Degree Name
Master of Science
Graduate Program
Mass Communication and Media Arts
Advisor
Carol L. Westerman-Jones
Abstract
The purpose of this project is to use new media as a platform for the values found in Western modernization and in Japanese traditional aesthetics to work together. Key points within the research find that with the advancement of technology our perspective, attitudes and aesthetics of time have drastically changed. The first part of the research investigates the fundamental effect of media brought into the human environment, how electric media has become so powerful as well as looking at the principles of new media. The second part of the research reveals the differences between Western and Japanese aesthetics by focusing on the value of simplicity. While simplicity found in Western modernism came from the pursuit of efficiency and practicality, simplicity found in Japanese traditional aesthetics is based on the idea of emptiness. Emptiness is different from nothingness, but it calls for free imagination and interpretation by leaving room to be complemented. The research includes a series of the net art works that employs both the principles of new media and Japanese aesthetics, which diametrically oppose to each other, to offer viewers a new experience of time.