Event 3: DMA UG Senior Spring Exhibition – Epilogue/Coda

 At this year’s DMA Undergraduate Senior Exhibition, Epilogue/Coda, one piece that deeply resonated with me was Marie Godderis’s Oculus, Revisited. The installation blends photography and mixed media using the ViewMaster, an old analog device once used to view stereoscopic images and repositions it as a portal into layered personal and collective memory. What struck me most was how Godderis engaged the viewer not just as an observer, but as an active participant navigating through frames of remembered and imagined history. 

By combining images from 1939 to 2019, Godderis blurs boundaries between analog and digital media, challenging our assumptions about authenticity and temporality. This idea echoes Victoria Vesna’s “Toward a Third Culture,” where she argues that bridging art, science, and technology requires artists to work across disciplines to open new perspectives. In Oculus, Revisited, the ViewMaster becomes more than nostalgic tech, it transforms into an interface for emotional inquiry, connecting with Vesna’s call for sensorial engagement with knowledge systems.

I was also reminded of C.P. Snow’s critique in The Two Cultures, where he laments the divide between the sciences and the humanities. This project lives right in that overlap inviting us to use a technical device to access a poetic, human experience. Similarly, Gimzewski and Vesna’s “The Nanomeme Syndrome” describes how art and science together allow us to question the limits of perception and reality. Godderis’s piece, too, explores this blurry threshold between what’s known and unknown, remembered and imagined. This event left me thinking more critically about how I might use media artifacts in my own work not just as tools, but as vessels for storytelling. I highly recommend this exhibition to anyone interested in the intersections of memory, media, and identity. It was not only inspiring, but also a reminder that even outdated technologies can carry new emotional and conceptual weight when recontextualized thoughtfully.

(sorry I did not take a picture with Marie because we were both running around since we both were part of the exhibition ) 

Works Cited: 

Gimzewski, Jim, and Victoria Vesna. “The Nanomeme Syndrome: Blurring of fact & fiction in the construction of a new science.” Technoetic Arts, 2003.

Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 1959.

Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being In Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001