Visual Studies Commons^™

Video Art In The Gallery Space, Juliet Wang, Matthew Thompson

Honors Thesis

The gallery space poses several challenges for incorporation of audiovisual or video elements, including offset entrances, lack of time investment, sound bleed, and light bleed. In order for an audiovisual work to be well optimized for the gallery space, ideally the artist should not only find ways around as many of these “challenges” as possible but also to embrace them and have the work be stronger because of these challenges.

The Art Of Animation: How Animation Is Creating A Better Film Industry, Judah Cooper

Senior Honors Theses

With the progression of streaming services in recent years, the art form of animation has gained traction, continuing to develop into exceedingly creative forms through the work of talented artists. Animation has developed alongside the film industry, achieving great success in the process. This thesis will define animation and its place within visual effects, critically analyze categories of character design, theme, and story while demonstrating their relationship with animation, and contrast animation with live action films to understand its strengths and differentiations. The research concludes that animation has great benefits to offer the film industry and should be continued to …

Evocative And Provocative Image-Making In The Age Of Generative Ai, Julian Kilker

Tradition Innovations in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education

Editorial for inaugural AI-focused special issue of Tradition-Innovations in Arts, Design, and Media Higher Education, published under the auspices of the Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru). Discusses three articles by five authors in this issue: (1) Choreographing Shadows: Interdisciplinary collaboration to orchestrate ethical image-making by Mark Burchick and Diana Pasulka; (2) Giving Up Control: Hybrid AI-augmented workflows for image-making by Joshua Vermillion; and (3) Hands are Hard: Unlearning how we talk about machine learning in the arts by Adam Hyland and Oscar Keyes.

Editing this special issue explored several key questions: What does “innovation” mean when …

Photography And 21st-Century Migration, Sarah Bassnett, Blessy Augustine

Visual Arts Publications

No abstract provided.

Family, Diaspora, And The Politics Of Care In Griselda San Martin’S The Wall , 2015-16, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

This article examines a series of photographs by Griselda San Martin, a Spanish journalist and documentary photographer based in New York City and Mexico City. The series focuses on the experiences of people at Friendship Park, a bi-national park located in the border region of San Diego, United States, and Tijuana, Mexico. Working in Tijuana, San Martin engaged with families as they attempted to connect with loved ones across the border in San Diego. Many of the people she met at Friendship Park had become separated from family members after living as undocumented migrants in the US and then being …

“Come Think With Me”: Finding Communion In The Liberatory Textual Practices Of Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Jehan L. Roberson

Criticism

Defining text as anything that can be read, self-identified learner and artist Kameelah Janan Rasheed explores reading as radical communion within her multifaceted textual practice. A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Rasheed’s work spans vast bodies of knowledge and temporalities to interrogate both the aesthetic and the limits of the text. At times producing collages with letters cut out from books in her own expansive library, and at other times posting scans from various books that are marked up with her rigorous note-taking, Rasheed approaches the text as an invitation to commune with the author in order to collectively arrive at new …

New Mapping, Dowon Yoo

Masters Theses

Tools determine the shape of most of the worlds that are manufactured or measured. Taking the Earth as an example, territory is shaped and transformed by the tools of the earth's plate movement, the sea, and humans. A map, a recognized territory, is represented through numerical instruments, mathematical formulas, and visual devices such as lenses.

The instrumental perspective is one of the powerful lenses that will work effectively into the past, present, and future. So I started to apply an instrumental perspective to digital space. Digital space which is Non-physical has become one of the most important worlds for contemporary …

Movement, Mechanization, And Coexistence, Yukyung Chung

Masters Theses

A movement is a tool that expresses the subject I pursue, ‘mechanization of human beings’. There are many technologies that replace humans these days, such as artificial intelligence. This makes me skeptical and afraid of being replaced as an artist in the future. Paradoxically, people, including myself, are enthusiastic about it, indicating that we do embrace the mechanization process as a society.

I will reveal this phenomenon of coexistence by demonstrating the possibility that machines cannot replace us, through motion experiments where rules increase, first starting with the reliance on intuition. I will explore not only the things that machines …

Superbland, Dougal Henken

Masters Theses

"A thin wafer is placed in the mouth of a kneeling woman and becomes flesh. A man masturbates quietly in a darkened room to a 3D model of a popular film actress. A car drives through an abandoned town and decelerates as it approaches a sign reading “Slow Children Playing.” A man fastidiously mows an artificial lawn while watching the sun dip low over a vast desert horizon. Superbland opens up new paths in understanding graphic design within the realm of the hyperreal. It begins with a study of simulation in graphic design contexts, building upon established forms of meaning-making …

Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang

Masters Theses

Disillusioned by my transnational identity, I have come to realize that my sense of belonging is no longer attached to any physical location, but instead to a state of mind, to an intimacy with the world. My notion of home is an obscure and unsettled—at times utopian—idea, which can be infinitely decoded, re-positioned and re-established psychologically. This thesis is an investigation of that liminal state, questioning the paradoxical place at the intersection of longing and belonging, interior and exterior, rootedness and uprootedness. Through a collection of short essays that accompany projects, I seek to unpack the precarious emotional complexities that …

Moondoggie's Ad, Mia Horvath

Graphic Communication

I created a 2 minute ad for Moondoggies that defines the brands “attitude” as well as establishes its demographic, highlights the products they sell, and showcases the natural beauty of the region Moondoggies was founded in.

Step 10, Jinhong Cai

Masters Theses

Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through

abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am

proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning

on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:

narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.

While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or

personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them

because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in

learning more about the motive behind this creation.

The questions I bought into the thought and creation

process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring

out …

Creating Project Contrast: A Video Game Exploring Consciousness And Qualia, Pierce Papke

Honors Projects

Project Contrast is a video game that explores how the unique traits inherent to video games might engage reflective player responses to qualitative experience. Project Contrast does this through suspension of disbelief, avatar projection, presence, player agency in storytelling, visual perception, functional gameplay, and art. Considering the difficulty in researching qualitative experience due to its subjectivity and circular explanations, I created Project Contrast not to analyze qualia, though that was my original hope. I instead created Project Contrast as an avenue for player self-reflection and learning about qualitative experience. While video games might be just code and art on a …

Digitizing The American West: Analyzing Rhetoric In Red Dead Redemption 2, Amalia Mcevoy

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

High-budget, long-form storytelling games offer dozens of hours of content for audiences to explore and learn from. Although far different from sitting and reading a book, there is a distinct connection to be made between how literature is experienced and how audiences can experience a narrative-heavy video game. Based on this connection, there are bridges to be built between video games and literature, understanding how one field can benefit from the other as well as how one field can be informed by the other. An analysis of the video game Red Dead Redemption 2 using reader response theory can illustrate …

Resitance Art And Urban Space: A Strategic Comparison Of Artistic Urban Space Usage In Buenos Aires And San Francisco, Adeline Rose Schmitz

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In the early Twentieth century the Mexican Muralism movement reached two important port cities: San Francisco and Buenos Aires. The artists in these cities quickly adopted the usage of public art as means to insert political dialogue into the everyday life of their citizens. Throughout the years the resistance art in these cities has evolved in parallel, shaped by their dynamic histories of social and political change. This paper critically compares the evolutions of resistance art in Buenos Aires and San Francisco over the past twenty years. It does so by analyzing the public art archives of local collectives in …

The Dark House And Its Inhabitants, Emily Bielski

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

From the inception of the genre, Gothic horror has been fixated on the domestic space in distress. This essay explores domestic archetypes and roles of the Gothic novel, serving as a “tour of the house”, analyzing the iconography of the dark castle, and how it externalizes and exacerbates the fears and behaviors of its inhabitants. The power dynamic of the household is starkly divided by the expectations and authority of masculine and feminine figures. In turn the “house” becomes a vehicle for the anxieties of the inhabitants—both experienced and inflicted—regarding gender, sexuality, isolation, and abuse. Exploration of the visual and …

Skin Echoes, Andreia Santana

Theses and Dissertations

Santana’s explores the intersection of biology and identity, incorporating living matter and performative gestures into installations to reflect on social constructs of history and gender. By observing water and its qualities of defying Western dichotomies, Skin Echoes focuses on the material interchanges across bodies and the wider material world.

Lars Gustaf Sellstedt: Art In Buffalo And The Buffalo Fine Art Academy, Shannon N. Gilmartin

History Theses

This Master’s Thesis Project researches the life of a forgotten Buffalo artist, Lars Gustaf Sellstedt. He was born in Sundsvall, Sweden and started his life as a sailor when he became a cabin boy as an early teenager. For most of his young life until his mid-twenties, Sellstedt was a sailor traveling to all corners of the world. He started his journey as an artist while in between sailing jobs. Over many decades he portraits locally and abroad mainly in the Caribbean Islands. Sellstedt was one of the few artists in 19th century Buffalo, sharing the profession with William J. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Metamorphis, Luca Lee Sobarzo Faust

Theses and Dissertations

Web3D interactive experience that explores time, communication, and transformation, from a personal storytelling perspective. Hosted on a web platform, the experience displays three environments: Metamorphis, Cuir AI, and Hain. These spaces propose a fragmented narrative that seeks to interrogate both the characters and the viewer’s perception on the linearity of time

Rescue Politics: Richard Mosse’S Thermal Imaging And The Containment Of Migration, Sarah Bassnett

Visual Arts Publications

This article focuses on a body of work by Mosse that includes the multichannel video installation Incoming, shown as a 52:12 minute three-channel video installation with 7.3 surround sound, and the photographic series Heat Maps (2015–2017) (Fig. 1). While Incoming concentrates on migration routes, Heat Maps portrays the architecture of refugee camps.4 I consider how the artist’s use of thermal imaging and his immersive mode of documentary complicates tropes used to represent migration. I reflect on the way Mosse’s artwork intersects with a long-standing interest by practitioners and theorists of film and photography in the idea of the camera as …

Interface: Technology & Portraiture, Mullins Sydney

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2023

In Interface, five Kentucky-area artists explore a new language of representation with the aid of digital tools like Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Automatic Facial Recognition Software (AFR). Some artists use algorithms to alter celebrity faces beyond recognition, others feed data sets of existing art to AI models in an attempt to generate portraits of no one in particular. Others still create tools for understanding the very act of facial recognition or obfuscation. All have one thing in common: they wish to stretch the limits of and critique the genre of portraiture, as well as to cause viewers to question …

Mascs: Masculinity Reimagined, Josh Porter

Graduate Thesis Exhibition Catalogue Gallery, 2023

MASCS: Masculinity Reimagined explores how performances of contemporary masculinities can counteract traditional binary understandings of gender. Justin Korver, John Paul Morabito, Betsy Odom, Moises Salazar, and Darryl DeAngelo Terrell expose, question, and subvert the ways that we culturally define masculinity by focusing on gender as performance. These artists not only critique cisgender, heteronormative binary understandings of masculinity, but also embrace the performative nature of gender and celebrate non-normative, alternative, and queer masculinities. By encompassing a range of gender and sexual identifications, these artists share their own personal experiences, interpretations, performances, rejections, and embodiments of masculinity. Breaking down the barrier created …

Jogakpo Window (7 Feet X 4 Feet), Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Materials: glass, sunlight, post-it notes. Image description: Photographs show a large window covered with a 조각보 patchwork of colorful post-it notes. Sunlight illuminates the paper.

For Everyone's Eyes Only: Digital Art As Public Art (Agency, Accessibility, And Aura), Linda Dai

Pomona Senior Theses

Should digital art qualify as public art? This thesis aims to explore the significance of this question in a contemporary context by cross-examining the two genres in terms of creative agency, accessibility, and aura. Through various interviews and case studies with global artists, I examine similarities and differences in materiality and engagement in public and digital art and the implications of my findings under broader, theoretical frameworks. I further seek to understand how the relationship between technology, art, and society has shifted over time. Ultimately, I argue that the fluidity of digital art allows to exist in public and private …

Playing To Win: The Effects Of Implementing Gamification Strategies In Product Marketing, Sabrina Stone

CMC Senior Theses

Let’s play a game. What effect do you think video games have on twenty-first-century marketing? In this age defined by its nature of digitality, capturing the attention of consumers is an arduous competition. Through market segmentation, research, and the observable variables of consumer behavior, product marketing has turned to video games as a solution to appeal to younger demographics. Gamification is an increasingly applied product marketing strategy employed to increase favorable metrics. Of those key performance indicators (KPIs), boosted measures such as click-through rates, impressions, and engagement rates suggest that gamification is a strategic opportunity to persuade consumers to take …

Comic Literature And Graphic Novel Uses In History, Literature, Math, And Science, James O. Barbre Iii, Justin Carroll, Joshua Tolbert

SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education

Graphic novels and comics have a rich history and have long served as a medium for both education and entertainment. Although we live in an increasingly technology-rich era which offers abundant visual stimulation to compete with comics, graphic literature is arguably a more immediate and robust resource than ever before. The following paper highlights specific applications of graphic literature to pedagogical purposes, including implications for the use of comics in teaching history, world languages, English as a new language, science, and mathematics. Across these areas, a wide degree of application exists for teachers, in both K-12 and post-secondary settings. In …