Abstract :
[en] Art-forms, which use digital technologies for production and design and which reflect these technologies critically, are becoming increasingly popular. Caused by technological development, art production and design has changed considerably during the last years. Nowadays digital artworks are generated multimodally and integrate the visitor and the environment as represented and interactive participants into their work. In order to explore the meaning making potential of these artworks, I develop a systemic functional framework of analysis. This framework combines a sociological and a formal approach and offers an alternative perspective to enrich our knowledge and perception when engaging with art. It enables researchers to relate art and culture with communicative events and to analyse the interaction and exchange going on between artist, artwork, visitor and environment by describing semiotic resources that are used to generate digital artworks. The developed framework is a multimodal approach, based on semiotics and functional theory, which applies a sociological concept and functional categories to the analysis of multimodal texts. This multimodal approach enables researchers to explain how different semiotic systems or modes (language, image, sound, body language, facial expression and three-dimensional spaces, etc.) are related to each other in different genres such as every day language, scientific texts and art to realise meanings. Hitherto multimodal analysis has basically focused on the combination and relation of only two modes in a text (i.e. language and image). By analysing artworks that are generated of verbal, visual and acoustic modes of communication as well as physical objects in three-dimensional space the multimodal approach is extended in this thesis. Thus this work will contribute to multimodal research and art and media theory. With this framework of analysis major principles of design in digital art, that have become significant within the last years, can be explained. Principles that are addressed in this thesis are: transformation, modification and translation from one mode into another, virtual environments and telepresence, creating new visitor perspectives and interactive concepts as well as cohesion in digital art.
