Start Over Unit LAUNCH

1. Controversial Saints: A Study in How Popular Culture Can Radicalize Religious Icons (00:22)

Date:
2022-09-16
Main contributors:
Alexandria Babineaux
Summary:
An animated digital painting designed to serve as a commentary on the debate surrounding the identity of Joan of Arc and her role in modern society. This debate has focused on her controversial adoption as a queer icon for lesbians and gender nonconforming individuals within the LGBT community, and the resulting conflict with the dogma of the Roman Catholic church. In particular, this work explores how the modern digital landscape contributes to the evolution of her identity while critiquing how Christian religions use the word of God and the Bible as an excuse for bigotry and persecution by subverting Joan of Arc’s actions into something more sinister.

2. Creation of Interactive VR Application that Supports Reasoning Skills in Anatomy Education (03:47)

Date:
2019-05
Main contributors:
Ackley, Amber, Chang-Gonzalez, Karla Ianina
Summary:
Demonstrates a VR (Virtual Reality) program created for an undergraduate thesis that allows users to view and interact with muscles and nerves of a canine leg. It utilizes anatomically accurate models of canine muscles and nerves, textured, rigged, and animated for use in an educational virtual reality platform. The end goal of the project is to create and measure the efficacy of a visually dynamic experience for the user, allowing them to generally explore canine limb anatomy, and to specifically visualize deficits in muscle movement produced by user interaction with the canine nervous system. This tool seeks to improve upon existing methods of higher-level anatomy education by allowing students to directly manipulate anatomical models and observe movements in a three-dimensional space. Employing the methodologies of “art-based research," this project was created with the help of anatomy experts from the College of Veterinary Medicine at Texas A&M University.

3. Exploration of Social Interactions Through Dance (45:44)

Date:
2020-08-07
Main contributors:
Dardeau, Madeleine, Klumb, Madelyn
Summary:
This video features a contemporary dance work that was inspired by the high prevalence of technological distractions within society. Performed by students from the Texas A&M University Dance Program, it is part of a study about the effects of distractions to present awareness of the impact of social interferences. During the performance, technological distractions were placed within the audience to pull the spectator’s focus from the piece. Upon completion of the dance, survey questions were given to audience members to evaluate their perception of the choreography and the planted technological distractions. The purpose of the study was to test whether the audience would be able to provide their full attention to the choreography due to the various distractions, and whether focus is crucial for the successful conveyance of the choreographer’s ideas to the audience.

4. Exploration of the Effectiveness of Dance as a Tool of Communication (29:59)

Date:
2019-05
Main contributors:
Eidson, Riley, Clark, Kelsey, Thompson, Ashlyn
Summary:
This video contains a choreographed modern dance piece that was created for an undergraduate thesis exploring the use of dance to relay information about historical events. The creators of the piece hope to “translate iconic and propagandist artwork from the time period of the Space Race, into a form that we most closely understand and may be more relevant for a wider audience.” By using artwork from this era as their inspiration, they attempt to evoke an emotional response in the audience beyond the memorization of facts while revitalizing this art form and building a bridge between artists and historians.

5. To the Moon and Back (16:34)

Date:
2022-09-06
Main contributors:
Parker, Olivia Grace
Summary:
Performance of a work that is an adaptation of Georges Méliès. 1902 film, Le Voyage Dans La Lune (A Trip to the Moon). This project deconstructed and developed Méliès’ film into a work of devised theatre that investigates, converses with, and intervenes in the original work. The goal is not to exactly replicate the film or simply adapt it for the stage, but to understand what the film and its creator are saying and craft a response using some of the same aesthetic and contextual language. What does the film articulate now, two-hundred years after its release? Combining biographical, autobiographical, historical, and generic elements, the resulting performance piece explores questions of identity, exploration, memory, the medium of film itself and our relationship to it.