Abstract

This thesis considers the shifting relationships between affect, governance, and technology, by examining two contemporary video installations: What the Heart Wants (2016) by Belgian-American artist Cécile B. Evans (b. 1983), and Roamie View: History Enhancements (2010) by American artist Ryan Trecartin (b. 1981). I argue that these works allow viewers to better conceptualize the media and socio-political environments surrounding them by drawing attention to contemporary affective experiences and to digital anxieties such as confusion, competition, fatigue, and performativity. What the Heart Wants presents digital infrastructures as affective and woven within modern intimacies, ultimately critiquing the notion of a programmed sociality. Roamie View: History Enhancements hyperbolizes info-glut and conjures an understanding of contemporary cognition as affective, and of the performativity of neoliberal networked subjects. In both works, I also examine the artists’ approaches to representation and identity. In different ways, these works fulfill technological governance in its totality, and through these intensifications, shatter common assumptions about networked life. Evans presents a world reduced to a controlling, confused, and anxious digital system, while Trecartin’s characters, living with cameras 24/7, lose their bearings and are caught in endless loops of performance. Both works come to question and document the seamless integration of platform technologies as “companion systems” (James Williams) of users’ affective lives. By examining the relationship between technology and emotions, these artists recognize the socio-political qualities of emotions, and their inextricable ties to history. This allows viewers to better see the potent influence of digital systems on affect, and to engage in a politics of emotions.