PhD thesis: decoupling and context in new media art

October 2013

Abstract:

This dissertation presents a novel characterization of new media art, centered on media appropriation: the dialectal insertion of technological knowledge into the art practice. The thesis identifies some defining characteristics of new media art's language, and indicates the defining role that explicitation plays.

While media appropriation is not necessarily linked to the digital realm, it provides a natural substratum for it and so this thesis analyzes some aspects of the relationship between art and technology, where it introduces the user-programmer continuum and the perceptual cloud, a new paradigm of human-computer interaction that emerges from the functional and geographical decoupling of the computational and perceptual layers of interactive systems.

Next, it analyzes the sociopolitical inscription of new media art, integrating the economic and political contexts of its practice into the analysis and providing a new reflection on new media art production from the geopolitical periphery. This thesis is proposed as a hybrid research-practice. A selected subset of the artworks created are presented and analyzed within the dissertation's conceptual framework.

Thesis advisors:
Dr. Álvaro Casinelli and Dr. Franco Robledo

Thesis readers:
Dr. Andrew Burrell and Dr. Pablo Prieto

Thesis (pdf file, 27mb)



Video documentation:

tomas laurenzo
tomas@laurenzo.net
..