Digital Commons Network^™

Human Experience In The Immersive Experience Economy, Beliz Yuksel Inal

Theses and Dissertations

This study explores the growing trend of immersive experiences, examining how they are designed and experienced. It compares the artistic Machine Hallucination and the commercial Van Gogh Immersive Experience examples. Analyzing audience engagement and social contexts, the research aims to understand the impact of immersive experiences on individuals and society.

The Great Synthesizer: Yuji Agematsu’S Map Works, Rare Objects And Affinities To Fluxus, Renāte Lagzdiņa

Theses and Dissertations

The thesis examines Yuji Agematsu’s artistic practice offering novel lens through which to explore artist’s oeuvre and employed methodologies. It delves into Agematsu’s map works, strategies for collecting the debris of the city, and researches his potential affinities to Fluxus movement.

The Musical, The Spectacle, The Spiritual, And The Political: An In-Depth Analysis Of Amiri Baraka’S 1972 Album, It’S Nation Time – African Visionary Music, Ryan St. Martin

Theses and Dissertations

Perhaps no work is a better representation of Amiri Baraka, the Black nationalist, than the 1972 album, It's Nation Time – African Visionary Music. The album serves as an amalgamation of the most present themes during that point in his career: the musical, the spectacle, the spiritual, and the political. Through a track-by-track analysis of the album, we can better understand Baraka's social outlook at such a pivotal period in the Black culture visionary's career.

A Taste For The Distasteful: The Aesthetics Of Gore In The Giallo And Horror Films Of Mario Bava, Thais Casado Bignardi-Engstrom

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis analyzes the Italian experience with horror in cinema in both psychoanalytic feminist and cognitive Marxist critical film theories through a study of visual renderings of excessive violence and sex in gothic and thrillers known as giallo films created by the film director Mario Bava. This is an art historical study that looks at Bava’s work against the Italian cultural landscape in the post war period.

Gold, Victoria Storm

Theses and Dissertations

Gold is a novel of careful attention and love for landscape, family, and what we call home.

Aguaaaa!!!, Cory Villegas

Theses and Dissertations

“AGUA” is a call for new models of learning and sharing, celebrating the diasporic as a place of global revolution. Salsa, rooted in Latin American and Afro-Caribbean histories, is choreographer Cory Villegas’s expression of cultural legacy. As an Afro-diasporic dance, Salsa carries the wealth and variety of African and Indigenous roots. Villegas contextualizes her thesis event “Las Leyendas: An Afro Cuban Suite,” presenting herself and her troupe Soul Dance Co. as evidence that contradicts the erasure of Latin & Caribbean Culture in US dance history. The paper uses English and Spanish, written, visual, and oral materials with an accompanying webpage.

Changing The Narrative: Athinai, An Illustrated Periodical For Modern Greece, 1934–35, Julie Fry

Theses and Dissertations

Athinai provided a Greek counterpart to European popular magazines of the interwar period. The integration of hand-drawn illustration with photographic imagery, collage, and multicolor printing yielded its distinctive visual language. Athinai portrayed changes in the daily life of modern Athens, attitudes to the body, and the role of women.

Road Gives Way: Transiting Indigenous Reconnection, Rosalind Aparicio-Ramírez

Theses and Dissertations

In the vein of the literary and artistic genre of Indigenous Futurisms, the author documents her understanding of indigeneity and the impacts of migration through her relationship with her father and extended family’s culture, one unbeknownst to her until adulthood. Through visitation to her family’s pueblo in Oaxaca, Mexico, her father’s hometown of Mexico City, her hometown in North Carolina, new conversations with family members on their Zapoteco and Mixteco heritage, and re-examination and contextualization of memories, the author begins to understand what the process of ‘reconnecting’ looks like for her family. Particular emphasis is placed on experiences of travel …

Old Mac Donald's Party Farm, Aida P. Riddle

Theses and Dissertations

An experimental collection of short stories

Proud Men, Jacob Appet

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the beginning of a novel about a disturbed leftist podcaster that goes missing. His co-host and childhood best friend reflects on their complex relationship before deciding to go search for him. It is a literary mystery with noir elements, that explores themes of political morality, toxic masculinity, and Jewish identity.

Heirloom, Mercedes P. Frias

Theses and Dissertations

This novel excerpt follows a mother, Luz, and her daughter, Rayneli, while they explore womanhood, generational trauma, and family dynamics.

Southern And Caribbean Transnational Black Feminist Dialogues In Contemporary Art, Adria Gunter

Theses and Dissertations

“Southern and Caribbean Black Feminist Transnational Dialogues in Contemporary Art” presents a Black feminist reading of the transnational cultural forms, as well as the political and social histories between the Southern United States and the Caribbean through the works of Andrea Chung, Allison Janae Hamilton, and Tamika Galanis.

Swallow Your Medicine: Marisol’S Saca La Lengua From The Peace Portfolio Ii, A. E. Chapman

Theses and Dissertations

Bundling associations of medical examination, consumption, oral fixation, horror, and protest, Saca la Lengua provides a preview of a decisively abject turn in Marisol’s work. This thesis probes psychoanalytic themes of abjection and the pathological in the language and iconography presented in this and other works by Marisol.

Thinking Sculpturally: The Implications Of Sculptural Space In The Work Of Charles Ray, Ad Canter

Theses and Dissertations

Charles Ray states that “space, sculptural space…is the sculptor's primary medium.” This paper unpacks the term “sculptural space,” uncovers historical precedent for it, and suggests why it is fundamental to Ray’s project. The paper argues that, due to sculptural space, Ray’s artwork allows for many forms of meaningful engagement.

Luca (Last Universal Common Ancestor), Tansy Xiao

Theses and Dissertations

LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is a non-linear virtual environment with a non-anthropocentric approach. Streaming real-time biometric data from performers' movements, brain activities, and bioprocess data from living microbiomes such as slime mold and yeast into the virtual ecosystem, LUCA explores the collective agency and interconnectivity among diverse living entities.

Corridors, Miguel Antonio Alfredo V. Luarca

Theses and Dissertations

After twenty years away, Anj has come home to the Philippines, where three generations of women mourn the death of her estranged father. But one day in her family’s ancestral house is enough to remind her why she left. And why she might never escape.

Last Gold, Minna Lee

Theses and Dissertations

At the Winter Olympics sponsored by Beef Bowls ™, figure skating’s three-time silver medalist Chili must compete against their perfect girlfriend for one last shot at gold. In an arena filled with penguins, Beef Bowls ™, and real Olympic history, love and success go head to head.

My Sauce! Living In The Polyrhythm, Zakiya Harris

Theses and Dissertations

This paper contextualizes “Ghana: The Place Where the Chief Sleeps,” for which Harris served as dance captain, rehearsal director, dancer, stager and choreographer. Harris details how her work living inside the polyrhythms of performance, practices, and pedagogies can produce a holistic West African dance education for students.

Feeble Transmitters, Indranil Choudhury

Theses and Dissertations

Feeble Transmitters is a series of electroacoustic sculptures made using ceramics, plexiglass, and home audio components like speakers, transducers, and amplifiers. The sculptures occupy a space between manufactured objects and organic forms. Drawing on the material culture of industrial design in audio, the series explores people’s relationships and rituals with consumer technology. When installed together in temporary installations, the sculptures activate their environment with a spatial soundscape.

The Routes, Wei-Ta Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The Routes is a 30-minute documentary that explores the filmmaker's reflection on the ties to family and homeland, as well as the nature of non-fiction filmmaking itself, all the while portraying in parallel the story of immigrant artist Hung-Ju as he delicately balances creative challenges with nostalgia.

Time's Radiant Keepers, Tara Aliya Kesavan

Theses and Dissertations

Time’s Radiant Keepers is a body of work comprising paintings, ceramic sculptures and video. Through these materials, my work emphasizes a tactile, embodied relationship between people and the virtual worlds they inhabit. I build on the idea of contending with the screen as a sculptural surface - one whose texture, form and objecthood we may look at, rather than simply look through. My formal inquiries are anchored in a rich narrative world. Drawing from state sponsored documentary films, feature films, and familial anecdotes from the 1950’s-1970’s in India, my paintings chronicle the emergence of the image of the urban, working …

Container Film, Dena Kopolovich

Theses and Dissertations

Container Film is an experimental nonfiction short film that explores the theme of carrying. Drawing inspiration from a blend of anthropological, religious, and artistic sources, the film is guided by an unknown narrator who contemplates the origins of humanity. Unlike conventional storytelling, the narrator’s uncertainty and inner dialogue punctuate the narrative, challenging a traditional linear structure. Jumping between diverse thoughts, she resists depicting human history with a singular hero or linear trajectory. Visually, the film unfolds through vivid tableaux vivants, dance sequences, and curious object arrangements, illustrating the subtle relationship between human cognition and materiality. Through its nuanced, tactile approach, …

Blurring The Boundaries: The Filmmaking Approach Toward Remission, John M. Mastriano

Theses and Dissertations

Remission explores the filmmaker’s personal experience with grief and fatherhood as well as the importance of a shared connection with the natural world that transcends life and death. Though primarily a first-person, reflexive short documentary film, Remission draws from other documentary models and modes, blurring the boundaries of documentary filmmaking.

Reflections Of Little Red Dot: An Interactive Mixed Reality Archival Experience, Chloé Lee

Theses and Dissertations

It has been nearly a decade since I last visited Singapore, a place I am connected to yet an outsider. Reflections of Little Red Dot is a mixed-reality experience that animates my archive of drawings, videos, and 3D imagery from everyday Singaporeans in 2015, the year their country celebrated its 50th birthday.

Walking through this liminal mixed reality space, we hear how citizens are personally affected by the rapidly developing landscape and erasure of personal and historical sites of significance while reflecting on our collective agency to shape the future of our environments. We are invited into homes where loved …

Conceptual Representation And Schemas: Perceived Gender Differences Among Kinds And Shared Properties, Kathryn G. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Schemas are modes of categorization containing associations between kinds and their related properties. Research suggests sex-linked properties possess principled differences between the sexes. The present study’s results suggest that non-sex-linked properties also possess principled differences, which were more prevalent among properties with principled rather than causal connections to a kind.

Lost In The Times Of Yesterday And Other Stories, Anes Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

Lost in the Times of Yesterday is an ongoing collection of fiction that features short stories who, while varying differently from one another, are all intertwined by the themes of immigration, post-colonialism, and Arabic and Arab-American identity, aiming to capture the diverse orchestra of Egyptian and Egyptian-American voices through the lens of magical realism. Some examples: the grief of a village girl and her attempt to understand her father’s ghost; an Egyptian-American actor whose slow physical disappearance leads to an examination of identity within contemporary performance; and the life of boy born with chestnut wings in a Brooklyn apartment.

The Set Falls Apart, Thomas F. Tait

Theses and Dissertations

Using systems, puppets, and reappropriated technologies as central features of my practice, in my work I explore allegorical connections and cross-affiliations between otherwise separate ontological categories. In this text, I draw on sources such as affect theory, science fiction, theater, and the uncanny, to consider our affectual relationship to the nonhuman.

As Mundane As Possible, Minah Park

Theses and Dissertations

Minah Park’s work explores the themes of mundaneness and control, and focuses on the body as the vessel of emotions. In her videos and installations, Park questions the idea that our brains might have already been programmed.

Bengal Memory, Fahim Hamid

Theses and Dissertations

Bengal Memory is a documentary short film, told through an expository and personal lens, about a forgotten genocide that occurred in Bangladesh during its Liberation War, the controversial role that the U.S. government played in it, and how the lives of Bengali people in both the homeland and in the American diaspora were shaped by these events. As a Bangladeshi American and narrator of this story, I traveled to my native country to investigate. My father, Mohammed, had lived through the 1971 war and recounts his memories of the atrocities committed by West Pakistan, which claimed the lives of a …

Mixed Feelings: The Emotional Appeals Of Zitkala-Ša’S American Indian Stories, Kayla Joan Baur

Publications and Research

Zitkala-Ša (Lakota: Zitkála-Šá, meaning Red Bird) was among the first to write about the experiences of Native American children in the U.S. Indian boarding school program to an English-speaking audience. As a writer and political activist, Zitkala-Ša uses emotional appeals and cultural ideas she learned through her white education to expose the very boarding school institutions that taught her. In American Indian Studies (1921), Zitkala-Ša critiques the violence that the Indian boarding school system inflicts on young Native Americans. She presents these critiques through emotional appeals that take two forms: one, a more traditional sentimental appeal associated with middle-class white …