Media, Art and Text

According to the Webster¿s unabridged dictionary, a mania is an excessively intense enthusiasm, interest, or desire; a craze. I experience a mania on a daily basis: I take photographs. I trap photographs inside flat, airless fish tanks where time stands still. The creatures captured inside the tanks resurrect every time I see them to remind me of a sound, an odor, a flavor, and, ultimately, a feeling I once experienced and now cherish. This project will attempt to show the energy captured in my photographic archives as a journey through memories using an "over the counter" experimental interactive software. Do you want to experience the stories beyond the print into a virtual environment? Then drop me an email to hyperscholar@gmail.com or visit www.hyperscholar.com for more information.

Breakthrough is my first experimental book of ""typoetry"": A hybrid product of typography, photography, and poetry. The ultimate goal of this product is to finance the completion of my Ph.D. studies in Media, Arts and Text at VCU and to start a career in media production using self-publishing technology to achieve it.

Interdisciplinary experimental narrative developed using hybrid media. Each short piece of "typoetry" merges Communication Design, Illustration, Literature, Poetry, Photography, and Fine Arts. The process encompasses hand made illustrations and computer generated graphics using state of the arts pressure activated drawing boards and wooden pencils.

I propose a theoretical framework that describes how avatars incorporate media as an inherent part of their nature and find a hosting body in cyborgs to navigate and spawn in media. I propose the birth of a new scion that combines avatar, medium and cyborg into a conceptual being that I call “ICEVORG.”
The ICEVORG expands beyond representation into the actual physical world by means of media transgression—more specifically, by the use of the Strange Loop also known as Metalepsis ICEVORG find an effective soil to thrive and interrogate our ideas of reality by means of iteration, expansion, fragmentation and naturalization.
The development of the framework that explains the concept of ICEVORG happens in the interstices between fiction and reality.
The ICEVORG transgresses boundaries to reach and transcend the concepts of the avatar and cyborg in order to generate meaning and pursue relevance in contemporary society.
By dissecting the ICEVORG under the light of metalepsis that I am able to elaborate a framework to explain the world of post-hyperrealism and how ICEVORGS have become agents of change. Finally, in order to construct my argument, I employ autoethnography, a research methodology that allows for a more personal voice to be included as part of the research process.

Reality is nevermore. Reality, or our state of being, has always been a site of contestation. Avatars are representations of us; they are digital beings emerging from our minds to populate and add a new layer of simulation to our conception of reality. Avatars now penetrate our consciousness and demand our attention. They need us, but not as much as we need them. Avatars are digital containers of identity operated by us, their initial puppeteers. They are the key cultural constituents of what French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1994) conceptualized as the hyperreal. I propose a theoretical framework that describes how avatars incorporate media as an inherent part of their nature and find a hosting body in cyborgs to navigate and spawn in media. I propose the birth of a new scion that combines avatar, medium and cyborg into a conceptual being that I call “ICEVORG.” The ICEVORG expands beyond representation into the actual physical world by means of media transgression—more specifically...

If there’s anything that Michael Crichton makes clear in State of Fear it is that the factors influencing climate change—and climate change research—are extremely complex at the very least. I’m afraid that it’s going to take somebody like David Lawrence to even begin sort it all out for us.

Arrakis. Dune. Desert planet. Arrakis has in abundance: sand, sand dunes, sand storms, sandworms, and sandtrout. It’s easy to suppose that the ecology of a world like Arrakis would be fairly ... parochial ... in its scope. Scientist and journalist David M. Lawrence reveals that it is anything but.

Three eastern hemlock (Tsuga canadensis (L.) Carr.) and three chestnut oak (Quercus prinus L.) ring-width chronologies were constructed from old-and second-growth stands in the Black Rock Forest in Cornwall. New York, the first developed for the highlands of southeastern New York State. The longest hemlock chronology extends from 1780-1992 and the longest oak chronology from 1806-1994. The oldest trees sampled had minimum ages of 275 and 300 years for hemlock and chestnut oak, respectively. The tree-ring chronologies were compared to monthly temperature and precipitation data from nearby West Point, NY for the 1850s-1990s and to Palmer Drought Severity Indices for 1911-1990. The chronologies provide forest growth information for the period prior to the initiation of meteorological measurements, begun in 1824 at West Point. Black Rock Forest eastern hemlock growth correlates positively with current July and prior September precipitation, with February-March temperature and with prior September Palmer Drought Severity Indices. It correlates negatively with prior June temperature. Black Rock Forest chestnut oak growth correlates positively with current June-July and prior September and December precipitation, with January temperature, and with prior September-October and current June-July Palmer Drought Severity Indices. It correlates negatively with current June-July temperature. The Black Rock Forest tree-ring records and analyses yield useful information for climate reconstruction and for assessing the potential impact of anthropogenic change (e.g. CO₂-induced climate effects, CO₂ and N fertilization, acid deposition, changes in soil chemistry due to atmospheric pollution).

Few paleoclimatic records exist for Hokkaido, the northernmost, coldest and least environmentally disturbed of Japan's main islands. Here, we present a chronology for kashiwa oak (Quercus dentata Thunb.) atLake Saroma on the north central coast of Hokkaido. This record (1710--1993) was compared with the meteorological data from Abashiri, thelongest existing station (1899--1989) near the site. Growth correlates positively with current June-July temperatures, but negatively with prior-year August temperatures. Growth also correlates positively with prior November, December, and March temperatures and with prior February precipitation. Results suggest that these oaks grow best during warm, early summers, or after warm, snowy winters. The lowest growth year is 1784, following the 'year without a summer' elsewhere in Japan. This record contributes to a growing tree-ring network for the North Pacific rim, including sites in Japan, Kamchatka, Korea, Alaska, and Canada. It also adds a new species to those considered useful for dendroclimatology.

Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner portrays an advanced technological society in which the environment has been largely destroyed and wild animals survive only as relatively tame, genetically engineered replicants. Human technology has literally turned on its creator: humanoid replicants desiring to live normal lives free of the hazardous slave labor they have been engineered for periodically escape from bondage, killing their human overseers in the process. Past rampages have resulted in their banishment from Earth and earning retirement—the equivalent of legally sanctioned killing—at the hands of a low-level class of law enforcement officers called “blade runners.”
The protagonist of the film, a blade runner named Rick Deckard, inhabits a postapocalyptic Los Angeles soaked with acid rain, overcrowded with both normal humans and mutants wasting their meaningless lives in a city-wide equivalent of a red light district, with nearly everyone longing for escape to the “off-world” colonies.
One of the themes that runs through the movie—and Philip K. Dick’s book, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—is of a spiritually bankrupt society suffering from what we now call nature-deficit disorder. In the Blade Runner universe, people are desperate for a taste of the natural world, but the closest they can get to it are the animal replicants they keep as pets. I examine Blade Runner in terms of what it suggests about the causes and effects of our ever-increasing separation from the natural world that sustains us.

In this paper, I discuss my experience as an out lesbian art professor and offer my view
into the future of queer art education. After a year of teaching at a southeastern private
Christian university, I’ve developed strategies for integrating queer art history even in
the least accepting of institutions. Throughout the narrative, I use three of my own
pieces to illustrate the intersection of my art practice, my pedagogy, and my experience
as a queer womxn. Ultimately, by framing queer art history as a crucial component
of art history, I argue that it is our job as educators to teach our students rich, complicated
histories of art so they are able to place themselves as artists but also as human
beings within that history.

This essay attempts to think the clinamen of the World-of modernity's politico-Symbolic order-as the chattel slave trade by considering slavery's "afterlife" through critically interweaving the literature of Mladen Dolar, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, and Noela Davis with that of contemporary Black scholars whose writing so necessarily challenges and radicalizes the formers'. Through engagement with the thought of Denise Ferreira da Silva, Fred Moten, and Calvin Warren, clinamen, with its various parts and affects (division, den, and encounter among them), is invoked to conceptualize the anti-Black World's construction and constant politico-symbolic reification and reproduction.