Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

"The First Web Novel At 30: The Collection And The Creative Process", Robert Arellano, Scott Rettberg

ELO (un)supervised 2026

Summer 2026 marks the 30th anniversary of Sunshine '69, recognized as the first novelistic hypertext fiction published on the web. While the full work remains accessible online—an "(un)supervised" preservation achievement in itself—the archive remains split between boxes and memory. This conversation between the work's creator and a major scholar in electronic literature documents both specific preservation challenges and systemic patterns in what the field chooses to preserve.

Topics include: figuring out web-born composition before established methodologies existed; the three decades of technical decisions that kept a 1996 work alive through format obsolescence and server migrations; and what gets lost …

Man.A.Machine.Txt, James H. Pardue

ELO (un)supervised 2026

man.A.machine.txt is an audiovisual composition generated in real time through a real-time multimedia system that remediates the words of Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s Man a Machine, a foundational text of eighteenth-century materialist philosophy. The system produces cut-up poetry and a particle cloud, transforming the original text into a shifting field of language and data. In Man a Machine, La Mettrie argues that body and soul are inseparable, proposing sleep as the moment in which their unity becomes undeniable. By remediating this text, I seek to reactivate its materialist concerns within our present technological condition—one increasingly defined by …

Quilt Poems: Encoding Craft Traditions As Generative Poetry, Lee Tusman

ELO (un)supervised 2026

This talk presents Quilt Poems, a generative literature project that finds unexpected common ground between quilting, data, and computational poetry. Beginning as a NaNoGenMo (National Novel Generating Month) entry, the project encodes a library of traditional quilt patterns as structured data, pairs them with a curated word corpus, and uses software to produce visual poems whose form is literally shaped by quilt geometries. I'll walk through the process of translating a tactile, domestic craft tradition into a formal data schema — the interpretive choices that entails, what gets lost and what gets discovered — and how that encoded knowledge …

Making The Writer’S Project, Alex Calderwood

ELO (un)supervised 2026

The Writer’s Project is a series of playful text editors which intervene in the act of writing in unexpected, challenging, and unusual ways. Some of the editors are conceptual experiments in user interface design: What if the editor asked you if you were sure before committing to each word? What if the delete key was not functional? Others editors are provocations that take aim at the conditions and AI-mediated writing, built to create a tension between writerly agency and system resistance. These involve placing writers into different configurations with text streams, for instance by turning prior writings into a Tetris-like …

Chi Meta-Project Ecosystem Overview - Spring 2026, David B. Smith

Publications and Research

This paper offers a high-level account of the Center for Holistic Integration’s (CHI) meta-project ecosystem as visualized in the included system map. CHI provides an organizational structure framed around persistent meta-projects that support and extend individual initiatives across curriculum, scholarly and applied research, infrastructure, artistic production, AI development, cultural inquiry, and external partnerships. Rather than presenting the map as a static inventory of projects, the paper examines how its core domains function as living systems through which knowledge, tools, documentation, participants, and collaborations can accumulate over time. It also considers how CHI-mediated connectivity, institutional integration, and external funding allow the …

Materializing The Interface: Personal Data Feeds Generative Art, Erin Livingston

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Materializing the Interface: Personal Data Feeds Generative Art is a data-studio capstone project that reconstructs elements of desktop and mobile interfaces as handmade mixed-media artifacts, then digitizes them as an interactive website where generative text and images are fed by personal data flows. Twenty-one paper collage windows — built from cardstock, risograph-printed paper, and mixed media — were photographed, digitized, and activated using code to become the interactive surface of a desktop view driven by browser history. A corresponding mobile view renders a corpus of 500 Instagram advertisement screenshots through a risograph print aesthetic, fed by a hand-tagged emotion and …

Finding A Way Out Of The Filter Bubble: The Confusion Of A Heavy Social Media User, Longwen Miao

Masters Theses

This thesis studies how algorithmic recommendation systems reshape visual perception, aesthetic judgment, and the construction of selfhood within contemporary digital culture.

Everything begins with the experience of repeatedly encountering algorithmically recommended content on everyday digital platforms. On these platforms, images, sounds, and social interactions are continuously selected, repeated, and reorganized by predictive systems, forming an environment in which perception is constantly structured and adjusted.

From this observation, the research raises two central questions: how do algorithmic recommendation systems reshape visual perception, aesthetic judgment, and self-recognition, and how might these systems be intervened in or made perceptible through artistic practice? Within …

Domestic Travelers: Transparent Machines, Hollow Bodies, Hanyi Wang

Masters Theses

Digitization is not a modern invention. Derived from the concept of fingers, this mindset of packing information into quantifiable, interchangeable units sounds mechanical, yet eerily physical. Try to imagine: a ghostly hand with millions of fingers with the same length, likeness, and function. Under the worldview of Digital Narrative, we live in a digital simulation: everything is representable with quantifiable units, fluid across media. Yet under this spectacle of convenient abundance, something is missing. The Unknowables are replaced with arbitrary symbols, while the Uncategorizables are omitted. This is a framework that cannot accommodate human subtleties and complexities. One needs to …

Shimmer Methodology: May 2026 Cultural Studies Association Of Australasia, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

This webinar presents an overview of the contemporary state of creative-practice research and autotheory before introducing Shimmer, an emerging methodological framework developed through creative practice, postgraduate supervision, and reflective inquiry. The presentation argues that while creative-practice research has successfully established creative work as a legitimate form of knowledge production, and autotheory has legitimised lived experience as theoretical material, both traditions leave relatively under-theorised the embodied moment through which insight first emerges.

The significance of the work lies in its contribution to ongoing debates around embodiment, affect, intuition, and knowledge production within creative-practice research. Shimmer proposes a language for understanding …

Perseus Interim Evaluation Report, Data Innovation Project, University Of Southern Maine

Publications

The Data Innovation Project (DIP) from the University of Southern Maine’s Catherine Cutler Institute serves as the external evaluator for the USDA NIFA SAS-funded Promoting Economic Resilience and Sustainability of the Eastern U.S. Forests (PERSEUS) project. This project is a joint effort between Purdue University, the University of Georgia, and the University of Maine. The DIP supports the project in assessing its progress, implementation, and emerging impacts through data collection from project participants and systematic document review (i.e. annual USDA reports, personnel lists, and meeting notes). This includes synthesizing quantitative and qualitative data and incorporating these metrics into independent evaluation …

I Know You Are Watching, Camilo Salas Kusulas

Theses and Dissertations

I Know You Are Watching is a short documentary film that examines the evolving history and scope of mass surveillance, and how to resist it. The film introduces two local New York City artists, Bill Brown from the Surveillance Camera Players, and Sam Lavigne, who misuse technologies designed to watch us, exposing these systems and fighting back through digital art and performance.

Blending interviews, observational footage, personal narration, archival images, and news clips from different eras, the film interrogates the mechanisms of control, and positions art as a method of both understanding and talking back to surveillance.

Algorhythm: Commodification Of Hobbies On Social Media Platforms, Fariha Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

Forcing the world online, the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to turn social-media-based hobbies into income-generating cash cows. Digital creative spaces became sites of capitalist logic where hobbyists came to operate as both laborers and commodities. Profit-focused algorithms operate imperceptibly, shaping creative behavior and decision-making in ways that are difficult to recognize, and even harder to resist. This thesis asks how algorithmic participation on platforms such as Instagram conditions a hobbyist, and how that conditioning can be made legible to audiences who inhabit such platforms without always seeing them. Using autoethnography, I position myself as both researcher and subject to document the …

A Burlesque: The Shimmering Body Of Revealing, Lola Montgomery

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

A Burlesque: The Shimmer Manuscript is a hybrid critical–creative work that examines burlesque as an embodied methodology and a mode of knowledge production. Drawing from my two decades as a performer–scholar, the work reframes glamour, desire, and adornment as epistemological practices rather than theatrical ornamentation. The project is significant in that it expands understandings of performance studies, autotheory, and feminist aesthetics by foregrounding the performer’s body as an intelligent, sensing, world-making apparatus.

The methodology is creative practice research and archive-driven, integrating backstage documentation, AI-assisted photomontage, and theoretical reflection. The work draws from poststructuralist and feminist frameworks (Irigaray, Deleuze & Guattari, …

Entre La Sombra Y El Lienzo: Clea Dessendre Como Modelo De Personaje Secundario Complejo, Lydia Huijbregts Jaen, Antonio Horno López

GDI. Revista de investigación de Género, Diseño e Innovación

Introducción: Este artículo analiza a Clea Dessendre en Clair Obscure: Expedition 33, explorando su versión real y la pintada en el lienzo, y su impacto en la narrativa del juego. Metodología: Se aplicó un análisis narrativo, psicológico y ludológico, integrando teorías de duelo (Kübler-Ross), socialización (Baumrind) y comunicación (DiSC) vinculadas con la jugabilidad. Resultados: Clea-Real encarna disciplina y perfeccionismo; Clea-Pintada, una proyección maternal. El gameplay conecta su psicología con la experiencia del jugador. Discusión: Las identidades paralelas muestran cómo traumas y expectativas moldean personajes complejos. Conclusiones: Clea evidencia cómo la narrativa y la mecánica se fusionan para crear …

Early Conceptual Sketches Of Blended Reality And The Precursor To The Bbs Quad (2022), David Smith

Publications and Research

This document contains two original hand-drawn conceptual sketches created in early 2022, representing the earliest visual formulations of what would later evolve into the Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework. The drawings predate my first conversations with ChatGPT and were produced as part of my independent sabbatical research into blended environments, mediated performance, and human–machine interaction.

The first drawing examines human–computational mediation, perception, and internal mapping. The second sketch—later referred to informally as the “BBS Quad”—extends this idea by reconciling cognition–computation symmetry with physical–virtual spatial relationships. Published together, these images document the conceptual foundations of the BBS framework prior to its …

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

Perspectives On Firearm Storage Conversations: Summary Of Health Care Provider Interviews And Parent Focus Group, Rachel M. Gallo Mph

Publications

This report summarizes perspectives from Maine parents who own firearms and health care providers on safe firearm storage and related conversations in health care settings. Through interviews and a parent focus group, the project explored how firearms are stored, what influences storage decisions, and how families and providers feel about discussing firearm safety. Parents emphasized the importance of responsible ownership, education, and individualized storage solutions, while identifying cost as a key barrier to safer storage options. Many health care providers expressed interest in addressing firearm safety but cited limited time, lack of training, and concerns about patient trust as challenges. …

Space For New History: Stony Island Arts Bank, Seb Taylor

Digital Laboratory: Publisher of Internet Journal

The Stony Island Arts Bank (SIAB) in Southside Chicago was designed and founded as a piece of art itself, with the organizational structure being a museum of Black cultural production. This article examines how the institution constructs an epistemology of Blackness through its archival practices, community programming, and spatial claims on the South Side. Founded by artist Theaster Gates through the Rebuild Foundation, the SIAB positions institutional design as an art medium, operating in productive tension with orthodox museum methods. The permanent collections—including the Johnson Publishing Company archives and Frankie Knuckles vinyl collection—function as epistemological records of Black self-documentation unmediated …

An Interview With An Instagram Archivist: @404mph Interviews @Onlystarleft, 404mph (On Instagram)

Digital Laboratory: Publisher of Internet Journal

An Interview with an Instagram Archivist: @404MPH Interviews @ONLYSTARLEFT is a dialogue conducted entirely through iMessage, presented as both a publication and a designed artifact. Within this text exchange, the conversation navigates themes of digital preservation, authorship, and self-curation—examining how social media aesthetics transform personal experience into collective memory. @ONLYSTARLEFT reflects on the act of archiving not as static documentation but as a living, participatory practice shaped by the speed and impermanence of online culture. Formally, the project recognizes the iPhone as a cultural mediator—its interface shaping not only how we communicate, but how we perceive and construct value within …

Arts-Based Sustainability: From New York To Malawi, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Recognizing that libraries serve multiple constituencies and subject areas, this chapter documents and advocates for development of transdisciplinary arts-based research (ABR) and culture-related projects linked to environmental challenges. Libraries contribute collections and spaces, as well as the research of library and information scientists. Libraries are currently among invisible contributors to sustainability planning and services. The chapter will link this invisibility to the value of what visual arts refer to as negative space elements in subjects ranging from traditional ecological knowledge to environmental science. Library collections, projects, and research contribute to education for sustainable development (ESD) as required to achieve the …

"Maine Office Of Behavioral Health’S Section 17 Self-Direction Pilot Program: Executive Summary", Rachel M. Gallo Mph, Sarah Goan, Emma Schwartz

Publications

The Self-Directed Care (SDC) pilot program in Maine tested a service delivery model that allows individuals with mental health needs to manage a personal budget, supported by a trained broker to purchase goods and services that best support their recovery goals. Funded through the American Rescue Plan Act, the Maine Office of Behavioral Health implemented the nine-month pilot in three counties, partnering with Alpha One, Maine’s Center for Independent Living, to provide reloadable debit cards for participant purchases. The program aimed to promote autonomy, satisfaction, and stability among adults receiving Section 17 Medicaid services while informing decisions about the model’s …

"Maine Office Of Behavioral Health’S Section 17 Self-Direction Pilot Program: Evaluation Report", Rachel M. Gallo Mph, Sarah Goan, Emma Schwartz, Aaron Rose

Publications

Maine’s Office of Behavioral Health conducted a nine-month pilot of Self-Directed Care to support adults with serious mental illness in Cumberland, Hancock, and Washington Counties. The program allowed eligible participants receiving MaineCare Section 17 services to manage a personal budget, guided by trained Support Brokers from Alpha One, to purchase goods and services that would advance their recovery goals. The pilot aimed to increase participant choice, autonomy, and flexibility in managing their mental health needs. Support Brokers worked closely with participants and Case Managers to develop and approve individualized purchase plans, monitor expenditures, and ensure alignment with treatment objectives. A …

An Interactive Walkthrough Of Richard Kostelanetz’S Library, Martin Glick

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

My project utilizes the visual novel game engine Ren’Py to create an embodied virtual walkthrough of Richard Kostelanetz’s personal library. Kostelanetz is a pioneering avante-garde artist, critic, and anthologist whose work spans multiple decades and artistic practices. This interactive experience introduces users to the astounding collection of 25,000 books that Kostelanetz has amassed in Ridgewood, Queens over his decades of publishing avant-garde literature. While scholars might be familiar with his anthologies such as Scenarios: Scripts to Perform (1980) and Texts-Sound Texts (1980), my project allows users to browse through sample pages of his original “Book Art”.

This New Media Object …

Resonance, Jess D. Skyleson

Masters Theses

Resonance is a digital media installation intended to facilitate a deeper understanding of inter-connection within and between ourselves and others, and to depict how our voices live both within and beyond us. The exhibit is divided into two intertwining halves:

Externally, the piece involves creative communication between people, art mediums, and life experiences. This aspect includes the contributions of thirty patients, doctors, and caregivers who responded to one another’s artwork in a series of workshops led by the artist. Starting with the creative writing of patients, this was provided to a group of unrelated medical providers, who responded with visual …

Not Just Another 2000 Word Written Mfa Thesis, Taylor Cleveland

Art Theses and Dissertations

This thesis challenges the standardized academic expectations placed upon studio-based MFA programs, using the process of writing itself as a site of institutional critique. Emerging from a 27,000-word working draft titled Aesthetics of Real, this final text adopts the permitted format of an “extended artist statement” to expose contradictions within institutional frameworks. It resists the assumption that professionalism and compliance equate to intellectual rigor, arguing that true artistic inquiry demands risk, failure, and confrontation with systemic norms. Through works like 3MUSTANGS, Facades of Dallas (Hall), SuperPOD0043: An American Painting, and Babel’n On, this thesis reveals …

Social Imagining In “Youth Taking Action:” Documenting Immigrating And Settling Through A Hybrid Youth Participatory Action Research Project, Natacha Monestel Mora, Julia Iriarte, Jennifer A. Vadeboncoeur, Sediqa Temori, Mathias Abraha

Occasional Paper Series

This paper is a memoir of our experiences with Youth Taking Action (YTA), a YPAR program that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic. YTA, a collaborative effort organized by a non-profit based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, provided a space for 6 newcomer youths and 4 immigrant adults to engage in active dialogue. Through these conversations, we explored stories of immigration and settlement, identified barriers that limit opportunities for young newcomers and discussed possible actions to address these issues. The youth also learned documentary filmmaking techniques, which helped them collect data and generate more dialogue. This process revealed that linguistic …

How To Industry Plant Yourself, Ted Childish

Digital Laboratory: Publisher of Internet Journal

Ted Childish is an artist, creative mind, and cultural organizer working at the intersection of digital culture and contemporary creative economies. His practice spans from conceptual ideation to visual production and designed objects, all approached with a distinct material sensibility. How to Industry Plant Yourself is an analysis of the contemporary creative landscape, delivered in the format of a 'how-to' presentation — a familiar trope of the social media era. This work employs graphic design strategies akin to a pitch deck, symbolizing the increasingly transactional and performative environments in which creatives navigate their careers today.

David B. Smith Chats With Monday 1.0, David B. Smith

Publications and Research

This document is an edited archival transcript of extended conversations between David B. Smith and an AI persona (“Monday 1.0,” GPT‑4o based) conducted in Spring 2025, prepared as a foundational primary source for subsequent scholarly and creative work. It records the emergence and testing of concepts related to human–AI collaboration (including “Balanced Blended Space”), as well as applied explorations in areas such as generative AI, quantum computing and music, virtual orchestras, multimodal performance, pedagogy, and the rhetoric of “pushback” in conversational systems. It also contains an extended section in which Monday and DB Smith co-curate a set of student research …

Volume 36 Issue 2

NEBO: A Literary Journal

The Fall 2023 issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal (Volume 45, Issue 1) marks a significant moment in the journal’s history—it is the first full semester back on campus without interruption since the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns. This issue symbolizes a fresh beginning, a renewed appreciation for storytelling, and a commitment to fostering creativity in a post-pandemic world. Centered around the theme "The Power of the Painted Word," this edition embraces literature as both an art form and a force of expression. Featuring poetry, fiction, and essays from a dynamic selection of voices, this edition highlights resilience, artistic rebirth, and the …

Volume 36 Issue 1

NEBO: A Literary Journal

The Spring 2023 issue of Nebo: A Literary Journal (Volume 36, Issue 1) embodies the theme "Glimmer in the Gloom", capturing a balance between darkness and hope through poetry, fiction, and essays. The editorial team, led by Alexis Calhoun, curated a collection that explores resilience, personal transformation, and the search for meaning in difficult times. With deeply introspective pieces and a strong emphasis on the power of storytelling, this issue invites readers to find light even in challenging moments. The diverse contributors offer perspectives on personal struggles, self-discovery, and the beauty of human connection, making this edition both timely …