Allopoietics in Real Time: Unfolding Among Art, Publics, Space, and Time

Abstract

This thesis proposes a conceptual lens for understanding contemporary generative arts by introducing the terms Allopoietics and Liquid Media. Building on generative and participatory art, it focuses on the real-time processes among artworks, publics, spaces, and time through which meaning dynamically emerges. Drawing on the author’s artistic works—Conjunktion, Looking at the Sun, and Public Eyes—as well as critical engagement with hermeneutics, process philosophy, and media theory, this thesis explores how agency is distributed across these processes, offering a means to reconsider all elements as equally generative. Allopoietics, derived from cybernetics, describes the generative capacity of systems to produce outcomes beyond the sum of their actants, emphasizing collective unfolding over isolated creation. Liquid Media expands the notion of interfacing beyond traditional media to include publics, space, and time, conceptualizing these as mutable and entangled actants. These concepts outline an Aesthetics of Real Time that evaluates the dynamic relations among increasingly immediate systems. By proposing these new terms, the thesis invites a shift in perspective from object to process: viewing artworks not as stable materializations but as parts of real-time systems of collective meaning-making. While emerging from an artistic practice, this conceptual framework resonates with insights from contemporary sociology and cultural studies, where notions of fluidity, distributed agency, and relationality increasingly shape our understanding of complex systems and realities.