Person

Doctoral project: Resolutions: The political aesthetics of information in contemporary art

The past decade of contemporary art has seen an abundance of data-based art, with artists increasingly using scientific modes of inquiry, presenting bodies of data, and using informational technology as a medium. I argue that this tendency largely exists because artists today often depend on academic institutions or other knowledge economies for funding and exposure. I argue that this engenders a kind of epistemic productivism within contemporary art, wherein artists are conditioned as knowledge workers, and art is evaluated as a knowledge process, as information in itself. With this critique as a starting point, the thesis reflects on art's relationship to information and knowledge, and compares how selected contemporary artists engage with hierarchies of knowledge and information--whether through strategies of scientific inquiry, abstraction, glitching, resistance, or even failure.