Online Specificity: Live Event Artworks and the Inner Continuity of the Network.
This practice-based research analyses the encounter of Net/Web artworks, their materiality and their space-time condition. I analyse a selection of online-specific artworks to examine their materiality and experiential features in an investigation into how they can offer a varied encounter atypical...
| Summary: | This practice-based research analyses the encounter of Net/Web artworks, their materiality and their space-time condition. I analyse a selection of online-specific artworks to examine their materiality and experiential features in an investigation into how they can offer a varied encounter atypical to offline artworks. The research suggests that these encounters have the potential to disturb a familiar linear or chronological sense of space-time. In line with this enquiry, the research explores qualities found in online-specific artworks that are analogous with the encounter of durée (i.e. duration). This concept was first theorised by Henri Bergson in 1886 as an experience of time with a heterogeneous nature that takes place in the inner self of human experience. I examine this theory to consider whether online-specific artworks are more capable of precipitating experiences associated with durée and its understanding of memory. In order to do so, I examine the materiality of these artworks (e.g. HTML/CSS) and their temporal existence in the network duration when online users establish a net connection to retrieve them (e.g. URL, HTTP). This research analyses the state of the network as a heterogeneous reality, as described by network theorist Tiziana Terranova (2004), in order to explore how such qualities impact the encounter of online-specific artworks as inherent assets of the network duration. The thesis proposes that the transitory reality of these time-based artworks are only operative in the live stream of the information flux that resides in the virtual state of the network. As a result, such encounters are analysed through a new notion of event described in the research as live events. From this perspective, the research explores similar experiential aspects that are shared between online-specific artworks and offline time-based artworks (e.g. Standing Wave (1920) by Naum Gabo) due to a live encounter during their temporal activation. Subsequently, this research analyses the materiality of ... |
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