Thesis (M.F.A.)--Washington State University, May 2010. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on May 14, 2010). "Department of Fine Arts."

Thesis (MTech (Design))--Cape Peninsula University of Technology, 2015. / This mini-thesis aims at exploring the process of design thinking in the transformation of a decayed found object into an artwork, with a narrative of sustainability and life, thus creating awareness around the role and function of decayed objects by repurposing them to give them new life. The scope of this study will be limited to the use of art to create awareness around repurposing found objects. However, these repurposed found objects will not become physical utility products. Rather, this study aims to discuss and explore ways in which art can be used to generate an ethos of 'redesigning' into a work of art which gives it an aesthestic value. An undertone of this study is the dilemma encountered in attempting to establish clear delineations between art and design in both pedagogic and professional practice domains. ABSTRACT This mini-thesis aims at exploring the process of design thinking in the transformation of a decayed found object into an artwork, with a narrative of sustainability and life, thus creating awareness around the role and function of decayed objects by repurposing them to give them new life. Key topics discussed in this mini-thesis are the noticing of and engagement with decayed found objects and sustainability. Other topics explored are repurposing and design for repurposing. Debates around the concept of 'design thinking' are ever current. Design thinking was employed in the study, which resulted in a process that examined the richness of my individual artistic journeys. My ontological stance is that all chosen found objects should have a life. This study is epistemologically situated within the interpretive paradigm since the study makes meaning of my experiences as I interact with found objects. The study drew on a qualitative design paradigm of embodied experience, phenomenological research and employed qualitative methodologies of reflective journaling, lived experience and a process-orientated art approach. The research method adopted a convenience or accidental sample, which is not representative of a population of found objects as the objects were presented by accident. All artworks created for the purpose of the study incorporated found objects that were selected randomly. The design analysis and findings verified the likelihood of a thematic approach by using comparisons of the choice of collected found objects. The general contribution(s) of this mini-thesis to the knowledge toward the direction design needs to take is three-fold: firstly, the study confirmed an awareness of using discarded banal found objects and giving these objects new life through design thinking; secondly, it emphasises the awareness around the critical concerns of sustainability and social responsibility; and, lastly it engages curricula development in robust dialogue that advances the sustainability agenda in a multi-disciplinary context in the Faculty of Informatics and Design, at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology, Cape Town, South Africa. In order to initiate further dialogue, this study argues and proposes that student learning can be enhanced through using a found object as catalyst to ignite creative expression and as a result positively contribute to the sustainability agenda. Typically the study could also propose through means of arguments in literature that creative practical activities structured around found objects and design thinking will allow students to adopt a deep approach to learning. These educational arguments will exceed the objectives of this mini-thesis. They are, nevertheless, considered a worthwhile theme for further research or a doctoral thesis.

Every day we encounter objects and use them for purposes related to improving our life. However, sometimes the reason these objects are manufactured is because of capitalistic gain rather than the need for improved quality of life. In fact, the more objects that are produced by American companies, the more garbage is inevitably ending up in landfills. The installation work, Ocean of Objects, arranges mundane objects in a different context within a diorama. The United States is in an age of consumerism where our relationship to the objects we buy defines the way we conceptualize our relationship to the physical environment we are in. As a theater artist, I studied scenic design and installing scenery for productions. The exhibition and diorama are created using methods of theatrical scenic design, and digital elements such as projections help reinforce the narrative setting. I sense that if people paid more attention to how things get made and then discarded and changed the perception of their environment through the objects they buy and use, then they could build a better community with each other. / Master of Fine Arts / The effectiveness of waste management impacts every person. Most people tend not to think about what they throw out once it leaves their home. To create a better ecology, it is critical to persuade people that their individual effort makes a difference. In the process of "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle," individuals can try in the latter two steps. Besides recycling, people have the power to buy less and find new ways to use objects that become "disposable" after their initial use. The exhibition Ocean of Objects puts members of the Blacksburg, Virginia community in close contact with objects, and asks them to reconsider how they buy and use things in their daily lives.

Student Number : 9406610A - MA(FA) dissertation - School of Fine Art - Faculty of Arts / This thesis is a study of the box constructions of New York artist Joseph Cornell from the early 1930s to the late 1960s, and the influence of his work on that of contemporary American jeweller Thomas Mann, as well as my own artistic production. The key areas of focus are the process of assemblage and the implications of the box format, with the following themes being explored: miniature space and time; preciousness; fetishism and voyeurism. These are followed through into the section on my own work, where the additional subjects of the history of collecting, automata and the stop-frame animation of filmmaker Jan Švankmajer are discussed. The conclusion that I reach is about the potential power residing in found objects, which form the basis of Cornell’s, Mann’s and my own work.

solid objects is a collection of objects and its cultural life, where the roles of the object, artist, collector, museum, writer, publisher and curator are suspended to reemerge in other possible forms. In this work the text becomes an object, the pocket a museum, the collection a persona, the artist its curator, the writer a sign.

Residents of the region just north of the U.S.-Mexico border experience migration and smuggling activities through constantly changing found objects on the desert landscape--a pair of shoes neatly arranged on a trail; a cross hung in a tree; a can of food balanced on a rock. Consideration of some found objects as placed objects, set down with apparent care by travelers unseen and unmet, demonstrates how the objects uniquely inform the perceptions and practices of residents who find them. Such finders speculate about the lives and movements of others by utilizing the objects as metaphoric figures of practice, tools that uniquely but only partially help them bridge knowledge gaps among multiple constantly changing variables in their everyday lives. The finding-speculating dynamic confounds a direct and easy association of found items with trash, of migrants with threat, and of a border wall with hopelessness. Residents instead craft a sophisticated and practical cultural memory of place in a region that is inhabited differently by day than by night, where tragedy, grace, danger, and hope fuse in unexpected ways. The objects and events that erupt into rural border life inspire a poetics that matches the territory. In a landscape of uncertainty, placed objects secure and extend situational understandings beyond common conceptual frames of epidemic, normalized patterns of violence and collateral damage that are often considered necessary conditions of life in the region.

Found and collected natural (organic) and industrial materials are conducive to Vicky Shukuroglou's making of artefacts. They have particular properties of materiality and origin for engagement, interpretation and intervention. Materials are sourced, selected and collected from such diverse environments as urban industries and remote coastal environs. They are chosen for their working properties, personal associations, and qualities such as colour, form, texture, weight, structure and material composition. Her observations of and responses to these diverse environments and their local materials become the influence in the process of making. Objects - such as hair and bone - are investigated and reflected upon as they hold certain qualities that appeal and intrigue, and inspire creative responses. Materials are significantly altered from their original form and utilised for the construction of works, or engaged with as 'objects' for inclusion that remain largely as they were found. They are built onto, extended, reconstructed, enclosed or joined with the constructed elements. Visual energy and ambiguity created from common and opposing qualities is considered and utilised in the interpretation of found forms. In the building of these objects or assemblages, they take on a detailed and intimate identity, whose scale expands beyond the hand held object. The process and activity of making is a vehicle for further observation and learning, generating an understanding and insight into the relationships of place, structure, form, movement, space, and personal methodologies.

This research project investigates factors contributing to what I consider to be an erosion within the contemporary culture of the imagination- crucial to the very concept of what it is to be human. It has been said that the 'civilising' of art within contemporary culture may have flogged the human imagination into retreat. If so what might be the best way for art to help us visualise more creative ways of living and being? This is the key question I have pursued in this research project, the main outcomes of which are a body of creative art works (presented for examination in the form of a site-specific installation, together with documentary archive of photographs and other interventions) and an exegesis which explores the critical context for these. In proposing site-specific installation art as a vital alternative to the over-commodification evident within much contemporary art, I also see repetition and play as being strategies with particular potential for encouraging active artist-participant dialogue on the subject of the poetico-ethical imagination- along lines suggested by thinkers such as Robert Kearney and Ken Wilbur. The artefacts and installations presented for examination are mostly devoid of textual explanation and commentary, with the aim of emphasising direct sensory experience. However, throughout the written component (exegesis) I have taken the creative liberty of including textual fragments and other visual elements as a means of suggesting that a form of disassociation, meandering or breakdown has occurred. The reader will also notice an absence of capitalisation in the titles of chapters (and certain works). In this I have sought to explore possibilities for undermining academic form through imaginative play.

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaf 28).

Digital technology has expanded the designer’s creative reach, but cannot duplicate the complexity of the imperfect and unexpected results of handmade processes. By executing a series of hand-built collage and assemblage pieces, I hope to not only rediscover the pleasure of working with my hands but also to develop creative methods to incorporate into future design projects. In this body of work, I have manually executed tasks that designers perform with software — cutting, pasting, layering, aligning, and creating transparency and drop shadows. The pieces are built from new and found materials, using text and images from old family letters and photos — physical evidence of relationships from my childhood and those of my parents and grandparents. These pieces express fragments of memories and family history.