This thesis looks at the connections between inequality and violence in Venezuela by exploring how people's relationships might mediate or mitigate these connections. It is often assumed that people's relationships can provide motivations for engaging in violence, or that they provide informal social controls that can keep them from violence. Venezuela is an interesting case study because traditional indicators suggest violence might not be related to inequality in this context, justifying a focus on lower-level mechanisms that might be responsible for the often found correlations in different contexts. This thesis shows that historical inequalities provide the distal conditions for the institutionalisation of el malandreo, a Venezuelan gangster identity. Nevertheless, violence between malandros –people that identify with el malandreo– itself is the proximate cause of the deadly violence that holds Venezuela in a venomous grip. The research is based on data collected during a year's fieldwork in the barrios, poorer areas of Venezuela's cities where the majority of violence occurs, of two different cities. I collected both qualitative observation and unstructured interview data, as well as more quantifiable personal network data that were analysed with E-net and SPSS. A large part of the thesis is also based on ethnographic observations as well as interviews with malandros. The findings show that many barrio residents feel disadvantaged and may be motivated to use violence, nevertheless, there is little evidence that there is a lack of informal social control in these areas. Instead, the absence of formal authorities and dense interaction networks open the barrio up to much more ambiguous forms of informal social control. Such observations emphasise that el malandreo can be seen to provide existential meaning as well as informal social control, through violence. Overall, the thesis argues for a relational understanding of the connections between inequality and violence and for seeing violence itself as a form of social control particularly in areas where authority is ambiguous and social networks are dense.

My creative practice addresses two research questions: how does ubiquitous computation affect the visual operations of the contemporary control society and what does this mean for the use of visual media in contesting such control? Through photographic and video work in digital formats, I explore the movements and arrests of informatic flows that constitute the operation of control, and the potential for resistance that may be felt in the turbulence of the interface, as a dynamic threshold where such flows meet. In this turn to the interface, I theorise the impacts of computationality on the loss of the image as a stable site of representational resistance, with the unsettling of perspectival representation in the topology of informational space and the ambiguity of a digital visuality whose software hides as it shows. When brought together with recent work on the de-materialisation wrought by informational Capital, the digital image comes to be seen as an instantiation of anxiety about the abstracted nature of power that increasingly operates as control. It is less to the digital image itself, but rather to the circulations and patternings of data expressed as light on the screen, that we must attend if we are to confront the digital visuality of control. The ‘image-machine of control' is the infrastructure that modulates these data circulations and patternings through inciting the making, sharing and watching of images. Drawing on affect theory, I emphasise the role that affects of insecurity, at the level of the dividuated subject and the abstracted socius, play in inciting an interactivity with the screen on which the State and Corporation alike rely for their accumulation and circulation of data. The digital-visual interface, being the encounter with the screen, becomes a sitemoment to explore its dynamic boundary condition, whose turbulence of data flows may open up ‘lines of flight' from the striated grid of control. These lines of flight help us see beyond the workings of the faciality system, and the subject-object relations of the gaze. Specificity of positioning in scopic regimes of control still matters, but posthumanist theorising suggests that such positioning be understood as vector and not point, whose movements we need to stay in touch with. Using digital photography to open up the everyday practice of image-making to its potential to disrupt the informatic flows of control, my first photographic work, medium specific, makes use of photomontage to look at the topology of informational space through its ‘folds', as a first experiment in disrupting the tempo of the image-machine's visual incitements through a ‘pleating' of its data. I use haptic photography in the pieces figure ground, surface gaze and touch light to stay in touch with the smooth space of the interface as a time-space of contingency, potentially resistant to the gridded striations of control. My exploration of the contingency of the interface continues with two video works, look screen and moving still, which address its vibrational ontology. I put the concept of the vibrational interface to use in confronting the rhythms of control deployed by the image-machine. Being a rhythm of not only circulation but also capture, not merely movement but also arrest, I suggest that understanding the ontology of the interface in terms of its vibrational forces is useful for disrupting, through its moving stillness, the rhythm of flow and stasis on which control depends. Both videos use visual and sonic vibrations to set up counter-rhythms and oscillations, whose trembling may release energies for change.