Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Re-Enchanting The Spectacle, Shayna Cohn

Graduate School of Art Theses

“Re-Enchanting the Spectacle” explores guiding notions and central themes within the art practice of Shayna Cohn. Cohn’s installation spaces and sculptures within them, evoke a type of fabricated aura and melodramatic attitude of entertainment sites. By isolating the affect outside of the original environment, Cohn references the perceptual duality of entertainment sites within this “post-sacred” era. Entertainment venues become sites of potential transcendence, yet are also inextricably tied to their automated mechanization. Drawing on the Peter Brooks’ analysis of the historical and poetic relationship between melodrama and the sacred, Cohn argues that contemporary notions of melodrama can be found within …

Rieglematica: Re-Imagining The Photobooth Through Female Performativity And Self-Portraiture, Allison E. Riegle

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper explores the historical significance and advancements of automatic photobooth portraiture from the late 1800s onwards, focusing specifically on the intention behind the photobooth’s creation and the significance and cultural implications of its introduction into society. As it gradually became a staple of modern society, regularly visited by citizens to have their portraits taken, numerous artists sought out the photobooth as both a studio and a stage in which to document performative self-portraiture. The space and aesthetics of the photobooth have inspired artists to re-envision the confines of the booth and use its automatic function as a point of …

Paiting, Lucas Page

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My work is motivated by the painting “as such” – as an inquiry into and intervention upon what constitutes a painting, how they are constructed, how they function, etc. Through an investigation of painting as a genre, both in its historical canon and contemporary forms, I deconstruct the formal and cultural elements surrounding the field. Four major axes serve as the basis for my inquiry and intervention of painting: Painting, Abstraction, Representation, Control. Taking as a point of departure the comment, “Your work is a representation of abstraction,” I aim to figure out how “the painting” (in all of its …

Violence Against Women: An Artistic Intervention, Kathryn Douglas

Graduate School of Art Theses

We have many tools available to impede violence against women. Legislative circles, educational systems, and advocacy groups all work tirelessly to eradicate these heinous crimes and serve the victims of abuse. However violence against women is still described as “‘the most pervasive human rights challenge’ in the world today”.¹

For some it can be difficult to view socially engaged art making as an essential component of women’s advocacy compared to immediate housing, legal counsel, help hotlines, and the education of women. Blurring the lines between activism and art history, this relatively new art form is often embraced by marginalized …

Remixing Remix Remixed, Joshua Cornelis

Graduate School of Art Theses

Remix culture plays an important role in the expression and communication of visual art. It is a discourse by which I strive to directly engage culture by cutting and pasting together already existing visual information. By doing so, I strive to promote an exchange of ideas and feelings between juxtaposed pieces. In this age of post-digital era collage, I am interested in the meaning and propaganda associated with collage and assemblage and the modes of disseminating messages via cut-and-paste.

By juxtaposing images that differ in style, content, and meaning, I am able to build panoramas of fractured identities that manifest …

Desire And Fantasy: The Conditions Of Reality Between The Self And The Other, Raleigh M. Gardiner

Graduate School of Art Theses

The human condition is constituted by the fluctuating operations of desire and fantasy, which emerge in response to one's fundamental differentiation between 'Self' and 'Other.' As infants, we exist in an expansive realm of sensational “sameness” with the world around us; but as we develop, we quickly learn to differentiate between our internal and external worlds, and are forced to divide and organize our once primordial experience of unity on the basis of isolated exclusion of difference. As we slip into the structures of our social and cultural reality, we absorb language, and are taught to construct our own identities …

Ergonomically Designing Art Objects, Ambika Subramaniam

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

The following thesis examines the work of Ambika Subramaniam, in particular her thesis installation Ergonomically Designing Art Objects, for the Bachelor of Fine Arts in Sculpture at Washington University in St. Louis. Based within a discussion of semiotics, the thesis researches furniture signification and tracks its evolution through traditional form, ergonomic function, and consumed product. Major points include the ways in which objects are capable of collapsing and retaining the semiotic divide between a sign and referent, and how that signification relates to contemporary design-oriented products. Using the chair as the exemplifying object, the thesis installation questions how objects have …

Application Of Problem Based Learning And Mastery Learning To Multimedia Education, Gabriel J. Grant, Dominick E. Fazarro, Luke Steinke

Online Journal for Workforce Education and Development

The current state of education and the workforce demands a special kind of learner capable of creativity, communicating effectively, analytical skill application, critical thinking, and problem solving. Whereas these skills are important, it is also a necessity for learners to be masters of the knowledge and skills that they have acquired. Traditional educational methods have proven to be somewhat ineffective in producing these results. Problem based learning has proven worthy in handling some of the load, however, mastery learning has been abandoned long ago for reasons in spite of its effectiveness. Through given examples and careful design, the educator will …

Thinking Bodies And Sensational Minds: Affect And Embodiment In Contemporary Art, Sandra Burke

Theses and Dissertations

The human subject is profoundly interdependent, in relation to other people and to the surrounding environment, both “natural” and technological. Western dualistic thinking creates bounded and oppositional categories and generates a conception of human subjects as autonomous, self-sufficient beings that are transparent to themselves and in control of self, other, and world. This contributes to the ongoing inequalities in society and supports normative hegemony. This dissertation argues that it is imperative to insist on the intersubjective, permeable, and contingent qualities of existence. While this project is preceded by a great deal of theoretical criticism of Western metaphysical dualism, we must …

Submersion, Hannah M. Harper Ms.

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The artist discusses the influence, concept, and process behind creating a cohesive body of work and accompanying show, Submersion, for the completion of her Bachelor of Arts degree and undergraduate research for the Fine and Performing Art Scholars branch of East Tennessee State University's Honors College. The show is to be held May 1st through May 7th of 2014 with its reception on May 3rd in the Submarine Gallery located on ETSU campus. The artist explored themes of the unknown, subconscious, and memory, using water as a reoccurring symbol. The works include five large portraits and two small to medium …

Building And Using A Character In 3d Space, Shasta Bailey

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The goal of this thesis was to take a character from concept to creation and animation. A variety of skills in 2D and 3D computer graphics were used in order to design and build the character for a 3D space. The character was taken from flat concept to 3D model, and then rigged with a skeleton in the 3D program Maya so that the character could be animated. The focus of the animation is a walk cycle.

Countering The Voyage Of The Present: Histories Speak Fragmented In 25 Frames Per Second, Vanessa Kelly Gravenor

Undergraduate Theses—Unrestricted

My thesis work presents a meditation on what it means to be contemporary. There are many ideas that prefigure this work but are not included in this written investigation.These notions come from Nietzsche’s Untimely Meditations and Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. In these texts, the authors state that the contemporary is the one who turns her or his back from her or his time and looks at the past. For my purposes, to be contemporary, one has to revolutionize the notion of histories in order to make past materials relevant. Therefore, my videos and photographic works do not invite the viewer …

The Design Of Compelling Narratives, Miasha K. Vicino

Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All

While storytelling is an essential form of communication and has been used to help humans make sense of the world and prepare for the future for thousands of years, compelling narratives are designed storytelling systems that encourage the audience to get involved and make active thought and behavioral change. Another significant aspect of compelling narrative design is that they are not resolute. While stories have definite endings, the end of a compelling narrative should be a “call to action”, an opportunity to engage further and invest time, effort, or aid back into the narrative’s cause. The challenge for designers is …

Familial Dialects, Amanda King

MFA in Photography and Integrated Media Theses

Using the framework of scientific investigation, ‘Familial Dialects’ explores the languages – systems of signs and codification of those signs - of individual members of my family, and the metaphors that arise from their interaction with pieces of the natural world. Each of the pieces combine an inherent form and an organizing action as a means of representing an individual’s form of expression. These familial dialects are created and translated using the methodologies of a naturalist - collection, dissection, observation, and classification. The pieces draw meaning from the connotative associations built from familial connections as well as from broader cultural …

Measuring The Effects Of An American Physiological Society’S Phun Week Activity On 2nd Grade Students, James Edelman

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In the last few years the United States has been on the decline in the fields of science and technology. The American Physiological Society (APS) has developed a program to engage young minds with scientists. Physiology Understanding Week (PhUn) is the APS initiative to use interactive experiments to engage school-age children with science and physiology. Even though PhUn Week has been going on since 2005, systematic assessment of the activities effects is rare. Here, we sought to assess if an APS PhUn Week activity enhances physiology understanding and interest in science in second grade children form a rural area. The …

Bakhtin’S Carnivalesque: A Gauge Of Dialogism In Soviet And Post-Soviet Cinema, Randy Davis

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines fifteen films produced in seven political eras from 1926 thru 2008 in Soviet / Post-Soviet Russia. Its aim is to determine if the cinematic presence of Bakhtin’s ten signifiers of the carnivalesque (parody, death, grotesque display, satirical humor, billingsgate, metaphor, fearlessness, madness, the mask, and the interior infinite) increase in their significance with the historical progression from a totalitarian State (e.g., USSR under Stalin) to a federal semi-residential constitutional republic (e.g., The Russian Federation under Yeltsin - Putin). In this study, the carnivalesque signifiers act as a gauge of dialogism, the presence of which is indicative of …

Senses In Synthesis: Imaginative Sensing In The 19th Century, Jesse Hernandez

Theses and Dissertations

During the late 19th century, arts and literature had a surge of sensory awareness, made manifest through sensory analogy, intersensory metaphor, and synaesthesia. This dissertation explores this phenomenon through a study of five poets and artists: Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Barlas, and Julia Margaret Cameron. Using imaginative sensing, these artists transformed the relationship between artist and observer, assigning greater responsibility to their audience while simultaneously asserting artistic control of their work. Their fascination with sensory mixing and multisensory awareness demonstrates unique ideas about perception and embodiment, ideas that have sparked both controversy and imitation. I begin …

Poiesthetic Play In Generative Music, John Priestley

Theses and Dissertations

Generative music creates indeterminate systems from which music can emerge. It provides a particularly instructive field for problems of ontology, semiotics, aesthetics, and ethics addressed in poststructuralist literary theory. I outline how repetition is the ultimate basis of musical intelligibility and of memory in general. The extension of these abstractions beyond tonal music to sound in general is afforded by the concrete iterability of audio recording media. Generative systems delineate a music that is repeatable in principle and in certain qualities, though not in specific forms; a music that produces emergent complexities from novel combinations, retaining the potential to surprise. …

Labor, Vera Bauluz

CGU MFA Theses

I make sacred objects from scratch, from ready mades, from industrial materials, and sometimes from trash or recycling. I treat those objects with love and reverence to embed them with essence and soul. I propose conversations with objects exquisitely executed, that question our social order and the machine, easily understood by everybody, although still challenging our understanding of contemporary art.

The placement of the work and the lighting, as fundamental part of the installation, attempts to generate strokes of conscience that enhance human understanding and capabilities beyond a specific discourse.

Humor and sacred coexist in my installation and in my …

Literary Landscapes: Mapping Emergent American Identity In Transatlantic Narratives Of Women's Travel Of The Long Eighteenth Century, Leah Thomas

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation examines intersections of the development of maps from the Native American-European encounter to the establishment of the New Republic and transatlantic British and American narratives of women’s travel of the long eighteenth century. Early European and American maps that depict the Americas analyzed as parallel “texts” to canonical and lesser-known women’s narratives ranging from 1688 to 1801 reveal further insights into both maps and these narratives otherwise not apparent. I argue that as mapping of the New World developed, this mapping influenced representations of women’s geographic and social mobility and emergent “American” identity in transatlantic narratives. These narratives, …

Technologies And Artworks: An Interdisciplinary Exploration Through Ihde And Latour, Kathryn Lynch Thibault

Theses and Dissertations

Technologies and Artworks: An Interdisciplinary Exploration through Ihde and Latour discusses and applies the phenomenological framework described by the philosopher of science and technology Don Ihde, in his text Technology and the Lifeworld, in relation to recent artworks of sculpture and performance that incorporate technologies. The study considers closely Ihde’s embodiment, hermeneutic, and alterity variants for the purpose of developing conceptual tools to investigate the complicated human-technology relationships present in the works considered. A subsequent discussion of psychasthenia and its relationship to Ihde’s embodiment variant demonstrates the limitations of Ihde’s approach and the need for additional sources in order to …

Zephyr: The Fifteenth Issue, Zephyr Faculty Advisor, Katie Labbe, Sarah Fleischmann, Megan Totten, Cassidy Bayen, Hillary Cusack, Alexandria Makucewicz, Paige Massingale, Nikita Naumowicz, Alanna Sachse

Zephyr

This is the fifteenth issue of Zephyr, the University of New England's journal of creative expression. Since 2000, Zephyr has published original drawings, paintings, photography, prose, and verse created by current and former members of the University community. Zephyr's Editorial Board is made up exclusively of matriculating students.

Textile Society Of America Newsletter 26:2 — Spring 2014, Textile Society Of America

Textile Society of America: Newsletters

Special Symposium Issue
[New Directions: Examining the Past, Creating the Future, 2014 Biennial Symposium, September 10–14, 2014, Los Angeles, California]

In The Air Tonight: An Uncommon Interface For Common Concern, Maggie Chan, Dave Colangelo, Patricio Davila, Robert Tu

School of Film Faculty Publications and Presentations

This paper is concerned with addressing social concerns with large-scale, multi-modal media art that uses digital networks, reactive architecture, and the city as semiotic resources. As artists and designers who are involved in socially engaged practice, we see an important role in foregrounding political and social issues through networks and architecture, negotiating and furnishing access to both while shaping compelling interfaces that allow people to contribute by amplifying an area of common concern. We discuss some previous work by Davila and Colangelo and focus on our latest project, In The Air, Tonight, which aims to visualize local wind patterns combined …

Taking In: The Best Of Undergraduate Photography 2014, Lucad Students

Taking In

Taking In is a student run project featuring a selection of work created by students attending the college of art and design. The project focuses on the business of promoting art and culminates each year with a juried exhibition, publication and a website all designed to promote selected works of AIB artists. The selected pieces were chosen anonymously by a jury of distinguished members of the Boston Art Community to represent the best of undergraduate in 2014. The book in your hands is the end result of a collective effort by those in the class.

Zenventures: Unwind Your Imagination With Guided Meditation, Darlene Kent

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

This project was designed to create guided meditation to enhance creativity. Research was done to gather information on guided imagery, meditation and storytelling to gain a strong understanding of meditation in general, and to determine the themes of the various meditations. The guided meditations for this project were called, Zenventures, a combination of peace and adventure. The guided mediations take the person on a journey where they connect to their creative potential. A success plan was created to ensure the project stayed on track. There were several outcomes from the project: seven written meditations, seven Zenventures (recorded meditations with music), …

Immaterial Traditions: Evolving Values In The Practice & Preservation Of Bhutanese Calligraphy, Madeline Johnson

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Lying somewhere between art, craft and document, the place of calligraphy in Bhutanese culture is difficult to singularly define: individual practice and motivation conform to the predetermined aesthetic of alphabets, and creativity serves the pragmatic end of documentation. In Bhutan's ancient history, the art of handwriting developed out of necessity, used for religious records and correspondences Bhutanese society, given the convenience of digital text. While cultural preservation has been a political imperative in Bhutan since the 1960's, the preservation of traditional crafts is mostly limited to those that appeal to increasing tourist market. While the active preservation of Bhutan's unique …

Old World, New Media: Cross-Cultural Explorations With Camera And Analytic Text In Cusco, Peru, Scott Dupre Mills

Theses and Dissertations

Abstract OLD WORLD, NEW MEDIA: CROSS-CULTURAL EXPLORATIONS WITH CAMERA AND ANALYTIC TEXT IN CUSCO, PERU By Scott DuPre Mills, PhD. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University. Virginia Commonwealth University, 2014 Major Director: Dr. Nicholas A Sharp, Assistant Professor, Department of English This dissertation draws on my field research in Cusco, Peru, documenting Old World methods of making Andean musical instruments. The cross-cultural interactions I engaged in are concretized and documented in the ethnographic film I shot at the time and in my experimentation with original music …

English Composition 100: Best Practices For Online Instruction, David Paschal Narendra Makhanlall

Theses and Dissertations

The objective of this dissertation is to explore the process of teaching English Composition in the asynchronous online format and to make recommendations for the best possible approach for continued student success. The teaching of English Composition is a complex subject and no two teachers will have the same approach. This matter is further complicated when online instruction is explored. An instructor cannot transplant an in-class course into the online format and expect the same results. This dissertation explores the best possible approach to teaching English Composition in an online environment with the use of multimedia applications. This exploration will …

Ivy Leaves, Volume 89, Ivy Leaves Editorial Staff

Ivy Leaves

The 2014 edition of the Anderson University journal of art and literature, Ivy Leaves.

The names of the known editors for this issue of Ivy Leaves were Christopher Mauldin, Anna Falardeau, Jonathan Kurtz, Jordan Sears, J.E. Tankersley. Cody Rabideau, Laurie Epps, Christian Bare, Nichole Dorontich, Hunter Burton, Charity Reed, Joy Hiller, Sarah Leugemors, Rebekah Rhoden, Julia Madden, Dixie Hemingway, Gage LaGreca, Kenneth Keller, Justin Parker, Teresa Jones, and Tim Speaker. Cover art photography by Julia Madden and Heidi Pettit.