Machine Space is an essay film that explores the city of Detroit as a space of movement and circulation. This city is negotiated in the moving image as a palimpsest of maps, spatial metrics and automotive infrastructure; illustrating the material and discursive layers that have constructed this now post-industrial metropolis. This is a city where, in the words of the urban thinker Henri Lefebvre, 'the production of space itself replaces - or, rather, is superimposed upon - the production of things in space.' (Lefebvre 1991, p.62) This practice-as-research doctoral project explores an interface of Lefebvre's 'production of space' with the cinema; as visual artefact, a phenomenological document; and as media exhibited in a screening space. The result is a productive discourse of 'Spatial Cinema'.

This thesis draws on psychoanalytic theories of trauma to interrogate works produced by Polish photographers after the Second World War. The aim of this thesis is to excavate traces of trauma latently embedded in post-war Polish art photography. By closely analysing a selection of photographs produced between the years 1945 and 1970, I argue that the events of the war cast a shadow over the lives of Polish artists. Rather than looking at photographs which directly visualise these traumatic events, I explore the ways in which these experiences manifest themselves indirectly or obliquely in the art of the period, through abstraction, a tendency towards ‘dark realism,’ and an interest in traces of human presence. Drawing on the photographs of Zbigniew Dłubak, Zdzisław Beksiński, Jerzy Lewczyński, Bronisław Schlabs, Andrzej Różycki, Józef Robakowski and other post-war photographers, I argue that the events of the war were not the only traumas to cast their shadow on the Polish psyche. Between 1945 and 1970, Poland underwent a series of transitions and changes in leadership, population and Party politics. Periods of optimism and leniency oscillated with phases of repression and social unrest. In my analysis, I suggest that multiple traumas can be discerned in these decades. What is at stake in this thesis is the proposition that a photograph can bear imperceptible traces of events that have wounded the psyche, which could not be articulated at the time, but which were made visible at a later date. Photographs made in the post-war years provided a space to belatedly return to encrypted traumas, to relay ideas that could not otherwise be articulated, and to acknowledge events that had been disavowed.

This portfolio and commentary documents an approach to audiovisual composition that utilises sound and photographic images in an effort to create immersive, affective art which I call audio-photographic art. When presented in an immersive context, I contend that the temporal dissonance between still image and sound opens up a space between the materials. I draw upon Gernot Böhme's writings on the aesthetic of 'atmosphere', as well as the the theoretical writings of Roland Barthes, Paul Ricoeur and Eleni Ikoniadou among others to illustrate how this experience is constituted. This space between is an affective conceptual space in which the participant enters into a relationship with the materials of the piece, transcending their usual perception of time as they are immersed in the internal times of the artwork, their own memories and atmosphere. Through the use of maximal aesthetics and atmosphere as compositional tool, these themes are explored and developed throughout the creative portfolio. In the written submission I study the practical and theoretical concerns of the space between from three perspectives: 'The Temporal Space', 'The Memorial Space' and 'The Atmospheric Space'.