Culture

Effective communication and a sense of togetherness between people from different backgrounds happen on a platform of mutual understanding. The boundaries of differences between people from various cultures limit our understanding of each other's conditions, problems, and concerns. As a designer, I seek to fade the boundaries between cultures and facilitate a conversation, promoting mutual understanding by blending visual elements from American and Iranian cultures. With interactive visual media and storytelling, I have created diverse visual artworks that combine traditional Iranian arts and crafts elements with visuals from American popular culture. This body of work includes illustrations, patterns, motion design, audio, and augmented reality. Through these shared visual experiences, I aim to introduce new values into the sphere of design, enrich the design world with diversity, and build a shared visual experience that talks both to Iranians and the cultural milieu of the United States. Producing art pieces with the theme of Shared Visual Experiences can aid in promoting diversity, fostering connection, encouraging innovation and creativity, and bringing attention to significant social and cultural issues. It is a meaningful way to contribute to a more interconnected world that benefits everyone.

In John Fowles's last two novels, he alters his authorial project of discovering freedom for an individual from a social system to how a social system can be changed from within. Using Julia Kristeva's theory of abjection and her interpretation of the semiotic versus symbolic processes of signification, readers can determine how an imbalance in the human signifying process has become corrupted by power. Through Fowles's heroines and semiotic irruptions of the symbolic order in both Mantissa and A Maggot, Fowles reveals weaknesses in the symbolic, and consequently, moments where transformation of a patriarchal, symbolic system can be recognized. These moments of strain on the symbolic are significant because they cause a disruption of the rules and borders that define a social system like patriarchy. By calling attention to these moments, the categorical imperatives that have been imposed on women and perpetuated for the purpose of maintaining power relations can thus be subverted. In Mantissa and A Maggot, Fowles accomplishes a breaking of the boundaries, both within and of the text, by providing a literary space where readers can glimpse the power of the semiotic, the corruption of social conditioning, and gain a new perspective of their own symbolic/social system in the real world.