This thesis is a practical project which involves moving images and paintings together as a medium that explores phenomena of contemporary China relating to personal identity, independence and its relationship with the traditional importance on collective groups, group centredness and interdependence. The project’s approach draws on sociological research on Western thought, values and beliefs naturally occurring in China since the “Open Door” policy as raw data to focus on the transition and transformation of contemporary Chinese individuality, and translates these data to form the concepts underpinning the metaphoric method of my artwork. Bubbles are the main visual symbols that metaphorically imply the incessantly transformable Chinese individuality and social cultural identity. My aim has been to portray this phenomenon through artistic practices on screens. By reflecting and engaging with moving images and paintings, underpinned by theoretical research and methods including data collecting, self-reflecting on data, practical manifestation and self-inquiry, I have attempted to unfold the phenomenon of contemporary Chinese individuality through my art practice. The thesis is composed as a creative work of moving images accompanied by an exegesis component. The moving image represents a nominal 80%, and the exegesis 20% of the final submission.

This research considers the ways in which digital, networked technologies influence contemporary everyday life and creative practice. Through studio practice and writing, I ask how a contemporary condition of everyday life, characterised by the suppression of distance in speed of communication and the ubiquitous presence of surveillant apparatuses, affects the way we understand and use the image. I also consider the role of the digital image in both destabilizing and reinforcing human agency. In the past, tactical creativity was protected by a level of invisibility from the vision of authority, as described by Michel de Certeau. With the the spread of networked technologies, that invisibility is no longer possible. I take Vilem Flusser’s methodology of ‘playing against the camera’—a recipe for overcoming of the functionalist relationship between human and image technology—as a possible model for establishing my own and identifying other artists’ practices as tactics of visibility. I seek to develop a material consciousness of the digital image based on ontologies that assert the materiality of its processes and effects. In studio work, I blend manual and digital techniques for image-making in order to expose the structure of the digital image. I attempt the work of the apparatus outside the apparatus, by performing digital processes by hand, creating a model of difference and refining a physical sense of the disparity between human and computer scales through the reassertion of the body in a process of making. Using Kendall Walton’s notio of photographic transparency, I make an argument for the affective potency of the ‘poor image’, evidenced in artwork and mass media, as inseparable from its materiality. I fictionalize aspects of this transparency, depicting an impossible reality and allowing me to model present anxieties stemming from the rise of digital image production. I find that transparency and the instantaneity of the digital network are responsible in part for the obfuscation of digital materiality, as well as a confused sense of spatial relationships and personal interconnection. Image quality is politicized by connotations of credibility or agenda as it bends to the need for ever-faster communications. Though certain characteristics of the digital image encourage or sustain an ignorance with regard to its materiality, these characteristics can also be exploited to foreground materiality in art practice that aligns itself with the spirit and purpose, if not the invisibility, of de Certeau’s tactics, and the critical methods of resistance to a programme of technology suggested by Flusser.

In the past thirty years, a growing community has emerged to advocate for the preservation and recognition of home movie collections based on their historical significance. Despite the significant cost of preserving and providing access to these collections and the myriad challenges they pose to archivists and researchers, no substantive research exists that evaluates their actual scholarly use or impact. Through a publication analysis and a survey of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, I sought to determine if there is a difference between whom archivists think should be using home movie collections and who is actually them. Though my findings suggest that home movies have yet to impact the scholarly work of historians, I offer recommendations for future research and professional development that may encourage increased scholarly use as well as increased collaboration between archivists and historians. / text

The fundamental conceptualisation of what animation actually is has been changing in the face of material change to production and distribution methods since the introduction of digital technology. This re-conceptualisation has been contributed to by increasing artistic and academic interest in the field, such as the emergence of Animation Studies, a relatively new branch of academic enquiry that is establishing itself as a discipline. This research (documentation of live events and thesis) examines animation in the context of performance, rather than in terms of technology or material process. Its scope is neither to cover all possible types of animation nor to put forward a new ‘catch-all’ definition of animation, but rather to examine the site of performance in character animation and to propose animation as a form of performance. In elaborating this argument, each chapter is structured around the framing device of animation as a message that is encoded and produced, delivered and played back, then received and decoded. The PhD includes a portfolio of projects undertaken as part of the research process on which the text critically reflects. Due to their site-specific approach, these live events are documented through video and still images. The work represents an intertwining, interdisciplinary, post-animation praxis where theory and practice inform one another and test relationships between animation and performance to problematise a binary opposition between that which is live as opposed to that which is animated. It is contextualised by a review of historical practice and interviews with key contemporary practitioners whose work combines animation with an intermedial mixture of interaction design, fine art, dance and theatre.

Going against phalloculocentrism’s situation in a hom(m)o-sexual paradigm and structuration of the male gaze and moving towards a gyneacentric perspective, the thesis explores how a feminised process of reception and interaction with artworks might arise. My installation and moving-image practice-led research is driven by a central question: How might a feminised form of spatiality, based on a gyneacentric model, deform an audience’s phalloculocentric reading of an artwork? The purpose of this thesis is to find a practice-led feminist method of producing an artwork that actively represents the feminine and de-centres an audience’s (male) gaze. By dislocating the eye from the lens of a camera, I propose to alter an audience’s usual cinematic experience of an image of the feminine through my artwork. This is developed through my proposition for composing an experience of her image through inter-relational exchanges in order to shift the register of reception from gazing to “touching”. I claim this could provide a potential for an embodied feminised process of spatiality and perception. A method of cartographically mapping the feminine through diagrams, photographs, drawings and video is developed in the preparation and installation of the central artwork that structures the thesis, (f)low visibility, in a nightclub. Feminist (installation and video) practitioners’, Martha Rosler, Louise Bourgeois, Mona Hatoum and Pipilotti Rist, approaches to representing the feminine are also investigated. The preparatory designs attempt to subvert the potential for a voyeuristic reception and/or exhibitionistic composition of the installation. This forms an investigation into how the reception and interaction with a feminised image might arise through a tactile process of exploration. I propose that although (f)low visibility produced ungraspable feminised on-screen images it afforded embodied partially locatable inter-relational exchanges in its reception of her. Luce Irigaray’s and Donna Haraway’s theories of embodiment are developed and intertwined in my conclusion. I claim that interaction with and reception of monstrous cyborg images on-screen occurred through the navigation of a fantasy of intrauterine “touching” in (f)low visibility’s installation as a feminised process of spatiality.

The expanding potential for the dissemination and archiving of aphorisms is explored in this practice-based research thesis. An aphorism is a short statement that communicates an insight about the world (and can sometimes function as a guide to action). Eric McLuhan, interviewed in Signs of the Times: The History of Writing (Goëss Video, 1996), suggests that the future of the book is the aphoristic statement. Aphoristic knowledge has traditionally been transmitted through texts and through libraries, but this project brings into play various modes of recirculating aphoristic texts using contemporary distribution networks and digital media such as moving image, projection on to urban screens, artists’ books, archival digital photography and glazed ceramics. Texts ‘virally inhabit’ a number of sites and languages in a series of works situated in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary text art and artists’ books. The sayings rejoin the cultural river of ideas in local and international incarnations. Practice-based work (80%) and exegesis (20%)

Academic and popular discourse frequently positions postcolonial countries as receivers of visual culture rather than as producers and transmitters. These countries are often deemed as being subject to hegemonic forces of global media flows, the influx of foreign programming into their media landscapes hindering any significant development of distinct national identity through visual media. Since independence from British rule in 1962, government, media practitioners and viewers in the postcolonial Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago have sought ways to build a national visual culture despite the inundation of non-local visual texts into the country. This study positions postcolonial Trinidad and Tobago as actively productive of its own identity, and through a cultural studies analysis of television advertising, examines the central role that this industry (including personnel, economic structure, equipment and texts) plays in the construction of a national visual culture. This process of collective imagining takes place within the visual imaging of the advertising industry, and ultimately charts the undoing of colonial, hegemonic discourses within the broader mediascape. Ultimately the advertising industry facilitates the active negotiation of national identity, catalyzing the process of visual sovereignty.

Moving images and sounds are processed creatively after they have been recorded or computer generated. These processes consists of design activities carried out by workers that hold ‘agency’ through the crafts they exercise, because these crafts are defined by the Moving Image Industry and are employed in practically the same way regardless of company. This thesis explores what material constraints there are for such creativity in contemporary Swedish professional moving image postproduction. The central aspects concern digital material, workflow and design work as distributed activities. These aspects are coupled to production quality and efficiency at the postproduction companies where production takes place. The central concept developed in this thesis is ‘creative space’ which links quality and efficiency in moving image production to time for creativity, capacity of computer tools, user skills and constitution of digital moving image material. Creative spaces are inhabited by design agents, and might expand or shrink due to material factors. Those changes are coupled to parallel changes in quality and efficiency. / Audiovisuella Medier

This project explores the areas of human perception and story narrative in moving images. Engaged by the research question, “Can spectators become co-authors in the process of a story narrative?”, the research focuses on exploring the co-existence and contradiction between the values of spectators and an author in a process of a narrative by developing a new potential narrative approach with multiple perspectives. I hypothesise that spectators could participate with the story narrative process as co-authors. My key method is to engage with spectators’ participation within a narration (story) by displaying story fragments across multiple screens simultaneously. The potential of having a story spread across multiple screens might bring further interest to authors to re-think the notion of a spectator and tell a story with multiple perspectives in a narrative process with spectators. In order to develop this project, I will use different approaches, such as Grounded Theory (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), Data Visualisation (Tufte, 1983), Action Research (Kemmis & McTaggart, 1988) and Heuristics (Moustakas, 1990), which I will explain in further details in each chapter of my exegesis.

The expanding potential for the dissemination and archiving of aphorisms is explored in this practice-based research thesis. An aphorism is a short statement that communicates an insight about the world (and can sometimes function as a guide to action). Eric McLuhan, interviewed in Signs of the Times: The History of Writing (Goëss Video, 1996), suggests that the future of the book is the aphoristic statement. Aphoristic knowledge has traditionally been transmitted through texts and through libraries, but this project brings into play various modes of recirculating aphoristic texts using contemporary distribution networks and digital media such as moving image, projection on to urban screens, artists’ books, archival digital photography and glazed ceramics. Texts ‘virally inhabit’ a number of sites and languages in a series of works situated in the interdisciplinary context of contemporary text art and artists’ books. The sayings rejoin the cultural river of ideas in local and international incarnations. Practice-based work (80%) and exegesis (20%)