This paper is a phenomenological approach to the field of performance art. It is aqualitative study based on observations and interviews. The aim is to understand how and why do artists use performance art. The empirical result shows that artists use performance art to challenge what art is. The study explains how artists use performance art as a mode of communication, a communication based on using the voice in different modes. Through using an electronic filtered voice, the artists capture the audience's attention and at the same time they challenge their own narrative and presence. Performance art is seen as a mode ofcommunication, which constitutes a social structure within communities. The study finds that the artists generate an existential and political awareness for their audience.

Embodiment grows out from deep concerns about the body and embodied knowledge across disciplines. As both subject and object, the body demands explorations that move beyond the dichotomy of body and mind, surface and depth, outside and inside. The interaction, intensity, and interstanding in the middle activate the body to move, to feel, and to be with other bodies. In the information age, with the rapid change in digital, computerized, and networkable technology, coupled with our growing concerns about the environment, embodiment becomes more complex and shatters the boundaries between human and nonhuman. In a sense, embodiment becomes posthuman by extending itself to interactions and interstandings with other species. In this dissertation, I extend embodiment into aesthetics and media by thickening the notion of surface in all of its profundity, contentious forces, and intertextuality. I emphasize as well its significance in exploring what an embodied curriculum and pedagogy could become for schools and society. This dissertation points toward the interaction and interstanding between philosophy, art, and technology. It encourages a notion of experience that engages readers/viewers viscerally with a technically manipulated surface. The readers/viewers not only encounter the theoretical mapping of the content of this dissertation, but also imagine and investigate the metaphorical and metaphysical possibilities of curriculum and pedagogy.

Thesis (Ph.D)--Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 2010. / Committee Chair: Gregory Abowd; Committee Member: Elle Yi-Luen Do; Committee Member: James Foley; Committee Member: John Peponis; Committee Member: John Stasko. Part of the SMARTech Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Collection.

The furry subculture (also known as the anthropomorphic fandom) creates identity through anthropomorphism and therianthropy. Anthropomorphism is the giving of human traits to the non-human. Therianthropy is the giving of animal traits to the human. Through play and creating art, these individuals of the furry subculture take on an anthropomorphic identity (what furries call a fursona) while bridging local and global groups through communication technologies. For this folklore project I conducted ethnographic field works interviews with the Bowling Green, Kentucky fur group. I also build off of the interviews project with an online furry role-play group as well as a Manhattan, Kansas fur group. This thesis explores furry folklore: how members of the furry fandom create, relate to, and express their fursonas. This was done by looking at people’s narrative of joining the fandom and stories of their fursona creation, furry art, fursuits, and fursuit performance. At the same time it covers the complexities of furries as a network and how they mitigate stigma and identity.

<p>The medium of performance art locates both the art-making subject and the art object in the body of the artist. Performance art thus serves as an appropriate medium for integrating the complex, repetitive, and often unconscious somatic knowledges developed by two distinct experiences: the practice of religious ritual and the overwhelming conditions of trauma. In this dissertation, I explore the foundational idea that the artist's body can become a site of both theological significance and traumatic memory. I examine the connections among the forms of performance art, bodily worship practices, and traumatic experience in the work of three contemporary U.S. performance artists with devout religious backgrounds. Born between the1940s and the 1960s, Linda Montano, John Duncan, and Ron Athey have all consistently positioned their work in religious contexts. This trans-generational set of artists represents a spectrum of Christian traditions in the United States: Athey's improvisational Pentecostalism, the liturgical tradition of Montano's Catholicism, and mainstream Protestantism in the form of Duncan's Calvinist Presbyterianism. At the same time, all three artists struggle with the persistent affect of traumatic experience, from domestic violence to sexual assault. These artists' works represent their traumatic experiences as mediated through the bodily, visual, intellectual, and aural forms of their respective Christian traditions. My dissertation identifies religion as a neglected foundation of performance art and as a fundamental motivating factor and force in shaping its forms, content, and significance.</p> / Dissertation

Looking at John Duncan's 1980 art performance, BLIND DATE, and its morally controversial content, I propose to investigate the nature of art's relationship to morality. My research consists of determining whether "immorality" represents an obstacle to the ontological identity of art and to artistic value. To question the authority of ethical criticism in art, I review a contemporary philosophical debate, which opposes two main schools, one in support of the validity of ethical criticism in art and the other against it. Following up on the second position, I elaborate a definition of art and a system of evaluation that aims to determine artistic value, both of which allow space for the potential artistic legitimacy of immoral art.

Thesis (MVisualArts)--University of South Australia, 2001.

Thesis (M.E.S.)--The Evergreen State College, 2007. / Title from title screen viewed (2/6/2008). Includes bibliographical references (leaves 71-73).

Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Western Sydney, 2001. / Includes bibliographic references.

Thesis (PhD--Anthropology)--University of Washington, 2008. / Title from PDF cover page (viewed on 4 February 2008). Includes bibliographical references (p. 220-236).