This thesis responds to a tendency in contemporary theatre practice and scholarship to overlook play texts when exploring the media-‐theatre relation. It challenges recent shifts in critical discourse concerning the mediatisation of theatre: the growing artistic and academic emphasis on performance; and misconceptions about postdramatic theatre as a non-‐textual form and the text's presumed inability to accommodate the new reality of mediatised culture and consciousness. In light of this, the thesis examines the impact of media technologies and culture on a selection of British plays written since the 1990s, exploring how they negotiate a media-‐saturated culture in both form and content. I introduce the concept of ‘mediatised dramaturgy' to describe the shifts in the fabric of plays due to omnipresent mediatisation. I argue that mediatised dramaturgy is present not only in texts that overtly use media forms, but also in aesthetic subtleties that echo the phenomenon of mediatisation without direct reference to the mass media. The thesis also considers the reception of these plays in selected productions in order to gauge British theatre's ability to respond to their dramaturgical challenges. Chapter 1 examines Martin Crimp's No One Sees the Video (1990), Mark Ravenhill's Faust is Dead (1996) and Enda Walsh's Chatroom (2004) as ‘dramatic' plays, arguing that thematisation of mediatisation without formal engagement limits the plays' ambit. Chapter 2 explores the workings of mediatised language in Patrick Marber's Closer (1997), Crimp's Attempts on Her Life (1997) and Sarah Kane's Crave (1998) to suggest language use in ‘no-‐longer-‐dramatic' texts speaks to altered ontological and epistemological conditions of the media-‐saturated, globalised world. Chapter 3 assesses the impact changing modes of subjectivity and interpersonal relations have had on the presentation of character by analysing Tim Crouch's My Arm (2003) and An Oak Tree (2005), and Simon Stephens's Pornography (2007). This chapter argues that they destabilise the dramatic model of characterisation in order to engage with the heterogeneous and objectified nature of contemporary subjectivity. Lastly, Chapter 4 focuses on Douglas Maxwell's use of videogame in Helmet (2002) and the televisual aesthetics of Caryl Churchill's Heart's Desire (1997), exploring how different approaches to remediation in plot structure affect the plays' capacity to relate to mediatised socio-‐cognitive conditions. The thesis demonstrates that plays, on the page and in performance, have undergone significant change, proving that the old medium of text is capable of responding to the mediatised age.

This research project is aimed at investigating musicality and theatre, and seeks to develop “musicalised dramaturgies” as dramaturgies for performances that venture beyond representation. The musical dimension is approached as an ontological aspect of theatre manifested in the work of the performer and in the process of dramaturgy as developed kinaesthetically with respect to the audience. The somatic dimension of the theatre act is investigated in terms of rhythmic and melodic associations which are proposed as sources of action in musicalised dramaturgies. The study looks at the conditions of musicality as dramaturgy by exploring the possibilities of developing performance processes generated by rhythms, tempos, and melodies as elements of the musical condition. The study acknowledges important developments that took place in the wake of theatre reforms at the turn of the twentieth century that gave more space to the presence of the actor in the creation of performance. These led to a ‘turn-to-performance' in theatre which, since the 1960s, characterised practical research where practitioners challenged traditions and pushed boundaries in order to develop non-representational practices. Gradually the theatre event shifted from serving as a basic means of communication of messages to a process where experiences are shared by performers and audiences. Contemporary scholarship acknowledges these developments in terms of a postdramatic critical framework where hierarchies and subordinations in the organisation of the work give way to equality and simultaneity of means. The postdramatic context serves as a theoretical foundation around which this study is set. Investigations were conducted via practical and theoretical analysis. Practical research was done in collaboration with Italian professional theatre ensemble Laboratorio Permanente di Ricerca sull'Arte dell'Attore (Permanent Research Laboratory on the Art of the Actor), and followed two complementary strands, viz. preexpressive and performance work. The pre-expressive strand had two levels: i. daily work with the actors where the research issues were put into practice and developed with professional actors, and ii. workshops and stages for University students, amateur actors, and laypersons interested in the work. The performance strand developed as a theatre work entitled Welcoming the End of the World. The piece was premièred in Malta in July 2011, and served as context where musicalised dramaturgies were put into practice and used creatively as foundations for performance. Theoretical considerations are discussed in a written document accompanying video documentation of Welcoming the End of the World. The written part examines the work of Konstantin Stanislavsky on rhythm and tempo-rhythm, and contributions made by Jerzy Grotowski with respect to what I argue are ideas of “embodied musicality” in his theatre making. The work of Grotowski is discussed in light of the claim for an Apollonian-Dionysian bond proposed by Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, published in 1872. The research also refers to recent developments in theatre practice including the work of Eugenio Barba, and critical discourses expounded by Henry Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Luc Nancy. In various ways their ideas inform the investigations and provide this research project with a critical foundation with respect to which musicality is proposed as dramaturgy for theatre performance.

This thesis examines postmodern theatrical adaptations of Antigone, Medea and The Trojan Women to show how they re-define the central female figures of the source texts by creating a new work, or ‘hyperplay’, that gives the silenced and often silent female figures a voice, and assigns them a political presence in their own right. Using a collection of diverse plays and their performances which occurred in a variety of geographical locations in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, this thesis analyzes adaptive, ‘hypertheatrical’, strategies employed by the theatre, through which play texts from the past are ‘re-made’ in the here and now of theatrical performances. A close analysis of these performances demonstrates how the historical and cultural identity of contemporary audiences informs the process of re-interpretation of familiar material within new contexts. They evidence how these re-makings reflect the culture, the political moment or the socio-historical coincidence in which they are conceived and performed. Most importantly this thesis shows that without exception these appropriations become entirely new Antigones, Medeas and Trojan Women; they invoke re-configurations or re-inventions of femininity which detect and emphasise individual women’s strengths and female solidarity, thus placing the plays firmly within a contemporary feminist discourse.

This thesis applies methods from the representation theory of finite dimensional algebras, specifically Brauer tree algebras, to the study of versal deformation rings of modules for these algebras. The main motivation for studying Brauer tree algebras is that they generalize p-modular blocks of group rings with cyclic defect groups. We consider the case when Λ is a Brauer tree algebra over an algebraically closed field K and determine the structure of the versal deformation ring R(Λ,V) of every indecomposable Λ-module V when the Brauer tree is a star whose exceptional vertex is at the center. The ring R(Λ,V) is a complete local commutative Noetherian K-algebra with residue field K, which can be expressed as a quotient ring of a power series algebra over K in finitely many commuting variables. The defining property of R(Λ,V) is that the isomorphism class of every lift of V over a complete local commutative Noetherian K-algebra R with residue field K arises from a local ring homomorphism α : R(Λ, V )→R and that α is unique if R is the ring of dual numbers k[t]/(t2). In the case where Λ is a star Brauer tree algebra and V is an indecomposable Λ-module such that the K-dimension of Ext1Λ(V,V) is equal to R, we explicitly determine generators of an ideal J of k[[t1,....,tr]] such that R(Λ,V)≅k[[t1,....,tr]]/J.

This project explores the notion of a world experienced and mediated through the image. The focus is on issues related to representation of that world to self through image-based narrative. Central to the creation of these worlds is imagery published in various public access media such as television, the internet, print publishing. Although filtered and interpreted personally, because of their ubiquity and familiarity, these images collectively constitute representation of our culture. Our construction of the world (the way we represent it to ourselves) is contingent on our encounter with such images.Sited within the milieu of a media-fixated age, the project aims to deal with our desire to make sense of the litter of images that people our visual horizon. The project seeks to employ these images as objects of direct experience and to consider the subjective frameworks and cultural narratives through which they are filtered.The work will play on the desire to make relational sense of images, often by invoking narrative. Painting will be used as a means to provoke encounter between imagery, with the performative act of painting, itself a narrative, both being and representing a process of mediation

Master of Visual Arts / Studio work The Postgraduate Degree Show is held from 6PthP December 2005 to 17PthP December 2005 and my work is installed in the Sculpture Studio (as a gallery space) at Building 29 of Sydney College of the Arts, Sydney. There are three installations of work, each with a series of paintings and object-models. The media I am using are oil on canvas for the paintings and wood for the models. The titles of my exhibition pieces are Project Studio (Stairs), Project Rented Room (Chair), Project Rented Room (Bed), and Project Object. Together they are entitled Project: Spanning the Space of Dislocation. The project explores the perception of space and its representation through painting and installation. The starting point is the image of familiar architectural objects to which I displace the experience of it from one site (my painting studio) to another (the gallery space) through painting as index. I use the technique of ambiguous linear forms in painting and the reflexive reading of orthogonal projective planes in installation to further extend the viewer’s perception of space and objects. The aim is to show that space has a meaningful relationship to objects and bring about a renewed awareness of habitual practice in seeing and representing space. UResearch paperU I have divided my research paper in two chapters. Chapter one explores the issue of spatial representation through ambiguity of simple linear forms and painting as index. My concern is on space being less important to objects in the distinction between space as ground and object as figure. Within this chapter I argue for an extended and a reflexive mode of seeing and representing space and objects instead of for a ground-figure contrast. By mapping my experience on a usual working site and displacing it to another space, I show that my perception of space is extended such that the boundary between the familiar and foreign (that is, space-object distinction) is blurred. Chapter two explores the method of presentation through painting and installation in a gallery and addresses the viewer’s space of perception with the work. I also discuss possible reflexive readings on the projective planes of the work which further extend the perception of it.

Doctor of Philosophy / The alternating Hecke algebra is a q-analogue of the alternating subgroups of the finite Coxeter groups. Mitsuhashi has looked at the representation theory in the cases of the Coxeter groups of type A_n, and B_n, and here we provide a general approach that can be applied to any finite Coxeter group. We give various bases and a generating set for the alternating Hecke algebra. We then use Tits' deformation theorem to prove that, over a large enough field, the alternating Hecke algebra is isomorphic to the group algebra of the corresponding alternating Coxeter group. In particular, there is a bijection between the irreducible representations of the alternating Hecke algebra and the irreducible representations of the alternating subgroup. In chapter 5 we discuss the branching rules from the Iwahori-Hecke algebra to the alternating Hecke algebra and give criteria that determine these for the Iwahori-Hecke algebras of types A_n, B_n and D_n. We then look specifically at the alternating Hecke algebra associated to the symmetric group and calculate the values of the irreducible characters on a set of minimal length conjugacy class representatives.

It is orthodoxy in contemporary philosophy of cognitive science to hold that the human brain processes information, both about the body in which the brain is located and about the world more generally. The internal states of the brain that encode this information are known as mental representations. Two matters concerning mental representation are interwoven here: the role of representational content in cognition and the format of mental representation. Robert Cummins, among others, argues that content is intrinsic to mental representation, rather than involving matters external to a representation, such as the use to which the representation is put. He also holds that resemblance accounts of representation best make sense of this fact. Thus, according to Cummins, the content of a mental representation is determined by its form. This thesis argues that an account of representation requiring that representations possess resembling structure is unlikely to be correct given (a) the minimal requirements that something must meet in order to count as a mental representation, (b) the tasks required of representation in cognition, such as capturing abstract properties, combining with other representations, and tracking change, and (c) the possibility that content stands in a different relation to form and cognition from the one Cummins has in mind. In criticising Cummins, however, this thesis explores possible implementations of resemblance theories in connectionist representation. It also redraws his map of the psychosemantic field to suggest that classical theories of cognition, which posit concatenative schemes of symbolic representation, share some of the benefits of tying content to orm. Finally, in exploring various notions of the role of form in representation, this thesis also advocates a pluralistic approach to the mental representations implicated in human cognition. / Thesis (M.A.)--School of Humanities, 2004.

The act of making challenges ideas through fabrication and the laws of reality that are part of becoming. This research explores the making of physical models as a design process where that act of making 'models for'1 design intention is itself a rich field of speculation. These models for design intention are different to the models of design intention as they are less a finished and singular object, and more an instrument for thinking. The aim of this research is to explore the qualities of models for design intention through an engagement with the landscape in order to understand making as a transformative and emergent process of space, time, material, technique, and the role of the observer. Making for design, the model as idea, seeks to both test and provide opportunities for the convergence of forces and relationships to be created and emergent. Fundamental to this notion is an understanding that the act of making is itself a continual re-making process. The reciprocity invoked by this action engages a rich field of criteria which are potent because of their schizophrenic nature. This paper will discuss my research through a number of projects and esquisses that have been explored during the course of this research which demonstrate the development of my position of making as a continual re-making of space.

<p>We show that, over an artin algebra, the tilting functor preserves (co)tilting modules in the subcategories associated to the functor. We also give a sufficient condition for the category of modules of finite projective dimension over an artin algebra to be contravariantly finite in the category of all finitely generated modules over the artin algebra. This is a sufficient condition for the finitistic dimension of the artin algebra to be finite [3].</p><p>We also develop relative theory and in certain subcategories of the module category over an artin algebra in the sense of [10,11]. We use the theory to generalize the main result of [26]</p>