This project is situated in the area of sonic art and explores my personal biography in relation to sound, silence, censorship and social control. Using the artistic productions of John Cage, I examine silence as both an object—a recording in a fixed medium—and as a verb directly addressing the question of censorship of the self and of others. The interplay of silencing and silence is expressed in my artistic practice which employs, as audio palate, the silences between the words of significant political speeches from South Africa. As a consequence of this process I have excised all recognizable words in various aural and video works leaving only the 'Cagean’ noise of the silence. I further examine related aspects of silence and silencing through the metaphor of the mute button—a mechanical silencing device—which serves both as a creative tool in a recording studio as well as a censorial device to prohibit voices being heard. The beating, hitting and silences are all set against a backdrop of (post) apartheid South Africa for the expression of some of my personal and theoretical realisations.

Bibliography: leaves 83-86. / My personal experiences of patriarchal abusive behaviour have shaped and affected me. Two things in my formative schooling years marked the beginning of deep emotional disturbances in my life. Firstly, the vulnerability of being a female schoolgirl, constantly trapped in fear by threats of potentially abusive boys both within and without school premises. The 'old boys', as we would refer to them, instilled in me a negative attitude towards men that has affected me in later life. Secondly, my Sub A teacher who welcomed me with a 'klap' on my first day at school. This was followed by a long year of misery. I found myself going through a journey of broken emotions that resulted in years of aggressive behaviour, creating havoc in my family. This disturbing turbulence led me to seek internal liberation in order to analyse and deal with my emotional state. My health became affected by constant headaches and other stress related conditions. In addition to these formative experiences is my experience as a fine art student at the University of Fort Hare. Like many other black people in South Africa, I entered the field of fine art at a tertiary level with no prior art training. My early work was informed by social concerns and focused thematically on the upbringing of children in a safe and conducive environment. This idea emanated from what I observed and perceived as the submissiveness and subordination of women in my neighbourhood, either as mothers or as girlfriends. The failure for women to stand up to their authoritative, abusive husbands has detrimental effects on children. One of the reasons being that children ' ... attempt to protect a mother who is being attacked by a male companion or a husband, or they are emotionally damaged by witnessing violence and abuse' (hooks 2000: 72). Once I had obtained my undergraduate degree I enrolled at the University of Cape Town for an HDE (Higher Diploma in Education in pursuit of my career). That was a distressing experience. I constantly felt alienated from the tutorial group as I was the only black person in the art tutorial class. This was my first involvement with 'white establishment'. Language and culture, among other things, created a gap and a barrier between my classmates and myself and I discovered that this was the case with other black students also from Fort Hare. Unlike at Fort Hare, I could not easily approach lecturers at UCT to discuss problematic areas concerning my studies. At the time there was only one male black lecturer, who only came in for a section in the Psychology of Education course. Entering UCT felt for me like an act of trespass. I made up my mind that I would not allow myself to feel as if I was at UCT under protest. It is this approach that is the impetus for this dissertation.

Includes abstract.|Includes bibliographical references. / The travelling exhibition was formalised in a series of manuals, The Organization of Museums: Practical Advice (Museums and Monuments Series, IX) published by UNESCO as recently as the 1960s. Promoted as a utility for societies seeking to mediate rapid cultural change to one another in the period following the Second World War, my study highlights how certain elements of this display genre could be seen as inherent to all exhibitions: firstly, that carefully selected objects have the power to transport ideological and aesthetic values; secondly, that exhibitions are transient objects, in themselves worthy of study, as constructs of logistical, conceptual, public and political bolts and joints; and thirdly, that exhibition curators often play the role of diplomat – negotiating and mediating meaning across borders of various kinds. Though seemingly an obscure example, the large-scale international exchange of the Exhibition of Contemporary British Paintings and Drawings (1947-8) and the Exhibition of Contemporary South African Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture (1948-9) between the colonial centre and so-called ‘periphery’ of the South African Union, is a complex case study within a certain trajectory of travelling exhibitions. Never dealt with previously, the occurrence of such an exchange is significant not only because of its political context – in an immediate post-war, pre-apartheid moment – but also because many of the curatorial strategies used in the exchange process are heralded in UNESCO’s manual of Travelling Exhibitions (1953). To unpack this British-South African colonial freight could be easily regarded as a ‘merely’ art historical or archival gesture. If however, we understand the archive to be an historically determined framework within which to arrange cultural knowledge (Hamilton 2011), then an archive of travelling exhibitions makes both actual and contingent those cultural arrangements – the transient curatorial ‘principles of packing’ (UNESCO 1963). This project asserts that whether or not an exhibition is designated as such, travelling, as both an approach and the effect of curatorship, becomes the utility for mobilising not only objects but also ideas between contexts as seemingly disparate as those of the 1940s exhibitions or in today’s expansive ‘art worlds’.

Bibliography: p. 90-93. / In today's capitalist society, the environment of the home has become increasingly insular. Though there may be television, Internet and other forms of technology that connect one to the 'outside world', time spent indoors is for many people time spent alone. My body of work is concerned with an individual's experience within the confines of the home, where the exterior (physical space) becomes a reflection of the individual's interior experience.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 120-126). / In 2007, Brian O'Doherty's words still apply. The art object and its context are intrinsically intertwined. A variety of contexts make up the mechanisms of the contemporary art world. From established organizations to more informal platforms, each performs a necessary function. Representation in a national museum or a respected public collection bestows a measure of credibility on a piece. Outside of austere exhibition rooms and refined gallery spaces, more informal arenas have their own authority. An independent artistic intervention on a busy pavement or a remote beach can suggest an anti-institutionalist stance. The artist is not bound by the conventions of more traditional structures. Yet, a great deal of interventionist work ultimately makes its way into galleries and collections in the form of residue and documentation. These become marketable and collectable products. Similarly, reputed organizations sometimes orchestrate potentially disruptive insertions into the public sphere in the form of performances or temporary installations. Even when they appear to be at odds, the different forums in which artworks exist rely on each other.

Includes bibliographical references. / 'Not today, but tomorrow', the title of this body of work, references a collection of daily lists I assembled during my first year of the Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) programme. I had written 'not today but tomorrow' on one of my Monday lists and that was all. It seems a fitting description and context for this body of work as I try to hold on to the moment, today, in anticipation of what is yet to come, tomorrow.

Cape Mongo is an anti-fable to the mythologies of Cape Town’s consumer culture. This anti-fable takes shape through an amalgamation of sculptural, performative and video-montage processes, culminating in five films. Each of these films follows a different Mongo character as it journeys through various urban spaces. Throughout these journeys, the project attempts to construct a form of social commentary on the current spatial, economic and political conditions of the city by exploring the variety of possible contexts and urban spaces that these discarded objects may have inhabited during their life cycles. This process has also involved a great deal of reflection on my personal entanglement with the conditions of living and consuming in the city. The journeys of the commodities that I consume and discard on a daily basis can be traced to reveal the intricate economic networks which underpin the consumer culture of Cape Town. The recyclable packaging of consumer goods is presented as mnemonic vessels of interconnectedness which expose the relationship between myself and the spaces and lives these objects inhabit. As the films follow the Mongo characters through various cityscapes, their journeys conjure up imagery relating both to my childhood as well as to several of the historical trajectories that have lead up to the endemic inequality2 and social alienation which characterise present day Cape Town.

My MFA project consists of sculptural installations, videos and images that, together with the written text, comment on the impact of information technology on society. In both the written and practical components, I refer to my own experience and developments in fashion and access to information technology (IT) in my home country, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), with a focus on Kinshasa. I also explore aspects of the consumerist nature of IT in Africa more broadly and how this generates trends relating to ‘FOMO’, an internet slang acronym for the Fear Of Missing Out. My primary reason for connecting African fashion with contemporary computer technology is because both concern Western products being utilised in Africa in the context of self-determination. The African continent is a source of mining wealth, for example coltan (short for columbite-tantalite), a mineral widely used in technology. The DRC is one of the major coltan-producing countries, and yet it is technologically underdeveloped or limited itself because of an oppressive capitalist system (Pole Institute – blood minerals [PI], 2010: 8-9), (PI, 2010). However, some of these minerals return to Africa in the form of products and create new consumers, desires and services in emerging contemporary technology contexts. In the process of upgrading to higher levels of technology, the developed world often uses Africa as a dumping zone for electronic waste (e-waste), with no regard for the environmental and human impact. For example, the UN environment programme's 2012 and 2013 report under the Waste for Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) legislation showed that thirty percent of the allegedly second-hand products imported to Ghana were useless (African WEEE Report by the UN Environment Programme [AWRUNEP], 2012). Pieter Hugo's photographs in the book Permanent Error (2011) provide strong visual evidence of this. Although I’m aware of the debate around issues of representation and ‘afro pessimism’ generated by Hugo’s images, my motivation in using them is that they provide sufficient documentation of the realities of disposing of electronic waste and the impact on people and the environment pertaining to those particulars zones of Africa. I draw an analogy between the consumption of IT and African fashion, and specifically with my own country's culture of dressing-up, which has developed into a kind of doctrine (the ‘cult of the cloth’) and an expression of resistance. The analogy is linked to the desire to stay up to date with IT, which can lead to addiction. I also consider it useful to compare the symbolic and aesthetic aspects of African customs of hairdressing, the wearing of hats and jewellery, and even body modification as a social identification with today's society, within which ‘personal media’ are additional accessories for urban status. My reference and use of computer parts critique the way that contemporary technology has become an extension of our personal style, as in the fashion sense described above: a virtual identification which could also suggest a tendency towards an alienation of the body (because of the virtual social interaction and virtual identity) from its immediate environment that has manifested in our current psychological landscape. Consequently, I suggest the consumption of contemporary media in urban spaces opens up the notion of virtual anthropology or virtual cultural anthropology, related to the electronic personality or e-personality.

In this Master's project, my work has been concerned with a number of ideas associated with old age and ageing, and with the physical, psychological and social conditions and changes that attend this period of human life. The realisation that one is reaching what is commonly understood as old age is a paradoxical one: a sense of change accompanied by wisdom and insight, yet also the recognition of decline and the stasis that accompanies this. In order to discuss old age it is necessary to try to define the term and to identify what the boundaries are between youth, 'middle-age' and old age. In popular culture, at times expressed through poetry, the progression through life is seen in easily identified stages, variously numbered from three (infancy, adulthood, old age) to Shakespeare's classic 'seven ages of man' from his play As You Like It. Despite this variety, the 'old age' state is generally accompanied by greying hair, and the noticeable onset of physical and cognitive deterioration. These various stages of human development are all affected by significant life events and crises, in many cases marked or celebrated by rites of passage for events such as leaving school after matriculating, marriage, the birth of a child, or celebration of the first year of a new decade. There is no definitive marker for the onset of old age, but perhaps the closest is that of formal retirement from working life, typically around the age of 65. Although many transitional events can be uplifting, bringing new gains and insights, they invariably involve some form of loss. In particular, it is the aged and elderly who suffer the greatest sense of loss as theirs are many and varied – children leave home, friends or family members die, the body begins to fail, mental abilities often diminish and social status is lost. More significantly, perhaps, old people often lose opportunities and the promises of the future. Yet despite these negative aspects, old age can also offer its own particular rewards and possibilities for growth, as my own experiences and investigations have shown.

This thesis is concerned with the ways in which the medium of immersive virtual reality has been utilised in the art context since the early 1990s, with a view towards the contemporary relevance of the medium. Artworks that have been realised through both Head-Mounted Display (HMD) and CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) systems are discussed. The first chapter uses the 1993 Solomon R. Guggenheim exhibition 'Virtual Reality: An Emerging Medium' as a starting point in order to introduce the defining concepts of immersion and interactivity into the discussion. Thereafter, the second chapter is focussed on the body in relation to immersive virtual reality, examining the idea of virtual disembodiment in detail. This discussion is influenced by William Gibson's dichotomizing of "meatspace" and "cyberspace" in Neuromancer (1984). The psychological effects of avatars (the virtual body that surrogates for the physical body in virtual reality) are also looked at. The third chapter extensively discusses the ideas of agency, interactivity and narrative in relation to expanded immersive models of cinema that incorporate active audience participation. Gonzalo Frasca's video game theory concepts of "ludology" and "narratology" are applied, as are ideas of agency from Brenda Laurel's Computers as Theatre (1993) and Janet H. Murray's Hamlet on the Holodeck (1998). These notions of agency are also juxtaposed with the problem of passivity within conventional 3D cinema. The fourth chapter concerns cyberspace (defined as a middle-space that emerges between networked telecommunication technologies) and its implications for immersive virtual reality. The chapter concludes with a nod towards the growing potential of the Internet to facilitate the distribution of immersive virtual environment artworks. Finally, the conclusion looks at technological developments that have taken place during the two years that this thesis was written in order to suggest ways forward for the medium.