The title of this research is constructed from: `via' - route and töp(os) -a place. Viatopias are urban spaces of continual travel or flux that incorporate multiple forms of perception and inscriptions of meaning. My aim has been to define and describe the increasingly important fluid perceptual spaces that have developed between static nineteenth century destinations. Viatopias such as passageways, underground tunnels, train tracks, and the North Circular escape a sense of destination, operating as ever-changing experiences or events. The practice has sought to produce digital representations of these urban travel spaces that exist in constant flux, to communicate the experience of Viatopias. The research explores themes such as: The North Circular as a Deleuzian Route exploring driving as performance; Plica, Replica, Explica an unfolding of experience through digital media; The Making of Baroque Videos, using Baroque architectures of viewing; Mobilizing Perception treating human vision as an artifact; Mirrors For Un-Recognition disassembling nineteenth century controlled vision; Sound as an Urban Compass considering urban audio experience; Narrative Practice in New Media Space analysing contemporary approaches in digital media; and Convergent Languages, Digital Poiesis investigating the dislocation of representation in different digital languages. These conceptual frameworks developed in symbiosis with the practice. The visual practice presents a collection of digital videos that extend and complicate these concepts through experimental visual and audio techniques such as layering, repetition, anamorphic distortion, and mirroring to produce visual immersion and the fracturing of space. The concluding digital works incorporate video with audio and text resulting in integrated visual statements that attempt to stretch the viewer's perception, in the process offering a glimpse of a new experience within urban space.

This thesis addresses temporal experience in moving image from the perspective of artists’ film and video and asks: "if material qualities are implicated in memory as pastness, how can this be made apperceptible using art practice?” The study contributes to the understanding of temporal and material experience in contemporary art practice, finding that materiality is entwined with pastness dynamically. In disrupting anticipated temporal and material flow, conflicting temporalities are exposed as present and apperception made possible. The moving image is a growing part of visual culture and with increasing access to both current and historical material there is a vast reserve to draw from. Early film and its reception, in particular the Rough Sea film, is a pivotal component in this research both as a means to consider how experiences of moving image materiality were shaped but also as reference points for later experimental approaches to making and viewing. Reflexive spectatorial and archival research is interwoven with critical, theoretical and philosophical review. The active viewer of structural/materialist discourse is recuperated as a basis for a contemporary critical position on materiality and moving image spectatorship. Selected works by artist-filmmakers are analysed as forms of practice research that inform the investigation. Material qualities such as interval and colour are examined as familiar and habitual aspects of moving image with involvement in senses of past. The limitations of isolating them are addressed through the two works. One, a video work created from appropriated archival film footage of sea questions temporality sequentially within the spatial mnemonics of the cinema. The other, a multi-screen film and video installation, explores temporality in a non- cinematic space through the concurrent and disruptive. Both works show that experience of the material conditions of moving image has significance in memory and are therefore crucial to an examination of pastness.