The Buttonwood Agreement

Miles Peyton

This project began when I found a Buttonwood tree near my home in Pittsburgh, whose bark has the appearance of an abstract, camouflage pattern. Upon researching this tree, I learned that the New York Stock Exchange was created under a Buttonwood tree at the Buttonwood Agreement in 1792. The environment relates the natural camouflage of the Buttoonwood tree, as well as its cultural and historical significance, to the practice of decorating skulls, guns, and other objects with camouflage. The objects in the scene are: a triceratops skull, a man, a buttonwood tree, a screenshot of the Buttonwood Agreement Wikipedia page, and an image of the Buttonwood Agreement. The scene is housed in the Great Deku tree, a character from the Legend of Zelda video game.

Miles Peyton is an artist based in Pittsburgh.

Streets

Joyce Wang

A documentation of the artist’s personal memories and visions, this website exhibits physical locations and street addresses in plain text on an html page with default settings. Anyone can click on the blue text and will be led to a piece of information that is relevant to the location in the text. Most locations are places that the artist has visited, while others are fictional or hold special meanings to the artist. The definition of “streets” is extended from the physical site or area to an idea, an object of affect and ultimate subjectivity.

Joyce Wang is from Beijing, currently a sophomore studying Video, Media Design and Computer Science in the intersection of technology, storytelling, and art.

Just Words

Hyunho Yoon

“It’s just words folks, it’s just words.”
-Donald Trump

This piece is meant to show the power of “just” words. The first part of the piece, “Word,” shows how manipulating language can be used as a form of protest. By emptying Trump’s speech of semantic meaning and showing them for what they (as he so bemoaned) are – words – the piece robs his speech of its power. It points to a level of subfunctional language wherein the signifier has no clear connection to the signified. The second part “Words,” on the other hand, examines a use of words that is much more than representation. The words themselves, as literature and as performative utterances (J. L. Austin), have value in themselves. The first few stanzas demonstrate how words can evoke feeling and change lives. The last stanzas, as the antithesis of the “Word” video, takes meaningless phrases and charges them with meaning. The last “Nonwords” part of the piece is a play on the dictionary definition of a chair in the “One and Three Chairs” piece by Joseph Kosuth, which served as inspiration for this piece. As in the manner of that work, the caption “Nonwords” refers to the invented vocabulary of the President-elect placed above. It is ironic that the only real word there is the caption, and the things that it refers to do not mean anything; unlike in Kosuth’s piece where the definition of the chair was also a representation back to the thing.

Hyunho Yoon is a junior double at Carnegie Mellon University majoring in creative writing and psychology.

*horoscopes with a trump rhetoric rising*

Kevin Brophy

Disable your pop-up blockers, remember when? The future was open and astrologers chose Nov 9th. We have made with forced exchange: top twenty words in your horoscope for the top twenty words from Trump’s campaign. Squint your eyes and pucker those lips, all currently-like, tick-tock, a wound, forty-two days ‘til.

Kevin Brophy is a reality artist, MFA candidate, Aries, and has a star at the base of both middle fingers which means fame-destiny, or infamy. FYI.

4 Months in 4 Pages

Mariah Hill

“4 Months in 4 Pages” consists of an entire (to date) handwritten journal transcribed into overlapping text. Primarily inspired by the Veil series of Charles Bernstein, “4 Months in 4 Pages” allows brief windows of clarity to come through the chaos. Unlike Veil, which used the layering of text as a compositional tool, all my writing was already composed, and the layering was a means of arbitrarily summarizing and superimposing a new narrative on my scattered personal life.

Mariah Hill is a sophomore in Carnegie Mellon’s BFA program wokring primarily in oil painting. She is interested in ideas of collective consciousness, the substance of dreams, and the concept of time. www.mariahstewarthill.com

Everybody Knows (by Leonard Cohen) Live Lyrics (by Maya Kaisth)

Maya Kaisth

This video piece is a tribute to the late Leonard Cohen, whose musical poetry holds as much sentiment behind it today as when it was originally written. His death, the day before we learned of the results of this disaster of an election, felt like a good force being struck from the world by an evil one. This video serves to point out the relevancy of his music, and, more importantly, illustrate the feeling of disbelief and darkness we feel in our current political landscape with humor.

Maya Zane Kaisth is an artist currently finishing her senior year of college. Her work focuses on involving the public, attempting to make the feeling of joy concrete, and creating magic. As always, she owes her continued success to the strong line of women in her life. Thanks, Mom.

Art Writer Syllabus, A Translation

Adam Kor

Taking cues from conceptual art and instruction-based artworks, I manually translated the Art Writer syllabus alphabet by alphabet into RGB color sequence. Each alphabet corresponds to a number from 1 to 26 that then gets regrouped into triplets to produce an RGB color code. The result is the translation of text to color, the legibility of the writing replaced by the visual effect of the composition.

Adam Kor is an aspiring designer and artist currently in his third year pursuing a degree in architecture at Carnegie Mellon.

All I Know & All I Know: Echoes

Samantha Mack

All I Know and All I Know: Echoes are investigations of the lyrical word: what words artists chose to sing and in what context. How do collections of the same phrase from different sources add to or detract from our collective knowledge or expression? For these works, the chosen phrase “All I Know” stems from an important contradiction. One cannot truly say all one knows in a single statement; our personal knowledge is vast. Therefore, singing the words “all I know” means that the artist is pointing to a specific, finite, knowledge; giving into the moment and expressing it through art. These works consider what happens when this sentiment is boiled down and compiled.

The constraints for both projects were simple: Gather lyrics from songs containing the words “All I Know”. When read together, these lyrics take on a new rhythm and tone, a collective “all I know” of many voices.

Samantha Mack is a junior Fine Art major and Professional Writing minor at Carnegie Mellon University. She works with both the materiality of language and the linguistics of physical media.

BREAKING NEWS: FAIR PLAY

Kira Melville

I got the childrens book FAIR PLAY by Munro Leaf written in 1939 at a tag sale two years ago. On November 9th, 2016, I read it for the first time. It teaches children about American Democracy. I thought it was better suited to an adult audience.

Kira Melville was raised in the woods in New England by two eccentric toy makers, and currently lives in Pittsburgh, getting angry reading about the systematic devaluation of women's indigenous technical knowledge and having vivid dreams about a world without capitalism.

Alphabet City

KelliLaurel Mijares

The intent of this project is to explore the "street" via the internet. This project is to serve as a mapping of paths through the internet; parallel to a mapping and journey experienced on a literal street.

The process is to begin with a dictionary word bank. The first word is "aa." By entering "aa street" into google image search, there is a translation of text to literal image. Next, by looking at the images and finding words within the jpegs and pngs, one is given a word bank. These seemingly random words are formed into the first poem [a] which is supplemented by some of the images that are resulted from the google search. This is an ongoing project that will eventually categorize the entire dictionary with image-text poems [a-z].

KelliLaurel Mijares is a 4th year architecture student from Houston, TX. She is interested in the curatorial realms of architecture and will continue her education in architectural history after CMU.

2002

Joni Sullivan

The audio gathering of human, non-fictional names recorded in ink from the year 2002, year 8.

Joni Sullivan is a 4th year in the Bachelor of Humanities and Arts studying Psychology and Fine Art. Since the age of 6, she has kept an obsessive record of her whereabouts, her personal interactions, and her desserts.

My kitchen remodel is iconic

Kate Werth

The twitterbot BritKelly, @britney_kelly1, was created based on Robert Fitterman’s idea of the metapersonality or the metacharacter. The metacharacter is a single character who is represented with a single voice however the single voice of the character is sculpted and created entirely from multiple appropriated voices from other sources or people. Brit Kelly, the bot, is a female metacharacter I created. The bot speaks with single voice, of a mid-thirties white woman, however the single voice was created and generated through the appropriation of male voices, specifically statements made by male politicians and male twitter users talking about the subject of women, things that annoy them about women, or how women should be or act.

Kate Werth is a junior Fine Art major at Carnegie Mellon University. Much of her art practice is involves text and the themes of relationships, intimacy, and the evolution of both.

Carnegie Mellon University 2015 Form 990

The JCWT

Carnegie Mellon University 2015 Form 990.

The JCWT is pursing her bachelor of fine arts in art and bachelor of arts in professional writing degree at Carnegie Mellon University. Her work is primarily on current events and interpersonal relationships and connections towards the world. She likes to explore space, color, material, and politics.

Hypnagogic Poems for Albert

Jamie Earnest

Writing words and phrases that appear to me in the hypnagogic state. I sent them to Albert Einstein for interpretation with his own experiences in hypnagogic observation.

Jamie Earnest is a School of Art Alum who hasn't decided what to do with her life yet. Fake it til you make it.