Visual Studies Commons^™

A Tropic Understanding Of Street Art As Political And Social Advocacy, Lindsay K. Kosel

Honors Theses and Capstones

Graffiti and street art has been prevalent in the past few decades taking stances toward social and political adversity, but there lacks discussion about how dialogue is provoked within street artwork. Through the detailed analysis of the visual display created by JR on the West Bank Wall, these paper places focus on the rhetorical function of how street artist utilize images as means for political and social advocacy. The display shifts the focus from trauma, dislocation, and victimhood to that of comedic relief in our “humanness”. The identification of tropes within a street art display indicates that they are in …

Fantasy Versus Reality: A Twenty-First Century Film Series To Explore How The Absurdity Of Alternate Realities Affects The Individual In The Audience, Courtney Wunderwald

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The purpose of this study was to understand how film viewers contextualize on-screen alternate realities with their personal perspectives, and if that is accurately represented by scholarly film critique. I then compared my findings with filmmaker interviews, which discuss their reasons for including specific imagery, symbols, and characters to evoke certain emotions or reactions from their audiences. My project aspired to offer a method that might redefine how viewers reflect on films and to open a discussion to gather data from audiences before assuming their reactions in film critique. I was always fascinated by the power of cinema, particularly how …

News Literacy, Sissel W. Mccarthy

Open Educational Resources

"The digital age has created the need for a new kind of literacy-a literacy that empowers news consumers to determine whether information is credible, reliable and truthful. This is not just a skill; it is a new core competency for the 21st century. So-called “fake news” is hard to spot and spreads easily, leading to disagreements over basic facts. The antidote to the growing challenges posed by this digital revolution is news literacy. This mini news literacy course includes two three-hour sessions that will teach anyone to become a more critical consumer of news. "

The News Literacy course package …

In Media Res, Christopher Andrew Sisk

Theses and Dissertations

We are inundated by a constant feed of media that responds and adapts in real time to the impulses of our psyches and the dimensions of our devices. Beneath the surface, this stream of information is directed by hidden, automated controls and steered by political agendas. The transmission of information has evolved into a spiral of entropy, and the boundaries between author, content, platform, and receiver have blurred. This reductive space of responsive media is a catalyst for immense political and cultural change, causing us to question our notions of authority, truth, and reality.

"It Came In Little Waves": Feminist Imagery In Chantal Akerman's Je, Tu, Il, Elle +, Staci C. Dubow

Honors Theses

Chantal Akerman writes, “she who seeks shall find, find all too well, and end up clouding her vision with her own preconceptions.”[1] This thesis addresses the films of Chantal Akerman from a theoretical feminist film perspective. There are many lenses through which Akerman’s rich body of work can be viewed, and I would argue that she herself never intended for it to be understood in just one way. I wish to situate Akerman’s films, in particular her 1974 Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1h 30m), within a discourse of other feminist film theorists and makers that were further rooted in …

The Cinematic College Professor: Conceptions And Representations, John C. Fitch Iii

Theses and Dissertations--Educational Policy Studies and Evaluation

Depictions of college professors in American films are common, and while a number of studies have investigated various aspects of college life in motion pictures, few have focused exclusively on the cinematic professoriate. In addition to being an indelible part of history, cinematic depictions of college professors are part of the national discourse on the role and function of the faculty and university. An investigation of how college professors have been represented in American films, and how these representations are read and created by real-life college professors and filmmakers may provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between popular culture …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

Ultrasound—Re:Viewing Bodies, Minjee Jeon

Theses and Dissertations

A medical evaluation of physical impairment imposes the additional burden of “labeling” the patient with the condition. The binary nature of the normal versus abnormal label emphasizes difference and can lead to trauma. Understanding differences, however, can lead to the generation of new forms and thus, more sensitive differentiation and representation. Tension is created by exploring different bodily forms—a dialectic between form and essence. I am designing a space that visualizes and illuminates difference as a source of trauma and amplifying the tension by comparing figures that represent varying degrees of normalcy. This forms a critique of idealized form and …

Work/Death, Of Each In Their Own, Micah H. Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Writings in support of my visual thesis, including some background, and bibliographic information: Oregon/Death/Animation/Vocation and the artist as an agent of potential.

Laminated Paint, Travis R. Austin

Theses and Dissertations

Though we may not perceive it, we are surrounded by material-in-flux. Inert materials degrade and the events that comprise our natural and social environments causally thread into a duration that unifies us in our incomprehension. Sounds reveal ever-present vibrations of the landscape: expressions of the flexuous ground on which we stand.

Safeguarding For The Future: Managing Born-Digital Collections In Museums, Kimberly Kruse

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

Over the past few decades, advancements in technology have changed society entirely. Every bit of information about world news, popular culture, and art is just a tap of a touchscreen away. So many aspects of the contemporary world have become digitized so that it was only a matter of time before museums would have to face the issue of born-digital media in their collections. From videos to web-based art, museums have to tackle how to save this new form of cultural heritage. Museums have to do so now before it gets lost forever. The challenge of born-digital objects lies in …

Stay Woke, Langston A. Williams

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Throughout the pages of my thesis, I comprehensively analyze the processes, intentions, and production of my thesis film Stay Woke. My examination will exhaustively probe every stage of the film from development to preproduction to production to postproduction and beyond. Individual aspects of this process including writing, casting, locations, production design, cinematography, directing, budgeting, scheduling, and postproduction workflows will be detailed. As I make elaborations in each section, I will explain my learning experiences from each day’s new tasks, challenges, and lessons. All of these things will be framed with regards to the overall goal and themes of the …

The Horse's Ass: A Survey Of Comediology, William M. Fisk

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

What is comedy? Can someone learn to be funny? Are there rules or guidelines for the production of laughter, the universal language? This paper, which outlines an investigation of successful comedians and the production of a short film, determines to aggregate as many of the relevant prerequisites of inducing giggles as possible, especially as they relate to the audiovisual medium of cinema.

On Capturing The Ineffable: A Moment From Experimental Film "59.10", Henry Leslie Foster Ii

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This artwork is a still from “59,” an experimental film installation I created with the following restrictions: I had to direct eleven 59-second films in eleven months with eleven collaborating artists, none of whom could be cis men.In the resulting project, we used film and those eleven short moments to capture our unique, fragile experiences. We explored everything from the way in which facets of personality drift in and out of the subconscious to the beautiful, mercurial nature of gender.

Post-Representational Presence: Disruptive Actions & Visibility Politics In New Media, Christian Hendricks

Theses and Dissertations

This text is a written component to a master’s thesis in the fine arts. It is a research-intensive text that conventionally examines contemporary conditions of politics and modes of representation, and analyzes the most innovative artists and visual producers working in these areas. However, the text also includes exercise modules with “challenges” for the reader, similar to a textbook. In the modules, the examples provided are works of my own. I also include text, images, and documentation of my own work from my MFA thesis exhibition.

[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 …

Magical Realism And Film: A Look At Midnight’S Children, Jeff Floss

English Theses

Magical Realism, arguably one of the most important literary forms to develop in the 20th century, is rarely discussed as a film genre, though there are notable film adaptations of magical realist novels. This thesis explores the film adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children to demonstrate how a magical realist novel may be adapted to a visual form, and still maintain the aesthetic sensibilities—and political implications—of the literary original. Drawing on film adaptation studies, close reading, and film analysis, the thesis argues that film can be an effective magical realist genre, even if the conventions of visual mediums are dramatically …

East, West And In-Between; Pass It On, Kam Fung, Sita Wong

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

East, West and In-Between

If art is a reflection of the creator, then Wong’s work is a visual collage of influences from East and West. She is interested in creating works where, within one piece, both cultures converse with one another not only through their traditions of material, form and craftsmanship, but also through their original cultural contexts. Her current work elaborates the local culture and craft traditions of Chinese pottery with a modernist and contemporary sense of design.

Pass It On

Clay, a material full of possibilities, is best to describe a class of uninitiated ceramics learners in the …

The Suppression Of Satirizing Belgian Community Difficulties In Flemish Cinema And The Film Adaptation Of Will-O'-The Wisp, Gertjan Willems

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "The Suppression of Satirizing Belgian Community Difficulties in Flemish Cinema and the Film Adaptation of Will-O'-the Wisp" Gertjan Willems analyzes two film projects of Frans Buyens. In 1970, Buyens received a positive funding recommendation for Top-Hit Girl, a satire about community difficulties in Belgium. However, Minister of Culture Frans van Mechelen refused to support the project because it conflicted with his pro-Flemish views. The minister successfully swept this controversial decision under the rug by offering Buyens the option to trade his socially critical project for a film adaptation of Willem Elsschot's novel Will-O'-the Wisp. …

Pink Is The New Bull: The Feminization Of Pit Bulls In Visual And Literary Discourses As A Rescue Tactic, Stephanie Hogue

Master of Arts in American Studies Capstones

Since the 1980s, pit bulls have been portrayed in a raced, classed, and gendered national discourse that has associated them with minority males of color in low-income urban areas. This discourse has led to a villianization of the breed that has resulted in restrictions on pit bulls and their owners. This project seeks to explore the raced, classed, and gendered representations of pit bulls in cultural productions and the nuanced ways in which the intersectional identities ascribed to pit bulls have impacted their status as acceptable pets in the United States.

I aim to demonstrate that through visual and literary …