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ThesisCC BY-NC-ND V3.0, Open Access
Dissertation
Mixed Reality Re-assembled: Software Assemblages at the Edge of Control
Doctor of Philosophy, University of New South Wales
2018
Abstract
In certain paradigms from commercial and engineering practice, migrated to media art, Mixed Reality (MR) is often encountered as augments viewed through a screen display. Understood as both informatic and digital, augments are supplementary content that enhance a human experience of 'reality'. My project cultivates a contrasting view of
augments as emergent via human and nonhuman processes that entangle digital as well as physical spaces. Through a practice based approach located in media art, this research contributes an artistic formulation the software assemblage supported by a suite of techniques and methods that attempt to reassemble MR as an expanded practice
that occurs both on and off screen. The software assemblages produced in this research, draw upon Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s machinic assemblage, a relational ecology of material elements organized by movement, as well as Karen Barad’s concept of agential realism, where nonhuman matter enacts situated modes of agency. Thinking with Donna Haraway, the software assemblage takes a diffractive approach, exploring patterns of interference in MR spaces. An analysis of selected media art practices operates in tandem with this trajectory, investigating influential work by Golan Levin and collaborators, OpenEndedGroup, Yvonne Rainer, Miya Masaoka, Adam Nash and Stefan Greuter, as well as Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau. Developing a refigured version of MR, augments become performative as they coemerge with my body, in media environments that assemble living plants, hardware devices, and computational networks. Augments will be apprehended not only as screen objects, but also as a mode of materiality. Emerging from this research, are techniques and methods that investigate: the performative potential of augments outside of the informatic; the Leap Motion gestural controller as a performative interface; the generation of augmented audio from the bioelectrical signals of plants; and, the extended senses of embodiment that embroil the performer. Here, signals, augments, and bodies are manifest as relational forces that diffract and modulate through the software assemblage. An alternative MR emerges that ripples through physical as well as digital space. And that's when augments exceed the informatic.
Details
- Title
- Mixed Reality Re-assembled: Software Assemblages at the Edge of Control
- Authors
- Rewa Wright - University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, School of Business and Creative Industries
- Awarding institution
- University of New South Wales
- Degree awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy
- DOI
- 10.26190/unsworks/21084
- Handle
- 1959.4/61519
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99679196102621
- Output Type
- Dissertation
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