Set up as a visual investigation, the research explores how the addition of paint and graphite materials onto the surface of found and discarded photographs, creates a visual and conceptual disjuncture by punctuating and altering the temporal frame of the photograph. The research is positioned in relation to Susan Sontag’s description in On Photography (1977) as to how the photograph can at once “transfix” and “anesthetize” the subject matter, which through the passage of time serves to create an “aesthetic distance,” and Roland Barthes’ observation in Camera Lucida (1980) that the photograph is “platitudinous.” The tendency to project nostalgic sentiment onto the found vernacular photograph is explored, drawing on Susan Stewart’s notion of the authentic object in On Longing (1984), which, it is argued, when expressed in the form of the found photographic object, becomes an emblem of loss, further exaggerating the sense of distance and impenetrability. Working specifically with the found photograph prompts a questioning of previous critical commentaries concerning painting over photographs, as in Gerhard Richter’s ‘Overpaintings,’ where Joannes Meinhardt (2009) suggests that the addition of paint intensifies the essential “speechlessness” of the photograph. This research extends these discourses and contributes a counter critical position, supported and articulated through an original body of work. It proposes that the applied paint on the surface of the found photograph punctures the essential “speechlessness” and unknowability magnified within this subset of photography. The very physical materiality and difference offered by the paint medium ruptures the perception of distance and mediates the tendency towards nostalgic interpretations, bringing a level of stability and certainty in the face of the uncertain, fluctuating meaning and temporal plane of the found photograph.

How interactive new media art can effectively communicate an indigenous philosophical concept. The sophistication and complexity of the philosophical concept concerning relationships between land and people and between people, intrinsic to the laws and customs of Australian Indigenous society, has begun to be communicated and accessed beyond the realm of anthropological and ethnological domains of Western scholarship. The exciting scope and rapid development of new media arts presents an innovative means of creating an interactive relationship with the general Australian public, addressing the urgent need for an understanding of Indigenous Australian concepts of relationship to land, and to each other, absent from Western narratives. The study is framed by an Indigenous concept of place, and relationships between land and people and between people; and explores how this concept can be clearly communicated through interactive new media arts. It involves: a creative project, the development of an interactive new media art project, a website work-in-progress titled site\sight\cite; and an exegesis, a Novella of Ideas, on the origins, influences, objectives, and potential of creative practices and processes engaged in the creative project. Research undertaken for the creative project and exegesis extended my creative practice into the use of interdisciplinary arts, expressly for the expression of philosophical concepts, consolidating 23 years experience in Indigenous community arts development. The creative project and exegesis contributes to an existing body of Indigenous work in a range of areas - including education, the arts and humanities - which bridges old and new society in Australia. In this study, old and new society is defined by the time of the initial production of art and foundations of knowledge, in the country of its origins, in Indigenous Australia dating back at least 40,000 years.

Thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Technology: Design in the Faculty of Informatics and Design at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology / Design education has been fundamentally changed by computers and new digital technologies. New ideas and new frontiers have emerged. Available literature shows ICT has revolutionalised design education through the online studio and blended learning. In response to the growing needs of ICT in design education, new courses are being designed, while collaborations on design projects are emerging owing to virtual design studios (VDS). Researchers in design, especially in professional architecture and engineering, believe that ICTs enhance the teaching and learning of design. The adoption of ICT at the various stages of problem solving has not yet been reflected in the teaching of graphic design, especially in idea development. In developing economies, in the recent past, more attention has been paid to graphic design pedagogy, as it particularly relates to using ICT in ideation. Using the ‘multi-method’ approach, the research captured both quantitative and qualitative approaches in a pragmatic paradigm. It explored how ICT has affected the teaching and learning of ideation in graphic design in a university in a developing country. This included investigating pedagogical models and paradigms that had informed graphic design education since the incorporation of ICT. It surveyed ICT methods and the players involved in graphic design education, and documented the everyday experiences of students and educators in the lecture rooms to obtain a more holistic impression of teaching and learning. Empirical evidence suggests considerable access to computer and ICT methods by students especially. Various perceptions on the use of ICT by students in ideation activities as far as graphic design education is concerned, and how ICT is informing ideation, were also captured through the data. The study revealed activity systems of ICT integration as something that created contradictions. The contradictions were characterised by activities of collaborations and uses of ICT by students on one hand, and lecturers on the other hand. There were significant revelations of the development of the graphic design processes of using ICT in ideation. Ultimately, they were revelations of complexity of the design process for which there were no precise and fixed formulas that bring together form, function, and context conditions, and which gave credence to the orientation of pragmatism in terms of epistemology to which the study ascribed from the beginning. The study therefore elicits a review of the pedagogy of graphic design, with constructivism becoming relevant in the teaching of ideation in graphic design education.

abstract: Transformation Is... is an arts practice-led research in Dance and Design, embodying and materializing concepts of structure, leadership and agency and their role in bringing about desired social transformation. My personal experiences as a foreign student interested in transformative experiences gave origin to this arts practice-led research. An auto-ethnographic approach informed by grounded theory methods shaped this creative inquiry in which dance was looked at as data and rehearsals became research fields. Within the context of social choreography, a transformational leadership style was applied to promote agency using improvisational movement scores to shape individual and collective creative explorations. These explorations gave birth to a flexible and transformable dance installation that served as a metaphor for social structure. Transformation revealed itself in this research as a sequence of process and product oriented stages that resulted in a final performance piece in which a site-specific interactive installation was built before the audience's eyes. This work became a metaphor of how individual actions and interactions effect the construction of social reality and how inner-transformation and collaboration are key in the process of designing and building new egalitarian social structures. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.F.A. Dance 2014

The decorative and the textual have a complex and uneasy entanglement within the history and practice of modernist art. Sometimes celebrated as critical modernist strategies, sometimes denigrated or repressed as the opposite of Art, the decorative and the textual were understood as "foreign" forms that variously endangered, or, in turn, invigorated the power of art. My creative practice, which includes installation, painting, photography, text and an exhibition catalogue, exploits and explores this decorative and textual instability within modernist art practice. In my work, (visual) codes conventionally associated with the fields of writing and pattern, are re-examined and problematised by placing them within the context of visual art. When writing and pattern become the subject of painting there is an intriguing oscillation, complication and dialogue between the spaces and codes of reading and seeing, writing and pattern, the decorative and the abstract. The thesis also explores the decorative and textual instability within modernism by analysing some key contradictory moments in aesthetic thought and arts practice. In the writings of Clement Greenberg, a "decorative" painting is deemed the highest achievement of modernist abstract painting but to arrive at this goal, the decorative must be used against itself. In Frank Stella's early abstract paintings, decorative patterns structure the work, and yet the artist and his commentators only see the work as a kind of pure, abstract painting. In Lawrence Weiner's statement-sculptures, the terse, laconic text, that nominates materials and processes, is thought to be a "direct" form of art information that would remain unchanged even in reproduction. But as Weiner's work is reproduced in journals and magazines, this "direct" form of art is complicated through a variety of reproductive forms - documentary photographs, transcription errors and differences in the visual format and typography of the text. In these key moments of contradiction, concepts such as the decorative and the textual, that have often been regarded as peripheral to visual art, will be shown to have central significance in analysing its specific qualities.

In and out of memory: exploring the tension between remembering and forgetting when recalling 9/11, a traumatic event. My research is an unravelling of a traumatic memory to describe, understand and answer questions about the 'trauma body.' In my research, I put forward the idea that traumatic memories are detached memories with an emotional resonance that fixes them historically in a specific place and time, unwieldy anchors for a body that is neither here (present), nor there (in the past). I analyse this paradox from philosophical and psychoanalytical perspectives. Through a layered arts practice of text, sonic art work, and moving and still imagery I examine the tension where trauma meets memory, whether in an attempt to forget, or an effort to remember. Memory in this context is perceived as crucial towards understanding oneself socially, culturally and personally, whilst trauma is understood as an experience borne by the act of ‘leaving,’ wherein the mind’s coping mechanism overwhelmed by shocking external events fractures or splits. I began this process by revisiting a journal written on the day of and days following the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. A journal that had remained closed and unread until starting my research in 2012. My aim was to deconstruct my memory of this traumatic event, lay it to rest and explore the latent witnessing that defies assimilation into a narrative. I employ autoethnography as a methodology to facilitate a greater understanding of trauma and its wider cultural implications, overlaying my personal memories upon a well-established collective memory of 9/11. Autoethnography, in this instance, is a reformulation of ethnography or anthropology, an in-depth examination of context incorporating cross-disciplinary approaches. With an emphasis on self-reflection and subjective participation, as both the artist and the owner of certain memories, my intention was to engage a larger epistemological discussion of the meeting place of trauma and memory.

This thesis recognises the incompleteness of early television history, specifically as it is articulated in media archeological explorations. Through the process of reenactment, a series of tropes, conceits and insights are suggested which oblige us to reappraise the ontology of television. These insights are not by imitation but by a multiplicity of readings in the viewing of a historical act in the present day through a laboratorial media archaeological arts practice. The thesis interrogates a perceived gap in media archaeology’s body of knowledge through creative, playful and experimental practice borne of archival and historical research, developed from the proposition that both contemporary media archaeology and television historiography do not concentrate on how television is and can be used, only on how it has been used. The practical elements of the thesis focus on one of the formative moments, John Logie Baird’s first television drama (in collaboration with the BBC): The Man with the Flower in his Mouth. The thesis draws upon Media Studies and the discipline of Media Archaeology which both suggest that historical fragments have stable readings and meanings, recognising that both miss the crucial aspect of artistic license, playfulness, and that a laboratorial media archaeological approach, aligned to a considered reenactment process can create a televisual arts practice to tease out the hidden and forgotten. This activated historical account through reenactment keeps the theatrical, the cinematic and the teleportation in a simultaneous presence, digging into the past to address present and future television through this televisual arts practice.