Events

May 8 | Screening at The Ross Media Arts Center | 313 N 13^th St | 7 pm

Seating is limited, so please reserve your tickets in advance. go.unl.edu/2025nebbys

Reception to follow across the street at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts 1300 Q Street

May 9 | 5 to 8 pm

Explore projects including: 

• Augmented Reality posters and experiences
• Virtual production films
• Immersive crime scenes
• Interactive installations
• Zine displays and video essays
• and more! 

The Augmented Aquarium is an interactive hologram illusion reef simulation that you can join by choosing to add your own fish or coral! The reef will be alive for a week straight, starting empty and void of life. Over the days, the reef will transform into a thriving community ecosystem as more people participate in the project. The Augmented Aquarium aims to offer an engaging and educational experience about our coral reef ecosystems and to show that we all play a role in the protection of our planet. The project also functions as a concept for a new mode of displaying aquatic life through the use of emerging media. 

This project is all about exploring what it means to be a Vtuber from a marginalized background—especially as a Black woman and someone with disabilities—while also diving into the tech, creativity, and the community behind it. By designing and embodying my own Vtuber persona and livestreaming to an audience, I’m researching how representation impacts audience engagement, how to make Vtubing more accessible, and how creators can build sustainable brands in digital spaces. It’s a mix of personal experience, creative expression, and scholarly research, all wrapped up in an interactive, immersive journey. 

The Proposal is a short film created within Unreal Engine's Fortnite Editor telling the story of four friends and their attempts to pick up their buddy’s ring. 

Animated using state-of-the-art motion capture technology, this film acts as a first of its kind for creating an intractable cinematic narratives within Fortnite. While viewable on a screen, the project can also be played within Fortnite by replacing the visuals of the main character with their own, making them a part of the story. 
 
The goal of The Proposal is to inspire more narrative driven creations within the Fortnite Creative ecosystem alongside advancing my own personal goals as a motion capture artist.

“Roots” is a multimedia installation that envisions transhuman botanical mutation as a pathway to social, political, and economic liberation. By examining the constructed hierarchy of ecological existence through an intimate, ontological lens— focusing on anatomical systems and reproduction— “Roots” illuminates the interconnectedness buried by the abuse of earthly matter. 

Featuring collaborative sound design and music composition projects completed for films and animations from Michael Pritza’s short film The Proposal, Charlie Major & Megan Kolbe’s volleyball video, and Jacob Jeng’s animation.

The artist will co-design wearables in partnership with physarum polycephalum—commonly known as slime mold. The budding relationship between human and protist will be captured through macro photography, time-lapse video, ambient sound, and spoken/written word. 
 
The piece will culminate in an intimate performance in which the artist occupies a simulated ‘design studio’ space with her slime mold partner for several days, conducting a series of ‘experiments’ in which she feeds the protist various bodily fluids, and documents the live generative design process that ensues. 

WBØRLJ is a short documentary that explores the world of amateur radio through the life and voice of Jim Vaughan, a longtime operator based in Omaha, Nebraska. As digital technology accelerates and analog traditions fade, this film preserves the story of a man who has spent over 900 consecutive days activating a Parks on the Air (POTA) station. WBØRLJ examines what it means to remain faithful to a longstanding tradition—and why ham radio still matters in the Heartland. This project is both a portrait of Jim and a window into a larger community of operators who continue to power on their rigs, call CQ, and keep the spirit of amateur radio alive. 

Optimized is an immersive live performance that blends theater and AI-generated media to explore memory, identity, and technological control. The story follows James, a man undergoing the Memory Optimization Protocol (M.O.P.), a clinical procedure designed to systematically erase his childhood memories. As the process unfolds, AI-generated visuals and soundscapes bring his vanishing past to life—allowing the audience to witness his memories dissolve in real time. 
 
This performance transforms a traditional theatrical experience into an immersive, sensory-driven event. By merging live performance with emerging technology, Optimized creates a unique audience perspective. One where viewers are forced to passively witness the irreversible loss of self. Inspired by projects like The Last of Us: One Night Live, this work examines the intersection of performance, AI, and psychological storytelling. 

This project tracks the artist’s research into the ways in which digital technology is changing how we see, interact with and understand the world. Using new methods of capture and collection to document and reconstruct their findings, and emerging generative technologies to represent and reproduce their work, they explore a new kind of cultural archive– one which blurs the lines between truth and fiction, documentation and creation, reality and simulation. 

This project documents an exploration into methodologies for capturing and analyzing contemporary objects and lived environments as emergent forms of digital memory. The research employs advanced techniques of digital capture and representation: neural radiance fields for spatial reconstruction, location-based data and motion tracking to analyze daily physical routines, and novel computer vision systems for algorithmic assessment. Through multimodal curation involving audio, video, and large language models, the work investigates the integration of this data into archival, historical frameworks. 

This is a portion of me that I want to share to people that are close to me, to people that have been kind to me, to people that I want to thank, to people I can't speak to anymore, to people forgotten, and to people that I haven't met, and possibly will never meet.

I am young and unexperienced in living, and may not have much to tell just yet, but regardless, I hope that even a little of the words and images that emerged from me during the most integral Turning Point of my life can spark something inside somebody.

Sway someone's heart to tears; put a smile on their face and make them laugh; make them curious about themselves or others; become someone's needed distraction, even if just for a minute. Maybe even write a story or draw with their own hands.

I want to write stories only I can write, and this is but the start of the first of what I have to give to the world. Although, the one who I want to give this to the most is myself.

Grief is a piece of each of us that we’re constantly grappling with and attempting to either hide away or make digestible to both ourselves and others. Vulgar Bath highlights the way that we process our own grief, and the avoidant uncomfortability we react with when faced with the grief of others. In using grotesque imagery to highlight the different stages of grief, and invoking the discomfort of emotional pain and healing, we turn discomfort into a meditation of understanding. The strange and repulsive becomes comforting as we shed the expectations of societal niceties in our journey towards emotional growth. Analog mediums combined with digital software align with the importance of embracing the past rather than running from it. Nostalgia comes as its own form of grief. Longing for the past keeps us from being able to completely move forward. Instead of trying to change this, Vulgar Bath acknowledges the importance of nostalgia and embraces it as a way to understand how grief can be beneficial in its own way. Grief is an inevitability in life, and this piece seeks to understand and heal through it rather than run away from it.

Installation at the Nebraska Union near the Starbucks through May 2 and will then be installed permanently in the UNL College of Business.

Enceladus is an immersive experience that uses a combination of set construction, physical props, and video games to place participants fully within its world. Set in a dystopian future where the Earth’s water has become polluted beyond repair, this 4-Person Immersive Experience invites participants to pilot a submarine through Saturn’s icy moon of Enceladus, taking samples and searching for a solution to the water crisis.