Soft(ware) sculpture : spatial and temporal interventions in audio-visual media

Abstract

‘Soft(ware) Sculpture’ is a re-articulation of the notion of sculpture developed in this thesis to reflect sculpture’s new relationship with software and the consequent emergence of new forms of sculptural practice and sculptural artefacts, which through digital technology are able to sense their environment and become reactive to it. ‘Soft(ware) Sculpture’ is therefore composed of a multitude of fluid relationships in constant motion across time, dimensions and realities. The notion of ‘Soft(ware) Sculpture’ was developed by the author from a re-articulation of expanded arts practices that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Contextualised through research that was conducted in sculptural and media arts histories across multiple artistic disciplines, these practices were re-evaluated and extended upon through the application of current digital technologies overlaid on the author’s existing sculptural practice, thus connecting material, time and space in order to explore possibilities previously beyond the remit of sculpture. Conceptual, historical and technological precedents were identified and utilised as foundations for the development of the frameworks that lead the software sculpture fusion. This study re-examines the relationships and the roles of sculpture with and within a constantly changing, technologically oriented society through the emergence of software as a mono-medium, more precisely, as a medium that has grown to encompass most of the technology that preceded it. The practical body of work that accompanies this thesis advocates the fusion of the conventional sculptural ‘object’ and the digital medium to create both a ‘sculptural ecology’ and a ‘sculptural situation’, read within this study as macro and micro-states of a new breed of sculptural artefacts that are fluid in both appearance and behaviour and that in themselves are also capable of creating artistic artefacts.