Jono jonobr1

The artist, theorist, and educator, Wassily Kandinsky, is lauded by the art world for being the “principal progenitor” of abstract painting. This notoriety is due to his ability to paint and to write about the artistic process. In his writings, Kandinsky unabashedly draws inspiration from other forms of art. This ability to define art which was previously unknown, to look to other art forms, and to focus on the artistic process resembles the practices of artists working in the field of new media, a technology-fused genre of art. In order to discover how new media artists build on top of Kandinsky’s theories, this thesis establishes a novel classification of the painter’s theories, known as his ‘science of art’. This rubric extracts three essential components from critical discourse of the painter’s theories: surface, precision, and dissonance. It is then applied to Kandinsky’s own oil painting, Composition 8 (1923), and three works of new media: the software-generated book Frankenfont (2011) by Fathom Inf