My research started with a question: Is it possible to create change if we understand life is interdependent and interrelated with nature in our environment? I researched this question from the perspective of a practising artist in the field of environmental art in the context of ecology. I chose trees as the focal point of my enquiry as trees represent the largest living thing we encounter in our day-to-day activities. Empathy, particularly as defined in the work of Edith Stein, emerged as a significant critical construct which I used to examine the inter-dependence and interrelation of humans and trees as dynamic and diverse communities on earth. Empathy is related to metaphor, particularly Donald Schön’s idea of a generative metaphor and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s 'empathic projection'. These metaphorical conceptions can be relied upon to talk about trees without falling into anthropomorphising nature. The research was also informed by positions in the aesthetics of art. First Emily Brady positions human imagination as aesthetic mediation between human perceptions and scientific understanding of nature. Secondly Grant Kester’s dialogical aesthetics that are informed by conversation, inter-subjective exchange and empathic relationship. I then sought to understand how empathy had been embedded in practices of art over the last thirty years. Particular artworks are selected because they are internationally relevant examples of work that intended to create change in a specific public sphere: Time Landscape (1978) by Alan Sonfist, 7000 Oaks (1982) by Joseph Beuys and Serpentine Lattice (1993) by Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison. My interest in these works is focused on the potential for an empathic relationship with trees as living things that are embedded in specific environments. To meet this goal in my aesthetic practice, I have developed a discrete relational artwork in collaboration with a plant physiologist, a computer programmer and other artists to create the means to experience how trees ‘breathe’. This is accomplished by translating the plant physiological processes - photosynthesis and transpiration - to sound using, and extending, a custom software system. I also invented Plein Air, an easel that not only holds the plant's physiological system and the sound system but also becomes a small portable station to observe various trees in different places. In my conclusion I examined the implication of ecological and symbolic meanings that go beyond an artist’s authorship, which is created through this empathydriven enquiry and shared experience between people, place and trees in public places.

This PhD research offers a new conception of negotiation that attempts to re-imagine the roles of and relationships between artist and participant-other in social art practice. Negotiation is implicit in art practice, and is often used without elucidation of its exact processes. This research addresses the gap through an articulation of negotiation that brings both artist and other to new positions of understanding. The resulting construct, negotiationas- active knowing, becomes a mode of knowing the world, others and otherness and distinguishes itself from more goal orientated definitions. The research draws on phenomenology and social art theory: Merleau-Ponty (2002) positions the perceiving body-subject as immersed and mobile within an environment. Shotter (2005) differentiates between ‘aboutness-thinking’ and ‘withness-thinking’. Kester (2011) describes the dynamic between the one and the many in the reciprocal creative labour of collaborative art practice. This literature yields three core qualities that are relevant to negotiation-as- active-knowing: durational immersive involvement, relational responsiveness and calibrative interplay. The research maps these qualities onto the domains of ‘ground’ (context), ‘contact’ (encounter) and ‘movement’ (art work/ process), that are drawn from the researcher’s experiences in social engagement for over 15 years. Negotiation-as -active-learning is tested through three case projects: Networking and Collaborations in Culture and the Arts (NICA), Burma 2002-2007; Galway Travellers Project, Republic of Ireland 2009-2010; and Imagining Possibilities/Thinking Together, Mongolia 2009-2011. Each project inflects and develops the conceptual framework; initially as a critical concept used retrospectively and increasingly as a generative concept that forms the dynamic of the work. The research concludes that the three core qualities of negotiation-as-active-knowing are intertwined and mutually supportive and cannot be practised in isolation of one another. Negotiation-as-active-knowing may potentially be effective both within the arts and more widely, in social, cultural life, in dealing with difference, or to possibly pre-empt conflict.

Mans conscious and unconscious contribution to the environment. An exploration through drawings, paintings, prints and philosophical diary, one man's reaction to chosen images from his surroundings. Mans creative aspirations now, as throughout history, have followed many pathways using all the accepted art forms be they visual, written, spoken, musical or in the form of movement. The underlying reasons for creative energy are many and extremely diverse. Less noticeable, yet equally prolific, is mankinds 'unconscious' creative contribution to his environment and to the very substance of his life. Aesthetic principles are often ignored yet beauty abounds quite naturally often in most unusual ways. Mans own intuitive instinct is a precious commodity worthy of greater recognition and understanding. The entire visual works presented for higher degree together with the written narrative represent a search for just a few of mans unwitting contributions. The thesis supports the major practical involvement by recording, in diary form, the writer's reaction to a few of these 'unconscious' contributions to nature's beauty; with an analysis of his own thoughts, and reactions to the use of materials, techniques, composition,colour and form creating a process of evaluation. Justification and comment are offered on the dilemma of perception in the expression of artistic beliefs as support to the theory that accurate self analysis can lead to wider communication and a better understanding of the nature of creativity.

This thesis is an analysis of the social, political and historical inter-relationships between moving image technologies, constructions of gender and sexuality, and theories of science and technology. Presented as a series of case-studies on film, video, medical imaging and computer technology in the work of five women artists, this thesis looks at the way in which artistic practice overturns traditional theories of technology as purely ‘instrumental’, theories of the subject in which identity is tied to the body, and the assumption that women do not access technology in a sophisticated way. It considers the various ways in which women artists have engaged with, and subverted, the explicit body in representation through deploying new moving image technologies at the historical moment of their widespread distribution across domestic, artistic, pornographic and medical spheres. It ends by asking what is the political potential in challenging the anthropomorphic and destabilizing the figurative through abstraction? Beginning with an investigation into the way in which Carolee Schneemann uses the material properties of film to establish a haptic encounter, in which female and feline bodies are caught up in a sexual economy of touch (pet/petting), this thesis then looks at the work of Kate Craig and the mutual expansion of pornography and home-video technology, questioning the emergence of the ‘amateur’ in relation to theories of power and gender; offers a technological and philosophical modeling of medical imaging technology (taking endoscopy in the work of Mona Hatoum as a case study); and re-evaluates the use of binary in information systems beyond a limiting analogy with ‘Western binaries’ through the work of Nell Tenhaaf. Using the languages of art history together with science & technology studies, medical discourse and feminism, this research theorises gender, technology and medicine as systems of representation that are all deeply inter-connected.

This thesis investigates the German artist Caspar David Friedrich and his involvement in the woodcut production of his brother, the carpenter and furniture maker Christian Friedrich. An analysis of published correspondence and other, previously unpublished material reveals that the collaboration of the Friedrich brothers lasted circa 25 years and encompassed the production of at least twelve, probably fourteen woodcuts. During this period, Caspar David Friedrich's role changed significantly, from initial designer to later agent and general advisor. It also becomes apparent that this collaboration was not without tensions, which can be related to the brothers' different backgrounds and respective expectations from the woodcut technique. The Friedrich brothers' various woodcut activities are further investigated in the print-historical context of woodcut making in early nineteenth-century Germany. This includes a discussion of the woodcut practitioners Johann Friedrich Unger and Friedrich Wilhelm Gubitz and the emergence of the English wood-engraving technique, popularised by Thomas Bewick and his pupils. Particular attention is paid to the reproductive applications of the woodcut technique which ranged from ephemeral printmaking, textile-printing, book decorations to fine art reproduction. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the Romantic movement and the discovery of the woodcut's potential as symbol of cultural identity. Within this context, the Friedrich brothers' early woodcuts are re-evaluated as illustrative work for a possible publication of poems and texts by Caspar David Friedrich.

Art and science cannot 'want' anything, but artists can be interested in disciplinary outcomes other than those authenticated within their own field, and scientists can want a greater sense of cultural agency than is allowed within a strictly-ruled discipline. The pursuit of such aspirations puts into contention the integrity of arts and sciences as disciplines (for knowing and making a world), and the effectiveness of their cultures in transmitting their selectivist disciplinary gains, or opening them to participation and scrutiny. This inquiry uses Pierre Bourdieu's formulation of the social fields of art and science critically within a self-reflexive (artist's) discourse. It asks whether aspirations to extend art and science in the ways summarized above are mutually-enhancing, or part of a struggle for disciplinary dominance and the control of normative culture. The aim is a better understanding of what is at stake for an ambiguously-defined contemporary art when artists and scientists extend their interests to each other's fields – given that their aspirations ('wants') can be disciplinary or cultural, and either intrinsic or extrinsic, conventionally speaking, to their home fields. Conventionally, art as a discipline modulates between the aesthetic and the intellectual, the wild and the rational, remaining ambiguous about its precise gains. Within the extended field of art, this ambiguity is resolved opportunistically, among mutuallydependent agents: artists, curators, academics, collectors (etc.). Explicitly scienceengaged art is a special case within this art world, and, conversely, art-world conventions are rejected by some prominent art-science practitioners. Such selective authentications and disavowals raise the stakes around science-engaged art. On the one hand it seems, at best, to be merely indexical of the ongoing scientification of everything; on the other, it particularizes the idea of art as a vector of rational agency, inviting a new necessity and progressivity in art.

This practice-related study uses a range of play theory to examine the creative processes behind the work of Eduardo Paolozzi, Philip Guston and Tony Oursler. All three artists express a need to create a semblance of life. Drawing on the work of D.W. Winnicott, Jean Piaget and Brian Sutton-Smith, the desire to animate matter is explored as the persistence of animistic play during adulthood. For Paolozzi, this desire is articulated as an attempt at “going beyond the Thing, and trying to make some kind of presence”;1 for Guston, it is expressed as a need to create “an organic thing that can lead its own life”2 and for Oursler, this manifests through a fascination with videoʼs ability to transform the “inanimate to animate”.3 By concentrating on the artistsʼ processes, the thesis explores the productive potential of moving away from a retrospective approach to childhood play. The particular form of play examined in this thesis is defined as a group of activities, objectives and perceptions that evolve. This enables the focus of the study to shift from the interpretation of a final image onto a potential toolkit of methods. The thesis uses this supposed ʻtoolkitʼ to activate the work in order to keep process alive in an object or image. The artistsʼ processes are seen to engage with the unforeseen and the unresolved. The repeated presence of stacking and piling in the work of Paolozzi and Guston is explored as a responsive process, whilst a notion of emergent narrative is proposed to place works by all three artists within change. Finally, the artistsʼ processes are discussed in relation to definitions of absurdity. In this context the artistsʼ uses of contradiction and incongruity are seen as means to suspend finality.

This dissertation analyses the social, cultural, and material construction of the landscape observer in the United States in mid-nineteenth century. Based on the aesthetic ideal of a perfect union between technology and nature, the reception of landscape entailed the notion of the artist/observer as a hybrid figure that comprised the human and the machine. This quasi-mechanical gaze, individual and corporate at the same time, played a determining role in the construction and diffusion of a nationalist model of democratic spectatorship embedded within pastoral ideology. In this cultural climate, the photographic apparatus, defined by Oliver Wendell Holmes as a ‘mirror with a memory,’ was adopted as a model for the landscape observer. Contrary to previous studies on the relationship among vision, technology, and modernity, in which modern visuality is considered as an abstract, totalizing, and homogeneous phenomenon based on a francocentric model, this dissertation emphasizes the ‘plurality’ of modern vision by situating visual practices and technologies within their specific local and material contexts. First, I discuss how the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for technology shaped the representation and reception of landscape within the visual arts, constituting the American spectator as a performative and collective cohabitation of the visual and the political. The analysis moves on to show how ‘high’ and popular culture embraced the model of the ‘mirror with a memory.’ Transforming landscape experience into a personal and collective ritual of nation formation, this model informed the paintings hanging in the homes of the élites, the large canvases by famous artists shown to the wide public as ‘Great Pictures Exhibitions,’ panorama and diorama spectacles, stereoscopic photography. Lastly, I investigate the relationships among scientific culture, survey photography, and landscape painting. Rather than questioning photography’s ‘artisticity,’ I look at the commercial and debased manifestations of painting and their relation with popular culture at the time of industrialization, media explosion, and the commodification of images.

The core of my investigation is the construction of narratives through film, self-fashioning and fashioning by others through the complex histories of cultural encounter — through colonialism, tourism, translation, ethnography. I will attempt to look at these encounters and the different forms of mimicry they have engendered as a positive force where the acquisition of ‘otherness’ becomes both performative and formative, immersive and mocking. I will look at both sides of the reflected gaze, and look for moments when through imitation/emulation/ mimicry one has tried to capture the other. In so doing I will navigate between the multiple subject positions and locations I personally inhabit as belonging and not belonging to the ‘east’ and the ‘west’, as constituting but also being produced by a cinematic apparatus, as embodied in the physical experience of the sweat, touch and dizziness of the dance while producing relations of power and spectatorship. I will draw on feminist film theory, postcolonial theory and theories of material culture to renegotiate the location of identity in the non-West and to consider ways of analysing cultural objects beyond disciplinary boundaries. The production of meaning has been theorised extensively in poststructuralist thought as one of endless displacement and infinite semiosis, yet is still held within bounded disciplines. The meanings circulate in all forms of cultural production and have the potential of producing fictions as well as analyses, inscriptions, as well as descriptions. The work we engage with as artists and researchers has also the potential of affecting and producing social relations, while trying to capture the relations in the making. The PhD submission will also include moving image, 16mm films on DVD referring to the current state of Zagreb and the war crime trials at the Hague.

Tibetan Tantric Buddhism is today considered one of the most important and controversial forms of Asian culture, using a rich and somewhat complicated range of methods and materials. The perception of the ‘mystical’ nature of Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art in the world beyond Tibet has changed and evolved significantly and profoundly over the last three decades. However, contemporary Tibetan artists feel confused about how to develop a Tibetan art tradition within the context of a globalised world. 　　Against this background I am interested in exploring the mysterious nature of Tibetan Tantric Buddhism and its art through grasping its religious values, historical context, and artistic qualities. In so doing I try to investigate questions concerning the cross-cultural analysis and utility of images in Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art, as opposed to political conflicts that often arise in the media now. 　　As an exploration of Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art and its contemporary significance, this research seeks to fulfill three important goals: first, to introduce Tibet’s mystical and magnificent art within its historical and religious contexts to those unfamiliar with either Tibet Buddhism or Tibetan Buddhist art and its cultural background; second, to examine the influences of Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art tradition on some contemporary Tibetan and non-Tibetan artists’ art practice; and third, to embark on combining theoretical research, methods of meditation and my own art practice as a way of exploring the trans-cultural translation of Tibetan Buddhist art in Chinese and Western contexts. The aim is to explore the potential of Tibetan Tantric Buddhist art as elucidating common ground between the meditative mind and the creative mind for engaging in an open conversation of faith, spirituality, religion, and aesthetic experiences in the contemporary period.