Flatness in Contemporary Art and Poetic Practice

Cook, Rory

Abstract

This project develops a critical frame of flatness to understand how intermedial arts and poetic practices engage with and critique the media effects of digital technologies. Flatness is understood here as an aesthetic mode that emphasises mediative processes; rather than seeking to ‘immerse’ viewers in a profound encounter with novel media, these practices instead present technical deconstructions of image-making. Intermedial art moves across and between media, and the practices considered here refer to extant works of art or media artefacts to develop this critique. As such, this project reads ekphrasis, which conventionally denotes a poetic rendering of visual art, as a form of intermedial practice, and uses ekphrasis further as a theoretical tool to understand the algorithmic mode of the digital image that flatness draws attention to. In the context of a digital image culture, which allows new configurations across medial networks, I contend that flatness in creative works activates a criticality in viewers and readers towards contemporary conditions around the image. This has a reciprocal relationship to my own poetic practice, which both responds to issues raised by the critical material and proposes new areas for theoretical inquiry.

Each chapter of this dissertation considers how artists and poets have elaborated these issues through their practice, with close readings framed by theoretical material developed from both literary and new media scholarship. This combination of literary and media studies outlines how flatness is a useful concept for practitioners and theorists of both disciplines. Following my introduction, which outlines a theoretical context for the thesis, I consider Abbas Akhavan’s juxtaposition of sculptural practice and greenscreens to critique digital memorialisation (Chapter 2), Sondra Perry’s digital animations in installation environments (Chapter 2), Elizabeth Price’s use of archival material to generate intermedial projections (Chapter 3), and Fred Moten and Ben Lerner’s expansion of literary ekphrasis in texts that moves between verse and prose, as well as both writers’ theorising of flatness in their critical writing (Chapter 4). This continuation of new analysis and theoretical framing—combined with my own creative practice that synthesises this research from artistic and poetic disciplines—offers a new, vital approach to considering digital conditions.

• Thesis Type: Thesis
• Online Publication Date: Mar 27, 2025
• Deposit Date: Mar 17, 2025
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 28, 2027
• Award Date: Mar 27, 2025