Précis, Committee Members, Prospectus, Dissertation, Bibliography,

Exams, Creative Elements

Media, Art, and Text

Virginia Commonwealth University

This dissertation will focus on Community Online Art Projects (COAPs), online works of art produced through user engagement and participation and which are orchestrated by artists  who employ the connected nature of the Internet.  COAPs compel a reassessment of the standard theory that digital works of art are defined primarily by the remediation from analog data into digital code.  While COAPs are firstly the product of the Internet, thus the product of the computer, COAPs have the power to extend beyond the computer because they rely on the engagement and participation of collaborators.   In order to show how COAPs challenge traditional concepts of art practice, I will examine COAPs by considering three prominent characteristics of online collaborative communication technologies: remediation, participation, and interconnection.

Chair, Dr. Richard Fine

Dr. Eric Garberson

Dr. Marcel Cornis-Pope

Dr. Nancy Stutts

Richard Roth

Eatrva.org is an online art environment created by Vaughn Whitney Garland.  This digital project stems from several ideas concerning the art object and the different forms that objects may take in the online platform.  The works that are presented on eatrva.org are individual projects that, when working together in the main index page of this site, create one environment, much like a cabinet of curiosity or a museum of natural history.  With the exception of “The Something in Coming Collective,” the works presented here were created in the months between June and November of 2010.  The page that includes “The Something is Coming Collective (SIC),” is a group project created by three Virginia Commonwealth University Media, Art, and Text Ph.D. students.  All other work, including parts of “SIC,” were created by me for this portfolio review.
During the spring 2010 MATX Lab class, I became very interested in how the art object, and the document that surrounds and defines that object, relate and are created when moved online.  After completing that course, I proposed that this eportfolio would address the notions of object and document.  I hope that I have addressed some of the different realtionships between object and text, including fusing text and object into a visual document. 

During the past year as a doctoral student at Virginia Commonwealth University’s
Media, Art, and Text program, one of the main interests developed out of the debates concerning the relationships between an author/creator to the produced document/object.  As a student of the studio arts, with a Masters in Fine Arts in Painting, this question weighs heavily on my own interpretation of art object, specifically those objects constructed in context of being sole representations of the artist’s hand.  The debates concerning the role of the author/creator have produced some remarkable philosophies of ownership and presence among the reader, the text or the art object, and the author or creator; however, there are additional questions yet to be answered or even uncovered.  New concerns that emerge from these conversations appear when the position of the author moves from a sole, independent individual to one that shares responsibility as an contributor within a group.  While at first this idea—the transformation of the artist/author, changes from a sole creator to shared producer may seem odd within a culture that prizes the heightened position of the created object as a singular objet d'art.  With close reading into philosophies developed by some of the foremost scholars on the subject of authorship, it is compellingly argued that a shared environment is neither new nor abstract, and has been part of the creative apparatus for quite some time. With internet technology, documents can be easily shared, searched, redefined, erased, and even co-written within a community structure wherein a group of people not necessarily in contact with one another assume shared creative ownership over usable material.  What is revealed when we look at the transition from oral, to scribal and manuscript, to print – an ultimately to electronic – traditions, is a clearer picture of how Internet technology allows for the development of conversions about the reader, the viewer, and the conscious...

Unlike the debate about authorship, one figure has taken the brunt and backlash of the critiques and theoretical fortifications the theory of medium specificity has created: New York art and literary critic Clement Greenberg.  With his concept of Formalism, Greenberg, who started writing in the late 1930’s, posited the ideas that would become emblematic of media specificity.  For most of the latter part of the twentieth century, Greenberg’s ideas have caused much commotion in academia and personal studios, forcing some artists to take sides in order to address the position of their own material choice for production.  What is rarely discussed in academic studio seminars is that Greenbergian Formalism, and the larger debate about medium specificity, comes out of a long conversation that highlights the privileging of materials. Greenberg’s ideas are part of a long line of historical defenses on the true nature of art.  This line reaches as far back as the doctrines of art have existed.  This is why, even looking past Greenberg’s Formalism, it is significant we address medium specificity – to use as an historical marker that sheds light on the dialectics of Modernity and the development of art history itself.  Furthermore, while later multimedia responses have entrenched and further challenged Greenbergian Formalism, and medium specificity, I do not see that these responses challenge the validity of medium specificity.  The responses to Greenberg and the theories others have created in response to Greenberg, and medium specificity, have served to instigate additional directions and ideas on aesthetics.... 

Check out this site.

The current verison of VaughnGarland.com was completed during the Summer of 2011 with the help of Christopher (Chip) Stevens of VCU's Mass Communication Department and Dr. David Golumbia of VCU MATX's program.

A big thanks to my brother, Brett Garland, for all his coding lessons

Thanks you all for the awesome help.

Cheers!