Arts and Humanities Commons^™

I Am Come Back To You, Eleanor Tomlinson

Masters Theses

Through various forays into psychological science and affect theory, this work attempts to understand how quick and simple commodities might coalesce into a complex portrait of individual and collective memory.

How Long Can You Hold Your Breath?, Felicia Leroy

Masters Theses

I began freediving, a sport in which one dives as deep as possible on single breath hold, as a way to approach the inaccessible space of the deep, to expand my understanding of the unobtainable.

This space (the deep) seemed to me to be representative of something that is totally unknown, its power existing in its inaccessibility, in its un-know-ability.

Through training/experiential data collection and using human physiology at depth as a framework, this thesis work book explores a single breath hold to the other side.

Work made in support of this exploration touches on darkness, depth, the edge, the …

Art Loser, Laura Jasek

Masters Theses

In my work, I aim to historicize the mechanics of misogyny. Through appropriation and re- authorship, the work interrogates and exposes the discreet erasure of contemporary gender inequalities and the societal attempt to obscure the historical origins of these inequalities.

My thesis work has been focused on Frederick W. Macmonnies, a predominant beaux-arts sculptor responsible for many early-twentieth-century American fountains and monuments. Many of his sculptures were embroiled in controversy, on grounds ranging from their aesthetic competence to their alleged misogyny. Macmonnies’ staunch academicism ran parallel to the birth of modernism, effectively expelling his name from the contemporary canon of …

Surface, Object, Space, Susan Doe

Masters Theses

Considered primarily a form of painting, my practice adopts the languages of sculpture and installation to explore abstract constructions of personal and societal hierarchies. In this current body of work, I am crocheting architectural forms that blur the distinctions between surface, object, and space. Whether occupying pictorial space or actual space, simple patterned units coalesce into emergent forms through repetition and accumulation. I am drawn to malleable materials that allow for an indexical registration of the force of my hands and body. Working in a wide range of materials including paper, mylar, fabric, foam, plastic, sheet metal, wire, monofilament, and …

A Theatrical Life : Negotiating Biracial Identity, Timothy Lai

Masters Theses

My paintings and drawings use autobiography, fiction, and theatricality to examine biracial-identity formation and the negotiation of different cultural ideologies. The personification of these ideologies in narrative accounts pose questions to which the characters must answer and respond. This leads to humorous, sad, problematic, empowering, and chaotic compositions that become an intimate chronicle of my own endeavor to find those “perfect” answers.

In my practice, painting and drawing are ways to explore a broad range of topics that stem from personal and familial stories. Using allegorical personifications, symbols, and metaphors derived from my family, I see the home as a …

Anthro/Post/Cene, Sofia Ortiz

Masters Theses

My project proposes a ‘deep-time’ lens, both in geological as well as cellular terms, as a strategy for dealing with an anxious contemporary world. By practicing the contextualizing of self within a multiplicity of worlds, one is able to be humbled, empathetic and (hopefully) conscientious. My work develops across multiple mediums, and seeks out different paths for creating immersive experiences that both highlight and promote interconnectivity. I endeavor to find dynamic systems that can accommodate multiple subjectivities, ideally fostering consensual indeterminacy between the work and its participants. With this in mind, my work unfolds as series of reconfigurable fragments, where …

Na'aseh : Ritual In Practice, Anna Henrick Karpatkin Benjamin

Masters Theses

This body of work is an exploration of Jewish identity through pattern and ritual. Pattern is used as a tool to question and reinterpret these actions. Drawings, prints and papercuts are created through repetitive and evolutionary actions performed over time.

Every Change, Ruhan Feng

Masters Theses

After being away from home for six years, distance and time make me reconsider: “Who am I?”

This thesis is an honest memoir, which records my reflections about life through my struggles, confusion with cultural identities, and conflicts with my mother in a one-child family. In a two-year graduate program, I continue to explore my identities as Chinese, an international student, an expatriate, and a daughter.

The text, accompanied by illustrations, interprets personal artistic changes. Printmaking in my work is not just a tool to make multiples. The ideas of layering and repeating are also applied to my three-dimensional installations …

Naturally Occurring Form, Margaret Kristensen

Masters Theses

I am trying to find art in my body, attempting to create images that personalize and desexualize the nude. Between the body of images that we have access to via social media and the images we have seen of female nudes, emphasis is put on finding the form to be within western society’s acceptable range of beautiful; so rarely do we find organic figures existing in the photographic environment.

Having been taught how to photograph the body by looking at images of women taken by men, I don’t see myself. The photographs by Edward Weston and Irving Penn look, gaze, …

Space As A Practiced Place, Elizabeth Leeper

Masters Theses

This thesis examines and retraces ways in which graphic design is fundamentally concerned with relational space, and tests spatialized theories, methods, and potential for praxis.

My practice investigates the relational qualities and dimensions of graphic design at three distinct scales.

1. Spatial logic (format) within a design object [Design space, book space, format, structure, sequence, counterforms, etc. (authority structure vs agency of user) within the design].

2. Spatial relations (sequence) between participants across a network. [Space to hear & see each other; to relate and connect].

3. Space within the world (circulation) [Space as composition, product, relational; not container, not …

Our Measured World : A Poetic Translation, Minryung Son

Masters Theses

Twenty-seven years alive. Sixty-one inches tall. One hundred forty-nine days abroad. How many more units would it take to describe me? What value is derived from this quantification? What quality of understanding does it offer? As human beings, we are constantly measuring our lives and implementing systems of standardization. Throughout history, measuring systems have served as frameworks for our comprehension and navigation of an increasingly complex world. This thesis approaches measurement as a means of revealing and processing this complexity of human experience rather than one that merely simplifies and distills. Through the lens of graphic design, my translation of …

Playgrounds, Cem Eskinazi

Masters Theses

Playgrounds defies the idea of singularity and control through a practice of design aiming to offer generous universes3 for one to explore freely. Building blocks of cognition such as modular thinking, hyper-linking, recursion, repetition, self-referencing and self-representation are utilized for designing honest and slightly uncomfortable experiences in order to keep the reader awake and aware.

Double Takes : Secular Magic & Empathic Vision, Lake Buckley

Masters Theses

This thesis examines the ways that a history of secular magic has shaped contemporary culture and design lexicons. It reviews modes of secular magic as design principles as well as the terms by which the meaning and value of these modes changed over time.

I carry on the legacy of magician filmmakers who thoughtfully questioned the material nature of their surroundings and tools in order to unearth new modes of visual experience. With film, delight drives invention which in turn strains vision and perception, requiring a certain collusion with the audience. My work celebrates the notion of the double take …

I Trace The Fold : Fluidity And Flux In The Terrain Vague, Alicia Oas

Masters Theses

The terrain vague is the interstitial fabric of city life. It is the space between and around the inhabited city – abandoned urban space that constantly shifts in form and function. The terrain vague is found in empty buildings, former factories, parking lots, along the train tracks, and in unclaimed alleyways. In these still and quiet places, a fragmented narrative emerges from the pattern of urban color, texture, and light.

I record these patterns in the structure of the textile. Warp and weft interweave in layers of experience. The curtain captures both the substance of our collective memory and the …

I Was There : Irreversible View, Asma Belhamar

Masters Theses

Living in a “time lapse” is what I could say about my experience of belonging to a place like the United Arab Emirates. The compression of time and expansion of space is intensely surreal. This idea leads my process to a series of investigations about the geological and cultural tectonics of the space, where I explore the conflicts between natural landscape and architecture. The urban surroundings are precarious: even monumental and unrelenting structures can change in a matter of days. This urban phenomena is commonly known as “mega structures” where nothing is impossible to build; buildings can be finished in …

Magkasama, Christina Chen

Masters Theses

This thesis explores how Filipinos can navigate their cultural identities through apparel. The Philippines has a history dominated by colonialism, diaspora, and assimilation. These systemic issues have contributed to the erasure of Filipino culture and they continue to impact the culture today. Because of these issues, many Filipinos living in America experience a disconnect from their cultural heritage and struggle to engage with their cultural identities. This thesis uses apparel to help Filipinos understand the source of their confusion towards their heritage and provides them with agency and ownership over their identities.

Connections : A New Model To Customizing Everything, Shao-Hsuan Hou

Masters Theses

Mass customization has long been a dream. However, thanks to evolutions in technologies (e.g. Industry 4.0 and big data analytics), there are more and more enterprises that offer configured customization to consumers. In this business model, the customers have limited choices to customize their own goods, nevertheless, these limited choices may not be enough to satisfy all of the consumers’ physiological and psychological needs.

In order to fulfill this need in the market, I propose a new ecosystem that connects consumers, design firms, and manufacturers. Moreover, based on this business model, I have designed an on-line platform and customization services …

Balance Speaker : Efficient Work And Break, Jin Cao

Masters Theses

The name of this product is "Balance Speaker”. It is aimed to help designers to concentrate better while working and breaking, using sound and light in particular.

In this book, I will show you the design/testing process of the product, show how the working timeline and energy levels influence designers' concentration, and how to design the interaction of the product and test its usability. A

Transforme : A Look At Sports Beyond The Gender Binary, Courtney Skabelund

Masters Theses

This work explores the next wave of athletes. Using speculative design, it questions institutionalized social constructs that many take for granted but that are a daily struggle for others. It looks to broaden the expressiveness and individuality of sport. Through careful consideration, research, and testing this thesis represents my views and ideas of how sport might evolve to represent the next revolution of athletics. Because without a gender revolution, the true ideals of sport will suffer.

Blood In The Water : Tracing An Interspecies Alliance Between At-Risk Humans And Jellyfish In The Mediterranean, Ala Tannir

Masters Theses

This thesis seeks to examine the Mediterranean Sea as a space of simultaneous ecological and political resistance to human-induced violence articulated by the concept of the Anthropocene. In one capacity, the Mediterranean Sea is the space that connects the extracting impulses of European States to the raw materials and resources of their ‘former’ colonies in Africa and the Middle East. Despite being divided in relation to national interests, the Sea defies the easy legibility of such bordering practices, and exemplifies a “vast, complex expanse” that contains many of the contradictions of national and regional interests that are pursued in isolation …

Communicatronics, Adi Azulay

Masters Theses

Design in its nature is a future facing practice. But the future is hard to predict or often even imagine. So how are we as designer to approach these types of problems?

In this thesis I attempt a novel design methodology to derive insights and produce new interaction models for long range communication. The methodology, which can be applied to any topic, focuses on a study of the past. More specifically using experimental archeology, the practice of rebuilding historical objects in order to test functionality and viability of a hypothesis. For this project I learned how to send smoke signals …

Transitions : Designing Acceptance In A World Of Change, Hanna Mclaughlin

Masters Theses

As a creative discipline, design works to instigate change. Often, a design’s success hinges on effecting a change in a user’s life, whether that be prompting the user to accept a new way to communicate, provide care, or share resources. A well-designed product can be offered to a user, and even acquired by a user, yet never be integrated into their daily life. This abandonment may be due to a flaw in the product’s function; however, it can also be due to a lacking system of support for the user while they are integrating the product into their life. In …

Empowerment Of People Of All Abilities, Kasia Matlak

Masters Theses

For my thesis, I sought ways to redefine disability, by focusing on people with lower limb amputations. I focused on the most troublesome part of their daily interaction with a prosthesis, which is a socket. My primary concern was to improve the experience with it, as it is where prosthesis attaches to the body. I looked at disability, prosthetics, body image, identity, and loss. After an amputation surgery, people experience a grief that is comparable to the loss of a loved one. Historically, some people deal with grief by creating and performing rituals. Those rituals have proved to be helpful; …

Motivated Motivation : A Consulting Tool To Find New Platforms For Business, Xiaoxio Jin

Masters Theses

Consumption motivation is the drive to satisfy needs and wants. It is also a desire for a product, service, or experience. The continual raising of the consumption desire has brought us where we are today. When old needs are met, new needs emerge, then we can create the infinite desire in our modern society. As brands are in a market full of competition, they are aware that they cannot stay in the same place when others are putting effort on business expansion. Our customers are calling for new service, thus brands need to keep being energetic and innovative.

Understanding consumption …

P-Lax : Toys For Adults, To Play & Relax, Zhizi Liu

Masters Theses

Adults don’t play enough. There is so much emphasis on working and being productive in modern day life, but this can have negative effects—for an adult this can lead to high stress and a sense of guilt when one isn’t being productive. My mission is to help adults de-stress and take a break from work by reintroducing play into their day-to-day interactions. Toys for children are often used for educational purposes and to help enhance their creativity and social abilities; toys for adults can instead used to improve mood, and to help release pressure that is built up from everyday …

Sight Lines, Makia Sharp

Masters Theses

Through investigations of liminal phenomena, this written thesis explores the direct and indirect effects of time, light, architecture , and metaphysical space. Along with the work, it is an attempt to create a framing around these phenomena which are both banal and transcendent, and which exist of the edge of perception.

Tendrescopic Endeavors And Other Dynamics, Jared Akerstrom

Masters Theses

Tendrescopic Endeavors and other Dynamics is an attempt to coalesce the ideas and skills that have been flying around my studio over the course of the last year into a single project. A trip to Storm King Art Center and ideas of modular making began a cycle of exploration into the way custom fittings could create light-weight and transportable sculptures. Developing a greater ability to digital model and create my own unique parts has been the charge that I have built this work upon. Science and the devices that facilitate scientific discovery act as the embodiment of the desire to …

The Past Is Today, Afra Al Dhaheri

Masters Theses

Process is a vital element to construction and deconstruction. Yet, materiality serves as a vehicle to expose the aesthetics developed by the process. However, without memories, the construction of these bodies of work would have never been conceived. Rapid change was the initial experience that formed memories in the first place, it was inevitable. Hence, an adaptation method had to be examined. The trees had proven to be worthy of the investigation. The trees required materials and the materials demanded a process. Process developed the work and the work had to have context. Context evolved from memory and required more …

Humor And Allegory, Christopher Goodale

Masters Theses

This series of works proposes the merging of aesthetic interests that undermine the self-seriousness of the artist and the idea of labor in painting. Painting’s slowing of time can hopefully extinguish the peripheral noise of the outside world and provide space for thought. These paintings propose different ways to help the viewer understand visual depth, narrative, and formal decision-making. The optical depth of red, the spatial depth of glazed paint, and the spiritual depth of the figure can provide multiple meanings and possibilities. Another metaphor for the development of this series of paintings would be one comedian telling a joke …

The Farce Of The Frame, Dominic Musa

Masters Theses

Both argument and joke, this series of works offers a critical inspection of the world. Characters trace their steps through the scene of each painting, questioning their place within the appearance of things. The central character is the artist-as-critic. Through this character, with his looming magnifying lens, we are implicated as readers of the faux world—an absurdist play intoxicated with scribbled lines, decorative patterns, and conflated histories—as we embark on a quest for an understanding of human existence. Emptied of any emotional concerns, the characters investigate the world they live in, searching for any indication of hope or a reason …