Date of Award
Spring 5-30-2017
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
Paul Soulellis
Second Advisor
Sarah Hromack
Third Advisor
Douglass Scott
Abstract
Content—Aware serves as a platform for investigating structure, corruption, and visual interference in the context of present-day technologies. I use fragmentation, movement, repetition, and abstraction to interrogate current methods and tools for engaging with the built environment, here broadly conceived as the material, spatial, and cultural products of human labor.
Physical and graphic spaces become grounds for testing visual hypotheses. By testing images and usurping image-making technologies, I challenge the fidelity of vision and representation. Rooted in active curiosity and a willingness to fully engage, I collaborate with digital tools, play with their edges, and build perceptual portholes. Through documentation and curation of visual experience, I expose and challenge a capitalist image infrastructure.
I create, collect, and process images using smartphone cameras, screen recordings, and applications such as Shrub and Photoshop. These devices and programs, which have the capacity to produce visual smoothness and polish, also inherently engender repetition and fragmentation. The same set of tools used to perfect images is easily reoriented towards visual destabilization.
Projects presented here are not meant to serve as literal translations, but rather as symbols or variables in experimental graphic communication strategies. Employing these strategies, I reveal the frames and tools through which we view the world. By exploring and exploiting the limitations of manmade technologies, I reveal the breadth of our human relationships with them, including those of creators, directors, users, and recipients.
Recommended Citation
Hensley, Llewellyn, "Content-aware : investigating tools, character & user behavior" (2017). Masters Theses. 61.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/61
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.