Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons^™

Resonance, Jess D. Skyleson

Masters Theses

Resonance is a digital media installation intended to facilitate a deeper understanding of inter-connection within and between ourselves and others, and to depict how our voices live both within and beyond us. The exhibit is divided into two intertwining halves:

Externally, the piece involves creative communication between people, art mediums, and life experiences. This aspect includes the contributions of thirty patients, doctors, and caregivers who responded to one another’s artwork in a series of workshops led by the artist. Starting with the creative writing of patients, this was provided to a group of unrelated medical providers, who responded with visual …

Hunting, Feiyang Zhuang

Masters Theses

This writing is about fragility and revelation of technological systems. It considers how brokenness, delay, and opacity are not flaws but openings—opportunities to reimagine our relationship to technology as something grounded, sensory, and continuous with the natural and material world.

,, Yujia Gong

Masters Theses

I am still learning how to understand the world.

As I moved through different countries, cultures, and communities, I often found myself unlearning and rebuilding what I thought I knew. At times I felt unanchored, floating without a sense of safety or belonging. So I began to walk.

Walking became my way of reconnecting. With each step, I used my senses to notice the details around me: shadows cast by sunlight; life growing from soil; the presence of buildings and objects as quiet evidence of human existence. These elements — scent, light, sound, size, temperature — shape our perception of …

Breath, Void, Ground, Huichun Yang

Masters Theses

Before the sound, there is breath. Before the explosion, there is a threshold. Before the noise, there is silence.

Inspired by the physicality of balloons, this thesis explores breath as sonic material that carries memory, moves through bodies, and resonates across spaces. The balloon becomes a skin that holds breath: a force inhaling trauma, ritual, and intimacy. When released through mouth and latex, breath conjures alien, untranslatable voices that hiss and hum.

It begins with a balloon and expands with endless breath. The balloon becomes a site where the history, body, and voice disintegrate and reform. The pressure and tension …

Belonging In Memory, Yilin Li

Masters Theses

This book is a visual and textual exploration of belonging, memory, and the sublime found in the mundane. Through a combination of written reflections and curated artworks, it traces my artistic journey, showcasing how I search for belonging through memory, everyday life, personal witness, family dynamics, and cultural memory.

The first part delves into the intimate connections between everyday life and artistic inspiration, weaving together personal experiences, observations, and memories into imaginative narratives. The second part presents a chronological selection of my artworks, illustrating my artistic evolution. Initially, my work responded to China’s rapid urbanization, exploring fading personal and collective …

Unseen, But There, Xinyu Dong

Masters Theses

Pedestrians often arrive at the Michael S. Van Leesten Memorial Bridge in a hurry—rushing through daily routines—only to slow down or stop at its center. Here, they are drawn by the openness of the view, the rhythm of the wind, and a sense of pause that floats above the surface of the Providence River.

This thesis is an ongoing experiment in direct, sensory experience. It centers on this pedestrian bridge not just as a site of circulation, but as a space of unintentional stillness and layered perception. While many passersby are drawn to its scenic beauty, few pause to consider …

Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love, Jonathan Erick Guzman

Masters Theses

“Jotographía // Fagtography: On Amor Propio Radical // Radical Self-Love” is an interdisciplinary thesis that explores the intersections of queer Chicanx identity, photography, and performance as technologies of survival and self-construction. I construct a speculative archive of Chicanx queer experience through my tripartite personas: Barbí, Luke, and myself—collectively, the Guzman Triplets.

Through these embodied avatars, I embrace rasquachismo, camp, Catholic iconography, and hybrid photographic processes—including Polaroids, AI-manipulated imagery, anthotypes, and installation—to investigate visibility, fragmentation, and ancestral memory. Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s frameworks of la herida abierta and nepantla, José Esteban Muñoz’s concepts of disidentification and queer futurity, and bell …

The Blue Below Still Breathes, Yiyi Wang

Masters Theses

The Blue Below Still Breathes explores disappearance transformation rather than loss—a shift in visibility that reveals the pressures, absences, and structures shaping perception. Across interactive installations and print works, I examine how power operates through omission, fragility, and formal control. At the heart of this practice is printmaking, reimagined as a responsive, impermanent medium that challenges its historical association with fixedness.

The thesis installation features a 5x5 grid of thermochromic screenprints of a concrete wall, where viewer proximity activates a randomized sequence of heating panels. As heat raises the temperature of the surface, a field of blue gradually emerges, breaking …

Field Journal: The Excluded Middle, Carrie E. Kouts

Masters Theses

What does it look like to engage with organisms and landscapes at the periphery of anthropocentric value structures? How does one break the internalized myth that the “built” environment is excluded from the natural world? When does a hyper-mobile and hyper-commodified society confront the exponential crisis of animal death? Within this series of journal entries, field notes, collection observations, weird prose, and sensory musings, one will find questions on the nature of being human and the complex narratives of care we encounter in a world shared with more-than-humans. Each handwritten vignette and photograph from daily life weaves a non-linear and …

Transplant Transplant(Ed) Transplant(Ing), So Jung Yoon

Masters Theses

Boundaries shape our lives and identities. The tangible presence of boundaries becomes a medium for engaging with the world—such as who occupies a space and how, or what tools are deemed valid in a design process. These boundaries aren’t always visible; they’re embedded in systems, habits, and assumptions that shape how we move, create, and are recognized. They extend far beyond fixed geographies and the specific positions we occupy within them.

Transplanting is the process by which things are moved or move across boundaries in hopes of being planted, finding a place to stay. Though it can be a search …

For The Time Beings, Tori Hong

Masters Theses

For the Time Beings is a socially engaged installation and artist book exploring the material consequences and future possibilities of sociocultural time theories. Time, in the West, is typically associated with Newtonian linearity, while in the East, time theory relies on Buddhist principles. These epistemologies reinforce hierarchical and patriarchal structures. Centered on Indigenous Asian and Asian American perspectives, For the Time Beings challenges dominant ideologies of existing in time and space.

For nearly a year, I’ve burned handwritten prayers on new and full moons. The ashes of these prayers are incorporated into reverential drawings of chosen ancestors, made with charcoal …

The Dialectic Of Airless Space, Ophelia Arc

Masters Theses

The Dialectic of Airless Space is a cumulative, cross-disciplinary research project that explores ‘airless space’ as a somatic and psychological condition shaped by institutional environments. Unfolding over time through five interrelated books, the project weaves together writing, ephemera, textile sculpture, and drawing to archive the invisible architectures of bodily and mental experience.

Rooted In Embodied Making: A Notebook On Process, Vija Lietuvninkas

Masters Theses

This thesis takes the form of a wooden box containing an archive of fragments – scanned notebooks, sketches, photographs, emails, journal entries, and other materials – that trace a year of embodied, process-based inquiry. Rather than presenting a linear argument or a polished final product, the work reflects a nonlinear, exploratory methodology grounded in making, wandering, and self-reflection.

Born within the context of the 2025 Sustainability Design Lab, an interdisciplinary initiative at RISD examining the material culture of wood across design fields, this project documents the artist’s evolving engagement with green wood as both material and metaphor. Through practices such …

Show Time!, Georgia Oldham

Masters Theses

Time is always ticking and never easy to hold on to. Luckily, twisting over sketchbooks and doodling in page margins, sequential artists are on a mission to capture it for everybody. They’re even going to tell you a story along the way. This thesis explores my relationship to sequential art as it relates to time, storytelling, accessibility, and the performing arts.

Not Just Another 2000 Word Written Mfa Thesis, Taylor Cleveland

Art Theses and Dissertations

This thesis challenges the standardized academic expectations placed upon studio-based MFA programs, using the process of writing itself as a site of institutional critique. Emerging from a 27,000-word working draft titled Aesthetics of Real, this final text adopts the permitted format of an “extended artist statement” to expose contradictions within institutional frameworks. It resists the assumption that professionalism and compliance equate to intellectual rigor, arguing that true artistic inquiry demands risk, failure, and confrontation with systemic norms. Through works like 3MUSTANGS, Facades of Dallas (Hall), SuperPOD0043: An American Painting, and Babel’n On, this thesis reveals …

Grief As Slip: (How Little I Show) An Exploration In Clay, When Words Are Not Enough, Michelle A. Smith

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Grief as Slip (how little I show) implies that even as we acknowledge our mortality and the fleeting nature of life, we still only reveal a fraction of our true selves or our deeper realities. The ceramic artwork in this exhibition carries and conveys a journey through the present and remembered emotions of the artists’ personal narrative. By juxtaposing the tactile nature of clay with the ethereal quality of human experience, Smith contemplates the profound interplay between material transformation and emotional resilience. The exhibition’s intent is to translate the essence of complex emotional states into abstracted forms so they can …

Sacral Glitch, Kareena Naresh Solanki

Masters Theses, 2020-current

Growing up in a multifaith environment in Mumbai, I witnessed many religious sites and people with diverse beliefs. My parents always remained open-minded to other faiths, and my house remained replete with idols of deities of different religions. I studied Nichiren Buddhism, particularly the Lotus Sutra, as my mother began practising it along with her faith in Hinduism. Philosophical studies became a part of my life at the age of nine. Catholic prayers turned into rituals in my convent school days, and Islamic prayers resonated from afar. I often reflect on the influence of multiple religions in shaping my approach …

The Design Of Time: Envisioning The Future Through Science Fiction Production Design In The Alien Franchise, Josephine Spanier, Charles Howard

Honors Thesis

In filmmaking, the production designer works closely with the director and cinematographer to ensure cohesion and uniqueness in the film’s visual design. This collaboration often provides the designer with a strong degree of influence on the film’s final look, thus shaping the thematic and visual impact of a film on the audience. In highly stylized and fantastical genres, such as science fiction, production design plays an especially important role in creating worlds that may be entirely different from the one we currently live in, while still reflecting the real-world context in which the film was made. This phenomena can particularly …

Automation Of Javanese Shadow Puppets Using Machine Control, Kristian Rice, Yinson Tso, Mukhammadali Yuldoshev

Publications and Research

The virtualization of Javanese shadow puppetry (Wayang Kulit) offers a unique opportunity to preserve and revitalize traditional performance art through immersive digital platforms. This project explores the development of a virtual Wayang Kulit experience using real-time 3D engines like Unity/Unreal Engine while focusing on simulating the mechanics and aesthetics of shadow puppet performance. The puppets are designed using detailed 2D planes and rigged with skeletal systems to reflect the stylized motion of traditional puppetry. An aspect of this project is integrating an AI-driven control system that autonomously animates the puppets, learning from recorded puppeteer performances to replicate gesture, rhythm, and …

Unmeasured, Detached, And Isolated: The Legitimation Of A Domesticated Identity, Eva M. Agüero

MFA in Visual Art

Unmeasured, detached and isolated explores the lingering effects of colonialism on identity, behavior, and cultural perception through the lens of my personal experience as a Venezuelan immigrant in the United States. I investigate how colonial legacies—especially those codified through manuals of etiquette like Manuel Antonio Carreño’s Manual de Urbanidad y Buenas Maneras—continue to shape self-perception and societal expectations. Through video, sculpture, miniatures, and installation, I reconstruct a visual language that resists simplification and reclaims complexity. Engaging with the symbolic weight of tropical imagery, domestic spaces, and hybrid aesthetics, my work challenges Eurocentric frameworks and examines the figure of the migrant …