Visual Studies Commons^™

With Love, ; An Interdisciplinary And Intersectional Look At Why Creativity Is Essential, Theo Starr Gardner

Whittier Scholars Program

My Whittier Scholars Program self-designed major, Teaching Creativity, is a mixture of Art, Literature, and Education classes. My research and praxis classes have been focused on the ‘how?’s and 'why?’s of creativity, so it felt only right that my project should be a constructivist, generative project. The project I have been working on throughout my time at Whittier, and that has just fully come to fruition on April 11th, 2024, was a solo art gallery/open mic event entitled ‘With Love,’. With Love, was conceptually inspired by the research I’ve conducted on creativity and creative arts education over the past few …

Contestant Theology: Toward A Play Theology Of Religions, Greg Jones

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

How can a Christian theology of religions navigate the interreligious dialogical problems of 1) the inability to fully articulate faith, 2) the lack of persuasive religious language, 3) the reality of violence among religions, and 4) the liquescent “truth” of modern times? This dissertation answers this question with a theology of religions considered through the lens of play theology. Contestant theology navigates these problems as 1) a space of cooperation and contest which 2) incorporates assertiveness (exclusivism), compassion (inclusivism), openness (pluralism) and free participation (Trinitarianism) to 3) hold together enriching and diminishing relationalities among diverse religious peoples with a view …

Dear Maliha,, Na-Eela Djemil

Capstones

Dear Maliha is a short documentary film exploring the complexities of spiritual abuse through Maliha Fairooz. Spiritual abuse is a form of abuse that uses spiritual or religious beliefs to control or manipulate others. In some cases, spiritual abuse can be used to describe a religious leader who abuses their platform. But in Maliha’s story, we explore the concept of parental spiritual abuse. However, we learn more about this through Maliha Fairooz and the creative use of her journal.

For Maliha journaling is a form of therapy she uses to process her feelings and days. She also uses it as …

Frederick Wiseman's Essene (1972): The Duality Of Mary And Martha, Nilita Vachani

Journal of Religion & Film

America’s legendary documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman shot Essene 50 years ago at the height of the commune movement in the United States. Unlike his previous institutional films which showcase an insane asylum, a public high school, an inner city police force, a hospital, and a military training school, Essene's canvas is the far less turbulent terrain of a serene and austere Benedictine monastery devoted to the love and service of God and the divine spirit. This paper undertakes a close textual and hermeneutic analysis of Essene alongside an appraisal of Wiseman’s working methodology, his cinematic portrayals of character and dramaturgy, …

Saga Beyond The Gate: Chapter One, The Coming Of The Gate Ghost, Tristan B. Miller

MSU Graduate Theses

“Saga Beyond the Gate: Chapter One, the Coming of the Gate Ghost” explores performance sculpture used as religious ritual. My work emphasizes ritual, creation myths, relics, physical manifestations of lived religion, and the power of narrative belief. One often turns to religion, science, or spirituality, to seek answers to questions about being a conscious entity, and one’s journey to the end. This saga uses scripts from all three of these schools of thought, placing the world of the Gate Ghost into tangible reality, as a play on a stage. Artefacts represent objects of power and mystery. Characters embody morality tales, …

Selections From Divinatio Diver, Sculptural Antipathia In Atonement Transcendo, And Mechanika Momento: Creatio Forecaster, Antonie Frankie Aquino

Far West Popular Culture Association Annual Conference

It is fated inspiration which penetrates the heart, satisfies the collective soul, and offers its spirit to the vastness of ceremonial vision. Vision becomes sound and sound forms a poetic voice displaced— this displacement radiates a mythologized poetic voice serving as a lyrical object, theogonic lyre, and the genealogical muse. Selected poems from Divinatio Diver, Sculptural Antipathia: In Atonement Transcendo and Mechanika Momento: Creatio Forerunner, the collected poems orchestrate a tryptic voice that dismantles the outward magnitude of the self by subverting the antithetical self through spiritual and organic sensualness.This mythopoeic tripartism simultaneously interconnects with religion, theology, and metaphysics which …

Playing At The Crossroads Of Religion And Law: Historical Milieu, Context And Curriculum Hooks In Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This chapter presents the use of Lost & Found – a purpose-built tabletop to mobile game series – to teach medieval religious legal systems. The series aims to broaden the discourse around religious legal systems and to counter popular depiction of these systems which often promote prejudice and misnomers. A central element is the importance of contextualizing religion in period and locale. The Lost & Found series uses period accurate depictions of material culture to set the stage for play around relevant topics – specifically how the law promoted collaboration and sustainable governance practices in Fustat (Old Cairo) in twelfth-century …

Apocalypse And Eschatology In John Ford's The Grapes Of Wrath (1940), Nancy Wright

Journal of Religion & Film

John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940) visualizes conventions of the apocalypse genre to represent not simply a particular historical setting, the Great Depression, but also a vision of history to be interpreted in terms of eschatology. Expressionistic photography transforms the characters’ experiences into enigmatic visions that invite and guide interpretation. A comparison of montage sequences in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath and Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke The Plains (1936), a Farm Security Administration documentary, clarifies how Ford’s narrative film aligns spectators within and outside the mise-en-scène.

The Fluid Gaze In Virtual Reality, Soudhamini

Film and Media Arts Faculty Articles and Research

"In 2006, in the course of an Artists Residency in Munich I made a video triptych titled Meditations on the Tiger, in which a story unfolds over three adjacent screens... The story is as linear as it can get, but working with three screens I found I could move laterally as well... There were multiple tracks of time running together on that train - the real time of action and event, the hurtling projected time of anticipation and expectation, and the deep, reflective time of memory, thought and speech. 3 video timelines synchronized so we begin to approach image, just …

The Binding Of Abraham: Inverting The Akedah In Fail-Safe And Wargames, Hunter B. Dukes

Journal of Religion & Film

This article draws upon Søren Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling and Jacques Derrida's The Gift of Death to trace how two exemplars of atomic bomb cinema reinterpret the Binding of Isaac (Akedah). Released during the twin peaks of Cold War tension, Fail-Safe (1964) and WarGames (1983) invert the Akedah of Genesis 22. In both films, an act of sacrificial patricide accompanies or replaces the sacrifice of an Isaac-like son. When viewed in the context of Cold War cultural politics—events such as Norman Morrison’s Abrahamic self-immolation and Kent State’s rejection of George Segal’s sacrificial memorial— the inverted Akedah emerges as …