A organização das ecovilas desafia o conceito de comunidade, tanto no campo da Sociologia quanto da Filosofia. A definição formal identifica as ecovilas como comunidades intencionais, tradicionais ou rurais resultantes de projetos coletivos e com o objetivo de regenerar o ambiente social e natural. Esta definição é produzida paradoxalmente por uma grande corporação, a Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) detém a legitimidade da enunciação do que significa ser uma ecovila, e certifica experiências ao redor do mundo. Esta pesquisa problematiza a apropriação do termo comunidade pelo movimento das ecovilas, a partir de duas perspectivas: a primeira é teórica e analisa a literatura produzida pela GEN; a segunda é empírica e compreensiva, produzida através de observação participante numa ecovila situada no sul do Brasil. A conclusão situa as ecovilas como manifestação comunitária contemporânea. Isto quer dizer que ecovilas sobrevivem em meio a contradições. Enquanto o discurso contido no material produzido pela GEN apresenta indícios de uma concepção romântica da comunidade, o caráter de sua precipitação fenomênica se situa numa espécie de interstício social e organizacional, lugar em que a experiência do ser-em-comum e a propriedade vivem no limite de uma síntese impossível. / The ecovillage organization challenges the concept of community in the field of Sociology as well as in Philosophy. The formal definition identifies ecovillages as intentional, traditional or rural communities resulting from collective projects and aiming to regenerate the social and natural environment. This definition is produced paradoxically by a large corporation, Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) holds the legitimacy of the enunciation of what it means to be an ecovillage and certifies experiences around the world. This research problematizes the appropriation of the term community by the movement of the ecovillage, from two perspectives: the first is theoretical and analyzes the literature produced by GEN; the second is empirical and comprehensive, produced through participant observation in an ecovillage situated in the south of Brazil. The conclusion places ecovillages as a contemporary community manifestation. This means that ecovillages survive amid contradictions. While the discourse contained in the material produced by GEN presents a romantic conception of the community, the character of its phenomenal precipitation lies in a kind of social and organizational interstice, a place where the experience of being-in-common and property live in the limit of an impossible synthesis.

This thesis offers a periodization of the present according to which contemporary art and visual culture are understood to be symptomatic of an increasingly pervasive pessimistic social, political and ecological outlook. This pessimism I will claim is what is authentically new about our contemporary cultural forms, which are directed towards a particular form of humour and stupidity. Core elements in the periodization include the limitation of imaginative horizons expressed in the well-known remark of Fredric Jameson’s that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, as well as the pervasive sense that nature is in a state of perpetual and endemic crisis and the idea that modern computing technology is making us stupider than we have ever been before. I argue that these issues are symptomatic of what Gilles Deleuze, in 1990, termed the societies of Control – a world of corporate power, ubiquitous computing, data extraction and financial capitalism that has intensified since its early diagnosis. However, dominant narratives of art and visual culture continue to theorize artistic production according to traditionally avant-garde categories of resistance, criticality, transgression and subversion. This presumes art to have an agency that is difficult to imagine in the current social situation. In this respect, the thesis in part constitutes a critical reflection on the pressures placed upon our existing models of art and visual culture - for example, and centrally, the idea of an ‘avant-garde’ - by current social and technological conditions. Building on these observations, the thesis proposes a new model of contemporary art and visual culture that has no agency: images under control that are formed, as epiphenomena, by technological apparatuses of Control; studying examples such as extreme sports stunts, internet memes, online trolls, bad quality jpegs and impassive ‘artworks’. The purpose is to ask what value we can place on these emergent cultural forms, which seem to mirror, reflect and reiterate a pessimistic worldview deeply entrenched in the societies of Control.

This study will look at fantasies of the mechanical body in a series of close readings of key modernist and contemporary texts. It will argue that these texts are sites of resistance or repression, in which unconscious and / or cultural narratives about the death drive have left their traces. Part One, Chapters 1-3, explores the links between war and fantasy, and between fantasy and gender. Chapter One looks at the art and writings of the Italian Futurists and English Vorticists, with the focus on Marinetti and Lewis, to consider how the rationalized bodies of the soldier and worker might be seen as the covert problems underpinning the fantasy, returning to it in the form of the repressed. Chapter Two concerns the writings of Ernst Jünger, where war, modern labour, the incursion of danger into everyday life, and photography are seen to provide signs of the emergence of the Typus, an organic construction, who has learnt to see himself as devoid of feeling, turning the death drive into the will to power in acts of aggression, and for whom the function of the eye is the same as that of the weapon. Chapter Three investigates the problem of war-shock and the shocks of cinema in First World War film footage of shellshocked soldiers, Lang's Metropolis, and Chaplin's Modern Times. It shows how discourses of hysteria, feminization and commodity relations form the common ground between the cultural reception of both shelishock and cinema, and how film-makers and critics responded to both sets of debates. Part Two, Chapters 4-5, explores the links between the machine, the maternal body and the death drive in the Terminator and Alien films, and considers the question of affect, mourning, and identification in Cronenberg's Crash.

Iludens! - a concept-opera comprises conceptual essay and music portfolio. The conceptual essay explores musical, dramatic, and ritualistic aspects that qualify play as a structuring factor in culture. It aims at producing a multi-layered amalgamation of Philosophical Anthropology and Art, focusing on the strategies for creating a new piece of music - in this case, a conceptual opera (or performative oratorio). The music portfolio features several pieces composed by me throughout the doctoral period. Some pieces have a more direct connection to my doctoral research. The largest and most important one is the concept-opera Iludens, through which I developed patterns of aesthetic creation inspired by philosophical conceptions related to the notion of play. Also, as agon1 is one of the crucial aspects I was able to identify in the history of play, I have explored some agonistic features in culture and provided an interpretation of elements of conflictive interaction using the tools of contemporary concert music. The conceptual essay and the main piece of the music portfolio are intimately related. I consider music according to the Greek classic notion of mousiké, namely an entity of multiple knowledge and applications, rather than a mere craft of physical sounds.

The challenge of contemporary art, unlike in art history, has only recently been identified in sociology. Furthermore, an overly philosophical orientation, has undermined sociological expla- nations of artistic production. To remedy this, I propose a sociology of exhibitions. This entails a shift of focus from the elusive subject matter of art towards the tangible exhibition, and the construction of a new framework: the exhibitionary system, which also stands for the physical, institutional, and network environment of exhibitions. The central question in the sociology of exhibitions is to explain how the exhibitionary system shapes artistic production. The answer was sought by observing exhibition making in the Chinese exhibitionary system, from which quantitative data about 1,525 exhibitions, held in 43 exhibition spaces between 2010 and 2016, were also collected. I argue that the exhibition context shapes the physical basis of individual artworks and the construction of an artist's oeuvre. Through the contextualised creation of artworks for public viewing, artists aim to raise their visibility, which is crucial for artists' career prospects and symbolic consecration. An artist's visibility is, however, constrained by where she exhibits and with whom she co-exhibits. My method for measuring visibility reveals its binary nature, divided along a singular dimension and a collective dimension. Yet no binary division between the non- profit and for-profit is found within the exhibitionary system with regards to the selection of artists. Rather, both sectors contribute to a dual selection of marketable artists. A model of professional autonomy, which reconciles "art and the market" on the level of practices and awareness, prevails in the exhibitionary system. The sociology of exhibitions has solved persistent theoretical problems in the sociology of art. My empirical findings give rise to new research questions. Finally, I have offered a dialogue between studies of non-western and western cases within the same framework.

In this thesis, I address ephemeras - namely temporary displays in the form of festivals and exhibitions belonging to the field of contemporary art. The most appropriate criterion with which to select and discuss the ephemera, i.e., the data in which I analyse in this thesis, is the notion of the 'event'. 'Event' is a philosophical concept, and therefore does not belong to artistic or aesthetic categories. However, two main characteristics are particularly relevant in considering it, and these are also pertinent to the field of art. Firstly, the tandem contingency and necessity. Secondly, the fact that no one can control the reach and impact of an event, which is also the case with an artwork and its interpretation. In this thesis, I am creating a confrontation between what is usually described as abstract thought (a work of philosophy for example) and the production of contemporary art, which is so often culturally and economically dependent on the art market and hegemonic power structures such as institutions, as well as the apparatus of historians and experts to evaluate and legitimise it. Furthermore, it is also necessary to state my understanding of art. This latter has strong propinquities with that defined by Kant when he coined the term 'fine art', namely a cultivated, context-aware and sensitive art, one's reflection on which provides pleasure exceeding the pure enjoyment or satisfaction produced by erudition or technical virtuosity. Secondly, the artistic manifestations that I discuss are always produced by a collective, group or organisation of which I am part. Consequently, what unfolds is an organisational discourse originating in my praxis of art. Finally, the very fact that I am a member of the group of people whose activities are discussed leads logically to autoethnography, a field of inquiry that I am also contributing to.

Addressing a perceived absence of critical attention to changes in the war film brought about by the advent of the digital, this thesis aims to construct an original study of contemporary (post-2001) US war cinema by exploring the shifting relationship between embodiment, subjectivity and digital (military-technological) mediation. In order to update the critical framework necessary for comprehending how the war film is altered by the remediation of digitised military interfaces, I draw on a highly diverse set of approaches ranging from journalistic accounts of the wars in Iraq (2003-11) and Afghanistan (2001-present), studies of military technologies from Paul Virilio to Derek Gregory and Pasi Väliaho, as well as film/media studies work on ethics and spectatorship. The corpus is similarly diverse, encompassing mainstream genre films such as Zero Dark Thirty (2012), documentaries, and gallery installations by Omer Fast and Harun Farocki, thus offering a comprehensive and inclusive portrait of contemporary cinematic trends. The thesis begins by identifying the genre's post-Vietnam turn to embodied, subjective experience and explores the continuation of this tendency through films such as The Hurt Locker (2008) and its complicity with phenomena such as journalistic embedding. Subsequently, I trace how drones and simulations radically alter conventional cinematic constructions of subjective perceptual experience through readings of Omer Fast's Five Thousand Feet is the Best (2011) and Harun Farocki's Serious Games (2009-10), noting in particular the emergence of the virtualised yet embodied 'presence' of the drone operator and the conditioning of trans-subjective, cybernetic networks via CG simulations. Finally, I turn to the remediation of various digital interfaces in films such as Redacted (2007), comparing the emergent models of military subjectivity discussed in the previous chapters with the spectatorial positions evoked by this hypermediated aesthetic.

Magister Artium - MA / There is a theoretical gap in scholarship pertaining to masculinity and disability in dance. Existing scholarship on masculinity, disability and dance respectively, seldom bring these three themes into conversation with each other, missing opportunities to examine the nuances of masculinity. Through an ethnographic study, I endeavoured to capture the narratives of three professional disabled male dancers from different contexts and backgrounds. The phenomenological approach was selected in order to enhance understanding of my participants’ experiences in an attempt to illuminate how these dancers negotiate and embody their masculinity in dance spaces. The nuances of masculinity, disability and dance are therefore interpreted through a phenomenological framework and seek to foreground the intricacies of negotiation and subjectivity. Through face-to-face in-depth interviews, watching performances and rehearsals as well as less formal conversations, this project aims to illuminate the lives of Marc Brew (Scotland), David Toole (England) and Zama Sonjica (South Africa) as disabled male dancers. I am particularly interested in disability’s ability to challenge normative ideas around dance, identity and masculinity. I argue the need to change limiting perceptions of hegemonic masculinity and the male dancer’s body to advance the artistic medium of dance and allow for constructive dialogue around issues of access and inclusivity. Furthermore, like Roebuck (2001), I am interested in the ways in which contemporary dance works "contributes to the development of a more sensitive understanding of the ways in which dance articulates masculine identity" (Roebuck, 2001: 1).

This thesis examines the trajectory of the ‘social document’ in contemporary art since 1989. Though art’s turn towards documentary modes has now been widely noted, this study establishes a longer, more complex engagement with the dialogue between the lens and the situational immediacy of artists’ social interventions. I argue that the social documents that arise through the reconfigured artwork can be connected with the demand for the circulation of social knowledge and increasingly urgent questions of realism, a methodology that divided the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde of the 20th century. Central issues broached by the thesis include the demand for the extraction and re-articulation of truth, the role of visual representation in the address to totality and the emergence of (independent) knowledge and (critical) pedagogy as key sites of struggle. My analysis begins, in Part I, with a selective mapping of the historical terrain through which I offer re-readings of prescient works produced in the 1960s and 1970s in a range of capitalist and state socialist contexts including Mary Kelly, Grupo de Artistas de Vanguardia and Sanja Iveković. I then move on to a more detailed appraisal of the ascendancy of the social document in art following the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the consolidation of global capitalism, situating its various calibrations in relation to what I call biopolitical globalisation. Part II takes a thematic approach to the material, using case studies to examine a) the curatorial narrativisation and production of social documents, b) the relevance of feminist elaborations on theories of social reproduction to analyses of the social document and art history, c) the persistent invocation of ethics in discussions of works that document the social subjects of the new economy, d) the implications of addressing the social document as a realist enterprise. Artists discussed in Part II include Anton Vidokle, Martha Rosler, WochenKlausur, Dani Marti and Pilvi Takala.

Este trabalho visa examinar, a partir dos artigos, textos e correspondências de Mário Pedrosa, os conceitos de arte, história e crítica. É objetivo dessa dissertação discutir o interesse de Pedrosa pelas experiências do Centro Psiquiátrico do Engenho de Dentro, pela Arte Indígena e a relação dialética existente entre Arte e Política em sua trajetória crítica como estratégia para definir seu interesse interdisciplinar e contemporaneidade / This study aims to examine, from the articles and texts and letters by Mario Pedrosa, the concepts of art, history and criticism. Goal of this dissertation is to discuss the interest of Pedrosa by the experiences of the Psychiatric Center Engenho de Dentro, the Indigenous Art and the dialectic between art and politics in his career as a critical strategy to define its interests interdisciplinary and contemporary