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In the late 1950s, a new medium sprung out of televisual technology to become the latest tool of representation. Pioneering video artists affected audiences by targeting their perception of reality, opening space for new subjective experiences, and investigating the phenomena of consciousness. What was in fact revisited was the oldest inherent function of representation as cognitive device, exposing the manipulation of reality and of subjective experiences by the media, advertising, and entertainment industries. However, today, in a world overloaded with visual representations to the point that we are threatened with the end of the real, cultural theorists inform us that we came upon another paradox: the end of representation itself. Amidst these proclamations, the bravest explorations of representation by video art in its first steps have been conveniently forced into oblivion, purposefully overlooked, or artfully undermined. Providing an art historical narrative of video within the tradition of western representation, this thesis is structured around a single question: Has video art offered a new locus for the representation of contemporary subjectivity? The first part examines the new medium in an art historical context, introducing significant connections between the novelty of video representation of time and space, and its psychological effect on audiences as experiential subjects. It also provides the theoretical context of my investigation of representation's cognitive function in shaping subjectivity, by an analysis of a significant example for western art and culture, and by a review of the transition from the lived experience of the modem to the postmodern self as seen by contemporary psychoanalytic theory and practice. The second part examines how video art reflects the conditions that inform postmodern subjectivity (fragmentation, discontinuity, dislocation, decenterment), employing the clinical experience of narcissism and schizophrenia. The art of video seems to have offered not only new systems of representation that derive directly from these experiences, but also a potential locus where cognitive and perceptual conditions can be recast to achieve the therapeutic and conciliatory states of reverie and containment.

The aim of this thesis is to provide a critical framework for addressing the use of the moving image in contemporary art that studies geography through the experiences of the mobile body and the use of a mobile camera. The research focuses on artistic practices that use video narratives to experiment with and explore contemporary dimensions of economic migration and cultural movement as a topic in which contemporary artists are engaged, either in representing their own movements or in observing those of others. Through the analysis of this complex field, the text argues that particular moving image works produce new cartographies of both urban space and also social relations within these territories of change and encounter. My research focuses on contemporary artists' use of video in several related ways. Video recording may be used as a primary research t061 for first-hand encounters reflecting the empirical aspect of traditional documentary practices as knowledge gathering procedures. T have examined what T term the 'analytical inscription' of video as articulat~d through the artist's subjective experience specifically in terms of the production of visual narratives based on primary 'source material'. These narratives can take the form of what has been recently named video essays, or they can be examples of narrative construction placed in a cinematic narrative and video installation environment. My practice seeks to bridge the objectivity of documentary and the subjectivity of the essay by articulating my experiences as filmmaker through narrative construction drawing on the experiences of 'others'. The thesis text attempts to contextualize my practice by relating contemporary theories of urban space and new geographies to the specificities of contemporary artists' uses of the moving image and the mobility enabled by video technology.

This thesis is to introduce and examine Video Space Art as a form of Video Art. Being primarily practice-based research, it offers a theoretical and conceptual framework to find a better understanding for my artistic practices. The thesis studies the classification of Video Art. It contains an extended discussion of the place of Video Space Art in the context of Video Installation. Furthermore, the distinctions are made from Video Sculpture by theorizing space and spectator. The thesis develops the language of Video Installation. It proposes that the two main elements of Video Space Art are space and spectator. It provides a conceptual discussion of real and virtual space and the role of the spectator in Video Art are established. It then explores the languages in developed media of pictorial art, sculpture, architecture and landscape architecture. Because Video Installation is a hybrid medium, the languages found in these media are applied to deepen its meanings. Video Space Art is defined as a space-time experience that includes people as participants. The thesis applies these theories to artworks to distinguish Video Space Art from Video Sculpture. Nam Jun Paik's Magnet TV (1965), Eagle Eye (1996) and TV Clock (1963-81), Shigeko Kubota's Three Mountains (1976-79), and Bill Viola's Heaven and Earth (1992), The Crossing (1996) and Passage(1987), Dan Graham's Present Continuous Past(s)(1974), Bruce Nauman's Live-Taped Video Corridor(1969-70), David Hall's Progressive Recession (1975), and Peter Campus' Negative Crossing (1974) are among the artworks explored. The extended discussion of the concepts and concerns behind these artworks are followed by the classification of these artworks into Video Space Art and Video Sculpture. In addition to these artworks, the analyses of the elements of Video Space Art are applied to my own practical works: Two (1999), It Takes me 15 Minutes to go to School (2000), and Love Potion in my Heart (2004). (The appendix to this thesis contains the documentation of my works in DVD ROM format). The theoretical analysis presented in this thesis sheds light on the classification of Video Installation. A survey conducted identifies the works of Video Space Art. By defining Video Space Art, as distinct from Video Sculpture I have refined aspects of the theoretical base and extended the understanding of my own practical work.

This is a practice based Ph.D. in Fine Arts. The subject of the research deals with strategies of doubling as a means to explore the relation between what technology promises and the fantasy of the viewer/user. The visual material that constitutes my research attempts to raise, in various interrelated ways, a set of core questions regarding the nature of surface as receptacle of images and to take into account the filiation that new media partake of, namely that computer-aided art is seen as a subset of fine art. Indeed, the first line of enquiry is to address what constitutes the 'picture plane' of a computer screen. Interrogating the nature of the digital Image and Its relations to the viewer/user, my question is "how does computer-aided art (animation, video and interactive installation) address the connection between surface and image, particularly when digital manipulation is used to consistently postpone a totalising view of the image?" This includes the analysis of how static and dynamic states of the image are generated in (digital) art, or where the phenomenon of doubling raises questions about what kind of visual economy operates with respect to art that uses advanced technologies. I critically analyse these aspects occurring in work by artists, whose practice deals with certain modes of addressing the totalising view of an image, an image that appears virtually complete. As a practising artist, in terms of the media I choose to work with, doubling is enabled by providing a certain degree of Interactivity with the computer screen, giving the viewer the illusion of control over the production of the image. However, the illusory nature of this control is revealed by the systematic Incompleteness of the image being 'painted' on the screen. Apart from provoking and frustrating the desire for totalising visuality, the deliberate incompleteness of the images holds open questions of scale, animation, and the relationship of image to surface. Given the nature of the medium in which the moving images were created, the pieces share the potential for continuing the loop in which they play ad infinitum. But, as the cyclicity of the loops makes manifest, nearly all of them are also predicated on an ontological duality whereby the same object, the same entity, can transform into something phenomenally other through the permeable interplay between emergent and receding aspects inherent within it. So integral to image-forming I find this doubling that I have extended the theme to my own public Identity, by sometimes functioning under an alias, the name of Sissu Tarka.

Abstract: This is a practice based PhD of predominantly video works/installations which seek to examine, alongside the accompanying reflective writing on these works, a particular dynamic set up between the artwork and the spectator which allows a rethinking of the model of the subject's relation to the 'other'. This investigation which is lead by my ongoing practice (presented as six artworks) is informed and underpinned by feminist theoretical concerns seeking a way out of the deadlock of Lacanian thinking which characterises the feminine as problematic (the other of the other). Though I make reference to psychoanalytic theories (as well as the writings of Deleuze), I will not give accounts of this background (though I will footnote key terms); I am therefore presuming a certain knowledge of these theories by my reader. The thesis (as practice and dissertation) explores more enabling accounts for the construction of identity which move beyond the fixed, traumatic model to propose that the encounter with the artwork enables more positive accounts of the self as fluid and open to change. This shift which now proposes a more productive relation to desire and otherness has been opened up, particularly by Elizabeth Grosz and Rosi Braidotti, through a consideration of Gilles Deleuze's notion of 'becoming' as a creative flow, an active force of connections and relations. This challenge to dominant accounts (both psychoanalytic and philosophical) that characterize desire negatively as a longing for something lost (tragically and impossibly), allows me to propose (theoretically and practically) the artwork as allowing us to 'become' by creating affect, where, immersed in a creative ongoing flow of connections and relations we 'become-hybrid' through an encounter with the other. As my contribution to knowledge and understanding, my thesis explores this affirmation of a new subjectivity through a sense of self as interactive (mobile) in the process of viewing; an inter-subjectivity which allows a freeing of the subject from the impulse to complete the self, allowing an engagement that does not set the subject against itself but produces new possibilities especially in a consideration of sexual difference. My practice argues for an engagement and creative response which allows for a dialogue of difference as non-oppositional; sensuous and expansive, the artwork proposes a new relation to gender, as beyond hierarchical (traumatic and fixed) oppositional accounts of the self. This shifts from an account of sexuality as problematic (or not) to one where the viewer is open to a renegotiation with questions of otherness and difference that underpin any notions of identity) to become productive of fluid accounts of the self.