Paulina Sierra and Clement Valla have won the first ever D+M Departmental Award for Written Thesis. The awards were announced at the departmental end of the year celebration on May 29th. The award recognizes the thesis that best integrates practice and scholarship, in this case a tie was declared. Erkki Huhtamo, Professor of Media History and Theory at University of California, Los Angeles judged the award and served as an external critic for the Final MFA Critiques as part of the overall process.
Congratulations Paulina and Clement!
Abstracts Follow:
Paulina Sierra – Eye I Eye Us
The following thesis is divided in two books. Both of them explore the relation of gaze and the Digital + Media.
Eye I, the first book is directly linked to a more personal or autobiographical work where these narratives of sight evolve around psychoanalysis and the mythological figures of Narcissus, Medusa and Aphrodite.
It is by the displacement of visual perceptions, mechanisms or simple ophthalmic objects that create certain behaviors where my work intends to originate inquiries about inner sight and narcissism, shame and scrutiny tied to a paralyzing self awareness of the Other’s gaze and finally, how this last can create a dialogue of intimacy that can heal these split internal processes to create the elemental principle of interactivity: insight through the Other.
Eye Us, the second book is divided in three sections. The first section sets the historical background for some of the split and integrative processes of acceptance or rejection to otherness in Mexican history and more precisely in Mexican art scene since the Conquest. It sets Otherness as a necessity to develop a common view of the world and the beginning for the acceptance of peculiarities.
The second section is interested in laying out the creative practice behind the projects that are carefully dissected in the third section. Projects that are interested in exploring migrating technologies, resourcefulness, behaviors towards objects and the re-purposing of narratives when identity and cultural resistance pose a nomadic condition to oppose mechanical and mental standardization.
These two projects vary in their relationship with technology which is only a multiple and divergent path for those of us who have decided to engage a Digital + Media art practice.
Clement Valla – Original Copies
Digital technologies are not simply new tools to create and distribute copies of things; they also enable new social relationships through which people produce multiples. This thesis explores two examples of such digital systems: outsourcing paintings to the Chinese oil paintings industry, and crowdsourcing drawings using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Looking carefully at these socio-technical systems —which are both unique and underexamined in the art world—raises a number of interesting questions about authorship and human/computer relationships. This thesis does not propose to answer these questions, but the projects described are an attempt to explore the implications of these systems in various ways.
