To Fill the Void With Color is a conceptual photographic installation of a parent raising an autistic child in the early 1990s. Despite major scientific advances in autism of the time, there still remains a sociological void in parent's experiences. Although one work cannot speak for an entire two decades of personal experience, one work can start to fill the void with words, with color, and with love.

This thesis documents a body of research that links the field of electro-acoustic diffusion and spatialisation with practice in the music and film post-production industries. Three research questions are posed: "How can the physical user-interfaces used for panning by the music and film post-production industries offer creative alternatives to the fader-based hardware approach commonly used for electro-acoustic performance?" "How can a Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) be used as an alternative to dedicated panning hardware? "How can emerging programming technologies offer creative alternatives to the MAX/MSP or hardware-based tools commonly used for sound spatialisation?" This practice-based PhD addresses these questions by designing, developing and testing a set of hardware and software tools, the Requirement Specification for this `Toolset' results from literature review and critical analysis of current systems to determine potential research gaps. This analysis is followed by the selection of a suitable methodology for development and testing that allows the research questions to be explored effectively and results in the following Toolset: OctoPanner: Amulti-featured eight-channel 3D touchscreen panner application for Apple's Mac OS X controlling a DAW hosted customisable VST 3D panning plug-in with C++ source code. ShapePanner: A synchronisable shape-based sequencer application for Mac OS X inspired by Experimentalstudio's Halaphon. The user is ab{e to describe the movement of sounds in a 3D space using shape primitives such as lines and circles and thus extend the capabilities of the Toolset beyond realtime manual manipulation of sounds. 3DMIDIVisualiser: An application to allow the user to work without access to a multi-speaker system by enabling the movement of sounds to be viewed within a virtual room. Foot Puck: Afoot-controlled panning controller enabling a musician to spatialise their instrument using foot movement. Initial prototyping was achieved using Cycling `74's Max/MSP but the final applications are written using Apple's Cocoa environment and Objective C. This thesis gives close analysis and discussion of the various stages of research carried out; including the use of Apple's CoreMlDl and CoreAudio Clock OS X Core Services in a Cocoa application.

This thesis examines Malaysian cinema in the context of the various processes and discourses of modernity. Analysing the processes of modernity which Malaysians are engaged with provides a crucial theme by which to demonstrate how various socio-political ideologies, institutions, and mechanisms may be promoted, rejected, or otherwise negotiated. This negotiation takes place in both Malaysian society and the cinematic representations of that society. Therefore, two discrete disciplines have been incorporated, those of anthropology and film studies. In the course of the thesis, discourses of modernity, encompassing processes and institutions, are addressed in terms of existing ethnographic literature, my own ethnographic research, and in the analyses of contemporary films. The introduction of an ethnographic background for the society in which the films are produced opens new vistas for film analysis. However, while the injection of anthropology into a film study has been a major concern, the importance of the reverse is also argued. Further, this thesis provides a multiple rendering of analyses, arguing that, as a symbolic media and/or art form, cinema is inherently open to alternative readings, 'mis'-readings, and rereadings. One of the goals of thesis is, through a different synergy between film and anthropology, to provide some alternative answers to the ever-present question haunting the Malaysian cinema industry, namely "Why aren't our films successful?"

The subject of this study is Sub-Sahara Africa Anglophone Video-moviemaking and the research process is an empirical enquiry into how this contemporary cultural industry has emerged in the region, bringing with it a paradigmatic shift in the concept of cinema on the African continent. Within this context I look at the interventions that necessitate and define this industry pioneered by Ghana and Nigeria. These interventions are historical, economic, social and political. To put this research into perspective I commence with the critical question: why is it important to do a study on Sub-Sahara Anglophone video-moviemaking? It is an important subject because this is the history that is barely constructed. It is a history that follows traditional lines of filmmaking and yet distinctly differs from the traditional concept of high culture celluloid filmmaking. It is an industry that is a significant part of the economies of producing countries. The products of this industry also constitute a major source of entertainment in Africa and among African immigrants in the West. Yet, studies on African moviemaking practices have, until most recently, bypassed this important industry. By undertaking this research I explore Sub-Sahara Africa videomoviemaking in order to open discussion and critical review of this creative industry that forms an important part of the economic and cultural systems in the region. This thesis is a hybrid with two components – a text document and an audio-visual documentary on a digital versatile disk (DVD). The presentation of these two components reflects the expansion of dissemination platforms for study results. In presenting these two different formats I have to reduce certain things from each side but I do so in such a way that they work together. In that working together is an emerging corporative that intervenes beyond academia.

In the mid-1960s and early 1970s, experimental and independent cinema received a considerable amount of support from the U.S. federal government through the American Film Institute (AFI), and from private philanthropies and arts institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation (RF) and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). These measures appeared at a moment when the theatrical film industry was reorganising its industrial model and its main trade organisation, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), was revising its moral standards. Only recently scholars have started historiographical research on experimental cinema's connection with arts and academic infrastructures, yet they have not paid similar attention to the FI's support for experimental and independent cinema production. Thus, they have failed to explain experimental and independent cinema's complex relationship with both the theatrical film industry and philanthropic enterprises during that period. In this project I address these connections through archival research on the FI's experimental and independent film production fund, the Independent Filmmaker Program (IFP), relating this measure to other distribution and exhibition policies. I locate the origins of these policies in pre-WWII federal government's and RF's film education and propaganda programmes. Then I further contextualise the measures within the wider international state of the film industry between 1945 and 1974. Thus I argue that the policies advanced in the 1960s engaged with some of the demands of experimental and independent filmmakers and critics for freer personal expression and more flexible modes of film production. At the same time, these policies contributed to expand non-theatrical film production and update film education in line with the interests of the main theatrical film industry. This study contributes to understand a key moment in American film history considering both the relationship between the U.S. federal government, private philanthropies and the MPAA, and between institutions and filmmakers.

This paper accompanies the show “Mise-en-Scène of Desire” that took place onMay 21st, 2010. Both the show and the paper deal with the subject of female hysteria,explored from both a historical and contemporary perspective. My aim is to look at howour ideas of female hysteria have been mediated, and how the representations haveproduced an incomplete picture into the experience of the actual female hysterics.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston University / A method of reducing the graininess of a photographic print and increasing resolution in low contrast regions is described. The method involves the printing of more than one negative frame to produce one print. This requires a series of negatives with identical detail coverage in the area to be printed. The success of the method depends largely on the precision of the solution of the registration problem. Each negative is printed in turn, using the normal exposure, partitioned in as many parts as there are negatives to be printed. Each negative must be registered as exactly as possible in the image area. Four different aerial emulsions were used to obtain the 35-mm negatives for the superimposition printing technique. Kodak films used were: Tri X-RP Aercon, Super XX-RP Aerial Recon, Plus X Aerocon (SO 1166), and SO-1213. The exposure versus resolution characteristics and the basic sensitometric curves were developed for these films prior to exposure of the final series of negative frames. The negatives were exposed under identical conditions with the exception of lens openings and shutter speeds at an object to image ratio of 160 to 1. The camera was a Contax IIA with a 50-nm F/2 Sonnar lens. The camera exposure settings were: Tri-X, F/16, 1/250 second; Plus X, F/16, 1/100 second; SO-1213, F/11, 1/50 second. Due to the level of brightness of the target, the camera lens was not used at its best aperture. No filter was used. [TRUNCATED].

Studies on Brazilians living in Britain show that, along with loneliness, unemployment and cost of living, the lack of proficiency in English is a key problem. However, there is little qualitative information about how the host language affects their daily lives. This interdisciplinary practice-based research asks how an art practice activated by experiences of displacement and dislocation in language can become a place of enunciation for decolonial selves. To this end, this research includes not only individual practices, but also collective activities carried out with a group of Brazilian women living in London, as a research focus. The endeavour to deal with English language has engendered writing processes in my visual work, which became a place for experimenting bilingual and fragmentary voices against the initial muteness in which I found myself on arrival in London. Using photography, printmaking, drawing, postcards, and artist’s books I have explored life-writing genres of diary, language memoir, and correspondence to raise an immigrant consciousness, explore accented voices and create practices for writing life individually and collectively. Assembling words and turning their meanings became strategies for expanding limited vocabularies. Once an impassable obstacle, the host language was transformed into a territory for exploring ways to know stories about language and write life narratives through art practice. This research is informed by humanist and feminist geographical approaches to space and place, postcolonial life writing, border thinking and a context of practice ranging from transnational art, accented cinema, visual poetry, conceptual art, and socially engaged art. It provides insights about English language in the lives of Brazilian women in London and offers a view on a practice in visual arts as place of enunciation for decolonial selves.

"To publish art – to literally make it public – was a political act, one that challenged the art world and the world at large" (Gwen Allen). This critical appraisal on the published journal Next Level reports the result of my research relating to the body of my work from 2005 to 2016. More specifically, I will survey the creative production of the contemporary photography journal Next Level, currently consisting of seven city editions from a volume of twenty-four editions. This acknowledgement is not intended to emphasise the subjectivity of the journal as a limitation, but rather to provide focus to the lens through which I have been looking at my data with important findings about the outcomes of measurable theoretical, critical and artistic approaches. The journal Next Level periodically publishes a number of editions that present the collection of original data about photography art communities through the exploration of various cities around the world. These editions are developed from data collected through on-the-ground research that is central to this evaluation, which is an examination of and response to a large range of data drawn from seven cities, providing new information. This provides a pivot for the work around which my ideas are put across in a meaningful, comparable and communicable way, creating a mapping of each city, always enabling and never limiting. This methodology of gathering data, consisting of governmental cultural reports, museum archives, catalogues, comment books and newsletters, visual artists’ curriculum vitaes (CVs), interviews and rich contextual material, in turn provides primary research for students, photography professionals, photography enthusiasts and future photography historians. By countering the standard framework of research and production, my work is theoretically, critically and artistically traced, not by making things new, but by comprehensively questioning the characteristics that have shaped things in new ways. This framework manifests itself in the preliminary research and creative practice that provided the foundation for the complete scope of the entire space in the journal, which I present alongside this critical appraisal. Through the dissemination of current photographic discourse, I discuss current traditions and new perceptions through various articles and features. These editorial pieces relating to local communities of contemporary art photography look in particular at their cultural outputs in response to the rise of globalisation. Through the roles of artist-as-editor and curator, the journal is an artefact that I have shaped, utilising print production as part of its aesthetic dimension. I have published and distributed between 8,000 and 20,000 copies per edition to 37 countries. The readership of the journal thus has access to viewpoints that are revealing and politically reflective of specific manifestations of power, representation and the unheard stories that are altering various aspects of the conventions of current photographic discourse.

My dissertation focuses on literary and photographic representations of female madness as a means of exposing the material violence that notions of normality and of national identity produced in Italian society during the fin-de-siècle. Although many studies explore the exclusion of minorities in the project of nation-making, the mentally ill have rarely been discussed. Those studies that focus on literary representations of madness usually treat it as a metaphor or literary expedient and leave unexplored the material violence that psychiatric institutions inflicted on the mentally ill body. I aim to connect cultural realities and their representations, exploring the ways in which psychiatric and state power constructed and used the mentally ill body in the quest to create national identity. This quest was rooted in the widespread image of Italians as effeminate southerners from a backward, pre-modern part of Europe, an image that led to a crisis of masculinity. In my study I consider the crisis of masculinity vis-à-vis practices of asexualization of the body conducted inside the asylum. Through a parallel analysis of psychiatric photography and literary representations of female madness in Giovanni Verga, Luigi Capuana, Gabriele D'Annunzio, and Futurist avant-garde writers, my study shows how these practices actively contributed to social constructions of madness. Chapter I is an introduction to the development of modern psychiatry vis-à-vis the project of national identity formation in post-unification Italy. Chapter II analyzes first literary representations of female madness and psychiatric portraits of female patients to argue that the asexualization of patients' bodies was used to offer an ontological weight to national manhood. Chapter III explores the phenomenon of hysteria to show how the body of the hysterical woman functioned as apparatus used to produce normalization. Chapter IV examines how the futurist avant-garde overturned the madness apparatus at the beginning of the twentieth century. The conclusion I draw is that the mentally ill body functioned as an abjected or excluded other whose alterity was key to the construction of Italian identity.