Barbara Morgan's Photographic Interpretation of American Culture, 1935-1980

In 1935, Barbara Morgan, a recent arrival in Depression-era New York, reinvented her career as an artist when she abandoned painting and adopted the medium of photography. In the four-and-a-half decades that followed, Morgan witnessed the remaining years of the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Cold War, the Vietnam War, and Three Mile Island. This dissertation will trace the photographic oeuvre of Morgan as she responded to these events both directly and indirectly, while simultaneously tracking the important artistic and cultural trends of each decade. The first chapter discusses Morgan's early photomontage work, in which she pushed the boundaries of American photography while exploring diverse metaphors for metropolitan splendor and urban isolation as well as the anxieties of the Great Depression and hope for a better future. Morgan's 1941 book Martha Graham: Sixteen Dances in Photographs anchors the second chapter. The influential dance photographs that comprise this publication highlight Morgan's modernist interpretations of Martha Graham's early dances and allow Morgan to examine beauty, strength, and a complex series of emotions through simple gestures and movement. The third chapter uses the light abstraction Morgan employed as a tailpiece for Sixteen Dances as the starting point to investigate her connections to broader artistic trends in the United States during and after the Second World War. In 1951, Morgan published Summer's Children, a photographic account of life in a summer camp that marked a major departure for the artist. Chapter four examines this book in the context of the Cold War and considers such diverse topics as summer camps, progressive education, fear-mongering, and the rise of the photo-spread. In the last two decades of her career, Morgan returned to the medium of photomontage. The fifth chapter examines this period, in which Morgan protested nuclear proliferation, environmental indifference, a perceived lack of scientific morality, and violent entertainment through her montages

Experimental Methodologies: Towards the Moving Image

The moving image - before it is anything else, before it delights an audience with beautiful stories, characters, before it communicates an idea - is the art of making us aware of movement; (Gunning 142) or, following Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, it is "the organization of light and shadow effects producing a new enrichment of vision."The methodologies in this thesis carry the legacy of experimental moving images, with its perspectives on formal aesthetics, emotion, and alternative modes of narrative. These methodologies informed my approach to physical interactions of objects and materials as a strategy to create unpredictable footage results - which through iterations yielded a poetic visual language from which I built a sequence focused on sensory impressions.These modes of inquiry and iterative experimentation generated two moving images - visualizing the human experiences from the current unstable immigration laws as manifested on the southern border with Mexico

Interaction Design: Foundations, Experiments

Interaction Design: Foundations, Experiments is the result of a series of projects, experiments and curricula aimed at investigating the foundations of interaction design in particular and design research in general. The first part of the book - Foundations - deals with foundational theoretical issues in interaction design. An analysis of two categorical mistakes -the empirical and interactive fallacies- forms a background to a discussion of interaction design as act design and of computational technology as material in design. The second part of the book - Experiments - describes a range of design methods, programs and examples that have been used to probe foundational issues through systematic questioning of what is given. Based on experimental design work such as Slow Technology, Abstract Information Displays, Design for Sound Hiders, Zero Expression Fashion, and IT+Textiles, this section also explores how design experiments can play a central role when developing new design theory