Academic inquiry and writing are essential parts of my practice. In addition to an undergraduate degree in design and graduate studio art degree, I hold a humanities-based PhD from Trinity College Dublin, and continue to write articles, reviews and artist perspectives for various mainstream and academic publications, as well as the spaces between. Below is the thesis abstract from my aforementioned PhD dissertation.

——————-

The Implicit Body
understanding interactive art through embodiment and embodiment through interactive art

This dissertation argues that examining interactive art and embodiment, together, enables an expanded understanding of the two. It puts forward a theoretical approach, as well as a critical framework, for doing so. The hypothesis of this approach contends that present discourses surrounding digital art (as engaged by, for example, Lev Manovich, Oliver Grau and Christiane Paul) have been too rooted in paradigms of linguistic and visual signification to adequately interrogate the complexities of interactive art. Contemporary theories of embodiment and relationality that have grown out of phenomenology (Mark B.N. Hansen, N. Katherine Hayles and Brian Massumi), by contrast, see body and world, subject and object, person and people as always already entwined, always already implicated across one another. To proffer an implicit body approach, this dissertation turns to performance studies theory via Rebecca Schneider and Richard Schechner, and phenomenology through Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Luc Nancy and Nick Crossley. It proposes a framework for examining interactive art that addresses inter-activity and relationality in equal proportion to artist intent and art work description. It then applies this framework to the art of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Camille Utterback, Simon Penny, Mathieu Briand, Scott Snibbe, myself and several others, in order to show its effectiveness in furthering our understandings of interactive art and embodiment, as well as what is at stake in the openness of each.

Ultimately, this dissertation contends that contemporary, interactive art is reconfiguring action and perception in ways that amplify bodiliness. It gives one potential mode of thinking through interactivity, and shows its practical application towards furthering the fields of contemporary art criticism, creative production, and public discourse about the body more generally.
——————-

See my CV for various Implicit Body publications, or download the six page introduction to my thesis from implicitbody.net