Art and Design Commons^™

Material | Adventure, Diana Wagner

Masters Theses

With the generous support of the RISD Grad Studies|Grant I traveled to London, England to deepen my thesis research of material libraries. This opportunity allowed me to visit the resources that inspired my enthusiasm for materials and to challenge the questions I posed in my thesis research, How we, artists and designers, learn from materials in the context of the library? The sources explored within this book highlight a growing community of academic and research based material collections in London, along with some exceptional exhibitions of materials and process in the context of the museum and archive.

Material Potential | Recontextualizing Material Libraries, Diana Wagner

Masters Theses

Material libraries are growing resources that offer an opportunity for artists and designers to discover a variety of materials. These collections are composed in a traditional taxonomy, pairing materials based on composition. Samples are typically commercially made and are displayed independent of context, means of production, cultural significance, and application.

Through making we learn a material’s potential: the transformation it can make, the form it can take, and the new composites we can create. This generative experience lives in the studio and workshop. But how can we introduce this language of process, critical thinking, and making to activate and challenge …

Not Not Real : Exercises In Styling, Sophie Mascatello

Masters Theses

As a generative process of visual form, styling and artifice are co-dependent. Styling mediates visual and sensorial elements for aesthetic benefit, and artifice produces a fantasy otherwise unattainable. Together they are a rebus — an orchestration of symbols and shifted realities — that impacts modes of representation and subsequent shifts in taste.

In Not Not Real, the logic of “real” life is moot. Relevance and subjectivity are the only fixed parameters that govern stylistic intuition. The image produced — however candid or authentic it may appear — is artificial. But this imagery supersedes reality in provoking aspiration, rendering the …

Learning To Live In Thick Interface, Jonathan Hanahan

Masters Theses

As media platforms shift towards more dynamic interfaces, the separation between user and content grows infinitely. While advertised as thin, light, and seamless, these platforms mask a thick and complicated space in which society must navigate. This is what I call the “Thick Interface.” The Thick Interface is the portal we use to toggle back and forth and through which we communicate. It is solid and porous, physical and digital, enhancing and diminishing. It may also be a combination of these things simultaneously, or none at all. My work highlights—rather than masks—the complexity of this space through interaction, participation, and …

Speculative Archives : An Index, Sameer Farooq

Masters Theses

Building an official archive, a comprehensive depository of cultural memory, is an impossible pursuit.My work centers around the question: what gets lost in the capture ? Responding to this problematic, I create “speculative archives”— setting the practice of archiving against the archive. In doing so, my display systems (including photography, film and writing) reveal countless ruptures, even blind spots, in the smooth surfaces of the archive: the invisibility of the archivist, the challenge of capturing ephemera, the inherent value bias in collecting, and the inexhaustibility of documenting a subject.

Speculating on the archive has consequence for design practice. From the …