Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
Hammett Nurosi
Second Advisor
Elizabeth Goodspeed
Third Advisor
Wael Morcos
Abstract
Can we navigate reality outside the constraints of chronological progression? As beings seemingly chained to linear time, can memory become a way to transcend this structure—to resist it, to time travel? What if time, instead of a line, is like the wind—non-linear, unpredictable, and both a force of creation and destruction?
Structured around three interwoven notions—the impulse to preserve (why), the forms that time takes (what), and the gestures through which we intervene (how)—this thesis explores how graphic design engages with the mutable, non-linear nature of time. The first notion, memory labor, considers the poetic and emotional desire to hold onto the ephemerality. The second, intentional spontaneity, investigates how linearity can be embraced, bent, or broken as a narrative and structural device. The third, progressive nostalgia, reframes archiving as a creative act that resists erasure while acknowledging its incompleteness. Together, these elements form a methodology for designing with and against time, where the past is neither fixed nor lost, but continually rewritten through aesthetic and conceptual practice.
Ultimately, this thesis doesn’t seek to conquer time but rather to reimagine our relationship with it, and to invite reflections on the transient, unreliable nature of memory and forgetting. It invites both confrontation and reconciliation, offering a space to imagine life beyond linearity and embrace the unpredictability of the winds of time.
Recommended Citation
Wu, Selina Kehuan, "Windbound" (2025). Masters Theses. 1452.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1452
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