The home is a material place of routine and isolation. Cyberspace, on the other hand, is associated with the lightness of disembodiment and engagement with others in virtual worlds. I am interested in the home as a locale of cyberspace in regard to the relationship between attaching and detaching, territorializing and de-territorializing, the smooth and the striated. My experimentation is about frozen moments in day-to-day situations. Through experiments with light, materials and installations, I intend to draw out a tactile perspective on cyberspace and domesticity. In terms of materials, I am particularly interested in the residues in everyday life. Light and materials are considered to be tactile as well as visual. Performativity, Heuristics and Active Documentation are my main methodological approaches. My work does not seek to fix a solution, but open up an area of ongoing discovery. The physical makings are the ignition for later developments. Once the installation has been set up, the performativity is transferred to the audience. The surrounding space becomes activated because of the energy released by the audience's engagement. Heuristic use of intuition and informal experience was applied in my working process to discover imperceptible traits of materials and daily situations. Active Documentation helps me to re-consider, re-negotiate, reflect and renew my work throughout the project. In this way, hidden codes can be brought out to the surface.

Thesis (M.F.A.) -- Montana State University -- Bozeman, 2007. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Rollin Beamish.

This thesis offers a critical reflection of posthumanism as seen through the perspectives of performance art. The first part of the text discusses the onset and development of posthumanism as a philosophical and cultural movement focused on the gradual convergence of the human and technology. The following second part then presents a reflection of thus conceptualized posthumanism in performance art. Posthumanism is conceived as a movement on the border between serious scientific discourse and fiction: Based on the mathematical theory of communication, as well as the legacy of cyberpunk dystopia, posthumanism offers a vision of a transition from human to the so called posthuman. The posthuman is seen as an offspring of technoculture, the synthesis of living and artificial, a loosely evolving entity without fixed ontological boundaries. The existence of the posthuman lies beyond dualistic categorization, has a processual character and refuses any essentialist approach. It is an attractive subject of science-fiction stories and a sexy postmodern slogan, but it is also a symbol of a transgression of actual predestinating categories such as race, gender or social status. More than anything else, posthuman is primarily a metaphor, adopted by a variety of narratives focused on the potential aspects of...

My dissertation focuses on various intellectual currents that shaped poet, composer, and amateur ethnomusicologist Amelia Rosselli’s work from 1950 to 1964, before she gained mild fame as a poet on the Italian literary scene. Rosselli had a trilingual background in Italian, English, and French, due to her Italian father and English mother and her family’s forced absence from Italy from Rosselli’s birth in 1930 until 1946, as a result of her father’s political activities. Rosselli is sometimes considered an outsider to Italian poetic movements, but in this dissertation I trace how she fits into various transnational intellectual networks. In doing so, I examine Rosselli through different lenses than what is typical in analyses of her work: I center her understandings of cultural difference according to her studies in various strains of anthropology and ethnomusicology. In doing so, Rosselli’s association of cultural difference with new conceptions of technology comes to the fore: namely, audiovisual recording technology used in ethnographic and ethnomusicological research; tools of electronic music that were bound up with this research in the 1950s; and new points of view on the body’s use as a technology, through a diffusion of the concept of techniques of the body. What emerges from my investigation is Rosselli’s political investments in establishing the universality of humans’ physiological and psychological capacities, beyond race (Chapter 1); valorizing previously marginalized cultural techniques, particularly techniques of the body (Chapter 2); seeking new mediatic modes of expression beyond the West (Chapter 3); and remapping relationships between self and other in her poetic output (Chapter 4). Although these political goals did not always result in building networks of solidarity, I argue that taking them seriously as important elements in Rosselli’s thought allows for a fuller consideration of how ideas of power dynamics, universality, and relationality play out in relation to cultural difference in her work. In doing so, I reveal how Rosselli inscribed herself into various political and intellectual networks that shaped Italian cultural life in the 1950s and 1960s.

This research briefly introduces the roles of art museums and presents selected digital technology implementation challenges and benefits in art museums in the Gauteng Province. An art museum is a building or space for the exhibition of work of art, usually visual art. Art museums collect objects of art and other historic artefacts that are documented and exhibited for different purposes, such as aesthetic value, social, historic cultural and educational, significance and research values that are traceable to a specific society or group of individuals. In South Africa, particularly in the Gauteng Province, art museums are failing to keep pace with international trends about the use of digital technology. It is, therefore, important for art museums as information dissemination centres to incorporate digital technology in their daily museum business as it may offer the opportunity for these museums to become more effective and competitive in the global information society. A literature review is done to understand the trends of different digital technologies in other first world international cities. The examined literature revealed that the Internet and other technological applications of the new millennium prompted a re-evaluation of cutting edge museum research, education roles, and documentation capabilities. Consequently, digital technology became an integral component of the digital policies of many art museums, allowing them to satisfy the demand for online information sharing abilities. A qualitative research approach together with a constructivism educational theory is used to fully understand South Africa’s position regarding the use of digital technology. In South Africa, digital technology usage in art museums is predominantly limited to email exchange, electronic invitations to exhibitions, data capturing of collections and viewing of basic websites. In other words, digital technologies are not optimally used in the South African art museum environment. The study explores the benefits of digital technology interfaces at art museums against fixed traditional art museum information dissemination practices. The objectives of the study are to create an awareness of best practice in the implementation of digital technology interfaces at art museums in Gauteng. The findings in this study indicate that digital technologies have proved to be useful in several spheres of public life resulting in the popular utilization of e-learning, e-mail, e-health, e-government and e-commerce. It is, therefore, proposed that art museums in South Africa embrace digital technologies to enhance the transformation of these museums. In essence, the implementation of digital technologies such as ‘virtual tours’ and other popular social media platforms and applications may raise the profile of art museums and market their contents to wider audiences, and may also help to popularise their heritage collections for leisure and scholarly purposes. / Mini Dissertation (MCHS)--University of Pretoria, 2017. / Department of Arts & Culture / University of Pretoria / Visual Arts / MHCS / Unrestricted

Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / The objective of this research, in visual poetic, is to investigate in a practicaltheoretical way, the photography production from the usage of a new media: the mobile phone. This research aims to question the mobile photography while photographic object, as question the ephemerid of photographic act through a mobile device. In the subjugate of the pre-established technical limitation, which is a mobile device characteristic, I am developing a poetic which works the photographic capture and post-capture in transit, the mobility. This is a poetic motivated by a growing potential that is reaching the mobile communication and that tries to include new media in daily basis. Therefore, we are being guided by electronic impulses and dialogs mediated by the machine. Through three-distinct operational process, from innumerous possible, I work the mobile photography searching ways to transform it in an expressive way of art. In the position of a armed subject and completely apparatus , with a camera always in hand, I tried to express an experience derived not only from my subjectivity while author and real subject, but also as a experience that elucidates the device chosen automatisms and, therefore, and automatized subject revealed, non-personalized. In this way, all the photographic production process, capture and post-capture, get instituted by an interactive dialog between subjectivity and automaticity. / O objetivo desta pesquisa, em poéticas visuais, é investigar de modo teóricoprático a produção de fotografias a partir do uso de uma nova mídia: o telefone móvel. O propósito é questionar a fotografia móvel enquanto objeto fotográfico, bem como questionar a efemeridade do ato fotográfico mediado por um dispositivo móvel. No subjugo da limitação técnica pré-estabelecida, própria dos dispositivos móveis, desenvolvo uma poética que trabalha a captura e a pós-captura fotográfica em trânsito, na mobilidade. É uma poética motivada pelo crescente potencial atingido pela comunicação móvel e que atenta para a inclusão cada vez mais frequente das novas mídias no cotidiano, fazendo com que o homem seja cada vez mais guiado por impulsos eletrônicos e diálogos mediados pelo maquínico. Por meio de três processos operatórios distintos, dentre os inúmeros possíveis, trabalho a fotografia móvel buscando maneiras de fazer dela um meio expressivo na arte. Na posição de um sujeito armado (SONTAG, 1980) e completamente aparelhado (COUCHOT, 2003), com uma câmera sempre à mão, procuro exprimir uma experiência que deriva não apenas da minha subjetividade enquanto autora e sujeito real, mas também uma experiência que enuncia os automatismos do dispositivo escolhido e, portanto, reveladora de um sujeito automatizado, despersonalizado. Dessa maneira, todo o processo de produção fotográfica, captura e pós-captura, instaura-se por meio de um diálogo interativo entre subjetividade e automaticidade.

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Through an experimental theatre play, this thesis explores the development of human-like agency in contemporary “social robot” technology. The entrance point of this study is the gender gap and lack of diversity in contemporary AI/robot development, with an emerging need for interdisciplinary research across robot technology and social sciences. Using feminist technoscience and critical posthumanism as the theoretical framework, this research involves an analysis of a particular social robot case, currently being developed at Furhat Robotics in Stockholm. Inspired by Judy Wajcman (2004), I analyze how socially intelligent machines impact perceptions of human agency, body, gender, and identity within cultural contexts and through interaction. The first part of the empirical research is carried out in the robot-lab. The robot is then, in the second part, invited to perform as an actor in a theatre play. Entangled amidst the other players and audience members, a queered agency starts to reveal itself through human-machine “intra-action” and embodiment (Barad 2003). Human-like agency in machines is shown to be a complex matter, drawing the conclusion that human-beings are vulnerable to a myriad of entanglements and preconceptions that artificial intelligence potentially embodies.

Within the new social and technological conditions of the second half of the 20th century, new conceptions of art are being established, later described as "New Media Art". Automated processes (often with integration of artificial intelligence) of artistic creation questions the status of authorship over the final artifact. Next to the ambiguities regarding the status of the artist, the nature of the works themselves is also changing (uniqueness, simulations). The aim of the thesis is to provide theoretical and philosophical analysis of new media artworks based on the synthesis of theoretical background provided by perspectives of multiple authors. This theoretical frame, along with own practical knowledge, will be used for the analysis of selected specific new media art projects, which will provide a closer view on the contemporary computer generated artworks. The end of the thesis will be formulate thoughts about possible future developments in the field of automated creation of algorithmic art or authorship.

This dissertation focuses on utopian versus dystopian perceptions of rural indigenous African societies with regard to the modern metropolis. Since the evolution of the modern metropolis, rural African societies have undergone significant and complex cultural changes that have dislodged rural cultures from being perceived in terms of the traditional notion of fixity. This has lead to the modern city being seen as either utopian or dystopian by rural African societies. The dissertation questions the “utopianess” of the modern metropolis with a special focus on its central idea of “progress”. Special attention is given to artists who explore this cultural phenomenon in the utopian–dystopian paradigm. The dissertation goes further to address the cultural impact of recent technological developments on rural and urban societies, the researcher’s perceptions of this impact and how this has contributed to the dynamics that characterise the cultures of contemporary rural and urban migrants / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Visual Arts)