Art and Design Commons^™

Body As Instrument: Crafting A Spatial Representational Language For The Dancer's Body, Avery Boland

Architecture Undergraduate Honors Theses

This project explored the intersection of dance and architecture using choreography, photography, and architectural principles through the development and application of a graphic notation system. Focused on the works of modern dance pioneer Martha Graham and photographer Barbara Morgan, the study tested the representation of the body in space through the use of Graham's choreography as captured by Morgan.

The results of the study demonstrated the effectiveness of the representational language in capturing the spatial dynamics of the human body in Martha Graham's choreography through the notation of “frame” and “plane”. Through a comparative analysis of the selected dances, the …

Raisin Fingers, Sophia Hatzikos

Graduate School of Art Theses

I am a sculptor that uses site reactive interactions, video documentation, and studio-based processes to explore landscape. I investigate my multifaceted relationship of self to my sensorial memory of landscape. Through themes of memory, loss and longing intertwined with my personal connection to water. I identify the intersections of sculpture and landscape seeking ways in which environments shapes decisions in the making process.

Through case studies of two distinct landscapes, Malaki and Tyson, I look at how these environments serve as sources of inspiration and material for experimentation. By identifying the ways in which I researched at each site respectively …

Uncanny Bodies, Samantha Neu

MFA in Visual Art

In “Uncanny Bodies,” unseemly bits are revealed, sensibilities are questioned, and solid ground morphs into shaky mounds. I delve into how the uncanny challenges traditional views and societal norms about the body. My artwork emphasizes the fluid and often unsettling experiences of physical existence, blurring the boundaries between personal and collective perceptions. Through distortions and manipulation of scale, the familiar is rendered alien in my sculptures, prints, and paintings. Through this ambiguity, I hope to offer space for the viewer to navigate their body’s emotional and physical relationship to the unknown.

Exhibiting The Museum: Interrogating Spaces Of Institutional Knowledge Production Through Interactive Print Design, Malcolm M. Church

University Honors Theses

This thesis explores the role of museums as active agents in the production of cultural and historical knowledge, focusing on the ethical implications of exhibition design and institutional practices. By examining the history of museums from ancient Greece to the modern era, with a focus on the Modern era, the research highlights how these institutions have perpetuated Eurocentric narratives and colonial ideologies through the collection and display of artifacts. Through interviews, participant observations, and historical analysis, this study uncovers the often-hidden decisions behind exhibition design and their impact on public perception. The culmination of this research is an interactive print …

Cards With Class: Formalizing A Simplified Collectible Card Game, Dan Ha

University Honors Theses

Collectible card games (CCGs) have been a wildly popular game genre since the release of Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering. These games revolve around their thousands of cards and the hundreds of thousands of interactions they can create with their many effects. For designers, it is an incredibly demanding task to ensure that every single card works properly and that each card’s text unambiguously conveys its intended behavior in all cases. The task only grows more difficult over time as the number of cards in the game grows and card effects become more complex or experimental. If the …

The Robot On The Hill, James Ryan

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

“The Robot on the Hill” is a rogue-like autobattler that procedurally models the state of the individual in the information age. The game abruptly transitions between diverse framings - a hill, a bedroom, a pond, a chessboard, the void - in order to highlight the disjointedness that is present in the informationalizing of self and reality. It dialogues with Byung Chul Han and Heidegger to portray what Han describes as a ‘narrative crisis’ in modernity and the devaluation of experience. When the value of experience diminishes and disintegrates, “all that is left is bare life, a kind of survival.” …

You, Me, And The Unknown: A Creative Exploration Into The Emotions We Feel About What We Don’T Understand, Selena G. Hall

University Honors Theses

I’ve always found the concept of fear and anxiety to be incredibly fascinating. As someone who grew up with extreme anxiety, I always wanted to rationalize it and figure out exactly why I felt that way. Anxiety is the inherent fear of the unknown and I wanted to know more about why we fear what we don’t understand, or in other cases, why we love it. I conducted a research project on our perceptions of the unknown that resulted in an experimental page layout print publication where I shared the participant’s views on the unknown through a visual storytelling medium.

Machines Of The Absurd: Leveraging Generative Ai For Creativity, Humor, And Playfulness, Tyler Sanders

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Machines of The Absurd is a collection of four projects exploring how generative AI can be leveraged for creativity, humor and playfulness.

1. neverOS — A node-based visual playground for interacting with large language models.

2. Other Calc — An iOS app with a calculator interface, where players can “calculate” text instead of numbers.

3. What Must Burn — An experiment where players type in text that can be dragged into a campfire to produce contextually appropriate sound effects.

4. Jazz vs Waffles — A turn-based comedy game, where players battle anything they type in.

Together, these projects make the …

Graphic Desire, Michelle Belgrod

Masters Theses

Before I knew about design, I knew about desire. A desire for the new, the beautiful, the promising. A desire that lives on a surplus of surfaces. On packaging, social media, on websites. A desire that makes the job of a graphic designer an object of desire itself. A practice that prioritizes aesthetics over meaning. Expectations over reality.

In Graphic Desire, I complicate the ways that desire affects both designers and consumers. Caught up in our own need for creative fulfillment, we often overlook our impact as the arbiters of desire. Under capitalism, we create work that over-promises a …

Function Follows Material, Pablo Ejarque González

Masters Theses

Dear Designer,

How often do we find ourselves lost in the design process, unsure of the next steps? It’s tempting to view every aspect of design as a problem needing a solution. However, function is not a problem. For a long time, I approached design from a problem-solving perspective, treating material as a secondary consideration after the idea had already formed. This approach needed to change.

This book is a journey—a map of material exploration. It is an embrace of experimentation and innate curiosity. Many of the experiments conducted did not culminate in finished furniture pieces, yet this does not …

Untitled, Lucia Steele

Masters Theses

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Industrial Tenderness, Elbert Girón

Masters Theses

Industrial Tenderness surveys the relationship between visual language, cultural expression, and diasporic practices through the design of functional sculptures. These designed objects seek to communicate cultural legibility, or intuitive cultural belonging, to Mexican-American peoples by challenging legacy notions of design language. Through a proposed design language framework and designed objects, Industrial Tenderness seeks to affirm a pluriversal practice of industrial design.

Legacy industrial design confines design language to a heavily prescriptive canon, resulting in a stark monocultural language that is unrepresentative of perspectives outside of a legacy dominant white eurocentricity founded in thinking from the Bauhaus and Ulm schools. Through …

Repair Rolodex: Exchanges, Changes, And Patchwork Parables, Ethan Howard

Masters Theses

This book is an index of nine exchanges with strangers whom I met online through email Listservs or by word of mouth. In these transactions, I offered to repair broken things for a trade-in-kind payment. Through the brief relationship between owner and designer, each interaction suggests that an object is almost never entirely obsolete despite its perceived obsolescence.

At the core of these trades is a grassroots protest of the landfill and a critique of our global capitalist commerce system. The apparent desire for and nature of these trades demonstrates that stories make our objects meaningful. Each interplay studies peoples’ …

Never Real Historians, Emily Bluedorn

Masters Theses

Never Real Historians is a graphic inquiry into how surfacing hidden histories can lead to a liberatory and layered design practice. It is both a record of my process and a template for future making and future ancestors. Mining inheritance can be an ambiguously murky territory, full of contradictions, collisions, and tension between the past and present. My hope is that this thesis functions as a model of navigating that terrain, by interacting with storied objects and ephemera, in order to revive forgotten and marginalized histories. By re-examining my own shared and personal inheritances, as an American woman designer living …

Lost Stories, Yuxuan Huang

Masters Theses

The owner of the laundromat by the corner of my temporarily sublet room in New York once told me his life story randomly on the last day I went to dry my bedding. We had never spoken before because we both weren't sure if the other spoke Mandarin.

It’s a long and intricate one, so long and intricate that he could write his own book and become the protagonist of a realist novel. If one word could describe this world and the life we all live, it should be “Wuchang.” According to various authoritative Chinese-to-English dictionaries, it could mean unpredictable, …

Unfurling Blue Carpet Memories, Sara Ahli

Masters Theses

Glass is an amorphous solid, existing in a liminal space, embodying indeterminacy. Its states of transformation from viscous flow to structural solidity carry the imprints of bodily influence. With the direct intention of using glass as a conduit to explore materiality, memory, and self-awareness, I construct a language of embodiment that arises through a series of performative encounters between my physicality and glass in the hot shop.

The mediating process I employ to create and arrive at the glass artwork I make is as necessary as its final form. Motivated by the desire to claim agency over my personal narrative, …

Creative Connections: Building Empathy To Foster Ecoliteracy Through Art Education, Jocelyn Salim

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates the potential positive impact of fostering empathy and understanding for the natural world through art education. Through action research, this study examines various teaching approaches, such as incorporating scientific knowledge, employing literature to discuss ecological themes, and engaging in participatory storytelling activities to cultivate empathy among elementary school children. The objective of this thesis is to explore empathy as a potential pathway to encourage children to foster connections with the natural world and develop compassionate traits, attitudes, and behaviors towards nature as they grow. The findings of this study reveal that children exhibit high levels of enthusiasm …

Half Dawn, Catherine Ashley

Masters Theses

By presenting these words on paper, I have given entry into a microcosm of recent research, questions, and creative explorations. There is potential for disconnection when trying to turn your head inside out and present it in a way that feels beautiful for other people. I’m trusting the moments of authenticity I’ve found in my wandering. Segue. Relationship. Gesture. Illusion. My musings all stem from notions of temporality. Time dances on the farthest ends of both immensity and desolation. I’ve spent stretches of time asking the people, texts, and experiments around me to define time in a way that I …

Umbrella And Jellyfish, Yanran Bi

Masters Theses

Rainy season arrives as soon as the summer begins in Shanghai. For some reason, I rarely remember to bring an umbrella with me. I have a lot of umbrellas, most of them are transparent ones bought at subway stations. When it suddenly starts pouring rain, umbrella vendors in Shanghai gather at each crowded exit of the subway sta- tions to sell umbrellas to people like me. The cheapest umbrellas they have are always the transparent ones. The whole city is turned upside down by the rain with its reflections on every street. Then a transparent umbrella opens up, then another, …

Lucid Dream: Embracing Uncertainty, Zhiyun Zhang

Masters Theses

Glass is a tool, a projection surface, a medium for optical phenomena. It creates a tangible link between physical space and perception, transcending the physical realm to reshape our sensory perceptions and resonate within our psyche, deepening our understanding. Inspired by cosmic and natural phenomena, my installations narrate the contemplation of the moon and the appreciation of rainbows. They reference historic optical technologies, incorporating glass, mirrors, light, darkness, and space to produce an encounter that extends beyond personal experience, resonating with our collective unconscious, uniting us in profound ways. The blurred boundaries between observer and observed, reality and illusion, sensory …

Modern Times, Will Beattie

Masters Theses

At the intersection of glass, photography and sound lies issues of perspective, framing, and information. These factors as well as the conceptual space between object and image offer an opportunity to explore the way we register narrative through contradicting signifiers. Glass historically has been used as an instrument to reveal spaces, moments, and phenomena previously imperceptible to the human eye. This rendering of previously unseen spaces through language, technology or vision, may work to reorient the viewers’ perspective and allow for a new understanding of the world. The power of disruption as a potential catalyst is central to my studio …

The Future Is Over, Dotan Appelbaum

Masters Theses

History is constructed out of the narratives by which we organize the substance of all that has ever happened. Our understanding of the contemporary moment is determined by how we shape our history. The future is a promise that emerges from how we contextualize our place in time.

This thesis starts by acknowledging that the futurity promised by enlightenment liberalism is inconceivable in the face of contemporary horrors and climate catastrophe. Given this reality, what are we doing as designers? With a Benjaminian understanding of and a Foucauldian approach to history, this thesis constructs a history of design that follows …

So Far So Good, Cooper Goldman

Masters Theses

What is the most beautiful object in the world?

The thick, heavy, white, porcelain diner mug.

Describe what you make…

Home goods and furniture. Crafted with attention to detail, with materials that you can feel good about.

Why do you make what you make?

Through the elevation of ordinary objects, we can elevate our daily routine.

Soft Procedures, Alec Figuracion

Masters Theses

Looking through the soft lens — from the vantage point of a place one calls home, and steered by an interiority that feels a little too much sometimes — I am interested in the hazy, undefined subjects and instances that occur around the peripheries of our lenses: fuzzy imprints of memories, shifting notions of home, and shapeless narratives. Working primarily with the moving image, I investigate the multiple threads that might exist between them, and persistently shift and adjust the focus ring on the camera lens so as to embrace and celebrate multiplicities, and our collective definitions of softness.

To The Dogs Or Whoever, Jacqueline Walker

Masters Theses

My creative process is inspired by the natural world and its inevitable conflict with humans. Through intricately layered screen prints, repurposed furniture, or reimagined animal hides, I craft narratives depicting the complex interactions between animals and humans, examining their conflict and the ensuing consequences. I weave layers of information and symbolism from natural history, behavioral ecology, music, and personal experience into each piece. This thesis explores my artistic practice, discussing its underlying values, and examining the influences and stories behind each piece. Focusing on the narrative of the animal, my body of work strives to cultivate empathy towards them and …

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 …

Moving Studio, Emilia Miekisz

Masters Theses

This collection of essays chronicles my journey through the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), exploring the concept of a “moving studio” and its influence on my creative process. From the fluidity of morning routines to the comfort found in Sunday pancake traditions, the essays delve into the intersections of personal experiences, artistic inspiration, and technological innovation. Through reflections on animation projects like “Wakey Wakey” and “Mr. Fragile,” I examine the transformative power of storytelling and the emotional connections fostered through my work. The essays also explore the evolution of perspectives, from initial resistance to embracing …

Folding (And Unfolding): A Site-Responsive Strategy For Reusing Construction And Demolition Waste, Jennifer Ansley

Masters Theses

Discarding—in its most reductive formulation— is a sorting operation that makes distinctions between materials (as well as objects, people, communities, and landscapes) based on perceived value. In her book Waste of the World, Nicky Gregson, therefore, argues for a more careful collection-curation strategy that revalues and re-signifies “waste” to make it available for repair and reuse. Gregson, however, points to limited space and infrastructural capacity as a potential barrier to the development of new material handling strategies. My design responds by proposing a network of walls and paths that operate in each of the sites I’ve identified as an …

New Craft: Craft Practices In The Digital Era, Paulina Bereza

Masters Theses

Advancements in technology point to a thriving future through the allure of new tools and the promise of enhanced performance. With the current environmental crisis, military invasions and broader global conflicts, how can we utilize new digital media in a way that dismantles oppressive positions of power? Looking towards the future, I explore the potential of materiality and new methods of making, to reshape our relationship with the environment and each other. I collaborate with newly adopted forms of intelligence, artificial and automated, to express and reconcile the accelerated cultural shift. From ancient fibres to digital circuits, what will the …

Absence Leaves A Mark: Illustrating Filipino Migrant Stories, Nina Martinez

Masters Theses

From July to October 2023, I volunteered at Damayan Migrant Workers Association, a New York City-based grassroots organization run by Filipino im/migrant workers dedicated to combatting labor trafficking. Every meeting opened with the same reminder: stories shared in this room do not leave it. Illustration became a tool for respecting the privacy of the members, many of whom were undocumented. Avoiding faces, I copied down objects, places, maps, and handwriting.

Absence Leaves a Mark explores the idea of illustration as field note when working with migrant populations. Beyond depicting visual witness, illustrated field notes can contain findings from research and …