How social media and Kickstarter are saving cult television shows like Arrested Development and Veronica Mars.

Through investigating my installation, performance, video and collaborative practice, Honeymoons builds connections between timelessness in repetition, the sacred potentials of pop culture, the animation of matter and the relationship of the body to space. Central to these relationships are questions about the function of the erotic in a mediated world. How can a sensual experience help us to define what is real, what has value?

The Oval Office is the most iconic room in the White House and one of the most recognizable interiors in the United States. I have recreated the Oval Office as a three-dimensional, interactive environment for the purpose of studying 3D modeling, texturing, and environment creation. My recreation of the Oval Office contains more than 30 unique models which use over 100 high-quality texture maps. My goal was to study the creation of both organic and hard surface models as well as learning which workflows were best suited to each object within a scene. I also wanted to study how different textures might be created and what workflows resulted in the most efficient and effective results, especially when creating Normal maps. The final project is designed for the Unreal 3 Engine, and still image renders were created with the Mental Ray renderer from within Autodesk Maya. The software I used to complete this project included Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Mudbox, Adobe Photoshop, Quixel’s nDO2, XNormal, and the Unreal Development Kit 3 (UDK) by Epic Games.

I challenge quiet regulations within my own community, the Claremont University Consortium, by hosting two Silent Discos in culturally and explicitly quiet locations: the Honnold Mudd Library and the James Turrell Skyspace at Pomona College. Attempting to demonstrate Silent Disco’s ability to sonically adapt to quietly marked areas I recorded the sounds generated by these events and later amplified them in these culturally quiet locations. These Silent Discos embrace the given environment and sound limitations, while simultaneously accepting the popular modes of musical listening. By performing Silent Discos in the James Turrell Skyspace at Pomona College and the Honnold Mudd Library, I give the power to each individual to reduce noise pollution, while collectively listening to the same music as a group.

Instead of a Resolution explores the functions of narrative as an accumulative, simplified and indexed order of elements (events, persons, objects and times,) through personal or family histories. Each work in the exhibition, in its own way, locates and/or fabricates connections between inside/outside, private/public, and individual/collective.

This paper addresses the relationship between the visually impaired and the visual arts. The first section focuses on the scientific background of sight and vision disorders, as well as touch. Current research indicates that the blind can process complex spatial information through touch, just as the sighted can through vision. Thus visual art can be accessible to visually impaired people if it contains tactile information, such as 3D shapes or textures. However, galleries traditionally display art that visitors are only able to interpret visually, excluding the visually impaired and blind. My Fall project aims to challenge the dominant visual mode of interaction with art through a personal lens. By creating 3D works that are touch-accessible, both sighted and non-sighted people can experience my art.

A Mediated Intimacy; Art, Technology and Exchange in the Digital Age examines the role of intimacy in the technologically extended work of art. The text posits that there are three strategies that the technologically extended work of art uses to create mediated intimacy. These strategies are technological completion, where the viewer/participant completes the work; technological exchange, where the viewer/participant enters into an exchange with the work; and technological displacement, where the viewer is displaced from their time and place and occupies a new co-constructed space. The strategies are analyzed through the theories of subjectivities of the self, and Foucault’s approach to inter-subjective exchanges is employed to understand how they function. The strategies are further demonstrated through analysis of works by Gary Hill, Janet Cardiff and Martine Neddam. A concrete example of the three strategies is presented in an original mobile media based project, Cite, Site, Sight: Richmond.

As new media become more ubiquitous, our emotional experiences in digital space are increasing exponentially as well. While there is much talk of “affective” computing and “affective” new media art, a disconnect exists between networked emotions and the popular media that they inhabit. This research presents a theoretical framework for assessing “digital emotions”—a term that describes the feedback process between digital technologies and the body with respect to short, networked inscriptions of emotion and the (re)experience of those inscriptions within the body and through digital space. Digital emotions display five basic characteristics that can be applied to a variety of media environments: (1) They describe a process of feedback that link short, emotive inscriptions in digital environments to users and their (re)experiences of those inscriptions; (2) This feedback process includes, but is not limited to, the inscriber, the medium, and the receiver and the emotive experience fuels the initial connectivity and any further connectivity; (3) The emotional value varies depending on the media, the community of users, and the aesthetic experience of the digital emotion; (4) Digital emotions influence our emotional repertoire by normalizing our paradigm scenarios; and (5) They are highly malleable based on changes in technologies and their ability to both expand and contract emotional experiences in real time. The core characteristics of digital emotions are applied to three broad and overlapping categories: technology, community, and aesthetic experience. Each of these aspects of digital emotions work together, yet they exist along the massive spectrum of our online, emotional experiences—from our casual click of the “like” button to digital community artworks. Applied to digital spaces along this spectrum, digital emotions illuminate the feedback process that occurs between the media, the network, and the environment. The framework ultimately suggests that the process of digital emotions explicates emotions experiences that could only occur in digital space and are therefore unique to digital culture.

The technology of the codex book and the habit of reading appear to be under attack currently for a variety of reasons explored in the Introduction of this Dissertation. One natural response to attack is a resulting effort to adapt in a bid to survive. Noël Carroll, leading American philosopher in the contemporary philosophy of art, touches on this concept in his discussion of the evolution of a new medium in his article, “Medium Specificity Arguments and Self-Consciously Invented Arts: Film, Video, and Photography,” from his Cambridge University Press 1996 text, Theorizing the Moving Image. Carroll proposes that any new medium undergoes phases of development (and I include new technology under that umbrella)). After examining Carroll’s theory this Dissertation attempts to apply it to the Children’s Picturebook Field, exploring the hypothesis that the published children’s narrative does evolve, has already evolved historically in response to other mediums/technologies, and is currently “e-volving” in response to emerging “e-media.” This discussion examines ways new media (particularly emerging e-media) affect the published children’s narrative form, content, and function (with primary focus on the picturebook form), and includes some examination of the response of the child reader to those changes. Chapter One explores the formation of the question, its value, and reviews available literature. Chapter Two compares the effects of an older sub-genre, the paper-engineered picturebook, with those of emerging e-picturebooks. Chapter Three compares the Twentieth Century Artist’s Book to picturebooks created by select past and current picturebook creators. Chapter Four first considers the shifting cultural mindset of Western Culture from a linear, word-based outlook to the non-linear, more visual approach fostered by the World Wide Web and supporting “screen” technologies; then identifies and examines current changes in form, content and function of the designed picturebooks that are developing “on the page” within the constraints of the codex book format. The Dissertation concludes with a review of Leonard Shlain’s 1998 text, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, using it as a departure point for final observations regarding unique strengths of the children’s picturebook as a learning tool for young children.

A Muslim should be encouraged to comprehend the benefit and value behind every aspect of Islamic practice and wisdom, and not just practice their religion because they were told to do so. The products proposed in this thesis aim to achieve this by inviting and encouraging a Muslim to practice The Five Pillars of Islam while comprehending their value through the use of modern means such as Arduino technology, 3D printing and visual computing programing. I am provoked by the fact that the circle of Gulf-region Muslims I’m surrounded by, and have been exposed to since childhood, belong to one of two stereotypes: those against or afraid of change who force adherence to religious chapter and verse, or those straying further and further away from our religion’s rituals and traditions. Can the practice of religion, and the values that it teaches us, be made more accessible and engaging by incorporating the very technology that is often accused of distracting us from its practice?