"In this PhD, the thesis/antithesis produces software art to induce social agency. In other words, the artist has produced a software program to be activated by whoever encounters the PhD on completing reading of the written submission: thus, within the context of the five written chapters, setting out the definitions, the history, technology and ideological and political basis for the thinking behind the program, the reader is invited to operate another anti-thesis program using Perl. The latter will provide an internal contradiction and set up a provocative dialectic which puts into question what the written text has apparently proposed. As this reveals, the proposed action on the part of the reader/activist is difficult to describe, however it is not difficult to execute. That is the point.

"The written part of the study is comprehensive, cogent and disciplined. It explores Marxist and Benjaminian ideas, alongside current theorists such as Friedrich Kittler, Kevin Kelly, Roy Bashkar, Inke Arns and Roy Ascott. It also presents a keen understanding of Chomski’s ideas about how language functions politically and socially. Overall, it conveys a clear understanding of how software as art can be proposed as something that can be both read, understood and executed to at least allow for the possibility of social change. It proposes its essential thesis within its own form by leaving the written component unfinished, that is without a full stop, so that it can express and induce a particular kind of labour and new knowledge when the reader activates the Perl program; the program will then induce a scrambling and a destabilising within what has been presented. Through the careful proposal of what software art is and how it might function and how an emergent history might be described in relation to a complex technology and technological development, this thesis proposes ideas about the complexity of labour within current culture and opens itself to becoming a software praxis;  through its formulated identity as artwork, action and coda it presents an inventive dynamic. This is complex indeed. However, its simple, lucidly described purpose is very carefully contextualised. It owes a very great deal to what Walter Benjamin calls “putting on display”, that is, not describing or reducing the thesis to a completed contextualisation, but actually presenting the PhD as a full, open and responsive art work. It becomes a kind of open source knowledge which entices the reader to become a new writer of programs. It is a without-end product. It is performative and proposed in the public realm, but also reflects its own structure and offers a critical site against the status quo of theory, which as Hannah Arendt posited, ‘cannot alone transform society’. This is a dramatic point to start our examples and it will be useful to say straight away that the author is a well-established artist/academic whose work has already been substantially published through exhibitions, conferences, books and curating. However, this is not the reason for this key choice. We propose it because it is aimed at a readership and a particular kind of social usefulness and contains within it, the distinctive tensions employed by many of the PhDs which we have studied."

Description of my PhD thesis by Katy McLeod, 'Writing and the PhD in Fine Art'.