Art and Design Commons^™

What Does One Billion Dollars Look Like?: Visualizing Extreme Wealth, William Mahoney Luckman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The word “billion” is a mathematical abstraction related to “big,” but it is difficult to understand the vast difference in value between one million and one billion; even harder to understand the vast difference in purchasing power between one billion dollars, and the average U.S. yearly income. Perhaps most difficult to conceive of is what that purchasing power and huge mass of capital translates to in terms of power. This project blends design, text, facts, and figures into an interactive narrative website that helps the user better understand their position in relation to extreme wealth: https://whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website/

The site incorporates …

Navigating Through World’S Military Spending Data With Scroll-Event Driven Visualization, Hong Beom Hur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Catching up with the current geopolitical event is more important than ever these days. Anti-western nations like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea constantly challenge the world order set by the United States and its close allies. As a result, the world has seen a rise in military spending consecutively for the last several years. This data visualization project aims to provide an easy-to-read summary of military spending data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for hotly conflicted regions: East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Scroll-event-driven visualization implemented using Scrollama.js and D3.js combines text, map, and data …

What An Interesting Video To Put On The Internet (An Amusing Economic Indicator), Dahlia S. Bloomstone

Theses and Dissertations

My exhibition reconciles representations of domesticity, labor, and morality through the lens of sex-work (SW). It consists of video work, a video game, and free-to-take objects, where donation, the strip club, and the fish tank converge. My work concludes that SW is a timeless construct that will always exist even after reimagining multiple worlds.

Peru's Fishmeal Industry: Its Societal And Environmental Impact, Angel Vizurraga

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Peru is the biggest fishmeal-producing country in the world. It has exported millions of tons of fishmeal to various parts of the world since the 1960s. However, this industry has created many problems for the Peruvian people and their environment. Past research done on this topic has failed to include the negative impacts of the fishmeal industry. My project aims to exhibit the main issues that are affected or created by the fishmeal industry. I will talk about its impact on socioeconomic matters such as malnutrition and employment, as well as its impact on the environment and the wildlife population …

Girl In Action: Junior Bazaar, 1945-1948, Rose D. Bishop

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis provides an overview of Junior Bazaar, a short-lived magazine for teenage girls published by Hearst between 1945-1948. Under the supervision of art director Lillian Bassman the magazine featured a variety of aesthetic devices — such as photomontage, asymmetrical layouts, the selective use of color, and playful placement of graphic forms — in efforts to distinguish itself from other publications on the market and construct a visual space specific to its teenage readers. Bassman’s unconventional stewardship of Junior Bazaar made room for an up-and-coming set of photographers, including Richard Avedon, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Louis Faurer, and other …

Rise, Fall And Renaissance Of Graffiti, Georgina S. Hallowell

Capstones

In a losing battle against street artists, “Make your mark in society, not on society” was the statement written in bold letters on Mayor Ed Koch’s 1982 anti-graffiti campaign. Graffiti writers decided why not? We’ll do both.

New York has witnessed the rise, fall, and renaissance of graffiti culture. There was a time when a “mark” on your property was considered vandalism. Today, those marks are used to drive profit, attract tourists, keep neighborhoods alive and are more than welcome through the doors of museums and galleries around the world. From scribbled tags to murals, graffiti writers have completely changed …

Arts Et Métiers Photo-Graphiques: The Quest For Identity In French Photography Between The Two World Wars, Yusuke Isotani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the evolution of photography in France between the two World Wars by analyzing the seminal graphic art magazine Arts et métiers graphiques (1927-1939). This bi-monthly periodical was founded by Charles Peignot (1897-1983), the artistic director of the largest manufacturer of typefaces in interwar France, Deberny et Peignot. Arts et métiers graphiques has been recognized in previous literature as one of the principal vehicles for the modernization of photography in France, primarily because it functioned as an essential conduit for the radical practices developed outside the country. The interwar period is regarded as the watershed in the history …

Framing The City: Photography And The Construction Of São Paulo, 1930–1955, Danielle J. Stewart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Between 1930 and 1955 São Paulo, Brazil experienced a period of accelerated growth as the population nearly quadrupled from 550,000 to two million. In response, the municipal government undertook an aggressive public works program and commercial building boomed. Photographic representations of the cityscape were essential in directing modern São Paulo’s physical evolution because they reflected both the real—a chaotically growing megacity—and the ideal—a literally new, modernized space. This dissertation centers on four case studies of artists practicing different photographic modalities in order to analyze the symbiotic relationship between São Paulo's urban development and its photographic representation.

Construction sites, scaffolding, and …

Dance Of Exile: The Sakharoffs’ Visual Performances In Montevideo (1935–1948), Pablo Munoz Ponzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis explores the life-work chronology of the dancers and choreographers Clotilde von Derp (whose surname then was Sakharoff) and Alexander Sakharoff, who were exiled in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Buenos Aires, Argentina, between 1941 and 1948. During their stay in the Rio de la Plata region, the Sakharoffs stirred up the art scene by performing extremely detailed dances with great attention to costume design. This thesis begins with a review of the reception of the dancers’ performances by the artistic and cultural circles in Montevideo, arguing that the Sakharoffs’ “queer” trajectory resonated with the Uruguayan artistic community, influencing the creation …

North American Data, Joseph A. Burwell

Theses and Dissertations

North American Data fractures and reconfigures pre-existing narratives into new, unauthorized forms of storytelling. Core samples extracted from various narrative sources are reassigned new roles according to their proximity to each other. This paper functions as an introduction to the essential actors and their dramatic inclinations within fluctuating scenarios.

Rror, Carter D. Johnson

Theses and Dissertations

Building on common definitions of terms such as machine, human, and code, this paper presents a strategy for an art practice that engages with data that has been processed and the processor as actor or character. Material is presented in such a way that rules, guidelines, logic, code, coherence may be viewed as tools to be employed for the use of obtaining and retaining power and control. Presenting digital technologies not only as a mediating force upon physical bodies but also a part of those bodies, and, furthermore, as abject and thus positioned outside an ideological structure of consumer technology, …

Long Vacation In Bk, Doll Chao

Theses and Dissertations

The diary of a transcontinental search for self and place, a journey through obtuse politics, cultural oppression, and loneliness - this film is the document of a lost generation of Taiwanese youth and its conflict with China, swirling in a transpacific gyre of sound, image, and text.

Heavy Ink: A Documentary On The Comicbook Revolution, Renzo Adler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Heavy Ink is a documentary short focusing on the comic anthology magazine, Heavy Metal, examining its history as both a standout comic magazine, and how it fits into the larger tradition of comic books. What started off in 1977 as a sci-fi offshoot of National Lampoon ushered in a new era of comics by bridging the gap between American and European comic sensibilities with a talent pool from all over the world.

Heavy Metal would go on to have reverberations beyond comics into music, movies, and the global entertainment landscape of today. Heavy Metal introduced the world to artists such …

Native American Chic: The Marketing Of Native Americans In New York Between The World Wars, Emily Schuchardt Navratil

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Focusing on four key figures - Morris de Camp Crawford, John Sloan, Amelia Elizabeth White, and René d'Harnoncourt - this dissertation analyzes museum and gallery exhibitions of Native American art mounted in the United States, particularly New York City, during the interwar period, and documents the immediate and lasting impact these shows and their promotion had on the emergence of "Indian Chic" in women's fashion and interior design.

In the late 1910s, Crawford, a research editor for Women's Wear and honorary research associate at the American Museum of Natural History, mounted a campaign encouraging Euro-American designers to seek inspiration in …

Working Women: Contemporary Cinematic Costumes In "Desk Set" And "Working Girl", Karen Hummel Kinsley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The contemporary cinematic costume designer is a visual storyteller. Through the dressing, or undressing of the actor's body, the costume designer narrates the cinematic character's physical and psychological journey from the first frame to the final credits. The costume designer creates the character's image by selecting specific garments and accessories that will inform the audience about the character's relationship with his cinematic environment.

The focus of this thesis is to examine how the contemporary cinematic costume designer unifies contemporary clothing with the actor's body to narrate a cinematic character's story. In order to understand how the costume designer creates a …