I am exhibiting several drawings, paintings, and sculptures representing a visual record of my creative research into, and my handling of, snails. Although I depict snails and their environment in a loose representational style, I have begun to incorporate digital drawing to enhance my art in a mixed media approach. I have created illustrative images of a forest floor as I imagine it would look to a snail in a giant, menacing world. Close-up images of grass become unusual jungle scenes, and my once tiny snails achieve a measure of control in this fanciful world. The inspiration for my art is my recollection of the insecurity and struggles I encountered while growing up as a military brat.

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隨著全球資訊網的發展，人們享受了資訊快速流通的便利，也造就了搜尋引擎的發展。針對學術文獻，ACM, IEEE等學術組織也將學術文獻數位化，並提供關鍵字查詢文獻的功能。此外，Google也發展了Google Scholar搜尋全球資訊網上的學術文獻。Google在回傳查詢結果時，除了考慮文獻內容與查詢關鍵字的相似度之外，也利用PageRank技術來考量文獻間的引用關係。但是，有時後使用者想查詢的是與查詢相關的重要參考文獻。這些文獻的內容與查詢未必有很高的相似度。 因此本論文的研究目的在研究並發展推薦重要參考文獻的技術。我們先利用蜘蛛程式( spider)與剖析程式( parser)擷取分析ACM Digital Library上所收錄的論文後設資料，並解析出論文篇名、作者、摘要、關鍵字、分類、參考文獻等論文的重要組成要素。接著利用Mixed Media Graph（MMG）以描述關鍵字與參考文獻間關係的MMG 模型。當使用者輸入關鍵字，利用MMG做random walk因此可以找出與輸入關鍵字相關性最高的參考文獻。 / The rapid development of the Internet, people enjoy the rapid flow of information to facilitate, but also created a search engine of development. ACM and IEEE have developed the digital libraries to provide literature search. Moreover, there exist some search engines for academic literature, such as Google Scholar. Google Scholar collects academic literatures from WWW and provides users the capability to query literatures by keywords. However, sometimes what users need is to search for important citations specified by authors, such as seminal survey papers or books. The aim of this thesis is to investigate and develop the mechanism for search for important citations. In the developed mechanism, first the spider crawls and collects the literature from ACM Digital Library. Then the parser parse and extract the meta information for each literature. The Mixed Media Graph is employed to capture the relationships between keywords and citations. Given a set of query keywords, the important citations are generated by random walk over the constructed Mixed Media Graph. Performance analysis shows that the proposed mechanism performs well.

The Replenishment cycle contains five works that allude to the experience of sleep, beginning with awake drowsiness and ending with the piece inspired by rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, titled Conceiving Realities. This last piece is an intermedia work composed for chamber ensemble, live painting with biofeedback, computer, and audiovisual processing. This critical essay describes the composition of Conceiving Realities within the context of the Replenishment cycle, followed by a thorough analysis of the research involved in the technological aspects of the piece, and finally, a description of the instrumentation, notation, intermedia elements, and technology comprising the work. Conceiving Realities uses a system of interactions between painting, biofeedback, music, and video, in which a painter wears brainwave and heartbeat sensors that send data to a computer patch processing the sound of an ensemble as the painter listens and creates the painting while responding to the music. This requires a passive biofeedback system in which the painter is focused on listening and painting. The computer uses the data to process existing sounds, instead of synthesizing new lines. The score blends elements of traditional notation, graphics, and guided improvisation; giving the performers some creative agency. This alludes to the way in which scenarios in dreams occur without voluntary control of the dreamer. Finally, a camera captures the painting and projects three video screens applying individual types of processing to the original video stream, controlled in real time by the amplitude of the ensemble. All these elements create an immersive experience for the audience that is mediated by the interaction of sight and sound.

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This thesis summarizes Danielle Riede's current art practice by detailing her materials, processes and inspiration. It also contextualizes her "Room Paintings" within the context of art history and contemporary art-making.

Human experience, particularly the trials and tribulations of growing up, is the foundation on which I build. In this body of work, I represent these somewhat unsettling times. I use flattened space, strong diagonals, and vibrant color to add energy to the compositions. An underlying structure of fragmented shapes suggests the incomplete nature of adolescence.

Everyday objects inspire and inform what I do. The personal histories and associations we may have with ordinary things are of great personal interest to me. Often times, these items reflect the social class, education, and background of the owners. I am drawn to these objects and the possibility of elevating them in a way that transcends their implied meanings (their worth, importance, and status). The transformation of the mundane is a method of working that allows associations to remain intact while bringing new meaning and perspective to the object. My method of working becomes an alchemic process aimed at turning the ordinary into "art" which is second only to turning used cooking oil into fuel to run your car, and maybe third to turning lead into gold.

The contents here in examine the artistic process undertaken by Vanessa Fassie to create the mixed media work, reunion. The subjects of fear, archetypal symbolism, personal and collective histories were examined through research, archival evidence, video, sound, movement, and installation. reunion, examines not only the powers of personal and collective histories through the symbolic language of archetypes, but also how fear manifests and evolves through time. The culmination of this work was the creation of an installation within the Anderson Gallery at Virginia Commonwealth University. This Thesis was created through the use of Microsoft Word 2004.

In my artistic practice, I emphasize personal and pan-cultural anxieties regarding civilization and the environment as an impetus for work in sculpture, video, and drawing. By locating marginal microcosmic subject matter that tellingly exhibits macrocosmic global dread, I seek to capture and distill our overwhelming eco-socio-political anxiety into a portrait of a society at a point in its history when the specter of nameless impending disaster weighs pressingly on the collective psyche. This thesis is supplementary to my work of sculpture in the Graduate School of the Arts Thesis Exhibition at the Anderson Gallery opening on April 27th, 2007. The work was entitled Busted Butte Or the Evening Deadness in the West, and images of it are contained within the text. This document was created in Microsoft Word 2004.