Visual Studies Commons^™

Gnosticism, Technology And The Soul In Cuarón's Gravity, Karli Brittz

Journal of Religion & Film

Situated within the Digital Age, where technology and science have made life in space possible, Alfonso Caurón's award-winning space-thriller, Gravity, explores critical notions of the relationship between technology and the soul. More specifically, Cuarón’s depiction of space voyage illustrates the dualistic approach to the soul in relation to technology, especially the gnostic mind/body split and its manifestation in the Digital Age. This intersection between technology and the soul is a notion of increasingly importance in contemporary society, however it is often evaded in literature. Accordingly, it is crucial to analyze and unpack films, such as Gravity, that confront audiences with …

Superhero Films: A Fascist National Complex Or Exemplars Of Moral Virtue?, Chris Yogerst

Journal of Religion & Film

This paper deals with the "why" regarding our collective desire for superhero narratives. My goal is to build on the many definitions of a superhero and find a framework that we as scholars can use to evaluate how superhero films present inspirational moral virtue and not zealous nationalism of any kind. In the process I want to address the problems with some of the scholarly work done on the connection to superheroes and heroism both historically and immediately after 9/11, particularly those who have argued that American superheroism is a fascist myth, and show how the recent evolution of the …

Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, And The Nation, Kathryn C. Hardy

Journal of Religion & Film

This is a book review of William Elison, Christian Lee Novetzke, and Andy Rotman, Amar Akbar Anthony: Bollywood, Brotherhood, and the Nation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016).

Pathos, Spring 2017, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Jessica Moore

Volume 11 No. 3

Sight And Song Augmented, Robert P. Fletcher

Sight and Song Augmented: Painting and Poetry in Mixed Reality

This file is an Android application built in the Unity 3D game engine with the Vuforia Augmented Reality extension. It remediates Sight and Song (1892) by Michael Field (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper), a collection of ekphrastic poetry about paintings by the Old Masters.

Analysis Of The Female Presence In The Male-Dominated Comic Book Industry, Nicole Choy

Honors Papers and Posters

This poster examines the female presence in the male-dominated world of comics, both in terms of representation of female characters and creation by female artists and writers.

Identity And Scene: Alterity And Authenticity In Taxicab Confessions, Steven W. Schoen

Faculty Publications

This essay examines the visual rhetoric of HBOs reality TV program Taxicab Confessions, New York, New York (2005). Drawing on Burke’s rhetorical understanding of scene and Straw’s approach to scene as a category for the analysis of urban culture, I argue that the taxicab interior and nighttime street images of New York City structure a scene of indeterminacy, intimacy, and “reality,” thus framing the passengers’ self-presentations within a context of “authenticity.” The program’s visual structure locates passengers simultaneously outside of and within social norms and reinforces hegemonic notions of race, gender, and sexuality. Passengers are situated within a scene that …

Animated Landscapes: History, Form And Function, "Evoking The Oracle", Tom Klein

Faculty Pub Night

No abstract provided.

Blowing Off Ste(A)M: The Value Of The Creative Arts For Gifted Stem Students (Iagc 2017), Tracy A. Townsend, Michael W. Hancock, Michael P. Dean

Faculty Publications & Research

The following is a collection of teaching documents, including classroom activities and assignment prompts, used in the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy’s Graphic Novels, Creative Writing, and Modern Theater classes. These materials are easily included in courses with broader topical focuses, however, either as single-day activities or units of study. The specific materials included here are especially beneficial as means of encouraging student creativity, building up a variety of communication skills, rewarding experimental work, and providing new outlets for critical thinking and social-emotional development.

Open Works: Between The Programmed And The Free, Art In Italy 1962 To 1972, Lindsay A. Caplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation historicizes and theorizes a group of Italian artists who were among the first to use computers and cybernetics to make artworks, developing the genre of Arte Programmata, or Programmed Art. It argues that the artists of Arte Programmata (Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and collectives Gruppo T and Gruppo N) turned to the generative, interactive, and probabilistic aspects of early computers not simply as new media for making art but as platforms for radically altering what it means to be a participant in an increasingly mediated and networked world. This is apparent in how each of their works deploys …

The Short Story And The Photographic: Twentieth-Century Imagetexts In And Of The Americas, Lucienne Muller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the visuality of the short story from an intermedial point of view, that is, with a focus on the relationship between the short story and the photographic visual. This analysis draws from photographic theory and from the writings of photographer and writer Julio Cortazar whose philosophy puts forward the idea of a reader who becomes the inventive co-creator of the fictional work.

"La Dolce Vita" Today: Fashion And Media, Nicola Certo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is a cinematic masterpiece that has inspired nationally and internationally generations of creative people and artists because of the extent of its themes and because of the mastery in the choice of its costumes. The actuality of the director’s criticism towards the decadent society of his years, the originality of his stylistic choices, and his sophisticated taste for beauty and fashion, brought him to influence media and contemporary fashion then and now. There are numerous examples of television commercials that Fellini directs and produces for purely commercial purposes. They are all critique of his society, …

The Fantastic Manifesto: Monstrosity Of Memory And Epiphany Of Selfhood In The Spirit Of The Beehive (1973), Layla Blodgett Carrillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Spanish culture of storytelling suffered under the nearly forty-year dictatorship of Francisco Franco. The government-regulated cinema welcomed propaganda and melodrama, and denied the fantastic, the legendary, and the magical. These carefully manipulated histories, which served to romanticize the ideologies of the regime, also served to eulogize the delinquent and the depraved. In the early 1970s, at the heels of the collapse of Franco’s reign, the people of Spain bore witness to a new national cinema. The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), the feature debut from Victor Erice, exists at the threshold between a storied history of Spanish dictatorship and …

Tandem 2.0: Image And Text Data Generation Application, Christopher J. Vitale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

First created as part of the Digital Humanities Praxis course in the spring of 2012 at the CUNY Graduate Center, Tandem explores the generation of datasets comprised of text and image data by leveraging Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). This project builds upon that earlier work in a new programming framework. While other developers and digital humanities scholars have created similar tools specifically geared toward NLP (e.g. Voyant-Tools), as well as algorithms for image processing and feature extraction on the CV side, Tandem explores the process of developing a more robust and user-friendly …

Adoptability And Acceptability Of Peace Journalism Among Afghan Photojournalists: Lessons For Peace Journalism Training In Conflict-Affected Countries, Saumava Mitra

Media Studies Publications

In this article, I seek to inform Peace Journalism (PJ) edu­cation and training in conflict-affected countries in par­ticular. Based on a case study of the professional expe­riences of Afghan photojournalists, I offer insights into the acceptability and adoptability of PJ practice by jour­nalists from conflict-affected countries. I present six key findings of a larger study on Afghan photojournalists in this article and discuss the lessons they hold for PJ train­ing in conflict-affected countries. In sections 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5, I provide some important theoretical, contextual and methodological background. In section 6, I discuss three professional adversities faced by …

Rodcon, Flier, 2017, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

RodCon 2017 at the Rod Library

Saturday, April 1

10 a.m. - 4 p.m.

Flier used in promotion of the event.

Rodcon, Program, 2017, University Of Northern Iowa. Rod Library.

RodCon Documents

Inside This Program:

--RodCon 2017 at the Rod Library, Saturday April 1, 10 a.m. - 4 p.m.
--Welcome to RodCon
--Locations
--Schedule
--What's That? Event Descriptions
--Sponsors

Pyramide: The Changing Power Structure Of Fashion, Ariana Callan

Scripps Senior Theses

This project examines the changing world of fashion in an interactive digital magazine format. In the past few years, fashion has increasingly been democratizing, as new designers and forms of media increasingly gain influence. Ready-to-wear designers are working with lower-end brands through collaborations, redefining what each brand is supposed to do, while blogging is allowing those whose voices are usually unheard to openly critique and influence fashion. Overall, they are creating a more democratized space, challenging what was once normal in the fashion industry.

Pathos, Winter 2017, Portland State University. Student Publications Board

Pathos

Editor: Jessica Moore

Volume 11 No. 2

The Visitation, Douglas Stichbury

Artists-in-Residence Programme : Exhibition Catalogues

The works in this catalogue were made to illustrate the uncensored 2012 edition of the novel Roadside Picnic by Boris and Arkady Strugatsky, originally published in 1972.

Works included were shown at Suite Gallery, Lingnan University, and Kunsthalle Brugg.

A Turn To Realism And Humanism From Propaganda: Chinese Photojournalism Practices Between 1976 And 1988, Shi Li

SIUE Faculty Research, Scholarship, and Creative Activity

China’s photojournalistic field undertook great transformations in the 1980s. While the conservatives continued to cling to the propagandistic doctrine, a more progressive trend was emerging. The tension between these two forces had its historical roots and would go on to shape the way Chinese photojournalism developed. Based on archival research and in-depth interviews, this paper revisits the history of Chinese photojournalism practices between 1937 and 1988 and identifies the key features of these three periods: the wartime propaganda of 1937—1949, the intensification of propaganda of 1949 —1976, and the transformation to realism and humanism in 1976—1988.

Course Syllabus (W17 Online) Coli 211m: "Superhero Film And Contemporary Culture", Christopher Southward

Comparative Literature Faculty and Student Scholarship

Course Description:

What might the current popularity and ubiquity of superhero film say about contemporary culture? This course will explore three possible implications of this question: (1) that the superhero genre reflects a moment in our species’ history of reconciling the human being-technology relation, which we shall view as a complex system constituted by our productive relations to material and ideological tools and their ensembles, the needs and aspirations that determine how we conceptualize and activate these relations, and the technically rationalized social reality that is their result, (2) that this ongoing process of reconciliation evinces, at once, the …

A Case For Empathy: Immigration In Spanish Contemporary Media, Music, Film, And Novels, Constantin C. Icleanu

Theses and Dissertations--Hispanic Studies

This dissertation analyzes the representations of immigrants from North Africa, Latin America, and Eastern Europe in Spain. As engaged scholarship, it seeks to better the portrayal of immigrants in the mass media through the study of literature, film, and music about immigration spanning from the year 2000 to 2016. Because misconceptions continue to propagate in the media, this dissertation works to counteract anti-immigrant, xenophobic representations as well as balance out overly positive and orientalized portrayal of immigrants with a call to recognize immigrants as human beings who deserve the same respect, dignity, and rights as any other citizen.

Chapter 1 …

Distant Electric Vision: Cultural Representations Of Television From “Edison’S Telephonoscope” To The Electronic Screen, Ivy Roberts

Theses and Dissertations

Do inventions that exist only on paper have less credibility than functional technologies? How has the meaning and significance of audiovisual media and technology changed over time? This dissertation examines historiography and methodology for media history, arguing for an interdisciplinary approach. It addresses methodological issues in media history—media in transition, media archaeology, and film history—through an examination of television’s speculative era. It tackles moving-image history through an historical investigation of Victorian and Machine age “television”.

Because the concept and terminology of “television” changed dramatically during this period, I use the phrases “distant electric vision” and “seeing by electricity,” to define …

The Monstrous Self: Negotiating The Boundary Of The Abject, Katya Yakubov

Theses and Dissertations

Through the lens of the horror film and the fairy tale, this thesis explores the notion of the grotesque as a boundary phenomenon—a negotiation of what is self and what is other. As such, it locates the function that the monstrous and the grotesque have in the formation of a personal and social identity. In asking why we take pleasure in the perverse, I explore how permutations of guilt, victimhood, and desire can be actively rewritten, in order to construct a stable sense of self.

The Institute Of New Feelings: Plastic Identities And Imperfect Surfaces, Weijian Zhou

Theses and Dissertations

Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into …

Open / Close: Assimilating Immersive Spaces In Visual Communication, Anika Sarin

Theses and Dissertations

I am interested in two spaces obverse to each other: open and closed. An open space develops organically based on how people inhabit it. Interacting with an open space is a dynamic, sporadic, multisensory, immersive, and subjective experience. In such spaces, we are confronted with an alternative aesthetic, one that is in conflict with the seamlessness of a closed space. A closed space is anchored on definite variables like structure, use and boundaries. While interaction between people and space is important, the space is tightly controlled and interaction is designed. Through this thesis project, I present a method that metaphorically …

Collaboration Between Art Museums And Universities In Hong Kong : Benefits, Difficulties And Methods, Yi Zhu

Lingnan Theses

Museums have the responsibility to meet the needs and expectations of audiences with different backgrounds, including families, students, adults and the elderly. However, the needs of higher education students can easily be overlooked in Hong Kong art museums because their age and educational background fall into different target segments. By the late twentieth century, learning opportunities for higher education students, especially those who were majoring in fine arts, art history and museum studies were inadequate in Hong Kong. In view of the increasing arts programmes offered by tertiary institutions in 2000s Hong Kong, art museums play an important role in …

Iain Muirhead, Iain Muirhead

CGU MFA Theses

Artist IAIN MUIRHEAD seeks possibility in a world of massive change. His work cultivates instability and chases an ungrounded experience. Systemic complexity and creative destruction are characteristic. Muirhead uses paint, objects, photography, installation, and video to break apart and reconfigure form and space. Terror often looms. Entropy gives way to emergence.

Play This Paper: Forms Of Time In The Open World, Branching Narrative, Roleplaying Game, Jimmy Evans

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This paper is an analysis of chronotopes in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt that reveals how the procedurality of video games might suggest a refined heteroglossic form. Synthesizing contemporary american philosopher Ian Bogost’s concept of procedural rhetoric with the materialist linguistic theory of Mikhail Bakhtin, this ultimately hypertextual and interactive article reflects on language as Bakhtin once did: as "agent and agency” (MPL 146). After detailing how the three major processes of the game coordinate spacetime, it is necessary to conclude that its kaleidoscopic nature provides new opportunities for the rendering of the geometry of thought in what is a …