Coupe, JamesHer, Yun Mi2020-08-142020-08-142020-08-142020Her_washington_0250E_21904.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/45713Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020The current dissertation points out that Internet platforms promote ‘individual homogeneity’ for easy control. This paper focused on how an individual’s view of social justice and cultural diversity could be acquired against the Internet platform’s surveillance system. Through my recent exhibition Natural Individuals in Seattle, which consists of VR Mobile Application, Metamorphosis into Self-resemblance (2020) and Generative Sculptures, The Space Beyond Recognition (2020), I reveal that the structure of Internet platforms limits individuals to think an object excessively in the category formed by ‘sharing and similarity’. Artworks of ‘Net art’ that inherited an artistic context from an avant-garde movement, dismantling and exploring the Internet medium, are researched in this dissertation. For theoretical reference, I used ‘resemblance of representation’ by Michel Foucault, ‘multiple being’ by Alain Badiou, ‘out of human-centered cognition’ by Quentin Meillassoux and ‘digital swarm’ by Byung-Chul Han. In Chapter 1, I criticize that internet platforms have a surveillance system disguising with communication, and it provokes ‘individual homogenization’ in cultural and social aspects. I point out that ‘similarity,’ a major methodology to form an Internet platform’s structure, leads to standardization of individuality. Individuals are categorized by similarity, form ethnic-network, and become labors producing data that are easy to process in the digital surveillance system for consumption encouragement. The surveillance system includes aggregate and statistical analysis, self-referentiality search results, recommend system reflecting major tastes, and their algorithms create an invisible framework to close the possibility of individuals’ diverse cultural preference and subjective identity. In Chapter 2, Net art combined with Net.art (net-dot-art) and Post-Internet will be researched to find ways to improve the Internet platform’s surveillance system ethically and aesthetically rather than trying to deviate from the system. Selected artworks in Net art show representative methodologies of avant-garde art movements like uncertainty, randomness, a collection with heterogeneous objects, media-translation, and annihilation. These methodologies are also analyzed in Chapter 2. In addition, the artworks intend to reflect changes in social and cultural awareness after the Internet and to dismantle and criticize the limited structure of the Internet environment. In Chapter 3, the two artworks in my dissertation exhibition, Natural Individuals, are explained. Metamorphosis into Self-resemblance (2020) is a mobile virtual reality application that plays back videos and sounds according to a viewer’s gaze. In Scene 1, the interactive mechanism works only on the waterfall of the pond, which looks real. To progress to the next scene, viewers have to fix their eyes to the waterfall, reminding viewers’ immobile single eye in front of the illusion made with a linear perspective. The viewer’s gaze moves to the next scene chasing the ladybug and wanders among miscellaneous images associated with a ladybug. In the last scene, the gaze cannot find the original ladybug missing in the previous scene and eventually transforms into the ladybug itself and disappears from the darkness. The narrative of Metamorphosis into Self-resemblance indicates that an object’s authentic identity can never be reached in the chain of representations moving from one resemblance to another. The Space Beyond Recognition (2020) is created from the three-dimensional arrangement of similar images obtained by searching for a specific keyword in an Internet search engine. These generative sculptures reveal the insignificant morphological information of a particular object that was lost on the web. A ladybug that has one side of its body, ammonites that still have its patterns but lost its three-dimensionality, and a conch shell with a free form except for the horns located at specific positions are examples. Their morphological metamorphosis implies that image data on the Internet is biased and limited to human-centered recognition. Lastly, in Chapter 4, my future direction after Natural Individuals includes generating ‘autonomous simulation’ artworks created with pure mechanical processes, including image training set. Classification of a new machine separated from the human realm is necessary to maintain the machine’s neutral decision. In conclusion, I emphasized that through the ‘pure mechanical category’ in the internet environment, we can find the possibility of social and cultural progress without any limitation and bias that the internet platform could lead.application/pdfen-USnone3 dimensional Internet dataInternet Platform surveillanceMobile VR ApplicationNatural IndividualsNet artPost InternetFine artsArtificial intelligenceMass communicationDigital arts and experimental mediaThesis