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Title
War of the Moon
ORCID
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3884-0067
Access Type
Open Access Thesis
Document Type
thesis
Degree Program
Art
Degree Type
Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)
Year Degree Awarded
2020
Month Degree Awarded
September
Abstract
Space, in the post-World War context, was the new frontier of ‘global’ dominion. Space Race of the 1950s was a competition to signal technological capability and military strength. The objective of War of the Moon is to unpack the motivation for Moon race in 1950s. What did countries have to gain politically, economically, socially and technologically by conquering space and landing on the moon. At what cost? Who financed it, and where did the labor, land, and raw materials sourced come from. And how it was used to accomplish said landing. Space security is a massive aspect of all current space programs, but this is not a new feature, in fact, its beginnings are in the Cold War era. The second objective of this thesis and exhibition is to understand through rhetoric analysis the language of “defense” as an ‘offensive’ strategy.
The artwork uses computer technologies to interrogate media and archives mimicking the state’s methods to suppress information. The work examines through archives the erasure of minority groups from cultural depositories or archives, thereby writing them out of history as the meta themes of exploration of space, and deliberate and chronicled. It is important that this work is not viewed as reactionary, but engaged in a direct dialogue: these pieces exist within the public sphere, in exhibition and projection spaces vetted by governmental, private and non-profit agencies. What is required of the work is to be subversive — to be flexible, to remain able to move freely anywhere and everywhere, and to cross barriers when necessary.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.7275/19180576
First Advisor
Juana Valdes
Second Advisor
Jeff Kasper
Third Advisor
Anne Ciecko
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Medkova, Bibiana, "War of the Moon" (2020). Masters Theses. 976.
https://doi.org/10.7275/19180576
https://scholarworks.umass.edu/masters_theses_2/976
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