Play is considered central to early childhood development, and has been an activity fascinating to me personally as a childcare provider of many years. Seminal scholars Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky still inform much of the current understanding and practice of play as a process, or tool, aiding the linear progression toward adulthood. Yet, my own experiences in returning to academia later in life have unexpectedly ushered me into exploring the intricacies and implications of play as an adult learner, and in cultivating a framework for play that is less linear, and more holistic. My interdisciplinary research began in the 2016 Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities, and proposes four interconnected components of play (mindfulness, cues of resonance, vitality, and metastability), reframing play as a capacity of attending to possibility, rather than an activity or behavior of childhood. My current research expands upon my assertions of play, designing and implementing a qualitative pilot study exploring if these elements of play are present during interactions of play, and how they manifest in contexts of adult-child interaction. Situating my understanding of play in the scholarly literature of both Early Childhood Development and Anthropological perspectives grounds my theory and expands my assertions to stretch beyond a singular approach. Through observation of adult-child interactions in existing video footage I seek to test the veracity of play as a mindset, and analyze interpersonal contexts play happens within. The broader implications of my assertions of play may offer the reframing of playfulness as an important tool for adults as facilitators, and proponents of play, across childhood learning environments. While play itself is a highly studied activity, I challenge theoretical perceptions of play in the hopes of better supporting playful minds across the early years of human development.

As science progressed, the understanding of optical perception developed. Today, our understanding of how we see turns upon the notion that light is reflected off an object, penetrates the eye and is then processed through rods and cones. This information is then sent to the brain where it is interpreted. Our intellectual interaction with the outside world is based upon a firm boundary between ourselves and an object. In the Middle Ages, things were more fluid. The boundaries between the self and the object were blurred. The reason for this was that the optical mode accepted at the time was intromission. This mode consists of a process where an object be it actual or artistic representation physically penetrates the eye and then, like a wax seal, imprints itself onto the brain. This created an embodied, intellectual experience. When the contemporary view studies Medieval Art they must somehow adopt this older lens. This project explores the concept of intromission through the presentation of Illuminated Manuscripts, Altar Pieces, and Painted Crosses. It considers the short falls of today’s science in regards to this older, more sensual experience of sight.

This paper investigates 19th Century photographic processes, considering how attention and vision were structured by these particular modes of representation. Following Vilém Flusser’s posit that photography constituted a rupture in ontological thought, this essay seeks to demonstrate how the representational claims of early analog photographs are distinctly related to specificities of granularities and densities of emulsion, applied to the picture plane. Materializing Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge discourse in concert with Jacque Derrida’s semiotic theory, this essay seeks to articulate the ethical implication of various syntaxes that regulate photographic representations in an attempt to formulate the distinctive ways in which these modes of representation order, distinguish, and structure meaning. Employing the writings of Jonathan Crary surrounding the changing visual order of the 19th Century in conjecture with experimental phenomenology that investigates the ways in which visual perception and appearance are grounded in cognition and neural processing, in this essay I argue that the relationship between the stress of the optic that photography represents, the materiality of the image’s surface, and its signification and eventually its ability to produce meaning represents a relationship which is not arbitrary.

Darkness is the focus of many works of art. In this essay I compare two artists works and their exploration of darkness. In How It Is, Miroslaw Balka asks the viewer to enter into and explore an environment in a physical and figurative sense. In contrast, Maya Lin beckons the beholder to examine literal and cultural darkness through a historical context, in her Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Though very different spaces, these works also take up a huge amount of space, which makes these experiences unforgettable. Each is deeply and intimately visceral, putting the viewer in a space where they must come to terms with either a corporeal experience or historical sense of darkness. I compare the use of darkness to understand the ways that these works explore themes of loss, fear, death, and strangely, comfort. I will comment on my own experience of these works to dissect these large sculptural installations. Balka’s sculpture creates an environment where a viewer must blindly walk forward into a dark void and discover the work through their other senses, while Lin’s memorial provides space to contemplate the darkness of war and to grieve for those lost. From their appearance, these spaces seem focused on negative emotions connected to darkness but I found that they create a sense of comfort when experienced. The intense emotions connected to experiencing these works lead me to a place of comfort where I have fully come to terms with each work. In this presentation, I will discuss the notion of safety in darkness, bring in more ancient understandings of the concept, and state how these works re-engage the concept.

This project discusses Hans Haacke and Christo’s works and the limiting effects of landlords. Haacke’s Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings, a Real-Time Social System, as of May 1, 1971 (1971) documents the expansiveness of the Shapolsky et al. Manhattan Real Estate Holdings. At the time, this group owned the largest concentration of real estate in New York, primarily in under-privileged areas. Through a series of images accompanied by supporting data, Haacke exposes the exploitation of the slumlords. Furthermore, the exhibition scheduled for the Guggenheim was cancelled shortly before the opening (involving a separate type of landlord—the Museum director, Thomas Messer). In contrast, Christo, the artist himself, recently pulled his proposal for Over the River. Christo and Jeanne-Claude, his late wife, designed the outdoor gigantic fabric canopy to span over forty-two miles of the Arkansas River in Colorado. They began planning the project over twenty years ago and, to date, have invested fifteen million of their own funds. Their carefully selected location, however, resides on federal land. Due to the recent presidential election upset, Christo abandoned the project. He refuses to allow President Donald Trump, his new landlord and antagonistic statesman against the arts, any form of ownership over the work. In this project, I explore the relationship between art and politics and the importance of artistic independence.

In the video installation, "IT WAS THE GAZE THAT KILLED", "illusion-building" exists in the overlaid, rendered drone footage of Afghanistan and my own iPhone footage of 20-something-year-old friends in clubs. The image of bodies in Afghanistan and in clubs in San Francisco and London captured under surveillance by the "all-seeing eye" of the drone and iPhone allows us question whether the gaze that kills is more familiar to us than we think.

We live in a state where there is a need to redefine economy of terror as materiality of unmanned aerial vehicles paint a new landscape of violence. The drone is an "all-seeing eye" that inflicts violence through the act of seeing. It is important to understand the process of seeing the Real that is fixed through its physicality of existence with it "having a foundation in fact." It is through the act of seeing the real (bodies) that destabilizes the fixity of the Real. Thus, the Real is the wound caused by the "all-seeing eye" as it inflicts violence through its materiality inherently embodied by the drone that allows it to see (nose camera, multi-spectral targeting system). In this particular distance that is created in the process of seeing between the drone and the wound of the bodies, "illusion-building" takes place in order to anticipate the pain. The process of "illusion-building" is necessary as this reduces the distance between the drone and the wound inflicted by its gaze. As a result, anticipation of pain emerges from this particular process of "illusion-building." This anticipation of pain is what re-defines terror, as it exists within economy of terror.
 

Frequencies are heard vibrating inside of our minds, bodies and souls, and these sensations influence spiritual experiences of the world. My project visualizes the religious experiences of sound by dripping paint onto vinyl records in order to illustrate the beauty and extrasensory splendor of religious sounds. The introduction of audio recording gives religious music new implications and availability because the religious practitioners do not need to be physically present to engage in the sound. Some argue that this makes spirituality more present throughout our every day lives, whereas others reason that the novelty and intimacy of live performance in religious settings is more powerful, and that this experience is often lost because of the convenience of recordings. By creating a physical mixed media spectrograph of the frequencies of the recorded religious music, my work intends to visualize the audial, sensorial experience of the religious practitioner. Religious artwork that highlights the divine, beatific aspects of sound and music encourages respect and appreciation of the charm of other religions and promotes open-mindedness because there is a similar yet unique beauty in each auditory experience of these spiritual sounds.

Typography and type design constitute the art and technique in making and arranging type to print text. Due to the lack of historically-situated aesthetic standards and China's rapid westernization in the modern era, contemporary Chinese graphic designers are at a loss when setting Chinese characters, while the typographic aesthetic standards of the west are often morphologically incompatible. By visiting East Asia collections in the US, I aim to survey and scrutinize woodblock-printed Chinese rare books in the Song dynasty (960–1279). Key aspects of investigation include, but are not limited to: mutual influence between technique and form; established typographic devices; technical details in the book-making process; and roles of different publishers (royal, private and commercial) in the codification of formal conventions. The aesthetic standards derived from investigation results can provide a viable alternative to the western aesthetic ideals and, more importantly, inform contemporary Chinese graphic design practice.