Graduate and Undergraduate Student Research
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Item Lessons in Buffoonery and Bravado: Erik Van Lieshout(Rice University, 2007) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Erik Van Lieshout for "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem Respect and Pride Restored: Zwelethu Mthethwa(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Zwelethu Mthetwa in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem Imprints of Conflict: Yael Bartana(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Yael Bartana for "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem Satire and A Cynical Smile: Josephine Meckseper(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Josephine Meckseper in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem The Dizzident: Lia Perjovschi(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Lia Perjovschi in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem Complicated Desires: Yto Barrada(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Yto Barrada in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem Subtle Shifts: Artur Zmijewski(Rice University, 2007-10-04) Hooper, Rachel; Walker Art CenterArtist entry on Artur Zmijewski in "Brave New Worlds" catalogueItem A Lexicon of Suburban Neologisms(Rice University, 2008-02-16) Hooper, Rachel; Yen, Jayme; Walker Art CenterThe suburbs have always been a fertile space for imagining both the best and the worst of modern social life. Portrayed alternately as a middle-class domestic utopia and a dystopic world of homogeneity and conformity--with manicured suburban lawns and the inchoate darkness that lurks just beneath the surface--these stereotypes belie a more realistic understanding of contemporary suburbia and its dynamic transformations. Organized by the Walker Art Center in association with the Heinz Architectural Center at Carnegie Museum of Art, "Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes" is the first major museum exhibition to examine both the art and architecture of the contemporary American suburb. Featuring paintings, photographs, prints, architectural models, sculptures and video from more than 30 artists and architects, including Christopher Ballantyne, Center for Land Use Interpretation, Gregory Crewdson, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Dan Graham and Larry Sultan, "Worlds Away" demonstrates the catalytic role of the American suburb in the creation of new art and prospective architecture. Conceived as a revisionist and even contrarian take on the conventional wisdom surrounding suburban life, the catalogue features new essays and seminal writings by John Archer, Robert Beuka, Robert Breugmann, David Brooks, Beatriz Colomina, Malcolm Gladwell and others, as well as a lexicon of suburban neologisms.Item The Parenthood Problem: Examining Egg Donation, Adoption, and Frozen Embryos in Terms of Law and Economics(Rice University, 2009) Ammons, JackieItem A Computational Model of Routine Procedural Memory(Rice University, 2009) Tamborello, Franklin Patrick, II; Byrne, Michael D.Cooper and Shallice (2000) implemented a computational version of the Norman and Shallice’s (1986) Contention Scheduling Model (CSM). The CSM is a hierarchically organized network of action schemas and goals. Botvinick and Plaut (2004) instead took a connectionist approach to modeling routine procedural behavior. They argued in favor of holistic, distributed representation of learned step co-occurrence associations. Two experiments found that people can adapt routine procedural behavior to changing circumstances quite readily and that other factors besides statistical co-occurrence can have influence on action selection. A CSM-inspired ACT-R model of the two experiments is the first to postdict differential error rates across multiple between-subjects conditions and trial types. Results from the behavioral and modeling studies favor a CSM-like theory of human routine procedural memory that uses discrete, hierarchically-organized goal and action representations that are adaptable to new but similar procedures.Item Architecture in the Marketplace of Ideas: Copyright and its "Chilling" Effects(Rice University, 2009) Tankard, JessicaThis paper questions the applicability of current legal standards of copyright to architectural works. Copyright law, as currently written, does not address the unique needs and design practices common to the field of architecture. For example, in architecture, the appropriation of existing design strategies in new built works is common, and should not be seen as a copyright infringement. Secondly, architectural works integrate aesthetics and utility in ways that are often difficult to separate, therein complicating the legal distinction between patents (intended for utilitarian objects) and copyrights (intended for artistic productions). Furthermore, architectural works are not usually meant to be mass-produced and are difficult to copy, thus bringing into question the need to regulate their reproduction. The desire to create connections with the surrounding context of a built work is a fourth argument against the copyrighting of architectural works. This paper problematizes architecture’s position as a copyright protected field, synthesizing information from intellectual property law, cultural theory, economics, and architecture, using the works of prolific architect Rem Koolhaas as key examples. Copyleft thought and antirivalry policies are defined and proposed as alternative solutions to copyright law in the domain of architecture.Item Making Waste Public(Rice University, 2009) Gambetta, Curt; El-Dahdah, FaresThis thesis questions the boundaries that define waste as a public or private dilemma, investigating these boundaries as productive sites for the imagination of social life. Learning from methods of processing, conveyance and disposal, I investigate a number of possible sites where the architectural mediates the life of a wasted object and the social life that is produced around an engagement with that object. Waste has largely been disappeared from the city and the senses by mechanisms of modern sanitation and architecture, moved to the urban periphery and concealed inside increasingly refined membranes of storage and movement. Though ruptures or discrepancies in the waste stream are often read as signposts of failure of a certain project of the modern city, I read these ruptures or excesses as productive irritants for working and reworking how we conceptualize public space. It is within the friction of overlapping claims made to an issue such as waste that public life emerges.Item Visual Displays: Developing a Computational Model Explaining the Global Effect(Rice University, 2009) Stanley, Clayton; Byrne, Michael D.This work aims to integrate Byrne’s theory of visual salience computation (2006) with Salvucci’s model of eye movements (2001) by testing participants on a visual search task similar to Findlay (1997). By manipulating the number, salience, and spacing of targets, participants exhibited the global effect averaging phenomena during the first recorded saccade, whereby short‐latency saccades land in between adjacent objects. Previous work has argued that the saccadic targeting system causing the averaging is influenced both by the salience and arrangement of objects displayed (Rao, Zelinsky, Hayho, & Ballard, 2002). However, to accurately account for these results, we did not have to couple the salience system with the saccadic targeting system. Instead, the systems work sequentially and in isolation, whereby the salience system simply hands off the next object to examine to the targeting system, whose accuracy depends only on saccadic latency and the location of the targeted and non‐targeted items.Item Safe Sex--The Dislocation of Satire onto Female Characters in Eighteenth-Century Nabob Comedy: a reading of satire in Samuel Foote's The Nabob and Elizabeth Griffith's A Wife in the Right(Rice University, 2009) Casiano, Cassandra (Cassie)Little is known of eighteenth-century dramatic performance. What remains are early printings of scripts and performance reviews buried in archives. In order to deal with a lack of knowledge of performance style and convention, literature scholars specializing in the eighteenth-century have tended to ignore the period's drama as a live and interactive event and treat only the primary dramatic text in their analyses. I offer authorial testimony and theatre reviews to support a reading which relies upon reception theory coupled with a view of performance as cultural barter, a la theatre anthropology. This study identifies a trend in nabob comedy of the mid-late eighteenth century in which the satire is dislocated onto economically enterprising female characters outside the marriage plot. I first investigate the practicality of this dislocation onto the "safe" and less investigated female character through a reading of a successful and often revived play by Samuel Foote--The Nabob. I attempt to prove the prudence of this dislocation by providing evidence of severe and physical audience reaction to the play. I then observe another dislocation of nabob satire onto women in the little known play, Elizabeth Griffith's A Wife in the Right. In this reading, I focus on women as a natural site for relocating nabob satire. As established internal Other in the patriarchal British society, it is a lateral shift for them to represent the threat of a cultural Other in British society-a threat realized by increased international travel. The physical theatrical space foregrounds this cosmopolitan shift in society. The staged physical representation of the female body as a canvas for wealth shown through jewels mined in the East also figures into the female characters tendency to subsume nabob satire in the highly visual medium of the theatre. In this play, the female nabobina figure must be expelled from the nation in order to mitigate the threat of the internal Other-Other in both gender and culture. Ultimately, I argue that through the dislocation of nabob satire onto women, the dramatists make progressive and influential statements about the increasingly diverse and cross-culturally inflected state of British society. In Griffith's case, I offer her nabobina character as an exercise in proto-feminism as well. All of this serves to elevate the oft dismissed genre of eighteenth-century drama and performance as a simultaneously catalytic and reflective site of change.Item Tracing the Last Breath(Rice University, 2009) Wood, Timothy Dylan; Faubion, James D.Anlong Veng was the last stronghold of the Khmer Rouge until the organization's ultimate collapse and defeat in 1999. This dissertation argues that recent moves by the Cambodian government to transform this site into an “historical-tourist area” is overwhelmingly dominated by commercial priorities. However, the tourism project simultaneously effects an historical narrative that inherits but transforms the government’s historiographic endeavors that immediately followed Democratic Kampuchea’s 1979 ousting. The work moves between personal encounters with the historical, academic presentations of the country’s recent past, and government efforts to pursue a museum agenda in the context of “development through tourism” policies.Item Dietary Supplement Industry and the Lack of Regulation(Rice University, 2009) Dinh, CindyItem Induction and Intuition, on the Center for Land Use Interpretation's Metholology(Rice University, 2009-01-01) Hooper, Rachel; Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts at the University of Houston; Blaffer GallerySince 1994, The Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI)--a research organization based in Culver City, California--has studied the U.S. landscape, using multidisciplinary research, information processing and interpretive tools to stimulate thought and discussion around contemporary land-use issues. During a residency at the University of Houston Cynthia Woods Mitchell Center for the Arts, the CLUI established a field station on the banks of the Buffalo Bayou, revealing aspects of the relationship between oil and the landscape in Houston that are often overlooked--even by the city's residents. The CLUI's findings are presented in this volume and a concurrent exhibition at the Blaffer Gallery, titled Texas Oil: Landscape of an Industry. The book documents the CLUI's methodology in a series of interviews and includes a photographic essay on land use in Houston featuring a panoramic, foldout section and a comprehensive chronology of the CLUI's projects and publications over the past 14 years.Item Now Let the Storm Break Loose(Rice University, 2009-10-31) Hooper, Rachel; JRP|RingierIn her photography, videos and installations, Josephine Meckseper (born 1964) sets images of political activism-photographs of demonstrations, newspaper cuttings-against twinkling consumer goods and advertising motifs. This publication concentrates on a new series of works, such as the installation "Ten High" (2007) in which silver mannequins bear anti-war slogans.Item Life, Death, Nature, and Faith: The Spanish Vihuela Songs of Alonso Mudarra(Rice University, 2010) Bandy, AmaliaThis project examines the connection between music and text in works for solo voice and vihuela de mano by sixteenth century composer Alonso Mudarra. In addition to outlining the vihuela’s history as an important, yet transitory, ancestor to the modern guitar, the paper provides a detailed analysis of a selection of Mudarra’s compositions, with particular regard to text painting and conjectured musical commentary on themes of life, death, nature, and faith.Item Precedents To J.S. Bach’s Fugues for Solo Violin from the Sonatas, BWV 1001, 1003, AND 1005(Rice University, 2010) Slough, TaraJohann Sebastian’s fugues for unaccompanied violin from the Sonatas, BWV 1001, 1003, and 1005, play a central role in the violin repertoire. Bach’s conceptualization of the fugues for solo violin, an instrument that would appear to preclude this sort of contrapuntal writing, is unique in the Baroque repertoire. This paper identifies precedents to Bach’s creation of fugues for solo violin. While Bach’s unprecedented and unmatched skill in the fugal genre provided for the creation of the violin fugues, he drew ideas from existing compositions and techniques. Specifically, he adopts the formal adaptation of the sonata da chiesa to the solo violin sonata which occurred in the Italian school of violin playing, notably Arcangelo Corelli. Furthermore, he builds upon early experimentation with the unaccompanied violin sonata and the development of virtuoso techniques within the German school of virtuoso violin playing of the late seventeenth century. Bach’s fugues for solo violin, therefore, represent a synthesis of the Italian and German traditions of violin playing.