This thesis offers an interrogation of specific terms within Acousmatic Music leading to the redefinition and application of analogous notions within listening, viewing, creation and analysis. These analogies between disciplines refer to comparable ideas within creative practices, transferring and adapting terminologies from one discipline to reinforce the creation and analysis of my own painting practice. As such the ideas are similar, comparable or equivalent but the terms introduced from Acousmatic Music theory are placed in the altered painting context. The analogies involve production similarities including comparable application of source collection, gesture making and manipulation of materials in both disciplines. Further analogies include corresponding use of levels of reduction within creative practices and parallels between listening and viewing. The central modes of thinking invoked are adapted from Acousmatic Music, namely Modes of Listening, Spectromorphology and Surrogacy. These core ideas will be interrogated before adaptation and analysis within my painting practice. My central contribution is identified through my own painting practice, with the newly applied theory proving to be useful throughout the advancement of my practical research. The potential for a wider contribution to knowledge will be pursued as a result of the research within this thesis. My focal methodology involves the employment of terminology transferred from its original context. The research developed in stages: identifying and interrogating the relevant terminology, adapting the terminology for transference into my painting practice, testing the newly applied terminologies through my practice and reflecting upon the practical developments in turn informing the written thesis and reinforcing my research project. The newly developing theoretical knowledge informed my evolving practical work, which in turn fed into the understanding of the theory and the contribution to knowledge. This methodology was at the forefront throughout my research, constantly developing my knowledge and advancing my practice. My practice involves painting that incorporates source identification and remoteness, focussing on the identification of a process of reduction within the work. This investigation informs the creation of a redefined understanding of painting with an emphasis on applied energy, gesture and movement. Alongside this part of the thesis and integral to my contribution to knowledge is a body of artwork that stands alone as a self-contained exhibition, but that also responds to my theoretical developments concerning the creation and viewing of paintings. There are three points of focus within my thesis with regard to my painting practice, namely the development of Modes of Viewing, Spectromorphological Thinking and Surrogate Orders. The collated research is employed within a case study of my painting ‘Renouvellement’, demonstrating the integration of my newly defined modes of thinking within the critique of my own practice. The study tested and evaluated the effectiveness of my research showing the practical application of the terminology and reinforcing my contribution to knowledge. A more thorough consideration of my creative methodology is provided through a text included in Appendix H entitled ‘Practice Methodology’. This text outlines the development of my practical work from initial planning stages through to completion. I have set in place an organised methodology for painting discussion and for practical application within the painting process, fulfilling my intention to develop a concise structural foundation for the development of painting knowledge both for the artist and the audience.

This thesis concerns the meeting of art and technology in the cultural arena of the American avant-garde during the late 1920s and early 1930s. It assesses the impact of Russian technological Modernism, especially Constructivism, in the United States, chiefly in New York where it was disseminated, mimicked, and redefined. It is based on the paradox that Americans travelling to Europe and Russia on cultural pilgrimages to escape America were greeted with 'Amerikanismus' and 'Amerikanizm', where America represented the vanguard of technological modernity. They returned to America with examples of and reports on Constructivism and an attendant enthusiasm for American technology, which manifested as 'machine art'. It proved deeply problematic when Leftist artists attempted to marry this notion of Amerika with a critique of the divisiveness of American industry and tried to construct a radical Americanism with the tools of Amerikanizm. This study covers work in several media, including photography, cinema, theatre, literature, printmaking, and architecture. I chart the introduction of Constructivism into America through publications and exhibitions during the period. The first chapter follows the emergence of Constructivism in Europe and its arrival in America, most notably at the 1927 Machine-Age Exposition, and its slow transformation into the apolitical International Style. Chapter Two assesses the impact of Constructivist theatre in America, with particular reference to the radical New Playwrights Theatre. The third chapter concerns the machine aesthetic in the photography of Ralph Steiner and Walker Evans. The final chapter addresses the discourse and practice of montage in the American experimental cinema. I am concerned with a period that straddles the Crash of 1929, but precedes the New Deal relief programmes. It is an analysis of culture at the blurred boundary of radical politics and experimentation.

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This thesis describes an exploration of the processes of conception of inspiration and application in art-making through making art (engaging audiences in some instances), reflecting on the process of making art, and through the accounts of others who undertake such practice. A review of the current situation evidences that being inspired to create art is largely seen as a stage removed from the creative process, which happens before the creative process, after it or beyond it, yet not as part of it. The literature separates the creative act from the initial stage of being inspired, dividing the process into two distinctive perspectives that do not sit together. The literature does not portray a uniform whole experience. This view sees the individual as having little influence over the initiation of his or her artwork and the motivation to create it.

According to Albert Einstein, artists and scientists were closely tied together in the past, in the seventeen-century, thanks to common ideals and the common language of Latin, which Einstein saw as uniting the entire world. As he stated in a short section titled ‘The Lost Paradise’ of The World as I See It, this bond between artists and scientists was so strong that political matters barely interfered in the disciplines’ own particular concerns. But this bond was lost, according to him, and we are now in a position of longing for this past unity, seeing it as a ‘lost paradise’, while politicians have become the guardians of international ideas. This statement is interesting for its perceptiveness about the growing importance of the role of politicians in today’s world. Yet, it is also interesting for its mythological imagination of a past that was unified, for its understanding of a global system for the arts and sciences, and for Einstein’s understanding–and desire–that the activities of art and science be free from political interests. What is important to problematise is the actual accomplishment of a complete autonomy of intellectual work. Indeed, was this insularity ever achieved? Are the disciplines of art and science so drastically separated today as much as during Einstein’s time? Is it not in fact modernity and its predicate of autonomy that Einstein aspired to by projecting its own achievement in the past? My argument is that it is precisely this type of mythical understanding, as much as the interaction between art and science, that must be critically examined. In We Never Have Been Modern, Bruno Latour has recently advocated an urgent reassessment of modernity, especially in the light of ecological concerns such as global warming, and for the fact that developing countries are inheriting our modern legacy. For Latour, some modern precepts, including the understanding of the development of modernity in terms of progress, need urgent revision. It is my contention that in such a task, the interaction between art and science is central–both have participated in, and indeed led, modernity’s development, as well as themselves offered critical takes on this forward march. It is as a contribution to this task that this thesis is orientated.

This theory-practice PhD project combines multi-sited curatorial and anthropological research in selected north-eastern and eastern borderland sites of India. The borderland is a choice for this research due to its manifoldness. Borders, though manmade and historical, often produce ambiguous lines of divide that are amenable to myths and memories, and related animosities and allegiances in a variety of configurations. The abstract borderland is potentially capable of creating different subject positions like citizens, denizens and non-citizens. This is the project of a curator-participant who works in alternating nuanced roles as participant observer, complicit observer, ethnographer and the critical entity to tease out the different aspects of the borderland from complex anthropological interactions. The research process involves three phases in each site. The first two are the study of the territorial issues via theoretical grounding and fieldwork. These lead to the curatorial intervention in the form of workshops that emerge as knowledge producing situations. The idea is to work with a curatorial strategy that emphasises the processual and is interactive and collaborative, with a view to exploring the shared body of knowledge generated at the workshop mise-en-scènes. Hence, the workshops are conceived as interactive and participatory, involving theatre and cartographic activities among others. Also, the ideas, images and concepts culled from hybrid sources during all the phases of research are juxtaposed here to create fields of multiple inflections, bringing different spaces and times together without merging under a singular discipline. The workshops are, thus, events poised at multi-disciplinary crossroads, where the knowledge of the border experiences maximum density. The project is aimed at studying the relational features of the selected sites; examining the emergence and nature of communities, the role of outsidedness in the implicated cultures and the different temporal registers encountered in the anthropological probing into the physical and metaphorical borderland(s) in their micro-social aspects.

I am interested in exploring the spaces that I have occupied in my past and the space I occupy in the present. How do I locate myself between opposing thresholds? How do I transition from one physical/psychological space to another? What is private and public? What is inside and outside? What should be revealed and what should be concealed? The space of the home is the most personal and private space; it is comfortable and it separates me from the outside world. But for me, a home is not a fixed space, but an imperfect space that changes or moves along with time. It is a temporary space that requires settlement and adaptation. Also a home is paradoxically comfortable, warm, complex, limited, temporary, divided, and empty. The spaces I have stayed in for a period of time have all become home to me, both psychologically or physically. I have thought about finding the meaning of the space I inhabit and considered what home means to me. As an artist living in an era where one moves around and has to remain flexible while staying for varying lengths of time in different accommodations and cultures, adapting to the role of the migratory citizen of this contemporary world.

The topos of the Nine Worthies and Nine Worthy Women was widely used in a variety of media across western Europe throughout the late medieval and early modern period_ While many scholars have commented on the Worthies, few have questioned their meaning. The common assumption is that these figures simply represented chivalric virtue and that this meaning remained relatively unchanged through their long history_ This thesis challenges that assumption by examining the contexts in which this imagery was used. Through a series of case studies ranging across geographic areas, media and periods, it demonstrates that the Worthies' meaning was complex, shifting and flexible - and that it was precisely this flexibility that made them so useful. Previous studies have tended to assume literary origins and paths of transmission of the topos. This thesis argues that this imagery was performative. It examines how the Worthies were used to negotiate between different layers of authority, and how they crossed social, temporal and spatial boundaries. The 'canon' of Worthy Women was more variable and less frequently used than the male version. The thesis compares the differing origins, use and reception of male and female Worthies and examines possible reasons for this disparity.

Modernity brings with it new imperatives for organising sensation into the fundamental binary poles of foreground and background, signal and noise. If there is perhaps nothing particularly new in such a division, the foreground-background division is as it were, brought to the foreground in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries by the daily incursions that the latter makes upon the former. The senses themselves become less a means of access to the outside world than the noise in the transmission and reception of the outside world. Recognising our senses means no longer recognising the forms and figures that our senses are supposed to mediate. Modernism, in a variety of different ways, plays upon this unsettled relation between our senses and the things they sense. If technology was in many ways responsible for this change – making our relation to our senses problematic by assaulting our sensory apparatus with a host of prosthetic extensions and intensifications – the technology of sensation also provided a new way of understanding both sensation and its interference. The theory of noise and information articulated by Claude Shannon at the tail end of the modernist time-grid provides the main theoretical support for my discussion. The metaphysic that the contemporary philosopher Michel Serres’ constructs around the concept of communicational noise and its application to the senses may provide a new way of understanding and interrelating some of the main theoretical staples of modernist criticism: chaos and order; time and timelessness; the individual and the universal. My thesis is organised around Sight and Sound. In Chapter One I look at noise in its ‘native’ element: that of audition. Taking as its starting point Boccioni’s 1910 painting ‘The Noise on the Street Invades the House’, I will put the painting in within its social context and look at how invasive background noise became a topic of heightened social concern. I then go on, in Chapters Two and Three to give close readings of individual authors: T.S. Eliot and James Joyce respectively, showing how urban noise is portrayed in their writings and how it affected their modes of representation. Chapters Four and Five are concerned with light and vision. Chapter four examines the idea of Dazzle: how the apparition of intense light was re-evaluated in the nineteenth and twentieth century, changing from its ancient role as the central, binding, unitary source of the visible realm, to noisy agent of disruption and corruption of vision. In Chapter Five I look at the effect of modern, industrialised speed on the eye that beholds it and the similar corrupting effects.

The process of constructing the research, begun at university and continued in public spaces and then in artistic institutional spaces, observes the boundary and modulates the form in which to translate the conceptual intuition between the ambit dedicated to art and the outside, between the symbolic dimension and the real one. The constructional artefacts produced allow for the flowing of various levels of consistency of the work, ranging from the immaterial to extreme concrete expression, considering as the supporting texture of the research itself the negotiation of permits, the translation between the ambits and the conversion of the languages. Within the prospect of a design that is never closed, where the result of a phase in turn becomes useful material for the next experimental passages, the exhibition phase is not considered as the crystallization of the work but rather as a privileged experimental opportunity. Artistic practice, therefore, is applied as a tool of experimental research that acquires, as a necessary and decisive component, the identification of the organizational nature of the context on which it acts. The artistic frame exceptionally allows to develop an experimental period within the spaces of everyday life, acting according to its own operational rules. In response to the analysis of the context, an "organizational analogue" is created and presented as a work of art. The "Analogous" is not a representation or a performance, but rather the assumption, via linguistic mimesis, of a pre-extant object to the form of which a change is made. The product is evaluated on the border of the language through which it interacts, allowing the components of the environment to negotiate its pertinence. The notion of "frame" allows one to imagine the localization of the dynamic border between the ambits.