Interactive Arts Commons^™

,, Yujia Gong

Masters Theses

I am still learning how to understand the world.

As I moved through different countries, cultures, and communities, I often found myself unlearning and rebuilding what I thought I knew. At times I felt unanchored, floating without a sense of safety or belonging. So I began to walk.

Walking became my way of reconnecting. With each step, I used my senses to notice the details around me: shadows cast by sunlight; life growing from soil; the presence of buildings and objects as quiet evidence of human existence. These elements — scent, light, sound, size, temperature — shape our perception of …

Lives And Lessons Of Zoo Animals, Nicole Emlen

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

This project was an interdisciplinary museum exhibit that was displayed at the Montana Natural History Center between April 4 and May 12, 2025. It displays my photographs that I took of some of the animals I worked with during my summer 2024 internship at ZooMontana. In this project, I educate the public about three main functions of zoos--rescue, conservation, and education--through the stories and lives of four species. These animals all have unique stories that are important to share to improve public knowledge of why zoos are important and how we can improve relationships between humans and wildlife. Photography is …

Envisioning Futures: A Photovoice Study On How An Urban Afterschool Program Empowers Caregivers To Be Agents Of Change In Their Community, Ellen Mays

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

As part of comprehensive whole-family out-of-school-time programming, parent engagement and education play an important role in addressing achievement and opportunity gaps in low-income neighborhoods. Parent groups have the potential to be a unique space of social justice work by creating supportive, innovative spaces to build social capital and organize around common action goals. This photovoice study looks specifically at “Parent University,” a parent out-of-school-time meeting group that focuses on empowerment education by providing opportunities for parents to meet, engage in rich consciousness raising dialogue, identify areas in need of change, and create and implement action for social change. This study …

The Landscape Does Not Care It Is A Landscape: A Utopian Pessimist Journey In Kentucky., Shachaf Polakow

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land …

In-Between Spaces, Trinity Kai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In-between Spaces is a paper based in personal narrative that uses Critical Race Theory and art to analyze the history of photography and systems of discrimination facilitated by hegemonic culture. Body is at the center as a symbol of the physical and psychological impacts systemic inequalities have on people that are classified as other and how one can be absent and present in institutional and public spaces.

Stranger’S Window, Nation’S Mirror, Kyoko Hamaguchi

Theses and Dissertations

In this text, I consider my identity as a Japanese immigrant in the United States during a global pandemic and its impact on my understanding of home as a liminal space. In particular, I discuss notions of home in relation to my work as an artist including two works that utilize the home-sharing platform Airbnb and three works that deal with the dichotomy of inside and outside.

Photography & Visual Perception, Rachel Leigh Bell

Open Educational Resources

This online class introduces students to the basic materials, terms and methods of digital photography. Students will be introduced to the digital camera, including camera settings and controls, but can also work with any photographing device. This is a hands-on class and students will photograph subjects indoors and outdoors, upload, edit, and print image files. Students will complete photo assignments throughout the semester as well as a final project that incorporates the techniques and themes covered in the course.

Modified Landscapes, Esther Nooner

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Modified Landscapes is a body of work that reflects serious thought regarding Nature and its future. My personal experience and beliefs are at the core of why I believe this subject to be of great importance and why it will sustain many artists’ investigations for the time to come. The influences that informed this process are explored through experiences I had traveling, reading and exploring the photograph as a material object. The manipulation of the photograph is meant to question the beautiful, untouched scene and break the Romantic gaze that is historically tied to representations of Nature and insist upon …

The Art And Science Of Light Painting, Reid Godshaw

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

A short overview of the making of light painting portraits explained by the artist.

The Year-Long Adventures Of The Blue Shoes & Their Friends, Michael R. Hill

Zea E-Books Collection

While participating in a Teacher Workshop organized by Georgina Valverde at the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013, Michael Hill began a one-year artistic and pedagogical odyssey making original images (always featuring some aspect of one or more athletic shoes) and posting them daily to a visual blog he created to help kick-start writing projects among the many student athletes he tutored at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He started the year self-identifying as “scholar/teacher,” but at year’s end Michael looked in the mirror and said, OK, still “scholar/ teacher,” but also “artist.” Here are the workshop organizer’s foreword, the scholar’s …

Digital Photography As Experience Artifact, Ryan V. Brennan

Theses and Dissertations

Through the screen interface, the boundary between personal and collective experience is being redefined both spatially and temporally. Here, memories are given independent mediated existence, taking form in digital photographic artifacts that can be communally shared and manipulated into a synthetic continuum.

Lara Salmon, Thesis Statement, Lara Salmon

CGU MFA Theses

My art brings together materials and ideas inspired by personal experience that do not usually exist side by side. My body is the primary mechanism with which I make work, incidentally making me the subject matter of the work. I use my physical self as an instrument to coalesce and transform other materiality. Through live performance and photographic installations I create tension and balance between crude biology and bright, polished formalism. This body of work focuses on Millennial Feminism and the Middle East.

A Passage From Brooklyn To Ithaca: The Sea, The City And The Body In The Poetics Of Walt Whitman And C. P. Cavafy, Michael P. Skafidas

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This treatise is the first extensive comparative study of Walt Whitman and C. P. Cavafy. Despite the abundant scholarship dealing with the work and life of each, until now no critic has put the two poets together. Whitman’s poetry celebrates birth, youth, the self and the world as seen for the first time, while Cavafy’s diverts from the active present to resurrect a world whose key, in Eliot’s terms, is memory. Yet, I see the two poets conversing in the crossroads of the fin de siècle; the American Whitman and the Greek Cavafy embody the antithesis of hope and dislocation …

Work It: A Study In Fashion Photography Portraiture, Dominic J. Iudiciani

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Fashion is a device with which the perception of one’s appearance is manipulated. It is a device that is used across all cultures to identify, symbolize, isolate, and appropriate. It is figuratively and literally woven into the fabric of humankind as a whole. Fashion has the ability to reinforce gender or create dissonance within it through androgynous silhouettes. It can express strength and confidence or emphasize vulnerability.

Through this study, the use of specific studio lighting techniques accentuates design elements of a highly curated collection of avant-garde, 21^st century garments. Drape, texture, form, and luster are but a few …

From The Inside Out, And Through., Dominique Ovalle

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

These photographs describe “Science” born of consumerism, hijacked by me, economically disenfranchised, or rather—temporarily embarrassed, artist. I was putzing around Malibu—my old college stomping ground, looking for free food; maybe a sample of some gourmet $5 chocolate, and all I got were these photographs.