UNIVERSIDAD POLITƒCNICA DE VALENCIA
SCULPTURE DEPARTMENT
DOCTORAL THESIS PROPOSAL

TITLE: AFTER THE GOLD RUSH (Influence, dissipative structure and event horizon in the conception of the artistic object as an allegorical device)
PhD CANDIDATE: JosŽ Maldonado G—mez.
DIRECTOR: Trinidad Gracia Bensa.

Keywords: Art, allegory, angst, allegorical strategies, dissipative structure, event horizon, influence, art object, radiation, theme, transaesthetics, transistor, transmedia. 

        Current artistic practices are the result of a combination of events which have developed with increasing intensity over the last six centuries. 
        We cannot consider artistic practice unless we do so in the light, or shade Ðas it is an optical-geometrical matter of a thermal natureÐ of events that have marked the semiological and semiotic direction of all the processes at work to constitute artistic languages past, present and under construction.
        The inter(de)composition of the languages of different disciplines or fields of the aesthetic, and of science in general, has brought with it contaminations, hybridizations, mutations, critical alterations, and a long list of processes and interactions within the systems of objects, society, the media, and even within political systems and discourse, transhuman relations (now verging on posthuman ones) and power, that is, within the usage and customs of language designated, taught and learnt by us.
        We are now facing new channels and vehicles for artistic expression which demand a fresh view of the workings of aesthetic discourse above and beyond its far-reaching and epochal potential. A survey about how we think and what it is we use to think through. 
        Thinking(through) in aesthetics is a conscious exercise requiring complex, creative, transmedial and transdisciplinary strategies.
        It is more fitting today to speak in terms of a transaesthetic theory or of a transpoetics of objects (now transobjects and transevents) in relation to the inevitable phenomena of transmission, transposition, transliteration, transcontamination and transparency surrounding us. 
        For this reason one must regard the activity of the so-called artist today as that of a transistor.
        It is only possible to carry out research into subject and influence, as central elements of ethical and aesthetical activity, by means of a detailed analysis of the transistorÕs formulas and expressions, of his or her work methods and approaches, of the routes and the interconnections set in motion as a way of gauging the depth or superficiality of things, of the processes constituting language, its modes, and its potential channels of insertion, transmission, transcodification, transmedialization and public and personal and transmigration. Accordingly, concepts such as angst and anxiety, dissipative structure and event horizon become the cornerstone of strategic processes of allegoresis in constituting the aesthetic object through time and culture.
        The aim of this doctoral thesis is to research the fundaments of the aforesaid strategies, practices and processes.