Art and Design Commons^™

Multiple And Moving, Maia Chao

Masters Theses

This document maps my negotiation of the art practice as experienced in school. It is a record of development, evaluation, narration, articulation, reflection, argumentation, and continual redefinition. I consider the physical and social realities of the studio practice as they relate to my needs, values, and desires on a personal and global scale. Flitting between the mundane and the fundamental, the center and the margins, this thesis reflects my mental topography as a series of parts whose relations to each other are multiple and moving.

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.

Design Syncopations, Mary Yang

Masters Theses

Design Syncopations is an inquiry into space and intervention. Central to this work, is the orchestration of scenarios to prompt visual, auditory, and physical engagement. My background as a musician strongly informs this practice as I borrow from and disassemble musical structures—time, rhythm, composition, and counterpoint. Through designed prompts and invitations, I incorporate musical themes of chance and improvisation, setting up programs, altering spaces, and interrupting existing conditions. Working at the intersection of sound and design allows me to conduct audience-led musical performances, reprogram gallery spaces, and collaborate with artists and musicians. The ensemble of works adds up to a …

I Trace The Fold : Fluidity And Flux In The Terrain Vague, Alicia Oas

Masters Theses

The terrain vague is the interstitial fabric of city life. It is the space between and around the inhabited city – abandoned urban space that constantly shifts in form and function. The terrain vague is found in empty buildings, former factories, parking lots, along the train tracks, and in unclaimed alleyways. In these still and quiet places, a fragmented narrative emerges from the pattern of urban color, texture, and light.

I record these patterns in the structure of the textile. Warp and weft interweave in layers of experience. The curtain captures both the substance of our collective memory and the …

Empowerment Of People Of All Abilities, Kasia Matlak

Masters Theses

For my thesis, I sought ways to redefine disability, by focusing on people with lower limb amputations. I focused on the most troublesome part of their daily interaction with a prosthesis, which is a socket. My primary concern was to improve the experience with it, as it is where prosthesis attaches to the body. I looked at disability, prosthetics, body image, identity, and loss. After an amputation surgery, people experience a grief that is comparable to the loss of a loved one. Historically, some people deal with grief by creating and performing rituals. Those rituals have proved to be helpful; …

Surface, Object, Space, Susan Doe

Masters Theses

Considered primarily a form of painting, my practice adopts the languages of sculpture and installation to explore abstract constructions of personal and societal hierarchies. In this current body of work, I am crocheting architectural forms that blur the distinctions between surface, object, and space. Whether occupying pictorial space or actual space, simple patterned units coalesce into emergent forms through repetition and accumulation. I am drawn to malleable materials that allow for an indexical registration of the force of my hands and body. Working in a wide range of materials including paper, mylar, fabric, foam, plastic, sheet metal, wire, monofilament, and …

Perceptual Alchemy, Evan Voelbel

Masters Theses

The farther we peer into the depths of human consciousness, the subatomic realm of quantum physics or the vast expanse of the observable universe, the more our notion of an objective physical reality or a predetermined, public, external world is challenged. With each new door we open, an entirely new set of questions is revealed. The world we perceive is never a direct representation, but even knowing how constructed our perception of an external reality is, are we capable of letting go of it? Through perceptual alchemy, my work probes the threshold between our constructed reality and the ‘external world’, …

Identity Production, Boyang Xia

Masters Theses

What are we talking about when we talk about identity? People are likely to define themselves in terms of what is relevant to their time and place, in other words, context. This indicates that identity is not a fixed definition, but more of a malleable construction; it develops its attributes via context. I am constantly recalibrating the relationship between the two. Context is ubiquitous, unnoticed, coexistent and interchangeable. Identity is reflexive, fragmented, shapeable and fluid. Identity Production explores and unveils how identity is adapted and manifested in contemporary conditions, as well as its external validation which paradoxically defines this indefinable …

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 …

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 …

Deceptive Fragility : Characteristics And Fabrication Methods Of Extra Thick Weft-Knitted Spacer Fabrics, Anastasia Onegina

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates technical and performance capabilities of extra thick flat-knitted 3D spacer fabrics. Several combinations of knitted structures and fibers are suggested for thermal and impact protection, general insulation, architecture and construction. Methods of constructing three- to seven-layer spacer fabrics up to nine inches thick are explained.

The Untold Tale, Yan Zeng

Masters Theses

Inspired by Manchurian heirlooms and family traditions, I create intricate textiles as narratives that viewers can empathize with, vehicles for expressing my own memories and cultural background. I have told many stories through my textiles in the past, but my thesis tells a very special one: it is a story that I have been afraid to make known for nearly 20 years, a dark fairy tale based on my childhood traumas and experiences; it is the story of a girl who was lost in a deep forest and struggled to find a way out. My thesis collection is composed of …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Embracing Traditional Chinese Culture Through Design, Jiaxuan Li

Masters Theses

As a designer from China I am constantly focused on my passion for design of China, This interest comes from both my commitment to deep-rooted Chinese traditions, and my concern with regards to the gradual loss of traditional cultural values within contemporary society.

As a product designer, I really like designing daily object, through exploring the relationship between consciousness and behavior. I consider this connection in order to make objects more meaningful to users.

This project discusses the current situations of Chinese traditions and cultural values, and the challenges they face to survive in the contemporary world. My mission is …

P-Lax : Toys For Adults, To Play & Relax, Zhizi Liu

Masters Theses

Adults don’t play enough. There is so much emphasis on working and being productive in modern day life, but this can have negative effects—for an adult this can lead to high stress and a sense of guilt when one isn’t being productive. My mission is to help adults de-stress and take a break from work by reintroducing play into their day-to-day interactions. Toys for children are often used for educational purposes and to help enhance their creativity and social abilities; toys for adults can instead used to improve mood, and to help release pressure that is built up from everyday …

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 …

Sight Lines, Makia Sharp

Masters Theses

Through investigations of liminal phenomena, this written thesis explores the direct and indirect effects of time, light, architecture , and metaphysical space. Along with the work, it is an attempt to create a framing around these phenomena which are both banal and transcendent, and which exist of the edge of perception.