Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
Kathy Wu
Second Advisor
Minkyoung Kim
Third Advisor
Clement Valla
Abstract
How do we live within the digital world? Is the space a tool, a refuge, a playground, or something so deeply embedded that we no longer notice it at all? The digital strives to disappear. In becoming invisible, it becomes harder to question, quietly reorganizing how we perceive, act, and relate.
Yet, the digital was not always encountered this way. There were moments when we explored the web, hacked it, and played within it — out of our own curiosity, mischief, or simple pleasure. These practices, often informal and unintentional, expanded the medium from within, stretching what it could hold and become. This spirit forms the ground of the methodology displayed in this book. Hacking, tool-making, and re-embodying are used as modes for moving with and through the digital. Through these gestures, I defamiliarize what has come to feel natural through alternative interfaces. The friction of a seamless facade seeps out, revealing the instability beneath the abstraction.
Seen through media anthropology and digital folklore, my work belongs to a longer lineage of vernacular engagements with the digital that are shaped by personal sovereignty, the joy of making, and creative freedom. This body of work is not nostalgia or a speculation but a critical retrieval of a specific ethos of living with and within the digital. Never independent, these interventions always circulate within a network. TRANSLATE with x English Arabic Hebrew Polish Bulgarian Hindi Portuguese Catalan Hmong Daw Romanian Chinese Simplified Hungarian Russian Chinese Traditional Indonesian Slovak Czech Italian Slovenian Danish Japanese Spanish Dutch Klingon Swedish English Korean Thai Estonian Latvian Turkish Finnish Lithuanian Ukrainian French Malay Urdu German Maltese Vietnamese Greek Norwegian Welsh Haitian Creole Persian TRANSLATE with COPY THE URL BELOW Back EMBED THE SNIPPET BELOW IN YOUR SITE Enable collaborative features and customize widget: Bing Webmaster Portal Back
Recommended Citation
Kim, Thea, "\n: Playground of Digital Interventions" (2026). Masters Theses. 1653.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1653
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.