Undergrad Thesis 2026

Hypnogogia

Olivia Howard

Hypnogogia is an interactive nonlinear website that functions as a collective digital dream journal. Drawing inspiration from concepts of the collective unconscious, liminal spaces, and dream cartography, the project invites users to explore a shared archive of dreams submitted by different individuals. Users begin in a hypnagogic waiting room, a transitional space between wakefulness and sleep, before entering a star-filled dreamscape in which each star represents an explorable dream narrative.

The project combines web-based interaction, atmospheric visual design, sound, and nonlinear storytelling to recreate the emotional logic of dreaming. Rather than presenting dreams as static text entries, the website transforms them into experiential environments that users navigate intuitively. Through this structure, the project examines how digital spaces can simulate subconscious experience while creating intimacy between strangers through shared vulnerability and memory.

By positioning dreams as both personal and collective artifacts, the project explores questions surrounding consciousness, emotional connection, memory preservation, and the internet as a site of communal storytelling. Ultimately, the work aims to create an immersive space that feels contemplative, uncanny, and emotionally resonant.

Elsewhere, Within.

Aiyanna Lopez

Elsewhere, Within is an interactive artist book concept exploring reflection, identity, and play. The project uses structured prompts, open-ended exercises, and analog interaction to create space for slower self-inquiry.

Rather than giving users fixed answers, the project invites them to observe their own thoughts, engage with ambiguity, and move through reflection in a personal, non-linear way.

Therefore, I am…

Mustafa Chattha

Therefore, I am… is an immersive AR installation that reconstructs my childhood living room as a living archive of caregiving. Experienced through Snap Spectacles, the work uses four domestic objects as physical relics that hold inherited maternal wisdom. The space resembles a Pakistani living room from my childhood, quietly layered with elements of Wonder Woman's Themyscira: tropical vines, marigold petals, warm amber light. Growing up surrounded by women in Pakistan gave me a language for vulnerability and the permission to turn softness into art. Themyscira is Wonder Woman's home, an island raised and governed entirely by women, where strength, wisdom, and care are the same thing. My childhood was not a fantasy, and not perfect — but structurally, emotionally, it rhymed with that myth.

To you & me, 30 years apart

Ian Chen

To you & me, 30 years apart is a mixed media archival documentary film that combines live piano improvisation. Using Ian Chen’s Christmas family visit as the anchor, it explores the unspoken truths that hide behind family, love, parenting, time, and memories; terms that are often cast in a light that feels sacred, poetic, and romantic.

The story brings a journey across 40 years, between two generations of people, and it examines the intersection of choices that were made before I existed. It asks where those paths will lead me in the future, and ultimately, where will I be in forty years? Will I tell the same story to the people I love at that time? What if I miss you?

Becoming

Dajah Childs

Becoming is an interactive installation rooted in the artist's personal unbecoming and traces the slow deterioration of her love for art as she reshaped herself to fit those around her. The installation culminates in the artist’s personal transformation and a profound return to the love for art and creativity.

The audience is invited to confront two questions in this personal journey: what are you ready to leave behind, and what is worth protecting? The project holds both answers separately and with intention. Becoming reveals identity is not lost all at once. It is given away in small pieces, to the wrong people, over time. This installation asks you to take some of it back.

Bobblehead

Nikia Fenix

What happens to a girl’s head when she thinks more than she lives?

Well, the thoughts start filling the ridges of her brain. From the gunk to the gold, they pile upon each other until her head begins to balloon, swelling to make space for it all. Eventually, it grows too heavy for the body to carry with it, and she must make a choice: pop the brain sac and move on or stand there stagnant.

Standing in front of you is a cautionary tale of choosing the latter. Step inside her head and explore the unseen mental efforts of getting by as a Bobblehead.

Now You See Her

Anne Fitzgerald

Now You See Her depicts the spectacle, fragmentation, and vanishing of the female body, staging her as both attraction and disappearing act. Using projection, the work transforms her into a contested site of visibility and invisibility. This looping audio-visual performance moves through her conjuring and consumption, her dismemberment and objectification, and finally her erasure across cultural, domestic, political, and aesthetic representations, gone without a trace.

The projector extends the magic trick of women's visibility, slicing and reframing the body in a chamber of horrors that implicates everyone who looks. As viewers move around her and interrupt the projected light, they become part of the illusion itself. Their bodies block, distort, and reframe her image, exposing how looking is never neutral. The light that illuminates her is the same light that makes her disappear. Now you see her… but maybe you don't.

Sound Design by Olivia D'Agati.

NO SIGNAL FOUND

Kai Kaneshiro

NO SIGNAL FOUND is a New Adult sci-fi graphic novel exploring how hyper-digital socialization erodes authentic human connection. Set in a cyberlike-future where mandatory algorithms dictate human connections, 12-year-old Skye discovers the unfulfilling reality behind her falsified life when a glitch exposes her to a fault in the system: a dying mall where the elderly gather offline.

Rediscovered Wonders: A Collection

Joyce Kim

Rediscovered Wonders: A Collection is an interactive installation that blends fabrics, mixed media, projection mapping, and spatial design to bring to life an imagined space of forgotten dreams. Familiar set pieces—closets, lamps, ponds, and stuffed animals—are transformed as responsive technologies, revealing moments of discovery shaped by each participant’s curiosity. Challenging the traditional separation between artwork and viewer, the installation invites audiences to actively engage, layering their own meaning onto the work while rekindling a sense of hope and imagination often felt in youth.

Fictional Playscape: Reimagining Themed Playgrounds in Los Angeles

Ming Leng

Fictional Playscape: Reimagining Themed Playgrounds in Los Angeles examines playgrounds as constructed environments designed by adults within the everyday city. Through a photobook and experimental documentary, the project studies how these spaces relate to their surrounding communities and what is simplified, exaggerated, or left out in the process. It questions how play environments shape memory and identity, and asks what kinds of experiences, values, and narratives should be represented and carried forward in spaces designed for children.

To Print and Burn

Reese Madison

To Print and Burn is a personal essay exploring the motivations of capturing memories in a world surrounded by the two elements most capable of taking them away from us - fire and water. Looking through tens of thousands of pictures, videos and memory artifacts that exist in my tiny space in the digital cloud, I reflect on my relationship with remote and analog memory capture, wondering what the biggest inspiration for how I take in and archive my memories is - love, fear, greed, or avoiding loss.

la dulzura de su sufrimiento

Nat Scamardella

a one-day performance, three-day installation.

consume, take, and devour: ""the sweetness of your suffering.""

A performance art piece is a reflection of the artist and their works.

to suffer, is to entertain.

Contains Themes of: Sexual Assault, Blood, The Female Body

Gluten Free, Dairy Free Cake

Contains: Eggs, Blackberries, Oat Milk, Cocoa Powder"

The Tides

Stella Schabel

The Tides is the 35-minute pilot episode of a sci-fi radio drama that explores what might happen if we tried to see our life in alternate realities. We often wonder if we made the right decisions, but we don't get to know the answer. It's no use obsessing over what could have been different. The grass isn't always greener on the other side. This episode follows the protagonist Maya Gray—an intelligent scientist weighed down by grief—on her return to her remote Alaskan hometown, Gipka. Upon arrival she discovers it is not how she remembered it.

Planeguin

Kate Shin and Desmond Kim

Planeguin is a first-person VR flight simulation game where players become a mama penguin piloting a handmade ice aircraft across the melting Antarctic. When a southern giant petrel adbucts her baby, the impossible becomes necessary: a penguin must learn to fly. Players engage in aerial combat, chasing down the petrel while managing melting aircraft system due to environmental warming. Blending cartoon realism with cinematic storytelling, Planeguin explores the themes of resilience, motherhood, and overcoming physical limitations. This game is for immersive VR experience that delivers emotional narrative, tactile fight mechanics, and mid air rescue in a compact but intense experience.

Instructions for a New Body

Mason So

Instructions For a New Body explores digital culture and its reshaping of reality and human identity through the means of a hybrid video and physical installation and examines how identity and agency are mediated within contemporary technological systems. Referencing Hito Steyerl’s How Not to Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File, this project adopts a self-reflexive, instructional video format that embodies surveillance and digital entanglement. Visibility and obscurity structure the project’s approach, as the still body becomes a vessel for a transition into an all-encompassing digital reality. Identity becomes unstable, performative, and inseparable from the networked systems that shape lived experiences, where visibility and participation continuously reconstruct the self within a hyperreality in which representations no longer refer to a stable or original “real.”

Gong Gong

Ian Wang

Gong Gong is a documentary animation born from the lingering regret of an international student caught in the relentless race for success. Gong Gong—the local Maoming dialect for Grandpa—represents a world I left behind. By weaving together the fragmented yet irreplaceable moments of my childhood spent in his care, I’ve had to redefine what "family" truly means to myself. We often push ourselves to the limit abroad, desperate to prove our worth. Yet looking back, I eventually realize that the most generous currency we could have offered is simply our presence.

Custosalia

Sam Woo

Custosalia is the name an imagined, underground species that has recently been discovered through a series of artifacts, now displayed in a museum exhibit. Found pottery and textiles offer a glimpse into their world, where creativity is not just ornamental, but essential to preserving the history of this community-based species. The making of these artifacts is woven into daily life, with each member contributing in some way to help cement their legacy. This invites us to imagine a similar way of living, in which we are strengthened by creative collection as a way to preserve our own stories.

Five Animals In One Body / 一身五兽(Yi Shen Wu Shou)

Han Zhuang

Five Animals In One Body is a five-screen, five-channel immersive audiovisual installation that explores the tensions and vulnerabilities of human experience through animal metaphors. Each animal represents a distinct psychological condition: a racehorse fixated on what lies ahead reflects competitive pressure; a peacock unable to display its feathers evokes appearance anxiety; a hedgehog shielding itself with spines suggests emotional guardedness in intimacy; a chameleon constantly shifting color speaks to a loss of agency in social interaction; and an eagle flying too high to see the ground embodies uncertainty toward the future. Through AI-generated imagery and layered visual compositions, the work transforms personal reflection into a sensory experience. Rather than requiring narrative understanding, it invites viewers to engage intuitively, encountering their own unarticulated emotions within the immersive field of image and sound.