Multimedia as Meta-Art:  the processes and aesthetics of interactive digital art.

 Includes a folio of Original  Multimedia Art with Supporting Documentation
© 2004 Barry Ferrier,  B.A., Dip. Music (Comp.), B.Litt. (Hons.).


A thesis presented to the School of Contemporary Arts,Southern Cross University, Lismore NSW, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.June, 2004.

 

ABSTRACT:

 

Concepts of meta-art, or a synthesis of the arts, have fascinated and inspired many historically important artists, including Wagner, Scriabin, Kandinsky, Cage, and the Bauhaus and Futurist artists. These thinkers dreamed of combining the diverse means of traditional artistic expression to create a total, transcending art experience.

A meta-art machine was visualized by the German author Hermann Hesse in his Nobel prize-winning novel The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi). Hesse explored the idea of a machine which has evolved to be the ultimate in art technology, a multidimensional machine/human interface, depicted (in a pre-computer time) as a fantastic creative and conceptual abacus, employing all the cultural and scientific knowledge of the ages.

This once futuristic vision is becoming a reality, with the rapid evolution of the contemporary personal computer, which offers multi-dimensional, multi-sensory art-making tools, within one machine. Connected to the internet, this nascent meta-art machine offers a channel for delivering multimedia art to the world.

The concept of a meta-art machine is used as a unifying theme in Part One of this dissertation, as a means of focusing and clarifying an exploration of a wide range of contemporary ideas about interactive digital multimedia art. Arts associated with each of the primary sense modalities, it is argued herein, communicate on a number of channels of communication. The arts associated with each of these sensory channels of communication are discussed, with a view to gaining a broad overview and understanding of the unique aesthetics of the newly emerged, technologically-based digital multimedia artform.

The authors personal exploration of multimedia art is presented in the accompanying creative work, and this work is discussed in Part Two of the written thesis, drawing on the insights presented in the theoretical discussion comprising Part One. The creative work is in two parts – the first a large scale experimental video animation, with synchronized audio/music track, presented on DVD, entitled Take Your Space Now ; and the second an experimental interactive CD-ROM, entitled the Machine.

 

 

The dissertation (described above) is  available direct from the author in .pdf form, as well as

the DVD entitled Take Your Space Now,

and the  experimental interactive CD-ROM, entitled the Machine .

 

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Excerpts from the Machine are posted online at bentlystrange.com