UMD Theses and Dissertations

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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2015 - 20172

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    Soft Circuitry: Methods for Queer and Trans Feminist Maker Movements
    (2017) Rogers, Melissa Susan; King, Katie; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    Fiber craft practices such as knitting, crochet, quilting, embroidery, and weaving have been used as experimental, hands-on methods for queer and trans feminist knowledge production, especially since the 1970s and 80s when feminist art movements in the United States were thriving. “Soft Circuitry: Methods for Queer and Trans Feminist Maker Cultures” tracks do-it-yourself (DIY) knowledge through contemporary feminist art praxis and high-tech maker movements, demonstrating how overlapping communities of practice use the language and techniques of craft in order to make sense of their worlds. Queer and trans fiber artists use craft in order to create historiographical interventions in the mechanisms of canonization, thereby reimagining what artistic and educational institutions might look like. At the same time, the commercialized maker movement purportedly seeks to democratize technology while transforming education, manufacturing, and war through “making”: a hybrid of art, craft, and machine-assisted fabrication, encompassing a vast array of construction techniques. Combining feminized skills such as sewing with new digital technologies for physical computing, wearable electronic textiles, and soft circuitry, maker education seeks to attract girls and women to Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields, incorporating them into the official narrative that the U.S. is a “Nation of Makers.” This nationalist narrative simultaneously excludes others from its narrow definitions of creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. I argue that the theories, methods, and conceptual tools that have been prototyped and iterated by generations of queer and trans feminists can be used to refigure the maker movement, which has a longstanding, yet devalued, relationship with craft. By attending to intergenerational feminist dialogues about craft and identity, recent art activist projects that queer digital technologies in order to create safer worlds for trans people of color, and my own fiber craft practice, I demonstrate that present-day maker cultures are active sites of transformation and feminist intervention. Borrowed from maker movements, the language of soft circuitry suggests useful metaphors for doing speculative feminist materialism. Feminist craft praxis functions as a soft circuit: a technological pathway or schematic for feeling our way toward newly habitable worlds and ways of being.
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    Sound and Documentary in Cardiff and Miller's 'Pandemonium'
    (2015) Wichmann, Cecilia T.; Shannon, Joshua; Art History and Archaeology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    From 2005 to 2007, Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller automated a live performance of simple robots striking furniture detritus and pipes in the cells of Eastern State Penitentiary, a Philadelphia prison that once specialized in isolation and silence. Oscillating between referential and abstract sounds, 'Pandemonium' suspended percipients between narrative and noise. So far scholars have investigated only the work's narrative aspects. This projects examines Cardiff and Miller's specific use of percussive sounds to position 'Pandemonium' in dialogue with noise music, sound art, and documentary-related practices in contemporary art. 'Pandemonium''s representational sounds coalesced into a curious kind of concrete documentary that triggered a sense of radical proximity between the percipient's body and the resonant environment of Eastern State Penitentiary. In doing so, it explored the potential for sensory relations and collectivity in a complex, contemporary world.