The objective of my research is to create a visualization of a place based on personal experiences. My research addresses this issue through a case study: the visualization of a women’s political prison located in Punta de Rieles, Uruguay, during the Uruguayan dictatorship (1973-85). In June of 2002, I went to Uruguay and interviewed nine female former political prisoners. I asked them to tell me stories about what happened to them during their time in prison. My research aims at relating their experience of prison through a visualization of their stories. The challenge addressed by my research is the creation of a virtual reconstruction that can communicate the experience of prison through the integration of narrative, light modeling and sound. The proposed visualization is a video installation based on these women’s personal experiences of the solitary confinement cell (calabozo).

Universiẗat, Diss., 1998--Hamburg.

This project explored a new work in the lighting and video area of the entertainment industry. This thesis archives the creative process of this specific new piece, resulting in a realized and finished work open to the public. The Box opened in the Oscar Brockett Theater on the University of Texas at Austin campus on March 19, 2012, and ran from 10 am to 7 pm for three days. The Box was an installation piece of art that told a story. This seemingly simple structure of a large black box contained a surprising inner life. The sculpture had an opening cut into its side, which upon entering transports the viewer into a space with a modified perspective. More than one person can view the piece at a time. Visitors entered the box and became immersed in a world of manipulated lighting, video, and sound. Characters existed in the form of animated light, color, and audio. These characters expressed elemental energies of air, fire, earth, and water that communicated primal emotions. The Box wove a narrative fabricated from lighting, animation, sound, and manipulation of perspective, without using traditional methods of storytelling such as actors or speech. While The Box was on display, viewers visited multiple times and interacted with the environment in different ways. Dancers danced in The Box, actors delivered monologues, and some viewers simply lay on the floor and became part of the art itself. / text

My argument is that documentary texts can be transformed into artworks via the processes of intertextuality and detournement, when they are exhibited as video installations. I argue that early 1920s modernist avant-garde painter-filmmakers shared with contemporary documentary video installation painter-filmmakers particular tendencies, characteristics and interests. The bodies of work in each period explore the generic properties of documentary through (primarily) abstract visual associations, rather than through a conventional linear space. Important 1920s modernist avant-garde films by Dziga Vertov, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, Joris Ivens, Man Ray and others will be considered in highlighting the relationship between documentary and avant-garde cinema. I use this discussion as a basis for examining my own work: for the creative component of this thesis, I filmed and edited a three screen video installation. I interviewed 67 Australian Muslims and used these interviews to explore the use of documentary in video installation. The theoretical framework I used is based on the following: Julia Kristeva?s notion of intertextuality, derived from Mikhail Bahktin?s work on dialogism, to interpret how documentary texts take on conventions appropriate to other genres; Guy Debord?s concept of d鴯urnement to provide a theory for the reuse of pre-existing artistic elements found in documentary film; genre theory to interpret interactions between documentary texts; Ludwig Wittgenstein?s notion of ?family resemblance? to explore the indistinct boundaries of documentary; and Pascal Beausse?s analysis of how artists have hijacked documentary. I also draw on Bill Nichols?s analytical framework of documentary modes (poetic, expository, observational, participatory, performative, reflexive) to explore documentary in cinema and installation art. The documentary genre is not habitually discussed outside film, television, photography or the web. My research demonstrates that the genre has found its place in other areas of artistic practice and can also apply to medium of video installation.

This thesis paper, Black Things, White Spaces, offers an in depth look into my journey as an artist and how my artistic practice has evolved over the years. Throughout this time of self-exploration, I have developed an interest in themes of racism, structures of power, representation and stereotypes. In my artistic work, I explore how these themes affect the African American community, as well as myself, as an African American woman. This paper utilizes the creative and theoretical frameworks by artists and scholars like, Bill Viola, Adrian Piper, bell hooks, and Franz Fanon to support the intentions of my work. This thesis illustrates for the reader how my work approaches these themes through certain methodologies, such as: tactical media, blurring the lines between art and life, and the manipulation of time and space. In this paper, I argue the importance of placing my work within the context of African American experiences throughout history. By doing this, my work is able to reference several events throughout history, while addressing our current moment in time. Included in this manuscript are detailed descriptions and analyses of each piece in the thesis exhibition. It is important to speak about the development and the intentions of my art. While speaking about the work, I compare and contrast my thesis work to previous artworks I’ve done, as well as other artists works, in order to place these pieces within an art-historical framework. Finally, this thesis, also addresses how my current work presented in the thesis exhibition will inform my future artistic practice. I believe that my contributions to the African American media arts practice creates spaces to celebrate diversity, empower the voiceless, but most importantly, creates new avenues for change.

Our impressions of this lifeworld are contingent upon our ability to see (in every conflicting meaning of the word). This paper reviews a body of scholars who often share disparate, "incompatible" ontological commitments in effort to examine how their ordering of concepts may reveal a deeper fluidity and permeability between all states of inquiry, creation and investigation into Being and Time. It begins with perspective, examining our subjective presence in the context of the camera apparatus and considers how the mirroring of mechanical instrumentation, namely the rotary shutter and optics of the camera has limited the true function of the cinema to a narrow, representational form. It considers the spiritual implications of the apparatus, exploring, regardless of what is filmed, what the method of inscription from still photos into motion means in regards to consciousness. The paper then investigates what the role of abstraction is in the context of a spiritually minded camera apparatus and attempts to reconcile Deluzian and phenomenological perspectives about film consciousness. All of this is, after all, is in the conceptual support of the four channel video installation Phase Space. The paper does not seek to, or claim to apply readymade philosophical concepts to cinema, rather it explicitly attempts to examine and discuss cinema on its own virtues and investigate how it can express itself as an experimental form of philosophy.

No description available.

Walk 14 Blocks is a document that describes my two-year investigation of simulation in everyday life. It describes how I examine both simulated places and the tools of simulation. I explain the key elements relating my work to simulation; experience, language, and the video monitor. I trace how I have utilized these elements in several works that led to my thesis exhibition titled Evidence.

This thesis explores my practice as it has progressed into video and video installation. I detail my use of cinematic tropes and mechanisms as they function within a spatial installation. I discuss the relationship of my work to other artists such as Pierre Huyghe, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, and Kevin Cooley who also deal with themes of landscape, spatial displacement, and video viewing. My work has evolved to video installation from a need to experience the traditionally flat viewing plane of photography in a more experiential way. The Locus installation is multi sensory, in that it addresses smell, sound, and vision. In my work, I employ methods such as obfuscated video and localized yet unconnected sound landscapes to consider notions such as the viewer’s self-awareness, fear of solitude, and the ‘other.’ I explore the other as a concept stemming from paranoia and anxiety of the unknown. This includes feeling an unfamiliar presence nearby or a known location that suddenly feels strange and unusual.

Esta dissertação se limita a registros de experiências e relatos documentais para evidenciar como as novas tecnologias alteram a prática religiosa, e refletir sobre a ressignificação de imagens sagradas do candomblé quando transitam entre meios audiovisuais e seus processos. A pesquisa objetiva seguir por trajetórias de registros do corpo humano em transe por diferentes dispositivos em diversos meios eletrônicos, para reuni-los em uma exposição de fotografias, vídeo e documentário expandido em múltiplas telas e diversos espaços dentro de uma série de instalações. O estudo amplia fronteiras entre o registro documental do evento religioso e sua reconstrução dentro do espaço expositivo, criando teias de relações entre as linguagens do cinema, fotografia, artes visuais e antropologia em espaços arquitetônicos complexos para potencializar uma experiência imersiva e sensorial. / This dissertation focuses on documentary records of experiences and interviews to examine how new technologies are changing religious practices, and how sacred images in the African-Brazilian religion of candomblé are being re-signified in transit between different eletronic and digital media. The research aims to chart the visual documentation of the human body in trance, generated by a wide variety of different devices, as it journeys through different media. The result of this study will generate an exhibition in which photography, video and documentary film will roam freely over multiple screens and various spaces within a particular venue. The study wishes to expand the boundaries between the documentation of a religious event and its reconstruction within the exhibition space, exploring multi-tiered relationships between cinema, photography, visual arts and anthropology in complex environments, in order to maximize the potential of an immersive, sensory experience.