Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Design (MDes) in Interior Studies / Exhibition + Narrative Environments
Department
Interior Architecture
First Advisor
Francesca Liuni
Abstract
Social media platforms, from their conception, posed a break in the lived experience of the average human being’s day to day routines. Although access to information has always been shaped by portals into other lived realities—through photojournalism, print legacy media, news broadcasts both on radio and television—social media has posited a novel phenomenological architecture where borders between embodied reality and perception of lived experience are simultaneously blurred and reinforced. This morphed duality of consciousness positions the body and mind in tension, deconstructing pre-social media conceptions of the ontology of lived experience. In a digital world shaped by limitless input by anyone with access to the internet, factuality has been placed into the hands of the holder and consumption of lived realities gets dictated by algorithmic systems of value. Platforms like Instagram and Twitter have subsumed the notion of veracity and instead invite the individual to become their own origin, both in creation of narrative and perpetuation of ideology through comments sections, live streams, reposts, and likes – the user is thrown into a fallacy of control, while concurrently being the product.
What happens when this secondary modality of “lived” experience becomes the primary methodology of parsing truth? When our timelines are spliced snapshots of curated ads, documentation of genocide, memes, and old family photos, consumed as part of our daily routine? My thesis, numb., explores the concurrent interconnectivity within social media as a conduit for documentation, journalism, activism, and consumption, and grants an outlet for my own feelings of stagnation and overstimulation by the constant pull between realities, one physical and one digital.
Taking form as a multimedia installation, numb. employs the inherent connectivity of fiber arts, specifically weaving with its legacy as the first tool to communicate code, to act as a physical and metaphorical link between these two lived experiences. The piece is dual in nature, consisting of an accordion book, displayed on a pedestal that morphs into a woven e-textile that hangs in front, communicating and connecting to one another through the cables from the weave. Hand woven from audio visual cables sourced from a previous ABC news station in Providence, the textile is both an embodiment and a material study. The book forms an extension of the textile, visualizing moments of personal memory in the form of news clippings, personal writings, photographs, and drawings. In an effort to simultaneously juxtapose and connect these two seemingly disparate worlds—the tactile and the digital, the witnessed and the embodied—numb. provokes the audience in all of us, as spectators and also as perpetrators, to not look away, while acting as an outlet for the culmination of my own resistance and desperate hope to keep feeling.
Recommended Citation
Rapson, Anna, "numb." (2026). Masters Theses. 1596.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1596
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
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