The emergence of a 3D object aesthetics in computer media

I identify the archaeological object of my study as the value-based and critically-determined art polemics surrounding 3D objects from the 1960's onwards. I begin with the premise that the art aesthetics of 3D graphical forms is largely the academic enterprise of critics, curators, art historians and other academics vested in the production of evaluative and theoretical knowledges of graphical figures. I view aesthetic criticism as the description, persuasive interpretation and judgement of creative work in terms of its form and content. The critic uses value-laden evaluators to articulate assumptions about the art work, and therefore expresses implicitly an aesthetical, theoretical and/or ethical agenda. Aesthetic theories and approaches do not combine into a single, cohesive theory of criticism, but exhibit a plurality of knowledges and practices that reflect the culture-specific contexts of meanings and values.;My dissertation contrasts the focus on the form of the autonomous material object as defined by its medium with more conceptual ideas that challenge the limitations of such a focus. Minimalism particularly confronts formalist restrictions on the critical aesthetics of art objects, allowing for more conceptual and valuative discussions of interactive 3D avatars. My dissertation engages in the rewriting of art critical knowledge and evaluative criteria surrounding the 3D object.;The central debate in art aesthetics in the 1960's and 1970's revolves around formalist and minimalist debates over the autonomy of the art object and its "normative" condition of "flatness" or abstraction as opposed to the arbitrary, everyday "object" that may hold conceptual, perceptual, utilitarian or instructional information. A paradox exists within formalism that is in part the legacy of Kantian aesthetics: the aesthetic judgement of what is "beauty," or what is "art" is dictated and ascribable only to the form of the work. Therefore, the self-critical tendency that Clement Greenberg calls "modernism" values form for the sake of form: its experience of art objects is merely phenomenal and logical.;Minimalist work departs from the prescriptive two-dimensionality of abstract expressionism by adding the 3D element.;The simulationist aesthetics of 3D objects are where form meets content in concrete cultural practices that include the design and use of interactive media. Both ideas and their effects are superficial in simulationist new media that express seriality and reproduction: The "depth" of meaning is realized on the surface in the domain of visual, auditory and tactile representations. Regarding these aesthetics, I select four threads of thought to sum up my presentation of ideas: They are (1) the modulation of topological surfaces in 3D media, (2) the object-concept and the conceptual uses of the constructivist computer interface, (3) the evolution of the intelligent 3D avatar, and (4) the cinematic, topological space of informatics and knowledge in computer media. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...