Emily Sparkes (RCA) - 2019-20 Students
emily.sparkes@network.rca.ac.uk

Painting the time of internet humour: networked materialities

Stemming from the proliferation of recent “post-internet” painting discourses, this thesis proposes a reconceptualisation of painting’s supposed privileged relationship with networks and flows, whilst avoiding the metaphysical pitfalls which would (again) reduce practice to a kind of well-bounded art-object within a priori structures.

This practice-led research is therefore concerned with ways in which new forms of wildness and humour might emerge and cohere in a painting-internet encounter, outside of representational modes of thought, yet without giving up on the image altogether. Critically, this thesis turns towards Haraway, Stengers, Barad, and Golding for an alternative ontological approach, able to re-articulate the structure that supports sense as a local interference of continua (diffraction), in order to come to terms with how art practice matters.

Primary supervisor: Prof. Johnny Golding, RCA
Secondary supervisor: Catherine Ferguson, RCA