When people go online and leave their mark in bytes, how do their traces get preserved, shared, or lost? In the early 2000’s through about 2012, communities of millennial girl web developers and bloggers flourished on the English-speaking Internet. They would write about their intimate lives, code their website designs from scratch, create portfolios of graphics, and forge friendships with fellow bloggers that lasted through years. Most of these blogs are now gone; only patches remain as screenshots on the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. For my senior project, I explored how techniques used in glitch art, normally used for destroying image files for purely aesthetic effects, could also be used to embed texts that could be read by humans inside digital photos. I excavated photos and self-portraits of individual bloggers whose old content has since been erased from their original domains as of 2018. Then, I overrode pieces of each image file with the respective bloggers’ journal entries extracted from https://web.archive.org. The result is a picture irreversibly corroded by the loss of its original data, akin to the state of their bloggers' archived websites. It still functions like any image file in that the picture can be copied, shared, and viewed on another computer. However, unlike a typical image file, it also hides a patchwork of legible English text; one can “dig” into the image’s encoding and uncover nuggets of letters from a past Internet presence--specifically, that of a millennial girl's thoughts on identity, life, and the joys and struggles of coding and managing her own website.

Of the Crickets imagines the overlapping worlds of ethical ecological solutions to climate changed sustenance and the potential for collective excellence in female exclusive environments. Using garments, furniture, site-specific installation and directed performance, the project harnesses social and material sensitivity to mine solutions for idealized living.

The What If Collection is a visual narrative that confronts white supremacy, the social, economic, and political ideology used to subjugate black civilization via colonial rule and enslavement in history and via structural racism today. Many white people have been socialized into a racial illiteracy that fosters white supremacy. This racial illiteracy fails to realize and understand the destructive effects of Western dominance on the rest of the world, particularly on past and present Africa and her diaspora. In response, utilizing discursive design, the collection constructs a counter-story that depicts a shift in the power structure in which the white oppressor is placed in the historical experience of the black oppressed. Moving forward from the past, a contemporary society is visualized where black people are the dominant force.

The newest generation, raised and immersed in today's hyper-consumer culture, has learned to define the self within a neoliberal and capitalist framework in which self-branding and ascribing to hegemonic principles appears imperative to one’s personal success.

Music Education as part of the learning area Arts and Culture is far from satisfactory in South African schools. Reasons for this include a highly sophisticated and complex curriculum (the revised National Curriculum Statement, 2002); the integration of four discrete arts forms into one learning area; and teacher training which is not always reflective of the teaching profession’s demands. The study was based on a mixed method design, investigating how teachers in best scenario schools implement music as part of the integrated learning area Arts and Culture. Interviews were held with various stakeholders in Music Education, including teachers currently involved with the presentation of the Arts and Culture learning area, lecturers at universities training students for Music Education, and policy makers such as subject advisors in the Arts and Culture learning area. Data was also collected by analysing commercially available resources for this learning area. Analysis of the data obtained revealed that few teachers in the Arts and Culture learning area are qualified in more than one art form. A major concern is that music is often omitted from regular classroom activities in the Foundation Phase due to teachers feeling pressurised by multiple assessment standards in learning areas such as Literacy and Numeracy. Another finding in all primary school phases was that the time spent on Music Education was far less than that spent on Visual Arts. Learners are often involved in projects collecting knowledge about music, but seldom involved in active music making experiences. Aspects such as different ways to integrate the arts into one learning area, generalist/specialist teacher training, as well as issues concerning product, process and performance during the delivery of the arts, were also investigated. The researcher drew from all the data to design a course for teacher training in Music Education as part of the learning area Arts and Culture. Recommendations include regular in-service teacher training courses; nationwide co-ordination of teacher training programmes and the establishment of a national council for Music Education. An urgent need for appropriate lesson material in Arts and Culture was also identified, including CDs with songs and backtracks. / Thesis (DMus)--University of Pretoria, 2009. / Music / unrestricted

A written thesis to accompany the M.F.A. Exhibition Heritage Sites, in which vignettes of the artist’s personal and familial narratives become a backdrop for examining themes such as global tourism, the notion of universal heritage, and questioning Puerto Rico as a postcolonial place. A two channel short video layers archival imagery with original material to examine the ways Puerto Rico has been represented and misrepresented personally and globally.

Fielding is an ongoing exploration of place-making, spaces of learning and relationship building in formal and informal learning environments. The project is comprised of a series of events and workshops that are embodied, multimodal, olfactory and engagement-focused and a mobile cart that helps to facilitate these happenings both in and out of the formal gallery space. I regard my art practice as pedagogical, a blurring of art and life into intentional ways of being in the world; an experience of sharing practices with others and a form of what is regarded in institutionalized art as social practice. I find art to be a powerful lens through which to see, and I strive to demonstrate how it can be applied in all matters of living. The practices of making enable me to contribute towards a more equitable, care-ful, empathic, connected and beautiful earth.

Space, in the post-World War context, was the new frontier of ‘global’ dominion. Space Race of the 1950s was a competition to signal technological capability and military strength. The objective of War of the Moon is to unpack the motivation for Moon race in 1950s. What did countries have to gain politically, economically, socially and technologically by conquering space and landing on the moon. At what cost? Who financed it, and where did the labor, land, and raw materials sourced come from. And how it was used to accomplish said landing. Space security is a massive aspect of all current space programs, but this is not a new feature, in fact, its beginnings are in the Cold War era. The second objective of this thesis and exhibition is to understand through rhetoric analysis the language of “defense” as an ‘offensive’ strategy. The artwork uses computer technologies to interrogate media and archives mimicking the state’s methods to suppress information. The work examines through archives the erasure of minority groups from cultural depositories or archives, thereby writing them out of history as the meta themes of exploration of space, and deliberate and chronicled. It is important that this work is not viewed as reactionary, but engaged in a direct dialogue: these pieces exist within the public sphere, in exhibition and projection spaces vetted by governmental, private and non-profit agencies. What is required of the work is to be subversive — to be flexible, to remain able to move freely anywhere and everywhere, and to cross barriers when necessary.

As a graphic designer and as a creative in general, my interest has always been in the conceptualization and execution of brand identities. I am most comfortable as a designer when I am working in the realm of art direction, and most of my design heroes and inspirations are legendary art directors and designers like Paula Scher, Paul Rand, and Michael Bierut. Logo and wordmark design in particular are among my favorite aspects of design, and finding ways to creatively apply these foundational aspects of a brand to each stage of the user experience is exciting to me. The stages of the user experience which I designed and art directed for my honors thesis included a logo symbol, a wordmark, a set of packaging designs, a storefront, a landing page, and an engaging ad campaign. Designing a brand identity across digital and physical mediums while maintaining a high level of cohesion and story is a rigorous process, and my progress was far from linear. The most important thing I learned was to trust the process; wherever it took me. I am excited to bring what I’ve come to realize during the execution of this project to the industry and to help brands, big and small, design for the digital age across every level of their user experience.

Words are fickle, easily misunderstood, and often put us at a loss... but we all have so much we feel we need to express. This begs the question: Is there any safe way of communication? Can anything ever really be communicated how you mean it? Will you ever see the reflection of what you feel, think, and dream outside of yourself? In response to this existential dilemma, I imagine an alternative language of images, sounds, color, feelings, and non-identification. My thesis is a meditation on the issues with standard language and the idea of alternative language. In my argument I understand language as a medium, and communication as an art for which we choose the medium that best conveys what we need to express. Through an experimental audiovisual collage film, I grapple with the phenomenon of the inexpressible and play with alternative ways that we can communicate more effectively and truthfully– with an emphasis on image-language.