Digital Commons Network^™

About Intimacy, Jiamin Lin

Masters Theses

Imagine that there is a person who goes everywhere carrying a chair. From the moment she places her chair down on the ground, this action defines a space around her. The shape of this invisible entity keeps changing. However, I still feel a specific way of “closure”. My thesis started from this moment, about defining intimacy.

Time may be translated into measures of movement and occupancies of space. Film and architecture both mobilize spatial and temporal modes of perception. My exploration of spatial intimacy started from filming the interaction between human being and larger entities. It exploits the filmic capacity …

Wrinkle Architecture : The Public Relaxation Pavilions For Geriatric Community In Cities Of Zhejiang After 1980'S, Yi Lu

Masters Theses

Wrinkles of the city just like the wrinkles of human. They are symbles of aging as well as the carriers of story. They are existing in unexpecting places in the city or in human faces. The wrinkle of the city is the texture of city during its urbanization process. They are small and chopped. They are between temporary and permanent.

This thesis integrates the “wrinkle architectures” of Hangzhou to improve the relaxation space and provide a better environment for in the elderly community of Hangzhou.

Adaptive Reuse Pattern Book : Re-Evaluating Historical Capital, Taylor Mccabe

Masters Theses

Vacant buildings in post-industrial America are produced by a metabolism of neglect and disinvestment. Challenging the conventional approach of demolish and rebuild, an alternative path is possible that acknowledges the built environment as it exists.

I am specifically looking at vacant structures in the city of Baltimore. Currently there are approximately 16,000 structures consisting of mostly rowhouses. Inherent to these buildings are shared walls and continuous facades which when subjected to decay will directly impact the physical condition of adjoining properties. Baltimore City is characterized by blocks and blocks of rowhouses, which tell a history of the development of the …

A City's Culture Should Include Birds : To Rethink Of Architecture With Birds In Mind, Pan Sun

Masters Theses

The truth of a city’ s culture is that Birds and Human live in a single-shared ecosystem boundaries. Architects as human always think of architecture according to human’s needs and neglect animals’ demands. However, the architecture and a city should acknowledge and response to the cultural need and value of the society of which it interacts—birds and human. Architecture needs to create spaces connecting these two species by boundaries. The thesis seeks to explore the transition area between these boundaries—a type of space providing a chance for birds and human living tog ether harmoniously.

Blueridgelivin' : Environmental Development And Suburban Sprawl, Chris Villalta

Masters Theses

This thesis focuses on investigating how precolonial Blue Ridge Cherokee construction was resilient to time and weather, integrated place, and respected the environment, traditions, and politics, to better integrate landscape, climate, ecology, and regionally specific architecture.

Uncanny Genericism, Eamon Wagner

Masters Theses

For the past two decades, disciplinary discourse on con­sumerism has been largely focused on vast commercial spaces - the shopping mall, the airport - the "Junkfood" of architecture . When it has ventured into the realm of the do­mestic, it has largely been in service to the specific object. This thesis attempts to reconsider the role of representation relative to ideas of the generic object, and understands these objects as sources of authorship that can be architec­turally generative in a time when objecthood evades clear definition.

Relocation Community Revival, Zhan Zhang

Masters Theses

The thesis tries to revive/re-imagine the public spaces of relocation community in Jiangsu, China by re-designing the in between spaces of the existing apartment buildings, dealing with the misfit of relocated residents to their new living environment during the rapid urbanization process.

Possibilities In Void, Fangyu Wei

Masters Theses

The interaction between architecture surfaces and urban environment is being more active, this transient boundary demarcates the inner core and external diverse environments to provide a different experience for human. The uncertainties in attitudes that have existed over time to the interior and exterior conditions, thus, the spatial tension between these 2 surfaces naturally form into several void spaces. As I observed that through individual action, ideas, and criticality, urban voids have become catalysts for social interaction and creative experiments. Re-appropriation of vacant sites by means of inhabitation or (new) subtle ecologies to emerge in the Taipei urban area. Residents …

Bundles And Blanks And Binds And Bends, Steven Kaplan-Pistiner

Masters Theses

This thesis investigates how objects we make offer us a chance at maintaining what makes us human.

A Space For Reconciliation, Xiaoran Liu

Masters Theses

The environment where I grew up retains some characteristics from The Chinese Cultural Revolution, and still influences my thinking and behavior close to the mainstream and following the rules unconsciously. Contemporary jewelry has affected me to be more critical in a positive way. I want to share this transformative experience with people who have never had contact with contemporary art, which is an alien concept for most Chinese people.

I use jewelry as the medium to express my ideas. But the typical response to my work is “I appreciate your concepts, but I can’t accept your pieces.” So, how can …

The Line, Hannah Oatman

Masters Theses

The Line is a series of exaggerated contemporary jewelry “products” that engage the audience through collecting, marketing, and nostalgia. It grew from a dissatisfaction with the world of “contemporary jewelry,” or “art jewelry,” or “author jewelry,” or whatever people are calling the field now (assuming they’re calling it anything).

The Line pushes against the rarely questioned conventions of contemporary jewelry by playing along with them (sometimes even playing a little rough).

This work intentionally walks on the lines between jewelry and art, and between art and product: lines that exist whether we want them to or not, but which can …

Frankenstein, Ruins, & Twilight, Braden Bandel

Masters Theses

I am invested in the idea of painting as a container for the psychological. Much of my research is concerned with the role of gothic fiction as a means of processing individual and collective fears and anxieties during times of rapid social, technological, and political change. Drawing a connection between literary fiction and the fiction of the painted image, I attempt to translate some of the ambitions of fiction writing into the realm of painting. I have a proclivity for the fantastical and the melancholic, which have remained as abiding themes in my work at RISD. This thesis will consist …

Accessibility To Possibilities : Discover The Unknown Unknown Worlds, Yutong Shen

Masters Theses

The digital revolution has transformed the world, and today we are drowning in information. We use search engines as an efficient way to access information, and when we search, by connecting, relating, or random recommending, our knowledge network expands from the keyword we put in. With this search engine model, it’s easy for us to find what we know we don’t know. But it’s hard to access things we don’t know we don’t know. In other words, our past limits our accessibility to information.

In this essay, I attempt to find an alternative way of approaching information in the design …

Smoke And Mirrors, Kiernan Pazdar

Masters Theses

The impulse to make work from the residue of real life has been called many things throughout art history. In my thesis, I use some of these methods to discuss generative modes of creating work. I talk about Lucy Lippard’s proposal for a “way of making,” Disidentification, Camp, Appropriation, Termite Art, and Hito Steyerl’s call to create art that addresses the present in imaginative ways. Each process relies on a commitment to being in the world and building something on its uneven ground.

In Liary I discuss the relationship between my drawing practice and fiction writing. Since subjectivity is dependent …

Hain't, Jarrett Key

Masters Theses

Jarrett Key’s thesis book examines their journey towards understanding their freedom through three lenses: Survival, Transformation and Celebration. Through pointed excavation of the oral histories and lost stories of their upbringing in rural Alabama, their work presents critiques of the historical conditions that sowed the seeds of their contemporary personhood, while simultaneously creating spaces to celebrate beauty, joy, and survival. The objects Key builds perform their freedom and are crafted from materials that reference pieces of their own personal narrative. Highlighting works from Leaving the City (oil paintings on cement), the Hot Comb (forged black steel sculptures), and Slave Ship/ESP …

Here And There: A Continuous Narrative, Hye Young Kim

Masters Theses

How can we transcend our literal place by connecting with natural space?

As industrialization and globalization have increasingly shaped our society, we have become more and more disconnected from nature, ourselves, and our memories. Furthermore, living busy lives, we have lost the ability to appreciate and be grateful for our surroundings. Nonetheless, we can reconnect with what has been lost—nature, ourselves, and our memories— with a small shift in our mindset and a habitual practice of walking, which pulls our footsteps not toward a certain place but toward an understanding of the passage of time, the resonance of longing, and …

Reviving The Hollowing Rural Village: Research On The Coastal Mountainous Region Of Kaihua, China, Rui Tao

Masters Theses

My research focuses on one county in China and the regional and local structure to understand the existing flows between urban and rural areas, including both ecological, industrial and social exchanges. Kaihua county, located in north-west Zhejiang Province, is currently the poorest county economically in this region and has more migrant workers and a more severe hollowing degree.

This thesis aims to revive the hollowing rural village and improve the village’s value as a hybrid public realm - a space encouraging reciprocal flows exchanged from both “rural ground” and urban “new comers,” strengthening the ecological and social ties among water …

Energy Convergence, Xiaoyu Xu

Masters Theses

The current state of our urban systems and infrastructure is untenable in light of ongoing urbanization, population growth and complexity of modern life, including the problem of the city’s deactivation. Current systems lack the level of integration and shared intelligence that our technology advancements allow and modern life requires.

And if we understand landscape and its systems as inherently integrated and self-sustaining and essential to the optimal functioning of our cities, then we can position urban landscapes as the foundation and framework for all future urban system redesign and development.

Green Arteries, Jiapan Wei

Masters Theses

My thesis asks how transportation infrastructure in a shrinking city such as Detroit, can be redefined as a malleable, generative, efficient synthetic system that can develop, manage and distribute urban resources, production, knowledge and skilled labor.

To achieve this, the highway system can be entwined with other systems in the city, such as food, energy, media, education, and water and waste. In the process, it will be reinvigorated as an engine for the city, a center of productive energy versus mere connective tissue linking former factories to outer suburbs, ports and distant markets.

The thesis uses a “cradle to cradle” …

Art Beside A Single Handshake : Can You Believe It?, Tongji Qian

Masters Theses

Although I was familiar with works by both McKinzie and Phil, their prints still caught my attention during the Printmaking Graduate Biennial at Rhode Island School of Design in January 2019. In contrast to the numerous talented artists who employed strategies to affirm the relevancy of printmaking in a contemporary discourse, McKinzie and Phil seemed to desire something different. Their collaboration series of Ten Identical Prints was predictably “printerly” and perilously unexciting, betraying a fraught and commonplace relationship between an expressive artist and a scrupulous master printer. How could these two artists showcase such mundanity? What was the stake of …

Recycle Bin (Trashure), Eunhyung Chung

Masters Theses

I am inspired by painful and exhausting situations, fragile or impermanent things that break easily and do not last long, so most of my works are installation or performance which changes as time goes by. I think a lot about the sense of loss and there are two kinds of loss in my work. One is the loss of precious moments and emotions of the past. Since I have so many blissful memories of my childhood related to art, they are the driving force of my artwork and they form the core of my identity. The loss of direction and …

Wrung From Grave Architectures, Megan Solis

Masters Theses

Found or imagined findings... notes, diary entries, texts, prayers and poems

Disasters are avenues to gain intimacy glory is the constant

What is the skeleton made of, if not to be filled with meat to be piled and molded to bring back life.

pain and memory to be grave architectures, the stuctures that fall,

a plea for humanity: “Am I just a phantom waiting to be ripped from shady ground?”

desperate melancholy we realize that she is

I am

you are

tragic.

guilt to perform, to retraumatize is a punishment and is masochistic. to violently reenact, like haunted ghosts, to …

I - 0, Sanghyun Koh

Masters Theses

This pack of cards is a provisional collection of encyclopedic thoughts and knowledge selectively hoarded for the artist’s comprehension of the world. These cumulative writings, packaged in a distributive form for intellectual play, cover the artist’s past workings, current studies and dormant plans, amassed in the responsible attitude of selection as well as in the irresponsible method of organization. The content of this 144-card deck is basically oriented to the oscillating status of a self seeking the ‘Grasping Totality’ as a human desire and of the ‘Improbability of Reach’ as a human limitation, whether true or false, proven or unproven, …

Unbound, Changrui He

Masters Theses

For many years, I have been repeatedly trying to understand what the term “trauma” means to me. While invisible, my trauma is ever-present, and I have not been able to understand how it has trapped me and my inner feelings. At the same time, more recently I don’t feel helpless or abandoned. I have been trying to tap the potential of connecting with the world outside, thereby piecing together the broken bits and pieces and reconciling with my family, past sorrows and myself.

In my thesis collection, I pay homage to a garden I often visited as a child. The …

Strata : Lessons In Latency, Mukul Chakravarthi

Masters Theses

Every visual artifact, from a street sign to advertising commercials, is an event of culture, a cross-section of time. Crucial to my work as a designer is to build an interpretive understanding of these images as more than surface, more than banal. Embedded in their construction are dense, unseen contextual latencies— social, economic, and political forces — that combine to define a cultural moment.

This thesis offers a series of lessons in making visible visual infrastructure. It emphasizes design’s semiotic potential to examine and leverage a view on what these visual signs represent as ideological constructions. Through a conscious un-layering …

Binge [Fantasy Reality], Elena Foraker

Masters Theses

[My appreciation for mainstream pop culture is genuine, but I am not a passive consumer.]

[Drawing from embodied experience and contemporary feminist theory, I design as a participant, cultural surveyor, and critic.]

[From these vantage points, I binge-watch to discern the tropes of media such as reality TV romance and dead girl shows.]

[My data bingeing leads to a process of archiving, de/recoding, and making visible the algorithm structuring pop culture.]

[“Fantasy” is derived from the Greek phantazein, meaning “to make visible.”]

[In this thesis, I demonstrate that the reality-fantasy relationship is not an either/or.]

[Reality TV challenges this notion …

Re: Ornament, Aleks Dawson

Masters Theses

Re:Ornament calls for a rethinking of ornament within the history and practice of design, urging a broad reconsideration of ornament’s value and a complete reimagining of ornament’s future potential. Charting the arc of ornament in the Western tradition, this thesis reexamines the impact of modernism’s rejection of ornament—and, with it, its embedded culture, history, knowledge and craft.

Studying ornament’s structure as a language, I make the case for ornament’s inherent beauty and excess and speculate on how ornament could apply to thinking and making beyond design. Through graphic form, material exploration and pattern thinking, I …

Ethnographemes, Vaishnavi Mahendran

Masters Theses

Spoken and written languages are living processes. As with our own natural systems, they are born, evolve in stages, yet also face the eventuality of death. Current research indicates that there are 7,111 spoken languages in the world. UNESCO lists a total of 577 languages as critically endangered.

This thesis examines the role of graphic design and its potential contribution to the preservation of endangered languages and writing systems of indigenous communities. My interest lies in exploring possibilities of the script serving as a vessel to share and celebrate deeper stories of each of these communities’ heritage.

Through my practice, …

Something To See Here, Weixi Zeng

Masters Theses

“Nothing to see here” is a suspicious phrase.

Whenever we hear it, we pause and become alerted. Something is most likely indeed happening, and worth noting — mishaps ranging from either an embarrassing coffee spill, unfair abuses of privacy, or insidious early signs of a pandemic.

Historically, states and national entities have always valued the power of information to allow them to see more, and see better — all the while obstructing the path to clarity for ordinary citizens. Systems and infrastructure have become expressions of authority, rife with distortion and deception. Familiar systems are commandeered to surveil us, yet …

Bluenessless, Yuxin Long

Masters Theses

Jewelry has a long history of functioning as wearable objects with memories. A small piece of jewelry on our body can become the bridge between one person and another.

My work is a memorial for the avifauna. It serves as a place that allows me to find the balance between myself and nature. The ritualized actions from the making process help me mourn for the loss of the kingfishers, who are hunted for the bright blue feathers used in traditional jewelry. Sometimes, people put a photograph in their jewelry to keep the memory of the one they love. I use …