Wing-Hong Lee, Michael Athans. / Bibliography: leaf 39. / NASA Grant NSG-1312. A revision of ESL-P748.

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The term ‘writing coastlines’ implies a double meaning. The word ‘writing’ refers both to the act of writing and to that which is written. The act of writing translates aural, physical, mental and digital processes into marks, actions, utterances, and speech-acts. The intelligibility of that which is written is intertwined with both the context of its production and of its consumption. The term ‘writing coastlines’ may refer to writing about coastlines, but the coastlines themselves are also writing in so far as they are translating physical processes into marks and actions. Coastlines are the shifting terrains where land and water meet, always neither land nor water and always both. The physical processes enacted by waves and winds may result in marks and actions associated with both erosion and accretion. Writing coastlines are edges, ledges, legible lines caught in the double bind of simultaneously writing and erasing. These in-between places are liminal spaces – points of both departure and arrival, and sites of exchange. One coastline implies another, implores a far shore. The dialogue implied by this entreaty intrigues me. The coastlines of the United Kingdom and those of Atlantic Canada are separated by three and a half thousand kilometres of ocean. Yet for centuries, fishers, sailors, explorers, migrants, emigrants, merchants, messengers, messages, packets, ships, submarine cables, aeroplanes, satellite signals and wireless radio waves have attempted to bridge this distance. These comings and goings have left traces. Generations of transatlantic migrations have engendered networks of communications. As narratives of place and displacement travel across, beyond, and through these networks, they become informed by the networks’ structures and inflected with the syntax and grammar of the networks’ code languages. Writing coastlines interrogates this in-between space with a series of questions: When does leaving end and arriving begin? When does the emigrant become the immigrant? What happens between call and response? What narratives resonate in the spaces between places separated by time, distance, and ocean yet inextricably linked by generations of immigration? This thesis takes an overtly interdisciplinary approach to answering these questions. This practice-led research refers to and infers from the corpora and associated histories, institutions, theoretical frameworks, modes of production, venues, and audiences of the visual, media, performance, and literary arts, as well as from the traditionally more scientific realms of cartography, navigation, network archaeology, and creative computing. Writing Coastlines navigates the emerging and occasionally diverging theoretical terrains of electronic literature, locative narrative, media archaeology, and networked art through the methodology of performance writing pioneered at Dartington College of Art (Bergvall 1996, Hall 2008). Central to this methodology is an iterative approach to writing, which interrogates the performance of writing in and across contexts toward an extended compositional process. Writing Coastlines will contribute to a theoretical framework and methodology for the creation and dissemination of networked narrative structures for stories of place and displacement that resonate between sites, confusing and confounding boundaries between physical and digital, code and narrative, past and future, home and away. Writing Coastlines will contribute to the creation of a new narrative context from which to examine a multi-site-specific place-based identity by extending the performance writing methodology to incorporate digital literature and locative narrative practices, by producing and publicly presenting a significant body of creative and critical work, and by developing a mode of critical writing which intertwines practice with theory.

The thesis argues that the notion of film consciousness deepens a wide-range of philosophical issues in ways which are only accessible through film experience. These issues, directly related to the continental tradition, deal with consciousness, experience, intentionally and meaning. We look to the implications of the initial acts of film reproduction as it creates 'images' of the world which reconceptualise vision in terms of space, time and dimension. We move from ontology to experience and examine an aesthetic form with radical implications for spectator consciousness. These issues are explored from two philosophical positions. Firstly, phenomenology, especially Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Secondly, the work of Gilles Deleuze who presents the most penetrating insights to date into film consciousness and its repercussions for thought and affectivity. The focus of this study is to draw together these two philosophical positions, showing their fundamental differences but also similarities where they exist. This approach is rarely attempted but the belief running through this thesis is that film is one arena which is invaluable for making such comparisons. It is argued philosophically that film writes large key phenomenological concepts on intentionality, time-consciousness and the relation of the lifeworld to the predicative. In terms of Deleuze, film is shown as a unique artform which in allowing us to link otherwise casts light on Deleuze's own complex system of thought. Chapters 1-3 are concerned with phenomenology and detail the role of film in terms of the lifeworld, intentionally, reduction and the transcendental in a way which has not been attempted elsewhere. The linking chapter on time (4) is used to introduce the work of Henri Bergson and its influence both on phenomenology's inner time-consciousness and Deleuze's fundamental categories of film movement and time imagery. The final two chapters look at the way film is reconfigured through montage and the implications of this for film's unique expression of movement and time.

Street performers have to create and manage their own performance events. This makes street performance an ideal type of situation for studying how an audience is assembled and sustained in practice. This thesis uses detailed video-based ethnographic analysis to investigate these processes in street performances in Covent Garden, London. Drawing on the performance literature, the role of the physical structure of the environment, the arrangement of physical objects within the environment and the physical placement of people are all examined. The argument of the thesis is that these analyses alone are insufficient to explain how an audience is established or sustained. Rather, an audience is an ongoing interactional achievement built up through a structured sequence of interactions between performers, passers-by and audience members. Through these interactions performers get people’s attention, achieve the recognition that what is going on is a performance, build a collective sense of audience membership, establish moral obligations to each other and the performer, and train the audience how to respond. The interactional principles uncovered in this thesis establish the audience as a social group worthy of studying in its own right, and are in support of a multiparty human-human interaction approach to design for crowds and audiences.

This thesis explores the position of female film directors working in Hollywood. It is intended to address an area in feminist film theory which has often been overlooked. Although it is incorrect to say there has been no feminist analysis of the "mainstream" woman director, most of the work which has been done concentrates either on finding the feminism or femininity of her films, or studies only a select few directors. This research widens the debate by validating the study of all women directors, and moves away from the search for definitive feminist meaning in the cinematic text. It employs a contextual and multi-theoretical approach to interrogate the multiplicity of meanings embodied by the phrase "woman director". The first chapter interrogates auteur theory because any discussion of female authorship must confront this critical perspective. The female director makes a problematic auteur since that figure is traditionally gendered as masculine. Chapter two is a "state of the industry" examination of the position of the woman director in Hollywood, with a special emphasis on mentoring. Chapter three examines the marketing of Mimi Leder's films The Peacemaker (1997) and Deep Impact (1999). Chapters four, five and six explore the construction of the woman director as "star", presenting in-depth case studies of Jodie Foster and Penny Marshall. Chapters seven and eight look at the reception of Blue Steel (1990) and Strange Days (1995) directed by Kathryn Bigelow, and Clueless (1995) directed by Amy Heckerling. Each chapter is designed to contextualise and historicise the woman director in order to better understand why her gender has prevented her from being seen as a "natural" director: that is, why directing has been viewed as a suitable job for a man but "no job for a lady".

This thesis sets out to investigate the relationship between the ‘classical apocalypse’ and the contemporary apocalypse as portrayed by the films A Clockwork Orange (1971), Apocalypse Now (1979) and Crash (1995). The ‘classical apocalypse’ is a literary genre which supplies a rich and vivid imagery where the image takes precedence over the narrative. At the centre of the ‘classical apocalypse’ is the image, and this thesis explores it the imagery of apocalypse can be translated from its traditional literary form to the visual form of film. The apocalypse is a revealing of that which has been concealed and which lies in the future of humankind at the end of time. In the postmodern era with the absence of meaning, apocalypse and God, the apocalypse has become a nihilistic repetition and the revealing has become feared since it might be a revealing of nothing. These contemporary depictions of the end, I would argue, help the apocalypse to come into its own in a postmodern setting, and the medium of film offers a possibility to further emphasise the visuality and potent imagery of the end, expressing the concerns of the apocalypse fully. As such they provide a ‘sense of an ending’ and an apocalyptic sentiment which is an unnerving and evasive as the ‘classical apocalypse’. These films revisit as well as revamp and rehearse the imagery of the Biblical apocalypse, becoming a-theological statements if not on the Bible, on the state of society and the apocalypse.

In der Produktion von Kinofilmen werden Bild und Ton aus technischen Gründen separat behandelt: Es gibt die Bildkamera und auch das Tonaufnahmegerät. Auch in der Filmbetrachtung werden die Erörterungen über das bewegte Bild, die Narration, die Filmmusik, die Geräuschebene gerne als getrennte Diskurse geführt. Gleichzeitig gibt es im frühen 21. Jahrhundert eine weit verbreitete Faszination für mediale Übergänge, für Transmediales, Visuelle Musik oder speziell für die Ästhetik der Geräusche im Film. Im Zentrum der folgenden Betrachtungen stehen die oft sehr komischen Verschränkungen von visuellen Vorgängen und akustischen Ereignissen in Jacques Tatis Film PLAY TIME. Dabei wird ebenso genau hingehört, wie auch detailliert betrachtet, um musikalisch Visuelles und/oder visuelle Musik zu entdecken.

Das US-amerikanische Medienfranchise Star Trek ist seit nunmehr über 50 Jahren ein globales Phänomen. Durch diese fortdauernde Präsenz erreichte Star Trek eine große weltweite Bekanntheit in der Populärkultur und einen großen Einfluss über Fernsehen und das Kino hinaus. In diesem Kapitel wird gezeigt, wie im Star Trek-Franchise der Aufbau von politisch-sozialen Strukturen dargestellt wird. Es wird davon ausgegangen, dass Star Trek eine utopische Erzählung darstellt, die eine ideale Gesellschaft skizziert. Aber ist die Vereinte Föderation der Planeten, die vorherrschende politische Struktur bei Star Trek, tatsächlich eine erstrebenswerte Utopie? Welche Rolle nimmt in diesem Kontext die fiktive Rasse der Borg ein, die eine fundamental andere Herrschaftsphilosophie repräsentiert. Und wie geschieht in beiden System die Überführung der Gesellschaft von einem chaotischen Naturzustand in eine sozialpolitische Ordnung?

Über Jahrzehnte hinweg hat Star Trek weltweit einen nicht mehr wegzudenkenden Platz in der Populärkultur gefunden. Millionen von Menschen sind in den über 50 Jahren der Existenz Star Treks mit dem Franchise in der einen oder anderen Form in Berührung gekommen und haben ihrerseits die Rezeption der Serie geprägt. Man kann Star Trek über die gesamte Entwicklung hinweg als groß angelegte utopische Erzählung auffassen, die mit ihrem Bestehen die politische und soziale Entwicklung auf der Erde gespiegelt und als Ausgangspunkt ihrer Erzählungen genommen hat. Doch wie verhält es sich mit der Behandlung von Genderaspekten in Star Trek? Wenn Star Trek eine zukünftige Idealvorstellung einer Gesellschaft zeigt, müsste dann nicht auch die Gleichbehandlung von Geschlechtern eine zentrale Rolle spielen? Da Star Trek sich über einen derart langen Zeitraum hinweg in der Populärkultur etabliert hat, stellt sich zudem die Frage, ob hier auch der zeitliche Kontext zum jeweiligen Publikum eine Rolle spielt. Dieser Beitrag möchte daher einen Überblick geben, inwiefern Star Trek sich in der Darstellung und dem Umgang mit genderbezogenen Kontexten verhalten und entwickelt hat.