Art and Design Commons^™

Counter-Archives In Digital Spaces, Patricia Belen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As evidence of human activities and time periods, archives are invaluable resources for research and the historical record. Digital, public archives are powerful sites of memory and discourse. The New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections platform has provided over 900,000 prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, and more on their public website. Recent calls for museums and heritage institutions to confront their legacies of colonialism have led to scholarly and activist work in the area of counter-archives that address inequalities and empower excluded voices. Counter-Archives in Digital Spaces (https://counterarchives.com) is an interactive website that explores history and visual literacy …

Navigating Through World’S Military Spending Data With Scroll-Event Driven Visualization, Hong Beom Hur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Catching up with the current geopolitical event is more important than ever these days. Anti-western nations like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea constantly challenge the world order set by the United States and its close allies. As a result, the world has seen a rise in military spending consecutively for the last several years. This data visualization project aims to provide an easy-to-read summary of military spending data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for hotly conflicted regions: East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Scroll-event-driven visualization implemented using Scrollama.js and D3.js combines text, map, and data …

Analyzing Relationships With Machine Learning, Oscar Ko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Procedurally, this project aims to take a dataset, analyze it, and offer insights to the audience in an easy-to-digest format. Conceptually, this project will seek to explore questions like: “Do couples that meet through online dating or dating apps have higher or lower quality relationships?”, “Can any features in this dataset help predict how a subject would rate their relationship quality?”, and “What other insights can I derive from using machine learning for exploratory analysis?” The intended audience for this project is anyone interested in romantic relationships or machine learning.

The dataset is from a Stanford University survey, “How Couples …

Visualizing Tedx Events: Ten Years Of “Ideas Worth Spreading”, Antonios Liamis

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

I have always been fascinated by how ideas are spread. Often, ideas are chosen to serve an immediate purpose, and there is an expectation that the choice will matter only insofar as it serves to achieve the desired goal. However, once an idea takes off, it becomes sufficient in itself to disseminate its message. When I first heard about the rubric “Ideas Worth Spreading” in connection with Technology, Entertainment, and Design (TED) conferences, I had an emotional response because I was always trying to get involved in those three categories. My fascination with the question of what makes some ideas …

Fair World 64: A Text-Based Game Of The 1964–1965 World's Fair, Christofer R. Gass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The project is a text-based game of a typical day during the first season of the 1964 World’s Fair in what is now Flushing Meadows-Corona Park. The 1964-1965 World’s Fair, that Robert Moses presided over as president, was one of the largest and most expensive fairs ever created, but only days after the last fairgoer left through the turnstile most of the many pavilions that brought education, entertainment, and joy to so many people were destroyed to leave a vast open space that is relatively empty to this day. Although most of the pavilions were either relocated or demolished, there …

Cultural Heritage Preservation In The Context Of Climate Change Adaptation Or Relocation: Barbuda As A Case Study, Martha B. Lerski

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This case study introduces an arts camp methodology of engaging communities in identifying their key cultural heritage features, thus serving as a meta study. It presents original research based on field studies on the climate-vulnerable Caribbean island of Barbuda during 2017 and 2018. Its Valued Cultural Elements survey, enabling precise identification of key tangible and intangible art forms and biocultural practices, may serve as a basis for further studies. Such approaches may facilitate future research or planning as climate-vulnerable communities harness Local or Indigenous Knowledge for purposes of biocultural heritage preservation, or towards adaptation or relocation. I report on findings …

Alternative Futures: The Creative Reconsideration Of Fashion Objects, Kathryn Roberts

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is the beginning of what I intend to be a larger, evolving work that seeks to marry the theoretical with the practical when considering fashion objects that have “served their purpose”. The object at the project’s focal point: a worn out pair of blue jeans. My particular focus on jeans is based on the fact that they, alongside the t-shirt, are one of the most ubiquitous and commonly owned pieces of clothing for people all over the world. This wardrobe staple transcends age, race, and class, as it occupies an iconic status that has made them invulnerable to …

The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …

Sonifying Hamlet, Ashleigh Cassemere-Stanfield

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Sonifying Hamlet uses data-mining techniques and algorithmic composition to read Shakespeare's Hamlet through sound. In so doing, it attends to pre-semantic, textual data that is only visible when one steps back from reading for narrative and instead focuses on formal details that, being individually small, but collectively numerous, are more visible to computational sorting than they are to human eyes that have been trained to look for broad semantic content. This use of algorithmically generated sound to reconstruct textual data continues the western trend towards ubiquitous quantification, while also challenging that trend's underlying assumption that reality is reducible to fully …

Open Works: Between The Programmed And The Free, Art In Italy 1962 To 1972, Lindsay A. Caplan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation historicizes and theorizes a group of Italian artists who were among the first to use computers and cybernetics to make artworks, developing the genre of Arte Programmata, or Programmed Art. It argues that the artists of Arte Programmata (Bruno Munari, Enzo Mari, and collectives Gruppo T and Gruppo N) turned to the generative, interactive, and probabilistic aspects of early computers not simply as new media for making art but as platforms for radically altering what it means to be a participant in an increasingly mediated and networked world. This is apparent in how each of their works deploys …

"La Dolce Vita" Today: Fashion And Media, Nicola Certo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita is a cinematic masterpiece that has inspired nationally and internationally generations of creative people and artists because of the extent of its themes and because of the mastery in the choice of its costumes. The actuality of the director’s criticism towards the decadent society of his years, the originality of his stylistic choices, and his sophisticated taste for beauty and fashion, brought him to influence media and contemporary fashion then and now. There are numerous examples of television commercials that Fellini directs and produces for purely commercial purposes. They are all critique of his society, …

Tandem 2.0: Image And Text Data Generation Application, Christopher J. Vitale

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

First created as part of the Digital Humanities Praxis course in the spring of 2012 at the CUNY Graduate Center, Tandem explores the generation of datasets comprised of text and image data by leveraging Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Computer Vision (CV). This project builds upon that earlier work in a new programming framework. While other developers and digital humanities scholars have created similar tools specifically geared toward NLP (e.g. Voyant-Tools), as well as algorithms for image processing and feature extraction on the CV side, Tandem explores the process of developing a more robust and user-friendly …

The New Reflexivity: Puzzle Films, Found Footage, And Cinematic Narration In The Digital Age, Jordan Lavender-Smith

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“The New Reflexivity” tracks two narrative styles of contemporary Hollywood production that have yet to be studied in tandem: the puzzle film and the found footage horror film. In early August 1999, near the end of what D.N. Rodowick refers to as “the summer of digital paranoia,” two films entered the wide-release U.S. theatrical marketplace and enjoyed surprisingly massive financial success, just as news of the “death of film” circulated widely. Though each might typically be classified as belonging to the horror genre, both the unreliable “puzzle film” The Sixth Sense and the fake-documentary “found footage film” The Blair Witch …