This dissertation redefines Los Angeles “light and space” art, tracing the multiple strains of abstract light art that developed in California during the postwar technology boom. These artists used new technical materials and industrial processes to expand modernist definitions of medium and create perceptual experiences based on their shared understanding of light as artistic material. The diversity and experimental nature of early Light and Space practice has been suppressed within the discourse of “minimal abstraction,” a term I use to signal the expansion of my analysis beyond the boundaries of work that is traditionally associated with “minimalism” as a movement. My project focuses on three women: Mary Corse, Helen Pashgian and Maria Nordman, each of whom represents a different trajectory of postwar light-based practice in California. While all of these artists express ambivalence about attempts to align their practice with the Light and Space movement, their work provides fundamental insight into the development of light art and minimal abstract practice in California during this era. In chapter one, I map the evolution of Mary Corse’s experimental “light painting” between 1964 and 1971, in which the artist experimented with new technology—including fluorescent bulbs and the reflective glass microspheres used in freeway lane dividers—to expand the perceptual boundaries of monochrome painting by manifesting an experience of pure white light. In chapter two, I plot the development of Helen Pashgian’s plastic resin sculpture from her early pieces cast in handmade molds to her disc sculptures that mobilized the expertise of the faculty and aeronautical engineering technology available to her during an artist residency at the California Institute of Technology between 1969 and 1971. In chapter three, I chart the origins of Maria Nordman’s ephemeral post-studio practice using natural light from her early works that modified the architecture of her Los Angeles studio, to installations in which she excised sections of the walls or ceilings of commercial spaces and galleries, and finally to her project at the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley for the 1979 Space as Support series, in which she turned the museum building into a container for the light of the summer solstice. The reception history I construct outlines how gender bias suppressed the contributions of women within the critical and historical discourse surrounding light-based work and minimal abstraction, while also exploring how women mobilized Light and Space’s interest in embodied perceptual experience as part of my wider analysis of the tactics deployed by women making abstract work before the discursive spaces of feminism and institutional critique were fully formed.

Choi Suet Han. / "Architecture Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Master of Architecture Programme 2005-2006, design report." / Includes bibliographical references. / Chapter I . --- Synopsis / Chapter II . --- Art and Architecture: From Art Space to Space of Art / Chapter III . --- From Spirituality to Physicality / Chapter IV . --- From Human to Nature / Chapter V . --- From Private to Public / Chapter VI . --- Dialogue with Artists / Chapter a) --- Water...and lines / Chapter i... --- Spiritual and Physical Engagement / Chapter ii... --- Between Consciousness and Unconsciousness / Chapter iii... --- Wandering in Geometric Abstraction / Chapter iv... --- Essence of Chinese Landscape / Chapter b) --- Shadow...and layers / Chapter i... --- Nature of painting / Chapter ii... --- Emptiness / Chapter iii... --- Shadow / Chapter c) --- Human and Memory / Chapter d) --- Light and Contrast / Chapter e) --- Wind and Wood / Chapter i... --- Solid and Void / Chapter VII. --- Space and Architectural syntax / Chapter VIII. --- Site anlysis and Site plan

Voice is an inconstant yet constantly performative material; it is our internally-housed, liminal technology. ‘Processes of voice’ is the term I develop throughout the text of this thesis to articulate materialities of voice and methods of address within processes of practice in artists’ moving image that ‘give voice’ to material and non-material forms. I interrogate this in relation to key concepts in Philosophy of Mind to address the complex ways in which bodily skills and action inform perception and thought to explore an account of perception and process in relation to voice. I examine the liminal, inconstant, and uncertain in subjective experience, and the ways in which this is extended into the social through a politics of embodied practice harnessed in moving images. I make a case for the uncertain I-voice, which engages the fully embodied and openly subjective, to challenge established narratives and conventions of address, and the power and knowledge dynamics that structure them. I come to focus on the uncertain acousmatic I-voice in moving image, which through its presentness, intimacy and acknowledgement of uncertainty relinquishes the acousmêtre’s threat of control to share a liminal territory of destabilized authority with the viewer. This is also explored in and through my own moving image work, A Desire For Organic Order (2015), a single screen video, which contributes to the overall thesis.

The overall objectives of this study had a dual focus. One was to determine the attitudes of children toward police from projective drawings. The second utilized the experience of performing the first objective to assess the possible adaptation and use of projective techniques in social work. One hundred and twenty-nine children from three different Portland public schools were given the topic “I met a policeman in my neighborhood” and asked to draw a picture. Second graders in an upper white socioeconomic school, a lower white socioeconomic school, and a school in a lower socioeconomic Negro area were compared. It was expected that the Negro children’s drawings of policemen would indicate more negative feelings than the drawings from either a similar socioeconomic group of white children or a higher socioeconomic group of white children. The lower socioeconomic white children’s drawings of policemen were expected to show more negative feelings than the drawings of the upper socioeconomic white group. To test the overall study hypotheses eight hypotheses were developed. These hypotheses were tested through eight judgment categories: distance between self and policeman, ratio of height of self to height of policeman, omitted body parts of policeman, large hands of policeman, number of weapons, and obvious aggression by policeman. Each picture was judged independently and blind by two judges. A third judge was used in cases of disagreement. Judgment agreement was above 95% for all eight categories. Resulting judgments for the three groups were compared on all eight items through chi square and median tests. A composite score for each picture consisting of the total number of the eight categories judged to be negative was then used to test the overall hypothesis. Comparison of the three groups on the individual categories yielded mixed results. The upper white group was significantly less negative than both other groups on the omissions item, and less negative than the lower socioeconomic Negro group on the height and smile items. Differences between the lower white and lower Negro socioeconomic groups and between the upper and lower white groups were inconclusive. The lower white group was more negative than the other groups on the omissions and less negative on the weapons items. These differences were not in the predicted direction. Testing of the overall hypothesis showed the upper white socioeconomic group less negative in their attitudes toward policemen than either the lower white or the lower Negro socioeconomic groups. There was no significant difference between the lower white and lower Negro socioeconomic groups. The study would suggest, then, that the upper socioeconomic white children have less negative attitudes toward policemen than either of the other two groups. This difference seems to be more socioeconomic than racial, since the Negro children’s drawings should have showed more negative attitudes than the white children of the same socioeconomic status if determinants were primarily racial. It was possible in this study for social workers to have high judgment agreement, but only by utilizing simplified and very concrete judgment criteria. Much skill and training are required for social workers to utilize the projectives. In addition, validity is difficult to determine, and interpretation of data using projective techniques can be uncertain and ambiguous. Given these limitations, the utilization of projective methods by social workers should be undertaken with caution.

Fur, Pixels, Loved Ones and Other Transients is a paper discussing my practice from 2000 to 2003. It is a personal and theoretical exploration of common concepts and theories in reference to my works Fluff Snuffs (2000), Relentless (2001), Trigger Displacement (2002), Bathing in a Warm Glow of Nothing (2003) and Memory Play Back (2003). The effects of Tele-visual and computer mediated images of death and violence within these works are investigated, which lead to an exploration of fear and trauma. This mechanism of mediation is used within the works as a means of exploring the subtleties within the screen-based image that may go unnoticed or seem disconcerting. The role of the soft toy is an important element in these works and this is further explored by referencing the use of the soft toy in works of several other contemporary artists. These works are discussed to further explore the complexity of ideas on death, violence, trauma, memory and fear / Master of Arts (Hons) (Contemporary Arts)

Artists’ books extend the limits of the conventional book. They take liberties with its form, content and configuration; they include subjects that might be considered insignificant, risqué, abstract or obscure. Their print run is too limited for ordinary publishing and marketing procedures. This thesis engages with the artists’ book in terms of its various moods as suggested by the bodily humours of Hippocrates and Galen. It argues that humour (in its embodied sense) takes many forms in the artists’ book: from the angry, the despairing or the melancholic to the comic or the joyful. In building a foundation for this approach to the artists’ book the thesis also connects with crucial moments in the evolution of twentieth century conceptual thought about art. Chapter One introduces the idea of humour as a strategy used by book artists to negotiate an art world in which the aesthetic canon is under scrutiny. Up to this point a characteristic feature of this negotiation has been a search for a consistent definition of artists’ book. My concerns are not so much with a fetishization of the book in a digitally challenging age, but, rather with the focus on the artists’ book’s ironic techniques that are employed to oversee the nature of the form relative to changes in its context, both technological and cultural. In the second chapter, I connect the artists’ book to some of its experimental origins within the literature of humour. I discuss a number of artists’ books that exemplify the sharpness of wit, the use of irony, the depth of melancholy and the place of nonsense among other forms within the spectrum of humorous possibility. The “anatomy” of humour is dissected in the third chapter, according to the way in which it embodies the creative process. The concepts of appropriation and détournement are basic tools, for the collection of subject matter. Every one of the books discussed use “wit” to carve a direct channel to the core of the idea it expresses. The diverse manifestations of irony enable the artists’ book in its various guises to mislead, riddle, surprise and seduce its reader. “Nonsense” keeps rationality honest by arguing a case for a productive form of “uselessness” that reflects upon an art world burdened by the weight of “usefulness” and overproduction. The fourth chapter examines a number of artists’ books and writers who, in various ways tap the rich field of the mundane: here is a source that like a compost heap, nurtures and produces those species of humorous surprise that also rejuvenate. The fifth chapter looks at larger aspects of the world, which shape our consciousness through spectacular images and the media. How these pressures permeate and influence the creative activities of the book artist is mapped in Chapter Six, which examines the shared internal space of the reader and the creator of the artwork. This internal space is the workshop of the book artist. Here the tactics are honed and the dynamics of the exterior world are in effect moulded and shaped into the subject matter and forms of artists’ books. In a culture in which “success” is commensurate with the accumulation of wealth, to be unsuccessful is to belong to an under-class, to be invisible. Chapter Seven makes use of an ironic sense of failure as a strategy to support the main objective of the thesis, which is to test the limits for the possibility of an art practice that continues to thrive as it ducks and weaves its way through and under the radar of contemporary cultural conditions. It argues a case for a fugitive practice that even as it is on the move is congruent, and in its selfreflexivity, accountable for its political and aesthetic stance. There has been a considerable resurgence of interest in the artists’ book since the late twentieth century with an increase in small press publications, the development of significant public and private collections of artists’ books and a growing body of critical commentary on them. Digital technology and desk top publishing have enabled many artists to produce books rapidly, cheaply and with qualities ranging in quality from the photocopy through to slick high-end productions. From the 1970s until the present, however, the commentary on artists’ books has been preoccupied with a search for a definition of the genre. Underpinning this endeavour has been a yearning for “consecration” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s sense) where acceptance would elevate the artists’ book to the same level as the “legitimate” art forms – painting, sculpture, photography and the finely crafted art object. By contrast, this thesis considers the artists’ book as an alternative art form and explores its ability to evade the constraints of consecration, to remain fresh and mischievous in creative and subversive ways / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

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This thesis presents a method for combining GPU programming with traditional programming to create a fluid simulation based watercolor tool for artists. This application provides a graphical interface and a canvas upon which artists can create simulated watercolors in real time. The GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, is an effcient and highly parallel processor located on the graphics card of a computer; GPU programming is touted as a way to improve performance in graphics and non–graphics applications. The effectiveness of this method in speeding up large, general purpose programs, however, is found here to be disappointing. In a small application with minimal CPU/GPU interaction, theoretical speedups of 10 times maybe achieved, but with the limitations of communication speed between the GPU and the CPU, gains are slight when this method is used in conjunction with traditional programming.

This thesis presents a method for combining GPU programming with traditional programming to create a fluid simulation based watercolor tool for artists. This application provides a graphical interface and a canvas upon which artists can create simulated watercolors in real time. The GPU, or Graphics Processing Unit, is an effcient and highly parallel processor located on the graphics card of a computer; GPU programming is touted as a way to improve performance in graphics and non–graphics applications. The effectiveness of this method in speeding up large, general purpose programs, however, is found here to be disappointing. In a small application with minimal CPU/GPU interaction, theoretical speedups of 10 times maybe achieved, but with the limitations of communication speed between the GPU and the CPU, gains are slight when this method is used in conjunction with traditional programming.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Teacher Education, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 61-63).