Browsing by Subject "Materiality"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    The documentary encounter:memory, materiality, and performance in contemporary visual culture
    (2013-02) Aldarondo, Cecilia Isabel
    My dissertation is an interdisciplinary, cross-cultural study of what I call the `documentary encounter': that moment when human beings come upon the material objects--such as photographic material, places, and personal effects--through which we are accustomed to constructing our sense of the past. Philosophers such as Jacques Derrida (1995) and Pierre Nora (1989) have contended that the twentieth century was characterized by a need to archive objects. If that is the case, then we could say that the twenty-first century is characterized by a rather different relationship to materiality, one of `waste management.' As our worlds are glutted with more and newer material objects, we are afflicted by a parallel concern for loss and obsolescence. Objects appear out of date as soon as we possess them. Decay suffuses the material world, and proliferates faster than we can stop it. The accelerated obsolescence of technology, global anxieties over toxic dumping, and the widespread recycling of personal effects all indicate that we have entered an age in which the objects that surround us are volatile and resistant to mastery. Rooted in the comparative methods of visual cultures, my research is the first attempt to draw together two fields, Film and Performance Studies, that have been similarly preoccupied by the historiographical concepts of `memory' and `archive', but which have remained largely isolated from one another. Employing a cross-cultural, multi-media approach--focusing on the installations of German-born, Canada-based artist Iris Häussler, a photographic archive depicting my mother's childhood in Puerto Rico, and the ruined architecture of Havana, Cuba--my dissertation weaves together these discourses on memory and the archive and brings them to bear on a chaotic material landscape. In investigating the effects wrought by a changing materiality on contemporary life, I seek to account for a concomitantly shifting landscape of memory, in order to provide an enriched and expanded set of terms for thinking about material culture and memory practices in the present.
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    An Exploration of Materiality in Josef Winkler’s Narrative Structures
    (2015-10) Burwick, William
    Josef Winkler’s work is defined by iterations of events from his childhood, most of them in the context of Austrian provincialism, Catholicism, and their patriarchal structures of dominance. In each of his narratives, memories are rehearsed and retold with increasing semantic precision, every time more complicated through intermedial references to sound, smell, and cinematic imagery. In his pursuit of the aesthetics of form and genre, Winkler consciously inserts material objects that become crucial elements in his recollections of the past. This dissertation argues that common household items, sacred relics, or brand items constitute familiar categories of objects that are presented, framed, and placed within the text, where they function as an essential part of narrative structure. While they re-affirm apparently ossified systems of belief, they also break them down. Everytime the object or thing re-occurs, it has changed and thereby changes everything around it. While he fetishizes and manipulates things, in particular those associated with the act of writing, he exposes both their power and their powerlessness with irony and satire. As objects in a system of exchange, they stand in as autobiographical as well as cultural signifiers and articulate a distinct discourse about a particularly ambiguous and ambivalent “semiotic order of things.”
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    From traditional to digital: understanding remediation of the postcard through the case of PostSecret.com
    (2013-08) Armfield, Dawn Maurie
    PostSecret has been credited with blurring the lines between private and public information and traditional media formats and digital media formats. In 2004, what began as one man's art project became a worldwide phenomenon that has continued past the publishing of this dissertation, a lifetime in online lifespans. This dissertation examines a rhetoric of remediation, the dynamics and rhetorical aims of ethos, habitus, and materiality that construct, support, and complicate a traditional to digital remediation of postcards that furthers our understanding of what it means to meet audience expectations and needs in multiple spaces.