News/Research

BCNM Welcomes New Students to the DE & Graduate Certificate in New Media

25 Nov, 2013

BCNM Welcomes New Students to the DE & Graduate Certificate in New Media

We are delighted to welcome 9 new graduate students to our Designated Emphasis and Graduate Certificate programs:

MA Certificate

Helena Keeffe is an MFA candidate in Art Practice. She focuses on employee media and is interested in addressing concerns of sustainability, transparency, and solidarity within arts communities. In collaboration with artists, curators, writers, and arts administrators, she is currently developing an online application that will increase the visibility of artist’s pay and empower artists to be seek compensation for their labor.

Designated Emphasis

Laura Devendorf is pursuing a Ph.D. in Information. Her research integrates her background in studio art and computer science through its exploration of ways in which individuals use digital media to create artifacts, while remaining attentive to their aesthetic qualities. She is particularly interested in investigating how meshing algorithms can be used in the art-making process, and the new opportunities this might generate for supporting computer science learning through digital fabrication. She has already developed with her Research Advisor Kimiko Ryokai an application called AnyType that offers an alternative approach to composing messages with the visual attributes of the environment to produce objects of reflection.

Nicholaus Gutierrez is a Ph.D. candidate in Rhetoric. His research focuses on how narratives are constructed through digital and new media, and how these discursive systems influence our understanding of moral value. By interrogating the relationship between language and material structures, Nicholaus hopes to gain insight into ethical systems.

Adam Hutz is undertaking a Ph.D. in Rhetoric. His work tackles historical new media studies as he investigates the turn of the 20th century as a site of new visual intensity, rampant technophobic resistance, and the birthplace of the postmodern subject, using Digital Humanities methodologies. In addition, he hopes to create an algorithm that collects phrases of a rhetorical type in a corpus and visualizes them by frequency, time of use, and relationship, to add not only to descriptions of an author’s style, but to come to conclusions about the rhetorical substance of a technique in a specific period.

Amy Koehler Catterson is pursuing a Ph.D. in Education. She researches educational technology that supports students’ reading comprehension and motivation. She pays particular attention to how sociocultural contexts and the contexts of implementation affect technological performance in the classroom.

Kate Mattingly is a Ph.D. candidate in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Kate has written extensively about dance, and is now exploring how technologies such as television shows and social media contribute to changes in definitions of dancing as well as expectations concerning what dancers do when we engage in performance. Kate argues that technologies simultaneously replace and intensify knowledges generated by dancing. Her investigation uses an interdisciplinary approach that interfaces with issues of embodiment, knowledge, performance, research, and documentation.

Lyndsey Ogle is undertaking a Ph.D. in Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies. Her research seeks to understand what it means to redefine a public space in the digital age through positioning the field of curation in conversation with developing technologies. She investigates forms of public participation and cultural critique that occur online and on-site, particularly that which draws together members of disparate fields and social groups and challenges the hegemonic structure of art discourse. Her work features a variety of methodologies, including Internet ethnography, intimate oral history, public town halls, and the salon, and she produces documentary films, audio podcasts, online publications and exhibitions from these projects.

Matthew Ramirez is pursuing a Ph.D. in English. His research focuses on developing algorithms to visualize narratives, mapping character action through directed graphs. He seeks to help students practice designing and visualizing their own narratives through a combination of science and art.

Brandon Schneider is a Ph.D. candidate in Italian Studies. Brandon studies political spectacle, exploring future politics increasingly conducted virtually through texts delivered to various devices. He interrogates the pressures these changes place on interpretive frameworks, not just between forms, but also existential paradigms.

Cesar Torres is undertaking a Ph.D. program in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. His research focuses on ‘contemporary making’ — the hybrid practice that forms from the mixture of digital and traditional media. His current projects explores how to provide a mechanism to incorporate environmental, temporal and chance design parameters into the digital fabrication process.