Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Nothing To See Hear, Adam Kuykendall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Nothing to See/Hear is a research experiment into minimalist visual narrative via the short film Not the Boss of Me, in which the criteria for production mandated only the bare essential elements required to construct and convey a plot and its characters be used while filming within a nondescript space - in this case, a mostly empty soundstage. How does one tell a story and define its characters without direct expository dialogue? What is needed to establish and define locations and/or environments when limited to only one or two items? Can an audience engage their imagination to fill in the …

Using Photovoice To Navigate Social-Ecological Change In Coastal Maine: A Case Study On Visibility, Visuality, And Visual Literacy, Kevin P. Duffy

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Media representations of the environment support specific cultures of viewing that can create expectations about how to observe social-ecological interactions in everyday life. While public perceptions may appear, in some cases, to reflect these normative representations, more critical and participatory approaches to environmental research and management have begun to complicate these representations as they are negotiated through intrapersonal, interpersonal, and group communication. Working from a visual cultural approach that interrogates issues of visibility, visuality, and visual literacy, this dissertation theorizes how coastal residents represent their own observations and experiences of environmental change through photography and what impact their views have …

Transdisciplinary Creative Ecologies In Contemporary Art Within Emergent Processes, Siglinde Langholz Villarreal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research is composing in the moving with affective speeds and rhythms, instead of unfolding direct and in linear ways. It is important to come across different planes of composition in movement. There are so many planes of voices spinning around in relation. Research-creation seems as forms of relations and an invitation to appreciate the collectivity at the heart of thinking. The many entering-into relation within a differential thought in the making of its own.

Emergent properties in non-human interactions, such as those presented in Steven Shaviro ́s Against Self-Organization (2009) and Brain Massumi, are symptomatic of how individualities relate …

Immersed In Fire: The Use Of Virtual Reality As An Attitude Assessor And Boundary Object In Wildland Fire Management, Casey Olechnowicz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Interest in using prescribed burning as a forest management tool to promote forest health and regeneration is growing in Maine. The goal for this research was to better understand the way that the public perceives prescribed burning practices in wildland-urban interfaces, with an emphasis placed on how immersive imagery, closely related to virtual reality (VR), compares to traditional communication methods. We specifically focus on the social acceptability of prescribed burning and analyze how the level of immersive imagery is related to that acceptability (Ahn, 2015; Bricken, 1990; Fogg, Cuellar, and Danielson, 2009; Smith 2015; Wiederhold, Davis, and Wiederhold, 1998). The …

Non/Disclosure: Documentation And Participant Observation As Hybrid, Nonfiction, Artistic Research Methodology For Ethnographic Media Production, Contemplative Discovery, Social Practice And Catharsis, Cyle P. O'Donnell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As if presaged by the physical, fine and philosophical arts that preceded it, the amelioration to the process of documenting the wonted human existence, political strife, and sundry cultural phenomena through the neo-normative medium of film (and eventually digital video) inaugurated the true scope and importance of anthropological research among a vastly wider audience who would use it, and its intrinsic capacity for the augmentation of artistic expression, to proliferate an expansive accompaniment to the field which would all become recognized platforms for demonstrative presentation of individual oeuvres.

Intermedia has worked in this way to amalgamate concepts like Futurism, Dadaism, …

We Are Cells Living In The World While The World Lives In Us, Tara Law

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What has been called the Anthropocene epoch is the first period of time in which human activities and technological advances have measurably contributed to climate changes. It is common to live in the shadow of industrial architecture. The landscapes we live in and the changes to our air, soil, and water quality are interconnected. Our bodies are made up of cells moving through the world, but the world also moves through us. I’m interested in how our environment changes us and what we can do to change our environment.

An exploration of book forms and by extension the many forms …

Towards A Filmic Look And Feel In Real Time Computer Graphics, Sherief Farouk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Film footage has a distinct look and feel that audience can instantly recognize, making its replication desirable for computer generated graphics. This thesis presents methods capable of replicating significant portions of the film look and feel while being able to fit within the constraints imposed by real-time computer generated graphics on consumer hardware.

Opera Enormous: Arias In The Cinema, Benjamin Speed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

For this thesis, I ask why people are coming to the Grand, a local independent cinema in Maine, for the Metropolitan Opera Live in HD simulcasts? I take the reader through historical and critical context of the program and the Grand along with framing the simulcasts as either media events, phenomenological experiences and/or performance rituals for audience members. Finally, I ask how can this research inform the Grand about its programming decisions? To answer these questions, a mixed method approach was employed. I am conducting a study composed of several different essays that explore the research question from different points …

Winter Tears: A Study In Computer Animation, Daniel Whinnery Bissell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project is a study into the art and science of Animation. Specifically, this project focuses on the development of story and character through the use of Computer Animation. From beginning to end, this animation comprises work done completely by the author. The main goal of the project was to understand the development process of an animated short through concentration on Story Development, Character Creation, and Character Animation. In totality, the completed work comprises 10 months of individual labor that began in July 2001 and ended in April 2002. These 10 months of work have resulted in the creation of …

Seeing The Past: Jesse James And American History In Motion Pictures, Clinton S. Loftin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

An Abstract of the Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts (in History) May, 2000 Historically-based films often reveal more about the time in which they were made than about their historical subjects. Three motion pictures about Jesse James made in three very different eras reveal more about contemporary history than they do about the facts surrounding the legendary outlaw’s life. While each film, in some way, purports to tell the “true” story of Jesse James’ life, each offers a different history of that life. In order to understand the reasons for …