Digital Commons Network^™

Living In Untranslatability--Performance Art In China And Usa, Ziyun Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis embodies discontinuities in performance art and its non-equivalent Chinese term “行 为艺术” between language and cultural context into a migrating journey. A comparative analysis on the disciplinary history of performance art studies in the US and China laid a foundation in exploring the dynamics of marginality in two contexts. Extracting from the narrative mechanism and body view of Chinese performance art, I demonstrate how the philosophy of living (生) inspired many artistic creation, which also echoes my research journey. And from our mutual living experience, I pose the concept of constructive untranslatability that applies positionality and situated knowledge …

“Little Old Wales”: Expressions Of Nationalism, Language And Pride In Welsh Football, Abigail Mathieson

Masters Theses

Welsh football, through its use of material culture, language, and acknowledgements of history, has become a major force in representing Welsh national identities locally and globally. This thesis expands on Benedict Anderson’s idea of the “imagined community” through contemporary research from academic sources and from voices throughout the Welsh footballing community. It highlights the significance of the sport in national identity, especially within smaller nations such as Wales with histories of post-colonialism. Along with this, football shows the role cultural nationalism plays in the nation of Wales and in its independence movements.

In A Condition Of No Light, Alana Perino

Masters Theses

In a Condition of No Light is an autofictional investigation into lineages of familial domesticity. The performances therein circumnavigate one family in one domestic environment, yet are in dialogue with repertoires learned and rehearsed within legacies of myth, literature, theater, film, music, and image; as well as through the otherwise untraceability of embodied memory and inherited trauma. The methodologies used are primarily photographic but also encompass practices reaching towards sculpture, installation, and performance. The line of questioning reserved for this inquiry is how a home, its objects, and inhabitants generate, spacialize, and embody the conditions of wealth, whiteness, and gender. …

Kole, Isaiah Aladejobi

Masters Theses

This project focuses on the development of building blocks influenced by the architecture and design styles of Yoruba culture and Washington DC. These building blocks aim to provide an educational and culturally enriching experience for individuals of all ages, with a particular focus on youth.

By combining the traditional design elements of Yoruba architecture with the modern urban aesthetic of Washington DC, the building blocks offer a unique blend of cultural influences for children and adults to explore. Through hands-on building activities, users can engage with the cultural heritage of these two regions, while also developing important skills such as …

Input / Output, Zach Scheinfeld

Masters Theses

Input/Output emphasizes the processes and systems that create engagement, narrative, and meaning in graphic design, as opposed to singular inputs and outputs. In a series of experimental frameworks, ranging in form from 3D printed objects to browser-based painting tools, variables are put into the hands of the audience and user, creating conditions that are prime for retooling, repurposing, world-building, and play. Throughout, an open dialogue and feedback loop is formed between interface and user, author and reader, and teacher and student, where power, agency, and structure are in constant circulation, resulting in the emergence of unexpected forms, speculative technologies, and …

Virtual Fantasy, Joey Petrillo

Masters Theses

Virtual Fantasy is a proposition in opposition to virtual reality. Fantasy is essential to queer survival; we daydream to escape the hetero-normative structures we’ve been forced to live in — imagining new futures without binaries, linearity, or traditional notions of success. By exploring immersion, escapism, and agency in our virtual worlds through a queer lens, VF offers a reframing of our relationship to VR — embracing digital spaces and their potential to imagine new futures and possibilities, while remaining present in the world around us, as we are here in our bodies, now.

Out In Thin Air, Daiqing Zhang

Masters Theses

My work often takes form in experience-charged installations underscored by phenomenology. The whys and hows behind the work mostly remain unspoken, since I would rather my work speak for itself. This writing project offered me the opportunity to comb through and tell the stories and thoughts that informed the work.

I have built a collection of documentation about the experience of having a sensitivity to moments of wonder in everyday life. These archives recorded sensuous imprints in life composed of mundane phenomena. In the collection there are images/footage of a glimpse of light leaking through cloud crevices; a brush of …

I, Others, World - A Glass Circuit, Ariel Aravot

Masters Theses

In the summer of 2022, I had an epiphany about what an art-work is in its most expansive form: a circuit, activated by art creation, between self and others, and between them to wider worlds, and back to the self. ‘A GLASS CIRCUIT’ is the tale of my ongoing exploration of myself as a glass artist, the conscious discovery of my path, which is both consistent and incessantly changing. My works are the stepping stones that sustain my creative process as a glass blower and at the same time introduce experimentality, new questions, and new research topics.

The circuit is …

Instances Of The Spirit (Glossary), Kamari A. Smalls

Masters Theses

This thesis offers a performative methodology to engaging with the worlds and ideas that these words have generated in the form of a glossary. The list of words include: Ancestor, Anointing, Attune, Breath, Conjure, Conversion, Dance, Erotic, Ephemera, Ethervism, God, Girlhood, Hallelujah, Imagination, Improvisation, Jazz, Knowledge, Love, Liturgical, Magic, Memory, Performance, Prayer, Remnant, Repetition, Ritual, Root, Sacred/Secular, Silence/Stillness, Sound, Spell, Spirit, Testimony, Water, and Witness. Personal reflections, contemplations and expansions from other writing, and passages that come out of Black feminist thought, Black girlhood studies, and Black performance theory exist here simultaneously. This glossary demonstrates the theory, theology and lineages …

New Commandments, Jacob Sussman

Masters Theses

I reach into the earth, pull out mud-encrusted objects, and recombine them to define new meanings. With every object transposed, the past breaks down; new potentials form. “New Commandments” recombines historical symbolism through an intuitive building, destroying, and merging to reimagine or re-establish meaning.

The work critiques rites of passage, masculinity, and stereotypes by deconstructing how histories, ideologies, and preconceptions form.

As a queer person raised in-between Judaism and Christianity, social preconceptions and religious expectations festered my formation. Our choice is taken away at this moment of conception. To take back autonomy, I reimagine historical, and religious symbolism and transmute …

Vanitas, Sae Jung Oh

Masters Theses

Vanitas is a tribute to the missing pieces within the reconstruction of human memory, places, and data. It is a cartography of words, including home, apartment complex, reconstruction, mourning, archive, memory, memorialization, a god within, collective memory, photogrammetry, cyberspace, omnipresence, meandering, heterotopia, alleyway, construction site, and mirror. I invite readers to meander in the map of relations and be lost in the topography. What can you discover when you meander? What happens when you renounce being a subject and become an object seamlessly blended into the topography?

Machine Kinship: The Impossible Duet, Diana Sanchez

Masters Theses

Machine Kinship: The impossible duet What does it mean to vanish from earth when you are the last of your kind? In 1987 the Kauai OO was recorded singing his final song. It was meant to be a duet, but as the last of his kind his song hangs in the air, unanswered. The other half of the duet is forever lost. Built to sing at dawn, birds must wake up earlier to hear each other before human chaos interferes. So here, it is always almost sunrise. As a parallel past-future response, the last birdsong was fed into a machine …

Finding The Balance, Danyang Song

Masters Theses

Translating different invisible emotions, feelings and symbiotic relationships. Explore the Traditional Chinese Humanistic Philosophy of 'Tian Ren He Yi'.

The interwoven relationship between human, nature and machine is complicated yet beautiful. I explores how visceral emotion, feeling, language and communication all play an important part of how our bodies react, to visualize this invisible feeling. I attempts to visualize the mystery of the human body and society through various ceramic and glass techniques, such as hand-building, blowing and ceramic 3D printing. Using different methods of combining and stressing the material, capturing that resistance and embracing the outcome through a series …

Cyberflesh: The Me I'Ve Made For You, Jordan Metz

Masters Theses

This thesis deals with the impact of digital life on individuals by examining how real things become virtual bodies of information. Throughout this text, I weave key theoretical and literary references between my own thoughts and experiences which led to the work that appears in this book. I find it useful to attend to the spaces in between entities, theories, and technolo- gies. In these undefined spaces lies the spiritual dimension of media, the everyday magic that makes digital life possible. These ‘in-betweens’ are the site of transcendence granted by technology. In my practice, I’ve learned that things have a …

Curiosity Beyond The Hidden, Yi Young Kim

Masters Theses

What lies beneath the surface of vessels? This captivating thesis explores the hidden world within, drawing inspiration from traditional Korean ceramics and employing coil-built sculptures. By focusing on the hollowness of vessels, this study unveils their profound interconnectedness and inherent uniqueness.

Through spontaneous stacking of claylike glazes and textured elements, the artwork reveals mysterious processes and transformations within these vessels. Exposing the intricacies of hollow spaces, viewers are invited to contemplate the mesmerizing realms concealed within.

Intertwining elements of Korean heritagewith intricate structures, this artistic endeavor

sheds light on the hidden and challenges preconceived notions of everyday existence. The work …

New Mapping, Dowon Yoo

Masters Theses

Tools determine the shape of most of the worlds that are manufactured or measured. Taking the Earth as an example, territory is shaped and transformed by the tools of the earth's plate movement, the sea, and humans. A map, a recognized territory, is represented through numerical instruments, mathematical formulas, and visual devices such as lenses.

The instrumental perspective is one of the powerful lenses that will work effectively into the past, present, and future. So I started to apply an instrumental perspective to digital space. Digital space which is Non-physical has become one of the most important worlds for contemporary …

Green + White = Pink, Dora Chen

Masters Theses

My thesis seeks to explore the unknown forces that are constantly shaping our lives. I am intrigued by the intangible connections that link people, objects, and places together, and how they manifest across space and time. As a ceramicist emphasizing both interiority and tactility, my work will dissect layered ideas of closeness and disruption in order to reveal a nuanced understanding of how we exist in perpetuity with what can’t be seen. I wish to explore this topic through carefully directed installations that emphasize intimacy and engagement among audience members. Through inspiration from my past experience, childhood memories, as well …

Destined Failure, Chengjun Pan

Masters Theses

I attempt to examine the complex structure of human communication, explaining why it is bound to fail. By reproducing experienceable phenomena, I demonstrate how they can expose communication structure and reveal the limitations of our perception and symbolization.I divide the process of communication into six stages: input, detection, symbolization, dictionary, interpretation, and output. In this thesis, I examine the flaws and challenges that arise in the first five stages. I argue that reception acts as a filter and that understanding relies on a symbolic system that is full of redundancies. Therefore, every interpretation is destined to be a deviation.

Intensifying The Experience Of Contemporary Art, Wanjin Feng

Masters Theses

Contemporary Art museums, emphasizing visual experience- es, struggle to accommodate multi-sensory art forms. This thesis introduces a groundbreaking exhibition design mod- el focused on creating immersive, multi-sensory experiences for visitors. The model transitions from a passive observation paradigm to an interactive perception approach, fostering a deeper understanding and emotional connection to art.

Applied to the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), the model introduces strategies such as narrative sculptures, interactive drawing spaces, integrated reading within exhibitions, and emotionally-driven spatial design. These strategies aim to make art more accessible, promoting personal connections with artworks.

In conclusion, the proposed model transforms contemporary art …

Distance: A Collection Of Studies Of Human-Computer Interaction To Explore Human Emotions And Relationships, Jinha Kang

Masters Theses

In today's society, technology has become an indispensable part of our lives, permeating our daily routines to the point where it feels as essential as the air we breathe. The COVID-19 pandemic further highlighted the profound impact of technology, revealing its dual nature. While video conferencing bridged distances and connected people, the excessive use of social media drove wedges between them. As a multimedia artist, this thesis focuses on harnessing the positive potential of technology. Specifically, the objective is to employ technology as a medium to create art that fosters meaningful connections among individuals and conveys intricate emotions and complex …

Movement, Mechanization, And Coexistence, Yukyung Chung

Masters Theses

A movement is a tool that expresses the subject I pursue, ‘mechanization of human beings’. There are many technologies that replace humans these days, such as artificial intelligence. This makes me skeptical and afraid of being replaced as an artist in the future. Paradoxically, people, including myself, are enthusiastic about it, indicating that we do embrace the mechanization process as a society.

I will reveal this phenomenon of coexistence by demonstrating the possibility that machines cannot replace us, through motion experiments where rules increase, first starting with the reliance on intuition. I will explore not only the things that machines …

The People's Food Project, Grace Barrett

Masters Theses

The architectural design of spaces offering food assistance has received little to no attention since food pantries emerged in the 1970s. Non-profit food initiatives are often sited quickly with limited resources, producing inadequate spaces unable to fully support a food insecure community, prioritize the experience of users, and create a sense of belonging. The current spaces limit services to merely food distribution. They do not take advantage of the opportunity to expand socioeconomic capital through the power of shared food experiences: growing, cooking, eating, and learning.

This thesis redefines the traditional food pantry model, responding to explorations in psychological comfort …

Overlooked Modi Vivendi, Natalia Silva

Masters Theses

Traditional gender roles, performance of heterosexuality, marriage, parenthood, and a large variety of other societal expectations manifest themselves in the domestic realm, both intangibly and spatially. The design of domestic spaces has historically catered towards heteronormative living stereotypes, marginalizing people whose way of living challenges the norm. Even in the present day, designers with non-user clients — developers, investors, real estate firms, etc. — will design with heteronormative households in mind. The rise in feminist and LGBTQ+ rights movements has allowed for non-heteronormative modi vivendi (ways of living) to be more vocally and visibly present in the sociopolitical and cultural …

Describe The City You Live In, Jingfei Hu

Masters Theses

I dive into the fields: frequency (sound), wavelengths (light), shapes (conversation): they build connections. What is action without reflection? Now I’m a city drifter. Through art making and dialogue I try to drop the anchor into the futuristic turbulent ocean (of society, speed, and the status quo ). Did I drop it? Not sure. I grew up in the most fast- paced city in China, Shenzhen. I feel pressured there. Do I feel that pressure here? of a precarious, unpredictable future? These questions push me out of the turbulent ocean to grab the present.

There are three stages of time: …

Elusive Geometry, Lauren Richards

Masters Theses

All I have is a collection of parts. Fragments and pieces, segmented and turned over in my mind and in my hands as I try to understand them, stack them together and try to find a system. It seemed so simple at first - I just want to know how it works, of course I can put it back together again. Sometimes it’s a constant dissection, and the tide of incoming information is impossible to keep track of. But it’s alright to sit down and think about where they go and what they’re made of. What structures do I know? …

To Melt, Huanzhe Hu

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the need for a reevaluation of the relationship between humans and nature in the face of the current ecological crisis. The author argues that the dominant anthropocentric orientation, which sees nature as a resource to be exploited for human benefit, has led to over extraction and resource abuse, disrupting the balance of ecosystems. Instead, the author suggests adopting an ethical framework based on mutual understanding and appreciation, breaking the "hunter's gaze" and fostering empathy for non-human life forms. This thesis also explores the potential for new forms of communication and engagement with nature, such as through …

The Approach: A Promise Of Warmth Inside, Louis Cohen

Masters Theses

Walking up those stairs is always a treat. The tacit knowledge that you are moving towards a hidden gem: a space most don’t know to find. Salt water, wood smoke, and roasted coffee perfume the air. But the best part of all is the intention. This is not a space to go to out of necessity or convenience. This is a space for slow sips and long reprieves.

This thesis explores many themes, but at the heart is the idea of The Approach: how we come to an object is just as important as the actual moment when we meet …

Destination Unknown, Dongheng Yang

Masters Theses

Since the end of my undergrad years, I’ve been noticing my increasing tendency to not want to talk much about my work. What is it that lingers inside of me behind such silence? What story could one possibly talk about his studio practice, when he has little to say? Well, this thesis documents the thoughts behind this silence, which, I have to admit, have fueled my works in the past two years. I investigate postmodern phenomena and literary analysis on pop culture in East Asia, including hikikomori and decisionism, to better understand myself and the world around me. Constantly faced …

Living In Nature & Design With Nature, Yuya Zhou

Masters Theses

“Each material has its own personality. What we need to do, as a co-worker, is to understand the material characteristics, negotiate with these materials and find a common space to create a beautiful design along with the materials.”------ Yuya Zhou

From the flexible use of biodegradable materials by the Yanomami people, to the brief introduction of the concept of biodesign, and to the organic combination of biodesign and furniture design, it is clear to see that furniture not only undertakes the functionalities as a product, but also plays an important role in constructing a harmonious environment and improving people’s mental …

Hearts And Minds, Steven Knapp

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exploration of how lived experiences, a sense of dark humor, and creativity translate into my studio practice. Through images, material exploration and pointed interactions with the audience I encourage people to embrace nuanced views of difficult topics that exist in our world.