Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Wielding Daggers : The Female Uncanny, Stephanie E. Hanes

Masters Theses

This thesis document is a compilation of personal essays that analyze aspects of visual culture and philosophy. I am greatly interested in how this analysis is related to women bodies; the nude in western art has a long history of being constructed for the male gaze. This significance of the identification of women with the body exposes women in our culture to learn their own particulars for self surveillance. By looking into the mirror, what is reflected back? With these essays, I am opening myself to the unknown and the unknowable, revealing the paradox of feminist and philosophical scholarship. When …

Breathe, Iggy Choi

Masters Theses

Everything around us is interesting, but we Keep so busy we miss out what is importance. When we first get a gadget we get excited for few months, but soon we lose interest and seeking for something new and cooler. We are constantly hurt, tired, stressed, overwhelmed, but we are not aware because we are so focused on the future. We need to reset to get back on our track. We need to stay aware and remember our first excitement in order to refresh our purpose and focus. Life would be better if we step back, breathe, and notice what …

In The Marketplace, Anina Major

Masters Theses

The decision to voluntarily establish a home contrary to the location in which I was born and raised (The Bahamas) motivates me to investigate the relationship between self and place. To further explore my own migration and the emotional complexities that surface, with a desire to fabricate terms of cultural integrity and its defining influence. To express poetically the kindred ideals that resonate from home and intertwine those values to cultivate moments of reflection and acceptance. To promote encounters between past, present and future by weaving the memories of my own background and experiences, consequently unveiling a rich culture composed …

Untitled, Ting Tan

Masters Theses

This is a collection of things I am interested in. Through these things I attempt an understanding of myself. They are unpredictable and often difficult to capture like clouds, trees, water, winds. This book is my journey of self discovery.

I walk in my memories. I walk in the city. There, I capture and record fleeting moments of things I love. Through this process, I give myself a chance to understand the reasons for this attraction. It also gives me an opportunity to understand why I want to find myself, and why I always want an exact answer to this …

Hear Her Sing, Da Wei

Masters Theses

Indeed, this is not an academic paper, nor really a novel or diary.

It is some words from a young soul.

“Hear Her Sing” is to explore a new aesthetic methodology of artist’s writing. Physically, it aims to approach an experimental experience between texts, images, sounds, materials, and paper form. The writing seeks for an aesthetic metaphorical printing representation of my embodied multimedia installations. The project looks for profound sensory impression of linking vision, hearing, touch and intuition, imagination; and asks the reader’s eye, ear, hand, and mind to constantly shift channels. While reading, imagination infinitely extends.

I Remembered I Am Happy, Emily Pan

Masters Theses

This journal is a collection of thoughts on small actions and repetition and getting through getting places.

I / You / They, Yolanda Lam

Masters Theses

This thesis is a journal of conversations.

Similarity In A Distance, Ran Zhuo

Masters Theses

I grew up in an interesting yet contradictory environment. As both of my parents were busy with their jobs, I was raised by my grandparents and I believe that’s where the contradiction aspect of my personality came. My grandfather was a professor of physics in a university and my grandmother was a professor of violin. Unconsciously, I was influenced by them and developed a keen interest in cross-disciplinary and cross-media subjects. The two subjects of music and physics represented art and science, emotion and reason, abstraction and concreteness, and invisible and visible to me.

My work is primarily engaged with …

Habitually, Sunha Joo

Masters Theses

This book is a journal of the conscious looking into my most unconscious behaviors. I documented and observed my unconscious habits, and tracked where they originally came from. Observing myself was both the process and the result of the work. I played a triple role throughout the process. I was an object, an observer, and a conduit. I wrote and became a subject of the writing. I used various forms, styles and voices in this book to align the work experience of these constantly changing roles with the writing experience and to embody different perspectives.

As a result, this book …

A Normal Novel Collection, Xiaopeng Qi

Masters Theses

This thesis is a game novel collection.

Which is an experimental attempt that I use the playable texts as a way to document daily clues. While reading the thesis, the readers will have an experience of the game-like sense of substitution and view switching. Through the narrative of texts, I try to express that in the future, making games which under structural wraps is a living strategy way to self-expression and communicate to outside in this hyper-normal spectacular society.

The Body Carrying Its Otherness, Rae Yuping Hsu

Masters Theses

Prosthesis points to an addition, a replacement, and also an extension, enhancement, transcendence.

Prosthesis points to subtraction, the creation of a void, a need, disability, deficiency.

This thesis explores the ways in which the body and technology come into contact with one another and are incorporated, integrated, fused and reciprocal. It seeks to negotiate the slippage space within these contrasting stand points and propose that the body and its otherness was always already one.

Space As A Practiced Place, Elizabeth Leeper

Masters Theses

This thesis examines and retraces ways in which graphic design is fundamentally concerned with relational space, and tests spatialized theories, methods, and potential for praxis.

My practice investigates the relational qualities and dimensions of graphic design at three distinct scales.

1. Spatial logic (format) within a design object [Design space, book space, format, structure, sequence, counterforms, etc. (authority structure vs agency of user) within the design].

2. Spatial relations (sequence) between participants across a network. [Space to hear & see each other; to relate and connect].

3. Space within the world (circulation) [Space as composition, product, relational; not container, not …

Content-Aware : Investigating Tools, Character & User Behavior, Llewellyn Hensley

Masters Theses

Content—Aware serves as a platform for investigating structure, corruption, and visual interference in the context of present-day technologies. I use fragmentation, movement, repetition, and abstraction to interrogate current methods and tools for engaging with the built environment, here broadly conceived as the material, spatial, and cultural products of human labor.

Physical and graphic spaces become grounds for testing visual hypotheses. By testing images and usurping image-making technologies, I challenge the fidelity of vision and representation. Rooted in active curiosity and a willingness to fully engage, I collaborate with digital tools, play with their edges, and build perceptual portholes. Through documentation …

Otra Vez : Hierarchy As Designer, Jordyn Alvidrez

Masters Theses

Methods of hierarchy are often represented in graphic forms. They shape our world into subjective places/spaces of belonging or oppression. The need for order is a human condition. There is constant tension between the utility of ordered systems against the manipulative and ultimately subjective manner in which they are created. Where there is a system, there is a story. The narrative the hierarchy tells is just as crucial to me as the mechanics.

I position myself within various hierarchal systems as a way to understand the logistics of their becoming, but also, to manipulate (or justify) my cultural and ethnic …

Scripting Allographs, June Shin

Masters Theses

Scripting Allographs* examines typographic principles and their pervasive impact on ways of seeing and making through design. This body of work demonstrates the many faces of typography and type design and the way they inform allographic thinking. It employs type as the primary tool and medium for scripting possibilities, embracing their differences, idiosyncrasies, and imperfections. Beginning with a focus on close observation of small details and ending with an approach that invites and celebrates variability, this thesis offers a glimpse into a design practice from the lens of a typographer, type designer, and educator.

Double Takes : Secular Magic & Empathic Vision, Lake Buckley

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ways that a history of secular magic has shaped contemporary culture and design lexicons. It reviews modes of secular magic as design principles as well as the terms by which the meaning and value of these modes changed over time.

I carry on the legacy of magician filmmakers who thoughtfully questioned the material nature of their surroundings and tools in order to unearth new modes of visual experience. With film, delight drives invention which in turn strains vision and perception, requiring a certain collusion with the audience. My work celebrates the notion of the double take …

How To Become Ocean?, Elaina Runge

Masters Theses

A shifting viewpoint transforms into multiple perspectives to explore surface and depth.

By compressing time into an instant, or expanding a moment out in infinite directions, patterns reveal and obscure themselves.

A process that is both rational and intuitive emerges through the use of different systems to approach the unknown.

The ocean operates as a metaphor. The beyond guides the search of one who is tethered to the shore.

Plastic, linen, silk, elastic, glass, cellulose, protein: fold, curve, bend, distort, resist to create forms that are neither unfamiliar nor named.

Blue, blue-grey, blue-green, blue violet, azure, cobalt, sapphire, lapis lazuli, …

Good Times, Tim Stoelting

Masters Theses

In this body of work, I set out to show an exaggerated display of the manipulation consumers face everyday Attaching stories to objects drastically increases their value. In benign settings, this might elevate a simple trinket into a family heirloom or drive a bidding war for a piece of gum chewed by a celebrity. On the adverse side, a story can play with our emotions to turn a desire into a need.

In this way, fear-based stories are a particularly powerful motivator; they can drive people to the most extreme actions. When used as a tool, fear can persuade even …

Balance Speaker : Efficient Work And Break, Jin Cao

Masters Theses

The name of this product is "Balance Speaker”. It is aimed to help designers to concentrate better while working and breaking, using sound and light in particular.

In this book, I will show you the design/testing process of the product, show how the working timeline and energy levels influence designers' concentration, and how to design the interaction of the product and test its usability. A

The Emotional Intelligence Of Machines, Lokesh Zope

Masters Theses

Technologies today claim to be capable of detecting human emotion. When such technologies appear on our everyday objects, how will our interactions be like? Can these objects know when we are frustrated with them? Wouldn’t that radically change the field of user experience design? However, would people be scared of such capability?

Born from this curiosity, this thesis project is a speculative and an experimental approach that explores the overlap of the fields of User Experience Design, Affective Technologies, and Artificial Intelligence. This exploration is aimed at investigating its need and illustrating a newly designed adaptive nature of domestic appliances. …

Transforme : A Look At Sports Beyond The Gender Binary, Courtney Skabelund

Masters Theses

This work explores the next wave of athletes. Using speculative design, it questions institutionalized social constructs that many take for granted but that are a daily struggle for others. It looks to broaden the expressiveness and individuality of sport. Through careful consideration, research, and testing this thesis represents my views and ideas of how sport might evolve to represent the next revolution of athletics. Because without a gender revolution, the true ideals of sport will suffer.

Body (Less) Fitness, Dan Gioia

Masters Theses

It’s too cold outside. You stubbed your toe. You had too much Chipotle. You didn’t have enough Chipotle. There’s no shortage of reasons to abstain from exercise on any given day.

Designing a product or system to get someone to exercise is almost anti-design. So much of design is making things seamless and easy for whomever your user may be. You want to make it easy for people to accomplish things they want to do. But designing to get someone to exercise? You’re trying to get someone to do something unpleasant. You’re asking your user to sweat, strain, exert, and …

Communicatronics, Adi Azulay

Masters Theses

Design in its nature is a future facing practice. But the future is hard to predict or often even imagine. So how are we as designer to approach these types of problems?

In this thesis I attempt a novel design methodology to derive insights and produce new interaction models for long range communication. The methodology, which can be applied to any topic, focuses on a study of the past. More specifically using experimental archeology, the practice of rebuilding historical objects in order to test functionality and viability of a hypothesis. For this project I learned how to send smoke signals …

Floop : Improving Eating Habits, Namrata Phirke

Masters Theses

All of us strive to eat breakfast daily, and a lot of us fail. 10% of all Americans skip breakfast daily, and the number increases sharply to 23% for the people in 18-34 age group. Something changes distinctly when people turn 18. This age group includes students who transitioned from their home to college. This shift severely affects eating habits. At home, our parents look after us and make sure that we get the optimum nutrition as we grow. But life isn’t so smooth in college. We realize the importance of our parents who used to worry about our health …

Impractical Community, Zixin Xiong

Masters Theses

Zixin lost her phone and she went on a journey with a girl to find it. During the journey, they collected cellphones to let these machines get a good rest; they explored a sandwich city and took a risk to follow an insect who ate people’s profiles. They were trapped in a forest of lies and heard about lots of silly questions, etc. After experiencing these weird adventures, Zixin found a new friend underground and dove into a magic river to live with her.

The Impractical Community is a magic realist fiction that reveals the disadvantages of our technology in …

Blood In The Water : Tracing An Interspecies Alliance Between At-Risk Humans And Jellyfish In The Mediterranean, Ala Tannir

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to examine the Mediterranean Sea as a space of simultaneous ecological and political resistance to human-induced violence articulated by the concept of the Anthropocene. In one capacity, the Mediterranean Sea is the space that connects the extracting impulses of European States to the raw materials and resources of their ‘former’ colonies in Africa and the Middle East. Despite being divided in relation to national interests, the Sea defies the easy legibility of such bordering practices, and exemplifies a “vast, complex expanse” that contains many of the contradictions of national and regional interests that are pursued in isolation …

Love View, Wudi Hong

Masters Theses

There are many kinds of love, but for some people, romantic relationships are the most meaningful element of life, providing a source of deep fulfillment. I am designing a new service to track, rethink, and improve relationships with people who move to a new environment and are separated from loved ones or for those who are in unsatisfactory relationships. People in long distance relationships lack physical interaction and the ability to share feelings daily. I am working towards designing a digital service and accompanying physical tools which aim to strengthen and maintain close personal relationships across distance for people.

Motivated Motivation : A Consulting Tool To Find New Platforms For Business, Xiaoxio Jin

Masters Theses

Consumption motivation is the drive to satisfy needs and wants. It is also a desire for a product, service, or experience. The continual raising of the consumption desire has brought us where we are today. When old needs are met, new needs emerge, then we can create the infinite desire in our modern society. As brands are in a market full of competition, they are aware that they cannot stay in the same place when others are putting effort on business expansion. Our customers are calling for new service, thus brands need to keep being energetic and innovative.

Understanding consumption …

Thesis, Robert Joseph Anspach

Masters Theses

This is a seemingly didactic account of the nature of the mind, art, and the end of the world. It is probably not very good and the author does not stand by what is stated within it, but has to turn something in in order to graduate. Maybe do not read it.

Dermis, Julia Betts

Masters Theses

I create situations that hold onto spaces or things. That psychic energy can be transferred to a viewer. I’m curious about this transference and The Aesthetics of Disengagement and the empathetic nature of making work.

I often engage the viewer through overwhelm (such as: texturally, amount of objects, length of performance, mark making…) to create anxiety/tension around a body or around how a body relates to space. To create this overwhelm, I use ritual, repetitive labor that is between obsessive and meditative. In this boundary, I wonder about whether art is healing or can be. I’m interested in creating spaces …