Art and Design Commons^™

Complex Conversations: A Creative Exploration Into Language Used Over Direct Messages On Social Media Platforms, Arden Craft

Honors Theses

This paper details a series of paintings that explore how the language used virtually over direct messages (DMs) on social media platforms can allude to how complex notions of gender, violence, and behavior function in reality. This research questions how forms of communication or interaction exist within different spaces and contexts, as well as how the recontextualization of language can disrupt power and produce new forms of interpretation. This paper acts as a secondary source of knowledge in relation to the paintings under review and provides further explanation of their conceptual motivations. In particular, the paintings engage with Sara Ahmed’s …