writing and the Phd in fine artour examples, it cannot be confined to the well researched area of research ‘through’
the arts and indicates how researchers themselves have moved the debate forward.
in the first phd, the thesis/antithesis produces software art to induce social agency
(Cox 2006). in other words, the artist has produced a software program to be activated
by whoever encounters the phd on completing reading of the written submission:
thus, within the context of the five written chapters, setting out the definitions, the
history, technology and ideological and political basis for the thinking behind the
program, the reader is invited to operate another anti- thesis program using perl. The
latter will provide an internal contradiction and set up a provocative dialectic which
puts into question what the written text has apparently proposed; it can be seen as a
demonstration of critical reflexivity in action. While the results of the proposed action
on the part of the reader/activist is difficult to describe, the action itself is not. That is
the point. There are, after all, some actions and resulting experiences which are not
fully accommodated by language.
The written part of the study is comprehensive and provides an overview of its
field. it explores marxist and Benjaminian ideas, alongside current theorists such as
Friedrich Kittler, Kevin Kelly, Roy Bashkar, inke arns and Roy ascott. it also presents
a broad understanding of Chomsky’s ideas about how language functions politically
and socially. overall, it conveys a clear understanding of how software as art can be
proposed as something that can be both read, understood and executed to at least
allow for the possibility of social change. it proposes its essential thesis within its own
form by leaving the written component unfinished, that is without a full stop, so that it
can express and induce a particular kind of labour and new knowledge when the reader
activates the perl program; the program will then induce a scrambling and a destabilizing
within what has been presented. Through the careful proposal of what software art is
and how it might function and how an emergent history might be described in relation
to a complex technology and technological development, this thesis proposes ideas
about the complexity of labour within current culture and opens itself to becoming a
software praxis; through its formulated identity as artwork, action and coda it presents
an inventive dynamic. This is complex. however, its simple, lucidly described purpose is
carefully contextualized. it owes a great deal to what Walter Benjamin calls ‘putting on
display’, that is, not describing or reducing the thesis to a completed contextualization,
but actually presenting the phd as a full, open and responsive art work (Cox 2006: 65).
it becomes a kind of open source knowledge which entices the reader to become a new
writer of programs. it is a without- end product. it is performative in the public realm,
but also reflects its own structure and offers a critical site against the status quo of
theory, which as hannah arendt posited, ‘cannot alone transform society’ (Cox 2006:
179). in other words, this phd functions critically in the world, it is professionally
didactic in that sense.
This is a dramatic point to start our examples and it will be useful to say straight
away that the author of the phd is a well- established artist/academic whose work
has already been substantially published through exhibitions, conferences, books and
curating. however, this is not the reason for its inclusion here. We propose it because it
is aimed at a readership and a particular kind of social usefulness, and contains within
it the distinctive tensions employed by many of the phds which we have studied. it
suitably mirrors ‘thinking as, thinking for and thinking into’ a potential and active