This PHD project has been based on 100% studio practice; the original title for the research programme was Between Reality and Fiction and aimed at exploring the construction of reality and truth in our society, a society strictly controlled by the mass media. Whilst developing the first project within this body of research - Isolation (an attempt to contrast a real life experience of a visit to a prison with existing institutional information obtained through second and third hand sources - readings, media, films ...), a range of other more pertinent concepts arose, causing a shift from those initial ideas to ones incorporating control, displacement and space, understanding this, not only as a physical entity, but also as a socio-political construction. Based on the different projects that form the basis of my research, I explored the concept of control and how that is exercised on individuals in free/democratic societies- from spatial control (access/no access), economical, cultural (oneself/others), medical/technological, or media control (the creation of public opinion). This research attempts to question/reflect public awareness of these control measures, in order to assess their limitations, whilst investigating any existing gaps in the system which could potentially subvert it. What has been particularly relevant has been the exploration of issues relating to space, understood not only as a physical entity, but also as a socio-political construction, how space is organised, divided and controlled in an era of globalisation, and whether, or why access to certain ‘spaces’ is either severely restricted or completely denied. Work developed during the PhD has consisted of: Practical studio research (mainly installations, video and photography), site specific visits/trips relevant to particular themes within the project (HMP Winchester, Strait of Gibraltar, Canary Islands, container depots, airports ...); related readings; compilation of explicit news reportage; and the construction of an extensive archive that includes all printed and digital matter tracking the entire research process and its methodology. Personal experience has also been a main factor, influencing the development of specific research: temporary/precarious housing, part-time jobs, or in general, the situation of living abroad with all that that implies in the way of physical and cultural displacement.

The project has engaged critically and reflectively in a series of investigations through Deleuzean theory and fine art practice. It has explored the functions of the diagram in relation to direct images of time, identifying novel perspectives on these aspects of Deleuzean theory through interconnections and a reciprocally transformative engagement with art practice. The research offers fresh insight into the complicated temporal shifts that become apparent through practice by layering visual and discursive elements. The work is concerned with the interrelation and transformation of different temporalities across surfaces and screens, and is situated in the intersections between text, film and drawing. <- Text functions in, about and as practice, and theory feeds and folds through processes of making. The interactions between analogue and digital, and the superposition and overlaying of the surfaces of drawings with projection are of particular importance. Digital film projections are traced and drawn, and the resulting layered surfaces are filmed again, repeatedly marked over and superimposed. The research addresses how these complex interrelationships might be understood as time images, and how different functions of the diagram can be seen to activate or make possible these direct perceptions of time. The diagram, in a Deleuzean sense, is characterised by a continual splitting that is simultaneously a divergence. Coming apart just as it runs together, the diagram is a marking out or working through that is provisional, temporal and engages with what is yet to be. The time image is identified as an instance in film where the virtual, or pure past and possibility, is perceived in the present. A stable, interwoven structure is developed through Bergson's theories of perception, recognition and memory, and this acts as a surface across, on and within which the main body of the text takes place. This is separated into three parts and each section proposes the interrelationship of a different diagrammatic function and a particular imaging of time. These are seen to arise through: slips, or loose, errant linkages; splits, or simultaneous bifurcations between

My area of research is the peplum, a cycle of mythological action films produced in Italy from 1957 to 1965, and its influence on both contemporaneous and subsequent filmic depictions of mythical heroes. I argue that this genre is a significant cinematic form which has been marginalised in the fields of film and cultural studies. My thesis reassesses the peplum in terms of its representations of heroic masculinity and the ways in which these relate to wider debates on masculinity. Critics such as Richard Whitehall (1963), Gianni Rondolino (1979) and Richard Dyer (1996, 1997) have noted that the cycle began with Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, Pietro Francisci, 1958), which established the peplum ground rules. Taking this film as my starting point, I trace the evolution of the genre through a series of case studies, including Romolo e Remo (Duel of the Titans, Sergio Corbucci, 1961), which offers contrasting forms of heroic masculinity, and counter representations of Herculean masculinity in Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), an American production made partly in response to the success of the peplum, and Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules Conquers Atlantis, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1961). I also discuss later reconfigurations of the peplum hero in the American-financed Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982) and 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007), which draw on the iconography and aesthetics of the peplum to markedly different effect. Previous peplum scholarship has characterised the genre as endorsing the value of white male physical strength in the context of a reactionary patriarchal status quo. I argue that the depiction of masculinity in these films is more varied, problematic and contradictory than this over-generalised reading would suggest. It is my contention that the peplum’s diverse representations of masculinity offer a notable contribution to ongoing debates on maleness as centred on and expressed by the body—within film studies, academia and the wider culture—that has been largely unexplored and unappreciated. My re-evaluation of the peplum also underlines the cultural value of Italian and indeed European genre cinema, fields still overshadowed in film studies by the dominant Hollywood models.

This thesis asks: how have recent changes in body politics impacted on the themes and ideas explored in contemporary body-based performance? What aesthetic and formal strategies do artists use to attempt to challenge sedimented norms, hegemonies, and power structures related to gender and the body? Contributing to an emerging field of contemporary research which takes a queer, transfeminist methodological approach to disrupting conventional ways of seeing and thinking sex, gender, and other constructions of the body, this study centers on contemporary practices which utilise the performing body as a ground for negotiating social prescriptions, and nurturing new, alternative forms of embodiment. This thesis undertakes the first detailed academic study of the performance practice of three under-researched artists: Mouse, Cassils, and boychild. Via close analysis of these case study examples it theorises specific deployments of the transgressive body in performance and argues that these bodies challenge assumptions of normative subjectivity through different strategies of queer intervention and subversion. Mouse exploits the disruptive potentiality in abject, grotesque, and parodic strategies; Cassils manipulates the binary structure of the heterosexual hegemony by queering the material form of her/his own body; and boychild’s queer, black embodiment extends beyond sci-fi inspired, cyborgian aesthetics, toward a plotting of posthuman, afrofuturist politics. Whilst each case study artist poses a challenge to bodily (hetero)normativity, each works in a different style or form to the next, using different aesthetics and appropriating from a range of ‘low’ or popular (sub)cultures. Consequently, the analyses in this study are formulated using a methodology which interweaves transdisciplinary ‘high’ theory approaches with non-academic literature on popular and/or subcultural forms. This thesis therefore makes contributions to knowledge primarily within the fields of body art and performance studies, but also within (trans)gender and (trans)feminist studies, queer theory, critical race theory and cultural studies.

This dissertation takes as its point of departure, the claim that difference, not identity, is the primary quality of language. This difference is initially argued to be an 'uncommon sense'; one which does not emerge from a ground, origin, or operate within a dialectic of essence/appearance, but which consists of an economy of acoustic surfaces/timings/spatialities: diffuse, interpenetrative, and unclassifiable: a 'sensual' logic, not a logic based on identity, or metaphysics. Traditional philosophies of language tend to flatten out and simplify the space/time /material relations of language, in favour of a stable, timeless, fixed identity, which makes logical thought possible, through fixed, linear, disciplinary forms. They claim that language is able to unambiguously locate concepts, concretely, in time and space, unproblematically supporting thought. In contrast, it is the original contribution of the thesis to extend and complicate categories of logic, to include doubt, paradox, infinity and 'unstable' forms of understanding, as evidence of difference as the primary quality of language: a "mimetologic" as Lacoue-Labarthe has termed it, or what Adorno calls an anti-system, or Negative Dialectic. The 'difference' which paradox, in its ability to be this/not this, embodies, shows us the limits of representational thinking; as it strains against that limit, while simultaneously (and paradoxically), retrieving the intensity of thought. Part I draws on the key historical debates within philosophy, as they concern language, logic, and an account of sense. Part II shows that in the search for what Wittgenstein has called "the subliming of our account of logic", wherein signs equal facts in a relatively simple, way, aporias are inevitable, becoming viral in any system, such logical paradoxes and antinomies undermining any stable, determinable, ground for language. In Part III an 'acoustic' logic is posed as an alternative to logics based on visual paradigms, which cannot capture the dynamics of paradox and art, or account for their non-identical 'surfaces'. Part IV points towards art, literature, and performance in which the mimetological surfaces of language form [Un]disciplined gestures, constituting a praxis of [Un]common sense, whose logic is acoustic. Finally, communication itself is seen to be comprised of acoustic, paradoxical, mimetological surface(s), and an acoustic logic is offered as an a-representational, sensual form of understanding.

This thesis presents a conceptual knot, namely of how to sustain the intentionally temporary. Part of the original contribution of this thesis lies in exploring what it means for an artwork to be temporary, tracing the historical context from the twentieth century onwards, thereby establishing the category of temporary artworks, and providing thoughts on how to care for temporary artworks so that they might be known and experienced by future audiences. On the basis of this research, a practical proposal is developed for what a retrospective of temporary artworks might look like. Temporary artworks should be considered as a category unto their own because of the specific set of constraints which set them apart: they are physical works of art which exist for an intentionally limited amount of time, and are created only once. These specific constraints problematize the engagement of future audiences due to the works’ very limited and singular existence as a physical work. In order to address the issue of how to (re)visit impermanence, I develop the claim that what is passed on from a temporary artwork is contingent on the stakeholders, including the primary audience, who are posited as a group of unintentional archivists holding stock in a type of living archive. After their material unmaking, temporary artworks can be experienced through the notion that ‘the artwork is not present’, a riff on artist Marina Abramović’s retrospective work The Artist is Present (2010). A retrospective of temporary artworks would consist of memories and documents contextualizing their fragmentary nature, highlighting what Severin Fowles discusses as ‘the carnality of absence’. A clarification of what is missing assists in sustaining what I develop and describe as ‘the performance of loss’, a critical part of temporary artworks. Stewarding a temporary artwork into the future thus depends on letting the material object go, and contextualizing its presence, loss, and absence for future audiences.

Immerse yourself in a world of sound and approximations. This practice-­led research is concerned with critically examining the roots and contemporary significance of immersion within sonic art and everyday life. This body of work has resulted from research into key issues repositioning the term immersion outside the normal parameters of art investigating the intertwining relationship between immersion, listening and anthrophony. The research has been informed by the working methods of selected contemporary artists using field recordings within various interior environments. Rigorous listening to works has also influenced and driven this research forward to search for definitions of immersion. The author analyses the sonic works produced by reflecting on his own practice, with the thesis focused on the works produced rather than any alternative historical notion of sonic arts. The thesis critically examines a collection of works perceived as immersive in nature and secondly explores the interaction with personal sonorous environments. This thesis presents a series of informative and illuminating original interviews that have reinforced expanded elements of immersion presented in the examination of the practice-­led aspects of the work. These primary source interviews give a wide spectrum of opinions and experiences enabling the term and practices of immersion to be viewed outside the commonly viewed perceptions and practices that immersion evokes with artists’, audiences and individuals. Thirteen interviews with international artists’, curators and contemporary writers reflect on their personal experiences of immersion in art and critical methodological influences and practices. The interviews also discuss the contested adjectives that the term immersion evokes and the wider reaching impacts of the term beyond popular usages of the term. These essential interviewees include: Alan Dunn (multidisciplinary artist), BJ Nilsen (field recordist and sound artist), Budhaditya Chattopadhyay (researcher and sound artist), Chris Watson (field recordist and artist), Christine Sun Kim (sound artist), Daniela Cascella (curator, researcher and contemporary writer), David Hendy (researcher and contemporary writer), Francisco Lopez (sound artist), Hildegard Westerkamp (composer and sound ecologist), Markus Soukup (film and sound artist) Matthew Herbert (electronic musician), Ross Dalziel (Local Curator) and Sebastiane Hegarty (visual and sound artist). This primary research brings together, for the first time, a broad spectrum of experiences, opinions and views on immersion in sonic art and everyday life and re-­considers the challenges presented when examining this theme. An accompanying collection of artistic recordings using three distinct methods is also presented as an integrated part of the thesis. First, using mobile phones to record the author’s everyday travels, conversations and movements. Secondly, it utilises the habituated environments and the in/significance of each reverberation by presenting recordings using delicate contact microphones. The third method utilises the phenomenological and abstract memories from the author’s autobiographical past, reconstructing the distant but real recollections. These methods illuminate the author’s immersive resonating capsule of isolated existence including and portraying the fragmented and often distorted everyday sonorous experience. Sound Received: Immersion, Listening and Anthrophony generates alternative and renewed thinking on immersion, re-­definitions illuminating historical moments that have shaped much of the research. The unique collection of interviews and sonic recordings contributes to the expanding area of sonic discourse and offers a unique contribution to the field.

My thesis works as an experiment, or rather a series of experiments, in methods of thinking about historical material. These methods come from anthropology and engage with myths and ritual, with the concept of “complementary others”, and the concept of “schismogenesis" as it has been developed by Gregory Bateson and advanced further by Marshall Sahlins. My overall goal is not to re-describe a well-researched historical event, but to explore how different ways of analysis, using different analytical frameworks, could lead to valuable explanations of the same political-cum-cultural event. The phenomenon I engage with is the last Oecumenical Council, a major religious event in the history of Councils within already schismatic societies. For this reason, I treat this Council in particular, as a ritual, unprecedented in scale and ambiguous in its inception. I am examining the structure and the return of this Event in History, and the controversies and tensions in the diachrony of East and West. I do this not only through the notion of schismo-genesis and ritual, but specifically the notion of sacrifice as developed by Maurice Bloch, in which the journey from Constantinople to Italy becomes a historical metaphor of mythical realities, regarding the Emperor John VIII Palaiologos. And finally, I explore the significance of Bessarion and complementary others within the notion of transformation and alterity. What I establish through discussions of the historical material, which span eleven centuries of history, is first of all, that there is no event without a system; that means the journey can acquire the form of the ritual. I argue that the relation between the myth and the idea of unity is dialectical in nature; the Event of a Union, which could bring peace in the one Church of Christ, from this moment of realisation becomes a fabrication, a mystery to the witnesses, and all the other myths that will be developed on the way become even more imperative and melancholic, because they seek to express a negative and unavoidable truth. The Event doesn’t portray reality any more, it exists despite it and becomes an extreme position, almost like a dream, and it justifies the vision one wished to be possible, only to show that it is untenable: the “what if it could be”; the possibility of all parts being aspirations to the whole, oecumenicity as a goal rather than unity. Overall, this thesis is about the presence of the past in the present, in relevance to the future.

This practice-informed research establishes points of intersection between reanimative practices within moving image work and queer theoretical positions. It frames this within autoethnographic understandings of memories pertaining to my adolescent experience of gay acculturation via textual sources. A bricolage methodology deriving from the work of Kincheloe and Berry (2004) is used. Multiple methods of investigation are employed including alternative archive creation, moving image tests and prototypes, processes of reading and re-reading and autoethnographic, reflective and academic writing practices. Analysis and evaluation are informed by selected queer theoretical concepts which correspond to the broad structural phases of reanimation. Research outputs deriving from these processes are i) moving image tests, ii) autoethnographic vignettes, iii) a moving image piece entitled Unbounded and iv) a written thesis. The research aims to build on current understandings of the term “reanimation” (Cholodenko, 1991, 2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2009; Skoller, 2013; Wells, 1998; Wells & Hardstaff, 2008), particularly within moving image practices using “found” material, and to articulate these within a queer perspective. A contextual review assesses previous work on reanimation in research, scholarship and queer-related animation. A series of moving image tests establish a relationship between animation, deanimation and reanimation which, I propose, constitutes the reanimative process. I consider this practice-informed understanding in relation to analogous patterns and motifs in queer theoretical literature. Finally, evaluation of the evidence from my practice tests and the terminal piece, Unbounded, corroborate a proposed set of intersections. The conclusion offers a conceptualisation of the process of reanimation in my moving image practice and establishes that the reanimated outcome attests to its reanimated status through the “temporal composite” (Skoller, 2013). I build on work concerning queer forms of evidence (Muñoz, 1996, 2009), alternative archive creation (Cvetkovich, 2003), queer temporality (Freeman, 2010; Rohy, 2009; Stockton, 2009) and futurity (Bansel, 2012; Edelman, 2004; Muñoz, 2009) to demonstrate that this reanimative principle is reflective of contemporary queer concerns with historicity. This practice-informed research contributes to knowledge by extending a modest body of animation literature addressing sexuality (de Beer, 2014, 2015, January 21; Griffin, 1994; Halberstam, 2011; Padva, 2008; Pilling, 2012b; Takahashi, 2014; Wells, 1998; Wood, 2008) through its focus on the formal aspects of reanimation and interconnections with the queer, as opposed to the more frequently addressed issue of queer representation.

Apparitions of empire and imperial ideologies were deeply embedded in the International Exhibition, a distinct exhibitionary paradigm that came to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. Exhibitions were platforms for the display of objects, the movement of people, and the dissemination of ideas across and between regions of the British Empire, thereby facilitating contact between its different cultures and societies. This thesis aims to disrupt a dominant understanding of International Exhibitions, which forwards the notion that all exhibitions, irrespective of when or where they were staged, upheld a singular imperial discourse (i.e. Greenhalgh 1988, Rydell 1984). Rather, this thesis suggests International Exhibitions responded to and reflected the unique social, political and economic circumstances in which they took place, functioning as cultural environments in which pressing concerns of the day were worked through. Understood thus, the International Exhibition becomes a space for self-presentation, serving as a stage from which a multitude of interests and identities were constructed, performed and projected. This thesis looks to the visual and material culture of the International Exhibition in order to uncover this more nuanced history, and foregrounds an analysis of the intersections between practices of exhibition-making and identity-making. The primary focus is a set of exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-1880s and early-1900s, which extends the geographic and temporal boundaries of the existing scholarship. What is more, it looks at representations of Canada at these events, another party whose involvement in the International Exhibition tradition has gone largely unnoticed. Consequently, this thesis is a thematic investigation of the links between a municipality routinely deemed the ‘Second City of the Empire’ and a Dominion settler colony, two types of geographic setting rarely brought into dialogue. It analyses three key elements of the exhibition-making process, exploring how iconographies of ‘quasi-nationhood’ were expressed through an exhibition’s planning and negotiation, its architecture and its displays. This original research framework deliberately cuts across strata that continue to define conceptions of the British Empire, and pushes beyond a conceptual model defined by metropole and colony. Through examining International Exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, and visions of Canada in evidence at these events, the goal is to offer a novel intervention into the existing literature concerning the cultural history of empire, one that emphasises fluidity rather than fixity and which muddles the boundaries between centre and periphery.