VTechWorks Repository :: Browsing by Author "Weaver, Rachel L."

Browsing by Author "Weaver, Rachel L."

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The Ashes and the Portal: An immersive stereoscopic experience on Cyclorama
Liu, Xindi (Virginia Tech, 2019-08-05)
the Ashes and the Portal is an immersive stereoscopic animated short capturing the burned library after a fire disaster at Mzuzu University, Malawi, Africa, and it also witnesses the new design of the library from Virginia Tech architecture students. This animated short recreates the burned library and presents the new library design with photo-real image sequences which can immersively bring the audiences onto the site. The Ashes and the Portal utilizes the Cyclorama system, which is a 32 feet diameter and 16 feet tall cylindrical screen with four projectors that can display visual content. The surrounding panels with rendered footage could provide an immersive experience within this semi-public space. This is a collaboration project between the School of Visual Arts and the School of Architecture + Design, also with technical support from the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology. This project explores the potential use of Cyclorama system as a platform for CG works, especially for stereoscopic animation.
Breeze: A Meditation into Movement
Lee, Boyoung (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-19)
Breeze: A Meditation into Movement addresses motion-centered thesis works, the titular work Breeze, Ripple, and Small Things. It examines artistic approaches to employ movement, such as materiality, the use of algorithms, and video projection. Under the same subject matter 'wind', these three works demonstrate the infinite and ever-changing movements that are created by wind. Breeze, a kinetic sculpture, introduces materiality and physical wind to create erratic movement and projected real-time animations, Ripple and Small Things use a set of algorithms and live data for nature-inspired movement and scene transition. By creating unobtrusive motion that permeates the real space, these three works aim to share time and space and deliver a contemplative experience to the viewers.
Calvary
Bush, Zachary (Virginia Tech, 2017-01-20)
Calvary is a 3D fictional cathedral that is based around Christian beliefs. It is a new way to experience spiritual landmarks, fictional or nonfictional, using virtual reality. The goal is to allow the viewer to experience this space wherever they are located and to create a dialogue about who God is to them.
Critical Inclusion: Valuing Student Perspectives, Queering Practice, and Hybridizing Pedagogy for 4D Media Critique
Weaver, Rachel L. (Www.Macaart.Org, 2016-10-28)
Over the past decade, time-based visual media has attained the same ubiquity that the still image has enjoyed for the past 150 years. In this deliriously-mediated present, guiding students to use 4D media’s evolving languages of critique requires teaching strategies that address the strengths and blind spots of digital natives. Most undergraduate, internet-savvy students are natural critics of 4D media, and thoughtful educators will facilitate critique by valuing and harnessing these existing interests and useful perspectives. Vernacular media forms become an important and playful entryway to close looking and parsing. Colloquial and familiar viewing habits are eventually transformed by adoption of new terminology and critical angles. Situating contemporary 4D media works within greater art and design history is an extremely important way to effectively broaden perspectives and generate new critical conversations. Reading, continuous discussion, and exposure to artists, media works, history, and theory in the context of the studio classroom is just as important as 4D studio practice itself. Unless we are lucky enough to teach at an institution with a media+art history course, the 4D media educator is often saddled with the hybrid role of both studio practitioner and pioneering contemporary art/media/technology historian. This challenge, however great, is also an opportunity unique to our discipline. The 4D media educator must remain chameleon-like in negotiation of critical viewpoints, looking across disciplines, and responding swiftly to the unending torrent of hybridized art forms, expanding design needs, and emerging media technologies.
Desubjectification and Ritual Process
Flood, Caleb Russell (Virginia Tech, 2021-06-01)
The process of decomposition can be used as a method for disrupting the knowing subject, thus creating space for the awareness of unnoticed ideologies and beliefs. The body of work presented in this thesis intends to point towards, symbolically represent, and alchemically initiate a process of dissolution. It arises from an intention to negotiate psychospiritual suffering, by transmuting impulses of self destruction and violence into ceremonial and ritual processes. This work incorporates various methods into its scope, including video, performance, sculpture, painting, and gardening.
Down Stream [Appalachia]
Franusich, David J. (Virginia Tech, 2020-05-06)
Down Stream [Appalachia] is an immersive, interactive art installation that addresses themes of ecological preservation, conservation, and connectedness—illuminating the precarity of imperiled freshwater species in the Appalachian region. The exhibition is composed of reflective, refractive sculptures and underwater video footage, surrounded by fully-immersive spatial audio. Both the audio and visual elements react to audience presence and proximity. Species highlighted are the Candy Darter (Etheostoma osburni); the Cumberlandian Combshell (Epioblasma brevidens) and other freshwater mussels; and the Eastern Hellbender Salamander (Cryptobranchus alleganiensis alleganiensis). This paper examines the context and content of this installation, its progression and influences, and themes of ecology and the environment in the Southeast United States.
Fragmented Self
Saxena, Shiven (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-09)
As an artist, my work reflects my own life experiences, allowing me to reinterpret and process difficult events in a new light. Creating art is a therapeutic process for me, enabling me to explore and understand my past and my own Self. In line with James Baldwin's views, I believe that the duty of an artist is to provide their audience with an opportunity to rediscover themselves; to help them explore their inner selves. In my experience, to achieve that goal, the first and most important hurdle the artist needs to cross is exploring themselves. In the process of answering questions about their own selves, they can touch many other souls. In Fragmented Self, I employ composited 3D animations of my own body parts juxtaposed over still and moving images. Each body part and piece in Fragmented Self is a metaphorical representation of a specific experience I have lived through. The resulting pieces are meditative, surreal, and abstracted spaces that speak to the complexities of life experiences. I believe each body holds messages from the past, and in Fragmented Self, I disembody and fragment my own body to study and explore my own Self. Drawing inspiration from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass in which he proclaims, "I contain multitudes", I see my Self as a composite of various selves shaped by different life experiences coming together to form one Self. I believe that I am a constantly evolving individual, influencing my everyday encounters and choices. As in the Japanese tradition of Kintsugi, in Fragmented Self, I trace the gold lined cracks that unite my multitudinous selves into one in hopes of answering the question "What makes me who I am today?"
Home Sweet Home
Cheng, Pai-Hsueh (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-27)
Home Sweet Home is a short horror film that tells the story of Gavin and his encounters with supernatural energies after he moves to a new room. In the end, the story reveals that his roommate is the initiator. The movie draws inspiration from a variety of classic horror films, with an emphasis on those that are set in homes and bedrooms. Home is usually considered the safest place, but when this familiar place is haunted, it tortures us, and we have nowhere to run. Taiwanese religious elements along with urban legends, are featured prominently in the video as a source of the terror.
Inhabitance
Jones, Tacie Nicole (Virginia Tech, 2022-02-01)
While the concepts and imagery presented here are not autobiographical, there is no way to fully detach lived experience from the process of making and theorizing this work. And although its impetus is a lifelong journey of healing, the focus here is transforming the inhabitance of trauma into an awareness of embodied presence. From a space of reflexivity, Inhabitance asks you to come back to your body through heart-minded creative action. This practice-based interdisciplinary methodology integrates the emancipatory powers of women and gender studies, consciousness studies and art. Through this hybrid approach, Inhabitance creates space for reconciling an imposed fracture between the sensory and cognitive aspects of our lives to rewrite the restrictive narrative that trauma can hold over both.
Intersections: Cross-Disciplinary Conversations about Social Justice and the Built Environment
Powell, Katrina M.; Weaver, Rachel L.; Pourchot, Georgeta V.; Bassett, Paola Zellner (Virginia Tech. University Libraries, 2019-11-13)
Focus: Migration, moderated by Paola Zellner Bassett, Associate Professor, Architecture.
Liminal Perspective: Still-Life and Interactive 3D Animation
Eddy, Adam M. (Virginia Tech, 2022-06-23)
Liminal Perspective refers to an alternative theoretical framework for understanding the interpretation of pictorial space in visual art when influenced by new technologies. Creating the illusion of depth on a two-dimensional surface has relied on the theory of linear perspective created in the renaissance. Leon Battista Alberti, in his landmark work De Pictura, created a geometric system for the illusion of deep space that uses orthogonals and a vanishing point to allow objects to diminish as they move backwards in space. This theory placed humans at the center of perception and the singular vantage point of pictorial space. Alberti's theory marked a huge philosophical shift from a god-centric worldview to a human-centric one. Technology, however, is rapidly changing our functional relationship to perspective and allows an expanded understanding of perception. Humans are no longer single vantage points but rather exist in tandem with technological augmentations like smart phones. The body of work discussed in this paper imagines alternative artwork-viewer relationships to what have been historically proposed by still-life painters in classical history such as those in the Dutch Golden Age. Using 3D animation in combination with computer vision and physical computing, Liminal Perspective explores new interpretations of pictorial space and how our perceptual philosophies might evolve to keep up with technology's evolution.
Mending
Jones, Tacie (Virginia Tech, 2019-12-03)
Mending is a body of artwork created in response to ancestral trauma inherited between women. This paper discusses the exhibition of work, which consists of media installation, sculpture, and photography. Mending confronts Walter Benjamin’s patriarchal argument that one must intellectually excavate deep memory. Rather, the processes used to create the body of work engage a sensorial approach, and attempt to both reconstruct embodied memory and reconcile trauma. The act of mending is an historically feminine gesture appropriate for resolving the transgenerational trauma of the female body’s experience. Additionally, the media serves as witness, and has the potential to act as an impartial observer in the process of unraveling embodied trauma, allowing for reflexive self-witness. Overall, Mending rejects the thought-centric process of excavation, instead centering sensory-based spiritual practices in contemporary art related to nature immersion, meditative ritual, and collaboration between women working to heal handed-down victimization.
Ocean of Objects
Link, Joseph Nehemiah (Virginia Tech, 2022-06-21)
Every day we encounter objects and use them for purposes related to improving our life. However, sometimes the reason these objects are manufactured is because of capitalistic gain rather than the need for improved quality of life. In fact, the more objects that are produced by American companies, the more garbage is inevitably ending up in landfills. The installation work, Ocean of Objects, arranges mundane objects in a different context within a diorama. The United States is in an age of consumerism where our relationship to the objects we buy defines the way we conceptualize our relationship to the physical environment we are in. As a theater artist, I studied scenic design and installing scenery for productions. The exhibition and diorama are created using methods of theatrical scenic design, and digital elements such as projections help reinforce the narrative setting. I sense that if people paid more attention to how things get made and then discarded and changed the perception of their environment through the objects they buy and use, then they could build a better community with each other.
Orientation Device
Shokhov, Nikita (Virginia Tech, 2022-09-13)
Orientation Device is a tool for understanding the other towards recognizing alternative possibilities, for care and compassion, for expanding our culturally and politically bounded mindset, a tool of vital nausea and questioning compulsory heterosexuality. The work is a series of augmented reality (AR) experiences for mobile device that allow the audience to participate in documentary queer performances in any private or public setting. These immersive experiences challenge our perception of space. The LGBTQIA+ community is often disoriented within heteronormative spaces, and this work reverses that dichotomy by disorienting the audience. As a cisgender creator, I invite queer performers, artists, poets, and thinkers who express their identity in their creative practices. As the AR medium is widely distributable, I want to give the participants the potential opportunity to present themselves to a wide international audience through the poetics of augmented reality and documentary video holograms.
Past, Present, Future
Kimbangu, Rodney Bidi (Virginia Tech, 2023-07-27)
Past, Present, Future is an immersive and interactive art installation that seeks to put displaced Congolese and African artwork - commonly displayed in world museums - into their original cultural context. The exhibit's immersive experience sheds light on the colonial exploitation of African peoples and their lifestyles: specifically the expropriation of lived African spiritual and artistic expressions. These artifacts - sometimes stolen outright, sometimes obtained through imbalanced terms of trade, and sometimes obtained by fair bargain - often appear in exhibits as disembodied objects devoid of explanation or reinterpreted through the conceptions of the exploiters. This phenomenon has historically supported the consciousness of colonialism and now of post- and neo-colonialism, maintaining its propagation through museums, schools, and other institutions worldwide. The exhibition is composed of a virtual environment in addition to projection mapping. The visual, aural, and interactive elements engage with and challenge the viewer's culturally conditioned ways of thought regarding artwork "consumption." This thesis, building on the exhibition, examines the possibilities of employing evolving technology and coding toward the long-term task of "softly" repatriating displaced artifacts while starting a conversation about physical repatriation and providing a model that Congolese scholars and artists can use to preserve and reclaim their cultural heritage.
Phenomenal Things
Schoenborn, Eric Cade (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-19)
Phenomenal Things is a comical look into the daily lives of Internet of Things (IoT) artifacts and their experiences as social beings in cyberspace. This Augmented Reality (AR) experience presents a storyworld set in the digital realm where the digital personas of IoT artifacts are engaged in activities normally invisible to humans such as information extraction, learning, talking to each other and communicating with other "things" online. By wearing a head- worn display (HWD), users will encounter anthropomorphized IoT artifacts going about their daily lives and come to understand these characters as digital beings with social lives. Placed inside of cyberspace, participants will find themselves within a circle of anthropomorphized IoT devices in dialogue with one another, as they welcome a new light bulb to their network. As participants move about the AR actors, proximity to each character will cause the participant to "friend" that character. "Friending" in this case means to get close to and influence the version of the story being told by changing the social network of the character. With this work I intend to create a mesmerizing yet subtly-interactive experience using proxemics to create an interactive narrative where participants can create emotional bonds with the AR actors in this immersive theater experiment.
Plasticene
Eggleston, Carter Christian (Virginia Tech, 2019-11-13)
Plasticene is an alternative term for Anthropocene, the proposed epoch that follows the Holocene and designates the beginning of significant human impact on Earth. While this moniker carries numerous implications across a range of disciplines, the scholarship of this thesis project is motivated by the creation and exhibition of a body of work that investigates the materiality and physical presence of technological convenience. Plasticene is an exhibition of four looping, digital video animations alongside two interactive sculptural installations. The video-based pieces are explorations into the medium of digital video and how it functions as a carrier of visual information. They were created through iterative manipulations of how that information is digitally compressed, organized, archived, and revealed. The sculptural works are attempts to amplify the physical presence of technologies that can often be hard to see. They were built to perform simple gestures and rely on engaging multiple senses to call into question the routine way in which we interact with different technological devices. This paper examines the essay "The Question Concerning Technology" by Martin Heidegger as a philosophical influence for this investigation before discussing several works by other artists to frame the works in Plasticene within a contemporary context. The individual works from the exhibition are then discussed with regard to their intention, conceptual motivation, and the process of their creation.
Playing with my Luck
Ampatzi, Vasiliki Traikos (Virginia Tech, 2022-01-19)
Playing with my luck is a performance which comments on feminine expectations and satirizes the oppressive social structures that women must follow in order to be accepted by patriarchal societies. The 10 Commandments short film borrows religious recognizable elements and displays some of Orthodox Christianity's conservative beliefs to parody the patriarchal and misogynistic ideologies that religion often promotes.
Propolis: Immersive Environment
Alarid, Renee Aurelia (Virginia Tech, 2021-02-15)
Propolis – Creating and using an immersive 2D honey bee environment to educate children between the ages of 3-10, about the importance of honey bees. This capstone project will showcase this researcher's skills in graphic design, spatial sound, architecture, exhibition design, and character illustration. Within this structure, individuals will be able to observe, determine, and make comparisons between a healthy bee colony and one that is fragile and dying.
Pulse 63: Live Streaming and Architectural Projection Mapping
Hardebeck, George Michael Aaron (Virginia Tech, 2018-07-11)
Pulse63 is a live streaming and projection mapping installation at architectural scale developed for Moogfest 2018, in Durham, NC. The project explores the relationship between telepresence and "superarchitecture". This paper will consider the artistic aspects of these terms through the work of Eduardo Kac, Pipilotti Rist, Doug Aitken, and others. The intent is to create a visual installation at Moogfest that works as a monolithic visual signifier by applying artistically mediated telepresence and "superarchitecture."

Browsing by Author "Weaver, Rachel L."

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