Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Uncanny Evolution, Will Baca

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

I like to think about reality and simulacra in the internet age as then and now. Then being everything before a conscious awakening and now being anything between consciousness and reading this. The image is an arranged landscape divided into thirds from right to left, similar to a timeline. I tried my best not to use square images, cutting out only the important objects or symbols. My image uses little to no negative space, somewhat of a sensory overload. All the images are different sizes and I used layer arrangement to embed smaller objects into any negative space. From the …

Integrating Art And Design With Environmental Science, Laura D. Hinson

The Confluence

This article demonstrates how combining art and design and environmental sciences would benefit both fields by analyzing how utilizing art and design in environmental sciences can help enhance aspects of the teaching process and environmental studies, specifically those dealing with climatology and pollution. Additionally, by taking an ecocritical approach to analyzing art and its creation, this article will detail how artists can become more conscious of the impacts creating certain types of art has on the environment while also noting environmental changes documented through art.

Transcendence: Exploring The Connections Between Transgender/Gender Non-Conforming Identities And Experiences Of Nature Through Art, Mc Jackson

Undergraduate Theses

“Transcendence: Exploring the connections between transgender/gender non-conforming identities and experiences of nature through art” is the written portion of a creative thesis revolving around an immersive art installation and short film. Transcendence, the installation, was created to promote connection by exploring the overlap between transgender and gender non-conforming (GNC) experiences and experiences of nature. Part of this installation is a short film of interviews conducted with transgender and GNC individuals about nature, their gender experiences, and the transcendent nature of the two. The written thesis analyzes existing literature on nature as a restorative, therapeutic, spiritual setting, offers insight into …

Inner Portraits, Bethany Salisbury

Graduate Theses

This paper investigates the many interconnected layers of women’s mental health through portraiture and how animal and plant symbolism can represent the way women's hormones and bodily health affect their mental health. I reveal how the artwork created presents these connections and inner mental health narratives to the viewer, creating a space of empathy, destigmatization, and self-reflection. This body of portraiture art connects five women through a series of both two-and three-dimensional portraits based on interviews using my own adaptation of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoots’ (1983) portrait methodology.

Women and non-binary individuals have always dealt with difficult interactions of bodily and mental …

Refigured: Separations In Portraiture, Caroline Myers

All Theses

Utilizing traditional painting techniques embedded with digital syntaxes, Refigured: Separations in Portraiture, serves as a catalog of my experiences with communication in a hyperconnected world. Processing illegible information caused by my hearing loss informs the process of imposing similar boundaries within my paintings. Like a technical glitch, these obstructions create an illegible visual experience, with evidence of my process remaining as a clue for the viewer’s understanding of the image.

Though personal in nature, I expand from my experience with auditory communication to employ pertinent explorations into the sustained unpredictability of today’s ever-expanding medium that is technology. My paintings …

“Block Island Stories”: Preserving And Showcasing Block Island’S Rigorous History Through Virtual Adaptation, Alexander Pretorius

Senior Honors Projects

No abstract provided.

Personal Details, Ben Nathan

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

In 2022 I lost my Paternal Grandmother. I found that in addition to the loss of a dear matriarch I mourned everyday things lost to the past. From furniture to childhood relationships, I was made keenly aware of their absence. As I longed to spend more time in the past, I created a studio practice of printing and drawing, whereby I enable myself to spend hours a day in quiet introspection, just drawing and reflecting on my life as expressed by personal details.

My work melds renderings of everyday spaces and objects from memories of childhood and my present experience …

The Siren Of San Francisco, Emily Gage

Whittier Scholars Program

The Siren of San Francisco is a story I have been interested in telling for the longest time focusing on the coming of age of the main character, Mia, and how she deals with change through gaining the power of shapeshifting. A lot of the graphic novel explores the relationships between Mia, her mom, and her close friends and how her relationships with them change during this transitional period.

The driving force behind this story was my enduring interest in relationships, identity, feminism, and how people can shape the people around them, including themselves. I approached this particular story from …

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 …

Someone, Stop Her! The Musical (The Gallery Show): The Thesis Document., Hannah Dewitt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis document accompanies a body of work that is radically vulnerable, personally political, and emotionally complex. Through my work, I challenge myself and my audience to sit with discomfort and create an environment suitable to generate a nuanced appreciation of pain that approaches its acceptance through humor, confessionalism, and the subversion of tropes against themselves as an act of counter-mimicry. This document situates my work within art-historical context with a primary focus on performance art and applies insight from each artwork referenced to further analyze and defend my own work. Additionally, I use texts relating to Camp sensibility, binary …

I Come Creeping: Remembering The Battle Of Blair Mountain In Graphic Narrative, Ellie James

Senior Honors Theses

Between August 24 and September 4 of 1921, approximately 10,000 West Virginia coal miners marched to Blair Mountain in Logan County in a militant stand for their right to unionize. Despite its status as the largest labor uprising in United States history, few know or understand the impact of the Battle of Blair Mountain today, even within the borders of West Virginia. This creative project aims to contribute to ongoing efforts to memorialize this period of the West Virginia Mine Wars through the creation of a 10-page comic, titled I Come Creeping, which depicts and is informed by the …

Coded Ceramics: Computational Design Of Persian Ceramics, Nasrin Iravani

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This research explores the use of computer-aided technology and robotics in the creation of digital art and crafts, while also considering the cultural history of digital design. It begins with an examination of the most recognizable styles of Persian ewers made between the years 1,000 and 1,400 AD in the Islamic era. After analyzing a hundred ewers from this period, I classified them based on distinctive features such as openings, necks, bodies, spouts, handles, and bases. Then I designed a series of 3D printed ceramic vessels – titled Coded Ceramics – that were inspired by elements of the historic ewers. …

Creating Character, Alexa Tenney

Honors Projects

This project explores the relationship between merchandise development and narrative development, with a specific focus on the creative development between dolls and animation. Through exploration of these creative mediums, I began to question: How does the creative process combining animation and merchandise develop, and what is the impact on the final product? This concept is broken down even further to focus specifically on characters, and how creative characters are developed for dolls. This project provides an overview of the history of animation and merchandising beginning with Felix the Cat in the 1920s. Felix represents an instance of an animated character …

Art Therapy And Internal Family Systems For Adolescents At A Therapeutic School: A Qualitative, Arts-Based Study, Emma Pici-D'Ottavio

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

Adolescence is an important developmental period marked by a search for identity and an increase in impulsive behaviors and intense emotions. The current study explored how a combined art therapy and Internal Family Systems (IFS) model is beneficial and appropriate for adolescents in a school setting. A brief art therapy group was facilitated with students at a therapeutic high school. The intervention integrated IFS approaches, including externalization and guided visualizations, with the goal of understanding parts and increasing self-compassion. Three main themes emerged based on observations of the sessions: 1) the concept of parts encouraged self-understanding and reduced shame; 2) …

Am I Another You?, Laura Diane Cobb

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

On my birth certificate are the names of my parents, though the name of my father stands in opposition to my genealogy. The script of his signature conceals my birth as donor conceived (DC). The truth of my origin would lay dormant for years behind his scrawl, burying my true heritage beneath the stories of my social father’s ancestry.

Learning the truth, I began to reevaluate my identity. Searching for myself along waterways, I explored the shores of the Platte River as if by knowing its sandbars, flora, and fauna, I would come to know myself. In searching the land, …

Ideation And Iteration For Creatives, Sandee M. Chamberlain

KSU Distinguished Course Repository

This course addresses the development of visual literacy including concepting, initial approaches of creating an encompassing aesthetic, creating timelines for production, and exploring the refining aspects of creative production. Students will devise an advanced creative problem and provide a documented account of their creative journey to present as a process journal at the end of the course.

Zephyr: The Twenty-Third Issue, Zephyr Faculty Advisor, Skyler Garcia, Faye Botelho, Aliyah Walker-Pasko, Paige-Marie Merrill, Madelyn Asher

Zephyr

This is the twenty-third 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.

How Do Arts Contribute To Educational Research? A Book Review Of Arts-Based Research In Education: Foundations For Practice, Niroj Dahal

The Qualitative Report

I write this review as a recommendation for potential readers: those who are new to and veterans with respect to arts-based research. Arts-Based Research in Education: Foundations for Practice is edited by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Richard Siegesmund, with contributions from 22 authors and a cover artist. In addition to providing some information from a usual structure around contents, central themes and concepts, intended audience, genres of writing styles, strengths and weaknesses, and uniquenesses, I primarily focus on the content of the chapter entitled “Four guiding principles for arts-based research practice” which I found extraordinarily significant in the second edition of …

Hi-05 Helen Dupré Moseley: Painter, Author, Roller-Coaster Fan, And Air Stewardess Of Flying Saucers, Lizzie Richards, Karen H. Goodchild Dr., Youmi Efurd Dr.

SC Upstate Research Symposium

Without having any formal training in the arts, Helen Dupré Moseley (1887-1984) made art for around fifty years of her life in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Utilizing different media and formal qualities, Moseley created fantastic works of art that forced viewers to use their imagination and make their own choices in interpretation.

In addition to works of art, she was also an avid writer and thinker, producing many short stories and unpublished children’s books. What makes her distinct is how she was formally untrained as an artist yet was not excluded from the art world, as she had the ability to …

African American Fashion Legacies, Yasmeen Orozco

[Archive] Belmont University Research Symposium (BURS)

This was an exploration of how African American Designers, former and current have contributed to fashion legacies. Key points that will be presented will be – brief biographies of seven African American designers, that covers their upbringing, education, and their fashion legacies. The seven fashion designers that will be discussed include - Patrick Kelly, Willie Smith, Anna Lowe, Stephine Burrows, Laquan Smith, Dapper Dan, and Zelda Wynn Valdes.

The study further features fashion trends that originated from the African American community. Notably, African Americans have been a pioneering force with creative styles that have been ignored and rebutted. Finally, the …

Open Textbook For Art 27, Nate Cooper

Open Educational Resources

Work in Progress - In the Spring of 2023, I will endeavor to work collaboratively with students to develop an open textbook for the Art 26: UX Visual Design course. As this class has only been offered once in the past and in general the UX courses are new at Kingsborough there isn't an obvious single authority on the subject. As a practitioner in the field professionally, I grow concerned that even if a solid text could be found in print that industry changes happen so frequently that the only helpful authority will need to be a dynamic work. Hence, …

Until Morning, Asher Berard

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Until Morning is an installation-based body of work that is rooted in fantasy through storytelling. It’s focused on a narrative about processing trauma through the self at their various stages of recovery. This exhibition consists of paintings, sculptures, audio, and videos reflecting a world built to regain authorship over unsettling memories that demand closure. The films are performative extensions of self in familiar southern Louisiana landscapes. The viewer shares perspective through the point of view of Memory, the main character depicted with pink hair. The fictional scenes all toy with notions of remembering, forgetting, and coping, while also provoking reactions …

Why Sweep The Cinders…, Gretchen Larsen

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In my creative practice I climb down the ladder, put the glass slipper on my own foot, and build the ball for myself (and everyone I know, of course). What I mean is, instead of waiting for the prince and his kingdom to come, I have learned to pursue my own dreams. I do this by dreaming up and building objects using a mixture of traditional and new media. I work with wood, acrylic, LEDs, microcontrollers, lamp parts, and other materials including fabric and projectors. I create, live with, and create again, objects of my own design. The objects I …

Spotify: The Addiction, Madison Skye Jackson

Graphic Communication

The redesign of the Swedish digital music streaming service called Spotify gives it the potential to play an even larger role in the world by becoming its own social media platform. Even with Spotify's successes, Spotify currently still lacks the best social experience because of the limited ability to share music within the mobile app.

A redesign of the Spotify app offers interaction opportunities between users to make it a solid form of social media and a stronger competitor to the rising TikTok app. Combined with user experience criteria and new visualizations, I was able to build a prototype that …

Agora: App Prototype To Improve The Live Event Experience, Taylor L. Leslie, Lexi Berryhill

Graphic Communication

Agora is a mobile application that aims to connect live event-goers with safety protocol and information about the event’s safety measures and plans. We are targeting live events with many attendees because there is a need for more safety and group planning support. Through initial conversations with friends, family, and peers, we discovered that it is constantly challenging to coordinate schedules, determine meeting points, message group members, and find medical and safety protocols at live events. This app will improve the user experience of live events and benefit attendees and event holders.

Agora’s prototype will feature solutions such as planned …

Creativity, Craftsmanship, And Connection: Large-Format Sculpture Design, Jacqueline L. Puga, Gordon Hoople

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

Artistry is a concept that is not usually explored in engineering yet is an invaluable skill that touches everything from product design to systems thinking. This past summer I developed conceptual designs for a large format sculpture that required connecting engineering knowledge with artistic vision. The initial phase required constant inspiration and creativity. The first step was to look at previous sculptures showcased throughout the world, such as at venues like “Burning Man,” to understand the possibilities or limitations of the space provided. Sketching varied and numerous ideas was essential in our design process. Next, we took our favorite ideas …

Gömböc The Great, Indigo M. Strickert, Lori E. Bradford

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

A sonnet written about the mathematics behind the self-righting shape of some tortoise shells.

Salty: A Diffractive Inquiry Of Visceral Knowing And Embodied Aesthetics, Mei Ling Chua

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation takes a diffractive, onto-epistemological approach to everyday practices with salt in order to articulate an expanded understanding of meaning making and knowledge production. This research reckons with and challenges dominant modes of knowing that engage a Cartesian perspective to situate knowing as the exclusive domain of the mind in both form and topic of inquiry. This research acts simultaneously as both a direct practice of and metacognition about knowledge production by examining 1. the embodied (including sensory and emotional aspects) and 2. the relational (including interpersonal and socio-cultural) dimensions of experience as visceral knowing. This articulation of …

Stand-Up Comedy Visualized, Berna Yenidogan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Stand-up comedy has become an increasingly popular form of comedy in the recent years and comedians reach audiences beyond the halls they are performing through streaming services, podcasts and social media. While comedic performances are typically judged by how 'funny' they are, which could be proxied by the frequency and intensity of laughs through the performance, comedians also explore untapped social issues and provoke conversation, especially in this age where interaction with artists goes beyond their act. It is easy to see commonalities in the topics addressed in comedians’ work such as relationships, race and politics.This project provides an interactive …

Sitting Here With You In The Future: Reimagining The Human Through Digital Art, Jared Z. Sloan

Crossings: Swarthmore Undergraduate Feminist Research Journal

This paper presents a novel construction of the Human that arises from digital art. Taking an interdisciplinary approach incorporating perspectives from queer theory, afropessimism, science and technology studies, and more, I analyze the works of three digital artists: Lucas LaRochelle, Arafa Hamadi, and Natalie Paneng. I chart the ways in which these artists negotiate borders between the physical and digital, human and non-human, and real and fantastical to challenge hegemonic Western ideas about humanity and the individual. I claim that by restricting the information available to the user in various ways, the picture of the Human that emerges from each …