Stranger's images: net art and an"other" representation

Abstract

This thesis explores the way in which the Internet facilitates artists in constructing an-other knowledge, defined as the deconstruction of a Modem and Western regime of knowledge/representation organized around the axis subject/object. Based on Fairclough's three dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis I have analyzed nine on-line artworks and five months of on-line and face to face interviews with Canadian based on­line artists. The result was a reading of these works in terms of strategies of subversion. This means that Net Art, art produced, exhibited and distributed for and on the Internet, constitutes a field where it is possible to observe Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) technology's contribution to the deconstruction of binary oppositions such as self/other, body/mind, technology/nature. This thesis proposes a shift from traditional definitions of Otherness as the non-Self to a notion of Otherness as a locus for reflection, a third term, an "in-betweeness".