Meet Sydney Carmer

Undergraduate Honors Thesis

My Honors Thesis for the Arts + Architecture Honors Program at UNC Charlotte was entitled Histories of New Media: The Contemporary Discourse of Digital Arts. As part of the research project, I created a syllabus for a new media art history seminar and studio hybrid course at the undergraduate university level. This included five units complete with readings, key artists/artwork, and accompanying studio assignments. The emerging field of "new media" or "digital arts" has become a pressing topic for artists and art historians alike in recent years, but this discourse-the statements surrounding digital art practice and the artifacts that result-is anything but novel. I chose to explore the intimate relationship between art and science by analyzing the history of new media and revealing an ongoing transformation of its related discourse rather than reducing it to a simple rivalry or novelty. This research was also presented and awarded at the 2024 Undergraduate Research Conference at UNC Charlotte. Read my full thesis here.