Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Race Book, Robert Dejesus

Theses and Dissertations

Race Book is a satiric animated short film about how social media influenced people during the 2020 presidential election.

Spit In My Mouth: Queer Intimacies, Material Intra-Actions, And Sensuous Becoming, Gm Keaton

Theses and Dissertations

This document describes my multidisciplinary art practice as it intersects with New Materialism, Queer and Affect theory, Ecology, and my embodied and experiential knowledge as a queer subject. The writing is divided into two categories. One is more theoretical, thinking through these different discourses. The other realizes them through relationships and intra-actions between my material kin and me. With these two modes of writing,I propose that embodied and felt knowing is as valid and illuminating as more traditional forms of knowledge. These sections are interdependent and resist linear logic, offering relational meanings to each reader as they find their way …

Metaphorical Cities - Behind The Cover Art, Elana Melissa Hill

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This is a reflection on how cities function like organisms. An artist's interpretation of the spaces surrounding them.

Metaphorical Cities, Elana Melissa Hill

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This is a reflection on how cities function like organisms. An artist's interpretation of the spaces surrounding them.

Hero Baby, Elizabeth J. Harney

Theses and Dissertations

With fiction and theory, the following pages give context to my most recent body of work called Hero Baby. The work in Hero Baby embodies an aesthetic of cuteness, as highlights the relationship between: aggression and protection, power and submission, war and commodity, nationalism and desire for love.

Yeezus Is Jesuz: Examining The Socio-Hermeneutical Transmediated Images Of Jesus Employed By Kanye West, Daniel White Hodge

Journal of Hip Hop Studies

Kanye is enigmatic in many ways. His continuous reference to deity while still embracing a person like 452 makes him worth the study and effort to explore his contribution and effect in the Hip Hop cultural continuum. This article investigates, Kanye West from a theological and spiritual standpoint to provide insights from his theological aesthetics. While the ever-growing field of Hip Hop studies begins to explore religion in Hip Hop, the present work seeks to address this and develop new theologies/theories that fit both a Hip Hop and Black theology context. While the formal discipline of theology in the United …

Arts Of Living On A Damaged Planet: Ghosts And Monsters Of The Anthropocene By Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, And Nils Bubandt, Randy Lee Cutler

The Goose

Review of Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Heather Anne Swanson, Elaine Gan, and Nils Bubandt's Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene.

Meta Me On An Ecstatic Walk With Hansel And Gretel: A Reflection Of Dispensed, Reclaimed And Reframed Existence, Laura White

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

This synthesis revolves around a rendition of Hansel and Gretel, in which I am exiled from innocence through the chaos of life. I recollect my breadcrumb clues in the form of thoughts and beliefs that I have held for as long as I remember. The breadcrumbs lead to open-ended questions about habits of mind for meaning making. My process of self-examination uses an adaptation of Action Research and I connect my current life to where I began using an Intersecting Processes analysis. I observe and document the unfolding of my life while studying it, using self-expression and thinking made visible …

Multiple Bodies As One, Valerie Skakun

Theses and Dissertations

Influenced by traumatic bodily injuries, physical therapy, muscle growth, breathing patterns, mental health, ways of supporting a disabled body, navigating the health care system, and exhaustion, the work described in this paper is a double meaning of the word "organ" and investigates the body as machine. The vital parts of a pump organ, the bellows and pipes, are extracted and re-configured into structures built for the performer's entire body to physically engage with in order to produce wind-driven sounds. Two of the sound sculptures require that two performers engage in play together, allowing them to audibly communicate through moving their …

Say Luv: Reimagining The Black Female Body, Jer'lisa Devezin

Art Theses and Dissertations

From hottentot venus to Cardi B, the influence of the white representation and the treatment of the black female body has shaped a culture of oppression amongst Black women, having surpassed the white community and trickled into the black community. In hip hop culture, reality television, and social media, black women are portrayed as angry and are stereotyped as ghetto and ignorant. On the music scene woman are always sexualized under the male gaze, however now that we are in the twerk era Cardi B is giving a new perspective to the representation of women in hip hop. By using …

Game On, Theresa Loong

Theses and Dissertations

Game On is a 25-minute documentary about game designer Brenda Romero, a successful woman in a male-dominated industry. Brenda, whose career spans over thirty-five pioneering years, has contributed to almost fifty game titles, developing innovative video and board games. How is her life a game space?

Seeing Through Feeling, Christopher Mitchell Rodgers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to describe both the inherent formal qualities and conceptual framework that are addressed within the exhibition, Seeing Through Feeling. The exhibition is centered around the methodology of making, collection, and display all through the one singular positioning, the object. The objects within the exhibition are either handmade or collected fragments that weave together around the singular position of craft and history under the pretense of how our understanding of time may not always be true. The thesis breaks down key components through specific themes into the categories of the hand, eye, symbol, object, value, …

An Echo From The Living Room, Makayla Nichole Songer

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

We are unable to interface with reality as it is. Everything that encompasses our understanding of reality and ourselves—from our physical perceptions to our memories—are subject to innate flaws that make a complete grasp of reality impossible. an echo from the living room is invested in the idea that reality itself is malleable, taking influence from altered states of reality such as dreams, nightmares, and memory. Drawing from the personal experiences of recurring nightmares and living in a haunted house, as well film, the uncanny, and the multiple, an echo from the living room strives to create space for these …

Reworking The White-Masculine Ideal, Steven H. Gonzalez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This text functions as an exploration of self through artistic practice, a designated space for reflection on contemporary Queer experience. In looking specifically at the permeation of the idealized-white-masculine figure as found within Western visual culture, social media and gay pornography become isolated as sites where these figures are commonly found. This line of inquiry defines how the ideal is reified through these differing digital platforms and the social implications the homogenized male form has on raced individuals. In addition to determining the image of the perfect masculine physique through research, this text expands on how its' imaged representation becomes …

Thesis/Thesis Document 2, Jessamyn Plotts

Art Theses and Dissertations

Thesis/thesis document 2 explores the subversive power of the painted image, made by a physical performative act. Such acts are not confined to the production of the art object, but expand across the landscape, involving the minds, bodies, and things of culture adjacent to the making process. Following the thinking of Maurice-Merleau Ponty, Thesis/thesis document 2 understands painting not as the container of a finite, legible message, but as a physical platform for the conveyance of perceptual, personal, and experiential ambiguity. Made in this way, painted images offer a powerful alternative to the proliferation of propaganda and advertisement …

North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell

Theses and Dissertations

North American Data fractures and reconfigures pre-existing narratives into new, unauthorized forms of storytelling. Core samples extracted from various narrative sources are reassigned new roles according to their proximity to each other. This paper functions as an introduction to the essential actors and their dramatic inclinations within fluctuating scenarios.

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 …

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.

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 …

All Hat & No Cow, Jesse Blumenthal

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

My thesis work, All Hat & No Cowhas been an exploration of End Stage Capitalism and Art/life in the American post-industrial Intermountain West. The research has been presented in one suite with three parts; a Sonic Ecosystem, Community Collaborative Foundry, and Mobile Blacksmithing School. Each of these activities present windows into ongoing (some career long) projects that comprise a diverse practice; different tracks on the same album. The three parts in the suite include technological progressions via the materials and process as the narrative arcs of societal “progression”. Structural welding, architectural blacksmithing, andcommercial foundry work emerged out of industrial …

A Renaissance Of The Visual Arts In Worship For Churches Of Christ, Heather Heflin Hodges

Doctor of Ministry Theses and Dissertations

This Doctor of Ministry thesis presents the results of a project in which a group of four artists from across the United States met via video conference to create liturgical art activities that can be integrated into the Sunday morning worship for Churches of Christ. The problem identified at the beginning of the project was a lack of integration of the visual arts in worship in Churches of Christ. I understood this lack to be due in part to an iconoclastic heritage in Protestantism as well as a focus on rational intellectualism and desire for simplicity in worship as a …

Integrating Art And Narrative To Enhance Quality Of Life In Palliative Care, Jennifer Fortuna

The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy

Lacie Lee Wallace, a mixed-media artist from Wheeling, West Virginia, is featured on the cover of the Fall 2018 issue of The Open Journal of Occupational Therapy (OJOT). The photograph depicts Lacie holding a self-portrait painted by artist CeCey Rose. Lacie’s physical appearance in the photograph is strikingly different from the physical appearance of the woman featured in the painting. The portrait was created 4 years before Lacie was diagnosed with advanced stage colon cancer. In the year following the diagnosis, Lacie lost nearly 100 lbs. as a result of an aggressive treatment regimen. When the palliative care team at …

Enacting The Glastonbury Pilgrimage Through Communitas And Aural/Visual Culture, Kathryn R. Barush

International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage

The sacred sites of Glastonbury in Somerset, England have long been places of pilgrimage, connected to the legend of the journey of Joseph of Arimathea to the British Isles, and have fired the imagination from the Middle Ages to today - inspiring the Arthurian legends, folk-stories and song, and visual representations. In response to the question ‘What is Pilgrimage,’ this essay seeks to explore the conjunction of artistic representations and geographic journeys to and among the ancient topography and mysterious structures of Glastonbury, with a particular focus on how sacred travel, and especially an experience of communitas, can be engendered …

Private Rainbows, Mikey F. Estes

Theses and Dissertations

I make art that refers to how the self is mediated through structures, objects, and images — a kind of self-portraiture that circles around its subject, reflecting a state of simultaneous formation and disintegration. Over the past few years, I have used my iPhone as a tool to make images of everyday life. As the user of this device, I am defined by both my presence and absence. I am interested in the process of locating the self within the scattered yet ordered space of the screen.

A World Of Possibilities, Austen Linder

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

The game Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) has been shrouded in stigma­ – so many people afraid to even try it out due to those undesirable personas constructed around the game. It’s hardly ever looked at as the incredible creative exercise and amazing bonding experience that it presents, a surefire potential to bring a group of people closer together as they joke, problem-solve, and process both game and real life together, while learning about how very much those two realms overlap. With how much the game has meant to me and how highly I regard the potential of its power, I …

Making Sounds, Patrick Costello

Theses and Dissertations

Using collaboration and performance as tools, I situate my personal story, my body, and my skills and interests within a contemporary landscape that is intersectional, full of partialities, and rooted in evolving ecologies.

The Flow Of Art: A Study On The Human Experience And Nature, Matthew R. Schott

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Through all of human history, artists and other creators have been able to access the extraordinary state of flow to achieve amazing feats. Whether it be for a divine purpose, or simply making someone’s day a little better, art has been used to lift the spirits and nourish humanity. In our attempt to cope with the world in which we live, we have found this great mental resource, that has allowed for achievements that not one person could not attain on their own. In my observation, I have seen this euphoric cycle of flow change the lives of so many …

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, Alyson Krajewski

Honors Projects

I have great pride for the neighborhood in which I was raised – a community that, while founded in strong Polish roots, has developed into an amalgamation of culture. Growing up with a deep connection to my Polish heritage as well as my Toledo pride has compelled me to introspectively question my identity, both as an individual and within my local community. These questions of self-identity vs. “identities within communities” have roots within topics of upbringing, social clubs, education, race, gender, and inclusivity.

Within my own neighborhood, one of the few remaining places where large bodies of citizens still gather …

In-Between: The Spaces Of Modernity, Elisa Fabris Valenti

LSU Master's Theses

During the past three years as a graduate student, I have experienced loneliness. Having recently emigrated from Italy, I have often asked myself why I am experiencing such hard times adjusting to a different country. My thesis explores this question. Referring to Marc Augé’s idea of non-place, I have chosen a geographical and spatial starting point to approach my work. Italian cities are built around the central piazza where social, political, and economic life revolves. In my thesis, I depict American spaces that lack specific location and create solitude within the urban corridors. Private feelings, such as loneliness, are paradoxes …

A Woman's Power & Place Vs. A Man's Power & Place, Christine Stoddard

The Crambo

Digital writing and photography.