Vectors propound an active, concerted force amplified onto an agent by an actor. Throughout the year of CCCP Thesis work, these eight students applied their own vectors onto and against the various documents and discourses to which they each attended. These vectors are not stable, axiomatic, nor one-directional: they are forces ignited onto archives, and in turn, are reverberated back onto each project. As these various platforms produce their own wayward vectors, these eight theses worked to decipher and expound upon the forces they carry.

Wayward Vectors is a series of interviews conducted by CCCP’s 2023 First Year cohort in one-on-one dialogue with the graduating class. Through reflection and resonance, we hope these discussions bring another layer of insight to these robust arguments proposed.

Trouble with ELIZA

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

The libidinal economy of display before the digital screen:

At a time when Audio-Visual technique had already revealed its effects on conditions of viewing, ELIZA, a computer psychoanalyst software produced at MIT’s department of electrical engineering in 1964, constituted an interruption pertaining to the problem that display poses. ELIZA simultaneously encapsulates three categories constituting a logic of display: the commodity, the screen, and what it reflects/presents (and what I am naming the automaton). The story of ELIZA’s scripting (as trick) and subsequent staging (as magic) shows that there is an elusive, aesthetic, and auratic register that persists, despite its unmasking. This apparatus presents an uncanny moment pertaining to the magic of technology. It is the ultimate fetish which obfuscates an existential lack and obscures its failure from the user. The staged apparatus functions within its illusion, enabling affective identification, desire and enjoyment, a trick that surpasses attempts of demystification. With the advent of the digital screen, the thesis departs from ELIZA to grapple with three categories of objects that construct the nexus of relations between the agents at play within display, namely, the subject/object, the staging apparatus, and the screen providing their mediation. I contend that the three instances are gendered attractions entailing a script, a commodity/woman and commodity/screen that conjure forth the elusive spectrality of the aesthetics of display.

Colonial Traditions: Village Modernities - Making the Artisan in the Rural Indian Subcontinent

Advisor: Ateya Khorakiwala

This project explores the creation of the artisan in the space of the village in the Indian subcontinent as a product of colonial modernity. It investigates nineteenth century theorization of the village, its spatial reorganization and reforms meant to support the aesthetic and political economy. The relationship between artisanal work and the village was drawn through historic narratives of ancestral and religious ties as well as the native’s instinct towards craft. Studies were conducted on the artistic behavioural patterns of the villagers which were then documented in various reports and publications of the time.

These written documents create an episteme that justifies violent interventions on the bodies and spaces of native communities. Exhibitions were also implemented to present an ocular demonstration of the impact of colonial rule in this successful transformation. These Reforms were meant to subjugate the communities and render them productive to the economic framework by creating cycles of dependency through financial reforms and artisanal training. I explore these reforms through journals and reports in an attempt to re-examine the violence of the document through a series of pamphlets. This format was used by resistance movements of nineteenth and twentieth centuries in their struggle to fill the gaps of history left by the dominant narratives.

In Lieu of Absence: Antinomies of Diplomacy at the Taipei Biennial

Advisor: Felicity Scott

As a format of international art exhibitions, biennials have proliferated since the 1990s, gathering together artworks, installations, performances, screenings, workshops, publications, and symposia. Often taking the name of their host city, they are expected to bridge local and global, national and international scales of exhibition. Established in 1998, the Taipei Biennial has negotiated these antinomies, speaking to and from the political context of Taiwan. As a cultural proxy for otherwise impossible diplomatic relations, the Taipei Biennial was initiated in response to an absence of representation for the island and increasing political tensions. Since, it has become a platform from which to display Taiwan’s culture and consider its political ontology, featuring artworks which begin to subvert established notions of cultural identity and political belonging. Comprised of three essays, each which takes as its subject an edition of the Taipei Biennial, this thesis looks at how such practices, as visual and spatial forms of knowledge production, can serve as forms of cultural diplomacy. The research engages with archival photographs, correspondence, catalogues, and other publications of these past editions, asking how curators and participating artists have understood the archetype of the nation-state as an “imagined and negotiated construct.” Especially within different historical and geopolitical contexts, it asks how the biennial might complicate seemingly concrete global relationships and in what ways it has contributed to new social imaginaries for Taiwan. This thesis considers the questions raised at the Taipei Biennial and how the event has become a platform for international visibility, decolonial critique, and even resistance.

Codex of Revolt: An Experiment of Historicizing Indigenous Destruction

Advisor: Felicity Scott

The “Codex of Revolt” is a parafictional archival collection. It aims at resituating the colonial knowledge—knowledge produced by official records and anti-colonial materials controlled in formal archives—for the purpose of constructing counter-knowledge about the history of interwar Palestine, with a specific focus on the Palestinian Revolt between 1936-1939 and the practice of violent resistance. It seeks to bring to light questions about the revolt and the practice of sabotage that have long been in the shadow of colonial narratives. While seeking to question the genealogy, ontology, and epistemology of the practice of sabotage, the question of the archive and its capacity to control indigenous knowledge and its reproduction through fiction figured prominently in this project. In that sense, the fictionality of the archive is not limited to eradicating the Palestinian position and its perspective. In fact, the codex does not argue for the phino-mythology of the archive. On the contrary, it seeks to demonstrate that official colonial and Zionist records controlled in the archive, in the majority, are facts. However, through a developed methodology for reading colonial facts—that consists of a practice of photo-text montage through which official colonial records are supplemented with the subaltern voice of the revolt—the very fact of archival fiction is materialized through the presentation of the facts and their interpretations. Against this backdrop, the codex comes to problematize facts and argue for their employment in an ideological framework that is often methodologized to serve the agenda of colonial forces.

Desert Bias: Bureaucratic Mythos of the Mojave Desert

Advisor: Felicity Scott

This thesis attends to the desert: a terrestrial biome named for its inhospitable conditions and defined by what it lacks. Despite the inherent association of desolation, the desert has inspired a myth of an abstracted and unspoiled landscape. To challenge both the etymology and imaginary, my project surveys physical objects, rhetorical accounts, and mediated references littered across a singular region, the Mojave Desert. This named landscape is at once the smallest American desert and the bearer of multiple superlatives: from holding the records for the hottest surface and air temperatures ever recorded on Earth and lowest point in North America to containing the largest national park in the contiguous USA and more endemic plants per square meter than any location in the country. Moreover, the Mojave, according to the World Wildlife Organization, is classified as roughly half-conserved and half-altered by human settlement. This classification, indebted to the California Desert Protection Act of 1994, provides artifacts of wilderness and of a productive landscape.

Numerous systems of knowledge exist in the Mojave which together paint a fractured and complex picture, and codify our understanding of the desert. This list includes federal histories provided by the Mojave’s dominant proprietors: the Department of the Interior (National Park System, USGS, and Bureau of Land Management) and the U.S. Armed Forces (Air Force and Navy). Against the backdrop of these multiple epistemic and governing frameworks, and against the impulse of romanticism or conservation, my thesis proposes an investigation of a series of artifacts that illustrates how federal authority and legislation are prolific forces through which the desert’s ambiguity is conserved and sustained.

Eco-logic: Agnes Denes and the Architecture of Interdisciplinary Research

Agnes Denes, a Hungarian-born American artist, was one of the first to address the intersection of environmental concerns, artificial intelligence, and interdisciplinary studies in her practice. To highlight Denes’ foundational role in broadening contemporary discourse on interdisciplinary research, this thesis analyzes her concept of “eco-logic.” Denes developed eco-logic as a method to bridge her ecological and logical modes of working—between thought and life and theory and praxis. One of Denes’ first projects exploring the concept of eco-logic was her seminal text, Book of Dust: The Beginning and the End of Time and Thereafter. The book provides a critical lens into the acceleration of environmental concerns, information technology, and specialized disciplines in the late 1960s. In the book, Denes posits dust as a material and conceptual vehicle for understanding the tensions between biology and technology that emerged with the information age. She explores these themes by cataloging the corporeal, conceptual, and cosmic dimensions of dust between 1972 and 1989.

Through analyzing Book of Dust, this thesis outlines the tools, methods, and models that shape the infrastructure of Denes’ eco-logic. The framework for this field guide consists of three parts. Part one, Research Tools, explores Denes’ use of numbers, containers, diagrams, and images in both the book and her practice. Part two, Research Methods, examines how Denes employs interdisciplinarity, paradox, fiction, and visualization strategies in her process. Part three, Research Models, situates eco-logic in conversation with ecological epistemologies put forth by Donna Haraway, Timothy Morton, and Bruno Latour. This section examines how each scholar aims to reconcile science with ecology and how these ideas map onto and build tension within Denes’ notion of eco-logic. The conclusion looks at how Denes’notion of eco-logic opens up new avenues for understanding the stakes of interdisciplinary research, artificial intelligence, and ecological concerns today.

An Atlas of (emerging) Carbon Territories

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

Anthropogenic carbon is everywhere. Currently, carbon not only circulates through infrastructures where it continues to be mined, extracted, burnt and emitted, but also through another emerging complex encompassing a vast network of operations where it is observed, measured, regulated, capped, traded, exchanged, offset, captured, transported, sequestered and re-utilized. An endless sequence of processes resulting from the anxiety to control its gaseous accumulation in the atmosphere are producing new territories where carbon circulates today.

This thesis deals with those territories. But also with a problem: the complexity derived from the variety of scenarios that conform the new territories of carbon, which vary from remote places where carbon dioxide is being captured and geologically sequestered, to conventions where intergovernmental treaties and protocols regulating the functioning of carbon markets are produced. It entails grasping complex networks of scientific observation and CO 2 measurement techniques in the air and the subsoil, and identifying the territories where the emerging carbon capture and sequestration industry’s architectures, infrastructures and machines are being deployed. Throughout, it also involves identifying the production of discourses, ideologies and imaginaries mobilized and enacted by a whole new set of experts, institutions and corporations that the gaseous carbon economy creates and interconnects in various and complicated ways – an intricate spatiality of carbon that this research unpacks.

Consequently, the task of this thesis is also to capture carbon, but otherwise. Conducting a process of semantic engineering on the (technical, violent) connotations of the term within the carbon capture industry, I instead understand capture as a research tool. This thesis is an exercise of locating, indexing, mapping and spatializing carbon and its new territories from the aboveground to the underground, as well as the new forms of labor, property acquisition, dispossession and scenes of exploitation that emerge on the ground. Through this process of compilation and analysis, this thesis (naturally) came to be an Atlas of (emerging) Carbon Territories, a means for seeing what otherwise seems ungraspable, elusive, or is even obscured.

Scenographics of Crime

Advisor: Mark Wasiuta

This is a project about the spatiality constructed around the human body and the crime scene. In contrast to superficial readings of the crime scene as a static space, Scenographics of Crime seeks to uncover the instability and temporality of the crime scene – a scenographic space charged with opportunity and danger for judicial narrative-making in its reclamation of power.

In the late 19th century, police detectives and examining magistrates, who used to mostly write and only occasionally draw, suddenly found themselves holding a shining new camera. Faced with a new media tension between drawing and photography, early criminologists invented a new set of judicial-visual rules, under which spaces, bodies, and their intermingled biological residues (blood) were not simply captured by a forensic way of “seeing,” but dissected, distorted, and re-distributed.

Scenographics tracks the emergence and evolution of crime scene documentation into the twentieth century, as well as the impact on the manipulation of spatial evidence by competing media – particularly drawing and photography – which inflected and to a degree determined the meaning of crime, its interpretation, and implications. By returning to the original question of vision and spatiality at key scenographic moments in the history of crime media, my thesis addresses how criminal spatial evidence at the crime scene gave rise to a range of secondary spaces and situations — from police photo studio to crime museums. In turn, the work generated by these spaces and institutions has contributed to the mediatic tension between drawing and photography. Lastly, the thesis seeks to expose the mechanism of power behind the production and dissemination of crime media knowledge, made explicit by the Scenographics of Crime.