My practice-based PhD project entitled, "V Portraits - Toward a Realized Poetic Play" will define the 'poetic play', a hybrid form of performative text. This definition will evolve through employing the following methodological question: How can a dialogic practice-based investigation of the hybrid form of the poetic play through the five individual sense modalities assist in the aesthetic situating of, and subsequently the fully realized definition of, the poetic play? The poetic play is a relatively new form emerging largely in the latter half of the 20th Century out of an experimental tradition that has not been completely developed in discourse. This project will offer context and a definition of the poetic play and then apply a model of analysis to five pieces by different artists. For the practice-based portion, I will explore the methodological question through my original text and five performative realizations in a sequence entitled "Portraits". These original performative pieces will each emphasize one of the five senses in order to establish an aesthetic history of the form and expand the sphere of its performative capabilities through contemporary theory. Expressing the text through various senses and media, brings the poetic play forward into the current social and artistic dialogue.

The direct interplay between colour and impulsivity has yet to be researched despite growing interest and activity in the field. The implications of gaining a better understanding of this area helps: realise the impact of LED use in modern environments, address the lack of evidence in reported crime and impulsive psychopathologies relating to coloured light and builds an understanding of impulsivity as a testable concept. The comparison of personality, behaviour and neurological approaches were used to understand: The effect of colour on moods and personality traits associated with impulsiveness, how colour interacts with impulsive behaviours and to explore how colour alters brain activity relating to impulsivity. Various methods were used in each approach: four self-report personality measures, two behavioural tasks and an electroencephalogram for information regarding brain activity. Results from the personality approach indicated that participants felt more impulsive under red light. However results from behavioural and neurological approaches differed indicating that blue light caused increased bursts in a balloon analogue risk taking task and increases in frontal (F3, FZ and F3 position) beta wave activity. These both suggest an increase in impulsiveness. Faster reaction times in the blue go no/ go task condition hinted at better performance but may also be an indication of hampered behavioural inhibition. These findings are contrary to the traditional notion that long wavelength lights are stimulating and short wavelength lights are relaxing but do align with the effects observed when intrinsically photoreceptive ganglion cells are active. It is recommended that until further empirically robust research is conducted, interventions relating to coloured environments effect on serious impulsive pathologies should not be implemented. Most prominently cases of blue light being used to reduce violent crime and suicide. The research also highlights the complexity of impulsivity, the difficulties in measuring it and the need to focus on sub-constructs in order to make accurate inferences about the effect of colour and impulsiveness in the future.

It is becoming increasingly important for all disciplines to consider their impact on the environment; fashion design is no exception to this, as garment consumption behaviour has significant impacts on the environment. Most research into sustainable fashion has focused on the area of supply and production while under-emphasising the importance of demand in the material garment economy. More specifically, effort has been focused on reducing the impact of materials and manufacturing while the consumer use phase of a garment's lifecycle (frequency of wear, retention, maintenance and disposal) has been downplayed. Reducing the impacts of the consumer use phase is dependent on changing consumer behaviour. Documenting and researching the consumer experience provides an opportunity to evaluate where changes towards sustainability can be made while acknowledging existing influences on behavioural practices. In this study, consumer research was undertaken in order to examine the motivations for, and barriers against four environmentally desirable consumer use behaviours; wearing garments for longer, repairing garments, shifting ownership of inactive garments and discard channel selection. A multi-strategy approach was utilised and included an in-depth qualitative wardrobe study with 17 participants followed by a quantitative online survey with 270 participants. The research sample was made up of females between the ages of 18 and 75, living in the UK. This sample was selected to give the best insight into garment consumption, framed within the location of the UK. The results showed that understanding of environmentally desirable garment consumption behaviours were variable amongst participants. Despite this, environmentally desirable behaviours were occurring, motivated by a range of factors. Pro-environmental intent was not found to be a significant motivating factor for any of the four target behaviours. The participants' personal circumstances appeared to have a considerable influence on their practices, and any changes in circumstances could act as a prompt for behaviour change. Previously, sustainable fashion 'solutions' have focused on the design of new garments, based on the assumption that that physical attributes of garments have a dominant influence on consumer behaviour. The results suggest that the influence of garment design on behaviour may have been previously overstated. Within fashion, little attention has been given to applying theoretical models to garment consumption behaviour. The understanding gained from the research was used to adapt Stern's Attitude-Context-Behaviour model for garment consumption behaviours. The adaptations focused on the inclusion of personal circumstances and the physical attributes of garments. This model offers meaningful insight into the influences on behaviour; a crucial resource for designing behaviour change strategies. It is hoped that this research will help to expand sustainable fashion solutions beyond the design of garments, and allow more targeted behaviour change strategy. With this understanding of consumer behaviour, we could be promoting more sustainable consumer behaviours in more interesting and exciting ways- by making them more convenient, by incentivising them, prompting them, and other clever tricks, such as encouraging public commitment to change.

A Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) results in partial or complete loss of sensation and/or function below the level of injury, affecting every aspect of daily life. SCI rehabilitation is a long,complex process that aims to equip patients with the skills needed for the rest of their lives. The initial aim of this study was to create more or enhanced opportunities for patient participation within this rehabilitation process, using a mixed-methods approach to explore and collaboratively shape the experiences of patients, family and healthcare professionals within it. This research began with a 12-month, in-depth contextual review of the host spinal injury unit (SIU) to identify potential opportunities for enhanced patient participation. Qualitative and ethnographic research methods, such as interviews with SIU staff and observations of rehabilitation events, were found to be crucial in generating a detailed understanding of the rehabilitation process and embedding the researcher within the unit. Design-based methods were then used to collaboratively develop the contextual review findings, including an exploratory pilot study with a group of the SIU community. From this, the Goal Planning Meeting (GPM), where patients, family and SIU staff members meet to discuss progress and set rehabilitation goals, was established as the site for intervention. A combination of observations, interviews and conversation mapping methods were used to triangulate the experiences of participants in the GPM, generating four main aims, or 'Experience Goals,' for the subsequent co-design process. From this, the researcher generated several prototype materials that aimed to support patients’ understanding of the GPM and their role within it. The prototypes were co-developed with outpatients and SIU inpatients and staff in a series of workshops with the aim of meeting these experience goals. The final phase of the study involved the implementation and mixed-methods evaluation (using observations, interviews and conversation mapping methods) of the intervention in the rehabilitation pathway of three patients. The co-developed intervention includes a second prognosis meeting, a meeting to set longterm rehabilitation goals (that address both staff and patient priorities) and simplified documentation of the Goal Planning Meeting. Although each patient engaged with it differently, evidence suggests that the intervention led to enhanced patient understanding of their rehabilitation progress, and more opportunities for staff to incorporate the patient's personal priorities into their practice and the patient’s rehabilitation pathway. This study also makes three claims with regards to designing for patient participation: 1. Designing to enhance participation in rehabilitation processes should consider the diversity of roles and perspectives involved in service encounters like the GPM 2. Designing for enhanced patient participation needs to acknowledge that participation is not a monolithic concept 3. Designing for enhanced participation requires an embedded participatory design process able to guide a progressive process of adoption and change not only with patients, but also for the key professional practices involved. In summary, this PhD study is concerned with the complimentary relationship between ‘traditional’ and ‘design-based’ research methods to collaboratively and robustly explore, communicate and positively shape the experience of group healthcare consultation events for staff and patients alike.

Captured from life, the photograph was long regarded as an image with an indexical link to its referent, a quality which set it apart from other forms of pictorial representation (Krauss, 1977). With the arrival of digital photography, however, many theorists divested the digital photograph of this link; arguing the photograph, no longer physically imprinted on chemical film, but stored as numbers, became an image open to manipulation and no longer reliant on anything in the world for its existence. The referent, as William J. Mitchell put it, had become “unstuck” (1994, p.31). Nearly thirty years since those arguments were first made, we can see that the mere fact of becoming digital did not exhaust the belief in the photograph as an image taken from the world (Rubinstein and Sluis, 2008). Today’s digital photographic images, however, are no longer the straightforward remediations (Bolter and Grusin, 2000) of chemical-based photography which prompted those debates. Instead they represent a convergence of digitally-produced photographs and computer programs; and viewed on screen become what Ingrid Hölzl (2010) has described as “moving stills”. It is against this backdrop, this research project explores the concept, and different definitions, of indexicality; and how the index might be reframed in a digital context. After beginning with the concept of metadata as mechanism to guarantee the digital photograph’s origins in a particular time and place; my practice-led research moved to consider how our experience of the digital photograph changes when it is merged with real-time or recorded data which describes a phenomenon. Specifically, to question if the integration of this data could constitute an indexical link to the world, and amplify the photographic artwork’s sense of immediacy (Bolter and Grusin, 2000). Drawing on both photographic and computational arts practices, I developed a series of custom software works merging my digital photographs with an additional element of data – ranging from the direction of the wind in a Scottish glen, to the recorded beat of my own heart – visually expressed through changes in colour, composition, and movement. The thesis documents and discusses these works from the perspectives of both artist and viewer, with the latter’s position drawn from a series of qualitative interviews conducted during the artworks’ exhibition. Drawing on these dialogues, my contribution proposes the merging of digital photographs, data, and bespoke program code constitutes an expanded digital photographic practice; and a form of gesture on the part of the artist to a secondary referent which sits outside, or cannot be depicted within, the frame of the photograph. References Bolter, J.D. and Grusin, R. (2000) Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, MT: MIT Press. Hölzl, I. (2010) ‘Moving Stills: Images that are no longer immobile.’ Photographies 3 (1), pp. 99 – 108. Krauss, R. (1977) ‘Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America. October 3, pp. 68 – 81. Mitchell, W. J. (1994) The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era. Cambridge, MT: The MIT Press. Rubinstein, D. and Sluis, K. (2008) ‘A Life More Photographic’. Photographies 1 (1), pp. 9 – 28.

This project uses and researches a particular art practice and its works. In it political and critical architectural strategies converge—convergences currently researched, generally, in cultural fields as modes of countering dominant techniques of governance. It investigates and, crucially, enacts and embodies such architectural art practice as a mode of having knowledge through the figure of non-construction. As ‘creative work’ and ‘text’, in a confluent screening of films and live broadcasts in the Cinema Car as the base of encounter and conversation, and in a confluent writing of quotations and comments along practical, philosophical, and theoretical positions, it addresses and makes the gesture and term of non-construction, now employed in new locations and formulations, available for uses and debates on and in current practices and works of art. The work draws on diverse fields spanning prehistoric life and art, the relation between art and life since the 1970s, discursive art practice, documentation, cinematographic and theatrical practices, curatorial practices, the relation between ideology, infrastructure and architecture, continental philosophy, and current practices of theory. Particular attention has been paid to the work of Georges Bataille and Walter Benjamin, accompanied by modern and contemporary thinkers and practitioners in art and architecture, often set in unexpected dialogue. The work is a reflection on praxis. The Study performs a reduction of architectural art practice to discursive practice, supposedly the legitimate contender of contemporary art, revealing the architectural typology of the study as a spatial and material factor of discourse, applicable to the current problematic. A Voiding draws back such practice to architectural art practice probing the strategy of voiding as the discursive architectural gesture of encounter. Building Cinema, finally, actually building films and cinemas, reclaims the practice of filmic documentation as such a discursive architectural art practice. Maintained in an economy of overspending, whose aim is not production but an understanding beyond it, the material offers artists the possibility of encounter along architectural strategies of non-construction. It also contributes to architectural discourse offering new possibilities for engaging with architecture through the work of art’s transgression of construction’s ideological constrains.

The discipline of exhibition histories has set out to bring into consideration social, spatial, and cultural frames. Despite this, like other areas of art history, it is increasingly constructing its own hegemony. In the process, other agencies, perspectives or approaches are inevitably overlooked and marginalized. This thesis looks to identify and readdress two omissions from some existing writings on exhibition histories - the intersection of audiences and media. This is achieved by researching the archives of London's Institute of Contemporary Art. With the ICA as a lens, this project offers a new critical methodology for writing programming and exhibition histories by bringing into consideration the nature of the mediated narrative within exhibitions. The thesis proposes that by taking into account analogue and digital media and ideas of audience engagement and interaction, we can extend the framework of exhibitions beyond curatorial or institutional authority. In taking digital media and its precursors as disruptions we can begin to see dual operations that are continually at play between art historical canon formation and the contemporary contingencies that resist any fixed point of interpretation. My approach to Mediating Histories has been shaped by the ICA programmes themselves; as well as the ways in which they remain, and are accessed in a variety of archives. Many of these programmes were aligned to a dialogue between art and technology, and as such, to support an understanding of a techno-cultural dynamic, the thesis draws on the media-based perspectives of Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham, Wolfgang Ernst, Bruno Latour and Jane Bennett, alongside feminist approaches to art history, exhibitions and spectatorship by Griselda Pollock and Laura Mulvey. This is grounded in the particular focus given to technology and temporality, and spectatorship and the screen in theoretical writings on the history of contemporary art. The research project contributes knowledge to exhibition histories, contemporary art and institutional histories, and provides original archival research into exhibitions, artworks and programmes held at the ICA that have not yet received adequate analysis.

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This practice led research investigates the banal ceramic mug, scrutinizing its potential for constructions of meaning, drawing upon theories of material culture to examine human/object relationships. The thesis makes special reference to the Shepton Collection, comprised of 412 drink related vessels. Belonging to a cider factory in Somerset, the collection spans industrial pottery production from the 1780s to the beginning of the 21st century. It also offers insight into local cultural norms embedded in the broader contexts of identity, in both domestic and public domains, those being the home and the cider/public house, exposing hierarchies of consumption implicit in the factory made ceramic mug. The corresponding creative practice utilizes the Shepton Collection as a relational and comparative tool to examine notions of contemporary cultural identity expressed via the banal ceramic mug. Drawing upon physical characteristics of the twin handled loving cup (a form synonymous with cider drinking), the practice explores and exploits particular themes identified within the Shepton Collection. As a contribution to knowledge the research has identified the value of considering a collection of seemingly banal objects as a viable tool to creatively analyse the significance of human/object relationships embedded in the everyday. Conceptually the practice led research has mobilized an unexpected application of banality, expressed through a series of significant bodies of ceramic works, applying increasing pressure to the simple mug form, its perceived use and ability to bear the weight of deep emotional engagement. Consequently material and cultural familiarity are challenged in terms of object encounter and the emotional impact the practice has engendered. The combined processes of cataloguing the Shepton Collection, the subsequent practice and theoretical analysis, has necessitated a tripartite approach to the research and is addressed as pre-studio, studio and post-studio activities. This approach also provides a model for future practice led research that intends to examine and correspond to already existent objects.

The intention of this research has been to discover the historical basis of Still Motion film. Within the context of examples of film and artwork that were not necessarily identified as Still Motion at the time, but which established a precedent for a way of making and looking at film, I have attempted to position more contemporary work, including my own, in order to explore the idea that although Still Motion is not a clearly defined genre, it is an established stylistic approach that I felt was worth exploring. The main focus of this study has been how contemporary artist filmmakers have used and continue to use this style of filmmaking specifically to study locations and environments. I have also illustrated how the passage of time has been approached and the impact this has had on the experience of the films as well as how on-screen and off-screen spaces inform each other and the viewer. This area of art practice has been identified by other writers but as far as my supervisors and I are aware, has not been researched or published as a project in its own right. The artworks I have made are original outcomes and examples of the area of my interest in drawing the viewer's attention to small, sometimes subtle things that might otherwise go unnoticed. The key methodological issues were to establish the area without over defining it so that different approaches remain identifiable as Still Motion within the broad range of the research focus. This study has revealed to me that there is much more to this area than I first envisaged. I could have explored other aspects of Still Motion such as the appropriation of this film style in mainstream cinema, television programmes and advertising, as well as other aspects such as its presence on Instagram, and influence on slow TV and music. However, I kept to working within my original intentions and key methodological issues to keep focused and directed, although as the project developed I have realised that there are still possibilities to continue and develop my work further.