This study constitutes the first critical history of dematerialization. Coined by critics Lucy Lippard and John Chandler in their 1968 essay, “The Dematerialization of Art,” this term was initially used to describe an emergent “ultra-conceptual” art that would render art objects obsolete by emphasizing the thinking process over material form. Lippard and Chandler believed dematerialization would thwart the commodification of art. Despite Lippard admitting in 1973 that art had not dematerialized into unmediated information or experience, the term has since entered art historians’ lexicons as a standard means to characterize Conceptual Art. While art historians have debated the implications of dematerialization and its actuality, they have yet to examine closely Lippard and Chandler’s foundational essay, which has been anthologized in truncated form. If dematerialization was not intrinsic to Conceptual Art, what was it? By closely analyzing “The Dematerialization of Art” and Lippard and Chandler’s other overlooked collaborative essays, this dissertation will shed light on the genealogy of dematerialization by contending they were not describing a trend limited to what is now considered Conceptual Art. By investigating the socio-historical connections of dematerialization, this dissertation will advance a more far-reaching view of the ideology of dematerialization, a cultural misrecognition that the world should be propelled toward immateriality that is located at the intersection of particle physics, environmental sustainability, science-fiction, neoliberal politics, and other discourses. This analysis then focuses on three case studies that examine singular works of art over a twenty-year period: Eva Hesse’s Laocoön (1966), James Turrell’s Skyspace I (1974), and Anish Kapoor’s 1000 Names (1979-85). In doing so, this dissertation will accomplish two objectives. First, it looks at how these works materially respond to the ideology of dematerialization and provide a means for charting how this cultural desire unfolds across space and time. Second, this dissertation contends that contrary to Lippard and Chandler’s prognostication, dematerialization—and immateriality—does not correlate to emancipation from capitalization. Rather, it will be shown that dematerialization, its rhetoric, and its strategies can actually be enlisted into the service of the commoditizing forces Lippard and Chandler hoped it would escape.

“The More You Look, the more THERE IS to see…” From Hinekaro Goes on a Picnic and Blows up Another Obelisk (Christine Parker, Oceania Parker, 1995) In the 1990s New Zealand was in the grip of free market fundamentalism, neo-liberal deregulation of the economy having begun in the mid-eighties. The Maori protest movement was a major source of societal conflict and feminism had become the ‘F’ word. This study examines my writing and directing during the 1990s in New Zealand. It is proposed that the films contributed to national and international conversations around feminism, colonial struggles, spirituality and the supernatural. It is argued that these works offer a social critique of neoliberalism and the divisive effects of it, on women in particular. In the context of this appraisal neoliberalism is understood to be a set of beliefs that support the functioning of the global free market, with minimal government regulation, except to protect the functioning of private enterprise and the ownership of private property. The short films One Man’s Meat (1991), Peach (1993), and Hinekaro Goes on a Picnic and Blows up Another Obelisk (1995) and the feature film Channelling Baby (1999) are located in an oeuvre of female, Gay, and Maori film makers and artists responding to this environment. The recurrence of alternative utopias, the use of magic realism and the representation of the spiritual and supernatural in my work are also considered in relation to other films made in the period. A case is made that the films were part of a small vanguard of films responding to the 1990s status quo by offering alternative modes of discourse to the dominant economic rationalism. Rich in visual intensity and heightened narrative tropes, such as irony and fragmented narratives, my aesthetic choices, together with recurring themes of chance and fate, agency and identity, are considered to link the films together as a coherent study. While the works are located in an evolving feminist tradition in the 1990s, their continued relevance today, particularly in relation to foregrounding marginal voices and the disruption of dominant paradigms and expectations of female behaviour and identity, underpin the claim for originality.

This thesis is a study of the Community Relations Department of the Southern Organizing Committee of the Congress of Industrial Organizations during the CIO’s Southern Organizing Drive, often referred to as “Operation Dixie.” The Community Relations Department was primarily interested in improving relations between organized labor and organized religion, in the hopes that improved church-labor relations would produce a situation more conducive to labor organizing, and reduce attacks on the CIO from religious leaders. This thesis examines the methods utilized by the CRD to achieve this end, and presents an analysis both of their efficacy and of their implementation. Specific programs that are explored are the CRD’s compilation, and publication, of various religiously themed pamphlets, the formation of Religion and Labor Fellowship groups, and the CRD’s relations with various anti-labor newspapers that made use of religious arguments to attack the CIO and Operation Dixie.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of History, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-31).

The research done for this investigation deals with both the motivation of the artist, the personal history and the individual's artistic process. This process is examined through two bodies of art work dealing with the home as a metaphor. The shared themes of belonging, loss and longing are further reinforced by "visual cues" represented in the photographic works. For the Home Divided series, I approached the style of the photographs and the subject matter through indexical photographs of multi-unit homes and the visual representation of a distinct and bilateral division of the structure. The imagery presented in this series deals directly with the historical use of landscape in photography and the house or home as the subject. This series is motivated by my personal experience with a fractured family unit and experience with the fractured notion of the home. The second part of this study examines and records the artist's exploration of space and surroundings in the series, Chez Moi. The images document occupied structures at night with a visual focus being on a light source within the structure. There are shared elements that exist between both bodies of work that elicit feelings of searching and belonging. The separation from the viewer and the subject is further reinforced by the layer created that separates the photographer from the subject through the lens of the camera. The concept of the flâneur, introduced by Charles Baudelaire is an integral part of the artist's process, finding a sense of place and belonging in a foreign environment. The written portion of this investigation gathers materials and information that deals with the conception of the family unit and the house that is literally, and metaphorically, utilized in the notion of home. This focus on the structure as a metaphor for home has further reaching v implications than the structure itself. Findings show that a Western view of community and belonging is rooted in a place of stability in one's community. The basis for personal growth within that community has a direct impact on an individual's development in it. (Goldburgh, 67) The fractured nature of my experience and emotions tied with the notions of home, are expressed through both A Home Divided and the Chez Moi series photographic series. Within this investigation there are references to the artist's memories and experiences that are in contrast and discord with the traditional concept of acceptance and belonging.

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This thesis is a transatlantic examination of self-representational strategies in factory women's poetry from circa 1848-1882, highlighting in particular how the medium of the working-class periodical enabled these socially marginal poets to subjectively engage with and reconfigure dominant typologies of class and gender within nineteenth-century poetics. The first chapter explores how working-class women were depicted in middle-class social-reform literature and working-class men's poetry. It argues that factory women were circumscribed into roles of social villainy or victimage in popular bourgeois reform texts by authors such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Caroline Norton, and were cast as idealized domestic figures in working-class men's poetry in the mid-nineteenth century. The remaining three chapters examine the poetry of Manchester dye-worker Fanny Forrester, Scottish weaver Ellen Johnston, and Lowell mill-girl Lucy Larcom as case-studies of factory women's poetics in mid-nineteenth century writing. Chapter Two discusses the life and work of Fanny Forrester in Ben Brierley's Journal, and considers how Forrester's invocation of the pastoral genre opens new opportunities for urban, factory women to engage with ideologies of domestic femininity within a destabilized urban cityscape. Chapter Three considers the work of Ellen Johnston, “The Factory Girl” whose numerous poems in The People's Journal and the Penny Post cross genres, dialects, and themes. This chapter claims that Johnston's poetry divides class and gender identity depending on her intended audience—a division exemplified, respectively, by her nationalistic poetry and her sentimental correspondence poetry. Chapter Four explores the work of Lucy Larcom, whose contributions to The Lowell Offering and her novel-poem An Idyl of Work harness the language and philosophy of Evangelical Christianity to validate women's wage-labor as socially and religiously appropriate. Ultimately, this thesis contends that nineteenth-century factory women's poetry from Britain and America embodies the tensions surrounding the “factory girl” identity, and offers unique aesthetic and representational strategies of negotiating women's factory labor.

<p>This project investigates a laser radar system. The system is based on the principles of time-correlated single photon counting, and by measuring the times-of-flight of reflected photons it can find range profiles and perform three-dimensional imaging of scenes. Because of the photon counting technique the resolution and precision that the system can achieve is very high compared to analog systems. These properties make the system interesting for many military applications. For example, the system can be used to interrogate non-cooperative targets at a safe distance in order to gather intelligence. However, signal processing is needed in order to extract the information from the data acquired by the system. This project focuses on the analysis of different signal processing methods.</p><p>The Wiener filter and the Richardson-Lucy algorithm are used to deconvolve the data acquired by the photon counting system. In order to find the positions of potential targets different approaches of non-linear least squares methods are tested, as well as a more unconventional method called ESPRIT. The methods are evaluated based on their ability to resolve two targets separated by some known distance and the accuracy with which they calculate the position of a single target, as well as their robustness to noise and their computational burden.</p><p>Results show that fitting a curve made of a linear combination of asymmetric super-Gaussians to the data by a method of non-linear least squares manages to accurately resolve targets separated by 1.75 cm, which is the best result of all the methods tested. The accuracy for finding the position of a single target is similar between the methods but ESPRIT has a much faster computation time.</p>

This project investigates a laser radar system. The system is based on the principles of time-correlated single photon counting, and by measuring the times-of-flight of reflected photons it can find range profiles and perform three-dimensional imaging of scenes. Because of the photon counting technique the resolution and precision that the system can achieve is very high compared to analog systems. These properties make the system interesting for many military applications. For example, the system can be used to interrogate non-cooperative targets at a safe distance in order to gather intelligence. However, signal processing is needed in order to extract the information from the data acquired by the system. This project focuses on the analysis of different signal processing methods. The Wiener filter and the Richardson-Lucy algorithm are used to deconvolve the data acquired by the photon counting system. In order to find the positions of potential targets different approaches of non-linear least squares methods are tested, as well as a more unconventional method called ESPRIT. The methods are evaluated based on their ability to resolve two targets separated by some known distance and the accuracy with which they calculate the position of a single target, as well as their robustness to noise and their computational burden. Results show that fitting a curve made of a linear combination of asymmetric super-Gaussians to the data by a method of non-linear least squares manages to accurately resolve targets separated by 1.75 cm, which is the best result of all the methods tested. The accuracy for finding the position of a single target is similar between the methods but ESPRIT has a much faster computation time.