This thesis is concerned with multi-media performance and installation art practices which foreground the live body in combination with mediatized images. The research is conducted through the making and examination of a number of the researcher's own art works. Practical multi-media performance and installation projects are analysed within the context of specific performance and visual cultural theories in order to advance their contribution to critical and cultural fields. The research champions a symbiotic relationship between theory and practice. Practical works were undertaken and exhibited as solo or collaborative art projects. These works then formed the basis for individual ‘case studies' and were subjected to a critical review informed by a variety of theoretical frameworks including feminist, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist philosophy. This practice-based methodology is contextualised by the mapping of historical and contemporary critical discourses for the field of multi-media performance. The ‘reflection-on-action' results in an understanding of the mechanisms and effects of multi-media performance as a cultural practice. Specifically this thesis aims to answer the question as to whether multimedia performance can form the basis for an ‘interrogation' of our contemporary media dominated society? Through a practice-led enquiry it unpacks the dynamics between a meeting of live bodies and mediatized images, concentrating on the differences and similarities of their experiential sensory qualities. The research then extends these findings into social and political contexts through a comparison with other ‘reality' and ‘identity' re/producing cultural practices. The study concludes that cameras and recorded images used within live and/or time based art contexts can counteract the conventional constitution of mediatized images. To the extent that mediatized images can also be said to reflect and in turn constitute human subjectivity, multi-media performance, therefore, can provoke a re-evaluation of culture and its associated human activities and behaviours.

This thesis is a critical examination of my own creative practice through my published works in the moving image: a short film, commercials and a television series title sequence. My creative approach has been to use a hybrid of digital and heritage practices to create original works for television, advertising and film. I define ‘heritage' as traditional, analogue and handmade practices that predate or overlap digital technology. I consider ‘digital' as a description of the means of production and also a medium of communication. Educational research, as a qualitative and quantative study in lens-based media also contributes to this thesis and forms an argument for future directions in art and design practice. The thesis explores the ways I fused heritage and digital practices to create works that were original at publication. A second aim is to recognise the different skills required by artists and designers to embrace a multiplicity of technologies, skills which can provide sites of resistance to technological and socio-economic change. Lastly, the thesis proposes a pedagogical imperative to ensure that heritage skills do not atrophy, but develop and are reinvigorated with new possibilities combined with digital practices and platforms of communication. Many of my works have been broadcast to a global audience, but I have also published through traditional academic journals. In the thesis I analyse the production methods that created the range of work presented here. My narrative of production unmasks the processes of illusion and argues that hybrid techniques can offer a more ‘human' expression that carries greater ‘authenticity' and a broader capacity of meaning than an entirely digitally created technique. Stimulated by a range of theoretical discourse I examine human relationships with technology in the creative industries. I also examine the conditions of production from a political economy perspective. The reflective and critical commentary on my published works argues for an urgency to this study. I conclude that to avoid ‘sleepwalking' into a digital conformity, heritage processes must be celebrated and advocated as areas of difference particularly in education. Taken together, I consider my creative practice and my educational work as a pedagogic intervention to explore a multiplicity of creative expression rather than enclose moving image in a solely digital medium.

Using my family experience as an auto-ethnographic case, I consider how photography creates postmemory and counter-memory and how it has come to adopt the position it currently holds in funereal rituals in Athens. My historical examination begins from the Byzantine creation of the cult of relics and the cult of saints. Through the history of the Orthodox religion and the creation of the Neohellenic state, I regard concepts of visual representation of death and identity. I examine the trends and tensions which have shaped death practices in relation to the semantic nature of and cultural impositions in the photographic artefact. These are the dominant factors which have constituted the photograph as a representation of death and counter-memory. I consider the cultural need to create visual representations and I examine such images as cultural products of communicating the thoughts and anxieties of the group which installs them; as such, photographs are representative of the mutability of death. In a secular age, the photographs of the deceased are treated by the living so they become quasi-sacred representations of symbolic capital and operate under a different system of values, according to the era in which they are produced. I argue that the way photographs in graveyards are currently transcending the roles Orthodox funereal doctrine bestowed upon them and the manner in which the photographic installations are accelerating in funereal practices, is a compensatory reaction to the postmodern disaffection of urban death. Keywords: photography, death-ritual, post-memory, identity, individualisation, Orthodoxy, Athens.

This project is driven by omissions at the intersection of ecological game studies and media-ecology. Although authors have studied videogames from a variety of ecological approaches, few have attempted to develop a holistic methodology, embracing videogames' specific attributes while recognising their role within larger physical systems. This thesis is an attempt to address this, reading videogames as simultaneously about and functioning as ecologies. My methodology draws on the agential-realist philosophy of Karen Barad whose theory of 'intra-activity' is abundant with ecological ramifications. Adapting Barad's 'intra-active' framework for use with contemporary videogames, I read them as assemblages of hardware, software and their human players. I explore three significant aspects of game studies: interaction, aesthetics and affect. Focusing on interaction, I analyse the game Shelter. Emphasising the role of hardware and software, I read these processes in conjunction with an understanding of gameplay. This encourages a shift away from seeing gameplay as 'interaction' as it is defined within human-computer-interaction, and instead promotes a view that is 'intra-active'. Siding with Barad, play is radically reframed as a phenomenon that produces the apparent objects of its inception. In the second study I approach a series of more experimental games illustrating how an agential-realist worldview influences aesthetics. Analysing high-concept puzzle games Superhot, Antichamber, and Manifold Garden, I suggest that these games place a focus on aspects of ecology often over-shadowed in so-called 'natural' imaginings of our world, such as time, space and their entanglement. Finally, bringing my focus to the role of the player in my ecological understanding of games I analyse a number of short, human-centred or biographical games. Seeing the role of the player in an ecological manner, designers deviate from traditional methods of generating pathos and affect. Rather than developing empathetic relationships between player and avatar through immersion, viewing the player as only a part of an ecological system demands a posthuman response from players. These designers ask players to empathise while acknowledging their role is small and not central. This thesis presents a novel point of view that draws attention to the ambitious design practices of artists while suggesting new avenues in the future.

This thesis interrogates partnership working between galleries and youth organisations involved in a four-year, Tate led programme called Circuit (2013-2017). This programme sought to build sustainable networks with youth organisations and services across England and Wales in order to ‘improve access and opportunities for harder to reach young people’ who may not otherwise engage with galleries and museums (Circuit, 2013a). Reflecting on the similarities and divergences that characterise practice in gallery education and youth work, this research untangles the historic barriers and tensions that have affected relationships between practitioners, organisations and the youth and visual art sectors. Mobilising Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, galleries and youth organisations are conceptualised as part of distinct ‘fields’, and their particular traditions, customs and internal contests are analysed. An exploration of the fields’ development under successive governments and changing policy priorities reveals that art organisations benefit from a greater affordance of agency and autonomy than youth organisations, which contributes to the uneven power dynamics that often exist in these cross-sector alliances. Reports from engagement with sector events also highlight how concepts of art and creativity frequently deviate between the fields. Through an ethnographic approach to the research context, participant observations and interviews produce data about Circuit’s programmatic decisions, and its efforts to shift problematic habitual practices. A series of in-depth site studies illustrate different ways for organisations to work together, as well as the challenges of collaboration in pressured political and economic circumstances. Cross-site analysis allows for further deliberation on the compatibility of Circuit’s wider peer-led programme agenda with the comparative agenda and practice of youth organisations. The ambition for young people to continue an independent relationship with the galleries’ programmes is shown to be hindered by a number of sometimes-misrecognised factors that unintentionally alienate certain communities of young people, particularly from working class backgrounds. The final stage of the analysis studies the identity, attitudes and positions of various youth sector agents working and participating within Circuit, and the specific ‘capital’ they bring to the temporary programmatic field. In discussing the implications for practice and research, this thesis asks whether (beyond programmes such as Circuit) it would be possible to establish a permanent collaborative or cooperative field between the youth and gallery sectors. I argue that this would only happen if a range of systemic changes were made, such as the development of national and regional structures to support integrated practice sharing; deeper engagement with the meaning and repercussions of partnership working; a determination to work collaboratively to address social urgencies facing young people, and a fundamental commitment to shift pervasive inequalities in the visual art sector.

The present study deals with the use of classical music in narrative film, and some of the theoretical and historical considerations that can help us contextualize and understand that use. The following is a list of chapters, and a summary of concepts contained therein. CHAPTER ONE: After briefly considering some of the challenges of interdisciplinary scholarship, I will review the literature on classical music in the sound film. This review will touch upon the early (1930s and 1940s) commentaries of Kurt London, Hanns Eisler and Theodor Adorno, and John Huntley, and then pass on to a kind of concensus held between both commentators and composers of the 1960s and 1970s. Finally I will review the work of more recent film music scholars who, along with some others working in other fields, provide what I feel to be a more open model for understanding this kind of film music. CHAPTER TWO: Having reviewed the position of the film music community, this chapter will concern some responses of music critics to film music generally, and the appropriation of classical music in particular. I will outline specific complaints and criticisms, and attempt to show some of the broader socio-musical issues that motivated them. CHAPTER THREE: This chapter will consider the musical parallelism associated with traditional Hollywood-type narratives, and then concentrate on the oppositional model (derived from "montage" aesthetics) represented by Soviet and other modernist cinemas. I will deal especially with the influential "counterpoint analogy, " and consider how musical discourse can resolve some of the confusions that this analogy has habitually presented. CHAPTER FOUR: The last chapter will have presented a counterpoint based on musical principles as a possible analogy or metaphor for how film music works, and how its meaning and affect can be understood. This chapter is about the programme music tradition that prevailed in the nineteenth century. I will enumerate some of its sin-fflarities, musically and in terms of its critical reception by the music community, to film music. I will explore how programmes, or extra-musical narratives, are also central to understanding musical meaning, and to the use of classical music in films. CHAPTER FIVE: Here I will look more closely at montage, meaning, and classical music on film. A number of questions will be addressed. What are the interpretive strategies that most apply? How does musical meaning function in a film context, especially with regard to source music? Beyond classical music in general, what is the importance of periods, idioms, composers and specific pieces? What is the significance of the artist's intent? What about when the artist is not fully in control of his circumstances, or of his craft? What of phenomenology? All of these expansions obviously complicate the equation. Accordingly the concept of indeterminacy will be reviewed to suggest how both chance and control operate within musical montage. CHAPTER SIX: I will suggest and expand upon some of the extra-musical implications of this study. I will suggest some of the possibilities these raise for future research.

This practice-based research sets out to explore new ways of visualizing and conceptualizing the notion of aura in art. It departs from Walter Benjamin’s widely known critique of aura, the thesis of which is that aura as ‘uniqueness’ of an artwork decays with the rise of technological reproducibility. Benjamin affirms with the decay of aura also the loss of the transposition of religious projections of distance onto fascist politics. His thesis had a major influence on contemporary critical theory where aura is still approached with great reservations. These concern a relapse into religious structures, which mirror, so the thesis argues, the fact that aura has been, also in Benjamin’s ambivalent conceptualization, left ‘territorialized’ in a regime of transcendence in art. The main research question has been: What could aura mean for painting in the expanded field, especially in relation to digital imaging? The outcomes of this research are paintings, works on paper (both involving the input of digital sources), digital films and writings. The thesis develops a reading and visual ‘mapping’ of aura in the framework of Gilles Deleuze’s (and Félix Guattari’s) ontology of immanence where difference and its repetition as differentiation replaces the static metaphysics of ‘origin’ or ‘essence’. Splendor Solis, a series of book illuminations from the Northern Renaissance proved to become a major visual source for experimentation. Aura is introduced in this alchemical work as the ‘splendour’ of Becoming, the deframing power of the differential processes that accompany individuation. As a sensation experienced in intuitive art practice, aura affects and is affected by a field of interacting multiplicities and the potentiality of temporal differentiations, which reach beyond any ascertained subjectivity into virtual collective questions and problems. Aura suggests as an ‘echo’ of Becoming an involvement with affects, and the research follows strands between qualitative intense moments that activate a ‘wound’ and extend to what Deleuze calls a ‘wound that existed before me’, an experience related to the synthesis of future, which confronts an individual with its emerging double. Constructing, or ‘mapping’ aura as visuals on an axis that involves media of ‘uniqueness’ and digital technology gives those outcomes an ontological status of ‘simulacra’ or assemblages, far from the traditional associations aura would evoke. Touching both experience and experiment, so the thesis argues, aura in immanence can provide an access to the virtualities of the ‘new’ in art practice. The research introduces a visual scenario or ‘conceptual persona’ for intuition, which as method of this research folds both practice and writing. Friedrich Hölderlin’s unfinished play Empedocles at Etna, provides a metaphor or metamorphosis encompassing aura’s and intuition’s involvement with immediacy and duration. The practice documentation of the thesis reflects the strands of the research as plurality of its differentiations, allowing the dynamics of its method in action to reflect the dynamics of aura.

In recent years, many American independent films have become increasingly engaged with popular music culture and have used various forms of pop music in their soundtracks to various effects. Disparate films from a variety of genres use different forms of popular music in different ways, however these negotiations with pop music and its cultural surroundings have one true implication: that the 'independentness' (or 'indieness') of these movies is informed, anchored and embellished by their relationships with their soundtracks and/or the representations of or positioning within wider popular music subcultures. Independent American cinema, often distinguished from mainstream Hollywood cinema in terms of the separateness of its production or distribution, or its thematic and/or formal transgressions, can also be seen as distinctive in terms of its musical expression. This thesis will investigate the impact that these popular music cultures have had on contemporary American independent film since the 1980s. The primary objective of this thesis is not to discuss how these films are positioned within the industry (this has been done elsewhere), nor is it the aim to scrutinise a film's independentness (or 'unindependentness') in terms of its production, but rather to assert how music functions in these films and how a notion of independence (indieness) can be measured from the relationship between the film, its soundtrack, and a wider music culture. This will involve textual analyses of how popular music has been used to score a selection of key independent films (ranging from Blue Velvet and Do the Right Thing through to Ghost World and Juno), how popular music trends and subcultures have been represented on screen (such as dance music culture in Go), and how the film and music worlds have interacted, particularly through collaborations between directors and pop musicians (such as Darren Aronofsky and Clint Mansell).

This thesis was instigated through a consideration of the views held by many film scholars who predicted that the political handover that took place on the July 1 1997, whereby Hong Kong was returned to the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from British colonial rule, would result in the “end” of Hong Kong cinema. From that day onwards, Hong Kong cinema would no longer enjoy its previously unfettered and uninhibited revolutionary creativity and the Hong Kong film industry could thereby be perceived as being “in crisis”. In considering whether these predictions have actually come to pass, this thesis sets out to focus on exploring representative Hong Kong filmmakers’ activities and performances following Hong Kong becoming a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1997 onwards. The exploration of the chosen filmmakers’ activities and performances includes examining the filmmaking practices that they have embraced and analysing the exhibition and distribution patterns adopted by the films that they have produced. The intention is to examine to what extent the political transition has shaped these filmmakers’ filmmaking practices and to observe the characteristics exhibited by the distribution and exhibition aspects of the films since the handover in order to specify any connection they may have with the momentous political handover. This thesis intends to show how Hong Kong cinema has responded to the challenges of an age of transition and globalisation through in-depth analyses of the activities of these key industry personnel that have elevated Hong Kong cinema’s position of regional and global popularity, and the commercially and critically significant films that they have made, covering the wider spectrum of genre, including those of action, comedy, realistic, horror and romantic drama. It is the aim of this thesis to present a new perspective that contributes to the study of post-colonial Hong Kong cinema.

Current discourse about internet based art practices brings renewed interest to the materiality of the art object and the exhibition event. Digital and internet artists reflecting on the institutionalisation of the internet find that the turn away from the world of the institutionalised gallery has become untenable, and now create artwork that functions in both realms: the gallery and online. My research acknowledges this dual approach and proposes that accordingly areas of interest, such as negation and the material condition of the art object within conceptual art, institutional critique, and internet art should be reconsidered. By means of a practice-led artistic research methodology and based on the above context, the artist-researcher initiated a research process focused on how the distribution of art can enable us to rethink the traditional status of the art object. Integrating theory and practice led to an approach to art practice where distribution is integral to the doing and making of art. In my proposal, dispersal – or spreading the art object over multiple platforms, some of which lies beyond the exhibition event – is seen as an act of self-determination by the artist and a means to create objects with an ambiguous ontology or material condition. This proposal is developed and tested in several situations inside and outside the gallery, online, and as tools applied to text. From my research emerged a new practice I call a dispersal practice, and the dispersed object becomes a project that consists of multiple entities that are located on, or circulate through, different platforms. Some entities might appear in different forms at different times. My research finds that the functioning of the dispersed object within the artworld raises permanent questions about the status of the art object in terms of its materiality and status as art. My research finds also that the dispersed art object needs to be seen as both process and object. The dispersed object can be authorised by the artist to have the following characteristics: distributed, unlocated, circulating and ambiguous, a hybrid object structured through modularity. It becomes exposed and performed through a succession of events in different configurations. These are the temporary conditions of the dispersed art object. The research concludes with a project in collaboration with the John Hansard Gallery that demonstrates the dispersed object. Keywords: art object, dispersion, dispersal practice, distribution, institutionalisation, status of the art object, conceptual art, institutional critique, digital, internet, process, materiality, hybrid, ambiguous object, digital object, symbiosis, archive, aggregation.