Abstract
This thesis explores artistic and philosophical responses to the entanglement of perception, ecology, and technological mediation. Through the development and exhibition of seven experimental video installations, the research disrupts conventional articulations of the moving image, foregrounding somatosensory engagement through a praxis of screen-reliant installation art. These works unfold across six axes—image, montage, sound, projection, spatiality, and temporality—mobilising strategies of disruption, diffraction, and perceptual reconfiguration to challenge cinematic conventions and foster participatory meaning-making.
Disarticulating and re-aligning insights from Lacanian psychoanalysis, Stieglerian technophilosophy, and posthumanist thought, the thesis positions art practice as an epistemic and ontological mode of inquiry—one that privileges speculative modelling and a neurodivergent engagement with the Anthropocene. From this praxis, it articulates four original concepts: disarticulating cinema, the ontological organon, the generative ground, and the collateral cascade. Together, these frame a methodology that investigates how technological artefacts recondition perception and recursively shape human ontology.
Disarticulating cinema emerges not only as an aesthetic strategy but as a philosophical and ecological intervention—one that seeks to expose and reconfigure the human-made structures that mediate—and misrecognise (méconnaissance)—subjectivity and environmental entanglement. The culminating installation, Singular–Plural (2024), integrates microscopic imaging, human ritual, and ecological collapse to model the ontological tensions between fantasy, fragmentation, and sympoiesis.
Collectively, the thesis contributes to contemporary debates in media theory, ecological aesthetics, and practice-led research, offering a model for how experimental cinema might help to unsettle anthropocentric paradigms and open speculative pathways for being-with in an increasingly precarious world.