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