Film and Media Studies Commons^™

Cheer Up Luv: An Examination Of The Activistic Efforts Of Eliza Hatch, Jasper (Kirsten) Boyd

Faculty Curated Undergraduate Works

This paper examines the efforts put forth by Eliza Hatch, who is an established photojournalist and activist, which pertain to women’s rights and sexual harassment all over the world. Hatch has a multitude of projects dealing with sexual harassment and the unequal treatment of women all across the globe. She is mainly based in London and New York, but has also completed projects in Sri Lanka. Through her activistic career, which began in 2017, she has garnered ample media attention and has raised awareness regarding the issues she tackles in her projects. Through her photo-sets, documentaries, and talks at universities, …

5 Or 6 Amphibians: An Animated Short Film, Nicholas Lockwood

Honors Theses

My art project, “5 or 6 Amphibians”, explores a feeling I have had at Union - that of being split between too many things. It is six minutes of rotoscoped animation, presented on an array of nine screens. It is the culmination of my interest in time-based art, especially film and animation, as well as construction and technical knowledge.

Superhero Movies And Politics: The Moral Obligations Of Film Makers According To Virtue Ethics, Russell Hendrickson

Senior Theses

The theory of virtue ethics implies that filmmakers have a moral obligation to explore political themes within superhero films. My thesis is comprised of four main sections. I begin by discussing the general theory of virtue ethics and what moral obligations are placed upon someone who subscribes to this moral theory. From there, I establish my argument for why film can be used as a tool of moral education, and I outline a framework for how artists can work to cultivate virtue in themselves through the use of Arnold Berleant’s Artists and Morality: Toward an Ethics of Art as a …

Say Luv: Reimagining The Black Female Body, Jer'lisa Devezin

Art Theses and Dissertations

From hottentot venus to Cardi B, the influence of the white representation and the treatment of the black female body has shaped a culture of oppression amongst Black women, having surpassed the white community and trickled into the black community. In hip hop culture, reality television, and social media, black women are portrayed as angry and are stereotyped as ghetto and ignorant. On the music scene woman are always sexualized under the male gaze, however now that we are in the twerk era Cardi B is giving a new perspective to the representation of women in hip hop. By using …

Game On, Theresa Loong

Theses and Dissertations

Game On is a 25-minute documentary about game designer Brenda Romero, a successful woman in a male-dominated industry. Brenda, whose career spans over thirty-five pioneering years, has contributed to almost fifty game titles, developing innovative video and board games. How is her life a game space?

Seat 20d, Jill A. Campbell

Theses and Dissertations

When artist Suse Lowenstein’s son Alex was murdered in the 1988 bombing of Pan AM Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, to combat her grief, she spent 15 years creating 75 life-sized sculptures of mothers’ of the victims naked and posed in mourning. Now she needs to find them a home.

Reworking The White-Masculine Ideal, Steven H. Gonzalez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This text functions as an exploration of self through artistic practice, a designated space for reflection on contemporary Queer experience. In looking specifically at the permeation of the idealized-white-masculine figure as found within Western visual culture, social media and gay pornography become isolated as sites where these figures are commonly found. This line of inquiry defines how the ideal is reified through these differing digital platforms and the social implications the homogenized male form has on raced individuals. In addition to determining the image of the perfect masculine physique through research, this text expands on how its' imaged representation becomes …

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 …

Remembering The Huia: Extinction And Nostalgia In A Bird World, Cameron Boyle

Animal Studies Journal

This paper examines the role of nostalgia in practices of remembering the Huia, an extinct bird endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand. It suggests that nostalgia for the Huia specifically, and New Zealand's indigenous birds more generally, has occurred as both restorative nostalgia and reflective nostalgia. It argues that the former problematically looks to recreate a past world in which birds flourished. In contrast, the paintings of Bill Hammond and the sound art of Sally Ann McIntyre are drawn on to explore the potential of reflective nostalgia for remembering the Huia, and New Zealand's extinct indigenous birds more generally, in a …