Art and Design Commons^™

It Takes A Muscle: Wholes, Holes, And Other Voids, Saar Shemesh

Theses and Dissertations

IT TAKES A MUSCLE¹

In the BELLY of the BEAST, the HUMAN

in the deep end of a SWIMMING POOL

in a GRAVE, looking up/out from within

at the base of a CRATER, ABYSS, PIT

the room as a CRADLE, INCUBATOR

architecture as MOTHER MOULD.²

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¹ Title is borrowed and abbreviated: Spectral Display, “It Takes A Muscle To Fall In Love,” 1982.

² For what American-English delineates as ‘mold,’ British-English uses ‘mould’ and is more specific in its technicality. The former doesn’t distinguish in spelling between mold (fungus) and mold (mould). I’m not particularly a fan of …

Manufactured By Nature: Growing Generatively Designed Products, Mohammad Jawad

Theses and Dissertations

Mass production and assembly lines are yesterday’s manufacturing methods. They have exhausted Earth’s resources and limited the possibilities of design in terms of both form and material, prompting designers to search for new processes. A new generation of making includes biomimicry-inspired technologies such as 3D printing and parametric simulation, which have transformed the production paradigm. Utilizing nature as industry, this thesis explores the possibility of “growing” designed objects by employing nature’s own processes and resources. It integrates bio materials, generative design and additive manufacturing to produce objects for a post-industrial world. The project outcomes employ natural minerals, crystallization and 3D …

The Curiosity Of Con, Petrified Breath, And An Accident Known As Blue., Steven Randall

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis installation emerged from an interest in visualizing breath. The resulting work came to exist at the intersection between art, biology, and performance.

The unicorn tapestries were used as a generative point of departure to explore the preservation and transformation of images through time, by time, and with time. Reproductions of the six tapestries were each etched into paper and then submerged into solutions of Phenol Red dye, Ferric Ferrocyanide (also known as Prussian Blue), and various forms of sodium chloride. Exhaled breath was used to encrust these images of the tapestries into physical objects which gradually crystallized and …

Dispersal: A Multidisciplinary Investigation Of Plant Life, Alexandra E. Arzt

Theses and Dissertations

Using plants as a basis for exploring the interstices between the human and nonhuman, this thesis investigates ideas of awareness, intelligence, deep time, animism, and the fluctuating human perception of the agency of Nature. It outlines environmental art practices since the 1950s involving vegetal life. In addition, the paper provides a critical analysis of plant perception of Jakob von Uexküll’s work and theories of vital materialism and “critical plant studies” while noting recent studies in plant neurobiology. In my work, plants become active participants via their movement, seeding, and smell. This study takes the form of imitation, purposeful symbiosis, anthropomorphism, …

Expanding Eco-Visualization: Sculpting Corn Production, Jennifer E. Figg

Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation expands upon the definition of eco-visualization artwork. EV was originally defined in 2006 by Tiffany Holmes as a way to display the real time consumption statistics of key environmental resources for the goal of promoting ecological literacy. I assert that the final forms of EV artworks are not necessarily dependent on technology, and can differ in terms of media used, in that they can be sculptural, video-based, or static two-dimensional forms that communicate interpreted environmental information. There are two main categories of EV: one that is predominantly screen-based and another that employs a variety of modes of representation …

Speed And Resolution In The Age Of Technological Reproducibility, Shawn Taylor

Theses and Dissertations

The rate of acceleration of the biologic and synthetic world has for a while now, been in the process of exponentially speeding up, maxing out servers and landfills, merging with each other, destroying each other. The last prehistoric relics on Earth are absorbing the same oxygen, carbon dioxide and electronic waves in our biosphere as us. A degraded .jpeg enlarged to full screen on a Samsung 4K UHD HU8550 Series Smart TV - 85” Class (84.5” diag.). Within this composite ecology, the ancient limestone of the grand canyon competes with the iMax movie of itself, the production of Mac pros, …