Type
Text
Type
Dissertation
Advisor
Advisors: Uroskie, Andrew V.; Belisle, Brooke; Gaboury, Jacob; Elcott, Noam M.
Date
2018-01-01
Keywords
Cybernetics, Motion pictures, Art—History, Experimental Film, Music History, Music—History and criticism, Media Art History, Sound Art
Department
Department of Art History and Criticism | Dissertation
Language
en
Source
This work is sponsored by the Stony Brook University Graduate School in compliance with the requirements for completion of degree.
Identifier
http://hdl.handle.net/11401/78304
Publisher
The Graduate School, Stony Brook University: Stony Brook, NY.
Format
application/pdf
Abstract
Illuminating experimental, time-based, and technologically reproducible art objects produced between 1954 and 1964 to represent “the real,” this dissertation considers theories of mediation, ascertains vectors of influence between art and the cybernetic and computational sciences, and argues that the key practitioners responded to technological reproducibility in three ways. First of all, writers Guy Debord and William Burroughs reinvented appropriation art practice as a means of critiquing retrograde mass media entertainments and reportage. Second, Western art music composer Richard Maxfield mobilized chance techniques and indeterminacy to resist scientific and philosophical determinism’s pervasive influences upon post-1945 art and life. Third, author and playwright Samuel Beckett conjectured that ubiquitous recording might become problematic to the quality of experiential life in technologically mediated environments. This study analyzes musical, cinematic, theatrical, and computational works of art from an art historical perspective that is broadly informed by film history, media studies, the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism, gender studies, and queer theory. | 287 pages
Recommended Citation
Hartnett, Gerald J., "Recorded Objects: Time Based, Technologically Reproducible Art, 1954-1964" (2018). Stony Brook Theses and Dissertations Collection, 2006-2020 (closed to submissions). 3798.
https://commons.library.stonybrook.edu/stony-brook-theses-and-dissertations-collection/3798