Diagrammatic Media: Subjectivity — Ecology — Event
Media Arts and Sciences PhD Dissertation (2020-22)
I defended my practice-informed dissertation in December 2022. The committee consisted of mathematician and media arts researcher Sha Xin Wei (chair), philosopher of science Adam J. Nocek, and experimental electronics performer and theorist Lauren Sarah Hayes.
Leonardo Journal's peer-review has recognized my dissertation abstract as a top submission to their abstract database and will be printed in their late 2024 publication.
I am currently looking for a position that would allow me to turn my dissertation into a book project.
The document is open access here.
Abstract
This dissertation charts another path for Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) by generating institutional and creative research practices that work against logics of integration and extraction. Drawing on activist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher FĂ©lix Guattari, I use institutional analysis to model how MAS came to inherit legacies of 1970s cyberlibertarianism and digital utopianism, which disavow politics in favor of technocratic steering. A key consequence of this disavowal, I argue, is an embrace of a integrative and market-driven mode of interdisciplinarity.
Responding to technocratic MAS, I argue for re-consideration of politics in MAS through an approach to research, creation, and practice informed by Guattari’s concept of diagrammatics. Diagrammatics centers subjectivity in crises of mental, social, and environmental ecology. Through creative social practice with computational media art, I work towards a notion of diagrammatic media grounded in experience.
Media diagrammatics intertwines the extensive engineering of concrete machines (artmaking, systems building, event making) and the speculative engineering of abstract machines (dreaming, conceptualizing, modeling, critiquing). Diagrammatic media objects (e.g., radiophonic aberrances in the electromagnetic field, a book, an autumn leaf) are lures for thinking-feeling. Diagrammatic media proposes we stop thinking in terms of computational media systems altogether and begin thinking about diagrammatic assemblages of concrete and abstract machines.
A prototype of a tangible media-rich writing system called diagrammatic points to the relationship between lateral thinking, moving, and feeling in learning and writing. I speculate on a slow network for the system that actualizes new modes of collaborative writing. Portacular Resonances, a radiophonic media installation, drives a Sci-Phi endeavor about contemporary anxiety differently: as a clue for cosmic becoming that spirals upward from emotional capitalism’s reactive affect and into a potential collectivizing force. Finally, through the Guattarian concept of the machine and a bespoke interview protocol, I ask about the conditions for transformation in gathering events such as SloMoCo, a slow conference for artist researchers.