School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemSpecta(c)torship in Net Art(?): Individuation After Simondon( 2022)This thesis constructs a new theoretical framework for understanding the process of spectatorship in net art. Recent theoretical debates in this field have problematized the concepts of 'artwork' and 'artist' by understanding the production of net art as an ongoing negotiation of a complex network of relations. Complementing these discourses, I aim to problematize in a similar sense the figure of the embodied spectator, to show that the body engaged in the process of spectatorship is not and cannot be assumed to be a 'human' body. In order to do so, this thesis critically engages with Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy, proposing to understand net art spectatorship as a process of individuation through which the embodied thinking subject emerges, always unequal with itself, as a product of relations. At the same time, the problematic of spectatorship requires rethinking the fundamental premisses of Simondon’s theory of individuation. I argue that the ontogenetic problematic outlined by Simondon (the becoming of being) has to be complemented by a phenomenogenetic one (the question of genesis of genesis of phenomena: the genesis of specific ways in which phenomena emerge). Upon this background, the process of spectatorship is understood as the problematization of the conjunction between the ontogenetic and phenomenogenetic dimensions of individuation. The specificity of net art spectatorship rests upon the type of embodied subjectivity that is problematized and deconstructed in this process, namely a particular instantiation of the modern 'human' subject contingent on the functioning of contemporary digital objects.