Thesis Film is a hybrid film that blends fiction and nonfiction and tells the story of the film’s making of. It consists of a blend of different media art materials — narrative film footage, documentary film footage, archival film footage, photography, and animation. The narrative center of the piece is a talking head whereby Nick Karpinski addresses a single camera and narrates the film’s making of, while interweaving the stated media art materials.

The thesis explores the relationships between knowledge and knowing in contemporary 21st century information society, using the foundation of the Faculty of Media Design & New Media Art at the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti in Milano as a research apparatus. This Faculty was established between 2003 and 2012, in Milano, Italy. The starting point of the research was established in the hypothesis that technics have tertiarised memory (Stiegler B., 1994), that knowledge is always founded on an ontological pessimism (Queneau R., 1933, Lyotard F., 1979) and on a perpetual process of the generation of meaning (Gadda C., 1923-29, Foucault M., 1966). Knowledge is always and inevitably linked to the technics with which it is passed on. Pedagogy becomes a questioning of the object of knowledge, which transmutes into a definition of the ways it can be visualised. This research then, setting out from a pessimistic position in relation to knowledge and truth, amplifies them to infinite possible forms and therefore causes a dual shift of philosophy towards art and of pedagogy towards hermeneutics. The methodology consisted of a textual and visual description of a territory in a cartography of meaning, seen as the relation between intuition and the way in which practices as knowledges, arts, form remnants.

Technoetic and media arts are environments of mediated interaction and emergence, where meaning is negotiated by individuals through a personal examination and experience—or becoming—within the mediated space. This thesis examines these environments from a musical perspective and considers how sound functions as an analog to this becoming. Five distinct, original musical works explore the possibilities as to how the emergent dynamics of mediated, interactive exchange can be leveraged towards the construction of musical sound. In the context of this research, becoming can be understood relative to Henri Bergson’s description of the appearance of reality—something that is making or unmaking but is never made. Music conceived of a linear model is essentially fixed in time. It is unable to recognize or respond to the becoming of interactive exchange, which is marked by frequent and unpredictable transformation. This research abandons linear musical approaches and looks to generative music as a way to reconcile the dynamics of mediated interaction with a musical listening experience. The specifics of this relationship are conceptualized in the structaural coupling model, which borrows from Maturana & Varela’s “structural coupling.” The person interacting and the generative musical system are compared to autopoietic unities, with each responding to mutual perturbations while maintaining independence and autonomy. Musical autonomy is sustained through generative techniques and organized within a psychogeographical framework. In the way that cities invite use and communicate boundaries, the individual sounds of a musical work create an aural context that is legible to the listener, rendering the consequences or implications of any choice audible. This arrangement of sound, as it relates to human presence in a technoetic environment, challenges many existing assumptions, including the idea “the sound changes.” Change can be viewed as a movement predicated by behavior. Amergent music is brought forth through kinds of change or sonic movement more robustly explored as a dimension of musical behavior. Listeners hear change, but it is the result of behavior that arises from within an autonomous musical system relative to the perturbations sensed within its environment. Amergence propagates through the effects of emergent dynamics coupled to the affective experience of continuous sonic transformation.

My thesis body of work developed from a desire to examine my nonrepresentational artwork in relation to the concept of entropy - the law of thermodynamics that measures the gradual, steady disintegration in a system such as our world. Experimenting with a range of approaches and mediums, I resolved to radically manipulate the inkjet printing of my digital photography files to introduce chance and provoke decay. The resulting prints operate as an orchestrated chaos alluding to environmental decline and collapse, and by extension, potential social degeneration. My art reflects my perceptions of our times as well as adds to the problem. I continue to produce waste through the consumption of materials. I contaminate through inks. I add to landfills with failures. My artwork points out the inevitable end. / Includes bibliography. / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2014.. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

Que Lugar é Esste? é uma pesquisa teórico-prática que verifica aspectos do lugar na arte e seus desdobramentos críticos no espaço social conectado. Os lugares são colocados em relação (entre lugares, dentro e fora). São permeados pelos fluxos informacionais e tensionados por conflitos que reúnem: abertura e fechamento, especificidade e multiplicidade, fisicalidade e virtualidade. A partir do cruzamento de diversas formas de compreensão do lugar na arte, três situações são analisadas sob o ponto de vista do lugar conectado. São elas: a residência, os deslocamentos e os aqui chamados lugares enunciados. O trabalho também compreende uma parte experimental composta pelos projetos artísticos: Casa Aberta, The Lovers, Estrelas Cadentes e O Transporte #1, todos desenvolvidos em 2009. São observadas novas formas de perceber e se relacionar com esstes lugares, entre a demasiada presença do outro e a solidão, as territorializações e desterritorializações, as desestabilizações e o controle, as negociações e transgressões. Perguntar que lugar é esste, é sugerir um lugar difuso, de difícil circunscrição, que pode não estar somente aqui, nem lá, mas no lugar entre um e outro, no vácuo da conexão entre ambos. É também o modo como indagamos sobre o lugar desconhecido, principalmente em situações de trânsito. / What\'s this/that place? is a theoretical and practical research on the aspects of the place in art and its critical developments in the connected social space. The places are considered to be in relation (between places, in and out), they are permeated by informational flow and tightened by conflicts that reunite opening and closure, specificity and multiplicity, physical and virtual. Departing from several forms of understanding of the place in art, three situations are analyzed from the standpoint of the connected place. They are: residence, displacement and here called enunciated places. The work also comprises an experimental part composed by the art projects Open House, The Lovers, Shooting Stars and The Transport #1, all of them developed in 2009. We observe new ways to notice and relate to these/those places, between the excessive presence of the other and loneliness, territorialization and deterritorialization, destabilization and control, negotiations and transgressions. To ask what is this/that place1 means to suggest a diffuse place, of difficult circumscription that can not only be here or there, but in the place between one and the other, in the vacuum of the connection between them both. It is also the way we question ourselves before a place unknown, especially in traffic situations.

Muriel Cooper (1925–94) worked at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for more than four decades as a graphic designer, an educator, and a researcher. Beginning in the early 1950s, she was the first designer in MIT’s Office of Publications, where she visualized the latest scientific research in print. In the late 1960s, she became the first Design and Media Director for the MIT Press, rationalizing its publishing protocols and giving form to some of the period’s most significant texts in the histories of art, design, and architecture, among other fields. In the mid-1970s, Cooper co-founded the Visible Language Workshop in MIT’s Department of Architecture. There she taught experimental printing and explored new imaging technologies in photography and video. And from the 1980s until her death, Cooper was a founding faculty member of the MIT Media Lab, where she turned her attention to the human-computer interface. Cooper helped cultivate a design culture at MIT. And before her premature death, she established some of the metaphors and mentored some of the designers that have shaped our contemporary digital landscape. Few 20th century designers have made significant contributions in both print and digital media, or helped to navigate the epochal transition between the two. Yet Cooper, in designing and redesigning roles for herself within new fields at MIT, did just that. Over her career and across multiple media, Cooper’s concerns remained quite consistent: She focused on developing both design tools and user experiences that would provide greater control and quicker feedback, eventually to be aided by machine intelligence. She sought to create experiences that were dynamic rather than static and simultaneous rather than linear, ones that engaged multiple media and a range of human senses. Cooper applied her knowledge of print design to software, and considered print and the process of its production as a prototype for the experiences that she would seek on screen. She also borrowed freely from media such as photography and film to inspire some of the effects she would later explore in new media. Cooper’s career traced an arc, in her practice and her pedagogy, from a focus on objects to one on systems. And her relationship to the digital evolved from a set of effects to be emulated in other media to seeing the computer at first as a tool, then as an assistant, and finally, as the medium itself. At the same time, she participated in a broader shift during this period from the paradigm of the humanist subject to the digitally augmented, “posthuman” condition of the present. In her interests and her achievements, Cooper exceeded any traditional definition of a graphic designer. At the same time, her work has defined the present state of the field. This dissertation, the first dedicated to Cooper, charts her pathbreaking career at MIT while also shedding new light on vital moments in the history of art, design, architecture, and media in postwar America.

Este trabalho é uma reflexão sobre as relações espaço-temporais que emergem das obras de artemídia, notadamente as que operam na fronteira entre real e virtual. A pesquisa estrutura-se em torno da conceituação de um arranjo espaço-temporal, que definimos como timescape, percebido em distintos graus de intensidade. Para tanto desenvolvemos uma cartografia que associa o desenvolvimento tecnológico, suas imbricações e ligações com a contemporaneidade e as manifestações artísticas, observando como essas situações se alteram em relação ao tempo. A pesquisa também contempla um conjunto de análises de obras de artemídia de artistas como o grupo Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jeffrey Shaw e Giselle Beiguelman, entre vários outros. / This research is a reflection on spatial-temporal relationships that emerge from media art works, mainly on the border between real and virtual reality. The investigation is based on the concept of a space-time arrangement, which we define as timescapes. Therefore we developed a cartography that combines technology development, its imbrications and relations with contemporaneity and artistic events, observing how the relationships have changed In relation to the time. The research also includes a set of analyses of media artworks like Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jeffrey Shaw, Giselle Beiguelman and from numerous others.

Que Lugar é Esste? é uma pesquisa teórico-prática que verifica aspectos do lugar na arte e seus desdobramentos críticos no espaço social conectado. Os lugares são colocados em relação (entre lugares, dentro e fora). São permeados pelos fluxos informacionais e tensionados por conflitos que reúnem: abertura e fechamento, especificidade e multiplicidade, fisicalidade e virtualidade. A partir do cruzamento de diversas formas de compreensão do lugar na arte, três situações são analisadas sob o ponto de vista do lugar conectado. São elas: a residência, os deslocamentos e os aqui chamados lugares enunciados. O trabalho também compreende uma parte experimental composta pelos projetos artísticos: Casa Aberta, The Lovers, Estrelas Cadentes e O Transporte #1, todos desenvolvidos em 2009. São observadas novas formas de perceber e se relacionar com esstes lugares, entre a demasiada presença do outro e a solidão, as territorializações e desterritorializações, as desestabilizações e o controle, as negociações e transgressões. Perguntar que lugar é esste, é sugerir um lugar difuso, de difícil circunscrição, que pode não estar somente aqui, nem lá, mas no lugar entre um e outro, no vácuo da conexão entre ambos. É também o modo como indagamos sobre o lugar desconhecido, principalmente em situações de trânsito. / What\'s this/that place? is a theoretical and practical research on the aspects of the place in art and its critical developments in the connected social space. The places are considered to be in relation (between places, in and out), they are permeated by informational flow and tightened by conflicts that reunite opening and closure, specificity and multiplicity, physical and virtual. Departing from several forms of understanding of the place in art, three situations are analyzed from the standpoint of the connected place. They are: residence, displacement and here called enunciated places. The work also comprises an experimental part composed by the art projects Open House, The Lovers, Shooting Stars and The Transport #1, all of them developed in 2009. We observe new ways to notice and relate to these/those places, between the excessive presence of the other and loneliness, territorialization and deterritorialization, destabilization and control, negotiations and transgressions. To ask what is this/that place1 means to suggest a diffuse place, of difficult circumscription that can not only be here or there, but in the place between one and the other, in the vacuum of the connection between them both. It is also the way we question ourselves before a place unknown, especially in traffic situations.

Este trabalho é uma reflexão sobre as relações espaço-temporais que emergem das obras de artemídia, notadamente as que operam na fronteira entre real e virtual. A pesquisa estrutura-se em torno da conceituação de um arranjo espaço-temporal, que definimos como timescape, percebido em distintos graus de intensidade. Para tanto desenvolvemos uma cartografia que associa o desenvolvimento tecnológico, suas imbricações e ligações com a contemporaneidade e as manifestações artísticas, observando como essas situações se alteram em relação ao tempo. A pesquisa também contempla um conjunto de análises de obras de artemídia de artistas como o grupo Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jeffrey Shaw e Giselle Beiguelman, entre vários outros. / This research is a reflection on spatial-temporal relationships that emerge from media art works, mainly on the border between real and virtual reality. The investigation is based on the concept of a space-time arrangement, which we define as timescapes. Therefore we developed a cartography that combines technology development, its imbrications and relations with contemporaneity and artistic events, observing how the relationships have changed In relation to the time. The research also includes a set of analyses of media artworks like Blast Theory, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Jeffrey Shaw, Giselle Beiguelman and from numerous others.

Contemporary art market in China has influenced Taiwan¡¦s art market recently. The number of auction houses and new art galleries has been increased in Taiwan. The researcher discovered that the work of New Media Art has represented by galleries gradually. However, the sale of work of New Media Art is still limited. The reason is that the work of New Media Art lacks of physical form, and it can be easily replicated, which is contradicting to the traditional collectors¡¦ perspectives. This research attempts to understand how the New Media Art be promoted through galleries¡¦ perspectives. Three questions are raised in this research: First, How is the partnership between galleries and new media artists? And what service galleries provide to the collectors? Second, how galleries manage the product of New Media Art? And how it is different from managing other traditional art works? Third, how galleries interact with external environment, such as competitors, governments, enterprises, museums, academic departments, curators and auction houses? And how these environmental factors influence galleries while managing the work of New Media Art? Cross-case studies are used as the research methodology. Eleven galleries were interviewed, including East Gallery, IT Park, Lin & Keng Gallery, Galerie Grand Siecle, Main Trend Gallery, AKI Gallery, Chi-Wen Gallery, VT Artsalon, Soka Contemporary Space, Project Fulfill Art Space, and Gallery 100 (by establishing time). Methods of data collection include observation, document analysis and interviews. Triangulation is used to increase the credibility and trustworthiness. In conclusion, this research shows the New Media Art is still one of the commodities that the galleries sell. In order to respond to variable formats of New Media Art, galleries need to take different actions to promote them. Few suggestions are generated from this research: First, the work of New Media Art can easily be replicated; therefore, the government should assist to develop more effective technology to prevent the work be duplicated. Second, solving the restriction on the circulation of knowledge by promoting the concept of copy left. Third, galleries should have a more clear policy in consignment and licensing. Fourth, encouraging hi-tech corporations to sponsor hardware, and be responsible for equipment repairing. Galleries will only need to responsible for software of the work. Fifth, art education is good way to increase consumers¡¦ understanding on New Media Art. Galleries should connect with the museums effectively. Sixth, curators involve in commercial art galleries improve the value of the exhibitions. Galleries and curators should work on the details of cooperation. Seventh, galleries should host hung events in order to improve the interaction with communities. Eighth, while the Taiwanese contemporary art market is developing, galleries should monitor the quality of art, and develop long-term career path for artists.