Art and Design Commons^™

That Mirror Again, Kyros Barton

Masters Theses

That Mirror Again is a summary of experiences, used to pose questions about self-hood through technological metaphor and theory. Its memories are disjointed, separate, and removed from time, and are an honest attempt to recenter an identity before the end of formal education. The themes of each section, Aground, Tilt, and Threshold, are presented as isolated definitions that set the mood for the writing before it is introduced. Referencing information age technology, invoking ancient deities in prose, and brushing against the fur of monster-hood, the text holds the memory it carries softly and offers it to the reader.

I Don't Quite Remember It That Way, Margaret Lindon

Masters Theses

In the fall of 2020, during the first week of graduate school, I crashed on my road bike and suffered a big-time concussion. Like, lost-consciousness-and-forgot-the-whole-day kinda big. I became obsessed with this permanent memory deletion. Trying to remember the event was like trying to remember the first time I saw the color blue. Impossible without supplementary data or second-person observation.

Memory recall can operate like a game of telephone. When we remember something, we’re really just remembering the last time we remembered it. We accrue subtle adjustments to our memories that result in gradual omissions and distillations.

This process lost …

What The Water Says As It Runs, Jeanette Cosentini

Masters Theses

During the last two years, I have been examining the importance of vulnerability, memory and empowerment within my work as it relates to archival silence. The archive is presumed to be an objective record but what is chosen and discarded is an inherently political act. When there is archival silence, what then becomes missing from our collective histories? My exploration has spread across many forms of media, including sound, video, textiles, sculpture and writing . I have sought to understand the ways that these different mediums embody sentiment and concept, while establishing an open-ended record within which others can explore …

Wanderer, Yuhan Ma

Masters Theses

My thesis writings include four chapters. It begins by my self-reflection, an introduction to my liminal space and how it has become a spiritual endeavor. Building on that, the second chapter Encounters elaborates on my childhood memory; and the following two, the Non-resident alien, A Sanctuary, respectively expresses my recent concerns or situations that have greatly affected my perceptions, and a mythological idea of sanctuary that can keep me away from the chaos. These chapters have been influenced by the eastern ideology icons, such as Buddhism and the culture of reclusion. They have examined a process of me dissecting …

Treeing: What Remains Of A Pilgrim, Sichen Liu

Masters Theses

Myths and legends have existed since the start of human civilization, but now we can only imagine a world full of wonders from our ancestor’s scripts. What if we could go back to the age of myths and magic? Would we see things differently?

In Treeing: What Remains of a Pilgrim, I propose a fictional book with 15 short myths of humans transformed into trees. The stories combine my own imagination with inspiration from real mythologies. In the annotations of each story, an unnamed person is following the myths as guidance and manuals, one by one, trying to bring them …

Wall, Jazzmynn Chang Hong

Masters Theses

The WALL is a mosaic-style book with a collection of personal anecdotes and reflections. Traceback from the earliest memory of mine, the instinctive exploration of a sheltered structure, to my recent art practices exploring the spatial perception when the boundary breaks. Each chapter, as I grow older, unfolds my progressive encounter and interpretation of the spatial boundaries.

As the book titled the WALL, its form references a traditional Chinese partition structure - the folding screen. It is not only an aesthetic manifestation, the screens are usually decorated with calligraphies or paintings, it also has a practical purpose as a spatial …

Everything Comes Full Circle, Lilan Yang

Masters Theses

Following Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas (1984) filming locations from Houston, Texas to Los Angeles, California, I use a 16mm Bolex camera to capture the vastness of the American West. The footage draws me to reminisce about snippets of my everyday life. I contemplate how we perceive the world through analog optical apparatuses and how memories are multidimensional yet fragile. Our recollections of people and places can be distorted, unrecognizable, and fictitious. These memories would eventually diminish with the passing of time. By converting the filmmaking back and forth between analog and digital filmmaking, with the loss of information during the …

Generative Image Systems And Emergent Play, Travess Smalley

Masters Theses

Generative Image Systems and Emergent Play is a collection of writings around generative creative processes and the emergent outcomes that can develop from simple systems. The generative systems I utilize in my practice are explored in this writing through the lenses of Instructional Art, Generative Art, Chance and Randomness, the Xerox, Computer Programming, and Emergent Play in games. These texts are a statement about my computational art practice and research, and they explore what it means to create with generative systems inside of other designer’s programs.

Abyss Without Vertigo, Jack Madden

Masters Theses

Science has difficulty changing the way we think because it takes us beyond our natural perception. To scales and phenomena that we are unaccustomed to, that are instinctively inhuman.

To fundamentally change the philosophy of our species there needs to be a bridge or, more presciently, an emergency ladder for the human mind to science.

As we are inclined to logic yet inherently emotional, the importance of the scientific cannot be understood using science alone.

Significance must be felt, feelings are the foundation of art, and validation the consequence of the artifact.

Embedded Are The Embers Of Echoes, Sarah Jane Cribbs

Masters Theses

What is a haunted house? What makes it haunted? What makes it a house?

I grew up in northern Appalachia. I sat in the back seat of my father’s car for trips from the Eastern foothills to the Western foothills of Pennsylvania mountains to visit my grandmother.

When my perception of the world grew larger as I did too, I began to hide my Appalachian identity. This ended as I began my practice, beginning with a realtime performance on artificial intelligence and queerness. Art practice opened up the possibility of critical play, a method of criticism that focuses on a …