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Thesis Info
- LABS ID
- 00837
- Thesis Title
- Charting Artistic Rigor: How three new media artists advance Wassily Kandinsky's theories on abstract painting and harness technology as a form of artistic expression
- Author
- Jonathan Brandel
- E-mail
- jonathan.brandel AT paris.edu
- 2nd Author
- 3rd Author
- Degree
- Master of Fine Arts
- Year
- 2020
- Number of Pages
- 88
- University
- Paris College of Art
- Thesis Supervisor
- Joanna Wlaszyn
- Supervisor e-mail
- joanna.wlaszyn AT paris.edu
- Other Supervisor(s)
- Klaus Fruchtnis
- Language(s) of Thesis
- English
- Department / Discipline
- Transdisciplinary New Media
- Copyright Ownership
- Jonathan Brandel
- Languages Familiar to Author
- English, French, Japanese
- URL where full thesis can be found
- drive.google.com/open?id=1Frss6Jw-aG97Sr3CZsUpkxVWDlGq3urf
- Keywords
- artistic expression, abstract painting, new media arts, creative technology, techniques
- Abstract: 200-500 words
- The artist, theorist, and educator, Wassily Kandinsky, is lauded by the art world for being the “principal progenitor” of abstract painting. This notoriety is due to his ability to paint and to write about the artistic process. In his writings, Kandinsky unabashedly draws inspiration from other forms of art. This ability to define art which was previously unknown, to look to other art forms, and to focus on the artistic process resembles the practices of artists working in the field of new media, a technology-fused genre of art. In order to discover how new media artists build on top of Kandinsky’s theories, this thesis establishes a novel classification of the painter’s theories, known as his ‘science of art’. This rubric extracts three essential components from critical discourse of the painter’s theories: surface, precision, and dissonance. It is then applied to Kandinsky’s own oil painting, Composition 8 (1923), and three works of new media: the software-generated book Frankenfont (2011) by Fathom Information Design, the software-generated video Flight Patterns (2005) by Aaron Koblin, and the software-mediated performance 24 Drones (2015) by ELEVENPLAY and Rhizomatiks Research. Interviews conducted specifically for this research and with the three contemporary artists yielded inconsistent extents of Kandinsky’s direct influence. Despite this, comparisons between Composition 8 and the three new media pieces reveal that surface, precision, and dissonance persist throughout all these artworks. Furthermore, each new media piece demonstrates implementations of the classified components at levels more complex than in Kandinsky’s painting. These results affirm Kandinsky’s relevance in contemporary art practices, offer a new way to analyze new media art, and provide four examples of how artists define the undefined.