Diagrammatic Media / Subjectivity—Ecology—Event / Generating Organizational Techniques Through Creative Practice for a Post-Media Era

This dissertation charts another path for Media Arts and Sciences (MAS) by generating institutional and creative research practices working against logics of integration and extraction. Drawing on activist, psychoanalyst, and philosopherFélix Guattari, I use institutional analysis to model how MAS came to inherit legacies of 1970s cyberlibertarianism and digital utopianism, which disavow politics in favor of technocratic interventions. I also identify the homogenizing and reactionary political and disciplinary consequences of MAS’s embrace of integrative modes of interdisciplinarity. Responding to integrative and technocratic MAS, I argue for reconsideration of politics in MAS through an approach to research, creation, and practice informed by Guattari’s concept of diagrammatics. Diagrammatics emphasizes the centrality of subjectivity in crises of mental, social, and environmental ecology. Through creative practice with computational media, art and technology, and social design, I work towards a practice-driven notion of diagrammatic media. I outline media diagrammatics as an intertwining of extensive engineering of concrete machines (artmaking, systems building, bookmaking, event making) and a speculative engineering of abstract machines (dreaming, conceptualizing, modeling, critiquing, analyzing, actualizing, virtualizing). In this sense, diagrammatics mediates mental and social individuations between a preindividual and an individuation. Diagrammatic media objects (e.g., a radiophonic aberrance in the electromagnetic field, a book, an autumn leaf) are lures for thinking-feeling embedded into a diagram. Diagrammatic media proposes we stop thinking in terms of computational media systems altogether and begin thinking about diagrammatic assemblages of concrete and abstract machines. A prototype of a tangible media-rich operating system called diagrammatic elucidates the complexities of the relationship between lateral thinking, moving, and feeling in learning and writing. I outline ways the prototype could be brought into a slow network that speculates on new modes of collaborative writing. Portacular Resonances, a radiophonic media installation, drives a Sci-Phi endeavor orbiting contemporary anxiety differently: as a clue for cosmic becoming spiraling out of the reactive affect of alienations and emotional capitalistic exploitation and into a potential collectivizing force. Finally, through the Guattarian concept of the machine, I ask how potential becomings are embedded through gathering events such as SloMoCo, a slow conference for artist researchers.