In the 21st Century a majority of the world’s population carry in their pockets devices that promise connection to others over distance. The instant connectivity offered by technologies of communication is somewhat of mixed blessing combining the allure of interaction and the threat of availability. Much of the advertising gloss for the technologies of communication – smartphones, video conferencing and social networks – relies on selling the idea of real human connection at a distance. This study sets out to explore the nature of mediated communications between individuals in the context of a perceived opposition that conceptualises technology as either distancing or enhancing what it is to be human. The research frames mediated interactions as one-to-one performance, an approach which encourages the unexpected and playful whist embracing vulnerability. In exploring the nature of the one-to-one performance scholars and audiences stress their experiences as personal, at times intense and certainly intimate. Here intimacy is engaged with as both a subconscious technological fluency as well as intrapersonal closeness, placing such interaction in the socio-cultural context of late capitalism. It is concluded that rather than technology enframing a commodified experience of the world, intimate interrelations are possible and inevitable. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction to the research question and contextualises the inquiry in regard to my own personal and professional background. Chapter 2 details relevant concepts, scholarship, performance practice and cultural context and serves to place the work in a lineage of other practice. Chapter 3 describes, documents and interrogates the research practice, including inspirations and experiments alongside the final works. Chapter 4 conceptualises the practice within a phenomenological framework, analysing contemporary communications technologies as part of an expanding perceptual toolset with which we co-shape our reality and placing technical infrastructure within a framework of late capitalism. The final chapter concludes the complimentary writing and clearly enumerates the findings.

The complementary discourse explores the function and value of narrative and why mankind seems to have always seen events, connected or unconnected, as stories. It investigates how we process and perceive fiction and compares narratives found in non-fiction, police witness statements, films and diaries to consider why the human brain seems hard-wired to transform events into narrative. The accompanying novel, A River, is set in Manchester over a three hundred year period. The events in the chapters are presented in reverse order; from the 1990's to the 1720's, beginning with the chronological end of the tale and working towards the starting point. The chapter's regression highlights how a familiar location is constantly in flux and sometimes shares little with the same place of the past. Time and location are both treated as characters, playing important roles in the personality of the city. The buildings and streets, events, food and language have all been researched for accuracy, either first hand or using diaries, films, maps and photographs. The novel occupies a grey area between fiction and history. The narrative actively avoids the traditional novel formulas of historical fiction and magic realism and is intended to be an accessible experimental novel, questioning the idea of what a story is.

How might an understanding of the temporal help us to engage with the visual? To what extent is this mediated by a sense of location - in this case within (or about) Ireland? This thesis takes the form of an enquiry into the meanings of time in relation to Irish art over a period of approximately one hundred years from 1910 onwards. Rather than a focus on the production of meaning within artworks themselves, however, the thesis is concerned with art historiography - an investigation into the wider discursive content of a selection of my published work between 2013-2018. In doing so it establishes a critical and distinctive position for the importance of time and temporality not just in relation to the broader field of art history, but within a wider understanding of the historical formations of Irish visualities. To achieve this, I focus on the deconstruction of selected notions of temporality within the discourses of art history (the role of linear histories, canons and contemporaneity) in conjunction with an analysis of the specificity of Irish temporalities. This takes two forms: evidencing the uneven experience of modernity and the active presences of traumatic memory, both legacies of colonialism, as a means of undoing the progressive drive of linear history, and an accompanying analysis of the complex temporalities of post-conflict Northern Ireland, as a means of more specifically situating how art historical writing can produce the meanings of its artworks in both locations. Finally, in conjunction with a return to the written work submitted to accompany this thesis, I map out further directions this can take, as a means of understanding the crucial role of past modes of temporalities in an engagement with the present and an attempt to shape the future.

Breer’s cross-disciplinary process and self-reflexive exploration of the single-frame within film presents an intensive questioning of representation, movement, and the hierarchies of form that taps into the debates of mid twentieth-century art. Having an approach that is unparalleled within the discipline of animation, Breer’s work constellates the renewed interest in the avant-garde from absolute abstraction to collage, along with abstract expressionism. Involving the use of non-art materials and technology in an endeavor to refigure the status of the everyday, Breer’s work also participates in the wide-ranging transformation of art, beyond traditional mediums and more fundamentally raises questions about the technical mediation of experience. The refusal in Breer’s practice of the imaginary of conventional cinema and commercial studio animation is underscored by the recourse in his work to the ‘low arts’ of early popular animation and precinematic devices which lay bare the underlying mechanics of film in a manner that nevertheless celebrates the appeal of its pleasures. Despite shared engagements with the neo-avant-garde, Breer’s cinematic assemblages presented a challenge to postwar plurality, and its recognizability was hindered by the marked novelty and art-institutional marginalization of animation-film then prevalent. The conceptual valence of Breer’s work, which questions its status as art, reflects upon its complex and contradictory historicity, and mediates between the principles of form and the so-called failure of craft, gains a renewed relevance today beyond the revival of retro-modernism, and in an era in which the technique of animation has become ubiquitous. This thesis sets out to recover the witty deflationary tactics and criticality of the aesthetic questions raised by Breer’s animated films. The practice component revolves around the materiality and analogue confluence of the digital moving-image; three short animated-sketches present inscriptions of everydayness and ephemerality as part of a recursively obsolescent gaze upon its single-frame image-objects.

My practice-led research aims to define what it means to call a person or thing ‘cool’. Methodologically, my fine art practice is bricolage: disassembling, repurposing, and modifying objects or ideas to generate new wholes and understanding. As a bricoleur, I thus set out to break down the value judgement of cool into constituent parts, to enable a more nuanced definition to emerge. By surveying current research on cool in fields such as marketing, jazz, and neuroscience, and by creating two artworks, I identified 14 sensibilities (i.e. processes sensed and engaged with) that culminate in judging something to be cool. My artworks, 1 2 3 (Unfinished) (2014-2016) and Lunar Salon (2015), highlighted that the sensibilities of originality and spontaneity are related to creativity, and so I proceeded to investigate how cool might be valuable to a creative practice. My final artwork, spacesuits for animals (2016-ongoing) concluded that all 14 sensibilities of cool could become incorporated into, and could enhance my bricolage methodology. In this report I articulate what these sensibilities emotionally and materially felt like as they fused with my practical methods. This articulation was key to understanding that cool as a value judgement is comprised of a flexible network of both experienced and observed sensibilities. The specific network that I produced was subjective, but its constituent sensibilities are a synthesis of discourse on cool and my personal experience, and are original contributions to knowledge. Cool is made of pre-existing physical/conceptual material, but it contributes unique value to the world in the same way that a bricolage sculpture creates unique value: not from what it is but rather, from how it is made. Calling something cool is the result of a creative methodology which builds connections between bodily interactions, personal experiences, concepts, and personal values, and as such, can help to articulate and even formulate one’s identity.

A digital fine art practice is at the nexus of some powerful dichotomies: the subjective versus the objective, the passions versus reason, and art versus science among them. This research uncouples such polarities and con-fuses them. It con-fuses the theoretical with the practical, the rational with the irrational. It con-fuses art, science and technology. And it does so to advance a distinct approach to making sense. Paul Feyerabend portrays knowledge as an ever-expanding paratactic ocean of mutually incompatible alternatives. He argues that scientific knowledge does not advance in an entirely rational manner. His analysis of its methodologies leads him to advocate deviation and error, ambiguity, approximation and open interaction. He demonstrates that these methods and practices are essential in the construction of the ad-hoc hypotheses and future languages that are themselves essential to the further development of knowledge. Moreover he asserts that these methods and practices are critical to human beings remaining free and happy agents. Within the context of a digital fine art practice, this research con-fuses such an anarchic epistemology with an antiquity. That antiquity is of ancient Greece as understood by Feyerabend and Nietzsche, and as wilfully misunderstood by myself. This text constructs a vaguely suspect chronicle of the trajectory and impact of aggressive rationality over the last two and a half millennia, and investigates the instruments and practices of what has become the dominant tradition within that chronicle. Those instruments and practices are then loosely misunderstood and misapplied to both an established art practice and an emerging writing practice. This text is witness and accomplice to the construction of a personal constellation and logos. It is my own personal Phenomena and Enoptron, my own lodestar and lodestone. It documents a dialogue between quite disparate voices. Between bots, agents and daemons. It is above all however, an account of the dialogue between the physical thoughts and mental objects that constitute my practice and this research.

This study addresses the recent interest in the role of the curator as author and producer, arguing for the value of shifting critical focus away from curating and towards the exhibition. It proposes that, when thought of in terms of knowledge production, exhibitions are actually constituted by the combined activities of artists, curators, institutions and their publics. With reference to three case studies it examines how exhibitions can be understood as sites of collective negotiation of knowledge, and goes on to question the curatorial role in relation to this new understanding. Beginning with the question 'How do we talk about curating?' the study observes the development of curatorial discourse since the beginning of the 199os. Through analysis of this critical development and the frequent announcements of a crisis in curating, it identifies several perennial points of impasse for the development of the exhibition. The study suggests that these have arisen as the result of a professional model bound to a framework of cultural traditions, which have come to define institutional practice today. In response to this rigid model, the study proposes an alternative in which the field of exhibition making is understood as a dynamic network of influences, where roles and codes of conduct are interchangeable and hierarchical characteristics prone to continual reconstitution. In this way production in the exhibition field is redefined as not only the making of art objects for display, or the forming of art -experiences but also the reception of these. The study looks in detail at three exhibitions that explore ideas of collective and collaborative methods of production, curated by independent curators between 2003 and 2007. It considers to what extent and at what stages curatorial decisions influenced the forming of temporary communities of practice, concluding by identifying what can be learned from exhibitions when they are observed as experiments in the collective negotiation of knowledge.

The aim of this research is to test a decisional aid model - the Analytic Hierarchy Procedure (AHP) - in risk assessment for development of an urban area. The Port Authority of Venice commissioned the Regional Environmental Protection Agency (ARPAV) to carry out an estimation of major industrial hazards in Porto Marghera, an industrial estate near Venice (Italy), via Quantitative Risk Analysis (QRA). However, this model only provided a list of individual quantitative risk values, related to single locations. Therefore, there was both a need and an opportunity to introduce a decision aid model, which could take into account the geographic distribution of risk, the quantification of intangible factors and the analysis of possible future developments. The experimental model, through a series of trade -off comparisons, encouraged the use of expert opinions in conjunction with traditional quantitative analysis, enabling the decision maker to generate quantitative data on risk assessment from a series of subjective, qualitative assessments. It was also a major result to bring together complementary skills and expertise from different disciplines in a wide and clear collaborative research project.

This thesis focuses on the social, material, and aesthetic engagement with the image of home by artists in Italy in the 1960s to offer new perspectives on this period that have not been accounted for in the literature. It considers the way in which the shift toward environment, installation and process-based practices mapped onto the domestic at a time when Italy had become synonymous with the design of environments. Over four chapters I explore the idea of living-space as the mise-en-scène, and conceptual framework, for a range of artists working across Italy in ways that both anticipate and shift attention away from accounts that foreground the radical architectural experiments enshrined in MoMA’s landmark exhibition Italy: the New Domestic Landscape (1972). I begin by examining the way in which the group of temporary homes made by Carla Accardi between 1965 and 1972 combines the familiar utopian rhetoric of alternative living with attempts to redefine artistic practice at this moment. I then go on to look in turn at the sculptural practice of artists Marisa Merz and Piero Gilardi in relation to the everyday lived experience of home. This question is first considered in relation to the material and psychic challenges Merz poses to the gendering of homemaking with Untitled (Living Sculpture) 1966. I then go on to explore the home, as it might be understood in ecological terms, through an examination of the polyurethane microhabitats made by Gilardi. These themes are finally drawn together by looking at a radically different type of work, Carla Lonzi’s book Autoritratto (1969). By examining the images interspersed throughout Autoritratto I consider how this book plays out the lives of fourteen prominent artists to create the semblance of an everyday shared lived experience.

This study aims to identify a consistent position for Concrete Art, relevant to an understanding of, and highlighting its vital importance in, contemporary practice. As a practice-led study, its primary research methods have drawn upon the curating of series’ of exhibitions, hosting of discussions and production of publications at the Highland Institute for Contemporary Art (HICA: www.h-i-c-a.org). HICA is an artist-run space that I co-founded in 2008. Its exhibitions are particular examples of relevant practice and vehicles for the further exploration of ideas. They have included artists such as Boyle Family, the Noigandres poets, Daniel Spoerri, and Liam Gillick. The diversity of understandings, artistically and philosophically, of the ‘concrete’ reveal the contradictory states a concrete art may be desired to occupy. Theo van Doesburg’s Manifesto for Concrete Art, of 1930, for example, appears to call for both opposite Realist/universal and Nominalist/particular understandings of artworks. Van Doesburg’s seems a monist position overall though, uniting contradictory elements as counterparts or ‘contrasts’; a position which, by extension, may better define the intentions of a general ‘concrete’ tendency apparent throughout modern art. Exploring relevant developments from the beginnings of modernism as the background to contemporary artists’ considerations of the concrete, the study reflects on how such phenomena as the universal and particular, form and content, or mind and matter, may currently be understood as unified, and as material. These considerations readily connect thinking in relation to Concrete Art to a shift in understanding from classical to modern physics. The study, developing a resulting focus on our general aesthetic experience, as our part in pervasive formative processes, concludes with a proposal of a new term; the ‘quancrete’, which aims to provide a contemporary sense of the concrete, consistent with these new understandings, and indicative of an on-going development, basic to ideas of modernism; connecting both its earliest experiments and its current diversity.