DIFFRACTING REPRESENTATION: TOWARDS A SITUATED AESTHETICS OF TECHNOSPACES

Abstract

My research for this thesis focusses on the concepts of representation and space in order to demonstrate their theoretical and practical co-implications. Discussing various theorists of space in the first part and analyzing a number of artists and artworks as case studies in the second part, I elaborate a critique of the representational imaginary in order to articulate an alternative notion of representation by means of which a relational, qualitative and performative spatiality can emerge. I specifically focus on technospaces, which I consider a privileged field for observing the intersections of representation and spatiality; it is a field in which the use of spatial metaphors abounds, very often relying on a series of dichotomies (such as location and mobility, the real and the virtual) that have employed and, in most cases, reinforced the traditional idiom of representational. Drawing on the lessons of feminist theory, particularly on approaches to the politics of location, from Adrienne Rich‘s initial formulation to the situated knowledge theorized by Donna Haraway, I elaborate a situated aesthetics of technospaces in which the observer‘s engagement with representational practices replaces the view from a distance of traditional representation, so that her/his position is accounted for together with the history of the production of space and its multiple representations. For this reason, I also formulate an articulatory turn in representation based on Haraway‘s semiotics in order to propose a non-reflexive notion of representation in which invention and factuality eventually meet.