Art and Design Commons^™

Until One Resembles The Other, Chad E. Mundie Jr.

Theses and Dissertations

A written accompaniment to Chad Mundie’s thesis exhibition titled Until One Resembles the Other, conceived during the years 2021-22 and installed at The Anderson Gallery, Richmond from April 9-22nd.

The following writing explores themes of labor within the home, generational knowledge, interiority, exteriority, and emotional residue through a series of essays surrounding areas of interest within my practice. The writing concludes with documentation of the show and an accompanying explanatory text.

Revenge Of The Lawn, Jason James Wallin

Journal of Social Theory in Art Education

A great irony of the present moment involves the return of objects long thought rallied to the will of man. As growing consensus in climate change research submits, the world presumably given to the mastery of man today returns as an alien force of material and conceptual upheaval. It is against this backdrop of rapid ecological transformation and its cultural impacts that Revenge of the Lawn is situated. As a work of speculative philo-fiction, Revenge of the Lawn surveys the horror of being “read” from the vantage of the non-human as it exists astride and yet withdraws from human melodrama …

Prey Begins With Play, Seren C. Moran

Theses and Dissertations

My work examines the lasting psychological and emotional torment of trauma focusing on sexual violence against women. My thesis consists of five short animated films recounting non-fiction experiences of sexual assault. To contextualize my work within cultural and historical representations of sexual violence, this text reflects my research on the mishandling of rape in Western art history as well as contemporary politics and cinema. In both my work and research, I address the complicated, and often contradictory, internal reality of experiencing and remembering trauma and how this relates to artistic strategies such as collage and maximalism. My personal struggles recovering …

Graphic Content Warning; Personal And Political Traumas, Emily K. Wardell

Theses and Dissertations

The written portion of this thesis work is meant to address and further investigate the visual work created using mediums of print and found video. This artistic research has been interested in examining varying associations with truth, recollection, and evidence. This includes the recollection of public histories and news-media narratives as well as my own history and trauma. Through this work my aim was to create a deconstruction and revolt against how associations are formed, and how to understand imagery as information. This thesis first discusses my relationship to appropriated imagery, then connects and examines it through the addition of …

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.

The Mall: A World-Building Speculation On The Future Of Privacy, Hazem Asif

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a science fiction exploration of a future dystopian world where privacy becomes a dominant currency that is distributed according to social class and ranking mechanisms. It utilizes speculative world-building to study the unanticipated implications of technology on personal privacy, surveillance and social inequality on future societies. The project introduces The Mall, as a highly efficient and hyper-connected world, but also exposes its downfall as a society with heightened cultural and socio-political disparities. Inspired by past civilizations, the development of the modern nation-state as well as contemporary society, the design adapts, appropriates and reformulates existing cultures into new …

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 …

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 …

My Eyes Due See, Johannes J. Barfield

Theses and Dissertations

My Eyes Due See is a multidimensional examination of the “black experience” in America. The installation is composed of a single-channel video, a music composition that utilizes music samples and live instrumentation, and sculptures made up of car parts and broomsedge grass. Each of these elements arranged in space share a nuanced and complicated view of blackness through the lens of a black man decoding personal history and American history simultaneously. Autonomy is the overarching theme throughout the work as it pertains to race, identity, urban and rural environments, and the relationship between generational trauma and nostalgia.

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.

The Institute Of New Feelings: Plastic Identities And Imperfect Surfaces, Weijian Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into …

Open / Close: Assimilating Immersive Spaces In Visual Communication, Anika Sarin

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in two spaces obverse to each other: open and closed. An open space develops organically based on how people inhabit it. Interacting with an open space is a dynamic, sporadic, multisensory, immersive, and subjective experience. In such spaces, we are confronted with an alternative aesthetic, one that is in conflict with the seamlessness of a closed space. A closed space is anchored on definite variables like structure, use and boundaries. While interaction between people and space is important, the space is tightly controlled and interaction is designed. Through this thesis project, I present a method that metaphorically …

Egyptianization: Culture Hacking As A Method, Hadeer Omar

Theses and Dissertations

In a broad sense, cultures undergo a metamorphoses due to the external influences and systems impacting the evolution of internal identities. Conversely, Individuals within cultures react to those external influences and systems.The act of hacking a culture is an opportunity to challenge an existing or imported system in order to bring about change and improvement. An aspect of culture hacking is to create messages of satire or irony in order to criticize, or completely reject established systems within cultures.

Post Arab spring, Egyptians practiced culture hacking by applying their cultural tools to external systems and influences, producing a process of …

So Much Apparent Nothing, Emily Mcbride

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on motivations behind selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition so much apparent nothing. Through journal excerpts and analysis of my own psychology, I attempt to put into words my thoughts concurrent to my making, indirect as they may be. The following text shares my personal conflicts and ideologies surrounding art-making, the permanence of objects, and the acceptance of an identity in flux.

Proactive Conversation, 3d Printing, And An Old Nintendo, Tesha C. Ellis

Undergraduate Research Posters

Abstract

One hundred years from now, it would be a true historical treat to be able to showcase 20th and 21st century digital entertainment by presenting video game consoles in mint condition for interactive, educational, play. Arguably, it would be more enlightening and informative for future audiences to be able to physically engage with the electronic artifacts instead of simply observing them behind glass. With the use of 3D technology, components of video game systems can be preserved, and then printed as needed for repairs. It will help keep them functional for future researchers, educators, and enthusiasts.

Cute As A Button, Marta R. Finkelstein

Theses and Dissertations

Cute As A Button explores powerlessness, vulnerability, illness and addiction all wrapped up in tender buttons and a cute, cuddly creature. Using animation, sculpture, sound and an intimate space, I surround the viewer in a saccharine nightmare, one that references the dark underbelly of the cute and the sweet. The visual and aural elements are representative of the psychological and emotional states of powerlessness, which are overcome by the act of making and exploring a medium over which I can have complete control.

Early Connections Between Film And Emerging Media As Evidenced In The Animated Worlds Of Adam Beckett, Pamela Turner

Kinetic Imaging Publications and Presentations

Making a “film” today rarely involves a journey to the lab as images are more often recorded digitally and not on celluloid. Even video’s electromagnetic record is transformed to bits and bytes. There is no frame to splice. The visual material exists as a virtual reference only. As McLuhan points out, new media doesn’t replace the old, existing media, but changes it. Theorists often point to the photograph and its impact on the painting. A similar event was the emergence of video technology and its ensuing relationship with film, a relationship whose differences have become increasingly transparent.

Looking at the …

Persistence Of Vision: The Value Of Invention In Independent Art Animation, Pamela Turner

Kinetic Imaging Publications and Presentations

The focus of this investigation is in the realm of animation that straddles the ever-shrinking gulf between a screening and an exhibition, the theater and the art gallery. There is a subtle maturity and movement in the animation art world that not only continues but also extends the often-overlooked legacy of independent animation while engaging the conceptual dialogue of contemporary art. This tradition of an art aesthetic is passed from the early inventors who fashioned the necessary tools and images. The myriads of techniques and concepts evidenced throughout this history inform the current practitioner, just as digital technology and the …

Content And Meaning In Abstract Animation, Pamela Turner

Kinetic Imaging Publications and Presentations

Talking about the content and meaning of abstract animation, for the practitioner or enthusiast, is like discussing why one eats chocolate or why we stand at the edge of the ocean, experiencing the sensation of the sand being sucked out from under our feet by the pull of the receding wave. Or why listening to a beautiful adagio can create such a stirring response. These experiences stand for themselves and need no explanation.

For the uninitiated, or the viewer who has little to no encounter with abstract animation, however, these moving images can be initially disconcerting and hard to understand. …