William Morris was a highly significant political and cultural figure of the nineteenth century. He was a great artist-craftsman and was hugely influential in the rise of the Arts and Crafts Movement in the second half of the nineteenth century, a movement which saw the revival of traditional crafts as a reaction to the utilitarianism of industrial mass production. Already an accomplished artist and writer, Morris became, in the 1880s, a significant figure in the development of the socialist movement. Often described as the first English Marxist, Morris ‘became’ a socialist when he joined the Democratic Federation in 1883. Morris was also deeply concerned about the destruction of the natural world caused by the increasing number of factories and he detested the stark contrast between the poverty of the factory workers and the wealth of the factory owners. He viewed the two, that is, social equality and care of the environment, as inextricably linked. Arguably, his political ideology would be best described today as eco-socialism. This thesis will demonstrate that, even as a young man, before he became politically active Morris was already thinking deeply about contemporary social and environmental problems, most of which were caused by what he viewed as the scourges of his era, capitalism and its concomitant industrialisation. This will be achieved by an examination of the cultural, social and literary influences on Morris from his childhood up to 1876. This analysis will focus on some of his literary inspirations that have not been explored to date. The aim of this thesis will be achieved , in addition, by a critical reading of Morris’s early poetry and prose from his contributions to the OCM in 1856 to the publication of Sigurd the Volsung in 1876.

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Pirro Ligorio (c.1513-1583) was one of the great antiquarians of the Italian Cinquecento. The aim of this dissertations to determine the extent of his understanding of the ancient Roman villa and in particular what he gleaned from the surviving remains which were largely ignored by other architect antiquarians. He left much material that can be used to answer this question, namely his alphabetical encyclopaedia (18 volumes in Turin) but also his reconstructed plans of the ancient Roman villas (in particular the Villa Salviana and the 'Villa of Augustus') and his Anteiquae Urbis Imago published in 1561. The thesis considers what Ligorio said about the ancient Roman villa in his writings. In addition it identifies the trends in Ligorio's representations of the ancient Roman villa by investigating how the ancient villa was represented in his drawings and the eight villas imaginatively reconstructed on the 1561 map. It shows that Ligorio's interests in the villa were only in part architectural. An analysis of the Turin encyclopaedia reveals that he is more interested in the estate and in identifying the owners. The analysis of the drawings and maps show that Ligorio had a greater understanding of ancient Roman villa architecture than earlier architects. He realized that the ancient villas were not as symmetrical in their planning and elevations as many architects believed. He also, it would appear, understood much about the villa complex realising, for example, that mausolea were often part of the villa compound.

This thesis examines political processes in Palestine-Israel by listening to their sound. While stagnating peace negotiations have been dominated by visual sensibility, it is argued that considering sonic sensibility could contribute to the re-examination of current border regimes. Sound and listening are examined as both the objects of study and the means of investigation, from their deployment by states for suppression and war to their use in power diffusion, resistance and critique. The central question is how the aural sense is deployed in both the assertion and critique of political power in Palestine-Israel – that is, what are the strategies, techniques, tools and approaches used, and how do they operate in claims for power, and in the undermining of such claims? The dynamics of sound inform the methodology of this practice-based thesis, which consists of a written text and a series of artworks produced during the research. The written structure is organised around a set of case studies and artworks by the author and other artists. The combination of art practice, theory and case studies informs and influences the theory involved, while the theory influences the artwork produced. As a consequence, a grounded theory of aural politics emerges, where power and dominance may be both asserted and diffused sonically. The theoretical framework draws on postcolonial and conflict studies (Balibar, Weizman, Said, Mbembe, Mignolo) and on sound studies (Barthes, Attali, Chion, Schaffer, Sterne, Erlmann, LaBelle, Henriques, Goodman, among others). Examining the problematics of Palestine-Israel through sound, the thesis makes a threefold contribution by 1) contributing to sound studies and the understanding of the sonic as a political medium, supplementing existing visual and discursive approaches to conflict studies; 2) applying a sonic analysis to conflict and power struggles in Palestine-Israel; and 3) making an artistic contribution through audio chapters and sound art produced during the study which draw on and impact debates on Palestine-Israel. This thesis therefore contributes to our understanding of the Palestine-Israel conflict, to the analysis of sound as a medium for social exchange and for the critique of power, and to the potential of sound to contribute to political processes.

This thesis addresses the value of employing noise in the formulation of interfaces that engage in self-reflection. The articulation of the interfaces' formalist devices (message and noise) can generate paradoxical patterns that when enacted by the observer promote experiences of alterity in the formation of the work of art. This project is transdisciplinary and parasitic (following Michel Serres) in the sense that it is located in the relation of the artistic practice and the other sources; it resembles a foreigner (following Julia Kristeva) whose presence disrupts and invites its host to greet its own foreigner, and moves like a snake (following Aby Warburg) with maximum mobility and minimum target to disclose contradictions and formulate hypotheses. The first chapter, 'Focusing Attention', covers a wide range of disciplines in order to find points of convergence with the artistic practice and proposes a theorisation of the interface - an object or situation where a subject or system meet and interact, which is defined by its elements (message, noise and interference). Attention is proposed as a selective and active process that allows for an embodied subject to engage with ontological contradictions, without representing them, and to evolve in reciprocity with the world. Chapter two, 'Scripting Journeys', addresses the work of Bruce Nauman in light of the previous considerations (interface and attention) while proposing a methodological practice that focuses on a notion of travelling to a place in-between. Nauman's practice is proposed as topographic explorations primarily concerned with the 'mechanics of attention', which are formulated in the production of interfaces (as scripts for new journeys to places in-between) to be engaged by an observer. Chapter three, 'On the Go', addresses the production of new works of art as a formulation of the methodology identified in Nauman's practice. The chapter covers the production process and its underlying concerns when travelling to places proposed as in-between. The proposed notion of the interface is addressed in a direct relation with the new works of art to further understand the value of employing noise in the formation of experiences of alterity. This chapter should be considered in relation to the works of art previously exhibited, which are documented in the thesis and proposed as formulations of knowledge and not as representations of knowledge. This project will conclude by proposing three contributions to knowledge, which should be understood as hypotheses: first, the proposition of the notion of interface and its formalist devices (message, noise and interference), secondly, the re-interpretation of Bruce Nauman's practice, and thirdly, a new body of work articulating the interface's formalist devices across different mediums, which can be attended to by other artists when considering any concept of the interface.

This thesis is concerned with how the ecological approach to perception with the inclusion of listening modes, informs the creation of sound art installation, or more specifically as referred to in this thesis as constructed sound environments. The basis for the thesis has been a practiced based research where the aim and purpose of the written part of this PhD project has been to critically investigate the area of sound art, in order to map various approaches towards participating in and listening to a constructed sound environment. The main areas has been the notion of affordance as coined by James J. Gibson (1986), listening modes as coined by Pierre Schaeffer (1966) and further developed by Michel Chion (1994), aural architects as coined by Blesser and Salter (2007) and the holistic approach towards understanding sound art developed by Brandon LaBelle (2006). The findings within the written part of the thesis, based on a qualitative analysis, have informed the practice that has resulted in artefacts in the form of seven constructed sound environments that also functions as case studies for further analysis. The aim of the practice has been to exemplify the methodology, strategy and progress behind the organisation and construction of sound environments The research concerns points towards the acknowledgment of affordance as the crucial factor in understanding a constructed sound environment. The affordance approach govern the idea that perceiving a sound environment is a top-down process where the autonomic quality of a constructed sound environment is based upon the perception of structures of the sound material and its relationship with speaker placement and surrounding space. This enables a researcher to side step the conflicting poles of musical/abstract and non-musical/realistic classification of sound elements and regard these poles as included, not separated elements in the analysis of a constructed sound environment.

In this PhD by Publication I revisit and contextualize art works and essays I have collaboratively created under the name Flow Motion between 2004-13, in order to generate new insights on the contributions they have made to diverse and emerging fields of contemporary arts practice/research, including digital, virtual, sonic and interdisciplinary art. The works discussed comprise the digital multimedia installation and sound art performance Astro Black Morphologies/Astro Dub Morphologies (2004-5), the sound installation and performance Invisible (2006-7), the web art archive and performance presentation project promised lands (2008-10), and two related texts, Astro Black Morphologies: Music and Science Lovers (2004) and Music and Migration (2013). I show how these works map new thematic constellations around questions of space and diaspora, music and cosmology, invisibility and spectrality, the body and perception. I also show how the works generate new connections between and across contemporary avant-garde, experimental and popular music, and visual art and cinema traditions. I describe the methodological design, approaches and processes through which the works were produced, with an emphasis on transversality, deconstruction and contemporary black music forms as key tools in my collaborative artistic and textual practice. I discuss how, through the development of methods of data translation and transformation, and distinctive visual approaches for the re-elaboration of archival material, the works produced multiple readings of scientific narratives, digital X-ray data derived from astronomical research on black holes and dark energy, and musical, photographic and textual material related to historical and contemporary accounts of migration. I also elaborate on the relation between difference and repetition, the concepts of multiplicity and translation, and the processes of collective creation which characterize my/Flow Motion’s work. The art works and essays I engage with in this commentary produce an idea of contemporary art as the result of a fluid, open and mutating assemblage of diverse and hybrid methods and mediums, and as an embodiment of a cross-cultural, transversal and transdisciplinary knowledge shaped by research, process, creative dialogues, collaborative practice and collective signature.

Richard Cockle Lucas (1800-1883) has been remembered for forging a Leonardo and marrying a fairy. This distorting vision, juxtaposed with his protean versatility and originality, makes Lucas an awkward subject for historiography to get a hold on. Lucas was a sculptor, printmaker, photographer, model maker, architect, performer, writer. From 1854, at Chilworth near Southampton he constructed two idiosyncratic Towers, each as his home, studio, gallery, and observatory. Proceeding from the thematic frame of Lucas as a tower builder and dweller, this study makes the first integrated examination of Lucas as a multimedia artist. It identifies that at the Tower(s) a major shift occurred in his practice: the placing of himself within the subject matter of his art, together with a preoccupation with notions of self, mind, and consciousness. Through the disciplinary sight lines of cultural history and the history of architecture in its broadest formulation (after Dana Arnold and Andrew Ballantyne), the study draws on conceptions of the relationship between architecture and metaphysical thought, notably Frances Yates and Gaston Bachelard on, respectively, magical and poetic space. The study conceptualises the realm of Lucas’s Tower and his ‘monumental’ books (scrapbooks and albums) collectively as a ‘memory theatre’. Employing this occult paradigm and spatial metaphor, it argues that the Tower was a strategic enterprise of knowledge and inspiration, self-memory and self-realisation. Lucas’s practice is found to raise intriguing questions about the dialectics between space, body, and mind in the nineteenth-century and beyond. Using Lucas’s untapped archive and writings, the main body of the study offers a layered series of findings and speculations around the themes of: nature, the view, and the miniature model; symbolism, mysticism, and (meta)fiction; and providence, posterity, and intersubjectivity. In the process, it brings to light connections with other noteworthy histories, such as Lucas’s work as a scale modeller for John Nash and with John Flaxman. In conclusion, the study suggests that Lucas is a significant and transitional creative figure who prefigured later developments and syntheses in the expanded and emerging fields of art and psychology. Finally, it exposes binary oppositions troubled by Lucas that persist through to the present-day within/between the natural sciences and the humanities, on issues of rationality, objectivity, truth.

This thesis conducts interrelated monographic studies on a selection of artworks made by three women artists, Yin Xiuzhen, Mona Hatoum and Nikki S. Lee in the 1990s and 2000s, which provide productive ways of imagining subjects’ encounters with foreign places and other bodies in an increasingly interconnected, yet unevenly developed globalized world. By employing quotidian household materials, objects and banal labour, these artists, in their practices, investigate notions of home and belonging in a constant state of transregional, transnational movement and exchange. On the basis of their itineraries throughout multiple local dwelling environments, they construct their artworks as affective objects or spaces of mediation to engage themselves and viewers in various inter-bodily, intersubjective and intercultural communications and contradictions. By drawing on the works of feminist scholars, such as Luce Irigaray, Sara Ahmed, Iris Marion Young and Alison Weir, this thesis develops a theoretical framework underpinned by post-structural, post-colonial feminist theories and psychoanalytic discourses, exploring a number of contradictory terms related to ‘home-making’, including placement and displacement, construction and preservation, habitation and uprootedness, and domesticity and publicity.

This study investigates visual artists’ experiences of becoming and being artists in the Republic of Cyprus, providing a missing link between the notion of artistic identity and professional practice. It identifies and analyses the contextual factors that influence their living and working conditions, and develops an understanding of their careers. A grounded theory analysis of visual artists’ experiences and interpretations showed that artistic identity is an integrative element of an individual’s overall sense of identity. This identity is reinforced by the reproduction of the artist myth, which helps artists position themselves in the artworld. The findings suggest that although their conditions have changed significantly over the last decades, a number of visual artists in Cyprus still reproduce the myth in order to make sense of their individual identity. The study makes a significant contribution to the understanding of how artistic identity is influenced by artists’ transitional experiences abroad. It shows that several of them experience a form of reverse culture shock when they return to Cyprus after being abroad for their studies, exhibitions or residencies. It suggests that the current model for re-acculturation is insufficient to illustrate visual artists’ experiences and proposes an adapted theoretical model that more suitably describes them. This model redefines the phases of reverse culture shock and suggests that it is a recurring process instead of an isolated experience. Furthermore, the study proposes a framework for conceptualising visual artists’ career development in Cyprus that can serve as a base for future studies on artistic career trajectories. This framework has generated a composite diagram that illustrates the fluctuant and heterogeneous nature of visual artists’ careers and visualises their individual trajectories in relation to an informally organised infrastructure of services and resources that exerts various influences over the artist’s identity and career development. The analysis concludes that such an understanding is useful in informing how private and public support systems are structured, what mechanisms, policies and practices are most appropriate and when support is needed most.