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Water, as a prominent motif in China’s intellectual and aesthetic tradition, became politically loaded as the Chinese government incorporated the control and domination of water as means of demonstrating state power and establishing political legitimacy. Amid exacerbating sociopolitical dislocations in the 1990s, the Chinese government dedicated major efforts to water control initiatives in an attempt to rejuvenate the public’s faith in the administration. In concert, many performance artists produced works that responded to state rhetorics regarding these projects. This thesis examines a selection of Chinese water-themed, site-specific performances from the 1990s, and investigates the visual and symbolic strategies they employed to defy ideals of progress, productivity, and the “collective good” valorized by these state rhetorics. Drawing from theories of politics and aesthetics proposed by French theorist Jacques Rancière, this thesis explains the mechanisms with which these performances productively reconfigured the stakes of water and water control within public consciousness, and redefined political participation within China’s highly restricted arena of acceptable speech. In so doing, it contributes to the evolving discussion of how artistic production can advance ecoactivist agendas and function as a creative means of political commentary in the contemporary world.

Water, as a prominent motif in China’s intellectual and aesthetic tradition, became politically loaded as the Chinese government incorporated the control and domination of water as means of demonstrating state power and establishing political legitimacy. Amid exacerbating sociopolitical dislocations in the 1990s, the Chinese government dedicated major efforts to water control initiatives in an attempt to rejuvenate the public’s faith in the administration. In concert, many performance artists produced works that responded to state rhetorics regarding these projects. This thesis examines a selection of Chinese water-themed, site-specific performances from the 1990s, and investigates the visual and symbolic strategies they employed to defy ideals of progress, productivity, and the “collective good” valorized by these state rhetorics. Drawing from theories of politics and aesthetics proposed by French theorist Jacques Rancière, this thesis explains the mechanisms with which these performances productively reconfigured the stakes of water and water control within public consciousness, and redefined political participation within China’s highly restricted arena of acceptable speech. In so doing, it contributes to the evolving discussion of how artistic production can advance ecoactivist agendas and function as a creative means of political commentary in the contemporary world.

Chinese performance artists Ma Liuming, Zhang Huan, and He Yunchang produced works in the 1990s that responded to various forms of oppression prevalent in the Chinese society at the time. Relying on critical theories of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this project interrogates the biopolitical domination of the Chinese Communist Party, revealing the strategies these three artists deployed to retaliate against government-sanctioned subjugation. Examining their works within China’s unique sociopolitical reality, this project places Ma, Zhang, and He within transnational cultures of dissent and contends that their performances constitute forces of political resistance that effectively undermine the sovereignty of the Chinese state.

This paper is the first to provide a thorough system design overview along with the fusion methods selection criteria of a real-world cooperative autonomous driving system, named Infrastructure-Augmented Autonomous Driving or IAAD. We present an in-depth introduction of the IAAD hardware and software on both road-side and vehicle-side computing and communication platforms. We extensively characterize the IAAD system in the context of real-world deployment scenarios and observe that the network condition that fluctuates along the road is currently the main technical roadblock for cooperative autonomous driving. To address this challenge, we propose new fusion methods, dubbed "inter-frame fusion" and "planning fusion" to complement the current state-of-the-art "intra-frame fusion". We demonstrate that each fusion method has its own benefit and constraint.