Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

The Cunning Little Vixen: A Folktale Illustrated On Stage, Mikayla Reid

Masters Theses

This thesis paper reflects upon the costume design process taken by Mikayla Reid to explore how color choice and application within designs can help create storybook characters off the page and onto the stage. This concept is explored through the costume designs for the opera The Cunning Little Vixen, a production theoretically staged at the Alice Busch Opera Theater for the Glimmerglass Festival in New York. The paper discusses Reid’s attempt to create designs that still feel like watercolor illustrations, even when realized in physical garments. It follows her process as she tests different dye techniques in search for what …

Your New Best Friends: An Exploration Of Furby, Siri, And Other Sociable Electronics, Avery Forbes

Masters Theses

Your New Best Friends: An Exploration of Furby, Siri and Other Sociable Electronics is focused around interactive electronic systems and the effect these systems can have on our human psyches. My work focuses on two particular periods of development: the late 80’s to early 90’s, and the 2010’s to present. One period represents my childhood and the other my early adulthood. By comparing the two I can examine trends in the ways we engage with robotics and can better understand the ubiquity of electronically mediated interactions today. I utilize these new understandings to manipulate the capabilities of devices from both …

Accumulations Of (Not) Doing, Richenda Cope

Masters Theses

As I encounter life during a global pandemic, caused by a virus that has us all homebound, I continue my own struggle with a different virus that keeps me not only homebound, but bed bound as well. In this thesis project, I make my way around and through the questions of chronic illness, self-worth, productivity and a changing relationship to time that arise in this dual viral experience - situating the personal within a larger social/political context.

In And Of The Body, Nicola Difusco

Masters Theses

This practice traces information as it moves through physical and digital spaces, asking questions surrounding how technology alters meaning as it makes interpretations. Led by my own personal interests and the memetic bodies of popular culture I was embedded, questions arise surrounding how individuals communicate with and experience the networks they are embedded within. Furthermore, this practice expands to investigate what happens when the body becomes a technological interface, and how issues of ownership affect our interactions.

Contemporary Art Warfare, Zongxian Huang

Masters Theses

Being an artist represents a lifelong commitment to nonstop development, despite life circumstances. I fully utilized my two years at graduate school to develop a sustainable way of living an artist’s life by creating a standard operating procedure (SOP), guiding my research and practice. An SOP is a strategic method designed to reach an objective in a systemic manner. Mine shows it is possible for an artist to stay productive, creative, and healthy under high pressure, even during unexpected contingencies like the COVID-19 pandemic. My personal experience completing graduate school during a pandemic presents a possibility to other artists of …

The Story Of Water, Zhanyi Chen

Masters Theses

Propelled by questions about the genuine understanding of weather, I attempt to find various collaborative methods with water in different states in the hydrological cycle. Through these methods, I receive input from water directly, mediating with technologies humans use as a way to understand and perceive the world. The marks that emerge from these inputs are crypto-linguistic scripts that whisper water’s memories and characteristics, a form of gestural automatism where the immediate experience of (nature’s) creating is emphasized and the (human’s) conscious mind is diluted. This state of receptivity enables us to dissolve the hard shell of vision so we …

Bootstrapped: The Cowboy Nomad From Silicon Valley, Emily Bright

Masters Theses

Silicon Valley is a place that grew out of the legends of the frontier. It has followed in the footsteps of Hollywood Westerns, counterculture frontiersmen, and cyberspace cowboys.

In Silicon Valley, the frontier has been a physical and a metaphorical landscape found between everything existing and everything new-- between ideas of the future shaping technology and technology shaping ideas of the future. This seemingly vast open landscape allows the well-meaning cowboy to use his unique position of privilege to spot and solve systemic technological and social issues.

As these Silicon Valley Cowboys enter the frontier in search of new unclaimed …

The Ephemeral Altar & The Floating Grave, Hannah Suzanna

Masters Theses

Using tarot and machine learning, I actively de-compose the narrative of four disintegrating sites — a conservation cemetery in North-Central Florida, my Dad’s house in California, an abandoned parking lot near my apartment in Providence, RI, and myself as an inherently mortal human.

Rather than a tool for prediction, I see tarot as a system of decay — breaking down human experiences into archetypes to allow presence with our existence.

What happens when we look at other predictive technologies, such as machine learning, as means of breaking apart our reality too? When talking about science fiction or speculative fiction, a …

Objects And Images, Jack Lovell

Masters Theses

My work often involves photographic source material as well as surrealistic forms. Two primary influences, René Magritte and Gerhard Richter, can be seen as at odds with each other in many respects. Drawing parallels and distinctions, I explore relationships in the work of Magritte, Richter and myself.

Listening To The Unhearable, Ollie Rosario

Masters Theses

My work lives in the world of trees, lakes, oceans, sunrises, starlight, hurricanes, and mountains, the world centered on the rumbling sounds of the earth and water, the quiet roars of silence in the air, in space, in the depths beneath, and all that lives in between. In approaching this world, I have found myself unable to hear everything it shares. The hard to perceive, often soundless parts of environments — those facets of climate, the ground we stand on, the subtle changes in noise - are often unobserved, or under-observed, and underappreciated. I have cultivated a practice of seeking …

Feral Devices : An Additive Fabrication, Kat Jarvinen

Masters Theses

This collection of stories takes place in a nearby dimension, in which objects and entities that are obsolete, mundane, discarded, or overlooked, define alternative rules for value and purpose. Here, a broken machine suffers an existential crisis while a hungry spider explores its interior; a dog imagines life as a moth; a feral creature escapes from a woman’s mind; and a worker suffers spam email induced headaches. United by the destructive capitalist logic of planned obsolescence and an attraction to blue light, these characters traverse mind, matter, metaphor, and technology to find their way into new forms, reinventing themselves and/as …

Tracking Traces, Songan Kyung

Masters Theses

My art practice in RISD is to reveal violent narratives embedded beneath the surface of digital traces. By taking the role of investigator — crime 71 scene investigator, conspiracy theorist —, I experiment in ways to dismantle and reconstruct the ongoing social phenomena caused by the circulation of harmful digital traces. My practice comprises careful choices of protecting the ones harmed by the malignant digital traces and disclosing the toxicity.

Knowledge From Below, Meghan Surges

Masters Theses

This thesis elucidates artistic research on the programmed world and its brutal machines. It describes a practice that hones a deviant worldview while confronting ubiquity. Applying web scraping as an investigative tool and a filmmaking methodology, I work with archives of traffic images. The pictures, portraying the smart city through its scattered, self-surveilling eyes, offer a cinematic mirror of reality. I select, annotate, and edit sequences to expose agents of administrative violence. Rejecting a vision of progress that rests on exploitation, I aim to destabilize readings of surveillance and policing as beacons of safety. My work proposes models for seeing …

Cloak Wood, Thomas Brett

Masters Theses

Over the last two years, I have been developing films and video games that hybridise techniques of live action and animation. This has primarily been done by reconstructing and modifying scenes from 3D photogrammetric scans that I make of objects, people, and places, allowing me to assemble new, imaginary spaces informed by the actual architecture and dimensions of my surroundings.

The film Cloak Wood was entirety is shot on 16mm Kodak stock. The physicality of this analogue technique confers the modified virtual space and its inhabitants with the aesthetic integrity of the actual. The virtual space, constructed from real objects …

House Of Reincarnation, Xinyu Li

Masters Theses

In this book, I will introduce my practice as an artist interested in nightmares, monsters, and abandoned places. My works are personal, so I have designed a character as a guide for the book; the creature is another version of me. This book will describe the adventures of the creature as the main storyline; the stories run through Hakka cultures and my personal experience, and gradually explain the source of my inspirations and design process. With the creature as company, readers won't feel lonely while reading the book.

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

The Passing Show, Kathryn Fanelli

Masters Theses

The Passing Show, examines the interface between contemplative practices and the destabilizing effect of the carnivalesque. A repurposed early 20th century merry-go- round is reconfigured as a conceptual vehicle for renewing our attention to removing hindrances. The site-specific installation, titled Vimoksha, is viewed through the lens of the radical imaginary, investigating notions of karmic inheritance through a heuristic approach to material processes, personal history, kinetics and sound.