Through imagining and creating provocative and sometimes 'nonsensical' new objects of material culture and social fictions, this thesis explores how an individual's ability to have radical sensory experiences and phenomenological conceptions of mundane and everyday materials is marred by utilitarian prescriptions of use, function, and productivity. Born from the concepts of Cognitive Estrangement (Darko Suvin) and Alienation Effect (Bertolt Brecht), this thesis-experiment and I, its author, will create for the reader a sort of isolation chamber, where they are invited to follow a series of \"Manuals\" on how to renew their ways of interacting with everyday objects. The thesis will deep dive into pre-existing literature of perception and phenomenology and ways of \"making sense\" by authors such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmond Husserl, and Jacques Lacan, evaluate the praxes of these theories developed by authors such as Sara Ahmed and Ian Bogost, and include cross-disciplinary developments of my own praxis of these theories by analyzing and creating new objects and materials that both exemplify and resist the bases of these theories. Each will have multiple \"Manuals\" for making use of them in ways that challenge what it means for objects to be \"useful\". The thesis will ultimately meditate on the radical potential of subverting these utilitarian prescriptions on objects, what it means to \"renew\", and how a trickle-up of radical individual experiences with uneventful objects enables us to imagine truly new and unknown social futures with unlimited subjectivities.
"},{"label":"Degree","value":["Bachelor of Arts with Departmental Honors"]},{"label":"Author-supplied Keywords","value":["Objects","Semiotics","Phenomenology"]},{"label":"Administrative Note","value":"Drupal Node ID: 24090