This study focuses on the relation of three Japanese artists to Fluxus: Takehisa Kosugi, Mieko Shiomi, and Yasunao Tone. In the early 1960s, these three were part of a free improvisational music group in Tokyo called ‘Group Ongaku’ (Music Group). In Group Ongaku, partly through concerns with l’objet sonore, they moved from focussing on sound only, to a concern with performing action as music. From 1961 onwards, they came into contact with Fluxus ‘leader’ George Maciunas via the experimental composers Toshi Ichiyanagi and Nam Jun Paik, and artist Yoko Ono. Kosugi, Shiomi, and Tone all participated in Fluxus activities in New York. Although their contributions have been mentioned in Fluxus publications, the relation between their early work in Group Ongaku and their later work in Fluxus has not been discussed thoroughly. This study aims to show why their work appealed to Maciunas, and bore similarities to the work of other Fluxus artists, resulting in a mutual appreciation. I wish to demonstrate that this was not just a simple matter of the Japanese artists having been influenced by Fluxus or John Cage, but that the beginnings of their experimentation and the development of their work was rooted in their own context in Japan. A view of Fluxus as an international group where specific, local concerns were also relevant to the artists that participated in it will be supported. Shared influences between some members of Fluxus, and Group Ongaku, such as Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and ethnomusicology ensured concerns with action, chance, the unconscious and re-evaluation of familiar environments and objects. This, for Group Ongaku, was set against the social and political tension of 1960s Tokyo, where World War II was still fresh in the memory of many citizens. Millions of protesters were taking to the streets fearing another war if America were allowed to continue with military bases in Japan, and the superficial happiness of middle-class workers wishing to make a good standard of living from the economic boom was being critiqued by artists. Close readings of each individual’s work bearing relevance to Fluxus are presented in the final part. This will be the first study to present chapter-length, in-depth readings of Group Ongaku members’ work together in the context of Fluxus. As close readings of the work of these three artists are scarce, this will contribute to the understanding of them. Japanese artists in Fluxus are numerous, yet under-studied as individuals in Fluxus contexts, and it is hoped that this study will add to Fluxus studies another perspective on the relation between Fluxus and Japan. Additionally, this will provide the first PhD-length study in English or Japanese on Group Ongaku’s relationship to Fluxus.

In this thesis I examine the development in the theatre outside London, known as the "repertory theatre movement". I concentrate on the first three theatres founded, the Gaiety in Manchester, the Citizens' in Glasgow, and the Liverpool Repertory Theatre, all of which came into prominence between 1907 and 1917, the ten years which span the life of the Gaiety Theatre. The roots of the movement are traced to Germany and its network of subsidised theatres, and to the Abbey in Dublin, which played a crucial role as the catalyst for the movement The British background to the movement is also explored. A discussion of the theatres' structure follows, with their establishment, organisation, finances, policy and the audience they attracted, surveyed. I then consider the repertoire of each theatre analysing which plays they performed, which new authors encouraged, and why the emphasis lay on a certain kind of drama. The backgrounds of the actors and actresses who joined the repertory theatres are discussed, as are their techniques, and how they adapted to the strictures of repertory. Similarly, the directors who undertook a huge workload were forced to find a new way of working which would ensure high artistic standards, while producing a large number of plays. I shall look at this development of a new stagecraft in a historical context and evaluate its strengths and weak-nesses.

This dissertation provides a critical re-assessment of the oeuvre of Francis Picabia (1879-1953) and assesses the ways the artist worked to resist the accommodation and domestication of his work. It emphasizes the role of negation and refusal in his painting and poetry, and examines his role as Dadaist and polemicist. This dissertation argues that as artists struggled to render art meaningful and sustainable under the totalizing effects of capitalism and modernity in the first half of the twentieth century, Picabia sought to travesty rather than transcend modernity by enacting an extremely nihilistic form of self-criticism and institutional critique. Picabia’s constant change of style and medium, delight in contradiction, elusive social behavior, extreme egoism, and steadfast commitment to the destabilization of intentionality in his work sought to interrupt the colonizing processes of commodification and to tautologically address the paradoxical and contradictory character of securing meaning in a world without meaning. Divided into five chapters, beginning with Picabia’s affiliation with Puteaux Cubism in Paris in 1911 and ending with a discussion of the final works made before his death in 1953, this dissertation seeks to contextualize major moments of during his career when refusal and negation—even the possible dissolution of his own practice—became the focus of his artistic production. Drawing on the theories of the literary critic Peter Bürger and the Hegelian-Marxist art historian TJ Clark, this study works to come to terms with the strengths, limits, and unresolved ambiguities of Picabia’s willfully antagonistic and conflicted oeuvre and to underscore the critical pressure his work and actions placed on stable narratives of modernism and the conditions that regulate and make meaning available in modern art.

The completion of History as Theatrical Metaphor, now submitted for consideration for the award of the degree of Doctor of Letters, represents an integration and culmination of a number of related strands arising from both my practice as a playwright over the last five decades and my relevant academic research. Susanne Kries has summarised a key approach underlying my writing of history plays as ‘deconstructing the ideological intent behind the very endeavour of writing history and of revealing the ways by which mythologies are formed’. Much of my related academic research shares this interest. A recurring theme of both playwriting and scholarly writing, central to the work submitted, is the significance of the interaction of drama, language – especially Scots and English – and history. The initial phase in exploring such themes was in my developing professional playwriting practice. In 1967, I wrote the first draft of Mary, eventually produced by the Royal Lyceum Theatre Company in 1977. In this first version I sought to address the theme of the life of Mary, Queen of Scots, but in a revisionary way. The play’s first acts, before Mary arrives on stage, involved an unlikely affair between Mary of Guise, Queen Regent in Mary’s absence in France, and her Secretary of State, Maitland of Lethington, conceived as a cross between a Chief Minister and a Mafia consigliere, a relationship in which Mary of Guise achieved some form of Lawrentian ‘authentic’ sexual release and self-fulfilment through her relationship with a powerful Scots leader. This motif was developed when Mary arrived and proceeded to fall under the magnetic spell of the even more Lawrentian Bothwell, a transformation of her sexuality and identity marked by the fact that about half way through her scenes she stopped speaking in French-inflected English and started to speak in Scots. The play’s tendentiousness was further marked by its being written in Scots-language free verse. The decision to write in Scots was consciously, if superficially, ideological. It sought to reflect the vibrant language amongst which I grew up on a council scheme, although in my home the dominant language was Standard Scottish English. I also sought to take a revisionary view of Scottish history, seeking to avoid what I saw as the sentimentalisation of that history in plays by an older generation like that of Robert McLellan. What I was concerned to do was later outlined explicitly by Tom McGrath in a 1984 interview, talking of his own practice: I suppose at that time we were coming up with a different ideology. We were coming up with a different approach after all that work, work that had been done [by writers like MacDiarmid and McLellan] in Scots language. We were coming up with this street level sound of existentialist man in the street, "black man in the ghetto" type of writing. It just upset the applecart. (Later I would develop a contextual interpretation of the shift McGrath refers to, and which I sought to be part of, in arguing that the use of Scots on stage was key to supporting and enhancing the cultural prestige of Scots in the 2011 chapter, ‘Drama as a Means for Uphaudin Leid Communities’. This – in a continuing conscious intention to assert the potential and status of Scots – while academic in content, was written entirely in Scots.) In short, from the beginning of my professional playwriting, a key strand was experiment in and exploration of the relationship of drama, Scots language, community identity and history, particularly the interrogation of accepted versions of ‘history’. The first draft of Mary came by the early 1970s to seem to me to be unsatisfactory in its exploration of the interaction of drama, language and history. By then, it appeared in its sensationalist version of Scottish history to have fallen into a parallel trap to the earlier one of a sentimental and romanticised view of that history. It certainly had moved away from conventional treatments of Scotland’s past, but was rather tending to a simplistic dramatic interpretation pour épater les bourgeois. Indeed, its attempts at sexual directness made it unacceptable at that time, 1968-69, to the management of the Royal Lyceum. While its Literary Manager Alan Brown spoke positively of the play, he still felt the company could not present it. Within very few years my own view came to be that, while it might substitute a certain late-adolescent Scots-language raunchiness for earlier playwrights’ Scots-language sentimentalities, it was itself somewhat naïve and sentimental. Further, the use of Scots in a free verse form, rather than adding anything to the dramatic potential of Scots language, seemed to remove it from the everyday discourse which inspired me to use it in the first place. This change of critical perspective and creative intention arose from two related developments in my dramaturgy. One was the impact of a variety of late 1960s theatrical experiments which impressed me in dealing with historical and political material in a post-Shavian and post-Brechtian way. These included the 1964 film version of Peter Brook's production of Peter Weiss's Marat/Sade, which I saw in 1968, John Spurling's MacRune's Guevara (1969) and Peter Nichols's The National Health (1969) in the programme of the National Theatre in London, New York’s Negro Ensemble Company's version of Peter Weiss's The Song of the Lusitanian Bogey, which is concerned with Portuguese colonial exploitation, presented in the 1969 London World Theatre Season, and John Arden and Margaretta D'Arcy's version of Horatio Nelson’s life and reputation, The Hero Rises Up, presented by Nottingham Playhouse at the 1969 Edinburgh Festival. I was further impressed by the theatrical techniques of the New York-based LaMama troupe, by its version of Paul Foster's Tom Paine (1967) and the popularised and commercialised exploitation of those techniques in Hair (1967). I had also read Foster's Heimskringla! Or The Stoned Angels (1970), written for LaMama and derived from Norse sagas. All employed varying metatheatrical techniques to deconstruct received versions of history and politics which extended my own understanding of what was creatively possible. The second development was that, as those plays affected my understanding of theatrical possibilities in exploring historically based themes, I was researching and beginning to draft my next play on a historical theme. This explored the life, business ethics and politics of Andrew Carnegie. On top of all of this, at this time, having showed Max Stafford-Clark, Artistic Director of the Traverse Theatre, a first draft of Carnegie, begun during the autumn of 1969, I was invited by him to work, in my first professional theatre role, as a writing assistant on the first Traverse Workshop Theatre Company production, Mother Earth (1970), directed by Stafford-Clark when he ceased to be director of the Traverse itself. With his new company, he was developing the deconstructionist and improvisational rehearsal techniques that would later be more widely thought of as the creative method of his Joint Stock Theatre Company, into which the Traverse Workshop Company morphed in 1974. The dramaturgical lessons learned from the examples cited above and by working with such a creative and methodologically innovative director as Stafford-Clark were allied to my own quizzical view of Carnegie’s reputation. This was partly derived from the fact that my great-grandfather was a first cousin of Carnegie’s. There were family stories which, if they did not fully undermine his philanthropic reputation, suggested there were other sides to his career.

This thesis compares the remote desktop protocol Spice to NX and VNC taking into consideration user experience when viewing multimedia content. By measuring the quality of the protocols by viewing a video in a slow-motion benchmark compared to ordinary speeds it is shown that Spice has a low video quality compared to VNC. It is likely that due to a large amount of data sent, Spice does not manage to reach a high quality user experience.

Since the 1960s contemporary art has seen a paradigm shift occur that has rejected the individual perspectives of modernity and begun to consider the value of connective and participatory aesthetics. New process-led and technologically-based practices have shifted the emphasis away from the art object and onto the art process, rendering the approach to making art a much more connected and relational one. In parallel, the curatorial role has radically shifted since it was first popularised in the 1970s. With less emphasis on the archival and more on the mediation and dissemination of practices, the role has risen to the forefront of the contemporary art arena, yet the actual methods of curation have not evolved in relation to the practices they curate, revealing an acute lack of curatorial convention for exhibiting and disseminating process-led practices. Employing the term Social Practice to actively define this ever-evolving body of process-led works, this research is situated at the juncture between the social outputs of reciprocal artworks and the curator’s role in exhibiting them. In establishing curation as a practice and situating it at a well-founded and clear point of perspective, this thesis argues that a clearer understanding of curatorial practice will in turn formulate an active and more integrated way of working. Focussed on the curation of media and performative practices specifically, and through four practical case studies: Becoming Electric, Fast and Slow Networks, Scatter Projects and Turnstile, in curatorial and exhibition practice, a dynamic form of curatorial practice is made manifest. This Social Curation seeks to contextualise fully the potential of exhibitions as structures of communication and exchange, maximising social interaction and engagement across curatorial approach, process and outcome. This thesis engages performative and participative approaches in its development of a research bricolage, revealing through practice how curation can function in an open and relational way. It contributes to methodical innovation through its use of a real-life initiative to test and ground the research strategies, and to the fields of artistic and curatorial research through original and responsive strategies towards evolving exhibition formats. Overall it has sought and revealed the means to both situate and question new ways of thinking and methods of working within the dynamic of the everyday.

Siemens Energy develops, manufactures, and provides service of products utilized for production of green energy. This thesis has been conducted at Siemens Energy in Finspång and the department of steam turbine design. A major part of the work at the department includes service and updates of operating steam turbines located all around the world. The tasks of updating and service are short and require quick answers as the plant is waiting to be started. In order to adapt to the rapid development time required, the department of steam turbine design has developed a CAD automation process for drawing production of steam turbine diaphragms. The automation process is developed in an older CAD system that the department long have relied on. This CAD software and thus the automation process will soon be retired and taken out of service since the company is switching to the modern CAD software NX. This thesis is aimed at investigating the current development process at the department and propose and develop a new CAD automation process in NX for steam turbine diaphragms. The work was initiated by performing an analysis of the current situation where the collection of data constituted a solid ground for the rest of the thesis. The data lay the basis for the creation of a design specification which later served as a starting point for both the search and development of solution proposals regarding CAD automation. During the concept generation, it became clear that the development process embodied the scope of concepts, a form of application programming interface to achieve design automation was considered evident. This implied a more area-focused concept generation leading up to multiple solution concepts. After the generated solutions had been sorted and ranked, the solution to proceed with was based on NX integrated tool Knowledge Fusion to achieve CAD automation in NX. The development of the automation process and associated models utilized theories such as the MOKA methodology, high level cad templates and on explicit reference modeling. Resulting in a CAD automation process with possibilities to deliver both CAD models and technical drawings within a timeframe that reduces development time. It was concluded that the developed CAD automation process and associated models assured quality and reliability of the CAD material produced. Furthermore, the developed solution fit in the existing diaphragm development process and showed potential to significantly reduce the development time of steam turbine diaphragms.

I det här projektet har en produktutveckling gjorts av en befintlig konstruktion vid namn “Dog-bone”. Projektet har utförts i samarbete med Hitachi Energy AB vilket är ett världsledande företag inom kraft- och automationsteknik och som ligger beläget i Ludvika.  Konstruktioner som transporteras under en längre period riskerar att uppleva utmattningsskada. I detta fall sker leveransen till havs, vilket innebär att konstruktionen påverkas av accelerationer och krafter från havet. I dagsläget är fästet “Dog-bone” konstruerad för att klara av en veckas transport vilket motsvarar 70 000 cykler. Syftet med projektarbetet var att ta fram ett konceptförslag på den befintlig konstruktionen ”Dog-bone” samt förbättra dess utmattningsegenskaper för att kunna hantera tio veckors transport vilket motsvarar 700 000 cykler. Material som skulle kunna bidra till minskning av utmattningsbrott skulle även undersökas. ”Dog-bone” sitter på flertal ställen i en 25-ton tung HVDC-ventil och utsätts för höga utmattningsspänningar vid leverans av ventilen. Det finns fem olika lager på ventilen där en “Dog-bone” sitter vid varje lager för att spänna fast stativet på ventilen med lagret. Detta för att minska spänning i ventilen vid transport. HVDC-Ventilens ursprungliga syfte är att överföra stora mängder ström med en lång räckvidd till minimala förluster.  Projektet har följt en designprocess som består av en förstudie, analytisk fas, kreativ fas samt en genomförande fas. Projektet inleddes med en förstudie för att få en bättre förstålse om företagets arbete och problemställning, samt undersöka utmattning, spänningskoncentration och dess påverkan på konstruktioner. I den analytiska fasen upprättades kravspecifikation i samråd med handledaren på Hitachi energy. Efter den analytiska fasen påbörjades den kreativa fasen där tre olika koncept togs fram utifrån brainstorming. Dessa koncept ritades sedan upp som CAD-modeller i genomförandefasen. Sedan gjordes det en hållfasthetsanalys med av hjälp finita elementmetoden i programmet NX för att få en bild om hur spänningskoncentrationer lokaliserar sig. Av den maximala spänning som finita elementmetoden resulterar i gjordes ett S-N diagram med givna accelerationer vid givna antal cykler för att representera hur de koncept som tas fram förhåller sig till utmattning. Sedan utvärderades koncepten med hjälp av en elimineringsmatris för att se hur väl de uppnår kravspecifikationen. Det koncept som fick bäst resultat från utvärderingen blir det slutliga konceptet för projektet. Resultet blev ett koncept där storleken av radier ökades.  Det material som ansågs skulle öka utmattningsstyrkan i konstruktionen är ett utmattningståligare aluminium t.ex aw7075-t6 eller ett stål i kategorin “Low-carbon steel”. Dessa resultat känns rimliga eftersom de var faktabaserade lösningar men det hade varit intressant att implementera i verkligheten och se om det stämmer överens med det resultat som tagits fram.

No description available.

In this thesis I consider the interface between copyright law and cultural practice. I argue that the protection of folklore through copyright obfuscates the status of folklore as a generative resource for derivative works in favour of its status as a carrier of national identity, over which states can exercise property rights. Specifically, I analyse the significance of folklore within the playwriting culture of Ghana and discuss how, within this specific context, the introduction of the 2005 Copyright Act (which requires nationals to seek permission and pay a fee to use folklore), rather than incentivising artists to create derivative works from folklore, significantly disrupts the ability of playwrights to continue to create work that reflects the codified theatrical practice established in Ghana post independence. As such, the Ghana Copyright Act, 2005 threatens to jeopardise the fundamental balance in copyright between protection and access, and so the purpose of copyright as a mechanism for incentivising artists. Through exploring the development of the relationship between folklore and copyright and how protection for folklore interacts at the international, continental and sub-regional levels, this thesis examines both the potential impact of the copyright law in Ghana and the efficacy of protecting folklore through a copyright paradigm at all.