Main menu
Staff & students

Dr Mattia Paganelli

Staff details

Position

Lecturer Computational Arts

Department

Computing

Email

m.paganelli (@gold.ac.uk)

Lecturer and researcher in non-linearity, philosophy, and contemporary art

I work at the intersection of contemporary philosophy, non-linear sciences and art.
Drawing on computational complexity, statistical mechanics and algorithmic information theory, my research explores how emergent properties and the dissipative coherence of autonomous systems (metastability) define new epistemological and aesthetic dimensions that constitute the sensual and poetic materiality of contemporary art practices.
My aim is to articulate the challenge this peculiar materiality of information, correlations and distributions brings to the linear understanding of aesthetics, and to develop conceptual tools that can enable both the artist and the thinker to operate beyond the metaphysical split of material-immaterial that still occludes ontological progress and artistic imagination.
The goal is to recast aesthetics not as the expression of ontology, but as the encounter with or the event of an ecology (logic of sense).

Academic qualifications

  • PhD, Philosophy and Contemporary Art, Birmingham School of Art, 2016 (AHRC Funded) 2016

Teaching and supervision

I would be interested in supervising research on the following subjects:

• incomputability / complexity / non-linearity / emergence / metastability / individuation
• irreducibility / asymmetry / finitude / possibility / materiality
• medium / poetics / sensuality / n-dimensional and ana-dimensional media
• post-ontological aesthetics / epistemology / ecologies / logic of sense / topology
• contingency / recursivity / information / entropy / noise / contingency of necessity
• intensity / diffraction / distribution / multiplicities / circulations / economies
• practice-based research / ana-methodology / encounter / event / collective learning

  • Module Leader: MA - Computational Arts-Based Research and Theory
  • Module Leader: MFA - Computational Arts Critical Studies

Research interests

My research looks at the statistical and informational reinterpretation of thermodynamics developed in complexity theory (Prigogine, Stengers, Turing, Chaitin, Cavia) asking how this can open radical new paths for thinking individuation, emergence, and agency as the entropic asymmetry of dissipative structures. The hypothesis is that this introduces a move where the notion of meta-stable equilibrium erases all distance between ‘natural’ and machinic (artificial) and replaces their a priori or virtual explanations for regimes where recursivity produces contingent and yet irreducible forms of autonomous organisation (necessity).

Publications and research outputs

Article

Book Section

Edited Book

Edited Journal