Art and Design Commons^™

Let's Meet Over There / Eury Kim., Eury Kim

Masters Theses

Small communities that were once reliant on the land for basic sustenance progressively grew into large urban states. Our current cities manufacture items that are exchanged for other goods, by building factories that exploit resources from the ground. These commodities are providing much more than just food and shelter. Industry makes sustenance a secondary need to production by objectifying nature.

Italian writer Italo Calvino compares the weight of two Industrial Revolutions, depicting the first with “rolling mills” and “molten steel,” the second “with bits of information that flow” also noting that everything we “value for lightness quickly reveals … unbearable …

The Line That Splits, Zahra Jewanjee

Masters Theses

The body of work I have created since beginning my MFA has been informed and impacted by my research into various inter-connected subject matters: subcultural spaces, the behaviours of crowds, micro and macro and territories and systems. These have been the philosophical and conceptual rationale of my studio practice. Meditation on these concepts is an important part in the preliminary stages of my process and the praxis of my studio work has been to interpret and implement these ideas. In many ways, this process suggests its own direction. I had no exact endpoint in mind but wanted to be driven …

Re-Creation : A Package Design For Daily Life, Wei-Hao Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis grows out of my observations of and inquiries into daily scenes,+ which are wrapped within what I am calling a package. The human mind often puts daily encounters into manageable packages to facilitate interaction with them. This process, however, makes us dull or neglectful. Looking into daily scenes allows me to unpack these packages and reflect on ubiquitous objects, notions and actions so that I am able to see them anew. To me, it offers a break from the habitual responses in life.

Re-creation: A Package Design for Daily Life intends to create a similar occasion for my …

Addicts Of Nostalgia, Samuel Robert Campbell Drake

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I will reflect on issues of nostalgia through a series of work based upon the landscape where I grew up. I discuss how my paintings stage themes and negotiate criticality towards memory. The writing analyses my engagement towards the collaging of documentary and fictional sources: and how my paintings seek to dispel legibility and embrace slippage. Alongside discussions of personal experiences, I talk about the relationship of distancing in my practice, concerning tangible and geographic detachment. The thesis expresses my adoration for the history of British painting, and my efforts to internalize its traditions. Moreover, this investigation …

Biomatters : Future Of Biology As Material Source, Tareq Alzawawi

Masters Theses

Through the history of human evolution, we evolved dependent on many different biological species, which led us to understand the significance of biomatters cultivation. Biomatters are materials derived from living or once-living organisms which are or were subject to biological growth. The biomatters we use, need, and waste were and continue to be a major resource. Wheat, wood, and wool are all examples of a biomatter, yet each serves a different need. Given the range of current threatening environmental concerns, all rooted in our species treating nature as never-ending material resource, we need reactions and solutions that are urgent. Biomatters …

Bitter Son, Adam Chuong

Masters Theses

This thesis concerns itself with centering the experiences of Asian Americans in order to better understand the complexities of the Asian American diasporic experience. The title of this thesis, 苦儿, roughly translates into English as “bitter son,” and is phonetically pronounced in Mandarin as “queer.” It lives directly at the intersection of these identities — Asian, American, Queer. This body of work is an act of making space and taking up space in an institution and discipline that has not largely been concerned with minority identities, or when it has, it has been misguided and prone to tokenism. It is …

Mindful Interactions, Shreyans Bhandari

Masters Theses

Mindful Interactions illustrates how we’ve become addicted to our smart-phones, and how its use in our everyday life affects our physical, social, emotional health and wellbeing. This design study proposes four product designs that make us aware of using apps, and compel us to reconsider their use during bedtime, mealtime, on-the-go and at home. As our pocket sized devices continue to evolve, the outcome of this thesis becomes a case study for rediscovering and applying the “human” in human centered design.

Pekka : Social Software To Improve In-Game Dynamics, Yu Mo

Masters Theses

Video games are like virtual cities. Similar to towns in the real world, virtual cities contain facilities and communities represented by game elements and players. There is a question for us: Can a game be a better city?

To answer the question, we need to understand what a good city looks like. Generally, a good city needs sound facilities and harmonious communities. Similar to a real city, we need to build more advanced game elements and peaceful game communities to make the game to be a better city. Games like Paragon have failed because they lacked game communities, even though …

Works And Process, Alex Hsu

Masters Theses

This thesis is a collection of furniture and objects that seek to embody the harmonious pleasantness of things through thoughtful consideration of their aesthetics, utility, and place. It reflects on the ownership and creation of objects and the role they play defining who we are. More specifically, it’s a reflection on how where I’ve come from and learning how to create have influenced these complex ideas. It’s a document that looks inward and serves as a manifestation of my developing process and its effects on my identity as a result. It grapples with my desire to create things that are …

Sky Is Sinking Below The Trees : Two Years Of Documentation And Observations, Xuelun Li

Masters Theses

I see landscape through my own eyes, hands and body, and also through the lenses of Chinese poetry, calligraphy and ink painting. These art forms are rich in metaphor. The way they imagine and depict landscape is romantic, often including observations on dual concepts as lightness and heaviness, movement and stillness, change and stability, all of which have inspired this collection of work.

These furniture pieces include benches, tables and lamps. They are abstracted landscapes, to spark imagination about natural forces and transformations, both through the process with which they’ve been made and through their final forms. I engage with …

American Slavic : And Other Writings, Zac Banik

Masters Theses

My current cycle of work deals with the exploration, digestion and reinvigoration of traditional Slavic craft and material culture with goal of contributing to a contemporary design vernacular which eschews the idealization of Western-European forms and stands on its own: aesthetically discrete and externally respected. This line of inquiry arose from my own journey to understand myself as a Slavic-American; what it means to be such a thing; how to reconcile assimilation against perceived authentic identity and what value the voice of the diaspora can bring to the discourse of the old world. The outward mission of this project is …

Glossary I : Graduate Thesis, Eli Backer

Masters Theses

Situated across various contexts and spaces– studio, domestic, gallery– Eli Backer’s work explores open collaboration with machines, often producing multiples to reflect on, obfuscate, and to futilely hold the space and shape of loss. In this text, she surveys radio stations, music, writing, and art that has formed and driven her practice and sets a framework for the limited continuation of this document.

Stepping Aside, Juan Pablo Gutiérrez García

Masters Theses

Over time, our connection with materials has changed. Centuries ago, artists interacted with just one material for years, gradually integrating the knowledge of its different properties into their existing expertise. They were learning processes which were acquired through the sum of different personal experiences and the reciprocal action between artist and material. Now, times run fast; we are exposed to a wide range of materials, and knowledge is indirect. We learn through books or by copying established industry processes, replacing our practical experiences. New potentialities of material are not sought frequently, and we end up validating only what has already …

Standards, Rules, Setting, Robert Mcconnell

Masters Theses

Greetings. Welcome to Standards, Rules, Setting. This short preamble serves as a user guide to the material that follows. It is, essentially, a set of standards that govern the organization and progression of the various items in this publication.

Everything in this book has been conceived and constructed in line with the Graphic Design Thesis Book Protocol. As my body of work deals with the communication of messages and the manipulation of their governing conventions and norms, this publication — as well — has been organized along similar principles.

There are five types of components in this thesis book: sections, …

Distance Is A Place, Zhiqing Guo

Masters Theses

Distance is a Place documents a body of work and a process — a journey in translation, where a quality of feeling becomes an effort of physical capture in jewelry.

The desire to reveal how a deep responsiveness to the atmospheric distance of the sky is associated with an innermost nonverbal place of refuge motivates me to make perceptible this awareness for contemplation. Incorporating photographic images of the immeasurable dimensions of sky within translucent resin, a spatial distance collapses into wearable, tangible stillness to be worn on the body as an eternal present. 8

Floating, Nina Shishkina

Masters Theses

My writing is influenced by the concept of Montage. It has bits of readings, thoughts, memories. Everything is carefully picked and curated to inform the viewer of the ideas behind the work.

This book is aiming to explain the context of the time and space I was born and raised. The nineties in Russia were an extremely dynamic space. The flow of information, ideas, cultural events were enormous. Everything coexisted. the real democracy and freedom, as now it would be described. It was a dark time, full of hope and expectations.

Unfortunately for the reader, this text is not that …

Where We Are : Where We Thought We Were Going, Nathan Prebonick

Masters Theses

In this thesis I will discuss ideas of place, space and repurposing as they relate to my paintings. By tying these ideas back to specific hometown sites, I will trace the evolution of ideas back to their genesis to provide context for the aesthetics of the work. I reference the texts of Robert Smithson and Tim Cresswell, who wrote about transitive notions of place, as well as David Joselit, who’s “Painting Beside Itself” essay focused on painters concerned with the question of how painting enters a network. I hope to use these texts, in conjunction with personal descriptions of sites …

Plenty : Wanting, Choosing,, Overwhelming Unloading, Christopher Cote

Masters Theses

We seek well-being from products and fall prey to the media that promotes them to determine our wants and needs as equal. Consumption becomes an obsession. At some point we accumulate so much that we feel the need to organize or cleanse what’s overwhelmed us.

To highlight the aesthetics of consumption, advertisement, and brand proliferation, I turn their tactics against themselves. Plenty: Wanting, Choosing, Overwhelming, Unloading explores, points out, embraces, and edits the complexity we live within. With the hope of better navigating the abundance of consumer choice and its visual bombardment, Plenty tracks and exposes the cycle of material …