PhD Oral Exam - Anoush Moazzeni, Individualized Studies in Fine Arts

When studying for a doctoral degree (PhD), candidates submit a thesis that provides a critical review of the current state of knowledge of the thesis subject as well as the student’s own contributions to the subject. The distinguishing criterion of doctoral graduate research is a significant and original contribution to knowledge.

Once accepted, the candidate presents the thesis orally. This oral exam is open to the public.

Abstract

This research-creation navigates the terrain of ethico-aesthetic inquiry as a philosophical excavation, proposing a procedural account of art as an unfolding force—an ongoing negotiation with the thresholds of perception, thought, and experience—and of composition as the generative shaping of conditions for emergence rather than the arrangement of forms.

Traversing various creative practices that move with concepts such as vortexing, crawling, vegetal life, stammering, ficta, giftfullness, and secrecy, this project reveals acts of creation—compositional processes—as modes of thought in motion: appetitive, affectively driven, and generative of ecologies of experience that elude the conventional bounds of the conceptual and the aesthetic.

By unsettling the presumed absolutes of time, essence, matter, truth, value, justice, and reason, this work foregrounds the processual, relational, and contingent ontogenesis of composition, creation, and thought—art as thought-in-act: an immanent, affective operation through which form and idea co-emerge in the unfolding of the event. Artful acts function as morphogenetic processes that displace perceptual thresholds and ossified structures, activating relational fields for novel modalities of sensation, and ethical attunement within an ecology of ongoing transformation.

Drawing on the lexicon of process philosophy, this project thinks through movement as a generative vector within milieus of individuation, subjectivity, reality, and experience, unsettling entrenched preconceptions and opening pathways for the emergence of new sensibilities within a field of continuous becoming. The oscillation between form and formlessness, continuity and discontinuity, solidity and liquidity, opens onto abolitionist paraontology and radical epistemology wherein uncertainty is embraced as a condition of thought and making becomes a temporally entangled process of abstraction-in-act.

This work illuminates art’s capacity to carve out a procedural, ethico-aesthetic space through living sympathetic and luring composition, where continual reinvention unfolds through thresholds, fissures, and edges: sites where tension, rupture, and friction catalyze machinic transformations. It traces how such practices cultivate a sensibility attuned to chaosmos process, where meaning remains in a perpetual assignification, an ongoing re-signifying through the modulation of intensities and relational thresholds. Art, as an artful practice, moves beyond its conventional boundaries, stepping away from traditional definitions and forging its own path as an uncontained, transversal, machinic act of composition and generation of novelty.