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The Hidden Price: Mapping Human Rights Abuses Within 21st-Century Armed Conflict

Description

The Hidden Price is a website made as a creative thesis project that archives 21st-Century occurrences of international human rights abuses caused by armed conflict. The Hidden Price is accessible at TheHiddenPrice.com and features an interactive map with markers that each represent an individual instance of a record in the archive. The Hidden Price also contains pages of different country maps, a search builder to analyze the events, an exploration tab to view every record as posts, forms for users to submit their own experiences, research, suggestions, and more. That is for you to find out, so go forth and discover your own hidden price.

ContributorsBachmeier, Thomas (Author, Co-author) / Acierto, Alejandro (Thesis director) / McCarthy, Paul (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies (Contributor) / School of Mathematical and Natural Sciences (Contributor)

Created2022-12

Mind-Uploading: A Psychoanalytic Analysis of Transcendence and Avatar and the Appeal of Artificial Immortality

Description

Mind uploading is the process of uploading one’s consciousness into another entity, spanning across the internet or another body. This project analyzes the use of Freud’s theories of personality and his theories of the unconscious while understanding the appeal of mind uploading in two fantasy and dream-like films, Transcendence and Avatar. Mind uploading is a popularized concept with Transcendence and Avatar inspiring aspiring filmmakers and scientists with its imaginative and limitless qualities. Both films uniquely explore mind uploading with their own creative processes. The use of mind uploading in Transcendence highlights the blur between the realms of unconsciousness and consciousness, showing the destructive nature of mind uploading. In Avatar, mind uploading is shown as an evolutionary process in which the newfound unconscious has the potential to save and create new lives, giving characters within the film a second chance. These films reveal the interconnectedness of Freud’s theories of personality and how collaborative the mind can be to achieve a common goal.

ContributorsDoorani, Sana (Author) / Mack, Robert (Thesis director) / Loebenberg, Abby (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Life Sciences (Contributor)

Created2023-05

Troubling Subjectivities: Asymptotic Realism and the Perception of a Non-Human (Avatar) Maker

Description

Subjectivity, phenomenology, and the expression of the human/nonhuman other are critical impasses for makers to challenge, curate, or circumvent within Posthumanism. Through an Abnatural aesthetic ungrounding of the WE as self/other/avatars, identities of a maker are infinitely reconstituted into variable signatures, logics, ethics, and moralities.Avatars exist as differentiable iterations of the perceived self, but they are also independent beings that flicker between states of the real/fake as simulacrums and contradictions embedded within the WE. This unfixity of a formal silhouette provides the self, as a maker, the opportunity to move beyond Paragonical structures toward x. Troubling in an unpredictable liminal directionality, the WE is subjected to another kind of alterity that fronts imperceivable biases. This process, rather than being extractive and intrusive, seeks expansive freedoms into the unexplored landscapes of each maker by dismantling the socio-cultural confines of practice. As an amateur, as a maker, and as an avatar, the WE is challenged to perceive otherness from within. In so doing, it becomes embedded, knowable, demystified, and embodied as a new modality for made/maker. How far can these tentacular forms reach, stray, and grasp? Pushing toward a nonhuman space, to critique the Posthuman, an Abnatural aesthetic produces elastic, generative collaborations that simultaneously critique the WE. Through case studies on Combinatorial strategies to frame objects, subjects, and making practices, an asymptote of trouble arises where subjects are entangled within their unfixable subjectivity. Experiencing as an avatar, how can an Abnatural aesthetic generate pathways toward inclusive and expansive making practices?

ContributorsSchoenekase, Benjamin David (Author) / Hejduk, Renata (Thesis advisor) / Broglio, Ron (Committee member) / McHugh, Kevin (Committee member) / Surjan, _ (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)

Created2024