My project explores the intersection of art, politics, and social justice in Brazil. I am particularly interested in street art, and the ways it is used by everyday people to comment on contemporary social issues. In Brazil racial identity and experience are a significant topic of concern. Accordingly, drawing on ethnographic research conducted between January and March 2017 in Sao Paulo, I analyze street art as a text to better understand racial politics in the region. I also examine how street art acts as a facilitator to social justice and politics and how Brazilians use street art as a means of resistance and/or healing in response to issues of racial inequality. The findings of this research apply beyond the borders of Brazil to all urban spaces around the world in which public artistic expression is entangled with major political and social issues.

This paper investigates 19th Century photographic processes, considering how attention and vision were structured by these particular modes of representation. Following Vilém Flusser’s posit that photography constituted a rupture in ontological thought, this essay seeks to demonstrate how the representational claims of early analog photographs are distinctly related to specificities of granularities and densities of emulsion, applied to the picture plane. Materializing Michel Foucault’s power/knowledge discourse in concert with Jacque Derrida’s semiotic theory, this essay seeks to articulate the ethical implication of various syntaxes that regulate photographic representations in an attempt to formulate the distinctive ways in which these modes of representation order, distinguish, and structure meaning. Employing the writings of Jonathan Crary surrounding the changing visual order of the 19th Century in conjecture with experimental phenomenology that investigates the ways in which visual perception and appearance are grounded in cognition and neural processing, in this essay I argue that the relationship between the stress of the optic that photography represents, the materiality of the image’s surface, and its signification and eventually its ability to produce meaning represents a relationship which is not arbitrary.

Play is considered central to early childhood development, and has been an activity fascinating to me personally as a childcare provider of many years. Seminal scholars Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky still inform much of the current understanding and practice of play as a process, or tool, aiding the linear progression toward adulthood. Yet, my own experiences in returning to academia later in life have unexpectedly ushered me into exploring the intricacies and implications of play as an adult learner, and in cultivating a framework for play that is less linear, and more holistic. My interdisciplinary research began in the 2016 Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities, and proposes four interconnected components of play (mindfulness, cues of resonance, vitality, and metastability), reframing play as a capacity of attending to possibility, rather than an activity or behavior of childhood. My current research expands upon my assertions of play, designing and implementing a qualitative pilot study exploring if these elements of play are present during interactions of play, and how they manifest in contexts of adult-child interaction. Situating my understanding of play in the scholarly literature of both Early Childhood Development and Anthropological perspectives grounds my theory and expands my assertions to stretch beyond a singular approach. Through observation of adult-child interactions in existing video footage I seek to test the veracity of play as a mindset, and analyze interpersonal contexts play happens within. The broader implications of my assertions of play may offer the reframing of playfulness as an important tool for adults as facilitators, and proponents of play, across childhood learning environments. While play itself is a highly studied activity, I challenge theoretical perceptions of play in the hopes of better supporting playful minds across the early years of human development.

In the video installation, "IT WAS THE GAZE THAT KILLED", "illusion-building" exists in the overlaid, rendered drone footage of Afghanistan and my own iPhone footage of 20-something-year-old friends in clubs. The image of bodies in Afghanistan and in clubs in San Francisco and London captured under surveillance by the "all-seeing eye" of the drone and iPhone allows us question whether the gaze that kills is more familiar to us than we think.

We live in a state where there is a need to redefine economy of terror as materiality of unmanned aerial vehicles paint a new landscape of violence. The drone is an "all-seeing eye" that inflicts violence through the act of seeing. It is important to understand the process of seeing the Real that is fixed through its physicality of existence with it "having a foundation in fact." It is through the act of seeing the real (bodies) that destabilizes the fixity of the Real. Thus, the Real is the wound caused by the "all-seeing eye" as it inflicts violence through its materiality inherently embodied by the drone that allows it to see (nose camera, multi-spectral targeting system). In this particular distance that is created in the process of seeing between the drone and the wound of the bodies, "illusion-building" takes place in order to anticipate the pain. The process of "illusion-building" is necessary as this reduces the distance between the drone and the wound inflicted by its gaze. As a result, anticipation of pain emerges from this particular process of "illusion-building." This anticipation of pain is what re-defines terror, as it exists within economy of terror.
 

What happens when the form in which whales communicate, locate food and find each other, is clouded by large ships, sonar technology and increased ice cracking noise in their environments? This presentation considers what the world of whales looks like beneath the ocean. I address this by taking a closer look at the auditory world of whales as a direct result of the lack of visual abilities due to limited light. I have focused on the chaos whales feel as a result of noise inserted within the depths of the ocean. With an increase in technological advances we see an increase in the number of ships and consequently of noise in the ocean. Underwater noise pollution is also attributed to ice fractures and collisions. These events do not occur at one singular time, they occur simultaneously for unknown periods of time and unpredictable areas. Understanding how animals feel and what they think is a difficult task, but we can better understand them by taking a closer look at their behaviors as the noise in the ocean becomes more abundant. My intention is that I will be able to formulate the chaos heard underwater into a humanized perspective and begin to understand these creatures as the hearing, feeling mammals they are.

I view energy as strongly intertwined with emotions, and that they are powerful forces that fluctuate and influence decisions. Thus, I chose to track instances where I felt a change in emotion in conjunction with its duration, what thought caused it to emerge, and if there was an attempt to deliberately shift moods. By developing my own codes and keys, I was able to monitor these fairly accurately on paper. However, I wanted to present this data in ways that differed from “traditional” portrayals of information. Hence, I used yarn and glitter in glass bottles to mimic bar graphs and liquid samples, respectively. These materials also served to emphasize the therapeutic nature within my project. The ideas of tracking something and its presentation were heavily inspired by duration exercises, which were done as assignments for the Summer Institute in the Arts & Humanities 2016, as well as Dear Data. The former required us to keep track of the passage of time for a minute, an hour, and 24 hours; the latter was a collaboration between Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec where they exchanged weekly postcards over the course of one year. Each week’s postcard included a theme of what they would both monitor in their daily life, a visual representation of the data they collected, and a key to decipher the image. Initially, my desire for this project was to encourage others to engage in mindful practices in order to experience the benefits it may have in their everyday life. However, by making this project deeply intertwined with something so personal as emotions, I also hope to challenge people to contemplate the relationship between emotions and data and the emphasis placed on pursuing objective results.