DOI

https://doi.org/10.25772/GVGH-SX84

Defense Date

2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Department

Sculpture + Extended Media

First Advisor

Corin Hewitt

Second Advisor

Lily Cox-Richard

Third Advisor

Lupe Maravilla

Fourth Advisor

Michael Jones McKean

Abstract

Hamburger Helper Recipes is a collection of essays and public addresses that aim to recuperate castoff and misfit material surrounding industries and tools which produce science-fiction fantasies, specifically videogames and television shows. The following essays confront the normative violence of capitalism, whiteness, and hetero-patriarchy that socially and technologically haunt these imaginary worlds and build hegemonic idealogy into their audiences. This collection takes industrial materials and software from their intended commercial purposes of production and “success” into places of abjection and quiet breakdown. The author’s own proximity to masculine and often toxic "work cultures'' within industrial spaces of coding and manufacturing has informed a practice of humor and play based in a conflicted love for industrial material. As it looks critically inward and outward from its own positionality, Hamburger Helper Recipes oscillates in relation to the inside or outside of that which is “standard”. The notion of a queer operative within these spaces is proposed as an undercover catalyst for the reimagination of these tools into tender co-conspirators or facilitators charged to break down taboo barriers imposed by normative, capitalist culture and model new relationships between individuals and collectives.

Rights

© Alex Goss

Is Part Of

VCU University Archives

Is Part Of

VCU Theses and Dissertations

Date of Submission

5-11-2021

Included in

Fine Arts Commons

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