This thesis discusses Åsne Seierstad’s international literary bestseller The Bookseller of Kabul (2002) and the controversy it created between the Norwegian author and the Afghan family presented in the book. Rather than asking what a book is, this research asks what a book does. It investigates the mechanisms through which a book like The Bookseller of Kabul can produce consequences in the contemporary world. In order to approach these productive abilities of books, the thesis develops an extended notion of the book as a relational and processual set of entities. Consequently, the thesis calls for research, which would take into account the complex relations between what we read and how we are able to read it. Methodologically, the emphasis is on material culture, the social life of the book and the actor-networks the book created as a global commodity. The thesis investigates how different actors and materialities collectively created the book and its consequences. Consequently, it discusses the relations a contemporary literary object needs and builds to other forms of media, to different materialities, to readers and to discourses in order to generate power effects. Because books are highly diffusible objects and enjoy a freedom and a status unthinkable for many other commodities, interventions against a literary bestseller are difficult if not impossible to carry forward. As a consequence, a book like The Bookseller of Kabul can play an unacknowledged role at the times when Western countries are involved in a war in Afghanistan.

This thesis is an enquiry into the importance and influence of interaction in architecture, the importance of which is observed through different modes of interaction occurring in various aspects of architectural discourse and practice. Interaction is primarily observed through the different use of software within architectural practice and in the construction of buildings, façades and systems. In turn, the kind of influences software has on architecture is one of the underlying questions of this thesis. Four qualities: Concept, Materiality, Digitization and Interactivity, are proposed as a theoretical base for the analysis and assessment of different aspects of computational architecture. These four qualities permeate and connect the diverse areas of research discussed, including architecture, cybernetics, computer science, interaction design and new media studies, which in combination provide the theoretical background. The modalities of computational architecture analysed here are, digital interior spaces, digitized design processes and communicational exterior environments. The analysis is conducted through case studies: The Fun Palace, Generator Project, Water Pavilion, Tower of Winds, Institute du Monde Arabe, The KPN building, Aegis Hyposurface, BIX Façade, Galleria Department Store, Dexia Tower, and also E:cue, Microstation, Auto-Cad, Rhino, Top Solid and GenerativeComponents software. These are important for discussion because they present different architectural concepts and thoughts about interactivity within architecture. The analytical processes used in the research distinguished and refined, eight modes of interaction: (1) interaction as a participatory process; (2) cybernetic mutualism; (3) thematic interaction; (4) human-computer interaction during architectural design production; (5) interaction during digital fabrication; (6) parametric interaction; (7) kinetic interaction with dynamic architectural forms; and (8) interaction with façades. Out of these, cybernetic mutualism is the mode of interaction proposed by this thesis.

In this thesis the author argues that although questions of the spectator’s corporeal engagement with film are much neglected by film theory, the body is nevertheless a central term within contemporary cinema, in its mode of address, as a locus of anxiety in media effects debate, and as site of disciplinary practices. And while the thesis begins by demonstrating both the socially and historically constructed nature of spectatorship, and the specific practices that work to create contemporary cinema’s corporeal address, the latter half of the dissertation devotes itself to revealing the regulatory implications of this physical address. That is, the author shows that cinema’s perceived capacity of affect the body of the spectator is a profound source of cultural anxiety. But more importantly, through an analysis of the films Funny Games, Irréversible, Wolf Creek, and the genre of ‘torture porn’ more generally, what is revealed in these final chapters is that the regulation of cinema in the contemporary era is less a question of the institutionalised censorship of texts, and more a question of regulating the ‘self’. In this respect, the author demonstrates the specific disciplinary practices that attempt to present the problem of violent, and sexually violent, imagery not as a textual issue per se, but a question of the formation of appropriate spectatorial relations. Moreover, this study begins the process of teasing out the ways in which the contemporary spectator is induced to see the problem of media violence as one that can be resolved through what Foucault would term, techniques of the self.

This thesis centres on the P2P internet protocol BitTorrent, music filesharing, and nascent forms of collective action developing through private BitTorrent communities. The focus is on one of these communities, a music filesharing website called ‘OiNK’. Founded in 2005, it was the first of its kind to garner membership in the hundreds of thousands, was emblematic of user-led movements to improve the quality, efficiency and availability of digital media online, and was very publically shut down in 2007. Making critical use of Simondon’s notion of ‘individuation’, two interrelated techno-historical impulses are identified as central to the ‘in-formation’ of both BitTorrent and OiNK. Firstly, through research into the development of the global music industry’s ‘productive circuit’ of manufacturing, distribution, retail and radio, it is shown how consumers were gradually excluded from having a say in how, what and where they could consume. Secondly, a history of ‘OiNK-style’ filesharing is gleaned, not from P2P, but from research into small, decentralised ‘online’ communities that emerged throughout the 1980’s and 1990’s, where enthusiasts learned how to use software and hardware to manage the storage, reproduction, uploading and sharing of information. This thesis shows how BitTorrent exposed these previously exclusive practices to masses of consumers who were dissatisfied with both retail/broadcasting and public P2P, through the new possibility of private BitTorrent communities. Through a case study of OiNK, encompassing in-depth interviews with ex-members, screenshots and technical analysis, this thesis shows how OiNK gathered a large and diverse online cache of ‘archival grade’ recorded music, bringing old and deleted music back into circulation and amassing a core of fanatically committed members. It accounts for a nascent form of online community, where large member-bases manage every aspect of the reproduction and circulation of digital artefacts, and at higher levels of quality/efficiency than legal alternatives.

This study understands communication as parasitic and symbiogenetic. It recognizes an object or technology no less and no more important than a subject, and appreciates the “process” of the “becoming” of both a subject and an object. Media and individuals create and recreate each other. In the symbiogenetic space in-between, what happens is not a physical addition of a technological object to an individual, but, rather, it is a chemical fusion of the two, which holds unprecedented, distinctive qualities that have not been seen from any of the two constituents. Among various communication media, this study examines why and how the mobile phone is particularly parasitic and symbiogenetic.

The starting point for this thesis is the juxtaposition of two works of art from the 1960s: Study for ‘Skin’ I, a print-drawing from 1962 by Jasper Johns, and the photograph Self-Portrait as a Fountain from 1966 by Bruce Nauman. Viewing these works in conjunction with Palaeolithic hand stencils, the marking of threshold events emerges as a theme. Resonant material is then assembled and studied: Surrealist texts and photography, or the use of photography, by André Breton, Claude Cahun and Man Ray; the medical theses of psychiatrists François Tosquelles and Jean Oury; and works on prehistoric art by Georges Bataille and André Leroi-Gourhan. The marking of threshold events at two nesting scales of analysis – the evolutionary emergence of the human species; and the psychotic onset of hallucination and delusion – is examined. Echoes are found to resound in a third register– in the neurological events that give rise to consciousness and dream experience. Consideration of the Johns drawing and Nauman photograph in these terms is proposed.

This thesis is a study of scientific practice in computational physics. It is based on an 18 month period of ethnographic research at the Imperial College Applied Modelling and Computation Group. Using a theoretical framework drawn from practice theory, science studies, and historical epistemology, I study how simulations are developed and used in science. Emphasising modelling as a process, I explore how software provides a distinctive kind of material for doing science on computers and how images and writings of various kinds are folded into the research process. Through concrete examples the thesis charts how projects are devised and evolve and how they draw together materials and technologies into semi-stable configurations that crystallise around the objects of their concern, what Hans-Jorg Rheinberger dubbed “epistemic things”. The main pivot of the research, however, is the connection of practice-theoretical science studies with the philosophy of Gaston Bachelard, whose concept of “phenomenotechnique” facilitates a rationalist reading of scientific practice. Rather than treating reason as a singular logic or method, or as a faculty of the mind, Bachelard points us towards processes of change within actual scientific research, a dynamic reason immanent to processes of skilled engagement. Combining this study of reason with the more recent attention to things within research from materialist and semiotic traditions, I also revive a new sense for the term “representation”, tracing the multiple relationships and shifting identities and differences that are involved in representing. I thus develop a theory of simulation that implies a non-representationalist concept of representing and a non-teleological concept of reason.

Looking through the lens of iconic singers Ian Curtis of Joy Division and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, Joy Devotion examines how social interest groups feed the canon of the martyred crooner, creating a postmortem posse of mythologized figures from the threads of actuality. The specters of Curtis and Cobain grow, mutate and are re-invented with each YouTube view, each video link passed and pasted, each blog written and commented upon in what amounts to a global community connected by the invisible tethers of the world wide web. The ease and speed of communication via the Internet's social networking sites allows for the continued evolution of the myths that surround the singers, granting them qualities in death they never possessed in life. The reality of what these cult heroes accomplished seems to be washed away in a tsunami of branding, consumer goods and annual tributes. This marketed, copyrighted, corporatized version of memory is sold back to consumers just as the 'real' underpins Factory Records chief Tony Wilson famously saying, 'Fiction is better than fact'. This ‘fiction’ has bloomed, blossomed and continued to play a role on the pop and cultural landscape thirty years after the singers physical demise. Joy Devotion explores the mediated nostalgia created in the wake of their passing and the cultural materialism key to the propulsion of global faux shared memory. Utilizing the framework of Siegfried Kracauer’s essays “The Mass Ornament” and “Photography,” Joy Devotion analyzes this fabricated past, specifically disassembling the assumed perception created by widely available images. Kracauer uses the Mancunian dance troupe the Tiller Girls to illustrate the process of blurring, and often erasing, individuality and criticality in the haze of mediated consumption and meaning. Within this context, Joy Devotion illustrates how such production, procreation and currency of icon has historical foundations across a diverse array of fundamental belief systems, including even the most sacred texts. By dissecting the means by which the stories of saints are recorded through hagiography, parallels between the evolution of religious myths dovetail closely with the symbolization applied to specific cult figures, thus allowing Curtis and Cobain to act as hallowed archetypes in the ever-increasingly secular world. Worship of the singers comes by bowing to the grinding wheels of capitalism, purchasing items featuring their youthful countenances and band logos or by taking sonic pilgrimages to areas associated with the artists, either in real time or as an on-line voyeur. Each journey, whether perpetuated by the click of a mouse on a computer or through retracing of footsteps taken by an idol, transform these places to a sacred space, mecca for fans, believers, in a world dependent on the world wide web. To further investigate the behavior at such sites of worship, this work includes a practical aspect. For one year, pictures were taken on the same day on a monthly basis at the Ian Curtis Memorial Stone. The trinkets, tributes and trash on the Stone is in constant flux, reflecting the ever-migrating myth of the vocalist himself- a harsh and glaring contrast to the finality of death. Joy Devotion captures for the first time a year in the life of the rock shrine- existing almost as a destination unto itself. With each visitor, identity, ‘memory’, meaning and the legacy of Curtis and Joy Division changes and flows- similar to the seasons rotating, and the movement in the landscape of the cemetery itself. Similarly, a visit to Seattle coinciding with the 17th anniversary of the Kurt Cobain’s death illustrates an ever-growing disparity between the rupture of perceived importance as perpetuated in the 2.0 world, and real-time activities occurring in physical space.

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This doctoral dissertation deals with the somewhat neglected relationship between mathematics and theatre. Specifically, the focus of this study is the penetration of modern mathematical thinking into European avant-garde theatre during the late 19th and early 20th century, particularly as regards the revolutionary experiments on scenic space and dramatic logic that occurred at the time. I will argue that modern European theatre underwent a period of crisis, whereby a number of avant-garde practitioners renounced the axioms of traditional theatre, particularly in relationship to the rule of mimesis, representation, and verbal speech. Theatres of the Surd argues for a penetration of symbolic languages in the wake of a decline of word-based textuality in the theatre, combined with a cultural shift toward more abstract, technologically mediated and autonomous forms of theatrical practice. This work focuses on three seminal theatre practitioners of the late 19th and early 20th century avant-garde; namely, Alfred Jarry, Stanislaw Witkiewicz and Samuel Beckett, and the impact of non-Euclidean geometry and modern mathematical logic in their work. I will claim that the mathematisation of cultural practices in the late modern era marked a crucial watershed that played an important role in the transformation of the axiomatics of theatrical practice, and the emergence of a truly modern, post-Aristotelian and post-representational form of theatrical praxis. Thus, mathematics may be said to function within the ambit of cultural dynamics, insofar as its penetration into culture discourse and practice has helped modernise the way theatre is conceptualised and visualised.