The Discrete Imaginary: Thierry Kuntzel's Video Installation Art

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. June 2016. Major: French. Advisors: John Mowitt, Christophe Wall-Romana. 1 computer file (PDF); v, 199 pages.In this dissertation, my goal is to analyze the reflexive function of video aesthetics. I focus on the staging of the video medium, its mode of display, distribution, and the proliferation of its usage in daily life to reveal the implications of analogico-digital images in shaping both psychic and collective life. In particular, I analyze how video is embedded in specific operations—from the pixelisation of the image to its algorithmically produced materiality. These operations, I argue, have come to be fundamental to thinking about how media grammaticalize our sensitive milieu. The manuscripts focuses on French theorist and video artist Thierry Kuntzel