Art and Design Commons^™

Rupture, Dionis Ortiz

Theses and Dissertations

I am an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, photography, printmaking, sculpture, video and installation. I employ these mediums to create a coming of age story as a Dominican New Yorker, exploring masculinity, vulnerability, the supernatural, family, and religion, as well as how culture plays a role in my community and in my life.

Music From The Harpsichord House, Julie Zhu

Theses and Dissertations

Music from the Harpsichord House is an installation and series of concerts that exists in the binary of in and out of performance. During a concert, the harpsichordist is hidden inside the house and his face is live-projected outside. Fifteen new musical compositions were commissioned for the harpsichord house.

The Posers: Instinctual Simulation Across Time, Kathryn Mccarthy

Theses and Dissertations

The Posers is a video about the occlusion of the self in history and in love. This paper explores methods of laminating historical moments with contemporary experience to explore the passage of time and the ongoing marginalization of women.

Graphic Activism: Lesbian Archival Library Display, Shawn(Ta) Smith-Cruz

Publications and Research

This chapter outlines the implementation of Graphic Activism, an exhibition of archival material from the Lesbian Herstory Archives, the oldest and largest lesbian archive in the world, located inside the display cases of the Graduate Center library of the City University of New York. The two-semester-long display stems from an institutional need to showcase material inside of the main library display cases, and the interest of including visual representations of Women's Studies material from the collection as well as those which represent the collection. The chapter discusses collaborative relationships outside of the academic institution, pointing to select challenges when …

Leftist Militant Songs And War Of Position In Lebanon (1975-1977), Mohamad J. Hodeib

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This essay looks at the emergence of a generation of leftist militant songwriters against the backdrop of a revolutionary moment that influenced political and cultural landscapes in Beirut during the 1970s. After the Arab military defeat against Israel in 1967, the conjuncture of the Lebanese and Palestinian revolutionary movements in Lebanon fostered a revolutionary moment that manifested itself on different levels, including art and cultural expression. I look at the development of leftist militant songs, a genre, attitude, and approach to song production and performance that came to be at the intersection of radical theatre, poetry, and music. Productions by …

Sonifying Hamlet, Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sonifying Hamlet uses data-mining techniques and algorithmic composition to read Shakespeare's Hamlet through sound. In so doing, it attends to pre-semantic, textual data that is only visible when one steps back from reading for narrative and instead focuses on formal details that, being individually small, but collectively numerous, are more visible to computational sorting than they are to human eyes that have been trained to look for broad semantic content. This use of algorithmically generated sound to reconstruct textual data continues the western trend towards ubiquitous quantification, while also challenging that trend's underlying assumption that reality is reducible to fully …

Heavy Ink: A Documentary On The Comicbook Revolution, Renzo Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heavy Ink is a documentary short focusing on the comic anthology magazine, Heavy Metal, examining its history as both a standout comic magazine, and how it fits into the larger tradition of comic books. What started off in 1977 as a sci-fi offshoot of National Lampoon ushered in a new era of comics by bridging the gap between American and European comic sensibilities with a talent pool from all over the world.

Heavy Metal would go on to have reverberations beyond comics into music, movies, and the global entertainment landscape of today. Heavy Metal introduced the world to artists such …

For(Years<28), Ricardo A. Contreras Jr

Theses and Dissertations

A life written in code, and code written in prose.

"Hippie Acid Freak Drag Queens:" Situating The Cockettes Within An Art Historical Context, Scott Dow

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis situates the Cockettes – a performance group rarely referenced in art historical discourse - within Bay Area performance art, second-wave feminist art, and the Gay Liberation Movement. Contextualizing the Cockettes within their contemporary art movements provides a new understanding of the group and emphasizes their significance to art history.

The Possibilities Of The Video Game Exhibition, Elizabeth Legere 2762328

Theses and Dissertations

This paper is an examination of video games as an artistic medium, and of their current presentation in art museums like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, as well as an attempt to come up with better modes of presentation for them within a museum space. Using a general understanding of video game theory and aesthetics, it might be possible to begin to look at solutions to the issues posed by current methods of presentation and interpretation, and to examine whether video games’ complicated aesthetic and artistic importance can be better highlighted by a new mode of display …

Open Works: Between The Programmed And The Free, Art In Italy 1962 To 1972, Lindsay A. Caplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation historicizes and theorizes a group of Italian artists who were among the first to use computers and cybernetics to make artworks, developing the genre of Arte Programmata, or Programmed Art. It argues that the artists of Arte Programmata (Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and collectives Gruppo T and Gruppo N) turned to the generative, interactive, and probabilistic aspects of early computers not simply as new media for making art but as platforms for radically altering what it means to be a participant in an increasingly mediated and networked world. This is apparent in how each of their works deploys …

Mónica Mayer: Translocality And The Development Of Feminist Art In Contemporary Mexico, Alberto Mckelligan Hernandez

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation focuses on Mónica Mayer (b. Mexico City, 1954), analyzing her work to understand the role played by the artistic and activist exchanges between feminists from Mexico City and Los Angeles in the development of feminist art in Mexico from the 1970s to the present. While scholars and curators are increasingly drawing attention to Mayer’s large body of work, which includes prints, drawings, installations, and public art interventions, the available literature emphasizes her connections to other artists working in her home country, positioning her artistic production within narratives of contemporary Mexican art.[1] In contrast, this dissertation foregrounds Mayer’s …

The Short Story And The Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts In And Of The Americas, Lucienne Muller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the visuality of the short story from an intermedial point of view, that is, with a focus on the relationship between the short story and the photographic visual. This analysis draws from photographic theory and from the writings of photographer and writer Julio Cortazar whose philosophy puts forward the idea of a reader who becomes the inventive co-creator of the fictional work.

"La Dolce Vita" Today: Fashion And Media, Nicola Certo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is a cinematic masterpiece that has inspired nationally and internationally generations of creative people and artists because of the extent of its themes and because of the mastery in the choice of its costumes. The actuality of the director’s criticism towards the decadent society of his years, the originality of his stylistic choices, and his sophisticated taste for beauty and fashion, brought him to influence media and contemporary fashion then and now. There are numerous examples of television commercials that Fellini directs and produces for purely commercial purposes. They are all critique of his society, …

Tandem 2.0: Image And Text Data Generation Application, Christopher J. Vitale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

First created as part of the Digital Humanities Praxis course in the spring of 2012 at the CUNY Graduate Center, Tandem explores the generation of datasets comprised of text and image data by leveraging Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). This project builds upon that earlier work in a new programming framework. While other developers and digital humanities scholars have created similar tools specifically geared toward NLP (e.g. Voyant-Tools), as well as algorithms for image processing and feature extraction on the CV side, Tandem explores the process of developing a more robust and user-friendly …

Merchandise, Promotion, And Accessibility: Keith Haring’S Pop Shop, Amy L. Raffel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

During the peak of his career in New York, Keith Haring took his highly recognizable artistic style and distributed it in the form of merchandise in his Pop Shop, established in 1986. Stemming from his early work displayed on the New York streets, directly within public space, and his explorations into mass media strategies, he learned he could make his work accessible to new audiences outside contemporary art institutions and art circles. He translated his work across several surfaces: from subways or canvases, to everyday functional merchandise, such as buttons, t-shirts, and bags sold in his shop. Responding to a …

The Untitled Black Burlesque History Project, Sekiya Dorsett

Theses and Dissertations

The Untitled Black Burlesque History Project is a character driven short documentary featuring Chicava Honeychild, a neo-burlesque1 dancer who is unearthing a hidden Black burlesque history. As Chicava searches for her “stripper grandmas,” she mentors a new generation of burlesque performers who are of women of color. Chicava Honeychild first meeting with Black burlesque Jean Idelle is interwoven with the burlesque journey of Henrietta, Chicava Honeychild’s burlesque student. As Henrietta is honing her burlesque craft in preparation for her first performance, we learn about Jean’s dynamic life as a burlesque dancer in the 1940s and 1950s. Utilizing burlesque as a …