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Abstract Stelarc, the performance artist, has since the middle of the twentieth century, harnessed technology to enable an ongoing challenge to the physical body. Embracing ever evolving technology, Stelarc provokes the art world with a series of works that he claims demonstrate the body as limited and obsolete. The body positioned as limited enables Stelarc to seek the transcendence of the same body through the use of the body/technology symbiosis in the form of medical instruments, prosthetics, robotics, virtual reality systems and the Internet. Acknowledging that this body/technology symbiosis has brought with it changes in embodied and disembodied experiences, this study reclaims the “obsolete” body as the lived experiential body by exploring Stelarc’s contradictions both in his rhetoric and his performance. The established contradictions substantiate the body as corporeal and embodied and as necessary to exist in and make sense of our surrounding world.

This is an original collection of poems, with an accompanying afterword that discusses poetics, grief, history, tradition, biography, ambulation, process, note-taking, note-keeping, experience, love, and thanks.

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This research study explored the role of the elementary art educator in facilitating individualized learning experiences for students in contrast to a standardized culture of education. The methodology of a/r/tography was used to investigate the role of the teacher, as well as artist and researcher, within an inquiry-based art curriculum for a fifth grade class. Inspired by contemporary art practices, students used inquiry to investigate, research and experiment with their ideas around an integrated topic of compare and contrast as found within the fifth grade science and language arts standards. Students created a work of art as a means to inquire or in reaction to an inquiry. This study hopes to persuade educators, specifically elementary art educators, to guide students toward personal and meaningful learning.

This action research study investigates classroom visual art assessments and their potential to improve teacher instruction and student learning. In order to examine this topic more thoroughly, a National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)-related classroom assessment was designed and administered to the researcher’s Drawing and AP Art History classes. Students were also asked to fill out a questionnaire that asked about their past art experiences and motivation to participate in art activities such as creating artwork outside of the school setting or attending an art museum. Students observed, described, and analyzed contemporary artwork, and they created and wrote about their own original works of art. The use of contemporary art exemplars led to some of the most interesting findings; namely, that students felt free to create their artwork in a contemporary style that was less about technical elements and more about the meaning they wished to convey. In general, the AP Art History students’ written contemporary art criticism scores were significantly higher than the scores of both of the studio drawing classes. Artwork scores of AP Art History, Drawing I, and Drawing II students showed no significant difference. Interestingly, all three groups indicated they were highly motivated to look at works of art, create art in school, and make artwork outside of the school setting. Also noteworthy was the relatively high number of students who indicated that the contemporary artwork they analyzed influenced the mother and child artwork they created. It could be surmised by this study that a NAEP-related iv assessment is a beneficial method for improving teacher instruction and student learning in visual arts education

My thesis explores the relationship between the human psyche and the perception of reality through the use of computer generated media. In a society in which we are bombarded with multimedia technology, we must look inside our selves for a true understanding of our past and memories. Rather than it acting as an escape from reality, my art becomes an opening for truth in reality.

My purpose in entering the UCF MFA program was to further explore and develop my passion for photography. During my time in the program, I developed my methodology--from having the traditional photography paradigm ingrained in my mind (and wanting to fit into it) to accepting and valuing my own unique process. I construct installations using diverse imagery and non-traditional presentation. In my installations, one may witness a reflection of the contemporary pace of image perception--fragmented, complex, abundant, and disordered. Together, images and their arrangements are used to create a unified piece that satisfies a new system within apparent disorder. The resulting installations summon the sensation of thinking and processing information in a new way, allowing for re-contextualization of fragmented imagery. Technology has pushed photography to evolve. Previously held traditional notions of photography as art (e.g., "single telling moment" photographs and similar subject matter) are now being confronted by a vernacular of "many telling moments". The current state of the art world is in flux, and is greatly influenced by the faster pace set by technology; I coin our new vernacular Image Culture.

This dissertation examines the development of alternative spaces in Los Angeles from 1970 to 1990. In the absence of museum support during the 1970s, artists in Los Angeles—many of whom were women, queer, racially diverse, young, politically active, and pushing the boundaries of new media—began to create organizations to provide the resources they lacked. I argue that this flourishing network of alternative spaces became one of Los Angeles’s most significant art-historical developments in the latter half of the twentieth century. This emergent contemporary art scene was defined largely in opposition to the city’s principal cultural repository, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), and formed the primary support structure for contemporary artists and exhibitions between the 1974 closure of the Pasadena Art Museum and the launch of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) exhibition program in 1983. The resulting complex of artist-run organizations laid the groundwork for the rebranding of Los Angeles as a capital of contemporary art and culture in the twenty-first century. My study is divided into three chapters, each of which focuses on the history and legacy of a different alternative institution. Chapter one examines the Woman’s Building (1973-1991) through this feminist institution’s exhibition and pedagogical programs, with a focus on the Feminist Studio Workshop (1973-1981). Members of the Woman’s Building sought to transform their Los Angeles community by educating both the women who came there to study and the audiences that encountered their work. The second chapter traces the history of LAICA (Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art, 1974-1987), which became the city’s first non-profit exhibition space dedicated to contemporary art. Through its exhibitions and publication, Journal, LAICA validated and disseminated Southern California’s artistic production to national and international audiences. The third chapter introduces LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, 1978-present), which emerged out of a community mural program to become the preeminent laboratory for experimental art in Los Angeles. The diverse group of artists who founded LACE established a democratically operated organization that prioritized artistic freedom. These three institutions anchored a network of alternative spaces that transformed the cultural landscape in Los Angeles. / 2022-07-08T00:00:00Z