Date of Award
Spring 5-1-2014
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
Bethany Johns
Second Advisor
Dylan Fracareta
Third Advisor
Benjamin Shaykin
RISD Fleet Library Catalog Record
Abstract
Today, there is a massive framework in place to share and build ideas and information, and yet the status of the public domain is being eroded legally and ideologically. In the digital age, we are constantly creating datasets, leaving physical and ideological trails of whatever captures our attention and experience. However, massive, disorganized archives are prone to becoming unnavigable storehouses of information—or worse—privately traded commodities. In opposition to the idea of our lives as privately stored and sold as imaginary capital stands The Commons — the vast network of our collective cultural memory that is readily available to the public—at least in theory. From the common tongue to the spatialized ethic of the town commons to our infinite library of the cultural commons, this framework provides a Utopian vision in contrast to the mechanisms of capital.
I was once told that it is insufficient to simply create a database; rather, a designer has the capacity to derive meaning from one. This thesis is not an attempt to inhabit the space of the commons; rather, it attempts to hack, stretch and reframe the mundane resources and tools that are accessible. It is an attempt to produce small-scale toolsets to navigate, intervene in and celebrate the public enclosures of knowledge. My work performs minor, local interrogations of the databases and shared landscapes generally accessible but not always legible.
My thesis constructs little hypocritical fictions, future possibilities for more democratic digital/analog experiences that privilege investigation over prescription and gift-economies over the rhetoric of entrepreneurship. My work is an attempt to begin to examine the possibility of the commons as a counter-practice to capital by way of operating on and examining archives of varying degrees of commonness.
Recommended Citation
Qadeer, Ali Shamas, "Readily Available" (2014). Masters Theses. 1507.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1507
Creative Commons License
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Comments
Additional Masters Examination Committee members / advisors: James Goggin