Interactive Arts Commons^™

There Are Ghosts In The Machine, Jonathan Green

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

There are ghosts in the machine is a body of paintings that dare to dissolve the boundaries between my physical body, intimate desires, and paintings. Utilizing the aesthetics of leather lifestyles, the paintings express the transformational potential of desire and transgression. Oriented within my experience as a queer, transgender male, I call upon influences that range from the body horror classics by director David Cronenberg or the transgressive attitude of Nine Inch Nails, to theoretical works on the power of eroticism by Audre Lorde and Georges Bataille.Modified by hardware such as chains, zippers, and grommets, the paintings express the transformational …

Crying At Nothing But Colors, Maryalice Carroll

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

crying at nothing but colors is an installation of ceramic works that explores the abstraction of feelings, both physical and emotional. The installation itself is a house made out of tension cables that stretch wall to wall in the gallery space. Inside the house are 7 ceramic objects placed on wooden pedestals paired with tufted rugs.

Throughout this essay, I will describe the abstract ceramic objects as Beings. They are colorful and have textured glaze on the surface with a gloopy opalescent glaze oozing out of holes that cover each piece. They are an extension of myself. They are the …

Nba: No (Anti-) Blackness Allowed, Rontaye M. Butler

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper serves as the foundational pillar in my art practice. This paper combines my experiences, influences, motivations, hopes, dreams, methodologies, historical research and contemporary analyses into a single document ripe for revisions. This document lives and breathes; its contents are constantly evolving, and should be continually challenged and evaluated for relevancy and validity. Part memoir, part manifesto, and part artist statement, it establishes where my work sits in the canon of fine art, even as I don’t know yet what that means. My writings, visual artworks and all other creative actions are tethered to this document and vice versa. …

Meet Everyone With Art At Location And Time; M.E.A.L.T. Phase 1, Michael Louis Leblanc

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As an artist who participates in socially engaged arts, it is paramount in my practice to cultivate the balanced power relationship between the audience and artist by providing an ongoing safe environment, accessible subject matter and venue location, and a mechanism that not only calls for participation from the audience but empowers them through direct action. Meet Everyone with Art at Location and Time or M. E. A. L. T. Phase 1 is a mobilizable art exhibition with the long-term goal to meet the audience where they are and to offer an alternative to traditional person-to-person interaction and socializing.

M. …

Covid-19 Masks In Terms Of Functional, Expressive, And Aesthetic Consumer Needs, Lily Highley

Apparel Merchandising and Product Development Undergraduate Honors Theses

The purpose of this study was to assess consumers' perspectives of COVID-19 masks under the functional, expressive, and aesthetic areas. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, masks have become an “accessory” to everyday life, and it was essential to research masks under these unique areas and explore consumer perceptions.

This study took place after background research on the topic and the FEA model. The study included a survey sent to Bumpers College students upon approval from the IRB. The data was analyzed and interpreted specifically in the FEA areas and can be useful to better understand the students at the University …

Age, Ty Barnes

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Age is a body of work that uses open ended, multi-directional narrative, economical craft, body positioning, and disorder to create situations for curiosity to take hold and rekindle a sense of naivety. Intentionally pedestrian material choice and playful, curious methodology work in tandem with the visual language of play to create a world building opportunity for the participating viewer. The objects are anchors or starting points with spaces in between for flexible narratives and imagined and reimagined worlds with no prescribed beginning or end point.

The exhibition and written thesis represent a conglomeration of connected-by-association ideas, a Rube Goldberg machine …

What's Going On Here, Joanna R. Pike

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This project is an installation depicting shirts and pants in various degrees of Recognizability. The Components vary from somewhat Unrecognizable to entirely Unrecognizable; Bumps and Blocks are interspersed and interrupt the Semi-logic of What’s going on here while adding repetitive elements to clarify the existence of the Semi-logic. The arrangement of the Components in the installation makes the Unrecognizable forms surrounded by the In-between Space into somewhat Recognizable versions of shirts and pants. The viewer does not fully recognize all the Components, but instead understands the implied Recognition given their existence within the installation. The ideas of Lists, Patterns, Systems, …

In-Between Spaces, Trinity Kai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In-between Spaces is a paper based in personal narrative that uses Critical Race Theory and art to analyze the history of photography and systems of discrimination facilitated by hegemonic culture. Body is at the center as a symbol of the physical and psychological impacts systemic inequalities have on people that are classified as other and how one can be absent and present in institutional and public spaces.

Fine Roman Dining At Affordable Pompeian Prices: A New Evaluation Of The Non-Domestic Gardens Of Pompeii, Claire Campbell

World Languages, Literatures and Cultures Undergraduate Honors Theses

Previous scholarship has designated Roman gardens into otium or negotium designations; however, this research on Roman gardens suggests that these concepts often exist in the spaces simultaneously. To address this issue, I compiled catalogs of garden spaces identified at Regio I and Regio VI of Pompeii. This methodology cuts across traditional public and private or productive and aesthetic designations, which will allow me to draw connections between the gardens found in different types of settings. This new catalog methodology of Roman gardens presented in this thesis allows for an integrative analysis of garden spaces, which reveals that these commercial gardens …

Perceiving Mathematics And Art, Edmund Harriss

Mic Lectures

Mathematics and art provide powerful lenses to perceive and understand the world, part of an ancient tradition whether it starts in the South Pacific with tapa cloth and wave maps for navigation or in Iceland with knitting patterns and sunstones. Edmund Harriss, an artist and assistant clinical professor of mathematics in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, explores these connections in his Honors College Mic lecture.

The Role Of Designers In Promoting Healthy Masculinity With An Approach To Stopping Violence Against Women And Girls, Fatemeh Abolbashari

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

While awareness about violence against women and girls is growing, there is still a lack of evidence about what changes behavior to prevent it from happening. As a graphic designer, I wanted to find the root problem of this issue and work towards a solution. Through my research and questioning, I concluded that this problem begins with men’s thoughts on hierarchy, language, and behavior, and supported by a prevalence of toxic masculinity in men’s culture.

Where does this violence come from? What has society done to raise this kind of man? Violence against women and girls is being couched in …

The Magic Circle: An Essential Experience Through Virtual Theatre, Brandon Roye

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the similarities of video game design elements within the world of theatrical scenic design. Using my 2019 scenic design of Marc Camoletti’s bedroom farce Boeing Boeing as the backdrop, I discuss the core concepts of game design. I then describe the scenic process of the production and the journey from concept all the way through to a virtual reality recreation of the design. The study of game design in theatre has the potential to open a wide new world of opportunities in the scenic design industry. This paper examines how the theatre can benefit from game design …

An Echo From The Living Room, Makayla Nichole Songer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We are unable to interface with reality as it is. Everything that encompasses our understanding of reality and ourselves—from our physical perceptions to our memories—are subject to innate flaws that make a complete grasp of reality impossible. an echo from the living room is invested in the idea that reality itself is malleable, taking influence from altered states of reality such as dreams, nightmares, and memory. Drawing from the personal experiences of recurring nightmares and living in a haunted house, as well film, the uncanny, and the multiple, an echo from the living room strives to create space for these …

Master’S-Level Counseling Students’ Experience Of Expressive Arts Techniques In A Cacrep Multicultural Counseling Course, Cameron Houin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Counseling governing bodies have defined what should be prioritized in multicultural counseling courses, including students’ multicultural knowledge and awareness; however, best practice regarding how to teach these multicultural concepts has largely been left up to the counselor educator. Counselor educators have begun implementing expressive arts techniques in the classroom, but very little literature exists related to using such techniques in a multicultural course in a manner that positively influence counseling students’ multicultural competency.

The purpose of this study was to explore master’s-level counseling students’ experience of expressive arts techniques utilized during their multicultural counseling course. Ten student participants took part …

Milk, Lindsey Heiden

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My work is a composition of contemporary fairy tales of visual, written and oral forms. I examined the historical evolution of formula, from animal milk, to powder formula and now to a combination of animal milk, human milk and powder. The current scientific research being done with formula and animals, coupled with a fairy tale is the inspiration behind my current tale. The importance of women both in regards to the historical development of keeping a cultural tradition alive through oral tale-telling and the much larger role of keeping humankind alive through reproduction and birth, further build the base that …

Modified Landscapes, Esther Nooner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modified Landscapes is a body of work that reflects serious thought regarding Nature and its future. My personal experience and beliefs are at the core of why I believe this subject to be of great importance and why it will sustain many artists’ investigations for the time to come. The influences that informed this process are explored through experiences I had traveling, reading and exploring the photograph as a material object. The manipulation of the photograph is meant to question the beautiful, untouched scene and break the Romantic gaze that is historically tied to representations of Nature and insist upon …

Real Goner, Nicholas Cox

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this thesis paper is to tell the story behind, and outline the theoretical and conceptual framework underlying the exhibition, Real Goner. The exhibition combines a number of elements drawn from music and art history, as well as the theoretical writings of Albert Camus, Guy Debord, and Joseph Kosuth. Together, these elements produce a cryptic exhibition that attempts to address the inherent chaos, and apparent meaninglessness of existence; and to see art as a proposition, a performance, and a practice. The exhibition addresses issues of celebrity, the production and consumption of culture, and where that cycle leaves us …

The Work Of Living Art, Empathy, And The Creation Of An Aesthetics Of Perception In The Early Twentieth Century, Sarah Peil Winstead

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), theorist and pioneering voice of the New Stagecraft Movement in twentieth century theatre, was a transformative influence on the history of scenic design. This paper looks at the links between Appia’s theories in theatre scenic design and contemporaneous German aesthetic theory. At the time German theorists like Adolf Hildebrand and August Schmarsow developed an aesthetic theory, Einfülung or empathy theory, based on the connection between the human body and perception. I will argue this theory influenced not only Appia and his contemporaries it also shaped the landscape of mid-century theatre design. Appia’s own theories revolved around three …

Be Here Now, Katrina Luehrmann Rattermann

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Drawing from my religious upbringing and my identity as a millennial, Be Here Now investigates my personal conflicts with the Art object. The exhibition, comprised of two pink, celebratory installations made-on-site and displayed in adjacent spaces, is an exploration of superficiality. Displayed in spaces that are externally visible from the street, the installations invite audience participation. Through the use of placement, color, construction and material make up, the works provoke visceral reactions from the viewer. Though viewers are able to approach the installations from various vantage points, they are unable to physically enter the works and become immersed within the …

Dinner, Daniel Reuben Baskin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Dinner is an interactive exhibition which presents appropriated works of art collected and hung in a clustered salon style, as well as a fully realized recreation based on a 16th century Dutch banquet still-life, which presents guests with meats, cheeses, fruits, vegetables, breads, and wine to share and imbibe. Dining ware is provided for guests at the entrance to the exhibit, as are suggested topics of conversation, which are presented on slips of paper for guests to carry with them throughout their time in the space. Within the collection of wall-mounted works are references to ancient Greek and Roman marble …

Making Sense Of Nonsense, Parker Boales

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

A paradox of simultaneous sincerity and humor, Making Sense of Nonsense attempts to identify deficient systems upon which we rely daily. Systems of logic, text, and visual language are all rife with flaws solely because their source--humankind--is irrevocably bound to error. This is not to say that these systems cannot be improved; on the contrary, a rigorous investigation of these systems allows one insight into their mechanics to the end that one endlessly questions the very foundation of the mode of communication being used. Materials and discarded objects such as vintage tools, automotive parts, spray paint, string, furniture, plastic, S&M …

Void Loop ( ) {, Jonathan Barrett Cromer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Void loop is an exhibition that addresses the dynamics of survival through an investigation of power, predation, migration, destruction, and renewal. As an installation of sculpture, video, and sound, the work on display explores associations between the human and natural worlds that inform who we are as individual, Social and biological beings. The repeated code surrounding the “void loop” title is a basic call and response serial communication between the microcontroller and the sensors. It commands the microcontroller to infinitely loop all code following the function, mimicking the repetitions of a pulsing heart. For the exhibition each piece is based …

Place(Ment), Ashley Lynn Byers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Throughout her time at the University of Arkansas Master of Fine Arts program, Ashley Byers has been creating work about the folklore, landscape, and people of the Ozarks. Though she continues to create work with the Ozarks in mind, it became a motif used for a broader conversation about the ad hoc, holiness, painting, landscape, the figure, and intimacy.

In many ways, the concepts within her work are born out of the Ozarks.

When can remnants come together to become more than the sum of their parts? Derelict, easily dismissed objects, when set in the right context or viewed through …

In Rift, Aimee Marie Odum

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In Rift is an exhibition of object, video, and sound installations investigating the process of embodying ambience from the natural world. As a whole, this work questions the distinct differences in experiencing a place psychologically, through the circulation of digital media, and holistically, in actual, present time. In Rift is comprised of two distinct works: Loose Liquids and Gorge. The first piece, Loose Liquids, contains specific imagery of water, rock, plant life, and digital blobs, combined with human cadence such as breathing, shivering, and rolling. This explores how a location’s details accumulatively contribute to an overall experience as we strive …

Portrayal, Kathryn A. Wilson

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is in addition to my thesis series, Portrayal, a group of selected photographs. In this essay I outline the contents and developments of the series of photographs by the same name. It includes information on the artistic techniques employed, concepts and considerations taken into account when making the photographs including the relationship with and presentation of the subject, the exhibition of the photographs, and influences on the specific composition and tone of the photographs.

The images in Portrayal are not candid or objective views. Each is constructed based upon the negotiations with the subject and represent an edited …

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 …

Noise., Laura Katherine Polaski

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

My research is in the realm of the psychological, the emotional and way these drives manifest physically. The works in Noise. aims to give a physical representation to the non-physical. Research on Affect Theory and the teachings of Silvan Tomkins were paramount to understanding emotional drives and the ways in which they manifest.

The purpose of this research is to understand how emotions are generated and communicated and to ask if specific emotions can be generated upon viewing inanimate objects. I create abstract figurative sculpture, which imitate emotion that has no specific physicality. These works exist with one foot in …

Ant Tribe, Yan Zhao

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

"Ant Tribe" describes the post-80s generation university graduates who live together in poor conditions without Social security in communities around China's major metropolises. They dream of a better life in big cities but struggle with low-paying jobs. These struggling "elites" have become the fourth weak Social group, after peasants, migrant workers and unemployed people. The reason why these college graduates are compared to ants is that they are like ants: clever, hardworking, politically weak and living in groups.

The real world is always different from the ideal world of the "Ant Tribe" in China. They often lose their purposes in …