Material Fictions: Moving (Between) Images of Contemporary Art

7 Abstract This master's thesis engages moving images of contemporary art in order to sketch out certain ontological qualities of the digital image and imaginary, as they increasingly spill out of all fixed frames and fill the spaces between screens, contexts, and human and non-human agents. Following Steven Shaviro's observation that digital media brought about a completely "new regime" of mutable technical imaging often independent of any preceding "real" space, but instead able to produce its own space-time, this text treats moving images as performative world-shaping fictions with tangible traction on reality. Instead of understanding their growing proliferation in terms of the often-mourned disappeared correspondence to some previous reality, depth or truth, it suggests taking their fluidity as an opportunity to rethink the very divide placed between reality and fiction, as it continues to blur throughout our interactions with digital media, and to treat images not as mere representations but as material forces intensively active in the physical matter of the world, as well as in our own cognition. To articulate this irreducible materiality of digital image-fictions, the thesis weaves together on one hand respective philosophical concepts of François Laruelle and Gillese Deleuze and Félix Guattari -..