When I observed Japan from a distance for the first time, I found a similarity between Japanese society and the idea of 'Utopia, 1 and I became interested in society as subject matter. Researching Plato and Thomas More's ideas of 'utopia 1 was the starting point of my research. When I realized Utopia is indeed a place without freedom, I became interested in the other 'possible world/ a world different from our reality. I have been obsessed with the idea, and I began making artworks related to the idea. 'Heterotopia 1 seemed to have a strong connection with the 'possible world, 1 and Michel Foucault became essential for my theoretical study. I spent a year researching on the theory, which later became the foundation of my studio practice. Along with these theoretical studies, I researched photographs of children which were related to the subject of my digital practice. By analyzing the work, I developed and understanding my practice. I improved the interdisciplinary aspects of my work by researching related artworks and films, and developed advanced techniques in digital media and collage. After studying the theory and writing the proposal for the Professional Doctorate programme, I found it difficult time for me to organize my ideas and relate these thoughts to my practice. The critical reviews helped me to reconsider my work and its presentation. While concentrating on my study and practice, I collaborated with other artists and designers in professional practice. I also curated a group exhibition, and the experience expanded my art practice in a new way.

How does one turn a cinematic passion into an academic thesis? This is the question that runs through my work, which is both a labour of love and a series of love letters. Does one, can one, tell the truth about one's love object? Written in solitude about the darkened passions of the cinema, and the commodified reenactment via DVD and video, it seeks to locate this body of work, organized under the signifier David Lynch, within a broader cultural history of film and art, rather than, as so many chronologically based studies have done, to assess the individual films and then collectively to remark upon the auteur's signature. Instead, it seeks to experience again, or anew, the ontological strangeness of film within the saturated market place, and observe how, in this body of work, the normative framework of the North American film industry is disturbed from inside by a practice which explores and critically examines the creative potential of the medium within the constraints of the capitalist mode of production and consumption. Taking Roland Barthes' neologism of the theory of the text as a hyphology as its means of organization, the thesis presents a series of chapters which consider separate concepts or ideas about these films which, although appearing freestanding, come together in the final chapter in this web of engagement with Lynch's cinema and critical theory. In the final analysis, the work reflects upon a range of approaches to its subject to conclude that the solitary, or seemingly isolated, experience of film is itself socially, culturally and politically important and tells us a great deal about contemporary subjectivity.

Centred on the development of discussions around independent curatorial practice from 1987 to 2007 - a time of expanded understanding of the role of the curator - this dissertation illustrates how curatorial discourse has generated a significant body of knowledge within contemporary art discourses. This research has both theoretical and practical outcomes, represented within a dissertation that is divided into three parts: 1. An historical survey of key developments within curatorial practice and discourse, forming the main body of text in three chapters. 2. Four exhibition projects realised and analysed alongside this research (with Power Point presentation submitted as Appendix Two). 3. Forty-four original interviews with leading curators, artist-curators, exhibition historians, critic-curators, graduates from curatorial training programmes and leaders of these courses working between 1987 and 2007 (Appendix One). 1. Chapter One reveals how, with the first appearance of independent exhibition-makers, `demystification' of the curatorial position offered a critique of artistic autonomy in the late 1960s. It illustrates how curating became a form of self-presentation with the `curator-as- auteur' in the late 1980s, and how the `super-visibility' of a new generation of curators took place in the mid-to-late 1990s when curatorial debates and published anthologies began to appear as a way of correcting gaps in historical curatorial knowledge. Chapter Two traces the globalisation of Curating in the context of biennials and large-scale international exhibitions from 1989 to 2006. It considers how, since `Les Magiciens de la Terre' in 1989, curators have embraced globalism, transculturalism and a move towards collective models of curating. Chapter Three expands on the concept of the `curator«a bst' and reveals a convergence of istic and curatorial practice in the 1990s, which provides a theoretical hacktop to the Practical component of this research project. 2. Employing a curatorial strategy of dividing an exhibition into three spatial categories - the background, the middle-ground and the foreground - four related exhibitions were realised as practical examples of how differences between collaborative and authorial structures converge in processes of co-production. These exhibitions reflect upon the dominant issues of the theoretical research in order to practically demonstrate how the group exhibition is based on organisational structures that are the results of co-operation between artists and the curator(s), leading to co-authored exhibition formations. 3. Interviews represent the methodological approach employed as the main means of gathering knowledge and provide the primary basis of the analysis of key issues emerging during this period. They not only establish an historical trajectory for curatorial practice but also allow identification of key moments of historical conjuncture within the field. Through an examination of interview transcripts alongside literature published between 1987 and 2007 and the four inter-connected exhibitions, this research re-evaluates the relationship between artist(s) and curator(s) by demonstrating how the group exhibition form has become a creative medium of communication in and of itself.

This investigation consists of an interdisciplinary analysis of photographic, cinematographic, architectural and literary documents representing the city of Havana in Cuba during different periods of the twentieth century. These periods are: the decade of the Great Depression; the 1950s during the rapid growth of the tourist industry in the island; the first fifteen years following the 1959 Cuban Revolution; and the so-called 'Special Period' during the 1990s, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was during these periods that the city went through very important transformations due to historical and cultural contingencies. These contingencies refer to the beginnings of the development of the city as a tourist centre, the first debates and cultural manifestations related to the Afro-Cuban traditions in the island, the post - 1959 evolutionary processes and the effects of the end of the Cold War on the city. The documents analysed have been drawn firstly from cultural productions made by Cubans: Cuban filmography and photography pre- and post-1959. Secondly, there are also those documents produced by non-Cubans, mainly Hollywood productions and other types of representation, which have also contributed greatly to create a particular image of Havana. An important part of this analysis also includes the architectural particularities of the city, with an emphasis on the symbology of some of its main buildings, such as the Capitolio and the National Hotel. This analysis relates the dominant visual tropes of the Cuban capital with more generic discourses regarding the tradition of utopian thought in the West and their embodiment in the image of the modern city. The diverse archival documents discussed throughout this thesis reflect recurrent themes that have characterised this tradition: the contemporary ideal of a harmonious multicultural society; the romanticisation of the 'old city' as a visual reminder of our 'non-capitalist' past and the utopianism associated with the dichotomy between work and leisure and between the diurnal and the nocturnal. Most of these themes can be found as forming part of the discourse on the national in Cuba, also characterised by a deep utopianism. The thesis examines the social and cultural history of Havana in order to analyse how the different documents have reflected, or even contributed, to the construction and problematisation of a Cuban national identity, while at the same time making testimony of the existence in the city of different cultural traditions. This has necessarily involved a reflection on the dynamics between the two main cultural traditions present in Havana: the Euro-Cuban and the Afro-Cuban. This thesis proposes that the cultural battles between the African, European and North American traditions in the city have been decisive in the modern re-fashioning of Havana as a museum-city, facilitating the predominantly nostalgic character of its most recent representations. This investigation also takes into account the crucial role of the city's spatial gendrification - the position of women within the urban space - when describing Havana's utopian representations. Finally, the interdisciplinary character of this thesis contributes to the analyses of the cultural history of cities as well as the relevance of the visual in the recreations of modern urban life and its relations to the narratives of the national.

This thesis is an examination of the influence of theological ideas on the development of liberal political philosophy in the seventeenth century. The basis of this account will be a detailed exanlination of the ethical and political ideas in the published and unpublished writings of the Cambridge Platonist, Ralph Cudworth. As the reputation of the Cambridge Platonists as other-worldly thinkers is well established in intellectual history, this thesis, in rejecting this common view, will examine how this image of the Cambridge Platonists came to prevail. I will argue that, when the Cambridge Platonists are viewed within their philosophical, theological and historical context, their thought contains a powerful critique of contemporary theological and political ideas. By a detailed analysis of Cudworth's theology, in particular his Trinitarianism, I will argue that Cudworth creates a sophisticated defence of political society based on the moral self-deternlination and political responsibility of the individual. Cudworth's defence of the political realm is deflned by his belief in the democratic revelation made to all men, in the form of reason, through the active power of a Neoplatonically understood Trinity. Cudworth allows for a political society (what I term an ethical community) in which the individual must make the most of his God-given potential, and in which the eternal and immutable truths in the intellect of God, and not the will of the sovereign, underpin the legitimacy and efficacy of that society. Cudworth's thought, far from being the apolitical system it is often assumed to be, provided ethical and political arguments which were, I argue, very influential on the late-seventeenth century debates for toleration and comprehension, and in particular the role played by the Latitudinarian divines in those debates. What we find in Cudworth's thought is a defence of the self-determining power of the individual which is defined by, and grows directly out of, a Trinitarian understanding of reality. This thesis will therefore show the way in which liberal political principles can be identified as growing positively out of the theological debates of tlle late-seventeenth century.

In this dissertation, I argue that the fantasy imagery of tum-of-the-century British illustrators Arthur Rackham, Aubrey Beardsley, and Sidney Sime, and French filmmakers Georges Méliès and Emile Cohl functions as visual rhetorical "texts" that explicate contemporaneous ideas about the self. At the fin de siecle, models of the self were shaped, in part, by scientific thought that interrogated themes of materiality and immateriality, visibility and invisibility, univalence and multivalence, permanence and impermanence. Dream Work grapples with these oppositions, the questions they brought up, and the provisional answers they elicited. I argue that both the science and the design considered in this study dealt with these oppositions, and the models of the self they elaborated, through a shared visual rhetoric of literal representation or hazy abstraction. I reveal this shared visual rhetoric through analysis of the form of the design considered in this study and its relationship to visual aspects of contemporaneous scientific discourse. I first show how Rackham's imagery, which echoes the visual vocabulary of physiognomical diagrams, deals with material aspects of self and mind. But Rackham's work likewise positions the mind as part of a grand continuum with the natural world. I describe the ways that Beardsley's imagery fluctuates between expression of material and ethereal elaborations of the self manifested in contemporaneous dream theory. And I show how Sime's imagery - which mirrors late nineteenth-century notions of the realms of other dimensions - probes abstract qualities of the self in strangely material forms. Finally, I discuss the ways that the mystifying abstraction that characterizes tum-of-the-century ideas about time, space, and motion marks the mutable selves expressed in Méliès and Cohl's work. In this dissertation, I likewise challenge the hegemony of the written word and of verbal analytical methods for interpreting visual entities. My goal, however, is not to dispense with the verbal analysis of visual artifacts. Rather, my intention is to foreground visual rhetorical analysis as a powerful method for understanding the visuality of both visual and verbal entities.

Underlying all the ideas articulated in this thesis is a political challenge to the designer's innate right to occupy a hierarchical position in the designer/user relationship. Equally, where these relationships have been superseded (in for example Desktop Publishing and web page design) the designer still has an important, but quite different, role to play. In contrast to some community design-led initiatives, the aim here is not necessarily to welcome users into an aspect of the conventional design process on terms determined by the designer by helping users conform to practices established by the designer. The aim is the development of strategies in which the designer and user can influence each other without dominating, going beyond conventional strategies of consultancy or feedback. My determination is not to turn everyday users into mouthpieces of surrogate design sensibility, in the way that 'makeover' TV programs, and their DIY predecessors, promote a particular aesthetic as good design, leading to a rejection of direct communication between designer and user. This places the designer in a position of power; users will skew their responses towards what they think the designer is looking for. Also designers could never work so inexpensively as to engage in bespoke design activity for more than a fraction of the population. This view has been achieved through the interplay of my own design practice and a spectrum of theoretical (broadly post-structural) influences, although most individuals referenced here would reject this (or any category), including Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, and the Situationists. My responses to these ideas influence and are influenced by the production of a range of design proposals, and the promotion of the colonisation, modification and even hijacking by others, including designers, users and educators. These have developed in a number of phases: 1 Modular/Adaptive proposals for office furniture, and product design; 2 CAD/CAM proposals in which users select and modify 'design methods' to help them exploit the more technical expert systems available to help them create their own artefacts; 3 Flexible communication systems, which are designs populated and modified by users in ways beyond the control or knowledge of the designer. These stages show an evolution in my creative responses from producing designed artefacts that promote interaction with users, to systems in which the designer and user have to contribute jointly for the systems to function. It is organic, uncontrolled development by the user that determines the development and configuration of these systems guided by the initial conditions and processes determined by the designer. This allows the interreIationship of designers and truly user-led creative activities.

The intertextual theories of V. N. Voloshinov, Mikhail Bakhtin and the early Julia Kristeva provide the most convincing account of the processes of textual production, conceived as constitutively social, cultural and historical. However, the ways in which intertextual accounts of reading (or 'use') have extended such theories have foreclosed their potential. In much contemporary literary and cultural theory, it is assumed that reading, conceived intertextually, is no simple decoding process, but there is little interest in what interpretation, as a process, is, and its relations to reading. It is these questions which this thesis seeks to answer. The introduction sets the scene both for the problem and its methodological treatment: drawing certain post-structuralist and pragmatic theories of meaning into confrontation, and producing a critical synthesis. Part one (chapters one to three) elaborate these two traditions of meaning and stages the encounter. Chapter one offers detailed expositions of Voloshinov, Bakhtin and Kristeva, contrasting these with other intertextual theories of production and reception. Chapter two examines inferential accounts of communication within pragmatics, focusing on Paul Grice and on Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's Relevance theory. Chapter three stages an encounter between these radically different traditions. A common ground is identified: both are rhetorical approaches to meaning, focusing on the relations between texts, contexts and their producers and interpreters. Each tradition is then subjected to the theoretical scrutiny of the other. Inferential theories expose the lack of specificity in intertextual accounts which completely ignore inferencing as a process. Intertextual theories reveal that text and context have semantically substantive intertextual dimensions, most particularly genre and register (conceived intertextually) which are ignored by inferential theories. Text and context are therefore far more semantically fixed than such theories suppose. Both traditions ignore the role of production practices other than 'speech' or 'writing', i.e. they ignore how publishing practices - editing, design, production and marketing - constitute genre and shape reading. In Part Two (chapters four to six), the critique is developed into an account of interpretation. Interpretation, conceived intertextually, is significantly, though not exclusively, inferential, but inferential processes do not 'work' in the ways proposed by existing inferential theories. Patterns of inference are ordered by the relations between discourses (in Foucault's sense) and genres in the text, the reader's knowledge and the conditions of reading. Chapter four elaborates the concepts required for such an account of interpretation, centring on the role of publishing processes and the text's material form in shaping interpretation. The limits of existing accounts of the edition and publishing, specifically Gerard Genette's Paratexts and work in the 'new' textual studies, call for a more expansive account of how publishing shapes genre and interpretation. Chapters five and six develop two case-studies which extend these concepts and arguments. These examine two contemporary publishing categories: 'classics' (Penguin, Everyman etc.) and literary theory textbooks (Introductions and Readers). Through the detailed analyses of particular editions, I develop and substantiate a stronger and richer account of interpretation as process and practice and its relation to reading. This is expanded in the final chapter.

This work enters into debates about about the meaning and significance of messianism in the Anglophone context of 'continental philosophy'. It does so by investigating the work of two traditionally opposed German philosophers, T. W. Adorno and Martin Heidegger. These figures stand behind the alternative traditions of recent philosophical messianism: historical materialist and neo-Heideggerian, or post-Hegelian and anti-Hegelian. Where the former tradition classically proposes the possibility of progress in, or towards history, without clearly questioning the metaphysical grounds of this possibility, the latter tradition questions the ontological nature of grounding itself, but often at the price of forfeiting a concept of historical change. The tum to messianism within historical materialism, inspired by Walter Benjamin, involves an attempt to give an account of these grounds. While sympathising with the motivation behind this tum, I suggest that it risks upholding a metaphysics that is equally as problematic as the one it opposes. I seek to interpret Adorno's late conception of an expression of 'waiting in vain' as a critique of historical materialist messianism. Since Adorno's idea is fragmentary, and still relies upon traditional metaphysics, it is read in relation to Heidegger's ontological account of waiting, according to his overall understanding of metaphysical modernity as a will to domination. The question of waiting connects the thought of Adorno and Heidegger - this has been understated in the secondary literature. I suggest that the connection is all the more convincing when their respective ideas of waiting are understood in relation to their philosophies of music and of 'the musical'. This theme is examined within a broader context of music and philosophy. It is pursued in order to respond to the overall problematic. A 'musical' concept of waiting can address some of the metaphysical problems encountered in a philosophy 'after' messianism, because it can propose an alternative notion of promise. The example of this expression is the music of Luigi Nono. A critical examination of his works is taken to elucidate the spatiotemporal character of an expression of waiting in vain, in a manner that both enriches and problematises the solely philosophical readings.

This dissertation comprises an exploration of the thesis that a holistic education entailing multi-disciplinary study is essential if classical singers and vocal pedagogues are to be prepared adequately for performance, for their teaching role, and for cooperation in inter-professional relations. The disciplines pertinent to vocal pedagogy are examined, and their varied contributions are discussed with a view to showing the ways in which they are mutually supportive. The case is argued on the basis of an exhaustive analysis of the relevant literature, and is underpinned by my wide professional experience as a soprano, and as a teacher both in primary, secondary and higher education, and in private practice at home and abroad. Starting with a survey of views on vocal pedagogy from biblical and classical times to the present day, important diverse roots are exposed, yielding differing and even conflicting tonal ideals which have a bearing on the consideration of different singing styles, and the interpretation of songs and arias. Ethics and psychology are identified as central to the entire pedagogical process, along with the scientific basis of singing, encompassing acoustics, anatomy and physiology, with special reference to the bearing of the latter two upon vocal health and hygiene. A detailed consideration of singing technique is the centrepiece of the dissertation, building on the scientific basis already presented. The several aspects of technique are discussed, and an understanding of the relations between good technique and scientific awareness is shown to be fundamental to good vocal pedagogical practice. In differing ways all of the disciplines thus far discussed - history, the ethics and psychology, science, vocal technique - contribute to performance, which is the next topic dealt with. In addition, since the evaluation of performance is a question of aesthetics, that branch of philosophy is introduced as a further discipline contributing to the education of the fully equipped singer and vocal pedagogue. While a considerable amount of research has been undertaken by others on the individual disciplines discussed in this dissertation, no study to date has attempted the task of showing the inter-relationships of all of them, and the ways in which together they bear upon classical singing pedagogy. The central theme of the dissertation is that the adoption of a holistic, multidisciplinary approach is of particular benefit to singers and voice teachers, and that such an approach facilitates mutual co-operation between them and other voice professionals.