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Covering the topics of my conceptual interests overlapping with the production of several bodies of work over the three years of my academic curriculum, this report addresses how my theoretical ideas and commitment to materials have shaped and informed my work. The work produced at my time in the Studio Arts Program at the University of Texas at Austin has indeed come full circle, with subjects and themes growing out of and eventually returning to some of the first work that I produced here. This work discussed is organized in a non-chronological order to expose similarities in approach over the course of time. Coming into the program I wanted to focus on developing the content in my work. Reshaping the way I thought and approached sculpture, I have adapted my previous investment in materials and incorporated my greater interests in the human condition as expressed through the cultural relics of society. / text

This thesis is an academic exercise set out to understand the secrets of Architecture. It is a compilation of a series of gestures made on behalf of Architecture. These gestures confront the materiality of Architecture to reveal the imprints beyond what makes the material exist according to the law of its nature, the imprints that reveal the material as an imprint for the human desire, the human will, and the human wish, for the material as a tool of representation and interpretation, thus the human thoughts, the human purpose and the human work. Explained in terms of space or environment, in terms of form or function, Architecture is never quite fully and satisfactorily understood. These terms reveal their anxiety about the mundane and the prosaic in the material constituents of Architecture. They tend to inadvertently distance themselves from the material seeking to appeal to the conceptual. As much significance as the conceptual and the intangible contribute to the principles of Architecture, this thesis revels in the tactile, the vivid, in what is all together sense perceptible, the real, the present. As much as it regards the secrets that reside in the divine and in the spiritual, it is eager to find them embodied in its material reality. Truth, poetry, beauty, all things conceptual, that reside in abstract immaterial form beyond reach in the upper ethers, are afforded by Architecture to exist within a corpus. Without the material imagination, one is prone to participating in the exercise of Architecture, with undue weight given to its form, its shape, its geometry, to how readily it will serve a functional need, a need that seems to reduce life around it to that specific act, overlooking what will eventually reside alongside us in matter. Without the material imagination, one is prone to readily accepting what modern technology or modern alchemy can afford this exercise of Architecture thereby readily adapting techniques and systems without careful thought. Without the material imagination, one is prone to overlooking the prima materia1 and the primordial architectural gestures, and thereby unduly and unwisely willing the material to conform to the conceptual. Without the material imagination, one is prone to overlooking what is in the nature of a material and thereby missing what its inherent beauty informs us. Along with trying to understand the iconic elements of Architecture, this thesis is also an investigation in its materiality. It is an exercise in trying to understand what confronting the materiality of an artifice reveals. It is an attempt to define architecture by man's endeavour to understand the creature, to understand the material presence, to unravel the mysteries of the material constitution and organization. / Master of Architecture / I used this thesis to better understand architecture by focusing less on the shapes of built objects and more on their constitution. I tried to focus less on the form that we see and more on the body that is present among us. Instead of making a specific use for a building the impetus for building, I tried to consider the experience one has in inhabiting an environment. To conduct the above exercise, This thesis is structured with three main parts. The first part looks at the material environment and how it is organized before man intervenes. This part is what is referred to in this thesis as ‘Matron’. The second part looks at man’s intervention on the same environment from a time that precedes us, and is referred to in this thesis as ‘Ruin’. The third and last part is referred to as new mineral. This part contains the main body of work relying on the research material from the previous two, to produce a design for a monastic complex for 36 Benedictine monks.

Inventing Authors draws on a diverse strand of methodologies from literary, book, and media studies to rethink the practice of authorship in the context of media history, specifically during the founding age of technological invention in the United States between 1870 and 1920. The Age of Edison witnessed an unprecedented explosion of new media that threw into relief traditional ideas about writing, literature, and authorship. By moving beyond economic narratives of authorial history, Inventing Authors radically disperses the practice and profession of authorship across the cultural techniques that mark it up. To rethink authorship in the midst of nineteenth-century media history, this project surrenders abstract concepts like "representation," "literature," and "culture" for the materialist rigor of what contemporary German media theorists call "cultural techniques" (Kulturtechnik), a term that combines an attention to media technologies with a focus on elementary techniques, skills, and practices, especially reading, writing, and counting. Drawing on material histories of inscription by Friedrich Kittler, James Beniger, and Lisa Gitelman, it engages authors not as artists, workers, or professionals in the market - the usual approach for studies of this period - but rather in mutually constitutive relationships with the skills, objects, and techniques that shaped the conditions of their possibility. Like Edison at Menlo Park, authors in the second half of the nineteenth century inaugurate a future in which technical expertise and ingenuity, not originality and inspiration, control the field of representation. Each chapter excavates the technical training of an author to demonstrate how authors capitalize on available materials to engineer new methods for inventing and marking up reality. My introduction and chapters are focalized around four authors - Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Theodore Dreiser - and the cultural techniques that shaped their methods, writing practices, and literature. In this period of American history, authors began to register how their literary inventions were not merely disembodied experiments in style, but rather technical operations that processed language through different markup strategies. They were not just artists making art; they were editors and engineers processing bits of culture in ways correlate with the cultural techniques trained into them.

archives@tulane.edu / I often find myself drawn toward objects that most would consider mundane. I am compelled to reevaluate subject matter that I have previously conditioned myself to disregard, investigate what I believe to know about the objects, and consider their new potential based on unexpected findings. My thesis exhibition explores my initial perception of repurposed cardboard boxes by fabricating realistic and formally exaggerated variations of them in clay. The three distinct categories of work within the show (trompe l’eoil boxes, abstracted cardboard boxes, and fragmented wall pieces) are an embodiment of my analytical approach to observing cardboard with a fresh perspective. Trompe l’eoil boxes provide a frame of reference. Abstracted cardboard boxes utilize unexpected characteristics of cardboard—as well as recognizable traits of clay—to challenge preconceived notions of how a cardboard box looks and functions. Wall pieces that partially resemble torn scraps of cardboard questions what remains of objects incapable of serving their intended function, while also discussing cardboard and clay materiality. A one-dimensional perspective of cardboard boxes presents them as utilitarian vessels, manufactured without ostentatious appeal, designed to protect objects we cherish, and meant to ultimately be discarded without contemplation. Through unbiased observation, formally and conceptually multifaceted layers emerge from behind initial perceptions of the box. / 1 / Holly E Ross

archives@tulane.edu / The embellishment of paintings of the Virgin Mary enhanced the meaning and value of the Marian devotions represented. This practice involved the direct application of ornaments made of precious metals and gems onto a painted canvas. This dissertation examines a small corpus of embellished paintings of the Virgin made in the Andes between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. At the center of this investigation is the heavily adorned image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, Extremadura, originally created by Spanish friar Diego de Ocaña for the Metropolitan Cathedral of La Plata (now Sucre, Bolivia) in 1601. This dissertation argues that the motivations for embellishing these Marian paintings stem from the desire to imbue them with the value represented by these luxury materials during the colonial period. Following the Spanish invasion and settlement of the American continent, Eurocentric perceptions of luxury minerals dictated the value of precious metals and gems extracted from and circulated throughout the Andes. This dissertation examines these values of precious gems and metals using theoretical frameworks on materiality, adornment, and the appraisal of objects. This is followed by the historical accounts of how precious metals and gems came to be used as embellishments in paintings of the Virgin in the colonial Andes. By employing visual analysis and contextualization of the materials that make them unique, the purpose of embellishing sacred images with precious metals and gems becomes clearer. / 1 / Lucia Abramovich

This dissertation addresses the complex status of Teotihuacan, officially demarcated as a "zone of archaeological monuments," at the center of Mexico, which is a pluralistic nation-state. Located 40 kilometers from the modern capital, its largest pyramid, the Pyramid of the Sun, was built almost 2,000 years ago. Attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, it is not only an important source of revenue but also a powerful symbol of Mexican national identity and immense historical pride. Leaving this site's prehistoric origins and significance for archaeologists to sort out, this thesis focuses on its position near the core of the political system and its role in articulating and commemorating national identity. By examining how the site has survived through history, how it has been represented, and how people interact with the site and at its premises, this thesis elaborates on the extent to which Teotihuacan should be conceived specifically as a nation-state formation place and on what other factors have shaped the place in its current form. The diversity that is revealed by this examination indicates, moreover, that the nation-state formation paradigm focuses too narrowly on ideological connotations, and fails to acknowledge some of the underlying aspects of materiality that form the site as well. The case-study examines the diverse ways in which meaning is constructed at Teotihuacan and proposes to study Teotihuacan as a 'total site.' Taking after French anthropologist Marcel Mauss's `total social phenomenon,' the `total site' concept describes a place that features diversely in the collective imagination and must be understood as such, and is used to integrate a variety of perspectives that relate to and give meaning to Teotihuacan as a diverse place. Serving as a heuristic device to characterize the complexity of Teotihuacan, the term captures both material and ideological aspects. This discussion, finally, exposes Mexico as a country with a strong nation-state formation tradition, but suggests that there is more to Mexico than that nation-state formation agenda.

This thesis considers the assumptions and beliefs of the archival profession to reconceptualize how materiality is related to contextuality, and thereby reveal the “mind” within their material (or immaterial) form and reconnect records’ materiality with their archival value. Although materiality has received little critical consideration within the archival profession, the thesis proposes that the materiality of archival records is evidence of their contexts of creation and use through time, and that this idea, therefore, complements the postmodern contextualist turn in recent archival theory. An examination of how the materiality of records is treated in common archival practices reveals gaps between recent archival theory and current archival practice. The thesis concludes with suggestions for adjustments to archival practice to bring it into alignment with the goal of preserving those aspects of records which contribute to their archival value, and reconnecting mind with matter.

This thesis considers the assumptions and beliefs of the archival profession to reconceptualize how materiality is related to contextuality, and thereby reveal the “mind” within their material (or immaterial) form and reconnect records’ materiality with their archival value. Although materiality has received little critical consideration within the archival profession, the thesis proposes that the materiality of archival records is evidence of their contexts of creation and use through time, and that this idea, therefore, complements the postmodern contextualist turn in recent archival theory. An examination of how the materiality of records is treated in common archival practices reveals gaps between recent archival theory and current archival practice. The thesis concludes with suggestions for adjustments to archival practice to bring it into alignment with the goal of preserving those aspects of records which contribute to their archival value, and reconnecting mind with matter.

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