This interdisciplinary research is situated within the practice and discourse of locative media at the confluence of art, location and technology. The practice-based research project aims to use the arts to address a crisis arising from rapid redevelopment in a marginal coastal town – Hayle, Cornwall. A recent supermarket build on a prominent Hayle heritage quay led to UNESCO’s threat to de-list the entire Cornwall and West Devon Mining Landscape World Heritage Site, awarded only in 2006. Research builds on recent findings on the link between increased sense of self and community cohesion through connection to heritage and participation in the arts. Media artists, participants and theorists have indicated that locative media experiences can promote connection to landscapes and their histories. However, these claims are unsubstantiated by empirical research to date. This research seeks to redress that through systematic analysis (unusual in the arts and therefore distinct). The main research question posed was: Does locative media allow people to develop a deeper connection with landscape and, if so, how? A smartphone deep map app was created – an evocation of a Cornish post-industrial landscape assembled from audio memory traces, sound and visual images revealed using GPS and the moving body. The Hayle Churks app weaves past and present, absence and presence and digital content into physical place. The Hayle Churks app is a research tool and published creative practice that received a national award in 2014. The empirical data is an original contribution to knowledge. Additional contributions include a timeline – a historical overview of the relationship between locative media art and emerging technologies and a deep map app reference tool for artists. The research explores the role of immersion and embodiment and how recording and listening to audio and voice performance affect immersion. Readers of this thesis are encouraged to access the Hayle Churks smartphone app prior to and during reading.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Open University. BLDSC no. DX231423.

Cette thèse consiste en une géographie des lieux et des circulations de l’émergence artistique dans une métropole du Sud. Elle se situe au croisement entre une géographie urbaine, soucieuse des agencements socio-spatiaux à l’intérieur desquels s’organise l’existence « ordinaire » d’une activité en train de se faire, et une géographie de l’art qui place les trajectoires spatiales des faits artistiques au cœur de l’analyse. Capitale postcoloniale, métropole est-africaine et périphérie d’une « économie mondiale d’archipel », Nairobi est un terrain de la rencontre entre métropolisation et globalisation. Dans le sillon des théories géographiques de la mondialisation, cette recherche propose de documenter et de cartographier les reconfigurations de l’espace artistique qui résultent de ces dynamiques. L’originalité de cette thèse est de rassembler l’ensemble des scènes et des productions artistiques d’une ville sur le dénominateur commun de la dimension spatiale de leurs circulations. Le matériau étudié (discours et curriculum vitae d’artistes, activités et archives de centres d’art) permet de confronter des circulations effectives à des horizons d’accomplissement différenciés, dont la trame est faite d’une ruralité encore prégnante et la connectivité d’une métropole mondialisée. La méthode développée relève de la traçabilité, dont la base est l’enquête par observation. Une exposition, une performance, une bourse de voyage, la visite d’un commissaire d’exposition, d’un collectionneur ou d’un mécène, les circulations quotidiennes d’un artiste et ses modes de socialisation, tous ces déplacements individuels, matériels, idéels et financiers constituent la matière première de la géographie proposée dans cette thèse. Comprise comme l’articulation entre, d’une part, les compétences et les tactiques spatiales des artistes et, d’autre part, les moyens matériels et institutionnels de gestion de la distance, la mobilité artistique interroge les conditions et le sens des déplacements autant que le devenir des acteurs engagés. / This Ph.D. thesis tackles the places and circulations involved in the making of art in a southern metropolis. It is situated at the crossroads of an urban geography concerned with the social and spatial layout through which this “ordinary” activity is organized, and a geographical approach of art that places actors’ trajectories at the heart of the analysis. Capital city in a postcolonial State, East African metropolis and periphery of the “global archipelagic economy”, Nairobi is a case of the encounter between metropolization and globalization. In the trail of the theories on the worlding of material geography, this study aims at documenting and mapping the reconfigurations of art space triggered by these dynamics. The novelty of this thesis is to assemble the entire range of art scenes and products of a city, using the common thread that is the spatial dimension of their circulations. The material studied (artists’ discourse and curriculum vitae; art centres activity and archive) takes on both the measureable circulations of artists while confronting them to their horizon of accomplishment. These are made up of the persistence of strong rural ties and the connectivity of a globally connected city. The method deployed relies on the notion of traceability and is based on a qualitative survey through observation. An exhibition, a performance, a mobility grant, a visiting curator, collector or benefactor, the daily circulations and socializing of an artist: all these individual, material, ideal or financial movements constitute the raw material of this research. The notion of art mobility is here understood as the articulation between artists’ agency and spatial tactics on the on hand, and the material and institutional means of dealing with distance on the other hand. Art mobility questions the conditions, directions and meanings of these movements as much as the growth of the actors engaged.

Visual records of place remain to a large degree inadequate when attempting to make visible the ephemeral states of consciousness that underlie the damage wrought by brutal regimes, let alone make visible the extraordinary histories and power structures encoded in images and views. This practice-led dissertation examines an emerging critical landscape genre in post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia, and its relationship to specific themes such as identity, belonging, trauma and memory. The landscape genre was traditionally considered inadequate to use in expressions of resistance under apartheid, particularly in the socially conscious and reformist discourse of South African documentary photography. I argue that, as a result of historical and cultural shifts after the demise of apartheid in 1994, a shift in aesthetic and subject matter has occurred, one that has led to a more rigorous and interventionist engagement with the landscape genre. I demonstrate how, after 1994, photographers of the long-established documentary tradition, which was meant to record 'what is there' in a sharp, clear, legible and impartial manner, would continue to draw on devices of the documentary aesthetic, but in a more idiosyncratic way. I show how these post-apartheid, documentary landscapes both disrupt and complicate the conventional expectations involved in converting visual fields into knowledge. I further investigate, through my own experimental documentary work, the ideologically fraught aspects of landscape representation with their links to Calvinist and German Romantic aesthetics. I appropriate and disrupt certain tropes still prevalent in popular landscape depictions. I do this in an effort to reveal the complex and troubled relationship that these traditions share with issues of willed historical amnesia and recognition in contemporary Namibia. Through my practice and the examination of other photographers' and artists' work, this project aims to further a self-reflective and critical approach to the genre of landscape and issues of identity in post-apartheid South Africa and Namibia.