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The thesis, titled ‘The Sensorial Invisibility of Plants: An Interdisciplinary Inquiry through Bio Art and Plant Neurobiology’, is an interdisciplinary art practice-related research that focuses on the complexities in recognising plant behaviour. It explores the contradistinction between scientific studies that reveal cognitive capacities in plants and our subjective perceptions where plants appear motionless and devoid of sensation. The difficulties inherent in perceiving plants’ interactions with their environment are concerned with physiological processes in plants, their morphological adaptations and temporal disparities. Thus, techno-scientific interfaces utilising genomic and electrophysiological approaches offer unprecedented scopes to extend our perceptual boundaries and reveal plants’ behavioural qualities. In biological art practices, scientific approaches and methodologies are deployed to empathetically explore intrinsic biological expressions in plants through aesthetics, genetics and electrophysiology. The thesis critically examines issues thrown up when scientific strategies are incorporated into artworks by questioning the role of the interfaces (i.e. green fluorescent protein or electrodes) and their authenticity in revealing aspects of plant responses and expressions. The practical aspects of the research draw on experimental approaches (using time-lapse, fluorescence and nanotechnology) to modulate plant motion into our frame of reference. In doing so, it investigates whether our subjective experience can be consolidated with the sensorial image of plants emerging from the sciences. Accompanying the written thesis is a visual documentation of the research’s practical component in the form of a multimedia DVD.

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This thesis explores how the formal elements of participatory linked chain and round dances (movement vocabulary and dynamics, rhythm and music) contribute to the experience of a dancing person. Developing and applying an interdisciplinary, post-positivist approach produced an in-depth analysis of the associations between form and being. Informed by the literature in Dance, Psychology, Music and General System Theory, the research is presented as four empirical studies, each with a specific guiding question and results. The first study investigated the way in which six participants—all of whom dance Balkan dances recreationally—reported their general experience of dancing. Theory and method from Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) guided data collection (semi-structured interviews) and analysis, resulting in the following seven themes that span the intra-, inter-, and trans-personal domains of experience: aesthetic experience, autotelic (‘peak’) experience, being cognition, connection, context, growth and development, and self. The second IPA study focused on the formal aspects of dancing of which the same six participants were most aware, resulting in the following five themes: emergence, group formation, motion factors and Efforts, movement and music. To explore these themes in greater depth, the third study comprised an analysis of and reflections on the associations of form and being based on the researcher’s own, inside experience of dancing linked chain and round dances, using the vocabulary of Dance Analysis and Effort Theory to develop detailed descriptions of specific dances and to suggest how different dances can contribute to different ways of being-in-the-world. Synthesising the findings of the data obtained in the previous three studies, the fourth study resulted in a conceptual model that associates form and being. In this model, the musical/dancing self both responds to and creates the form of a dance, and it is this creative power that changes the dancer’s way of being.

The Korean National Ballet (KNB), founded in 1962, is a pivotal, government-funded ballet company which acts as a national representative both domestically and internationally. This thesis investigates how the KNB has contributed to the formation of ‘Korean ballet’, a complex phenomenon interpreted through Homi Bhabha’s concept of post-colonial hybridity as a ‘doubling’ of the Western ballet form which simultaneously resists it through indigenisation. It examines the company’s artistic trajectory and repertoire, and analyses how it translates the codified ballet vocabulary to develop its own distinct movement style. The central concern is to show how such hybridisation enables the KNB to fulfil its role as a national organisation charged with representing Korean identity. While the introduction of ballet into Korea is a classic example of cultural imperialism in Edward Said’s sense, the nineteenth-century Russian ballet tradition, particularly Yuri Grigorovich’s interpretations, has exerted more direct authority, foisting colonial sentiments and demands onto the KNB via its set criteria and conventions. Thus a coloniser/colonised division separates the Russian and Korean ballet fields, as colonialism refers not to a past political system but to present sentiments and strategies inscribed in the process of continuing imperialism. The thesis evaluates how the KNB subverts these colonial demands to appropriate ballet as a legitimate means of articulating Korean identity. In the process, it negotiates various forms of state-led nationalism, supporting and shaping cultural policy by absorbing and transforming indigenous elements to bolster and reshape the national image propagated by the state. Paul Gilroy’s work on camp-thinking provides the theoretical foundation for understanding the political reshaping of national identity, while his reflections on the black diaspora confirm the hybrid cultural space as a new site of identity-formation. Thus the thesis nominates the KNB as a crucial insitution in the development and reshaping of national identity in Korea.

In the field of dance, the advent of the virtual and robotic body of a human performing subject pushes choreography in new dimensions since these nonhuman presences bring into question how they engage with the perceptual and embodied experience of the human subject. To resolve this question, this thesis analyses selected digital performances where choreographic composition is employed in creating the posthuman, addressing how the human body is engaged with its technological self and vice versa, and then how these choreographic practices evoke ideas about the posthuman subject and its embodiment. For the analyses of the case studies, I draw upon critical posthumanism and post-Merleau-Pontian phenomenology as a theoretical framework, which helps the posthuman escape from an anthropocentric humanist bias against technology’s physical and cognitive ability as a threat to humanity and from a popular posthumanist desire for the disembodiment and transcendence of the body. This thesis argues that in the case studies the choreographers manifest the posthuman, as an alternative and affirmative vision of the human, which resists an anthropocentric view on the nonhuman as the ‘Other’ or something to control. Instead, they rethink technology as a constituent part of the construction of human subjectivity, while reframing choreographic knowledge of human embodiment as a synthesis of corporeal and digital thoughts. Posthuman embodiment in the choreographic works urges us to rethink the notion of the anthropocentric and Cartesian human subject in terms of the human’s relation to machine, and re-inscribes the body’s doubled condition of presence and absence in the experience of the (physical and/or virtual) world. Also, the case studies reveal the validity of choreographers’ specialised knowledge of bodily ways of being-in-the-world in a posthuman age and the possibility of expanding their knowledge into further domains.

A growing body of human-computer interaction (HCI) research uses performance to explore embodied or multi-user interactions with technology. At the same time, digital technology is reconfiguring approaches to performance practice and research. This interaction design thesis identifies areas of overlapping interest within these two fields: digital media sharing in HCI, and autobiographical performance in performance studies. It posits a practice of ‘intermedial autobiographical performance’, in which people engage with a technological intervention to create autobiographical performances by sharing photos and stories of their life experiences. To explore this practice, the thesis develops a hybrid methodology that draws on relevant theories in both disciplines, as well as detailed analyses of four autobiographical performances, to create a two-phase interactive technology called Collect Yourselves! The first phase uses prompts to guide participants who do not identify as performers through a process of selecting and contextualising their personal digital media. The second phase provides a structure through which they perform their media for each other, engaging with the properties of autobiographical performance. Analyses of the Collect Yourselves! performances reveal new theories for both digital media sharing and performance, including ‘doubled indexicality’ and ‘performed photos’, as well as frameworks of reminiscing and storytelling, comfort and challenge, and ‘attending’ and ‘marking’. These frameworks help to explain the workings of an interactive performance event centred on personal digital media. Finally, the methodology and findings point towards a larger field of Performative Experience Design (PED), situated between HCI and performance studies. Intermedial autobiographical performance is only one part of this emerging field, in which performance is understood not as a rarefied or optional realm that exists only for its own sake, but rather as an insightful, intimate, risky, and potentially transformative experience that personal digital media technologies are particularly well suited to enable.

This dissertation presents and analyses original contributions to rehearsal and performance practice. Flow criticism - the use of flow theory to examine performance practice - is proposed as a tool for evaluating existing identification-oriented processes. Flow criticism demonstrates that several dimensions of flow are impeded by any process that simultaneously requires actor-character merger and the execution of pre-agreed-upon performance structures. In this circumstance, goals exist on one level of consciousness (the character) while feedback exists on another (the actor). The schism between these two dimensions of flow results in divided consciousness, which affects other flow dimensions: action and awareness cannot fully merge; actors cannot exercise control over the outcome of the fictional performance. A hypothesis is then advanced: this schism may be resolved by minimizing pre-agreed-upon performance structures. Following a version of the action research enquiry cycle modified by reflective practice and my conception of directorial practice, two projects were undertaken, resulting in the development of Inter-Actor Interaction, a rehearsal and performance approach that supports the structure-minimization hypothesis. The modified cycle - reflection-in-action, analysis-through-practice, reflection-on-action - is supported by a variety of research methods including rehearsal with actors, interviews, surveys, video strip analysis and reflective journaling. Presentation and analysis of Inter-Actor Interaction suggests that minimizing pre-agreed-upon performance structures may be achieved by introducing tensions: re-orienting the acting process from the communication of specifically chosen meanings to playing a psychophysical, interactive game whose outward manifestation is mediated by lenses derived from other levels of performance (such as character, world of the play and scripted text). Further evaluation shows that Inter-Actor Interaction successfully reduces the use of pre-agreed-upon performance structures, minimizes divided consciousness and supports flow experiences in actors.

This study presents an analysis of the appropriation of public space by cultural producers in Cuba, with a focus on art collectives, in particular, OMNI Zona Franca from Alamar, east of Havana. Based on primary research conducted with the artists, cultural producers, and scholars, I discuss OMNI’s work in the context of the history and formation of a nascent movement for civil society in Cuba, locating the collective’s work within the matrix of alternative and African diasporic cultural production. The latter is framed as part of a historical continuum and in the context of the discussion of race that emerged in Cuba’s public sphere during the 1990s with a concurrent movement among black Cuban artists to address issues of race. Situating OMNI’s work in a longer history of Afro-Cuban cultural production in Cuba as well as within the history of art collectives this study demonstrates how OMNI’s participation in the public sphere relates to social practice, appropriation of space, alternativity, and the forging of a wide coalition of civil and artistic alternatives among diverse communities. I draw on discourses on the production of space, particularly those of Henri Lefebvre and Raymond Williams, and argue that the unique and specific history of Alamar provided a fertile ground for alternative culture where multiple and countercultural expressions could be incubated and take root. The struggle over public space and the attempts by artists to create an autonomous public sphere in Cuba have led to continual conflict with the state. Using Gramsci’s theorization of civil society as incorporating both the hegemonic and contestatory realms, I contend that the level of contestation in OMNI Zona Franca’s work should be seen as counter-hegemonic expression aimed at altering the status quo. Producing new social relations, the collective’s practice is offered as an example of how art and cultural production is inaugurating alternative counter-spaces in the context of a demand for a more inclusive and representative Revolutionary public sphere.

This practice-led research investigates – through artworks comprising of drawings, video, spoken word and installations – issues of cultural and national identity, forms of memoralising, belonging, conflict and loss in relation to a transitional period during the break up of Former Yugoslavia. I am interested in how these issues could be addressed indirectly through avoiding representation of or by employing motifs directly associated with this transitional period and war. These issues are not necessarily directly reflected in my work; rather they have a significant impact on my approach to making work. The question I ask is how can a work of art have both a strong sense of loss and a strong sense of connection to a place? In the process of making work I explore and test different visual references in order to illustrate detachment, displacement and geopolitical fragmentation as processes that reflect the transitional period and disintegration of a country. I do this through developing installations as immersive, disorientating and disintegrating sites. To that extent I employ processes of repetition, recollection, reconstruction and invention in a variety of media. In the process of drawing and painting my aim is to articulate states of flux, flexibility and change through experimenting with the use of different media and methods of practice. The space of the gallery, the context in which the work is shown and the visitors’ interpretation of the space are an important aspect of the work. The installations are composed of works reconstructed and remade in a variety of media in order to destabilise forms of presentation and to develop different and shifting angles on the topics I work with. In order for work to have a conversation and connection with its own past I re-stage and re-build one aspect of work on to another, such that works become cumulative. Through producing works that evolve from earlier works the intention is to foreground multiple readings and perceptions of places. My intention is to investigate the influence that dislocation may have on the move from a geopolitical to an imaginary landscape. I develop a methodology that explores travelling and forgetting as metaphors, thematic elements and artistic strategies for displacement and change. In practice, this is examined through spatial models that allude to fixity and mobility, the real and the imaginary: the museum, the monument and the ship at sea. The experience of the Balkan wars informed my initial work for the research, part of which was to look at symbols like monuments and museums. I sought concepts that relate to this problem, finding that memory/memorialising and forgetting are conditions that I specifically associate with the work of Jan Kampenaers and David Maljković. I considered amnesia and amnesty as suggestive concepts of questionable stability and loss, which informed my subsequent work (supported by reference to the writings of Paul Ricoeur). The thesis submission includes the presentation of an exhibition of artwork, with published art books and a vinyl record.