Incomplete record (stub)

In this habilitation thesis I report on over 30 years of creative research in the visual arts. I conducted and analyzed three selected experiments to cast light on the artistic process. In a body of work entitled Paris Réseau/Network I explored the possibilities of networked art using protocols and instructions. I developed this in several stages. Originally designed as a performance, it quickly developed beyond the real-time experience to take charge of its own archives. The second chapter describes the making of Partially Buried University, an interactive 3D environment, and reflects on my implication in a collective research project involving artists, scientists and industrialists. In the third experiment, the goal was to test protocols developed by other artists. As a pedestrian, I followed the paths traced by these artists, and as cartographer I represented and situated these experiences. Finally, with a view to interpreting the “field data,” in the last chapter I outline the problems that underlie all these practices. Can we take advantage of the instability of digital media to design a “robust” art that is not limited by a single presentation device? What is the role of the onlooker in the resulting artistic experience?

This thesis conducts a critical investigation into digital literature—a genre of literary expression that is integrated with, and articulated using, digital computing systems and infrastructures. Specifically, it presents a framework for evaluating the expressive capacities of this genre as it relates to particular conceptions of knowledge-making in the contemporary technocultural environment. This framework reveals how the generation of critical knowledge concerning digital literature, as crystallised through a reader’s material engagements with specific works, enacts a ‘performative’ conception of knowing and being, in which the observable world is treated as emerging in the real time of practice—as being articulated through the entanglement of human and nonhuman agencies, rather than existing as a fixed array of passive, unchanging primitives. Digital literature is presented subsequently as a model of this greater performative vision—as a means of evaluating the structures and processes that manifest it, particularly within digital systems, and for assessing its practical and political implications for art and culture more broadly. In so doing, this thesis aims to justify the value of engaging digital literature from a standpoint that is more expressly political, contending not only that these texts are revealing of key processes shaping digital activities, artefacts, and environments, but are enacting alternative vectors of thought and practice concerning them.