Visual Studies Commons^™

Transforming The Mundane: Juxtaposing Maria Friedman’S "High Society" With George Cukor’S "The Philadelphia Story" As An Emphasis On The Importance Of Theatre, Dana T. Speight Ms.

Undergraduate Honors Theses

The subjects of film and theatre belong to an extensive hierarchical debate that has remained prominent within the realm of performing arts since the introduction of cinema in the late nineteenth century. A plethora of scholars choose to argue in favor of the former, suggesting that film surpasses theatre as superior in both aesthetics and overall execution of naturalism; however, the argument is purely subjective and cannot be applied to all films and their corresponding plays. As a counterclaim, theatre continues to thrive as a prominent source of artistic entertainment globally, not only offering a contemporary twist to preexisting texts, …

Communicating Through Space: An Exploration Of Interdisciplinary Relationships Between Architecture And Theatre Through Practical Application, Erin E. Hunter

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

Space as an expression of ideas is a relevant topic both in theatrical design and architectural design. Both create worlds, places in time, and experiences. The theatre is a platform where architectural ideas can be explored on a real scale. Audiences can make associations based on representation on the stage and connotations from popular culture. Theatre is more temporary than architecture by nature, and therefore theatre can reference architectural ideas in temporary settings to tell a story. By analyzing the physical characteristics of a space and the societal and cultural conditions that created it, a theatre set can isolate moments …

“Deliberate Voluptuousness”: The Monstrous Women Of Dracula And Carmilla, Judith Bell

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Vampire women play a culturally significant role in films and literature by revealing the extent to which deviation from Socially accepted behavior is tolerated. In this thesis, I compare the vampire women of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla to their depictions in recent adaptations. In Stoker’s Dracula, the vampire sisters are representative of the shortcomings of 19th century gender roles, especially in regard to women’s communities. In recent adaptations, the vampire sisters’ revealing clothing, promiscuity, and lack of characterization are still closely connected with villainy, and as in Stoker’s novel, the women’s violent deaths in the …

Exploring Ethnic Stereotypes Through The Production Of Five Short Films, Ines Galiano Torres

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This is a nontraditional thesis that combines social research in ethnic stereotypes in TV and film with the creative process of film production. This paper contains the formal step of research, in addition to the details on the production and creation of five original short films related to the issue of ethnic representations.

Avatars Of Oneself, Patrick L. Miller

Sophia and Philosophia

Zoe is an American woman who has found that “drawing the line and standing firm has always made me feel like a bitch, and, actually, I feel that people saw me as one too.”[3] For two years, however, she played an online role-playing game using a male character where “as a man I was liberated from all that.” She made mistakes in her unfamiliar role, but learned from them. “I got better at being firm but not rigid,” she says; “I practiced, safe from criticism.” Case is an American man, who plays a similar game but always appears as a …

Pathos, Spring 2016, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Philip King

Volume 10 No. 3

A Borrowed Language, Yvonne Osei

Graduate School of Art Theses

Art has the potency of mediation: bridging human differences, questioning voids in historical trajectories, negotiating spaces of relevance, and most importantly, being signifiers that embody the absent. I speak in a borrowed language, a multilingual visual tongue, inspired by a culmination of Western and African Art modes of practices to create charged platforms for multicultural communication.

My art presents visual portals that allow for intercultural and interracial mingling as issues of colorism, present-day colonialism, gender inequality and the politics of dress are foregrounded for collective deliberation. The essence of the work is often activated and brought to its full potential …

Palimpsest, Mary Stephen

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

This interactive booklet features the “fictional documentary” Palimpsest directed and edited by Ms. Mary Stephen, Artist-in-Residence for 2nd Semester 2015/16, Lingnan University. Readers can understand more about Mary’s works by viewing videos she previously directed and scriptwritten, including A Very Easy Death, Labyrinthe, and Ombres De Soie.

To see the videos of Ms. Mary Stephen, you would need to use this booklet and your device:

Step 1: Download the free application Aurasma
Step 2. Start following marystephen
Step 3: Scan the images with [　]
Step 4: Tag once to view full screen and tag twice …

The Fantasy Self, Jill Lobianco-Bartalis

All Student Theses and Dissertations

If you could be anything what would you be? The Fantasy Self is a visual and psychological examination of fantasy personas, analyzed using the vehicles of photography and Jungian psychology. The subjects are photographed as their fantasy self and then psychoanalyzed with the intention of making the connections between the subconscious mind and the conscious mind. The Collective Unconscious is comprised of twelve major archetypes, each with their own set of distinct characteristics. The Innocent, The Orphan, The Warrior, The Caregiver,The Seeker, The Destroyer, The Lover, The Creator, The Ruler, The Sage, The Magician, and The Fool. Every human being …

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety, Rebecca Schroeder

Honors Projects

Seeking Solace: Regret, Grief, Anxiety is a triptych video and artifact piece inspired by the abstract analysis of my dreams. It recognizes worries held within my subconscious and brings them to life through graphic design, photography, and video. The process of creating provides a new perspective of looking at both art and occupational therapy as methods of solving emotional distress.

I have recorded over 80 of my dreams in the past year. In these dreams, regret, grief, and anxiety are common themes. These themes are represented in three triptychs that cycle through past, present, and future problems. The cycling of …

Buster Keaton's Comedic Innovations, Tyler P. Templeton

Symposium Of University Research and Creative Expression (SOURCE)

A brief examination of Buster Keaton's contributions to cinematic comedy starting circa 1920, and specifically his progressive fusion of comedy with dramatic narrative. Keaton's innovations in the genre have allowed for his work to influence many contemporary filmmakers today, one of the most prominent examples being Wes Anderson.

Petrography, The Tar Sands Paradise, And The Medium Of Modernity, Warren Cariou, Jon Gordon

The Goose

This article engages with the artistic practice of petrography, the art of creating photographic images through the action of sunlight upon bitumen, the heavy-oil material that is the source of the petroleum in the Athabasca tar sands. It presents several examples of petrographs that document the process of industrial bitumen mining itself. Further, it theorizes the ways in which both the process of producing petrographs and the act of engaging with them as a viewer require a degree of collaboration normally absent from our consumption of petroleum as the medium of modernity. A key argument of the paper is the …

關於雨傘 : 創作、情感、記憶, Suk Mun, Sophia Law

Research Expression through Art : Visual Studies Faculty

這是一本關於雨傘運動、藝術創作與情感記憶的書。

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …

Shadows And Light. Ernie Gehr Exhibitions At The Museum Of Modern Art, Sean M. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis examines exhibitions and media installations of Ernie Gehr’s work at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), beginning with the pivotal 1970 show Information, which presented four films by Gehr. Wait (1968), Transparency (1969), Reverberation (1969), and History (1970) were screened alongside work by other avant-garde filmmakers and video artists in a circular viewing booth in the gallery space, in a show featuring works now considered masterpieces of conceptual art. It also considers the two site-specific video works, MoMA on Wheels (2002) and Navigation (2002), which Gehr created for the lobby space at MoMA QNS, …

Identity, Community, And Nikki S. Lee, Haley Yarborough

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research

This research sheds light on the complex artistry of Korean-born photographer Nikki S. Lee. Although Lee's work initially appears straightforward and casual, this essay explores how photographs in "The Hip Hop Project" and "The Tourist Project" actually reinforce and critique specific cultural stereotypes. In performing different ethnic and cultural identities for her photographs, Lee also investigates what it means to one's own identity to be labeled part of a specific community.

Rodcon, Slides, 2016, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

RodCon Program Schedule of Events

Rodcon, Program, 2016, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

Inside This Program:

--RodCon 2016 at the Rod Library, Saturday April 2, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
--Welcome to RodCon
--Locations
--Schedule
--What's That? Event Descriptions
--Autographs

Illusory Perspectives: Edward Weston, Jeremy Razook

Bridges: A Journal of Student Research

Photographer Edward Weston was famously able to capture unexpected beauty—no matter if his subject was fruit or human. This essay locates Weston's artistic vision within the modernist movement of the first half of the twentieth century and uses two well-known images to illustrate Weston's unique talent for transcending the boundaries between human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, being and nonbeing in his desire to encourage the experience of introspection and contemplation in viewers.

Pathos, Winter 2016, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Philip King

Volume 10 No. 2

Display-Through-Foregrounding By Photojournalists As Self-Reflexivity In Photojournalism: Two Case Studies Of Accidental Peace Photojournalism, Saumava Mitra

FIMS Publications

This article explores media self-reflexivity as understood within Peace Journalism (PJ) in the case of photojournalists and photojournalism. Carrying forward the discussion started by Allan (2011) for research into ‘peace photography’ to be extended to ‘tacit, unspoken rules’ underlying photojournalistic images, the article shows, through two examples of mainstream news images, how photojournalists can and may break from diktats of ‘news values’ to advertently or inadvertently critique the myths of the very practice they function within. Such self-reflexive, synecdochic images which display media’s own role in covering conflict are examples from which PJ can take lessons for a new visual …

The Outsider Within: Béla Tarr And Hungarian National Cinema, Lilla Tőke

Publications and Research

Béla Tarr is probably the most paradoxical figure in contemporary Hungarian cinema. His artistic trajectory shows a movement from documentary style realism (Family Nest, 1979) towards more modernist cinematic practices (Satan’s Tango, 1994, Werckmeister Harmonies, 2000, and The Man from London, 2007). A major celebrity in the global film culture that prides itself in being transnational, international, and in crossing linguistic and ethnic boundaries, Tarr has consistently found himself on the fringes of the Hungarian cultural and political establishment. In this study Tőke considers Tarr’s films and public persona as catalysts in the debates about what constitutes “Hungarian cinema” in …

Socially Engaged Practice: A Reflection On Values, Theory And Writing, Alan Grossman, Anthony Haughey

Books/Book chapters

No abstract provided.

A Theory Of Participation: Joining The Cast Of 'Heavy Rain', Matthew Bryan Oliver

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

Video game scholars have gone through an arduous process of defining video games as their own art form that communicates to its audience in as different a way to other art forms as they to each other. This article compiles much of this research and engages in a ludonarrative analysis of Heavy Rain to show that video games offer a unique narrative structure where players step vicariously into the positions of video game characters and create their own story through that interactive relationship. Heavy Rain, specifically, uses an innovative system of controller mechanic interaction and visual cues to encourage this …

Rodcon, Flier, 2016, University Of Northern Iowa

RodCon Documents

RodCon 2016 at the Rod Library
Saturday, April 2
10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Course Syllabus (W16 Online) Coli 331: "Pulp Fiction And Quentin Tarantino", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Objectives and Expected Learning Outcomes:

Rejecting the standpoint of the passively entertained consumer, our shared objectives in this course will be (1) to bring our selected cinematic and written texts into interaction in such ways as to produce high-quality scholarly writing. It is hoped that, by the end of the semester, each student’s active engagement with our course material should have enabled him/her, (2) to deepen and broaden his/her knowledge base concerning the social problematics we will have treated in such ways as to inform and encourage constructive social action.

We will view Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, Reservoir …

Father Of All Destruction: The Role Of The White Father In Contemporary Post-Apocalyptic Cinema, Felicia Cosey

Theses and Dissertations--English

Since September 11, 2001 a substantial number of English-language, post-apocalyptic films have been released. This renewed interest in the genre has prompted scholars to examine the circumstances within western society that make post-apocalyptic films appealing to audiences. The popularity of these films derives from a narrative structure that reinforces conservative notions of good and bad and moral absolutism. The post-9/11, post-apocalyptic film typically features a white male hero who, in one way or another, reestablishes the pre-apocalyptic social order through proclamations of mandatory and prohibitive laws that must be adhered to by the survivors. The hero of post-apocalyptic film does …

Grizcode: A Web Series About The University Of Montana From The Student Perspective, Darien W. Gostas

Undergraduate Theses, Professional Papers, and Capstone Artifacts

The point of this paper is to explore the development, purpose, and challenges of making the web series, GrizCode. It is not as scientific, as it is a narrative of what came to be. The goal of GrizCode was to paint a picture of what student life is like at the University of Montana, giving tips and life advice while celebrating and parodying what it means to be a “Griz.” It consisted of floating head type interviews of students over a green screen background of animations, with fun upbeat music that would keep the audience engaged and promote a joyful …

So Much Apparent Nothing, Emily Mcbride

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on motivations behind selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition so much apparent nothing. Through journal excerpts and analysis of my own psychology, I attempt to put into words my thoughts concurrent to my making, indirect as they may be. The following text shares my personal conflicts and ideologies surrounding art-making, the permanence of objects, and the acceptance of an identity in flux.

Magic At The Crossroads: The Rise Of The Video Essay, Morganne Tinsley August

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines the birth, rise in popularity, and evolution of the video essay, a subgenre of the essay found recently in online literary journals. Chapter one provides a brief history of the alphabetic essay as it expands to include photo essays, audio essays, and essay-films. The second chapter outlines the history of the online literary journal and John Bresland’s role in the introduction of the video essay as it appears in online journals. Chapter three contains an examination of the way image, text, and sound function in video essays and the tools and strategies essayists are using to create …