'What is the desire of the medium?' is both a rhetorical question and a fundamental one. The rhetorical question serves as a framework for investigating the interplay between the artist/designer... Show more'What is the desire of the medium?' is both a rhetorical question and a fundamental one. The rhetorical question serves as a framework for investigating the interplay between the artist/designer and the medium during the creative act. Arts and design operate on the level of problematising: they do not reproduce the visible, they make visible. By this, I am suggesting that there is no preconceived objective criterion: all perception needs to be produced. A critical supposition is that the complexity of the world cannot be reduced to either macro- or micro-systems or models (anti-representation). The only interesting route to pursue is to investigate what a medium does (asignification), not what it is (essentialism). My interest lies in affective capacities, not inherent properties and their respective place in any taxonomy or ontological setting. This requires the exploration of a non-hierarchical, flat ontology based on the equality of all parties (human and nonhuman). I propose four backgrounds against which to investigate the desire of the medium: ethoscape (which deals with affect), ideoscape (which deals with concepts), mediascape (forms of expression) and technoscape (forms of content). The desire of the medium is located somewhere in the middle between affect, concept, expression and content. Show less
This dissertation shows that the subjective experience of surprise and curiosity depends on where people are in their process of making sense. Part 1 focusses on surprise. It shows that to study... Show moreThis dissertation shows that the subjective experience of surprise and curiosity depends on where people are in their process of making sense. Part 1 focusses on surprise. It shows that to study surprise it is key to take the temporal dynamics of sense-making into account and to distinguish surprise (i.e., the response to the unexpectedness of an event) from the state that follows it after sense-making (i.e., the response to the valence of the event). Part 2 focusses on curiosity. It shows that anticipation is a key factor for how it feels to be curious. The closer people are to the resolution, the more they anticipate discovering new information, the more negative feelings of deprivation are reduced. Moreover, the more people anticipate that they can deal with complex novel things, the more curious they will become. Taken together, the findings in this dissertation show that people first need to master a situation of "not knowing" before they can appreciate it. Show less