THESIS: Grounding the work

The more I get confused about how to tackle my PhD thesis, the more I search and read and get nowhere. Finally, I began reading Dr. Andruid Kerne's thesis which is everything but a classic academic work centered in "objective academia". Kerne convinced me as he has done before that objectivity in academia does not exist. It's the tomb of creativity and the redundancy of knowledge. Knowledge itself is a subjective interpretation of discovered academic pathways. It is transient and transcendent from disciplines and between them, and hence grounding knowledge discovery in segregated disciplines could slay the formation of encompassing views or new theories. Hence, the question remains: how to ground my PhD work in scientific foundations? My advisor Dr. Josep Blat keeps asking me this question repeatedly.

When I started to read Lev Manovich's book The Language of New Media (i will talk about the book later on), I realized that my work should be founded in New Media. Since my early interests in information visualization, Ambient Displays, Calm technology, Ubiquitous Computing, Human Computer Interaction, and Interface Design, I was searching for a domain that encompasses all of these disciplines, but finally I became convinced of the trans-aspect of working with all of them. In other words, New media calls for the free democratic subjective aggregation or reformulation of knowledge units in a transient fashion that cross boundaries of subjects and disciplines to the greater sphere of knowledge creation.

In their book Creative Cognition, Ronald A. Finke, Thomas B. Ward and Steven M. Smith introduced the Geneplore model of creative generation based upon a composite process essentially formulated by a generative step of pre-inventive information structures, followed by an exploratory step where these structures are interpreted, associated, and recombined. Such a cognitive model of creativity could as well apply to my definition of New Media, as well as to the formulation of new knowledge in the context of a PhD. I will try to study the generation of pre-inventive information structures for New Media and provide the environment and tools for exploring and manipulating them. By closing this process or by feeding recombined knowledge back into pre-inventive structures, I hope to create a flux of information and knowledge that fulfills the visions of a new interactive and trans-active medium, a new democratic Media where the people do not only participate in the preconception of knowledge, but rather where such process totally rests on their participation.

My own PhD work will be put to use in demonstrating the validity of such approach by using it in the formulation of my own Thesis. The environment that I will create, (The expression wall) will be the test bed for the theory that I plan to develop. I long to theorize on the catalysis of the creative process that generates the loop encompassing knowledge discovery, ingestion, digestion, and augmentation. I will also study these activities and formally define them as active components in a new bread of popular media.