The Poetry of Logical Ideas: Towards a Mathematical Genealogy of Media Art

In this dissertation I chart a mathematical genealogy of media art, demonstrating that mathematical thought has had a significant influence on contemporary experimental moving image production. Rather than looking for direct cause and effect relationships between mathematics and the arts, I will instead examine how mathematical developments have acted as a cultural zeitgeist, an indirect, but significant, influence on the humanities and the arts. In particular, I will be narrowing the focus of this study to the influence mathematical thought has had on cinema (and by extension media art), given that mathematics lies comfortably between the humanities and sciences, and that cinema is the object par excellence of such a study, since cinema and media studies arrived at a time when the humanities and sciences were held by many to be mutually exclusive disciplines. It is also shown that many media scholars have been implicitly engaging with mathematical concepts without necessarily recognizing them as such. To demonstrate this, I examine many concepts from media studies that demonstrate or derive from mathematical concepts. For instance, Claude Shannon's mathematical model of communication is used to expand on Stuart Hall's cultural model, and the mathematical concept of the fractal is used to expand on Rosalind Krauss' argument that video is a medium that lends itself to narcissism. Given that the influence of mathematics on the humanities and the arts often occurs through a misuse or misinterpretation of mathematics, I mobilize the concept of a productive misinterpretation and argue that this type of misreading has the potential to lead to novel innovations within the humanities and the arts. In this dissertation, it is also established that there are many mathematical concepts that can be utilized by media scholars to better analyze experimental moving images. In particular, I explore the mathematical concepts of symmetry, infinity, fractals, permutations, the Axiom of Choice, and the algorithmic to moving images works by Hollis Frampton, Barbara Lattanzi, Dana Plays, T. Marie, and Isiah Medina, among others. It is my desire that this study appeal to scientists with an interest in cinema and media art, and to media theorists with an interest in experimental cinema and other contemporary moving image practices