AbstractsEngineering

Absurdity online: visualising digital absurdity through new media and drawing

by Daniel Irirangi Knox




Institution: AUT University
Department:
Year: 0
Keywords: Drawing; Absurdity; Digital Technology
Record ID: 1303039
Full text PDF: http://hdl.handle.net/10292/7357


Abstract

This project explores the nature and influence of digital absurdity. It offers drawing as a tool to navigate and visualise the complex status of human/digital interaction, with particular focus on the instances when this interaction results in moments of potential absurdity. Digital absurdity is proposed as a ubiquitous aspect of digital technology. This project suggests that, new media, due to its primary position as a liminal space between human and computer, materiality and immateriality, and abstraction and referentiality, provides a useful location to examine digital absurdity at work. Through an investigation of several qualities, unique to new media, and understood according to Hodges’ (2010) conceptual framework of “the digital absurd”, this project offers a contemporary drawing practice as a means of articulating, visualising and potentially navigating the terrain of digital absurdity. Through an investigation that highlights drawing and new media’s similar and equally ambiguous attributes, an approach to image making, that combines the emotive and material immediacy of traditional drawing, and the potentially absurd computational nature of new media, is offered as a way to synthesise the two technologies of drawing and the digital, with the aim offering an evocative and human centred visualisation of the current technological landscape.