This practice-led, fine art PhD is an enquiry into the circuits of influence and affect between and across networked information technologies and art practice in the 21st century. I argue that the advent of networked information technologies, such as the Internet and smartphones, has altered not only our social, political and economic landscapes but also our aesthetic landscape. Art-making is situated at a point of transition where these changes are not yet fixed or codified, a moment described in ambiguous terms as ‘post-Internet’ or ‘post-digital’. Generating artistic responses to this context, my work responds to both epistemological and “unassimilable” (Massumi, 2002) orders of experience in the network world. Utilising Heidegger’s critique of technocratic society (Heidegger, 1977) and his concepts of poiēis and technë as a theoretical framework, I ask: • Can artistic methods of engagement challenge technological enframing and open new and immanent ways of understanding the networked world? • In what ways can the poiētic revealing of art challenge a scientific discourse that reduces all things to relationships of utility? This submission works against technological determinism and “fantasies of realism” (Lyotard, 1984) through the event of art, allowing access to an immanent ‘beyond’ of direct experience. The thesis embodies the argument that, by bringing the affective dimension into consideration, as explored and expressed through artistic work, artistic practice can augment our understanding of the experience of life in the digitally networked world. It expands the field of art and image-making practices in the digitally networked world and related discourse around it, attending to lacunae in current thinking on the intersections between art, technology and politics.

‍

Awarded Date: 14/11/2016

Principal Supervisor: Professor Rona Lee

Second Supervisor: Dr Allan Hughes

Additional Supervisor: Professor Craig Richardson

‍