Nomadic Encounters with Art and Art Educatio

This dissertation is both a philosophical inquiry and series of case studies that explore how artists' practices navigate and negotiate the forces and intensities of chaos and the structuring order of the world to create the conditions for the emergence of something new in the artmaking process. The philosophical inquiry is rooted in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's concepts related to the encounter, both as a radical perspective on the emergence of thought, and as a concept to be put to work to create a new terrains of thinking through artmaking.;As a case study, this dissertation examines the artist practices of Tehching Hsieh and Nina Katchadourian, as well as a self-reflective inquiry on my own practice as an art student several years ago. These practices are approached as art-based counterparts through two philosophical paths. Deleuze's early writing conceptualizes a first power of thought as a pre-subjective emergence through the encounter. In his later writing with Guattari, Deleuze turns to the encounter as generative nomadic process which emerges as a productive, paradoxical engagement of territorializing and deterritorializing assemblages that gives rise to new expanses of thinking through which creation and learning takes form as artmaking.;The philosophical inquiry takes form through the various conceptual entwinements of the nomadic encounter in analyzing the artist practices in the case studies, which in turn raises questions surrounding how art educators might consider the implications of these processes in creating a milieu through which new mindsets might emerge for teachers and students to experiment with these concepts through artmaking.;The primary thesis of this study is that artists and teachers are constantly struggling to create new terrains of thinking through artmaking in the face of the various systems and structures that reinforce a dogmatic image of thought and constrains the movements and flows of creative transformation. As such, this study looks toward a new nomadic milieu of art education, through which the subjectivity of teachers and students are co-constituted through an experimentation through the lived experience of artmaking---one that reconfigures a teaching and learning environment that is always on the lookout to disrupt our habits of thought, and avoiding adherence to predetermined outcomes in artmaking.