The Mapping Between Interactive Art and Classical Rhetoric: An

Nathan Guo
Masterarbeit, 2017
Interface Cultures Merging modern science and technology, media art has become an increasingly crucial genre of contemporary art. The ways that media art appeals, generates, configures, persuades, stylizes and delivers resemble the general principles of rhetoric. Modern rhetoric, inspired by posthumanism, has expanded into a wide variety of domains, including film, visual art, journalism, advertising, fiction, architecture science and so forth, yet the linkage between media art and rhetoric remains relatively unaddressed. This thesis explores this connection by highlighting the intersections between interactive art, one of the most representative genres of media art, and classical rhetoric, which established the paradigm for general rhetoric. This aim of the thesis is to provide a methodology for analyzing interactive art from the rhetoric viewpoint and to propose a paradigm of Media Art Rhetoric. In this research, methods of analogy study, case studies of the author’s artistic work and scientific modeling are utilized. The two domains are outlined and bridged according to their characteristics, mapped according to the five canons of rhetoric, the extracted methodology is applied and finally, a visual model is generated as the result. Although this thesis is limited within the domains of interactive art and classical rhetoric, there are still enormous potentials for further research in other realms of rhetoric and media art. Online presentation: goo.gl/8miMcq
PDF download: goo.gl/13A3CA