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Articles 1 - 17 of 17
Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Winter Solstice, Jingwen Cao
Winter Solstice, Jingwen Cao
Masters Theses
For a long time, I have been thinking about what contemporary photography is, what its position is, and what the relationship is between artists and audiences. At the same time, I was developing my concepts and photographic directions and trying to make my work and my perspective on photography relevant. Winter Solstice includes a series of essays that locate my thinking and my work. Its title references the longest night of the year.
The position of photography has changed significantly over the past few decades. The way people read photos is also changing. Perhaps because of reverence for art and …
Landing: Body, Site, Material, Renata Berta
Landing: Body, Site, Material, Renata Berta
Masters Theses
I believe that in order to build on the land, I must establish a profound relationship with it. As an outsider to New England territories, I actively seek this connection through immersive activities such as swimming, surfing, climbing, and extensive walks, immersing myself in the land to better understand it and synchronize with its rhythms. In my artistic and architectural practice, I explore dissolving traditional boundaries, emphasizing the vital return to the land to create a more responsive and embodied architecture that symbiotically engages with the landscape
Within this ongoing project, “Landing: Body, Site, Material,” I conceptualize my body not …
Modern Times, Will Beattie
Modern Times, Will Beattie
Masters Theses
At the intersection of glass, photography and sound lies issues of perspective, framing, and information. These factors as well as the conceptual space between object and image offer an opportunity to explore the way we register narrative through contradicting signifiers. Glass historically has been used as an instrument to reveal spaces, moments, and phenomena previously imperceptible to the human eye. This rendering of previously unseen spaces through language, technology or vision, may work to reorient the viewers’ perspective and allow for a new understanding of the world. The power of disruption as a potential catalyst is central to my studio …
From Here To The Ground, Courtney Mccracken
From Here To The Ground, Courtney Mccracken
Masters Theses
Art, for me, is a thinking process. It is also a process of connection to body and place. It directs my fractured attention toward the things I care about. As I labor through process, I am gifted with a moment of attentiveness. In a time where everything feels urgent, and our perspective can be warped by the endless flood of information, making art is a chance to stop, to think, and to feel.
It is a space for holding, and a space for being held.
Recently, I have been working primarily in animation and sound design, experimenting widely across media …
America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah
America, Dreaming., Sarah Meftah
Masters Theses
There is a version
of America
that exists
only in dreams,
a kind of folklore,
shrouded in images,
technicolor interiors,
wrapped in plastic,
ghosts of recent past
to haunt and guide;
a constant reminder.
Wishful thinking
a constructed imaginary,
one I can hold in my hand.
Popular culture and spectacle, America and the domestic ideal, capitalism and the collective unconscious of a national identity. As an artist, I am interested in the myriad images that manifest for a viewer when they think of the spectacle of American pop culture, its domestic archetypes, and the material worship it revolves around. My …
Embodied Abstractions: Identity And Representation In The Digital Era, Srikar Hari
Embodied Abstractions: Identity And Representation In The Digital Era, Srikar Hari
Masters Theses
The digital image is a copy in motion. As it accelerates, it deteriorates.
It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, squeezed through
digital connections, resized, uploaded, downloaded, reformatted
and re-edited.
- Adapted from “In defense of the Poor Image” by Hito Steryel
With today’s digital technology, the image is no longer a stable
representation of the world, but a programmable database that
is updated in real time. It is not only part of a program, but it
contains its own operating code: the image is a program in itself.
Consequently, the image’s rhetoric has taken on …
Moving Studio, Emilia Miekisz
Moving Studio, Emilia Miekisz
Masters Theses
This collection of essays chronicles my journey through the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), exploring the concept of a “moving studio” and its influence on my creative process. From the fluidity of morning routines to the comfort found in Sunday pancake traditions, the essays delve into the intersections of personal experiences, artistic inspiration, and technological innovation. Through reflections on animation projects like “Wakey Wakey” and “Mr. Fragile,” I examine the transformative power of storytelling and the emotional connections fostered through my work. The essays also explore the evolution of perspectives, from initial resistance to embracing …
“Little Old Wales”: Expressions Of Nationalism, Language And Pride In Welsh Football, Abigail Mathieson
“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
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. …
New Mapping, Dowon Yoo
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 …
Movement, Mechanization, And Coexistence, Yukyung Chung
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 …
Describe The City You Live In, Jingfei Hu
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: …
Superbland, Dougal Henken
Superbland, Dougal Henken
Masters Theses
"A thin wafer is placed in the mouth of a kneeling woman and becomes flesh. A man masturbates quietly in a darkened room to a 3D model of a popular film actress. A car drives through an abandoned town and decelerates as it approaches a sign reading “Slow Children Playing.” A man fastidiously mows an artificial lawn while watching the sun dip low over a vast desert horizon. Superbland opens up new paths in understanding graphic design within the realm of the hyperreal. It begins with a study of simulation in graphic design contexts, building upon established forms of meaning-making …
Coast To Coast, Zeyuan Ren
Coast To Coast, Zeyuan Ren
Masters Theses
This essay contains four bodies of work created during my graduate studies, all of which take place on either the West or East coasts, incorporating performance, photography, and video. In the first half of the paper, I examine how the theme of “displacement” is established in my initial works, and highlight the significance of the state of “being displaced” in my process of imaging and (re)understanding the ocean.
At the core of the thesis, I investigate the wave-piloting of Marshall Islanders and a particular cartographic model, the “stick chart,” which is a mnemonic device embedded with the voyager's somatic memories, …
Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang
Rooted In Topsoil, Jiaying Wang
Masters Theses
Disillusioned by my transnational identity, I have come to realize that my sense of belonging is no longer attached to any physical location, but instead to a state of mind, to an intimacy with the world. My notion of home is an obscure and unsettled—at times utopian—idea, which can be infinitely decoded, re-positioned and re-established psychologically. This thesis is an investigation of that liminal state, questioning the paradoxical place at the intersection of longing and belonging, interior and exterior, rootedness and uprootedness. Through a collection of short essays that accompany projects, I seek to unpack the precarious emotional complexities that …
Step 10, Jinhong Cai
Step 10, Jinhong Cai
Masters Theses
Step 10 is an experiment on provoking empathy through
abstracted elements within my studio practice. I am
proposing to craft an emotional piece without leaning
on my identity. This written thesis consists of two parts:
narrative prose and an explanation of my studio practice.
While the installation is entirely devoid of cultural or
personal references, this text-based thesis is full of them
because it is intended to inform whoever is interested in
learning more about the motive behind this creation.
The questions I bought into the thought and creation
process are: Can a piece of art still successfully bring
out …
Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills
Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills
Masters Theses
Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …