Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Expanding Experimentalism: Art And Popular Music At The Kitchen In New York City, 1971-1985, Sarah A. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations

This paper explores artists' engagement with popular music at the interdisciplinary alternative space, the Kitchen, from 1971 to 1985. It seeks a critical language to challenge institutional frameworks to account for the creative output of artists' bands and the relationship between parallel and hybrid popular music and avant-garde performance practices.

Design For Living Complexities, Peter J. Taylor

Working Papers in Critical, Creative and Reflective Practice

Lectures from a 12-session course that addresses the intersection of design with critical thinking. Design in this course means intentionality in construction, which involves a range of materials, a sequence of steps, and principles that inform the choice of materials and the steps. Design also always involves putting people, as well as materials, into place. This happens by working with the known properties of people, as well as the known properties of material, and trying out new arrangements to work around their constraints (at least temporarily). Critical thinking, as I define it, involves understanding ideas and practices better when we …

Dress Up, Ye'ela B. Wilschanski

Theses and Dissertations

Dress Up (Performance, 40 minutes) is a dress that functions as a floor, blanket, tablecloth, book and walls. It tells a visual story about domestic care giving rituals, referencing different times and places.

The Social Role Of The Artist, Gabino A. Castelan

Theses and Dissertations

Gabino A. Castelán, tells a personal story of loss that influenced his artistic practice. He embraced this narrative to create two projects “Practice of Everyday Life-205 (PoEL-205) and the formation of a temporary collective called, Cultural Workers. He presents two case studies of twenty-first century artists, whose projects have business models that allow them to function in social roles during political and social turmoil. "Conflict Kitchen" and "Rebuild Foundation" provide context about running for-profit and not-for-profit artistic practices. Castelan writes about these projects' influencing his artistic practice in general.

Jet Magazine: Celebrating Black Female Beauty, Jazmyn Shepherd

XULAneXUS

Once referred to as, “the Negro bible” by famed actor and comedian Redd Foxx^[1], Jet has continued to be a pioneer in representing Black Americans as beyond the stereotypes to which they are so often relegated. The magazine has not only provided accurate coverage throughout momentous Black historical movements such as the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s, the Black is Beautiful movement of the late 1960s, and the Natural Hair Movement of the 2000s, but it has also catered to the daily interests of Black Americans, such as fashion and beauty, lifestyle advice, dating advice, politics, health …

High + Low: A Forty-Five Year Retrospective Of D. Dominick Lombardi, T. Michael Martin

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

This catalog contains information about the exhibition High + Low, a 45-year retrospective curated by T. Michael Martin, featuring 20 distinct chapters of the art career of D. Dominick Lombardi. The common thread throughout his work is his interest in blending together qualities of highbrow and lowbrow art, and experimentation with various media. His life-long journey began with his exposure to modern art when he first saw a reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica(1939) at the age of 3 or 4, and continued with his introduction to the seductive world of Zapcomix in 1968.

The exhibition begins with the …

Teaching Visual Literacies: The Case Of The Great American Dust Bowl, Mary F. Rice, Ashley K. Dallacqua

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Teachers and students require a range of tools to engage with visual texts. Using The Great American Dust Bowlby Don Brown (2013) as an exemplar text, we outline four conceptions of visual literacy: rhetorical, instructional, industrial and visuo-spatial and discuss their use in our literacy education practice. In addition, we provide a brief model of a second text, The Arrival (Tan, 2013) and a list of suggested texts for students at different levels (elementary, middle, and high school). We argue that these tools have the potential to deepen conceptions of visual literacies and empower teachers and students to understand …

Teamlab Research, Chinchen Liu

MA Theses

teamLab undoubtedly opened a new era of art. It allows professionals in multi-industries to use the latest science and technology to create art, they are all popular for local audiences from Japan to the United States, from Italy to China, wherever they go. As a significant representative form of the trendy show and immersive exhibition, teamLab's works are completely different from the past in terms of creative logic, exhibition experience, and collection methods. By going through the development history of teamLab, this article studies the characteristics of its exhibitions, audience, and the connection with traditional art, in order to explore …

Performance Measurement In Maine’S Social Sector: The Intersection Of Philanthropy And Nonprofits, Susy Hawes, Sarah Goan

Publications

The Data Innovation Project undertook this project to better understand foundations’ expectations of grantees in terms of performance measures and outcomes as outlined in their grant applications. Over the past two years, the Data Innovation Project has engaged with over 250 Maine nonprofits who are navigating the data reporting requirements of a diverse portfolio of funders with varying degrees of success and challenges. This paper looks more closely at how the important relationship between foundations and nonprofits may benefit from increased understanding and clarity around measurement approaches so that both dollars and efforts lead to meaningful and measureable results across …

Beauty In Imperfection: Post-Hyperreal Cosmetic Containers, Se Hee Jang

Theses and Dissertations

An unhealthy reliance on vision alone, fed by pervasive, doctored, hyperreal imagery in the mass media, suppresses a more balanced use of other senses, reinforcing superficial beauty standards. Trapped by an uncritical preference for the visually “perfect” and harmonious, people increasingly seek to remove physical attributes they consider “imperfect,” without first considering how these “imperfections” benefit and distinguish them as unique individuals.

This thesis addresses superficial beauty standards by shifting focus from singularly visual experience to a more nuanced sensory aesthetic that also considers haptic qualities. Through a combination of research writing and targeted making, my work examines society’s understanding …

The What If Collection, Aisha J. Daniels

Theses and Dissertations

The What If Collection is a visual narrative that confronts white supremacy, the social, economic, and political ideology used to subjugate black civilization via colonial rule and enslavement in history and via structural racism today. Many white people have been socialized into a racial illiteracy that fosters white supremacy. This racial illiteracy fails to realize and understand the destructive effects of Western dominance on the rest of the world, particularly on past and present Africa and her diaspora. In response, utilizing discursive design, the collection constructs a counter-story that depicts a shift in the power structure in which the white …

Untitled Unknown, Taylor Simone Stewart

Theses and Dissertations

This article is the first of a series exploring domination culture through the ways narrative has been indoctrinated as reality and weaponized as a holding cell for captives. Within this exploration, the narrative of domination is placed in relation to higher dimensional realms of the unknown; this being the before and after of domination culture. This positioning will allow for the reality of a simultaneous existence within the labyrinth of domination and a higher dimensional unknown to be framed. Within this series of articles, I question the roll of the rogue characters shamanistic agents of resisting domination, the fear of …

The Gamification Of Modern Dating: A Feminist Analysis, Hannah Travis

Scripps Senior Theses

My project gg is a digitally rendered 360° animation of a tech-filled bedroom, accompanied by a joystick that can be used to navigate the 3D space. A visual comparison between multimedia games and modern dating culture, the bedroom scene draws parallels between the prioritization of male perspectives in fine art and digital media and the social prioritization of “masculine” qualities like logic over emotional vulnerability in the initialization of interpersonal relationships. My project investigates human motivations for playing games, both in the literal and idiomatic sense, using stereotypically feminized colors and symbols, to reclaim the patriarchal world of gaming for …

The Attention Crisis Of Digital Interfaces And How To Consume Media More Mindfully, Kristen M. Liu

Scripps Senior Theses

Digital forms of media are monopolizing individuals' attention spans, utilizing visual strategies that demand our interactions. Throughout the history of media technology, mediums have become increasingly immersive, presenting more information than ever before. The user interface designs of digital platforms can damage our ability to focus and distribute attention in meaningful ways. Through analysis of our digital media consumption, this capstone project ultimately proposes mindful practices that help us lead more balanced lives and thrive in the digital age. The second half of this capstone project is a digital zine with digital illustrations, animations, and editorial-style articles. The digital zine …

Let Me Tell You A Story = 讓我說一個故事, Sau Ping Adam Wong

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

"Let Me Tell You a Story" is a showcase of nine short films made by the students and a trailer of them edited by the Artist-in-Residence, Mr Adam WONG Sau Ping.

Wong’s films show a humanistic perspective and employ storytelling to reveal incidents and experiences of real people contemporary society. In the spring of 2019, he teaches the course VIS3298 Studio Practice with a theme on “The Art of Storytelling by Film and Video” and gave a seminar on “Adam Wong On His Filmmaking, from VHS to 4K” at Lingnan University on 25 March. In his course, Wong guides nineteen …

Globalized Interfaces And Anticolonial Engagements With Material Technologies Of Empire: Tabita Rezaire And Morehshin Allahyari’S Works, Neelufar Franklin

Scripps Senior Theses

The virtual is far from immaterial and its expressions are multifarious. The infrastructure of a technologic-globalism has opened new pathways of desecration, created new networks of exploitation, and reinforced fraught foundations. Tabita Rezaire and Morehshin Allahyari are two artists whose radical technofeminist and new materialist practices engage with counterdiscourses in the face of the globalized interfaces of technology; from mappings of submarine fiber optic network cables or understanding water as a knowledge repository, to 3D printed queered figures of Islamic mysticism and hypertext narratives. In these anachronistic approaches to technological use and analyses, archives become possibilities for renderings of futurity …

The Gamification Of Modern Dating: A Feminist Analysis, Hannah Travis

Scripps Senior Theses

My project gg is a digitally rendered 360° animation of a tech-filled bedroom, accompanied by a joystick that can be used to navigate the 3D space. A visual comparison between multimedia games and modern dating culture, the bedroom scene draws parallels between the prioritization of male perspectives in fine art and digital media and the social prioritization of “masculine” qualities like logic over emotional vulnerability in the initialization of interpersonal relationships. My project investigates human motivations for playing games, both in the literal and idiomatic sense, using stereotypically feminized colors and symbols, to reclaim the patriarchal world of gaming for …

Aesthetics And Imagining The Octopus’S Mind, André Krebber, Maike Riedinger, Yvette Watt

Animal Sentience

Several commentators on Mather’s target article discuss the challenges of finding adequate cognitive methods and concepts for accessing the mind and experience of octopuses. Building on Godfrey-Smith’s commentary, we propose aesthetics as a way. The arts provide means to perform what Godfrey-Smith calls an “imaginative leap” to access the experience of octopuses, especially mimesis. We are trying to do this in our current project Okto-Lab. Laboratory for Octopus Aesthetics.

Visualizations For Cartilage Restoration Method, Klayton Riley

Summer Community of Scholars Posters (RCEU and HCR Combined Programs)

No abstract provided.

Bending Educational Reality, Mariam Rafehi

Theses and Dissertations

Virtual reality (VR), an emergent technology, affords experiential content delivery in education by evoking emotive responses in users, which can be prohibitive via traditional media. This thesis explores VR for the development of grit – passion and perseverance, which are essential characteristics in education and long-term success. The research proposes design strategies to stimulate senses for emotional engagement and a physiological response. In the project, two interactive environments position the user in emotional states to build passion and perseverance. To develop passion, the virtual world is designed to engage in creativity using 3D-spatial audio and visual effects. In contrast, to …

Interactive Sonification Strategies For The Motion And Emotion Of Dance Performances, Steven Landry

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

The Immersive Interactive SOnification Platform, or iISoP for short, is a research platform for the creation of novel multimedia art, as well as exploratory research in the fields of sonification, affective computing, and gesture-based user interfaces. The goal of the iISoP’s dancer sonification system is to “sonify the motion and emotion” of a dance performance via musical auditory display. An additional goal of this dissertation is to develop and evaluate musical strategies for adding layer of emotional mappings to data sonification. The result of the series of dancer sonification design exercises led to the development of a novel musical sonification …

Fragile Oceans, Synthetic Flotsam And Microbial Collaboration – Explorations In The Visual Communication Of The Plastic Crisis, Ivan Langesfeld

Pomona Senior Theses

Scientific evidence that the ocean plastic crisis is larger in scale and more sinister than previously thought continues to mount, but the rate of plastic production is only rising. What will it take to decisively turn the tide against plastic? We need scientists, politicians, and industry changemakers to continue producing knowledge and positive change in the industry, but we need to go further still. This thesis explores art as an alternative visual communication strategy with the capacity to encourage curiosity, empathy, and positive engagement with the issue of ocean plastics. The series of work explores bacterial bioluminescence as an artistic …

Living Tangent, Cornelius Alexander Hugo

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

A living tangent is how I am known by many and how I have lived my life for some time. I think in tangents and my life and art seem to evolve through them. Everything I make is connected by multiple thoughts or tangent lines that run from something as simple as the color red, to the idea that I believe communism has invaded my family’s homeland. This then leads to the recollection of childhood games, taught to me by my family in Venezuela and the importance these games played in my psychological development and in my presence as an …

Roses & Thorns, Stephanie Alaniz

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This written thesis has been created alongside the thesis exhibition shown in the Laura Mesaros Gallery at West Virginia University (displayed March 18th to March 22nd). The work presented consisted of drawings, bookmaking, and various forms of printmaking and collage. This body of work is meant to create an analysis of insecurities and body positivity we associate with our physical selves. This work is a collective experience that has been a collaboration with over 80 participants. The number of participants help to create a larger overall collective voice. By creating this collective voice, we can experience these feelings together and …

My Clothing Is Me: Embracing Adhd In Traditional Qatari Apparel, Rabab Abdulla

Theses and Dissertations

Children diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) are often secluded from society, as the condition is perceived to be a defect. These children constantly fidget, move, lose track of time, and forget to complete tasks, leading them to struggle within existing social environments. Additionally, in Qatar there is a need to educate society about ADHD. This research explores wearable solutions that alter behaviors through physical interactions and sensory engagements. In response to the challenges faced by ADHD, Qatari traditional attire has been customized to support children with time management, and communication between child, parent, and society. Additionally, these wearables …

Weaponization Of Space: Subverting The Architecture Of Occupation, Majdulin Nasrallah

Theses and Dissertations

Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestine and oppression of the Palestinian people has manifested itself in countless ways. The built environment, fueled by spatial theory, has been transformed into an instrument of war that serves a military agenda. In this context, the physical environment is not simply the arena of conflict, but a weapon wielded by occupying forces. This research investigates spatial control through seemingly mundane architecture and military practices, which are deployed deliberately to strangulate Palestinian livelihood and prosperity. Derived from Deleuze and Guittari’s delineation of smooth and striated space, with an emphasis on walls and barriers, this thesis subverts …

A Sacred Gift: Rebalancing Our Relationship With Water, Noora Naser Melhim

Theses and Dissertations

In the Middle East, and specifically Qatar, water has significant cultural history and preciousness as a commodity. Today, the rapid economic development has resulted in a disconnection from the past leading to subconscious overconsumption of water.

This thesis investigates water from the context of cultural relevance, by examining systems of distribution before and after the discovery of oil. It reinterprets the materiality of the traditional ceramic vessels used to contain and preserve water with the intention of using the natural properties of clay, such as cooling and filtering, to produce new artifacts. The intent of this research is to critically …

Whirling Hybrids: A Dichotomy Of Belonging, Rabeya Khatoon

Theses and Dissertations

Migration is a phenomenon wherein individuals relocate from one country to another, albeit temporarily or permanently, for numerous reasons. The State of Qatar is a highly diverse nation with a large population of foreign residents. According to Priya D’Souza, as of 2017, 60 percent of the resident population in Qatar are from South Asia. Growing up in this environment, third culture kids develop a unique, hybrid culture through experiencing multiple cultures. This research investigates a dichotomy of belonging from the perspective of South Asians in Qatar. A series of hybridized spinning tops were produced in collaboration with a South Asian …

Manufactured By Nature: Growing Generatively Designed Products, Mohammad Jawad

Theses and Dissertations

Mass production and assembly lines are yesterday’s manufacturing methods. They have exhausted Earth’s resources and limited the possibilities of design in terms of both form and material, prompting designers to search for new processes. A new generation of making includes biomimicry-inspired technologies such as 3D printing and parametric simulation, which have transformed the production paradigm. Utilizing nature as industry, this thesis explores the possibility of “growing” designed objects by employing nature’s own processes and resources. It integrates bio materials, generative design and additive manufacturing to produce objects for a post-industrial world. The project outcomes employ natural minerals, crystallization and 3D …

Toward Liveness: The Polytemporality Of Performance Objects, Tracy Stonestreet

Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, I examine the temporal and material connections between component parts of hybrid artworks, specifically between live events / acts of performance and the long-lasting sculptural elements that those events / performances produce. I propose a re-orientation of the temporal gaze of performance art history, from one oriented to the past to one focused on the continually unfolding present. Such a re-orientation requires a nonlinear approach to art making that complicates set boundaries of past and present, liveness and record, and presence and absence, and disrupts in potentially corrective ways our historically normative systems of looking, categorizing, and …