agnes Pelton, 1825-1961, Jason Friedman May 2021

An Infinite Horizon: Space, Time, & Mind In The American Imaginary From Thomas Cole To Agnes Pelton, 1825-1961, Jason Friedman

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines how artists, intellectuals, spiritual seekers, and industrialists represented the American horizon across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The purpose of this inquiry is to show how art transmuted ideological and religious beliefs across time and to demonstrate the interdependence of esoteric self-perceptions and American hegemonic power.


Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry May 2021

Kinstitution: A Topia Between Archive And Proposal, Christopher Lineberry

Theses and Dissertations

Situating Topher Lineberry's work, this paper offers a primer on institutional critique, preliminary developments of "kinstitutional critique," and the cultivation of family-derived art history through the work of the artist's grandmother, Helen Lineberry. Feeding into a working understanding of family-and-kin-as-institution, the paper ultimately locates Topher Lineberry's work between relations to place, historical archives, and speculative proposals.


Memories As Old As Outer Space, Nicholas Benfey May 2021

Memories As Old As Outer Space, Nicholas Benfey

Theses and Dissertations

My paintings draw from personal memory, as well as the nostalgic longing and nightmarish foreboding of the irrational psyche. Cosmic ruptures, cliffs, cemeteries, and parking lots appear alongside snowglobes and canopy beds. I aim to suggest things to be wary of, while giving space for optimistic fantasy and reflective wonder.


A Draft: Up N’ Upper Or Sisyphus Lounge; Notes, Poems & Essays From The Road & The Cabin, Andrew M. Foster May 2021

A Draft: Up N’ Upper Or Sisyphus Lounge; Notes, Poems & Essays From The Road & The Cabin, Andrew M. Foster

Theses and Dissertations

This text imagines a reconciliation where the slick, sterile nature of contemporary objects and conditions might offer a sort of soft retreat. Sisyphus Lounge, a modular installation of light, near-defunct-technologies and carefully cluttered “stuff,” attempts to locate and explore value systems fogged by dis/information and the impossibility to articulate is-ness.


Errantry, Simon A. Benjamin May 2021

Errantry, Simon A. Benjamin

Theses and Dissertations

Errantry, Simon Benjamin's current body of work, named after Édouard Glissant’s theory, is comprised of a series of multi-channel video installations and related works. Errantry is centered on the polyphonic rhythms of coastal space, the Caribbean sea, and the life sustained by it in a non-linear narrative that raises questions about time, labor, environmental degradation and the ongoingness of colonialism.


Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon May 2021

Some (Im)Material Girls, Living In (Im)Material Worlds, With Seeds, Stars, And Shit, Matthew Weiderspon

Theses and Dissertations

This writing situates material and gestural vocabularies cultivated in my artwork in relation to my lived experience; primarily my rural upbringing in Colorado. Scattered floor dispersals, calling sounds, and bodily movements desire reconsiderations of hope in precarity through a disorientation of place, association, scale, and language.


Home, It Turns Out, Is Always A Matter Of Paperwork, Leonardo Madriz May 2021

Home, It Turns Out, Is Always A Matter Of Paperwork, Leonardo Madriz

Theses and Dissertations

A meandering of life-thinking on notions of migration & diaspora, assimilation, place & home, family & loss, cruel optimism and new imaginaries - through text, film & video, installation, and expanded cinema.


Structures Of Time: Expressions Of Subjectivity And Social Politics In Works By Silvia Gruner, 1986–2014, Silvia Sampaio De Alencar May 2021

Structures Of Time: Expressions Of Subjectivity And Social Politics In Works By Silvia Gruner, 1986–2014, Silvia Sampaio De Alencar

Theses and Dissertations

The works of Silvia Gruner (born 1959) illustrate the use of time registers as strategies to express contemporary subjectivity’s experiences with globalized environments between 1986-2014. Through this approach, the artist connects her production to the social politics of Mexico to critique the effects of globalization on Mexican society and culture.


Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis Apr 2021

Eagle Eye Vs. Gear Jammer, Jessica Danielle Ellis

Theses and Dissertations

Where similarities in class struggle have historically operated as a unifying force globally, the American crafted mythos isolates the individual and dehumanizes those that do not fall within the parameters of the cowboy archetype. The national protagonist is turned into a class traitor and an extension of government power.


Beauty And Decay, Chiung-Ling Jyan Siebert Apr 2021

Beauty And Decay, Chiung-Ling Jyan Siebert

Theses and Dissertations

The intention of the project is to create an environment where the viewer can explore and form a personal narrative in the process of organic interaction with the work. At first glance, the scale of the installation will attract the viewer to the exhibition, however, upon close investigation he will discover there is deterioration, decay, and mutation. The ideas of time, beauty, decay, mortality, and interdependence will be discussed in this paper. The visitors are invited to interact with the work. I hope through spontaneous interaction the arrangements from the viewer will result in evolution of the work. The balance …


Yo, Mi Persona Y México, Jaime Trinidad Apr 2021

Yo, Mi Persona Y México, Jaime Trinidad

Theses and Dissertations

For as long as I can remember, I have struggled with understanding who I am. What makes me is something I try to make sense of through art. When I started working on this my graduation show, the idea behind it was to make a portrait of the Mexico I know, but when the pandemic hit, I found myself locked down at home, completely alone in a new country for the first time. This led me to question my existence and the belief systems I espoused and prompted me to try to understand myself better in the context of a …


Linking Exposure To Political Content On Social Media With Political Polarization: The Mediating Role Of Anger, Audrey Anne Halversen Apr 2021

Linking Exposure To Political Content On Social Media With Political Polarization: The Mediating Role Of Anger, Audrey Anne Halversen

Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has detailed concerns that exposure to both pro- and counter- attitudinal content on social media can result in outcomes of ideological polarization (e.g. Bail et al., 2018; Lu & Lee, 2018). However, further research is needed in order to understand the conditions under which this polarization may take place. To investigate this issue, this study utilizes a sample of 414 social media users in the U.S. to investigate the mediating effects of a) anger toward political opposites and b) anger toward oppositional social media content on the relationships between various types of political content exposure and the outcome …


Perceptions Of The Physically Disabled Influenced By Media Portrayals, Jessica Parcell Apr 2021

Perceptions Of The Physically Disabled Influenced By Media Portrayals, Jessica Parcell

Theses and Dissertations

Using a quantitative coding method, the current study analyzed cinematic productions between the years 1989 and 2019 (N = 79) for presence of supercrip and victim stereotypes among portrayals of the physically disabled. A series of One-way ANOVA - Bonferonni and Bivariate Correlation tests were performed, and results indicated that while negative and supercrip stereotypes of the physically disabled have decreased over this 30-year period, simultaneously, very positive and victim stereotypes have risen. Results showed negative (F = 3.215, p = .046) portrayals decreased over time, but that simultaneously victim (F = 8.044, p = .001) and very positive (F …


Delightful Scars, Shahrbanoo Hamzeh Mar 2021

Delightful Scars, Shahrbanoo Hamzeh

Theses and Dissertations

At the door of the house who will come knocking? / An open door, we enter / A closed door, a den / The world pulse beats beyond my door (Bachelard, 25).Border is a dichotomous concept. Within a border exists both the potential for protection and alienation. By exploring the closure in borders around people in both a family and a country setting I am exploring communication on both an interpersonal and intrapersonal level; how our understanding of ourselves and others can affect us; how we can be close to each other and help each other. I suggest that our …