Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Digital Media
First Advisor
Shawn Greenlee
Second Advisor
Stephen Cooke
Third Advisor
Tucker Houlihan
Abstract
We are, by our very own nature, confined within our own lived experiences. To transcend our inherent loneliness, we seek ways to fulfill a fundamental sense of belonging through symbolic interactions. The external world we navigate is a subjective framework constructed through repetitive, mundane interaction, and as actors, we participate in such monotonous performances as a means to create shared meaning.
Such performance manifests as a collective entity - an intangible force that is not bound by institutionalized systems, emerging organically from grassroots beliefs and practices. Throughout the performance, there are symbols - artifacts, space, and interactions. And these transformative elements form a composite consciousness, in which, we, as actors, act as agents.
The performance is a desire to work - work that thrives on collective effort, and mutual dependencies. It is an embodied form of communication.
In labor (or work), we lament repetition - those same ideas, the same process being repeated over and over again. But with each motion revisited, repetition creates a different meaning, exists within a different context each time. The constant cycle of adaptation and improvisation creates endless possibilities in a non-linear course of events.
To repeat is the perpetual recreation of experience, transferred from one individual to another. Through collective repetition, habits are formed - not through the rigidity of rules but through the fluidity of practice. The performance of work is a spontaneous generation of precedents that may offer a suggestion to how it may be done, with no definitive end.
This work is not intended to illustrate this. It is a set of experiences from a singular person to be released into the world to live a life of its own, however insignificant it may be. If this work and this manual may serve its purpose, it will too offer a suggestion and nothing more than that.
Recommended Citation
Jeon, Seung Ho, "Untitled" (2025). Masters Theses. 1364.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1364
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
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