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, Nevertheless,, Ji Yoon Chung

Masters Theses

Derived from transitions, my artistic practice is an act of condolence for the transient presence that takes time and indulges every process as an acceptance of loss.

Over the years, I have moved between distinctive regions and cultures, only to be disoriented by mementos that are residues of a seemingly in- accessible past. What remains is to witness the vanished moments that evoke associated memories. I tend to solidify the volatile condition of transition by carving a temporary fragment on a permanent surface to make the ephemeral, eternal. The attempt to preserve a transitory phenomenon through archives by utilizing digital …

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 …

Expanded Skin, Jihoo Kim

Masters Theses

Our digital interfaces have been degrading human sensory intelligence by limiting our body to only vision and the first two fingers. Despite the high level of available technologies, we do not fully utilize them due to our lack of awareness of its applicability in more various aspects than just media being consumed. It is also because of its inaccessibility in terms of human–computer interaction (HCI) beyond our sense of sight and touch screens. Those technologies have been key elements in all of my works, since my ultimate position is to redirect the technology in a way that could enhance human …

Bug Chaser, Peter Rogers

Masters Theses

The veins of the leaves were bustling roadways, complex interactions that occurred at such a distance from my own anthropocentric understanding, they may as well have inhabited their own universe.

Dwelling within the infinite wonder of these microcosms, I coined myself a nickname that I abode within intimately: Bug Chaser. Perhaps I had heard the term on the news, or caught one of the teachers use it in passing, but as far as I was concerned, the term was entirely of my own creation.

“I’m a bug chaser!” I announced triumphantly to my kindergarten class.

“You mustn’t use that word,” …

Under / Over Looked, Kopal Seth

Masters Theses

Across the stages of migration, I have confronted emotional and social complexities. The farther I am from my roots, the more I want to strengthen my connection to India. Through a process of observation and reflection on every day, grows the desire to house a cultural identity within my work. Here, encounters between past, present and future layer atop history and memories.

To reclaim the kindred character of the craft culture of my country, I rediscover those values that resonate within me through recontextualised forms, clay acts as my drawing tool to outline social structures, psychology, traditions and nostalgia.

Web Trauma And Haunting Images : Experimentations On Materiality, Installation, And Operation Of Screens, June Yoon

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to compose dynamics among the screens, images, and space for viewers to confront what we easily ignore: the haunting ghosts of mistreated humanity in this age of web-trauma.

An Exploration Of Multisensory Practices And Its Value In K-12 Art Education, Melissa St Pierre

Masters Theses

In the past few decades, it has been established that the dominant model of art education focuses on a reductive and rigid approach to building knowledge, enforcing conformity of the mind and often dulling curiosity. Making sense of these limitations, the current study delves in an exploration of multisensory practices, an approach that might result in considering options for redesigning the system to support positive change. To do so, my methodology includes a literature review and a case study I conducted with high school students in the 10th grade. The review pertaining to the science and theory behind human senses, …

Encouraging Creative Behavior Through Art Education, Elaine Li

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I discuss different strategies that encourage creative behavior through high school art education that I argue would have benefits beyond the limits of art. By examining theories around creativity and creative behavior through particular published sources including Ken Robinson’s (2011) Learning to be Creative, Theories of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (2008), and the Handbook of Creativity by Robert J. Sternberg (1999), I analyze how creativity functions on a psychological level. Additionally, in order to provide practical examples, I examine a number of art programs designed specifically for high school students where the focus is on the development …

In The Flesh, Courtney Sierra Johnson

Masters Theses

This thesis is written in two parts:

Part one discusses the history of artistic swimming and its correlation to understanding the fluidity of gender. I adapt the analysis to interpret the underlying theme of critical theory. Tying to my work, I use the notion of the fountain to justify the theory of abjection towards the body and the suppression of natural bodily behaviors within society. Furthermore, the fountain explores water as a symbolic place of equality and gathering.

Part two was written during quarantine of the Coronavirus pandemic. It describes my inability to complete my original thesis and how my …

Generating Tension : Memorial Of Sexual Slavery, Mary Park

Masters Theses

War crimes, such as slavery and rape can lead to hatred between countries of perpetrators and victims, souring political relationships for generations. Memorials of these atrocities are the physical indication of an effort, however nascent, to continue the dialogue and keep questioning the tragic history. The memorial as a reminder of a specific incident, not only changes the relationship of surrounding spaces within the site but also between different groups that are engaged in that specific history.

In South Korea, the history of sexual slavery by the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II has been a major cause of …

Envisioning Work : An Autism Friendly And Anxiety Free Office, Naixin Ren

Masters Theses

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) refers to a broad range of conditions characterized by challenges with social skills, repetitive behaviors, speech and nonverbal communication. It is estimated that worldwide 1 in 160 children has ASD, and in China, about 1 in 69 children has ASD.

There are many successful educational environments specially designed for people on the spectrum to support learning, understanding, and behaving. However, after graduating, it is usually very hard for people on the spectrum to move toward independence because there is a huge difference between school environments and office environments.

Most office environments are designed to meet the …

The Things Of Mind, Yini Luo

Masters Theses

My thesis research shows my thinking and reflection on environmental changes around me in the past and especially the past two years. Through the experience between the city and nature, my research has clarified my different perspectives and explored the expression and reproduction through the print media and glass media.

Acoustic Signatures: Their Study, Representation, And Agency In The Experience Of Architectural Spaces, Nathalie D'Hennezel

Masters Theses

I am proposing to engage sound in the design of space through the representation, study, and creation of acoustic signatures.

Living Together : Revisiting The Sro + New Forms Of Collectivity, Elizabeth Parker

Masters Theses

The current affordable housing crisis has reached a boiling point. Home prices are increasing at double the rate of wage gains, and almost half of all renters in the United States are considered costburdened (spending 30% or more of their income on rent). There simply isn’t enough affordable housing available to meet the growing demand and people are being priced out. The housing market, as it stands, is in desperate need of re-examination.

Options that better reflect the demographics of growing cities and promote inclusion are of vital importance for a sustainable future.

This directed research project responds to the …

Adapting Home : Residential Development And Domestic Comfort In Vermont, Mikéla Sumner

Masters Theses

Vermont is experiencing a loss of “ruralness” as social insulation replaces physical comfort as the driver of residential design. Furthermore, the pre-packaged comfort often associated with social insulation requires an upfront cost. The variety of Vermont’s housing stock is limited, as most homes are single-family and 36% of Vermonters are currently cost-burdened, meaning they spend over 30% of their income on housing. Ultimately, there is a shortage of housing that can affordably meet diverse comfort needs. Without the ability to adapt the home over time, in the tradition of the local Vermont home, the house is only compatible with specific …

He Makes The Figs Our Mouths To Meet And Throws The Melons At Our Feet, Josh Meier

Masters Theses

He Makes the Figs Our Mouths to Meet and Throws the Melons at Our Feet investigates the relationship between the painted image and the cast subject. By compressing the visual contradictions of pictorial and physical space, my work argues for a simultaneity of conditions and emotions. I am interested in how two material realities can hybridize to produce a new, unanticipated, re-imagined self-portraiture. This thesis contextualizes my recent works within historical frameworks and discourses including other artists’ writings and artworks, philosophies of abjection, feminist and queer theories of embodiment, poetry, film, and stream-of-consciousness memoir.

These Inadvertent Marks, Thomas Wilder

Masters Theses

These Inadvertent Marks is a photographic investigation of scuffs, stains, residue, scratches, holes, and blemishes as a complex set of inadvertent marks which possess an inextricable relationship to the human intention to find and make meaning in the world. Excluding marks that are clearly the result of highly substantial accidents, I look to consider those which are largely deemed trivial and peripheral as a means of renewing perception and surrendering to the unconsidered. The photographs included are the result of a process of discovery and close consideration through wandering in my local surroundings: urban streets, private homes, airports, bathrooms, alleys, …

The Knots On The Underside Of The Carpet, Lily Colman

Masters Theses

A woman enters marriage, guided by a rich lineage of strong, lifelong marriages, yet is also caught in a web of misplaced ideals and expectations deferred by culture. She carries the weight of these histories, as well as her own expectations. Throughout history, women have been minimized and shoved into their own separate, domestic “spheres.” Future generations inherit these traumas, which in turn affects how they experience life. When a woman realizes her marriage is not what it should be, that she has been turned into a flat and unfulfilled version of herself and ultimately files for divorce, the weight …

Make Yourself At Home, Han Seok You

Masters Theses

“Make Yourself at Home” is a personal journey of self-documentation to discover a definition of “home” and family, and to reenact the missing scenes from my youth. As a child who grew up in many different places far away from home, I missed out on many family moments and a sense of belonging. As a South Korean passport holder who has lived mostly in North America, my identity is unresolved. I find myself in the balance between Korean and American. With the progression of this project, I try to reconcile my past in order to gain an understanding of my …

Watermarks : The Catalogue For Home Enthusiasts, Susana Oliveros Amaya

Masters Theses

Not just when tricks are revealed as tricks, but also when they become something else and materials still push one direction but then take a different turn. The wardrobe does not quite fit in your Ford Ka, the shelves are not exactly straight, the bed does not fit the mattress and the cabinets do not line up. The tension between ideals and use opens a space for re-appropriation, one that can reveal and turn its socioeconomic codes against themselves. Perhaps these are precisely the moments of friction when these ideological watermarks can be disrupted.

Madrepora, Elizabeth Burmann Littin

Masters Theses

Exploring materiality and how we’re inextricably entangled with it, this thesis dive into bodily, aqueous, and political engagements for dissolving the human project of separating nature from culture and bodies from environments. This dematerialization practice driven by discursive means has served as an excuse for the industrial exploitation and abuse of the less seen.

Infused by the material turn in feminist theory, I propose to think with materiality in all its wet, slimy, and dusty ongoingness as a way to craft from the living and dying processes that we embody as current wanderers among contamination, scarcity, and ruins.

Proposing a …

My Millennial Asian Fetishized American Fantasy, Seyong Ahn

Masters Theses

The perspectives that I present throughout My Millennial Asian Fetishized American Fantasy are South Korean-centric, biased, absurd, skewed, unfair, and real.

Instead of being nostalgic, the contents introduce questions—ones that persist as I examine my design practice. They open a process of dialogue with the present, while provoking a consideration of the future:

1) If I am a product of capitalism and globalization, how might I better interrogate and define my cultural DNA?

2) What is my approach to the evolving conception of graphic design under new (technological, ethical, ontological) conditions?

3) What interests and concerns truly engage me, such …

A Very Large Array, Hilary Dupont

Masters Theses

The Very Large Array is a radio telescope in a remote area of western New Mexico. An array is a single telescope made out of multiple satellite dishes. The satellite dishes move in and out on tracks to focus on different distant points in the solar system. These multiple dishes are functioning together to look at one single point, the combined powers of the satellite dishes results in a sharper focus.

This book is an array. The objects included are my observations, interests, experiences and ideas. My thesis is a point in the distance, and I am looking at it …

Counter Formation, Fabian Fohrer

Masters Theses

Counter-formation establishes a foundation to envision a more accurate shape and field of inter-relations across disciplines and contexts that are not only receptive but appropriative and elaborative.

By approaching the space of the counter-form, my ambition is to generate a responsive structure and an archive of fragments to build upon - a blank canvas with a variable format to recast vision and action.

Counter-formation places emphasis on the transformative, liminal space that allows one to encounter contexts from within, between, and around to organize or break them in a different fashion.

Ancient Hyper Present, Sophie Loloi

Masters Theses

My practice, especially this virtual garden, is a collage made of media, images, and virtual space across different eras and time signatures. Graphic design can exist in a gallery, on the screen, inside headsets or in the streets. Like a lucid dream, it can be disorienting as it opens up to a more-than physical ground of experience; within the virtual, within shared memory. This reflective practice arises as a form of “anachronism.” Before I could arrive at my transdisciplinary practice that considers experiences of exile and diaspora, I had to grapple with a singular question: what does it mean to …

Skew-Morphic Dream, Yoonsu Kim

Masters Theses

Skew-morphic Dream explores design approaches that shift one’s viewpoint, that agitate the familiar with a daydream. The doubling disjunctions presented here frame an ‘unreal real’, a skewed perspective on the function-driven interface design represented in skeuomorphism. To achieve this effect, a kind of perceptual halt, I implement defamiliarization. Within these spaces, there emerges an opportunity to think differently about perception, tools, and interfaces.

This thesis catalogs three methods used to create ‘skew-morphic dreams’: utilizing familiar tools with inverted functions, opening portals to defamiliarized landscapes, and developing platforms that require the audience to behave in unfamiliar ways.

How To Do Things With Things, Emily Guez

Masters Theses

Humans have always done things with things. It’s at the very origin of who we are as a species: we’ve gone from being bipedal homonins to people who live in complex societies by making rocks into tools. Things can serve a practical function, but they also carry cultural and symbolic meaning: they can tell our personal stories, allow us to connect with each other, and be the outer manifestations of our inner lives. The things we use in our every day lives, by implying a set of actions we can take when interacting with them, participate in shaping our reality: …

Living Under Surveillance, Fan Jia

Masters Theses

Our first impression about surveillance will always likely relates to with advanced technology. However, advanced technology is the means that only awakens our consciousness of surveillance but is not the birth of surveillance. It has been embedded in our lives in our lives all the time for generations. Before the age of technology blooming, surveillance was carried out by the human eye, and this mode continues always. My thesis starts from our daily relationships, and analyzes how surveillance happens around us within those relationships and people interactions.

This thesis proposes a surveillance system in a specific city: —Washington D.C., which …

Re-Connect, Xin Ren

Masters Theses

We live in an era of contradiction: the order of the external world always stands in an ambiguous relationship to individual autonomy. In this time of high industrialization and fast paced efficiency, the development of technology has not only greatly reduced the distance between space and time, but also causes the over-coupling effect in social division: institutions are formed with a dangerously strong and stable dependence on each other. This excessive reliance on one another weakens their independence and resilience. Meanwhile, in this hyper-connected society, access to instant satisfaction through consumption and fragmented entertainment is the norm. Similar to the …

Re-Occupation : Buildings, Ideology And Decolonization In Northeastern China, Ziyu Wei

Masters Theses

Buildings often survive longer than a single human generation, and many witness significant transitions from generation to generation. When we approach varied eras that have washed over an unchangeable building like tides eroding a bank repeatedly, how can we distinguish the building’s primary identity and judge its fate?

In Northeastern China, a Japanese dormitory survives as a witness of Manchurian colonization, early socialism and the economic recession that caused its abandonment until today. The city also suffers a swiftly aging population and brain drain as the brightest of the youth move away. How can an intervention build dialogue and revive …