Digital art faces challenges that non-digital art does not. Technology is mercurial, and digital art is always in danger of its platform becoming obsolete. It is, at its most basic form, information which can be transferred and viewed across different media and in different formats, allowing for greater accessibility. Because of this, ownership, collecting, selling, archiving, and controlling digital art is difficult. Museums are no longer restricted to physical institutions. They adapt to new media by introducing new ways to experience art, "refashioning" old media. Examining digital methods led me to explore with my own origami pieces, by using software to design the base, then refining by hand the details.

My thesis takes a look at the history of webcam culture and investigates the changing attitudes towards surveillance and privacy since the creation of webcam technology and the rise of participatory culture. I postulate that since webcam culture became increasingly popular, the strict divides between private and public spheres began to shift, resulting in the private sphere becoming increasingly represented and performed. As a result, commercial influences began affecting social understandings of the self and one's own private sphere. The marriage between commodification and privacy in modern webcam culture subsequently complicates existing power structures associated with surveillance, as the object viewed can now receive economic and social benefits from being surveiled. My thesis concludes by grappling with different and unexpected ways in which one's self, or one's private sphere, is being commoditized with or without the subject's explicit permission, and how the way someone is consumed has also changed the way one performs one's private space.

My thesis scrutinizes the U.S. media construction of the events of September 11, 2001 as "national trauma," and the way in which this framing of the attacks has allowed '9/11' to invoke a visceral imagination of the deterministic relationship between Islam and violence. In particular, I examined American cultural memory of the attacks in popular U.S. news and entertainment television texts since September 11, 2001. My thesis is concerned with the fact that the American public's internalization of the events as national trauma furthers simplistic narratives of American innocence, and of Islam as inherently 'Other'. Moreover, my thesis is concerned that the naturalization of "our" collective experience of trauma exploits the lived trauma of those who had a personal encounter with the violence; and that the internalization of our experience of trauma is manipulated by public figures as a way through which to sway public opinion regarding morally questionable practices.

In my thesis I discuss single player digital games. I examine a family of views in critical game studies called ludocentric views, which are the most prevalent methods of analysis in academic games studies today. These views closely resemble formalist views from the literary theory tradition as applied to video games. I begin by dissecting two specific ludocentric positions, as well as one position outside of that umbrella for contrast. I attempt to levy the critique that these views ignore the agency that the player has both to make decisions and to determine the content of their own experience. I then suggest a position that I see as addressing these things while still retaining the strengths of the ludocentric position.