I’m glad to share! The dissertation that I presented in January 2020 has been awarded as one of the forty best Ph.D. theses in Austria among all disciplines. The Award of Excellence was conferred in December 2021 by the Bundesministeriums für Bildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung (Austrian Federal Ministry for Education, Science and Research).

The dissertation titled “Post-Media Practice: Techniques and Technologies as Objects and Subjects of Artistic Practice” was supervised by Univ. Prof. Dr. Christa Sommerer at Kunstuniversität Linz.

Following, a short abstract:

The relation between Media Art (MA) and contemporary arts (CAs) has been extensively debated in the latest decades. However, considering the expansion of MA in various hybrid approaches, in recent times it is possible to observe stronger instances of integration. Excluding the arguments that would offer a sociological reading of the configuration of cultural fields and the contextualization given by the trajectories drawn by art history, a relevant part of the discussion focused on the definition and use of media in artistic practice. This aspect is considered highly critical since it concerns the ambiguous etymology of the term medium, the overlaps that incurred in the transition from modern to postmodern art theories and the large variety of artistic practices, intentions and trends that developed during the time. The contributions proposed in this research intend to offer additional insights to the consideration of media in the context of artistic production, posing on the foreground the experiments in which art and technology converge. The development of this theoretical research proposes a transdisciplinary approach that relies on the methodologies of qualitative and qualitative comparative analysis. Following the exploratory phase, the incremental knowledge found during the various steps of the research are presented in the dissertation. The final achievement proposes a common perspective that concerns the function of media in artistic production, integrating the principles of the Media Arts (MAs) and contemporary arts (CAs) in the definition of Post-Media Practice (PMP). Term that includes the definition of artistic media as instruments of art production and as material or immaterial objects that express artistic practices and social aspects.