This thesis proposes a novel system for audiovisual composition called AudioVisual Collage. It consists of a screen-based interactive system, which contains a series of algorithms responsible for automating the tasks of image segmentation, inpainting, virtual camera motion, 3D lighting, visual transitions and visual motion generated from data extracted from audio files. With the merging of theory and practice, this research project investigates new possibilities, new approaches, and alternative examples of what can be explored in the field of computational art so as to offer a computational framework embodying a set of conceptual principles for digital fine arts practice. The set of algorithms that constitute the AudioVisual Collage framework embody a collection of digital design techniques and artistic concepts created through an iterative, collaborative process with other artists, in which I acted as the sole computational practitioner. The two collaborative projects presented in this thesis, Surround Sounds and Interactive Art Gallery, are part of an on-going creation of case studies, which have allowed me to better understand a series of approaches and methods, leading to the design of a framework to successfully communicate and apply specific creative ideas. AudioVisual Collage is a framework that allows other artists and designers to create their own audiovisual aesthetic experiences, generating rich media outcomes constructed by software in real-time. That is, the system incorporates approaches from traditional media, such as sound recording and cinema, in order to generate new computational media based on a set of clear design principles. It also proposes an art vocabulary for audiovisual composition in the digital domain, which aims to deliver something unique in terms of the inherent potential of digital work that is not possessed by other media. AudioVisual Collage demonstrates an approach for manipulating the temporal structure and spatial organisation of visual elements so as to reflect their content, and also, a method for combining visual artworks and sound in the creation of algorithmic screen-based aesthetic experiences. Equally important, it is in itself a statement of what could be possibly developed in terms of algorithms for audiovisual composition in the filed of computational art.

My thesis concerns the relationship between the law and intern et art, in particular those works that claim to critique the social bond that is constructed through the law. This relationship is typically characterized in adversarial terms. Using Derrida's work on performatives I argue for a more nuanced approach which acknowledges the performative nature of art explored in work concerned with images and objects that are taken from the "everyday world" (Archer, 2002:12). The way in which such art has undermined the ability to identify it as art on the basis of aesthetic judgements has brought its relationship with the law sharply into focus. The law has been called upon to enforce the designation of such work as art in cases where there has been conflict between identification of work as art though artists' declarations on the one hand and through institutional validation on the other. Moreover, art's concern with the everyday has been understood in instrumental terms as a critical social engagement. This has facilitated positioning it as being opposed, but necessarily subservient to, the performative force of the law. I propose understanding art as allowing the emergence of an awareness of law’s claims to being a historical and a contextual. Approaches to intern et art's use of technology tend to disavow this because it is usually understood in terms of making "reality" more transparent through its use of technology. In contrast my argument is that internet art stages the way technologies change the rhythm of the construction of the social bond. Internet artworks may be understood as sites at which decisions have to be made as to where the boundaries are to be drawn between art and the everyday. As such intern et art witnesses the constructed nature of society and opens the possibility for change to the social bond.

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The intentions of this practice-led thesis are to investigate the interplay between Internet based digital narrative, image and interaction, and ultimately develop new practice, which primarily within the experiencing of the artwork articulates a new contribution to the field of study. The dual literature and contemporary practice reviews highlighted this as desired output. The predominant research in the field is not focused on the production of new projects but uses various forms of literary and critical theory to search out new interpretations and structural understanding of the artefacts in question. Similarly the reviews revealed a strong set of visual hegemonies - namely the ascent of neo-minimalism and a preoccupation with the replication of reality. My practice sits between these poles as being a hybrid of detailed line art, handcrafting and popular imagery, and as such, functions with uniqueness. The interstitial paradigm is used to support the practice, as parallels are drawn not only in the aesthetics of the work but also the politic of the communication. The thesis is organised in three sections, Chapter 1 is theoretically orientated, aimed at defining the context for the practice. Chapter 2 is focussed on the artworks and in the main discusses the thinking behind, development and the production of two new projects -- The Bloody Chamber and Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw. Chapter 3 presents the discoveries rooted in the practice, concludes the thesis and finally offers some possible vistas for further research. The research questions were set-up to investigate the structural and aesthetic possibilities on offer to the practioner when aiming to create artworks that interstitially function on the premise of confutation and resistance whilst still attempting to create a sense of narrative immediacy. Through a combination of making practice, reflective evaluation and the appraisal of existing artworks I developed a new aesthetic in answer to the research questions. This aesthetic is termed as the "fragital". The fragital is an uncommon pairing of the digital experience -- that being the individualized remote onscreen touch, and the sense of a material and sensitive tangibility. This was used as a means to significantly and emotionally immerse the participant within the multiple state environment, whilst still in the structural accessing of the project, utilising the powers of confusion and disturbance as inherent in interstitial practice. The culmination of the research and an example of the fragital at work -- is located in the project Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw. The artwork is elucidated using critical insights from a group of twelve invited expert participants and an in-depth self-analysis. This group was invited on the basis of their interdisciplinary abilities, personal voice and commitment to my research area. The objective viewpoints of these participants was used not only to aid further understanding of the perception of the project but also to help me as the artist to extract extra arguments, complement my subjective understanding and gain additional contextual insights about my work. The different strands of the presented research work together to offer new insights into the production and concept of screen-based multiple state environments, and an original artefact Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw, which stands as a method to experience the core of research argument. The insights and discoveries as located in this thesis would be of use to other digital narrative practioners and those studying new media art.

The research investigates definitions and representations of the interstitial through digital art practice and through critical reflection and discussion in an accompanying textual dissertation. It began with a series of photographic light paintings which I argue via metaphorical mappings, are representations and definitions of the interstitial (or what Duchamp termed the infra-slim) in terms of moments, forms and spaces. Practice-based study then aimed to create new audiovisual interpretative responses that articulate the interstitial based on these definitions. The investigation through practice encompassed a combination of two distinct approaches towards the creation of form, each with its own aesthetic. Firstly the use of generative systems and algorithms that allow for unforeseen visual outcomes, resulting in a more organic aesthetic; and secondly, direct manipulation of form through 3D modelling and montage techniques, leading to pre-defined visual outcomes that demonstrate an aesthetic that is more synthetic in nature. Over the course of the study, both approaches were employed to create a series of motion-based audiovisual artworks that explored and negotiated tensions between these seemingly conflicting visual aesthetics in response to the source images. In doing so, a dialogue between these distinctive aesthetics unfolded, and a new interstitial aesthetic emerged.

This practice-based PhD is comprised of two interrelated elements: (i) ‘(un)childhood’, a 53’ video-essay shown on two screens; and (ii) a 58286 word written thesis. The project, which is contextualised within the tradition of artists working with their own children on time-based art projects, explores a new approach to timebased artistic work about childhood. While Stan Brakhage (1933-2003), Ernie Gher (1943-), Erik Bullot (1963-) and Mary Kelly (1941-) all documented, photographed and filmed their children over a period of years to produce art projects (experimental films and a time-based installation), these projects were implicitly underpinned by a construction of childhood in which children, shown as they grow, represent the abstract primitive subject. The current project challenges the convention of representing children entirely from the adult’s point of view, as aesthetic objects without a voice, as well as through the artist’s chronological approach to time. Instead, this project focuses on the relational joining of the child’s and adult’s points of view. The artist worked on a video project with her own son over a four-and-a-half year period (between the ages of 5 and 10) through which she developed her ‘relational video-making’ methodology. The video-essay (un)childhood performs the relational voices of childhood as resulting from the verbal interactions of both children and adults. The non-chronological nature of(un)childhood offers an alternative to the linear-temporal approach to the representation of childhood. Through montage and a number of literal allusions to time in its dialogue, (un)childhood performs the relational times of childhood by combining children’s lives in the present with the temporal dimensions that have traditionally constructed childhood: past, future and timeless.

"Art invites us and allows us to linger at the frontier of what there is, and it gives us an outlook on what might be." Henk Borgdorff (2010, p. 61). Developing a body of work that explores an intimate relationship between my blood and the machinic in a practice-led process of fabrication, this PhD enquiry considers how the materiality of my body is translated, dispersed amongst the non-representational “froth of code”; becoming techno-corporeal abstractions through techno-scientific processes. This is my distinct contribution to knowledge. Throughout the written exegesis, poetic praxis is developed as my unique method of approach—both initiated and grounded by the nature of practice-led artistic research (praxis)—and philosophically inflected by poesis: processes of questioning and reflection that reanimate key aspects of current techno-scientific practice. I reflect upon a series of works fabricated through both two and three- dimensional print practices: articulations which I read (after Chadwick) as my "Enfleshings"; a virtual fleshy materiality. I also provide a critical analysis of emergent material practices of 3D Print (also known as Additive Layer Manufacture). The exegesis elucidates the artworks, their materiality (as Nylon 12) and concludes by considering future scenarios of biological techno-scientific practice, in which the body itself becomes 'fabricated'. A portfolio of practice is presented as a parallel volume, which enables the reader to navigate documentation of the artistic research process. These stem from early studio-based experiments; tacit-intuitive approaches to materials and processes which foreground later, lab-based fabricated works. The portfolio includes photographs of the completed series of art works, collectively named as Untitled_Force (2011-2015) alongside documentation of their public exhibitions, reconfigured as sculptural installation at three different sites. I argue throughout that poetic praxis as a methodology is a vital means of approach, revealing the unknown within existing instrumental research paradigms.

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John J. Donovan, Louis M. Gutentag, Stuart E. Madnick, Grant N. Smith. / Includes bibliographical references.