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This mini-dissertation places a specific focus on the City of Cape Town and considers the space between aesthetics, commercial interest and social relevance in public visual communication practices. Instead of making a general statement or providing a value judgement, this research examines the nature of the debate surrounding public artistic practices by referring to three main artists; namely Michael Elion, The Tokolos Stencil Collective and Freddy Sam. The basis of the discussion is centred around the recent controversy surrounding Michael Elion's Sea Point public art sculpture, Perceiving Freedom (2014) and the respective questions it raised about what public space means, who has the right to represent themselves, and what that looks like. By drawing a comparison with Perceiving Freedom (2014) to the visual communicative practices of Freddy Sam and The Tokolos Stencil Collective, this research examines the progression of the debate. This encompasses the ways in which each artist and their work serve to illuminate the different visual modes of engagement in Cape Town's public spaces. Due to the contemporary nature of the subject matter, this debate is engaged with on three different levels. The first level examines the context of this debate and each artist, whereas the second level considers the points where their respective visual communicative practices intersect and engage in dialogue with each other as well as the general public. The last level considers an alternative way of reading the content, context and form of visual communicative practices so that their resulting effect can be better understood. This is done with the use of Marshall McLuhan's (1964) total effect media theory. Although several other prominent South African artists are mentioned in the scope of this research, it is important to note that the focus still pertains to the aforementioned themes of aesthetics, commercial interest and social relevance in public visual representative practices. Therefore Michael Elion, The Tokolos Stencil Collective and Freddy Sam remain the specific focus of discussion, as their respective works are used to illustrate these three themes. The first level of engagement offers a theoretical background to the reader by briefly familiarising them with international street art and graffiti practices. This brief yet concise background allows for a better understanding of the history and politics surrounding unsanctioned public visual practices and how they differ to formal sanctioned and funded ones.

The conflict and controversy sparked by the production and public consumption of creative work wherein African queerness is liberally expressed is rarely explored from the perspective of the African queer creative. This paper examines how South African queer creatives interpret and understand the often-tumultuous reception that exhibitions of queerness in film and television receive from largely heterosexual South African audiences. With its focus trained on locating the labor concomitant to queer visibility, labor carried predominantly by members of the queer community, it interrogates the positioning of cinematic presentations of African queerness within South Africa's past and current social and cultural landscape by examining how performative resistance of African queer narratives impact the Black queer creative community in South Africa. Finally, this study critically explores the line of reasoning behind the displacement central to arguments that simultaneously seek to strip African queerness of any legitimate claim to ownership of indigenous African cultures and stories. Jon Trengrove's film, Inxeba (The Wound) (2017), functions as this paper's primary text. Inxeba's conceptualisation, production, reception, and the controversy that succeeded its release will ultimately ground this paper's examination of the consequential impact that its exhibition's spectacle had on the lives, and production outputs, of Black African queer creatives

Includes bibliographical references (p. [223]-246). / This thesis examines the agency of marginalised subjects in the context of global capitalism and the information age. The key question that is addressed is whether transnational corporations have appropriated aspects of cultural identity, creative expression and technological innovation for their own enrichment - to the detriment of civil society. Where this is the case, this thesis considers what opportunities exist for issuing challenges to the power of global corporations. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's concept of Empire provides the theoretical foundation for examining cultural, technological and legal conflicts between the interests of citizens and those of corporations. Hardt and Negri theorise the ways in which former imperial powers continue to extend their military, economic and political power in former colonies. The authors argue that former imperial powers no longer compete with each other for the same resources because they now co-operate with each other through multilateral organisations and trade agreements. Ultimately, the key beneficiaries of these modes of co-operation are global corporations that tend to monopolise the production and distribution of technological and cultural products at the expense of the public interest and the functioning of democracy. This work considers the possibilities of responding to Empire and resisting globalisation through strategies that employ some of the same decentralised, network-based techniques that benefit global corporate entities. Hardt and Negri's concept of 'the multitude' as a multiplicity of singularities makes sense of the diverse struggles under discussion in this study, providing the conceptual basis for possibilities of multiple engagements with Empire that are not reductive and that do not exclude certain interest groups. This is an interdisciplinary project that uses case studies to analyse the relationships between law and policy documents, technological development, and the production of cultural texts (such as hip-hop music). Specifically, this work explores the MP3 revolution and Napster (version one); digital sampling in hip-hop; hip-hop activism on South Africa's Cape Flats and these activists' use of new media in their pursuit of social justice. It addresses concerns about the commodification of youth culture as well as debates about intellectual property and the United States' use of trade agreements as enforcement mechanisms that serve the interests of its own corporations. This thesis presents an overview of copyright and trade agreements in order to examine the vested interests that underlie them. In keeping with the focus on globalisation and cultural imperialism, US legislation - such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - is discussed in relation to alternatives to proprietary approaches toward intellectual property, such as open source software and Creative Commons licenses.

Domestic space and place, as well as how we conceptualise the home, are shifting in response to changes in digital and SNS technologies, and our relationships with such technologies. The home is not only the building in which we live, but a networked assemblage of material and digitally mediated space and place. This study examines predominantly white middle class arrangements of domestic space and place in South Africa, which provides insight into a relatively unexplored aspect of digital culture: the performance of domesticity via SNS, particularly Facebook. Furthermore gendered and racialised power dynamics and privilege in everyday life were investigated through a digital ethnography and critical discourse analysis of posts by 50 Facebook users. This data was supplemented by interviews and in-situ observations of five couples drawn from the broader sample. In combination, these methods revealed how space, place, and domestic responsibilities are secured through narrative practice. Through this study I show how Facebook has emerged as a collaborative platform where storytelling practices are influenced by the site architecture and algorithm. Facebook has opened up the private space of the home allowing domestic space, place, and practice to steadily gain visibility. This visibility, analysed in conjunction with Actor-Network Theory, revealed that homes, and narratives about the homes, are networked and dependent on relationships between actants. The home, and the relationships that stabilise it, are also reflective of discourses and power relations. Human actors negotiated territory and network roles, and these negotiations reveal power and hierarchy. Women remain more tightly bound to the home because of cultural and historical gendered discourses, and as a result the white women participants in this study continue to create place and ascribe space in digitally mediated and material versions of their homes. Furthermore, the resurgence of middle class postfeminist accounts of domesticity have promoted domestic idealism and many women have migrated back to the home spurred on by popular media, and economic privilege that has allowed them to forego paid employment. This study also shows that white, middle class women participants were offered choices to construct their own postfeminist narratives of domesticity. On the other hand, the black women employed as domestic workers by these middle class couples, were largely absent from such narratives and conversations. Findings further suggest that domestic space and place remained the domain of white women participants, and that white men were able to renegotiate their domestic responsibilities because they remained distant from domestic narratives and conversations, where they were largely associated with domestic inadequacy.