Visual Studies Commons^™

Do Androids Dream Of Bad Tv?: Un/Originality In Neil Burger’S Voyagers, Tom Ue, Callum M. Mcnutt

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Critics did not take kindly to Neil Burger’s Voyager (2021). On Rotten Tomatoes, the film scored a dismal 25%, and the consensus is that it’s a trip best not taken: “It has a game cast and a premise ripe with potential, but Voyagers drifts in familiar orbit rather than fully exploring its intriguing themes.” This article seeks neither to reclaim the film as an unjustly neglected cinematic masterpiece nor to assert its importance in the canon of dystopian works. Rather, it treats Voyagers as a test case for exploring our own critical investment in the genre. Our aims are …

Finding Kurt, Ryan Block

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Upon completion of my Honors Project, I will have filmed, edited, planned, and directed a documentary on poverty in Akron. Through film, I will show the community what it is like to be homeless, without anyone there to look out for you. I will journey across Akron alongside my friend Jordan, looking to find a specific homeless man we once met. Along the way, I hope to come across other people without homes who will share stories about their lives, either in passing or through interviews. If I do not end up finding the man I set out to find, …

How Bollywood Has Influenced Cinema And Viewers Both Locally And Globally, Bhumi Patel

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The evolution and impact of Bollywood cinema follows its journey from silent films to contemporary masterpieces. Bollywood reflects India's rich cultural heritage while adapting to societal shifts and embracing progressive themes. From timeless tales of romance to modern explorations of feminism, LGBTQ+ rights, and mental health, Bollywood has evolved into a dynamic force for social commentary and cultural expression. Through integration of deep emotions and universally enjoyable music and dance, Bollywood transcends language and cultural barriers, captivating audiences worldwide. While facing setbacks such as lack of diversity, Bollywood is gradually embracing inclusivity and evolving with the times. By addressing taboo …

More Than Meets The Eye: Proximity To Crises Through Presidential Photographs, Laurie J. Bonnici, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

We look at three photographs, each made at a time of profound crisis, in order to tease out notions of proximity. Vision gives us proximity at a distance. Photographs may give us a similar proximity. Human vision depends on experience built up from individual events of seeing. Can a photograph made in a fraction of a second by someone else at some other time and some other place provide anything more than data about some surfaces in front of the lens? Can words and other images from the photographers enhance the viewer’s proximity to the original? Can we make use …

Designing A Website For A Non-Profit Organization, Kristen Lauck

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The purpose of this honors project is to redesign and launch a website for the nonprofit organization Better Future Facilitators. Better Future Facilitators is a 501c3 non-profit organization that helps homeless men and women start their own businesses by providing them with the education, skills, and support necessary to be successful and break the cycle of homelessness.

Starting June 3rd, I will be writing website copy, taking photographs, reorganizing content, and designing a simple website layout for betterfuturefacilitators.org via Wix.com’s website creator. This website will allow the organization to better communicate with their target public and create a secure place …

Homelessness In Akron: A Research Documentary, Tyler Gunter

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This Honors Research Project at The University of Akron is one that will serve as a learning experience relative to my Major and will also become a useful tool to show my expertise to potential employers. My project is a filmed and edited mini-documentary on homelessness in the city of Akron. The link to the project can be found on page 15.

Through this project, I am hoping to bring more awareness to the issues of homelessness in Akron, and some of the different services and programs that are assisting those who are in need. I will be doing this …

Performing The Quality Of Imperceptible Interactions Between Individuals: A Technological Challenge Regarding The Collective, Marine Theunissen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Contemporary technologies allow incredible possibilities of capturing individuals, but a problem arises when it comes to capturing a chorus, that is to say a "collective body" in motion. This proposal will address the problem of the sensitive capture of the quality of the interrelations between individuals, and of their refined interpretation through algorithms to "output” them in other forms. We will address two questions on the subject: how to capture the relations between individuals within a collective? How to create a circular-causal loop, whose artistic material (the digital data) is the interrelations of a collective, without engendering redundancy in their …

[For The System, Alternate Title: If It Sort Of Looks Like A Duck: Reflecting On Bad Photographs And Chains Of Custody], Jodi Kearns, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Though the system will not permit it, our abstract is an out-of-focus photograph of ducks at 1900 pixels wide and black and white, which is approximately 20% the size of the original color photograph we use for our title. By most technical standards, it is a bad picture. Straightening the horizon, cropping the image to emphasize the two foremost ducks, brightening the image to highlight the feet, and adding a caption that indicates activity might yield a “better” picture for some viewers. This piece captures nearly 20 years of conversations about good and bad pictures, and continues the conversation from …

Photo Synthesis: The Expatriate Family Album As Historiography, Kamayani Sharma Ms

Proceedings from the Document Academy

I want to look at the expatriate family album as a site of history-writing.

Through an examination of three photographs from my childhood in West Asia, I try to think about the idea of historical space and time through the visual narratives available to me of my own family.

This essay will be an exploration of the way in which nostalgia for a personal past gets imbricated within the shared experience of a bygone cultural moment.

I am interested in how an encounter with visual material from private archives initiates memory work and how these traces from the past can …

What Makes A Movie, Richard L. Anderson, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Perhaps when the conditions of film projection will change, through technical progresses which promise to allow us to have access at will to films, it may be possible to walk leisurely, to wander, to loaf about, stroll and loiter …delighted to explore the ordered depth of a film, to appreciate a thousand details in a sequence while experiencing the unique character of the whole.

This quote from Baudry looked forward from the conclusion of our early piece “Access to Moving Image Documents,” published before the availability of digital computational tools. The digital environment has provided the stage for Baudry’s vision, …

Transmedial Documentation For Non-Visual Image Access, Melody J. Mccotter

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In my doctoral studies on information accessibility for the individual who is blind or visually impaired, I’ve been exploring the ways we can make image documents more accessible. This requires using an alternative sensory modality, and translating the document into a different format. The questions that arise when we consider this process are many, but among them are:

• Is it the same document once we’ve converted it to an audio narrative about the work, or a 3D topographic map of an artwork, or a musical interpretation?
• If it is not the same document, how truthful can the “trans-medial” translation be …