Video is currently at the forefront of most business and natural environments. In surveillance, it is the most important technology as surveillance systems reveal information and patterns for solving many security problems including crime prevention. This research investigates technologies that currently drive video surveillance systems with a view to optimization and automated decision support. The investigation reveals some features and properties that can be optimised to improve performance and derive further benefits from surveillance systems. These aspects include system-wide architecture, meta-data generation, meta-data persistence, object identification, object tagging, object tracking, search and querying sub-systems. The current less-than-optimum performance is attributable to many factors, which include massive volume, variety, and velocity (the speed at which streaming video transmit to storage) of video data in surveillance systems. Research contributions are 2-fold. First, we propose a system-wide architecture for designing and implementing surveillance systems, based on the authors' system architecture for generating meta-data. Secondly, we design a simulation model of a multi-view surveillance system from which the researchers generate simulated video streams in large volumes. From each video sequence in the model, the authors extract meta-data and apply a novel algorithm for predicting the location of identifiable objects across a well-connected camera cluster. This research provide evidence that independent surveillance systems (for example, security cameras) can be unified across a geographical location such as a smart city, where each network is administratively owned and managed independently. Our investigation involved 2 experiments - first, the implementation of a web-based solution where we developed a directory service for managing, cataloguing, and persisting metadata generated by the surveillance networks. The second experiment focused on the set up, configuration and the architecture of the surveillance system. These experiments involved the investigation and demonstration of 3 loosely coupled service-oriented APIs – these services provided the capability to generate the query-able metadata. The results of our investigations provided answers to our research questions - the main question being “to what degree of accuracy can we predict the location of an object in a connected surveillance network”. Our experiment also provided evidence in support of our hypothesis – “it is feasible to ‘explore' unified surveillance data generated from independent surveillance networks”.

My creative practice addresses two research questions: how does ubiquitous computation affect the visual operations of the contemporary control society and what does this mean for the use of visual media in contesting such control? Through photographic and video work in digital formats, I explore the movements and arrests of informatic flows that constitute the operation of control, and the potential for resistance that may be felt in the turbulence of the interface, as a dynamic threshold where such flows meet. In this turn to the interface, I theorise the impacts of computationality on the loss of the image as a stable site of representational resistance, with the unsettling of perspectival representation in the topology of informational space and the ambiguity of a digital visuality whose software hides as it shows. When brought together with recent work on the de-materialisation wrought by informational Capital, the digital image comes to be seen as an instantiation of anxiety about the abstracted nature of power that increasingly operates as control. It is less to the digital image itself, but rather to the circulations and patternings of data expressed as light on the screen, that we must attend if we are to confront the digital visuality of control. The ‘image-machine of control' is the infrastructure that modulates these data circulations and patternings through inciting the making, sharing and watching of images. Drawing on affect theory, I emphasise the role that affects of insecurity, at the level of the dividuated subject and the abstracted socius, play in inciting an interactivity with the screen on which the State and Corporation alike rely for their accumulation and circulation of data. The digital-visual interface, being the encounter with the screen, becomes a sitemoment to explore its dynamic boundary condition, whose turbulence of data flows may open up ‘lines of flight' from the striated grid of control. These lines of flight help us see beyond the workings of the faciality system, and the subject-object relations of the gaze. Specificity of positioning in scopic regimes of control still matters, but posthumanist theorising suggests that such positioning be understood as vector and not point, whose movements we need to stay in touch with. Using digital photography to open up the everyday practice of image-making to its potential to disrupt the informatic flows of control, my first photographic work, medium specific, makes use of photomontage to look at the topology of informational space through its ‘folds', as a first experiment in disrupting the tempo of the image-machine's visual incitements through a ‘pleating' of its data. I use haptic photography in the pieces figure ground, surface gaze and touch light to stay in touch with the smooth space of the interface as a time-space of contingency, potentially resistant to the gridded striations of control. My exploration of the contingency of the interface continues with two video works, look screen and moving still, which address its vibrational ontology. I put the concept of the vibrational interface to use in confronting the rhythms of control deployed by the image-machine. Being a rhythm of not only circulation but also capture, not merely movement but also arrest, I suggest that understanding the ontology of the interface in terms of its vibrational forces is useful for disrupting, through its moving stillness, the rhythm of flow and stasis on which control depends. Both videos use visual and sonic vibrations to set up counter-rhythms and oscillations, whose trembling may release energies for change.

Videoblogging is a form of cultural production that emerged in the early 2000s as a result of the increasing availability of cheap digital recording equipment, new videoediting software, video website hosting and innovative distribution networks across the internet. This thesis explores the close entanglement of culture and technology in this early and under-examined area of media production – most notably in the self-definition and development of a specific community around video practices and technologies between 2004-2009. These videobloggers' digital works are presented as an original case study of material digital culture on the internet, which also produced a distinctive aesthetic style. The thesis traces the discourses and technological infrastructures that were developed both within and around the community of videobloggers and that created the important pre-conditions for the video artefacts they produced. Through an ethnographically-informed cultural history of the practices and technologies of videoblogging, this thesis engages with the way in which new forms of cultural and technical hybrids have emerged in an increasingly digital age. The ethnographic research is informed by histories of film and video, which contribute to the theoretical understanding and contextualisation of videoblogging – as an early digital community – which has been somewhat neglected in favour of research on mainstream online video websites, such as YouTube. The thesis also contributes to scholarly understanding of contemporary digital video practices, and explores how the history of earlier amateur and semi-professional film and video has been influential on the practices, technologies and aesthetic styles of the videobloggers. It is also shown how their aesthetic has been drawn on and amplified in network culture, mainstream media, and contemporary media and cultural production. Through a critical mapping of the socio-technical structures of videoblogging, the thesis argues that the trajectories of future media and cultural production draws heavily from the practices and aesthetics of these early hybrid networked cultural-technical communities.