This thesis presents the findings of the practice-led investigation which documented the processes of learning the skills of framework knitting, using traditional techniques to establish creative dialogues between Academic, Industrial and Heritage institutions. The investigation was conducted using active researcher participation to determine the contribution that personal experience can make to ‘experiential knowing’. This research was supported by a Collaborative Doctoral Award from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) which set the parameters of the inquiry to include creative interaction with locations where framework knitting still takes place. The study supported the preservation of technical skill by establishing a new way to value expert craft knowledge which was used to inspire contemporary creative practice. Through a process of creative learning and reflection, this study used naturalistic observations to identify evidence of creative decision-making and technical skill, which was further supported by the analysis of knitted artefacts and previously unseen workman’s notebooks which were used to identify pattern inspirations, stitch counts and construction methods. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with existing hand frame practitioners, to record their personal experiences of framework knitting. The shortage of knowledgeable experts was a significant limitation to this investigation and therefore the interview testimonies were a vital contribution of primary evidence of practitioner knowledge which enabled creative narratives to develop. The narratives explored themes of Inspiration, Exploration, Communication and Implementation, as well as Creative application. As the first study of its kind to investigate framework knitting beyond a historical or industrial context, this thesis contributes to a new field of creative knowledge which uses practitioner interaction and personal reflection to inform creative practice on the hand frame. This thesis highlights a contemporary direction for future practice-led inquiry using traditional craft skills and practices as a method of inspiring creative investigation.

The aim of this research is to develop a new method, Hybrid Printing System (HPS) to explore digital craft methods to create surface patterns for printed textile design. This novel method of creating ‘handcrafted’ prints is a result of the integration of two technologies such as motion-capture (MOCAP) and digital textile printing (DTP). The research towards such an innovation required a current, historical, contextual and experimental study of use of motion capture in Art &Design. The research contextualises the hand and its relationship to digital crafting methods in printed textile design, the digital medium and the process of audience participation in printed textile design to create a new conceptual framework balanced in practice and theory. The practical research then develops three new methods of motion capture such as, motion tracing, motion sensing and motion tracking to generate gestural motifs and gestural patterns. This thesis and the accompanying set of experimental work demonstrates that HPS culminates in developing new aesthetics through a new mode of creation in a new medium, which will impact the user, the designer and the product as a part of the cyclical process. HPS is an advancement of printed textile design, centred in active participation of its audience at the generative stage of design. This results in a shifting role of a designer and subverts the current model of printed textile design practice. HPS is a democratic design process where the participants design for themselves, have their own voice, which induces a sense of community, togetherness and harmony in the creative process.

This thesis sets out to investigate the understanding of the relationship between key-frame movement performances and procedural animation. It is geared towards building a theory of practice that would help develop a succinct method for generating believable character animation using procedural animation. This research places an emphasis on a practical aproach to the theory of animation and movement, and investigates the historical development of character animation and the notion of believability. It uses Laban Movement Analysis as a method in the application of procedural animation. The study seeks to address the following objectives: (1) To examine what areas of procedural animation may enhance the believability of a key-framed movement performance; (2) To identify the areas of procedural animation that are or could be used within professional studio practice; (3) To examine the potential of procedural animation to help develop convincing and life-like character movements; (4) To identify where and how a keyframed character movement can be enhanced procedurally; (5) To carry out empirical studies in order to analyse the effects and possible benefits of procedural enhancements on a key-framed movement. The techniques used for data collection include a literature review, observation, content analysis, a survey, discussions with practitioners and semi-structured interviews; the study also incorporates the author’s experience in practice The information gathered was analysed quantitatively and qualitatively. Procedural animation is an uncharted practice within the field of animation; as such, its effects and its relationship to the notions, phenomena, theories and understandings of character animation appear to have been little investigated. The discussions conducted with practitioners in the course of the study confirm that in the current context, where procedural animation is an unguided practice, they are driven to time-consuming implementation procedures, which also prevent undergraduate and postgraduate students to study and research in to this powerful tool. The recommendations and suggested approaches that follow aim to develop an understanding of the complex relation between the practice of procedural animation and believable character movement performances, to help fill this gap.

Building on original ethnographic work carried out in a cosmopolitan, multicultural British context, as well as on dialogical engagements with textile experts, artists and designers, this study prioritizes — in an attempt to fill a void in the existing literature — the analysis of privately-informed, emotional, spiritual, artistic, idiographic (versus public, political/ideological, or class-related) aspects of modest gear appropriation. Drawing on a wide range of scholarship, from anthropology, history and fashion studies to psychology and design theory, the project looks into the creative individuations and taste (in)formation mechanisms of contemporary modest wear, with a particular stress on the Islamic headscarf. In concrete terms, the focus falls on agency-driven, (micro)cultural and psycho-sartorial dynamics of hijab observance, and the ways these are enmeshed, in real life cases, within a socio-biographical tableau of a far more complex facture than has been generally acknowledged. I will evidence throughout how, alongside publicly-evident aspects, there can, indeed, exist an incredibly rich depth 'inside‘ a textile‘s surface. Above all, the nexus of relationships between (material) dress, as it is worn and/or created by a subject at a given point in time, and its (immaterial) projections into the person‘s imagination, memory, and value system — in other words, the idiographic, often self-enhancing experience resulting from its wearing or making — will be brought to the fore.

This thesis raises concerns about current heritage practice regarding notions of inclusivity, the agency of audiences and the authority of heritage institutions, such as museums. Experts including Tony Bennet (1998), Graham Black (2005), and Eileen Hooper-Greenhill (1994) claim that recent developments in heritage practice have directed museums towards offering experiences that invite active, participatory viewing, rather than that which is passive, or merely receptive. Similarly, in the field of contemporary art practice Grant Kester and Claire Bishop argue the importance of audiences’ participation, inclusivity and agency to current approaches. Evidently, certain standpoints within the literature concerned with each of these fields, state an attitude of sensitivity to imbalances of power between audiences and either artistic or heritage practices. However, this thesis recognizes and demonstrates that authoritative, or hierarchical approaches to audiences exist within each field, and guided by poststructurally informed theoretical perspectives, it confronts these approaches. Moreover, this thesis claims to establish a unique, interactive and practical autoethnographic approach to artistic research, which supported by its theoretical perspectives, generates non-authoritative and democratic methods. In particular, this thesis establishes that, dialogical engagement prompted by audiences’ responses to artistic situations and aesthetic objects, results in non-authoritative, or democratic encounters with heritage and contemporary art. Consequently, the contributions to knowledge that this thesis makes foreground a new dialogical art practice identified as ‘gossip practice’, whereby interactive co-authorship of new oral artifacts is generated through informal and empathic relating. Additionally, through the thesis’ theoretical framing of this study’s newly identified ‘gossip practice’ within the concepts of performativity and everyday social acting, it makes a new contribution to the established literature on ‘heritage performance’ (see Jackson & Kidd 2011) and ‘intangible heritage’ (see Smith 2006, 2008). This thesis also contributes a new model for approaches to Nottingham’s lace heritage, whereby audiences’ encounters with combined material objects and sensory experience facilitate open ended, participant directed interactivity. As well, the thesis contributes a new model for exhibition preview events that, through consultation with diverse communities, offers a democratic and inclusive approach to audiences. Finally, with regard to Nottingham lace in particular, this thesis contributes new models for the public display of heritage artifacts, and in doing so presents alternatives to conventional, authoritative approaches that, conceptually and physically separate audiences from artifacts.

As a practitioner in site-specific performance, my research arose from an interest in how aspects of globalisation (time-space compression, homogenisation, technological development, travel and diaspora) are affecting people's experience of place, and how site related performances (referred to here as 'performances of place') might offer a questioning of or resistance to these phenomena. My research drew on the theories of Henri Lefebvre (e.g. 1991, 1996) who suggested that 'To change life ... we must first change space' (Lefebvre 1991: 189). In this thesis, I consider how contemporary 'performances of place' can be seen to 'change space'. I look at practices from both the overtly political and the more aesthetically orientated ends of the performance spectrum. In an analysis of the antiglobalisation protests surrounding the G8 summit (Gleneagles 2005), I suggest that art activist practices attempt to 'change space' through creating a fluid, spontaneous and nonlinear organisation of/in space in contrast to the carefully 'cut up and marked' (Neild 2006:61) spaces of state and global capitalist control. In looking at the practices of contemporary performance companies, Lone Twin and Blast Theory, I suggest that their practices create an alternative spatiality by blurring the boundaries between place and space (or 'concrete' and 'abstract 'space, to use Lefebvre's terms). I then propose that 'performances of place' in themselves create a 'doubling' (Lefebvre 1991: 188) of place that destabilises any fixed meanings of place. In my framework, The Five Acts, I explore how this 'doubling' of place and performance operates through different types of performance, which I divide into five categories: act out, act as if, act as, act up and act/ion. The framework is then applied to a case study of a small-scale performance by Reckless Sleepers as part of Oxford's Evolving City festival.

The thesis establishes a sovereign artist figure, which operates through fictionalisation. It is suggested that the figure of the artist is free to be anything in tenor with the movement of emancipation in modern art. This sovereignty is mapped on to the concept of sovereignty – particularly Bataille’s concept of sovereign subjectivity – and read against his notion of a restricted economy of purpose and a general economy of excess. The double movement is explored via Derrida to suggest a self-ruinous, sovereign subjectivity. This subject is then relocated in terms of political sovereignty to suggest a privileged artistic subject of decision, whose transgression is similar in structure to that of the political sovereign. The sovereignty of the artist is thought of in terms of Bataillean ‘useless self-expenditure’ as a ‘counter-sovereign sovereignty’. Laughter is seen as a key attribute. The self-ruin, implied in Derrida’s concept of ‘autoimmunity’, is conceived as a falling sovereignty, which implicates the world in a contagious comedy. This comedy unfolds in a materialism of literature as a Bataillean ‘sovereign operation’. From Derrida’s understanding of the sovereign phantasm as a speech-act, it is suggested that the political sovereignty of power operates within the same materialism. Power is understood to unfold as spectacle on the same order as the shenanigans of the artist comedian. Ultimately, the contagion of laughter is seen as the true counter-sovereign operation. This comedy of falling is borne out in the supplement. The papers document how the researcher lost consecutive court cases while writing. In the first, against an author and his publishing house, he lost ownership of his identity. In the second he was taken to court as he refused to be held accountable for actions attributed to that identity. The posturing in the court cases is revealed as a comedy, but with real consequences.

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This research contributes to knowledge by conceptualising a post-foundational theoretical base to assess the significance of social art practices and their political dimension, whilst allowing, at the same time, for such a foundation to remain permanently contingent. Thereby, I discus the key terms: society, the social and the political in relation to art. In so doing I identify the two main criteria for social art practices namely non-identitarian solidarity and minimal politics which, I argue, constitute and define the possibility for the political in social art practice. The (post-foundational) criteria for minimal politics are organisation, strategy, collectivism and the aim of becoming a majority (Marchart 20 I 0: 318). In order to distinguish the political potential of social art practices from any form of totalitarian political art they have to be democratic and have to be at least based on principles such as freedom and equality. I then claim that social art practices also have the potential to become radically democratic, as soon as they base their practice on the principle of difference and root their practice in non-identitarian solidarity. Prerequisites for social art practices developed in this thesis contend that art becomes a social practice as soon as it intervenes aesthetically into social conditions by oscillating between the poles of aI1istic dialogue and aesthetic autonomy. The artistic component of this PhD project is the website project The Political Sphere in Art Practices, which is based on interviews that I conducted with experts in the field of social practice art. The interviewees are Grant Kester, Margit Czenki, Christoph Schafer, Roger Behrens, Neala Schleuning, Mary Jane Jacob, Gregory Sholette and Nora Sternfeld. The project provides an interactive dialogical platform constructed as a modular system of questions, answers and categories.

The thesis analyses the visual space displayed in pictures, film, television and digital interactive media. The argument is developed that depictions are informed by the objectives of the artefact as much as by any simple visual correspondence to the observed world. The simple concept of 'realism' is therefore anatomised and a more pragmatic theory proposed which resolves some of the traditional controversies concerning the relation between depiction and vision. This is then applied to the special problems of digital interactive media. An introductory chapter outlines the topic area and the main argument and provides an initial definition of terms. To provide a foundation for the ensuing arguments, a brief account is given of two existing and contrasted approaches to the notion of space: that of perception science which gives priority to acultural aspects, and that of visual culture which emphasises aspects which are culturally contingent. An existing approach to spatial perception (that of JJ Gibson originating in the 1940s and 50s) is applied to spatial depiction in order to explore the differences between seeing and picturing, and also to emphasise the many different cues for spatial perception beyond those commonly considered (such as binocularity and linear perspective). At this stage a simple framework of depiction is introduced which identifies five components or phases: the objectives of the picture, the idea chosen to embody the objectives, the model (essentially, the visual 'subject matter'), the characteristics of the view and finally the substantive picture or depiction itself. This framework draws attention to the way in which each of the five phases presents an opportunity for decision-making about representation. The framework is used and refined throughout the thesis. Since pictures are considered in some everyday sense to be 'realistic' (otherwise, in terms of this thesis, they would not count as depictions), the nature of realism is considered at some length. The apparently unitary concept is broken down into several different types of realism and it is argued that, like the different spatial cues, each lends itself to particular objectives intended for the artefact. From these several types, two approaches to realism are identified, one prioritising the creation of a true illusion (that the picture is in fact a scene) and the other (of which there are innumerably more examples both across cultures and over historical time) one which evokes aspects of vision without aiming to exactly imitate the optical stimulus of the scene. Various reasons for the latter approach, and the variety of spatial practices to which it leads, are discussed. In addition to analysing traditional pictures, computer graphics images are discussed in conjunction with the claims for realism offered by their authors. In the process, informational and affective aspects of picture-making are distinguished, a distinction which it is argued is useful and too seldom made. Discussion of still pictures identifies the evocation of movement (and other aspects of time) as one of the principal motives for departing from attempts at straightforward optical matching. The discussion proceeds to the subject of film where, perhaps surprisingly now that the depiction of movement is possible, the lack of straightforward imitation of the optical is noteworthy again. This is especially true of the relationship between shots rather than within them; the reasons for this are analysed. This reinforces the argument that the spatial form of the fiction film, like that of other kinds of depiction, arises from its objectives, presenting realism once again as a contingent concept. The separation of depiction into two broad classes – one which aims to negate its own mediation, to seem transparent to what it depicts, and one which presents the fact of depiction ostensively to the viewer – is carried through from still pictures, via film, into a discussion of factual television and finally of digital interactive media. The example of factual television is chosen to emphasise how, despite the similarities between the technologies of film and television, spatial practices within some television genres contrast strongly with those of the mainstream fiction film. By considering historic examples, it is shown that many of the spatial practices now familiar in factual television were gradually expunged from the classical film when the latter became centred on the concerns of narrative fiction. By situating the spaces of interactive media in the context of other kinds of pictorial space, questions are addressed concerning the transferability of spatial usages from traditional media to those which are interactive. During the thesis the spatial practices of still-picture-making, film and television are characterised as 'mature' and 'expressive' (terms which are defined in the text). By contrast the spatial practices of digital interactive media are seen to be immature and inexpressive. It is argued that this is to some degree inevitable given the context in which interactive media artefacts are made and experienced – the lack of a shared 'language' or languages in any new media. Some of the difficult spatial problems which digital interactive media need to overcome are identified, especially where, as is currently normal, interaction is based on the relation between a pointer and visible objects within a depiction. The range of existing practice in digital interactive media is classified in a seven-part taxonomy, which again makes use of the objective-idea-model-view-picture framework, and again draws out the difference between self-concealing approaches to depiction and those which offer awareness of depiction as a significant component of the experience. The analysis indicates promising lines of enquiry for the future and emphasises the need for further innovation. Finally the main arguments are summarised and the thesis concludes with a short discussion of the implications for design arising from the key concepts identified – expressivity and maturity, pragmatism and realism.