Visual Studies Commons^™

Undocumented Migration And Political Community In Susan Meiselas's Crossings Photographs, Sarah Bassnet

Visual Arts Publications

In 1989, Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas (b. 1948) photographed irregular border crossings in southern California. At the time, it was relatively easy for undocumented migrants from Central America and Mexico to cross between ports of entry, even as there was growing pressure on American officials to address border security.1 One photograph in Meiselas’s Crossings series depicts a border patrol officer apprehending a migrant off the interstate near Oceanside (fig. 1). Two torsos fill the center of the image. The officer grasps the man’s clothing, propelling him toward the nearby vehicle. With heads cut off by the frame and backs turned, …

Memorias | Electronic Literature + Live Coding Performance, Jessica A. Rodriguez Miss, Rolando Rodriguez, Alejandro Brianza, Luis M. Guzman

Electronic Literature Organization Conference 2020

Memorias is a web-based artistic project by Jessica Rodríguez developed through the Estuary platform —an online platform to host live coding languages. It is based in six autobiographical writings connected to the way she “hears”, “writes”, “watches”, “reads”, “sees” and “listens” to the word. Through these texts, six code works were designed and programmed, hybridizing natural and computing languages by parsing three existing live coding languages: Tidal Cycles, Punctual, and CineCer0.

Together, Memorias’ languages collide different materialities as well as visual and sonic approaches, going from voices in English, Spanish, Cello and Paetzold samples, audio and visual synthesis, and pre-recorded …

The Object Memory Palace, Amra Causevic

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in orchestrating instances of potentiality or concrete possibilities that proposes the futurity of play through means of touch, activation, assembly, and interaction within art spaces. The installation mentioned is composed of found objects and repurposed materials that address themes of place, memory, object-ness, and the archive, through gestural means of poetics and map making. It is an invitation to create new logics and find moments of empathy, connectivity, and hopes for a collective.

Dunidedcudigunadie, Lawrence Reid

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses his Master of Fine Arts exhibit, titled DUNIDEDCUDIGUNADIE. The exhibit is to be held at the Tipton Gallery in downtown Johnson City, TN, from April 2nd to April 10th, 2020. A live reception will be held the evening of April 3rd, featuring a performance with the work, titled Look at You!

The following thesis explores the artist’s formative years – investigating how childhood experiences combine with artistic and theoretical influences to inform his art-making process.

El Quijote En Alcalá De Henares: Graffiti, Arte Urbano Y Autorrepresentación, Juan Fernandez Cantero

Vernacular: New Connections in Language, Literature, & Culture

En el presente trabajo se realizará un estudio de los procesos culturales existentes en la ciudad de Alcalá de Henares en la actualidad a través del arte urbano. Concretamente, se analizarán las representaciones del Quijote, personaje universal de Miguel de Cervantes, en el casco antiguo y en los barrios periféricos de la urbe. Se demostrará cómo la figura del Quijote es un medio para la autorrepresentación de la ciudad. Más allá de las decisiones políticas sobre el arte urbano en el centro histórico de la ciudad, se verá cómo la iconografía del Quijote se consolida como un elemento cohesivo para …

Terre Brûlée : Une Éco-Poétique Du Vide, Pierre Taminiaux

20th and 21st Century French and Francophone Studies International Colloquium

Au XXIe siècle, les sociétés occidentales sont confrontées à de nouvelles formes de chaos. Celui-ci comporte plusieurs dimensions, à la fois sociales, culturelles et écologiques. L’art doit dès lors prendre en considération cette situation d’une manière ou d’une autre. C’est ce qui m’autorise à parler ici de mes images photographiques rassemblées sous le titre de Terre brûlée.

Celles-ci ont été prises à l’automne 2017, au Portugal, près de la ville de Leiria, dans une forêt de bord de mer (une pinède, plus exactement) qui fut longtemps considérée dans l’histoire de ce pays comme un domaine royal. Cette saison fut …

Making Space For You, Livia Elizabeth Sponberg-Paraday

Senior Projects Spring 2020

Making Space for You is a senior thesis submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College. I created Making Space for You over the course of 8 months in my studio and in my living room of my apartment. My intentions for my paintings are to create an aesthetically awesome image that the viewer is automatically attracted to. I use color confidently to make the paintings strong and catchy. I enjoy painting people, hands, feet and objects. The project began with oil paint and the goal to teach myself to paint an image of people in a space in …

Indominable, Kathleen A. Fox

CGU MFA Theses

INDOMINABLE, Kathleen A Fox

The reformation of the feminine portrait from that of idealistic sexual beauty into a portrait of strength, community, longevity, transformation, and inane human foundational essence of societal value. This collection of portraits illustrates the uniqueness that is often overlooked for the fast, idealistic and instantly read images of women hailed as beautiful. These women contain a space they have earned with their strength of character, spirit, and unwillingness to be moved from their places of significance. Created with an expressive abstractive edge to traditional portraiture, these female portraits refuse to be easily glossed over, for their …

Biafra And The Politics Of Humanitarian Consumption, Chi-Chi Ayalogu

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

The Nigeria-Biafra War (1967-70) is overwhelmingly represented by photographs of malnourished, sickly looking and often protein-deficient children, iconic and complex images that encapsulate the narrative of an impoverished black Africa in the western imagination. While these photographs reveal the grievous, inhuman atrocities that took place in Biafra, they have come to be negatively associated with the entirety of black Africa, as they tend to validate inaccurate ideas of homogeneity on the continent. Yet despite their homogenizing effect, Biafran leaders re-appropriated images of suffering for propaganda use, specifically to elicit a humanitarian response and thereby procure aid and resources from denizens …

Film On Paper, Graphics On Screen, Feminism In Story: An Exegesis Of A Feminist Graphic Novel Project, Jingwei Xu

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

This research is the second stage of my entire graphic novel practice looking at a feminist topic – women’s awakening from marriage. In this phase, the study carries out the practical process of the creative work, involving a graphic novel (body), an opening title (hook) and a package of visual communication design (promotion), in order to convey my feminist claim that women’s real emancipation depends on whether they can rouse their subject awareness and break through the chain of marriage. Based on this practice-led research, my personal knowledge is generated, including the value of combining graphic novels and title sequences, …

Getting Located: Queer Semiotics In Dress, Callen Zimmerman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The body, a long contested site of identity construction, has been used by historically by queers to convey desire, build affinity and transgress norms. Looking at the fashioned queer body, this capstone takes the form of a proposal for an art exhibition at the Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. Seeking to engage with objects, performance and film which approximate, provide proxy for or depart from the body as a site, it explores the social and political quagmire of getting dressed. Comprised of contemporary art that looks at the rupture of legible bodily semiotics, this show wonders what …

The Psychos, Paula N. Stevenson

Graduate School of Art Theses

My current body of work is a series of drawings that juxtapose characters of fiction and reality in an attempt to explore the relationship between horror film and contemporary social issues. I strive to render an accurate portrayal of the face to draw the viewer into questioning the troubling narrative these characters illuminate. I focus on retelling stories of fear and horror, and crime and infamy. I want my work to convey ethical dilemmas as they are present within the relationship between horror movie antagonists and the audience (all of us). It is these concerns I attempt to visualize in, …

Needle And Thread, Caitlin Carvalho

Theses and Dissertations

Needle and Thread is an expanded cinema performance that involves the projection of 16mm film, archival footage, video, 35mm slide projection, soundscape and liquid light projection. It explores the fibers of connection, the thread that ties together my matriarchy, utilizing the language of cinema to piece together the memories.

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 …

Transdisciplinary Creative Ecologies In Contemporary Art Within Emergent Processes, Siglinde Langholz Villarreal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research is composing in the moving with affective speeds and rhythms, instead of unfolding direct and in linear ways. It is important to come across different planes of composition in movement. There are so many planes of voices spinning around in relation. Research-creation seems as forms of relations and an invitation to appreciate the collectivity at the heart of thinking. The many entering-into relation within a differential thought in the making of its own.

Emergent properties in non-human interactions, such as those presented in Steven Shaviro ́s Against Self-Organization (2009) and Brain Massumi, are symptomatic of how individualities relate …

Recipe For Disaster, Zac Travis

MFA Thesis Exhibit Catalogs

Today’s rapid advances in algorithmic processes are creating and generating predictions through common applications, including speech recognition, natural language (text) generation, search engine prediction, social media personalization, and product recommendations. These algorithmic processes rapidly sort through streams of computational calculations and personal digital footprints to predict, make decisions, translate, and attempt to mimic human cognitive function as closely as possible. This is known as machine learning.

The project Recipe for Disaster was developed by exploring automation in technology, specifically through the use of machine learning and recurrent neural networks. These algorithmic models feed on large amounts of data as a …

Humans Aren't Boxes, Art Isn't Finite, Brianne Alta Humphreys

Theses and Dissertations

I am bored. All around me are systems that perpetuate repetitive, reductive, and mundane modes of living. In an attempt to counter a culture obsessed with singular ways of existence and bite-sized perfection, I utilize moving mediums of video and performance to dive head first into a vast array of sloppy sincerity. The crisp, white-washed, analytical, and restrictive is loudly replaced with the empirical, haphazard, and instinctual. My intention is to create and encourage raw, performative-based work that is as multifaceted as unbridled life itself. This alive and physical practice hosts a conglomeration of sweat, memories, heartbreaks, hymn singing, line …

Parallel Narrative: Short-Video Social Media Platforms’ Influences On Contemporary Narrative, Ruiqi Zhang

Theses and Dissertations

Through the study of Kwai, a popular short-video social media platform in China, this thesis investigates the social issues, media class divides and aesthetics specific to Kwai culture. It further proposes a strategy of artistic practice - parallel narrative - an experiment in video art production and editing techniques that explores new possibilities of narrative in video art. Integrating theoretical research on Post-Internet art and object-oriented ontology, this thesis reveals people’s ability to digest multisource information and shows how mobile technologies and open-source materials contribute to the formation of parallel narratives.

The Zone, Jordon W. Soper

Senior Projects Spring 2019

There are places, soft spots, in our world where the membrane between realities and possibilities is thinner. Here the familiar constant fundamentals described by natural science to order our understanding of the world are inconsistent. Natural laws are stretched, warped, and refracted in chimeric distortions. To enter is to encounter the unreal and the unknowable, to comprehend the incomprehensible. The familiar and the unfamiliar intertwine and overlap. In the zone we see in circles, sensory experience expands, and minute details become revelations. At the fringes of consciousness and perception we meet with the shimmer of simultaneous wonder and terror.

Within …

A Mellow Night For Memories, Angelo Ilya Raphael Chammah

Senior Projects Fall 2019

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Un/Dead Animal Art: Ethical Encounters Through Rogue Taxidermy Sculpture, Miranda Niittynen

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Beginning in 2004, the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists began an art movement of taxidermied animal sculptures that challenged conventional forms of taxidermied objects massively produced and displayed on an international scale. In contrast to taxidermied ‘specimens’ found in museums, taxidermied ‘exotic’ wildlife decapitated and mounted on hunters' walls, or synthetic taxidermied heads bought in department stores, rogue taxidermy artists create unconventional sculptures that are arguably antithetical to the ideologies shaped by previous generations: realism, colonialism, masculinity. As a pop-surrealist art movement chiefly practiced among women artists, rogue taxidermy artists follow an ethical mandate to never kill animals for the …

Performing The Quality Of Imperceptible Interactions Between Individuals: A Technological Challenge Regarding The Collective, Marine Theunissen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Contemporary technologies allow incredible possibilities of capturing individuals, but a problem arises when it comes to capturing a chorus, that is to say a "collective body" in motion. This proposal will address the problem of the sensitive capture of the quality of the interrelations between individuals, and of their refined interpretation through algorithms to "output” them in other forms. We will address two questions on the subject: how to capture the relations between individuals within a collective? How to create a circular-causal loop, whose artistic material (the digital data) is the interrelations of a collective, without engendering redundancy in their …

Murmur/Murmuro, Paola M. Di Tolla

Theses and Dissertations

By using repetition or misplacing intonations and accents, etc. one can imitate the slipperiness of spoken language. However, it is the accidental slippage that I find most revealing and exciting because it allows for two conversations to exist in one. Once spoken language is transcribed as text, it is put through another filter and the risk of [accidental] slippage increases by a different measure. Fingers don’t keep up or autocorrect insists on taking matters into its own hands.

“After-Ozymandias”: The Colonization Of Symbols And The American Monument, H. R. Membreno-Canales

Theses and Dissertations

After-Ozymandias examines the visual rhetoric of American patriotism through its many symbols, including flags and monuments. My thesis project consists of photographs of empty plinths, objects, products and archival materials. Countless relics remain today memorializing leaders and empires that inevitably declined, from antiquity to modern times. Looking back at distant history feels like a luxury, though: the question for our time in America is whether we have the strength of mind as a society to scrutinize our history, warts and all.

Literarische Filmsimulation: Heinrich Eduard Jacobs Medienphilosophische Filmästhetik In "Blut Und Zelluloid", Paula Vosse

Arts & Sciences Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Heinrich Eduard Jacob´s novel Blut und Zelluloid was published in 1929 and therefore mostly reviewed as a critical artwork regarding European film-propaganda before the outbreak of the Second World War. This thesis provides the interested scholar with a different approach: It discusses Jacob´s media-philosophical method to simulate the upcoming medium film in literature. With his implicitly and explicitly organized systems of diverse media, he circumvents constraints of the Paragone-discourse and offers a well-balanced literary construction.

Jacob´s method is compared with Pinthus´ Kinobuch and Pirandello´s Shoot!, while Simmel and Benjamin provide the thesis with a fundament to support Jacob´s theoretical approach. …

Representation Of Settler Colonial Violence In Palestine, A Thesis In Support Of The Multi-Media Exhibition Choreographies Of Resistance, Rehab Nazzal

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This project-based dissertation emerges from my engagement with theories of representation, settler colonialism, and genocide, as well as involvement with direct engagement through embodied experience of the Palestinian reality in the colonized West Bank during 2015–2017. The artworks and written components of this project seek to represent shards of the multilayered Western-Zionist settler colonial project in Palestine through a focus on the struggle and resilience of the Palestinian people and the endurance of their land. Land seizing as the aim of settler colonialism and the colonised bodies as sites of oppression and sites of resistance are central to the various …

Strange Woods, Song Park

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am interested in searching for images of women that have not been adequately represented in visual art. As a visual artist, I am directed by my sense of sight to investigate and know something. I like to challenge myself to visualize things that do not already have a visual representation. It has been frustrating for me to create images of women, and I have experienced a deep ambivalence in response to the different images of women I have encountered. The socially and culturally constructed images of women that I have internalized and those that have developed from my own …

Lumumba’S Iconography As Interstice Between Art And History, Matthias De Groof

Artl@s Bulletin

How does Congolese art and artistic representations of Lumumba “mediate past, present and future”? How do they relate to historical narratives and to the dialogues within the Global South? This contribution proposes Lumumba’s iconography as a case in point of the interstice between art and history. It positions the image of Lumumba as mediating between past, present and future for both the Congo and the Global South more broadly.

Supernova: Performing Race, Hybridity And Expanding The Geographical Imagination, Raheleh Saneie

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis attempts to explore the many socio-political, temporal and spatial factors that contribute to the formation of cultural identity. Through my video work, SuperNova, I examine how race is performed and the discursive structures that contribute to the process of racialization. The core question that is central to this thesis is how race is performed and the potential benefits and drawbacks of this performance. In chapter one, I explore how whiteness is performed and how racial hierarchies are maintained through performance. I critique the Aryan race discourse that is a part pf Iranian nationalist discourse of identity. In …

How To Be The Perfect Asian Wife!, Sophia Hill

Art and Art History Honors Projects

“How to be the Perfect Asian Wife” critiques exploitative power systems that assault female bodies of color in intersectional ways. This work explores strategies of healing and resistance through inserting one’s own narrative of flourishing rather than surviving, while reflecting violent realities. Three large drawings mimic pervasive advertisement language and presentation reflecting the oppressive strategies used to contain women of color. Created with charcoal, watercolor, and ink, these 'advertisements' contrast with an interactive rice bag filled with comics of my everyday experiences. These documentations compel viewers to reflect on their own participation in systems of power.