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This thesis is a pursuit of a personal diagram poetry, with a submission of part creative work, part critical exploration of selected diagram poetry over the past 50 years. I examine my own work and that of pioneering diagram poet Jim Rosenberg as variations of the conceptual diagram, and explore wider examples in the work of contemporary visual poets, arriving at a diagrammatics that creates systems of thought from modalities of materiality, spatiality and iconography. I follow Foucault and Deleuze's pursuit of the diagram as a paradigmatic system, tracing its properties and potentialities in the social field but extract my own version of it, arising from exploration of the philosophical roots of the diagram. I apply DeLanda's realist critique of the diagram, moving it towards the concept of the assemblage and positioning the diagram as an episode of relational interactions that affect surroundings rather than statically record them. Both text and icon as language systems are probed as structures and as signifiers through close application of post-structuralism as the most rigorous interrogation of language's structures. The resulting creative work assumes a position in the gap between the textual and the visual to seek Drucker's 'semantic chords' in a retinal-cognitive collusion of word and image. I merge the visual exteriority of classifications, visual iconography, and associated graphic language, with the interiority of a personal vocabulary, mediated through what I term 'diagrams of disturbance' which seek to destabilise cognition with both the form they take and their challenging subject matter. I use models from the hard sciences to examine the abstract properties of the diagram, while seeking a common ground between word and icon in cognitive linguistics of Lakoff, and seeking underlying structures of diagram poetry in the application of information theory. Arising from the competing elements of word and icon the two halves of the research emerge as both a development of my own diagram poetry and a critical inquiry into diagram poetry as a form.

This practice-based research investigates objectiles as diagrams for movement and emphasises the importance of designing for the ongoing processual and affective encounters between artefacts and bodies rather than addressing them as static givens of a designing process. This thesis follows both processual and speculative lines of thought. Accordingly, it is inherently concerned with the emergence of the new and it aims to enquire into this through its material practice: designing objectiles as diagrams. The material practice embraces a shift from the object to the objectile as material artefacts that are not yet concretised as objects and which are in constant dialogue with the emergence of the new. The aim of following a processual trajectory is to shift the focus from designing within the already given systems to designing speculatively with the unknown, the unexpected and the potential. The concept of the diagram becomes central to the processual and speculative pursuit in design because of its capacity to call forth an emergence of the new. Although the diagram is discussed widely in relation to architecture and painting, it is not examined in depth with regard to designing objects. Therefore, its capacities in this sense are mostly unknown. Thus, designing objectiles as diagrams for movement aims to develop a diagram that is specific to design as a generative and speculative device. In addition, as movement is the primary condition through which the object-body interactions take place, objectiles as diagrams and interactions with objectiles are investigated with respect to emergent movement qualities. These movement qualities are investigated via the dancers' interactions with the objectiles and discussed in conjunction with the speculative approaches to object interactions and use.

The French physicist Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) coined the term 'graphic method' for the array of recording devices that encoded phenomena in patterned lines such as seismographs, and chronophotography, also developed by Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904). This research puts forward the indexical line as a new concept to locate and analyse how the line was informed by the technology of the ‘graphic method’ in experimental science of the nineteenth century and taken on by the conceptual art movement in the mid-1960s. It presents the redefinition of the line and its concomitant contexts such as drawing, technology, and abstract thinking, anachronistically. That is, dialogically across two time periods that re-assess each other through the scope of the index. Stemming from semiotics and applied to film and photography theory, the index as schematized by Charles S. Peirce (1839 – 1914) is a sign with a direct relation with the ‘real’ as cause between the sign and the thing: the object causes the shadow or the photograph, which are the indices. This notion was applied to the art of the 1970s (Krauss 1977; Doane 1996/2007; Iversen 2017) as a traumatic trace; here, Peirce’s notion is interpreted as a measurable trace to open it up to other potential readings, especially the conceptual project of an ego-less, unemotional array of data constituting the artwork. So, what happens if this type of line originating from technology is in direct relation with the reality it expresses graphically albeit abstractly, like a photograph? And what possibilities does it open up when it shifts to art? Through the case studies of the pioneers of conceptual art, Douglas Huebler and Sol LeWitt, who cross-referenced science, graphic and photographic endeavours across times, the indexical line provides a pathway from the graphic method to graphic expression, by introducing language, technology, maps, diagrams, and sequential photography into artistic practices. What is the consequence of such an introduction of science and technology in artistic formalisation of the artwork from the perspective of the subject (the artist-spectator)?

Current debates on space reveal a dichotomy between two apparently conflicting understandings of space: on the one hand, space is understood as a physical, tangible entity that has an impact on how we perceive, feel and emotionally inhabit the world, and on the other hand, space is conceived as an abstract entity, suggesting that space has no active role (a productivity) within everyday life, being solely a conceptual product of intellectual reasoning. As a result, the commonly used word: ‘space’, will be discussed as an ontologically paradoxical, ambiguous and elusive concept; a concept that cannot be captured within a single definition. This thesis consequently researches the ontology of space by informing a framework that embraces the complexity of space as an ambiguous and unrepresentable entity. It aims to reconcile the multiple understandings of space, liberating it from the binary thinking that opposes the abstract to the physical, disclosing its potential productivity. This thesis thus proposes a methodology departing from a transdisciplinary approach that addresses the variability, multiplicity, paradoxicality and ambiguity of space through a ‘bastard’ epistemology that defies binary logic by considering what falls out of order and norm. To research an ontology through a bastard epistemology is to work outside of (but in combination with) the intelligible and sensible realms, through a framework that is non-representational, but instead enactive and performative, driven by experience, affect and aesthetics; thus allowing access to an entity that is both ambiguous and also unrepresentable. In doing so, this thesis argues that space is diversely implicated in the constitution of research methodologies through its interactions with order and structures, as well as agential in the constitution of understandings of human interactions with the world; and therefore, it will be argued, space has methodological purchase. The consequence of this methodological purchase is that space can reveal itself if a research strategy is implemented that works through the multiple dimensions of space. Within this context the diagram will be introduced as a productive path because enables a bastard epistemology to work through the multiplicity of space, since the diagram, is a performed, materialised outcome of multiple experiences of the making of order through the interaction between physical and conceptual dimensions. In synthesis, the diagram is used to recursively research an ontology of space, showing the main contribution of this thesis: of how without negating its complexity and multiplicity, space can be useful, constructive and productive within contemporary contexts of research methodologies.

This dissertation intervenes to theorize the implications of late 20th and early 21st century economic financialization for media studies and visual culture by considering the ways in which both the contemporary economy and contemporary culture share a central emphasis on speculation, a term which ambivalently refers both to the capacity to see, as well as the capacity to hypothesize and imagine. The central issue at stake is the question of how imaginary, speculative, and representational values in the economy can have real effects not only on stock prices but also on the material conditions of lived experience of individuals, as in the emblematic case of the 2008 global financial crisis. To answer this question, the dissertation develops a theory of the figural, drawing on the writings of Erich Auerbach, Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, and others, in order to explain how abstract processes of speculation can come to have concrete, material consequences. At stake is the notion that social reality and aesthetics are intimately imbricated through figural relations. Consequently, it is to mediated aesthetic renderings of the process of speculation that the dissertation looks to locate and comprehend these economic and cultural transformations. I focus on objects that deal centrally with conspiracy and investigation, which I argue following Fredric Jameson is the dominant representational locus of the cultural imagination of global finance. Body chapters contain close formal analyses of the amateur conspiracy chart style known as “Chart Brut,” the medical mystery television series House M.D., the found-footage horror film Sinister, and the videos news thriller Nightcrawler. A conclusion considers how the film Arrival constellates the formal and thematic issues at stake in the body chapters together into a potentially unified figure.

This paper will be researching special properties of Rouquier blocks of partitions of integers. This problem is motivated by ongoing work in representation theory of the symmetric group. For each choice of integer parameters w and p with p = 2 and w = 1, there is an object called a Rouquier block; this block can be visualized as a collection of points in a plane, each corresponding to a partition. In this group of points, we say a pair of points is “connected” if certain conditions on the partitions are met. In this paper, we will be finding a formula that will restrict the diameter of this graph. We want to minimize the distance between the two points that are the furthest away from each other. A formula to give the most efficient path is either impossible to find or is too complicated to be useful; rather, we will set a ceiling on this distance, so that, given any two blocks, we will know the largest “most efficient” path length possible. Once this is done, we will also extend our problem to find the largest degree in a graph.

This dissertation treats the diagram as a literary object. It explains how the diagram structured the conditions of possibility of a world-literary modernity as it emerged in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century. Caught between the competing epistemic regimes of scientific and humanistic knowledge, as well as between the clash of cultures, East and West, the diagram's potential as a scientifically neutral, and thus, "universal" language was deployed and redeployed in complex ways: just as the diagram was used to reveal the fundamental conditions of literary possibility, it was also made into a literary object itself. Thus, as both a hermeneutic tool and an aesthetic object itself, the diagram's place in literature is shown to hinge upon the necessary but ambivalent relationship between the gravitas of literary criticism and the spirit of play in literary art. Beginning with a philosophical and genealogical archaeology of the diagram, the dissertation unfolds by situating various theoretical issues elicited by the placement of the diagram in literature, such as problems of interpretation, cognition, translation, adaptation, and materiality, within an intricate matrix of historical and cultural contexts. Readings likewise draw from a wide range of disciplines, such as continental philosophy, history of science and mathematics, visual studies, as well as from a wide range of languages and literatures, from English, French, and German, to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

During the period of 1994-2000, Mark Lombardi (1951-2000) created a series of drawings titled Narrative Structures, which depict the analysis of spatial relationships through a multiplicity of lines that interconnect formally on paper. The artist constructed graphite webs that visualize hidden multinational connections of powerful individuals, worldwide corporations and government institutions. This thesis argues that in order to understand how Lombardi’s series of drawings function as a web or network, they must be productively understood in relation to the new global power system or Empire, a concept American literary and political philosopher Michael Hardt and Italian sociologist and political philosopher Antonio Negri elaborate upon in their texts Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004). Such an analysis reveals how Lombardi’s Narrative Structures and Hardt and Negri’s projects are analogous in the ways in which they seek to reformulate information as a tool for understanding and visualizing the connections of the global power system.

Developing effective instructions for complex, sequential tasks is a challenging information design problem. The focus of this thesis is on the non-verbal, visual explanations. This thesis attempts to define a set of instructional communication standards necessary to develop highly functional graphic design solutions to complex instructional information. These standards are then applied to free-weight instructions to improve their clarity and usability. Free weights, or dumbbells, are heavy-weight, metal bars that are lifted in repetitive steps to gain or tone muscles through resistance. When attempting to use currently available free-weight instructions, most people are unsure how to interpret them. This can lead to unnecessary confusion, and even injury in some cases. An established set of standards that simplifies and clarifies sequential visual explanations will result in less confusion and fewer injuries. It is hoped that these standards for instructional design will be useful to a wide range of similar design problems where complex, sequential instructions need to be conveyed with clarity, simplicity and grace.

Programming has advanced a great deal since the appearance of the stored-program architecture. Through the successive generations of machine codes, assembly languages, high-level languages, and object-oriented languages, the drive has been toward program descriptions that express more meaning in a shorter space. This trend continues today with domain-specific languages. However, conventional languages rely on a textual formalism (commands, statements, lines of code) to capture the programmer's intent, which, regardless of its level of abstraction, imposes inevitable overheads. Before successful programming activities can take place, the syntax has to be mastered, names and keywords memorized, the library routines mastered, etc. Existing visual programming languages avoid some of these overheads, but do not release the programmer from the task of specifying the program logic, which consumes the main portion of programming time and also is the major source of difficult bugs. Our work aims to minimize the demands a formalism imposes on the programmer of geometric subroutines other than what is inherent in the problem itself. Our approach frees the programmer from syntactic constraints and generates logically correct programs automatically from program descriptions in the form of diagrams. To write a program, the programmer simply draws a few diagrams to depict the problem context and specifies all the necessary parameters through menu operations. Diagrams are succinct, easy to learn, and intuitive to use. They are much easier to modify than code, and they help the user visualize and analyze the problem, in addition to providing information to the computer. Furthermore, diagrams describe a situation rather than a task and thus are reusable for different tasks—in general, a single diagram can generate many programs. For these reasons, we have chosen diagrams as the main specification mechanism. In addition, we leverage the power of automatic inference to reason about diagrams and generic components—the building blocks of our programs—and discover the logic for assembling these components into correct programs. To facilitate inference, symbolic facts encode entities present in the diagrams, their spatial relationships, and the preconditions and effects of reusable components. We have developed a reference implementation and tested it on a number of real-world examples to demonstrate the feasibility and efficacy of our approach.

In Taiwan, students have considerable experience with tasks requiring geometric calculations with number (GCN) prior to their study of geometric proof (GP). This dissertation examined closely the opportunities provided to Taiwanese students’ experiences with GCN and their performance on GCN and GP. Three sequential studies were conducted, corresponding roughly to key aspects of the Mathematical Tasks Framework (MTF); namely, GCN tasks as found in instructional/curricular materials, GCN as enacted by teachers and students, and student performance on paired GCN and GP. Study One found that GCN used by one Taiwanese mathematics teacher were drawn not only from the textbooks but also from other sources (e.g., tests) and the tasks varied with respect to cognitive complexity, with the tasks additionally included being generally more demanding than those found in the textbooks. The high demand GCN appeared to afford opportunities for Taiwanese students to master the types of knowledge, the reasoning and the problem-solving skills that are essential not only for proficiency with GCN but also for GP. Study Two showed how the teacher sustained the cognitive demand levels by making the diagrams more complex and using gestural moves to scaffold students' visualization of the diagrams so that they could sustain their work on the tasks. Through scaffolded experiences with GCN containing complex diagrams, the teacher appeared to nurture students’ competence in constructing and reasoning about geometric relationships in ways that are likely to support their later work with GP. Study Three presented the analysis of Taiwanese students’ performance on matched pairs of GCN and GP, which require the same diagrams and geometric properties to obtain solutions. The findings strongly support the hypothesis that students’ prior experiences with GCN can support their competence in constructing GP. Taken together the three studies sketch a plausible pathway through which Taiwanese students might gain high levels of proficiency in creating GP through their experiences with GCN. In addition, the use of a sequence of three studies that examine different aspects of students’ experiences with mathematical tasks appears to have utility as a model for other research that seeks to understand cross-national differences in mathematics performance.

This dissertation explores the drawings of a fourteenth-century Italian priest, Opicinus de Canistris, who is emerging as a critical figure for medieval art history. His drawings contradict numerous assumptions of how scientific curiosity, space, allegory, gender and humor operated in medieval visual culture. Opicinus combined maps with human bodies to create complex allegories of the natural and spiritual world. These drawings defy traditional art-historical classification; they relate closely to contemporary maps and sea-charts, religious pictorial imagery, medical drawings, and cosmological diagrams, but belong to none of these categories. This study examines his drawings in relation to medieval epistemology, science, cartography, allegory, and gender, as well as modern theoretical approaches to mapping and the diagrammatic mode. This study also explores Opicinus's process of experimentation and making. To gain a greater understanding of what Opicinus was trying to convey through the creation of embodied maps, the maps, themselves, are explored first - their empirical basis, conditions of use, geometric techniques, and visual qualities - seeking what it was in them that so fascinated Opicinus. The next chapter explores vision and allegory in the drawings, probing the interactions between cartographic form and theological content that created his meanings. The third chapter questions the relationship between Opicinus's body-world drawings and contemporary conceptions and pictures of cosmic relationships and their relation to the body, and the final section examines how Opicinus used gender binaries and graphic sexuality as structural devices and metaphors.

In the design of a commuter rail station at Tongzhou (near Beijing,China), it is highly relevant to consider the theory of “SpaceSyntax” for the purpose of designing a physical space that wouldenhance the experience of the estimated 45,000 passengers whowill use this station daily. Space Syntax, as defined by Hillier andHanson, is a process of breaking spaces down into components,analyzing the networks connecting these components, and usingmaps and graphs to describe the relative connectivity (“permeability”)and integration of these spaces. The design process used hererecognizes that many of the theories referred to above are originallyconceived of as two-dimensional analytical tools. In order touse them in the design of a rail station, it is necessary to developa design process that incorporates their diagramatic presentationsbut extends them into three-dimensional spatial manipulations. Theprocess outlined here extends the approach adopted by Peter Eisenman,making use of many of his operations on diagrams throughsuccessive superimpositions. The final building form results fromthe sculpting effects of both interior and exterior forces applied onit, while the transit functions are assigned.

In an attempt to address the accessibility of the arts in Washington, D.C. and also to engage the underutilized waterfront, this thesis proposes a cultural center for the arts that at once links the building with the water, but which also becomes a source of excitement for the city. The arts center will act as an atelier that mixes education, production and exhibition of fine arts, theater, dance and music, with the goal being to achieve a space alive with activity and shared energy. Typically, buildings for art education have followed a model that emphasizes interaction by forcing artists of different media to share the same space in a classroom environment. Those same rooms may appear no different than, say, a room intended for an English class or science lab. The District of Columbia Waterfront Atelier (DCWA) aims to offer spaces that are designed for the specific medium and nothing else, thus, elevating the importance of the craft. By separating the arts into singular units, one may wonder if interaction between artists is lost. Interaction, however, may be achieved through different methods rather than, simply, by programmatic ones and the DCWA has become an exploration to discover alternatives to maintain and heighten the universal goal of an art atelier: to become engulfed and energized by the arts in an interactive setting.