DOI
https://doi.org/10.25772/43AC-YZ56
Author ORCID Identifier
0000-0003-2112-2843
Defense Date
2017
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts
Department
Graphic Design
First Advisor
Nicole Killian
Second Advisor
David Shields
Third Advisor
Irvin Morazan
Abstract
Digital media are moldable spaces where an image is simultaneously a thought. This instance and flexibility enables digital existences to be malleable, transformative, situational, and unstable. They are plastic images. Video games generate digital bodies that are a fusion of subjectivities and cybernetic simulations, in a perceivable and ambiguous process. Such bodies are extensions of ourselves, being girlish, imperfect, unfinished and happening—digesting and emitting clusters of feelings, regardless of our biological gender and age. The performative experience of play is progressively departing from spectacle, gambling and competition, and increasingly shifting towards an emotional journey of alternate realities, spreading subjectivities into the visible and invisible areas of screens. Such experience, and our plastic identities that reside within, marks a collaborative attempt between designers and audience to establish a new protocol of liquid perspectives functioning within and beyond digital space. Digital plasticity itself is a practice, as well as an inextricable process of understanding and deploying identities in the contemporary media-saturated pluralistic environment.
Rights
© The Author
Is Part Of
VCU University Archives
Is Part Of
VCU Theses and Dissertations
Date of Submission
5-15-2017
Included in
Digital Humanities Commons, Game Design Commons, Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Ethnicity in Communication Commons, Graphic Communications Commons, Graphic Design Commons, Other Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons, Visual Studies Commons