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Through a series of case studies, analysed via the theoretical framework of site-specificity, this thesis explores the ways in which artists, from the 1980s to the present, have attempted to critically represent and understand more fully the socio-political fabric of the Mexico-U.S. border and the systemic violence that undergirds it. The introduction discusses the historical and political context of the thesis, establishes its methodological territory and outlines the current research of this field. Chapter One focuses on the collective Border Art Workshop/Taller the Arte Fronterizo (BAW/TAF) arguing, with reference to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnival, that these artists tried to propose an new narrative of the Mexican and U.S. history. Chapter Two focuses on performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña whose work, created at the height of the institutionalisation of multiculturalism, analysed the role of capitalism in creating attitudes that operated along the pernicious lines of race and nationality. Chapter Three examines Ursula Biemann’s video-essay Performing the Border, where the artist analyses female deskilled labour carried out in sweatshops in northern Mexico. I examine how she attempts to represent the hypermobility of capital vis-à-vis the physical immobility of the assembly plant worker. Chapter Four deals with Chantal Akerman’s film From the Other Side, arguing that her focus on landscape not only reveals how national narratives are often tied to representations of landscape, but also offers valuable insights into the journeys that migrants have to endure in order to cross the border. Chapter Five reviews the work of Teresa Margolles and her engagement with the so-called ‘drug war’ that has witnessed deaths in the tens of thousands. She uses bodily fluids obtained from victim’s corpses and in doing so she forces an unprecedented encounter with a section of the population unmatched by visual systems of representation.

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This thesis re-evaluates the arguments about rhythmic accuracy in new complexity. New complexity emerged during the 1980s, prompting composers, performers and analysts to reconsider their own ideas about the ontological status of the score, notational potentials as a compositional tool, compositional intention and the role of the performer as the mediator between the composer, the score and auditor - all under the general notion of the representation of complex phenomena. Richard Toop's paper, Four Facets of 'The New Complexity' (1988) was the beginning of a dialectic that has continued to provoke diverse opinions about the status of new complexity as a distinct genre. The scores by the composers associated with new complexity presented challenges to the performers who had to find new methods of learning the works. I critique these for the benefit of performers new to the area. One view is that a performance is only valid if it is compliant with every aspect of the score. By means of analysis of recordings of works from different instrumental families, I demonstrate that the interpretation of objective analysis to determine such compliance is problematic. Roger Marsh's work on the identification of score with performance, Heroic Motives. Roger Marsh Considers the Relation between Sign and Sound in 'Complex' Music (1994) has been criticised. I show that, while there are flaws, Marsh's questions are still pertinent. My work builds on Marsh's in an attempt to reconcile the notions of accuracy to the score with fidelity to the composer's intentions. Part of this project evaluates all these ideas through my own preparation of three pieces for the guitar by composers inextricably linked with new complexity. The result of this is a CD recording of these works. The case studies can be considered to be a resource for performers.

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Through a creative portfolio of autotopographic sound works and a written thesis, this research explores the role of sound within individual and collective constructions of place. The process of walking in specific locations has generated materials such as text, field recordings, photographs, and objects, which together form a body of site-specific work that includes soundwalks, fixed audio pieces, installations and live performances. The voices present in these works are often disembodied, and play with language and time to test the possibilities of re-contextualising, or mis-'placing', the body and the mind within primarily aural surroundings. This practice-as-research. PhD examines the many layers of association, meaning, and significance that interconnect across our surrounding environments, not only in places of physical and conceptual stability but also in sites of liminality. This research offers new insights into the role of sound art in geographic identity, while placing language and voice at the centre of this work. I argue that artworks and discourses that consider interactions between sound and site can contribute to an understanding of these subjective relationships, and their influence on self-identity.

This thesis is a written commentary accompanying a portfolio of original compositions and interactive installations that are composed primarily of environmental sound. The portfolio confronts many themes that, together, work to recontextualise environmental sound. These themes include: varying context in sound by stimulating multiple listening modes simultaneously in the quest for a deeper understanding of environmental sound; personification of environmental sound musically, thus embodying performative aspects of environmental sounds through music; accentuating the connection between subjectivity in listening and memory association. suggesting that music has the ability to allow the listener to venture on a unique and personal journey, relative to associative memory. There are six fixed medium compositions in the portfolio. These are The Listening House, The Watering Hole, Passage of the Masses, Port of Call. Magnetoception: A Geomagnetic Flight and Filtered & Blended. There are also three interactive installations: Auragate, Zettajoules and Camera Obscura Quietus. The works in the portfolio constantly shift environmental context and consequently perception of such sounds. This changing of perception can lead either to the personification, objectification or expunction of certain soundscape relationships through composition. All of which help to reveal sound in new light, thus giving new context and a higher level of understanding of the soundscape and the sounds therein.

This thesis focuses on the body in political debate during the Romantic period. My original contribution to knowledge is an analysis of a corpus of periodical writing in intense detail, and I track the way in which periodical writing utilises a medical vocabulary and the reasons for this appropriation. I identify the key concern of each popular periodical, and reveal the way in which the editors attempt to achieve their goal by using language borrowed from medical discourse. I also uncover the ways in which periodical writing influenced medicine, by outlining how medical practice was politicised by social and cultural demands. Political essays and letters are the main focus of the thesis, but I also analyse poetry included in the periodical press, paying attention to formal attributes such as article placement. Illustration and marginalia are also considered. I argue that political, social, and cultural agendas shaped the direction in which medical discourse moved. Periodicals have been selected as my primary texts due to their immediacy and highly political nature, and I have selected titles that were prominent in both the literary and political spheres. I conclude that the body becomes a site of political contention in the Romantic period, and is used as an allegory in discussions of systems, power, and resistance.

This collection of published works is an outcome of my practice-led inter-disciplinary collaborative artistic research into deepening understanding of creative process in the field of contemporary dance. It comprises thirty written works published from 1999 to 2007 in various formats and platforms. This collection is framed by a methodological discussion that provides insight into how this research has intersected over time with diverse fields of practice including contemporary dance, digital and new media arts and non-art domains such as cognitive and social science. Fields are understood in the context of this research to be largely constituted out of the expert practices of individual collaborators. This research starts from an interest in the impact of new media technologies on dance making/ choreography. The collection of works show evidence, established in the first two publications, of an evolving engagement with two concepts related to this interest: (1) the 'algorithm' as a process-level connection or bridge between dance composition and computation; (2) the empirical study of movement embedded as a 'knowledge base' in the practices of both computer animation and dance and thus forming a special correspondence between them. This collection provides evidence of this research through a period of communitybuilding amongst artists using new media technologies in performance, and culminates in the identification of an emerging 'community of practice' coming together around the formation of a unique body of knowledge pertaining to dance. 5 The late 1990s New Media Art movement provided a supportive context for important peer-to-peer encounters with creators and users of software tools and platforms in the context of inter-disciplinary art making. A growing interest in software programming as a creative practice opened up fresh perspectives on possible connections with dance making. It became clear that software's utility alone, including artistic uses of software, was a limited conception. This was the background thinking that informed the first major shift in the research towards the design of software that might augment the creative process of expert choreographers and dancers. This shift from software use to its design, framed by a focus on the development of tools to support dance creation, also provided strong rationale to deepen the research into dance making processes. In the second major phase of the research presented here, scientific study is brought collaboratively to bear on questions related to choreographic practice. This lead to a better understanding of ways in which dancers and choreographers, as 'thinking bodies', interact with their design tools and each other in the context of creation work. In addition to this collection, outcomes of this research are traceable to other published papers and art works it has given rise to. Less easily measureable, but just as valuable, are the sustained relations between individuals and groups behind the 'community of practice' now recognised for its development of unique formats for bringing choreographic ideas and processes into contact, now and in the future, with both general audiences and other specialist practices.

This thesis comprises a critical exploration of female dance performances in the recent democratic history of Spain. It discusses democratic Spain’s relationship with the memory and forgetting of its repressive dictatorial past. In the aftermath of Francoism (1939-75), Spain transitioned to a democratic system without confronting those responsible for the repression of the previous regime. This tacit sociopolitical agreement, known as the Pact of Silence, imposed a process of collective amnesia on Spain. As a way of breaking the pact of silence, this analysis traces the development of gender values, under the effects of this social oblivion. My research suggests that this collective historical amnesia has had direct repercussions on the construction of feminine identity in post-Franco Spain. My methodologies depart from a critical dance studies perspective, and borrow from contemporary semiotics and post-structural criticism to analyse dance pieces as socially encoded discursive practices that generate meaning. Through their choreographies, a democratic generation of female choreographers, Anna Maleras, Avelina Argüelles and Sol Picó, have opened up possibilities for discussing the female body’s relationship with historical silence, offering choreographic tactics to vanquish the national amnesia.