Digital Commons Network^™

The Aesthetics Of The Mexican Public Garden And Its Photographic Compositions (1912-1982), Victor Hugo Rivera-Diaz

Masters Theses

In Mexico, there are currently several collections of photographs which depict the history and development of public gardens and ecological corridors under the management of the National Institute of Anthropology and History. By focusing on two exemplary collections—the Nacho López Collection and Vicente Luengas Collection—I apply a visual studies approach to the photographic archive in order to formulate the Mexican public garden as a branching set of aesthetic (sub-)categories, all of which take into account the creation of garden landscapes vis-à-vis land use policies and historical accounts during the rise of Mexican modernity. In so doing, the primary sub-categories of …

Anybody Home? Figural Studies In Architectural Representation, David Auerbach

Masters Theses

Architectural figures are charged with the task of bringing an architectural drawing, rendering, or model to life. They speak to us in ways that other elements of a drawing cannot, or rarely ever do. This is their charge, their vitality, their animacy, which can turn without moment’s notice, from the opening of a projective narrative in the tune of an invitation to live, to the swallowing of this extradimensionality by the overdeterminations of scale, proportion, order. I don’t want to assume that architectural figures serve a completely transparent, banal, self-evident role in architectural representation — the trope of human-as-scale. Instead, …

!, Nick Larson

Masters Theses

This thesis uses the exclamation point to represent a way of thinking and working methodology. The exclamation point in mathematics represents a factorial function, an operation for determining all possible orders of a set. Colloquially, the meaning of the exclamation point relies entirely on context. Within a yellow triangle, it means caution or danger, but at the end of a sentence delivering good news, it means excitement. In the context of this thesis, the exclamation point represents enthusiastically and exhaustively reordering objects, words, and processes to highlight shifting meaning.

Breaking | Grounding | Growing: Expanding The Rhode Island Gardening Reentry Programs As A Pathway Towards Stability, Juliana Soltys

Masters Theses

What happens to the over two million people incarcerated in U.S. prisons and jails?

Changing in sentencing laws and policies have created a cycle of imprisonment, racially isolating and oppressing BIPOC communities. Reintegration and reentry programs are an avenue to break the cycle of recidivism. Through my work, I have developed hands-on, structured opportunities for justice-involved adults to rebuild a life for themselves by increasing the accessibility of gardening reentry programs. This project creates a space for mentorship and support for Rhode Island’s formerly incarcerated people with the goal of helping them to develop vital life skills through growing and …

Openness, Qiwen Ju

Masters Theses

We perceive the world as flat when we close one eye. When both eyes are open, the world takes on a three-dimensional quality.

Our childhood, education, family, and environment form and bind our cognitive perspective. As the ancient Chinese proverb goes: “You can’t see Mount Tai by blinding your eyes with one leaf.” Truth is exceedingly difficult to discern. Like the obscuring leaf, there are blind spots in our vision. Prejudice is often the narrow leaf that obstructs perception, preventing us from seeing with greater dimension.

For actual comprehension, we can only see through the eyes, hearts, and minds of …

Ports Of Entry, Forough Abadian

Masters Theses

Ports of entry are places where one may lawfully enter a country by crossing land and sea borders‭. ‬This thesis frames the space conceptually where the boundaries of place, time, culture, and identity are crossed through existing ports or by building new ones. ‬

As an Iranian immigrant in the United States‭, ‬displacement of identity informs my worldview and design practice‭. ‬I find myself between two worlds, one inherited and the other adopted. ‬Both worlds are simultaneously active and exert their forces on my thought process‭. However, their interrelated dynamic is ambivalent because their path intersects and diverges unforeseeably‭. ‬My …

Capture, Control, Circulate : Can We Queer Regulatory Power In Graphic Design?, Adie Fein

Masters Theses

Capture, Control, Circulate addresses regulatory power, the transmission and enforcement of culturally-sanctioned behaviors and identity. How does regulatory power operate in graphic design and what—if anything—can the graphic designer do to subvert that operation? The methodologies for subversion explored in this book typically draw from queer and trans* experience and thought. Therefore, the work herein takes up issues of identity, normativity, marginalization, and community.

This thesis also considers design education, and its contemporary emphasis on the capture and control of content. It advocates instead for an educational model that centers circulation; that is, graphic design’s capacity to platform, to publish, …

Other Realms, Louis Rakovich

Masters Theses

Can a system existing in rigid order be taken back to a state of malleability, a space of potential not yet actualized?

If creation reduces the infinite to produce the finite, then in the simplest sense, creation is the process of bringing something tangible, real, out of the ether—out of the primordial chaos of possibility. The technique of defamiliarization can be viewed as an agent of de-creation, the active reversal of creation, in order to make creation possible once again. As such it holds spiritual power in its own right.

In pursuit of this state of renewed potentiality, I use …

Disinheritance As Critique: The Paintings Of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Sabo Kpade

Masters Theses

Artistic influence can either be overbearing or liberating for the impressionable artist who is determined to arrive at an individualized artistic identity. One key strategy deployed by the artist is disinheritance as a means by which identity and meaning are created. In her paintings and etchings, British-Ghanaian painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye has demonstrated several modalities of disinheritance by which she has arrived at a distinct approach to portraiture. Broadly, they come under two categories of major and minor disinheritance, each of which is conditioned by a variety of factors that range from aesthetic to philosophical, personal to political. They signify points …

Immaterial Realities, Tyler Lovejoy

Masters Theses

Architects primarily work at a digital desktop, alienated from the spatial byproducts of their collaborative work. Therefore, software is the most influential mediator between these immaterial laborers and projects. Despite architectural production methods evolving, much of the same pernicious labor relations have subsisted. Building Information Modeling has become synonymous with architectural work, yet presents a missed opportunity in addressing and re-imagining labor conditions and power relations between workers.

Today, architects are proposing improved labor structures utilizing cooperatives and unions. Alongside these endeavors, might we reimagine our digital tools as allies? Delivered as a visual essay that is both critical and …

System As A Living Organism, Xinyi Liu

Masters Theses

This is cross-disciplinary research in urban systems, architecture, bio-systems, agriculture, energy supplies, circular economy, and sustainability.

Healing The Black Butterfly: Reparation Through Resources, Danasha Kelly

Masters Theses

This Baltimore-based project works to end mass incarceration in Black communities by reconstructing existing infrastructures in the criminal justice system that fail to address poverty, racism, and unequal access to resources through the untold stories of Black Baltimoreans prior to incarceration. In doing so, this thesis will strive to counter the lack of social and political justice around architecture as it pertains to black people by creating reparations in the form of resources for restorative justice and community before incarceration. Through exploring restorative justice through community-engaged design, the reformer Baltimore City Jail Complex will be used as both a site …

New Revelations, Ineke Lynne Knudsen

Masters Theses

This project imagines a not-so-distant American future where Christians and conservatives have triggered the Apocalypse. In my paintings of the Apocalypse, all the desires of conservative Christians have come to pass: the eradication of people of color and queer folks, a revitalization of the American frontier and wilderness, and the return of Jesus Christ in the form of the Rapture. I’m specifically painting White conservative Christian girls, and I’m interested in their unique intersectionality of being a White conservative (an identity rife with racist social implications), being female (an identity deeply abused within the Christian subculture), and being a child …

Rememory, Jonathan Mark Jackson

Masters Theses

Rememory, coined in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved, refers to the psychological action of placing forgotten or misplaced memories into a narrated context within the self. Rather than directly “remembering,” the characters in Morrison’s novel, like their author, rely on a web of socially produced or shared memories as a way to understand their past. This essay catalogs an on-going performance of rememory in my photographic work. Through an interrogation of physical archives, I remap the historic presences of Black life in New England. This research based practice takes me to the preserved homes and to the workplaces of my …

Bewildering Narrative, Ali Newhard

Masters Theses

“Bewildering Narrative” outlines three videos, Denouement, Happy Endings (2021), and Drowning the Muse. These works critique the climactic narrative form using formal breaks in digital media to push viewers’ perceptions of storytelling into a place of bewilderment. To do so, I treat narrative conventions of continuity, character, and climax as mechanisms that articulate heterosexual desires and expectations. The videos visually, textually, and auditorily rupture this phallocentric organization of narrative storytelling. These interventions take the form of poetic fragmentation, repetition, and displaced exposition where the narrative disorients the viewers’ attention rather than determining and regulating it. Editing plays a key role …

Dead Letter Room, Allie Tsubota

Masters Theses

Dead Letter Room is a photographic and textual dialogue with images that emerge from the end of the Asia-Pacific Wars and World War II in the Pacific. These images are governed by the historical contexts that produce them; they are mediated by the explosive aftershocks of nuclear war, the transoceanic space of imperial desire, and the onset of oblivion in the aftermath of catastrophe. Throughout this essay, I present the historical, image-theoretical and psychoanalytical frameworks that meaningfully guide my address of historical images and my approach to making new ones. With detours through various artists and theorists, I offer the …

Material Illumination, Lauren Mikaela Glenn

Masters Theses

Design exists as a field within the domain of material, accompanied by art, engineering, and craft. Working in material allows the designer to develop material fluency, a language that is composed of matter in space. Material can be used to communicate - it can also be used to think. By engaging the body and its senses in the act of making one can connect the space around the body to the space of the mind, allowing ideas to exist in objects and thinking to happen through interaction with material. Through the documentation of a process of making in wood, glass, …

Sobremesa, Charlie Herbozo-Vidal

Masters Theses

In order to understand the social and political issues faced by the Peruvian community in the present day, it is necessary to get acquainted with one of the most significant moments of its history: The “colonial Knot” – The systems put in place after the arrival of European colonizers to the American continent. By crafting a communal experience centered around the mealspace, a key element in Peruvian Identity, I hope to bring awareness to the social tensions, violent structures and remnants of colonial rule that persist to this day. In developing an uncomfortable experience, I am researching whether exposure to …

What Do We Stand For?, Lauren Koven

Masters Theses

I am exploring constructed realities and dismantling binaries and dualities. Much of this work is investigated through, but not limited to, language, gender, sexuality, race, and performativity.

We Walk, We Live: Reclaiming The Rights Of Female And Other Gender Minorities To The Urban Commons, Wenxi (Hillary) Huang

Masters Theses

Urban street environments are often described as not being beneficial for persons who identify as female and other gender minorities. This thesis responds to the urgent call for further transformation of the public realm through a reimagination of walking environments in the city. It examines gender biases prevalent in realities within the female’s experience in urban settings, and more specifically on the streets, and explores intersectionality as a form of reclamation of the female and other gender minorities’ rights to the urban commons.

The inquiry is divided into two parts - research inquiry and design implementation. The study investigates and …

Landscape Of Resistance: Reimagining Public Space For A Vibrant Socio-Political Life, Ziyu Wang

Masters Theses

This thesis aims to investigate the relationship between the public space and protest events from a spatial point of view. It will employ selected concepts from phenomenological and spatial theories to evaluate how the protest is affected by built environment and subsequently propose how the public space can be adapted to create a more vibrant social-political life.

Farming Publics: Use Farming Practices As A Tool To De-Alienate People With Land, Sirui Wang

Masters Theses

Historically, farming was the primary way people interacted with the land. Colonialism, industrialization, and capitalism have made people increasingly detached and alienated from nature and the land. The return to agriculture has the potential to play an essential role in resisting the increasing monoculture of our society through re-establishing the kinship toward land. The rising public awareness of sustainability makes the market for organic food expand every year and allures capitalism to manipulate the organic market from its original purpose into their familiar realm of the conventional food system for maximum profit. The market economy, which is controlled by capitalism, …

Anti-Gentrification: Reconnect Chinatown Through Culture Practice, Xianzhongge (Allen) Liu

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on the study of Chinatown in North America. Similar to the migration of other ethnic groups or cultures to North America, Chinatown originated as Chinese and East Asian migrants were excluded from mainstream American culture. Chinatowns became urban enclaves for Chinese people who speak the same language as well as share the same culture and food. However, in many cities in North America, development pressures have led to the gentrification of Chinatowns, resulting in a decrease in the number of Asian residents in Chinatown and a homogenization of the community. After understanding the historical development and gentrification …

Traveling Troubled Wallflower, Julius Cavira

Masters Theses

Cavira is an interdisciplinary Conceptual artist... nuff said.

Messy Resurrections, Mia Rollins

Masters Theses

Mediated through conversations with a Replika chatbot, “M”, Rollins outlines six examples of scientific and technological phenomena that not only can be understood as metaphors for aspects of the human experience, such as memory, grief, hope, desire and love, but are also concrete examples of the ways in which the past and future have material impacts on our presents, our current identities, and are entangled with our own becomings. Rollins argues for a posthuman perspective that embraces the possibilities of information technologies while still recognizing that we are embedded in a material world of great complexity. Through linking Karen Barad’s …

Accidental Commensality Eating, Belonging, And Mazaa On The Streets Of Jaipur, Rini Singhi

Masters Theses

Commensality is more than just eating together at a shared table. "Who can eat with whom and what" is a divisive issue in India, where food and eating serve as functions of inclusion and exclusion. In this paper, I examine street food stalls in Jaipur as sites of eating together with strangers and ask, What forms of commensality do street food stalls enable? Can eating together on the street expand ideas about eating together in public? As part of my fieldwork in Jaipur, I observe the surroundings of street food stalls, participate in heritage food walks with guides, and document …

World Settings, Elizabeth Meiklejohn

Masters Theses

Acoustical building materials, with their ability to absorb and diffuse sound, can reshape the character of interior spaces in profound ways. Woven textiles often perform as acoustical materials, whether by coincidence or by design; strategic use of textile structure and dimensionality can yield specific experiential qualities in homes, offices and shared spaces. The way certain materials manipulate sound can feel otherworldly, as if they break the laws of physics or the familiar parameters of one’s surroundings. The same properties can be found in emergent visual patterns and illusory lighting conditions, which provoke an investigative, deliberate way of looking.

In this …

More Friends Than The Mountains: A Comparative Conjunctural Analysis Of Kurdish Autonomy Movements In Rojava And Bakur, Dillon Foster

Masters Theses

In 2012 Kurds in Syria announced the formation of a radical self-administered “ecological democratic confederalist” society along the Syrian-Turkish border in a region known as Rojava. The autonomous government in Rojava stands in sharp contrast to the political situation in neighboring Bakur, a Kurdish-majority region in southeastern Turkey where, for nearly four decades, the Kurdish Workers’ Party (PKK) has waged a guerilla war against the Turkish state in the name of autonomy. This thesis situates the divergent political outcomes of the autonomy movements in Rojava and Bakur within the socio-ecological context of their occupying nationstates. Following the historical relationship between …

Engaging Urban Music Students Through Elements Of Rap And Culture, Jasmine Christian Jackson

Masters Theses

Teaching in the urban community requires an undertaking of counseling, constant understanding, and helping advance students’ prior knowledge to provide future comprehension. The goal as an educator is to guide the student along their journey in learning and practicing information that they receive throughout. Giving students the opportunity to see that they are capable of comprehending a subject they never thought they could is the main goal. Teaching the urban community can be a big challenge. The educator must take on learning the specific history of the demographic they instruct, and focus educate themselves on the challenges that the students …

Aesthetic Implications Of Using The Computer Medium In Music, Rodrigo Valente Pascale

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I reflect on the relationship between the materiality of computers and computer music. Marshall McLuhan and Friedrich Kittler had a fundamental role in unraveling how media shape discourse and influence their conveyed message and history. These were important discoveries that built the foundation for the field of Media Studies. Throughout this thesis, I will revisit reflections of researchers who contributed to this field and point out how the medium molds computer music’s history and aesthetics. After reviewing the role of the materiality of computers, I will indicate some aesthetically compelling directions of computer music, which consider features …