Exploring vital aesthetics through feminine principles in biodigital art

Abstract

In an era shaped by artificial intelligence, biotechnology, and intensifying ecological crises, this thesis investigates how contemporary artistic practice can reawaken ethical imagination. Centred on BioDigital art at the intersection of biological and high-technology systems, it examines how hybrid artistic forms unsettle inherited distinctions between human and nonhuman, natural and artificial, and creator and creation. Rather than resolving these entanglements, the study approaches them as fertile sites for ethical sensitivity and relational awareness. Drawing on John Ruskin’s concept of Vital Aesthetics and the feminine principle, the thesis reframes BioDigital art as an ethical-aesthetic practice grounded in attentiveness, care, and embodied responsiveness. The feminine principle is framed not as gendered identity, but as archetypal receptivity, vulnerability, and sensuous responsibility through which ethics are felt and cultivated. A lifecycle framework places BioDigital analysis in dialogue with the practice-led investigation titled The Chrysalis Code: Unfolding the BioDigital Feminine. This creative work translates ethical conditions into material and experiential processes through BioDigital image-making, projection, and exhibition design. Grounded in embodied ways of sensing the natural world, the practice is situated within reworked South African landscapes embedded in the visual language of Western art history. Rather than seeking ethical resolution, it engages ethical questions through sensuous encounter, temporal unfolding, and environmental responsiveness. The thesis advances a sensuous framework for BioDigital art practice in which aesthetics serve as an ethical orientation, articulating an alternative vision of coexistence grounded in empathy, vulnerability, and relational attunement at the edges of the vital.