Evaluation of the master’s thesis: From live to interactive electronics by Artemi – Maria Gioti, written in 2015.
Level of Design
The thesis was handed in at the University of Arts in Graz, which, like most universities, has a rather specific and strict style that theses need to adhere to. In the case of the University of Arts in Graz, this means an estimated font size of 11 and double line spacing on a white A4 sheets. The whole thesis is (even in its PDF-version) in black and white without a single spot of color to be found.
This of course makes it rather difficult to evaluate the design of this thesis – knowing that there was basically no design of choice involved. However, I still find this very minimal and “scientific” style to be rather pleasant, as long as the work sticks to a standard scientific structure, too.
Degree of Innovation
The thesis topic seems very innovative – live performance in symbiosis with software agents is a topic that strives to explore new ground on various levels: The technical background. the musical aspects, as well as the whole artistic perspective of performative arts.
Independence
I do not feel like I am in a position to evaluate the independence of this thesis. However, since the topic seems to stem from very individual interests, I am confident that the thesis was conducted with at least sufficient independence.
Outline and Structure
While the outline seems generally logical to me, I was heavily missing an introduction. The first part of the thesis is structured into background and terminology of the topic, which is an interesting and refreshing approach considering the field of performative arts. The second part talks about Gioti’s work, the system that she performed live with. While this becomes clear when reading, I still would have preferred to get to know about the approach to the structure within an introductory chapter. It also counts to say that the thesis is very short, with 26 pages in total. If it was longer, the outline might have been even more confusing and would have definitely needed structural guidance.
Degree of Communication
The author communicates very professionally in English, with complex enough sentences, that are still not too difficult to read. However, I feel like there is too much of an avoidance of writing first person statements and in turn too much passive voice, which are leading to some confusion about subjects in some sentences in my opinion.
Scope of the Work
While the topic seems very interesting, the thesis clearly turned out rather short. The theoretical first part is very general and also on point, and while there does not seem to be missing anything substantial, it also does not seem very specific – which is something I would usually expect from a master’s thesis.
The second part is well written and crisp, but extensive enough. This makes the first part slightly seem like a mandatory small effort contribution to the thesis to become complete.
Orthography and Accuracy
The thesis looks clean and well written. I did not come across any spelling mistakes or typos, however, there is a wrong page number stated in the table of contents.
Literature
For the small amount of pages, there seems to be an okay amount of references. Unfortunately a lot of the references are very old. I would estimate almost half were published more than 15 years before this thesis was written.
Gioti, A. From live to interactive electronics. Masterarbeit, 2015.
