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Spatial hearing provides access to auditory spatial cues that promote speech perception in noisy listening situations. However, reverberation degrades auditory spatial cues and limits listeners’ ability to utilize these cues for segregating target speech from competing babble. Hence, spatial unmasking—an intelligibility benefit from a spatial separation between a target and masker—is reduced in reverberant environments as compared to free field. This work tests the hypothesis that interaural decorrelation, the result of increasing reverberation, will broaden the perceived auditory source width with a cascading effect of reduced auditory spatial acuity and subsequently poorer spatial unmasking. To understand the perceptual consequences of poorer spatial unmasking in reverberation, four tasks relating to functional spatial hearing were assessed in virtual reverberant environments: interaural coherence (IC) discrimination, perceived auditory source width (ASW), auditory spatial acuity, and spatial unmasking. Three primary auditory environments were simulated using ODEON and auralized to vary interaural coherence: a control anechoic environment, a classroom designed to meet classroom acoustics standards (IC = 0.58), and a classroom of the same size with more severe reverberation (IC = 0.37). Individually measured head-related transfer functions were used to binaurally reproduce the auralized signals over headphones to a group of normal-hearing adults. The results indicate that increasing reverberation correlates to increased ASW perception and decreased performance in IC discrimination, auditory spatial acuity, and spatial unmasking. Advisor: Lily M. Wang

I seek out and spend time in relatively wild outdoor locations and create art based on my observations. The resulting work explores time and place, while the creation of the work increases my engagement with the environment. This process serves as a reminder that time is relative and life itself is continuous. I start by finding time in locations where nature has been given a chance to thrive and where the sound of human activity is at a minimum. During these retreats, I use my senses to absorb information and document the experience by journaling, making recordings, taking photographs, drawing, painting, or a combination of these methods. After returning from the retreat, I allow time for the experience to distill before creating the work. The studio process prolongs my engagement with the subject. Paintings are typically completed over the course of several days to several weeks, allowing for a variety of working methods. I allow the scale, medium and method to be determined by my current interests and curiosities, while the subject remains grounded in the retreat. The reworking of a painting or a section of a painting can result in multiple variations of the subject. When immersed in a wild place, it’s easy to imagine that it is a different decade or a different century. I maintain this illusion by deliberately omitting human artifacts in my art, leaving only natural markings of time. I take comfort in envisioning what might be happening concurrently in those quiet places, and I also reflect on what they might be like in the future, but above all, this thesis exhibition is about engaging with the environment for the purpose of being present, in this time and place. Advisor: Aaron Holz

SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES is an immersive video and audio installation that uses ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) to investigate the intersection of transgender and neurodivergent identity, expressing an urgent need to imagine stories about transgender, autistic people that affirm our agency and autonomy amidst a political climate that weaponizes neurodivergence to delegitimize trans experiences. The American political right’s vilification of transgender people is used to uphold structures of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy that become destabilized when rigid binary gender categories are challenged. The political right has a vested interest in keeping trans people out of public view, thus weaponizing the internet’s capacity for generating trans support networks and resources, and positing trans identity as a “social contagion” that is transmitted online. Contemporary visual culture has a tendency towards prioritizing visibility as an outcome of trans representation, when in reality these visual representations and their dissemination online can result in increased violence against trans people. I use ASMR to produce a non-visual representation of trans embodiment. ASMR refers to a tingling sensation that begins in the scalp and emanates down the neck and spine. The sensation is triggered by sounds, usually whispering, tapping, or other soft tones. ASMR video content on social media platforms is an intimate technology; often involving personal attention and care, it fosters a connection between listener and creator that extends beyond the digital interface to produce bodily sensations. I use binaural audio to create a sense of presence that orients the listeners into a virtual, intimate proximity to the speaker. I employ these techniques to ground the installation’s trans narratives in physical sensations and audio-spatial presence, so that the story resonates in the listener’s body. This produces a representation of transness that is not grounded in visibility, rather it produces a haunting, a force that can be felt even without being seen. SPIT BRIMMING WITH FUTURES imagines what a neurodivergent, queer future could look like, where the categories of gender begin to dissolve and society, rather than neurodivergent people, is measured by its functionality in embracing non-dominant forms of communication, embodiment, and expression. Advisor: Dana Fritz

When a beam of bright light hits the convex and polished surface, an image is reflected back onto the wall. This is a description of a magic mirror, an object from the Han Dynasty (206 BC -24 AD), that embodies how Euro-America views China: both technically advanced and shrouded in mystery. The magic mirror also points to the history of photography, as this term was often used in the Victorian era to describe a camera. The image created by a camera is a mimic of reality, both all too familiar and unfamiliar.[1] Like magic mirrors, the GIFs I create generate mirror images to reveal an alternate world that highlights the ways rituals are both private and public and the ways my body cannot fit into the impossibility of Euro-centric beauty standards. I use the aesthetics of Camp, the lighting studio, theatre-esque curtains, and spotlights to stage drag performances that confront audiences’ understanding of gender. I reference historical Chinese objects as a method of reimagining connections to my ancestral roots and to build a reality where Chinese American femmes can exist and thrive outside of a patriarchal, ableist society. Through installation and projections, my GIFs both reflect and refract within the space, alternately obscuring and challenging the viewer’s perception. The mirror manifests in the magic mirrors exhibition through the mirrored actions that occur in my GIFs, in the ways the images of me reflect off the acrylic sculptures, and through the circular shapes that continuously repeat, as spotlights, bowls, round fans, tabletops, and mirrors themselves. The stylized repetitions found in both my GIFs and installations are informed by Judith Butler’s exploration into gender performance and employ José Esteban Muñoz’s disidentification, not just as a method of survival, but one that imagines a limitless futurity. My self-portraits refuse to provide the viewer with a full experience of my body; thus, refuse to further the exploitation that I am critiquing. As Legacy Russell stated, “[Glitch Feminism] asks us to look at the deeply flawed society we are all currently implicated by, participating in and to confront the violence this society has done to bodies who disidentify, to bodies who exist within the liminal and embrace the in-between as a core component of survival, of futurity.”[2] [1] Andrea Henderson, “Magic Mirrors: Formalist Realism in Victorian Physics and Photography,” Representations 117, no. 1 (2012): pp. 120-150, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2012.117.1.120, 133. [2]Legacy Russell, “#GLITCHFEMINISM” (presentation, Refiguring the Future Conference, New York, NY, February 9-10, 2019). Advisor: Walker Pickering

These thesis and exhibition, invite the viewers to travel through different places in Central and Eastern Kentucky. The region’s landscape, like many other American landscapes, is often known to the public through the settler colonial lens—a lens that ignores Indigenous peoples’ history in the region. The work in the exhibition is a response to landscape art's history and its complicity with American settler colonialism- art that was recruited to create a new identity for the settlers and for the country from the beginning of the American Colonial Project. Landscape art was a crucial part of this effort, presenting the land as an empty, God-given place for white settlers. However, not only was this land not empty but it has been occupied by Native Americans for millennia. Communities lived within the land and did not separate themselves from it. As opposed to this way of living, settler colonialism seeks to take over land and extract its resources, while trying to eliminate all Indigenous peoples. This approach has never ended and in many ways is the root of the climate and environmental crisis we live in. The exhibition offers both moments and images that appear to be more dire; others are intimate and hopeful. This contrast and tension are a reminder that while we grieve the victims and losses of colonial violence, there are many survivors. Regardless of what the future will look like, we can be inspired by the resiliency and nevertheless imagine a new world.

My work, “audience,” reflects binary oppressions sensed and recognized in my private memory and psychological space of living as a transnational being. Linguistic and sensical cognition I(a vulnerable transnational individual) had, have easily been dis-esteemed and devalued by White-centric epistemology. By confronting the reality of history that shapes my thoughts, performance, names, and meanings, I emphasize transnationality as an opportunity to multiply visual tools, dialogues, and inter-connections of individuals. This work integrates moments of physical connection and accountability by utilizing multidisciplinary expression, including ceramics, writing, sound, and the movements of performers and of the audience. Like an interfusion between artists and viewers (as object and subject or vice versa), which is invisibly bridged through artwork, it is my anticipation that this text transforms into an image of my work, “audience,” as the work transmits into the text. In this work, art becomes a way to communicate the dispersing emotion, thoughts, culture, and time of the maker in infinite ways, comparable to an endless parenthesis for every single vocabulary, space, and punctuation mark.