Santry, Arron. 2024. Art After Control: Artists’ Moving Image and Aesthetic Resistance in Control Society. Doctoral thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London [Thesis]

Preview

Text (Art After Control: Artists’ Moving Image and Aesthetic Resistance in Control Society) MCCS_thesis_SantryA_2024.pdf - Accepted Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (2MB) | Preview

Abstract or Description

Gilles Deleuze’s concept of control society is often deployed as a shorthand for the social mutation wrought by the proliferation of digital technology at the end of the twentieth century, marking a new historical period characterised by widespread institutional crisis as a result of rapid technological change. Control names a post-cybernetic logic that underpins the invention of a new space-time, and as a result, comes into conflict with the creative act. This thesis is structured the opposition Deleuze draws between art and control, and asks how and how far art resists control.

In setting up an antimony between art and a ‘mutated’ capitalist society at a moment of intensive technologisation, the contours of an aesthetic theory that Deleuze draws in his writing on control intersect with the Aesthetic Theory of Theodor Adorno, which similarly theorised art’s resistance to social domination under capitalism. This thesis advances a reading of Adorno via Deleuze, and vice versa, in order to account for the relation of art to control society and to explore the possibility of aesthetic resistance to control.

Employing an anecdotal methodology, and taking artists’ moving image as a form particular to the conditions of control society, each chapter closely analyses one moving image artwork in terms of its potential to resist control. The first explores the transformation of artistic labour and its relation to general social technique in the work of Tabor Robak; the second explores the technologization of memory in opposition to ‘vogue’ and cultural memory in the work of Jacolby Satterwhite; the final chapter considers the act of ‘worlding’ as an act of resistance to control in the work of Ian Cheng, also attending to the possibilities of AI art in control society.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Identification Number (DOI):	https://doi.org/10.25602/GOLD.00037219
Keywords:	Art, Moving Image, Aesthetics, Resistance, Technology, Control, Deleuze, Adorno
Departments, Centres and Research Units:	Media, Communications and Cultural Studies
Date:	31 May 2024
Item ID:	37219
Date Deposited:	04 Jul 2024 16:55
Last Modified:	04 Jul 2024 17:01
URI:	https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/37219

View statistics for this item...

Edit Record (login required)