This practice-led PhD thesis proposes a reconceptualisation of painting after the internet that departs with post-medium and post-internet discourses. As this thesis will show, such discourses function by identifying painting with an ultimate ontological reference point that serves to justify painting’s ongoing survival. Defined within these paradigms, the sensual-material nature of practice is either disregarded as an inessential attribute in favour of the concept, or otherwise generalised into an event of possibility in the virtual realm, and hence art has no place for itself.

Critically, this thesis turns towards Barad, Golding and Stengers for an alternative approach, able to re-articulate the present as the local interference of continua or radical matter which is no longer reducible to an ultimate. This is emphasised within the thesis by the move from “network painting” as an aesthetic category to networked materialities: that is, instead of theorising practices as variably related identities, reality is a matter of mutually constituting entities. Thus, this thesis encourages one not to think the ultimate but to think painting in terms of the specific finite forms of its organisation, which are radically material.

Attending to the developments of my own practice helps make apparent the material conditions of practice-led research outside of representationalism, shifting the focus to how artworks and arguments cohere, emerging as material- discursive phenomena. Importantly, humour is re-conceptualised as giddiness, a vector of sensuous experimentation, which pertains to a practice’s ongoing and problematic nature and helps to reframe assumptions concerning the anxiety of the artist in an increasingly connected world. Hence, this research offers a new paradigm for thinking and making contemporary painting that simultaneously accounts for the impact of new technologies, whilst situating painting as central to art practice.