Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

I Don't Quite Remember It That Way, Margaret Lindon

Masters Theses

In the fall of 2020, during the first week of graduate school, I crashed on my road bike and suffered a big-time concussion. Like, lost-consciousness-and-forgot-the-whole-day kinda big. I became obsessed with this permanent memory deletion. Trying to remember the event was like trying to remember the first time I saw the color blue. Impossible without supplementary data or second-person observation.

Memory recall can operate like a game of telephone. When we remember something, we’re really just remembering the last time we remembered it. We accrue subtle adjustments to our memories that result in gradual omissions and distillations.

This process lost …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Finding Identity In Memories, Hyejun Youn

Masters Theses

What are the ways in which we form and build our identities and habits in both physical and digital spaces? How can our different uses of the digital expression which evolved from analog forms reveal traits and memories that we have forgotten or overlooked?

The way I define my identity through the analog media I collect correlates with the quality of the memories within my current schema, knowledge structures that represent typical instances of categories.

We interact with an infinity of objects from birth to death. Our collection of objects resonates more and more with memory and nostalgia as the …