Scholars have argued that we are currently seeing new tendencies in the social that are effects of the expansion and intensification of information, biological, digital, and nanotechnologies in advanced capitalist societies. In response to this expansion, scholars claim the increasing importance of affect and affectivity, the tendency toward the "mattering" of information, the new role of complicity in societies of control, and that attention is being given to non-organic life such that the stark opposition between it and organic life are modulated and we are pressured to redefine life and the human. Further, these tendencies require new understandings of ethics, politics and subjectivities.

Taken together, these changes are illustrated and exemplified in new media and contemporary art, specifically in the work of Tana Hargest, Daniela Rossell, and Natalie Jeremijenko. In taking up these artworks as cultural objects, I suggest that as material aspects of the social world, the art objects themselves exist as changes in sociality as well as exemplifying broader social change. In the field of cultural studies, there has been an increasing interest in using the work of Gilles Deleuze to theorize social relations, and to draw on his writings as a way to use aesthetics to address the relations of art and sociality. Following Deleuze and writings by scholars of his work, this dissertation frames the new ethics, politics and subjectivities that are exemplified in the artwork as "ethico-politics" and "new formations of subjectivity."