The quest of this project is to question and better understand the effects of a widening gap between Middle East and West on Middle Easterners’ experiences and feelings in exile, inbetween. This is to articulate this separation, but also to invent a visual and spatial experience that may enable us to traverse the space of the border. For those not in and of this space, as well as for those in it, a new way of looking may furnish a better understanding of both positions and facilitate communication.

The quest of this project is to question and better understand the effects of a widening gap between Middle East and West on Middle Easterners’ experiences and feelings in exile, inbetween. This is to articulate this separation, but also to invent a visual and spatial experience that may enable us to traverse the space of the border. For those not in and of this space, as well as for those in it, a new way of looking may furnish a better understanding of both positions and facilitate communication.

This research considers the production and presentation of 3-D CGI animation where the intention is to explore the potential of this mode of practice as material. Through a practical and theoretical study, this research project outlines the proposal that within the context of 3-D CGI animation there exists a property that can be regarded as unique, or deemed as an essential quality, which in turn can be defined as material. The research refers directly to work developed by Structural/Materialist filmmakers and artists working in the 1960s and 1970s whose investigation into process and materiality acts as a method and potential framework for exploringapproaches and processes within 3-D CGI animation. The project asks the following questions: 1. Is it possible through a practical exploration to establish distinctiveness for 3-D CGI animation? 2. Can theoretical research in relation to media studies, film studies, specifically Structural/Materialist film assist to support and shape project development? 3. Can the practical work associated with the project and theoretical undertaking converge to support a basis for determining an individual characteristic for 3-D CGI animation? Hypothesis My hypothesis in relation to the expected findings and outcomes for the project can be distilled to form two strands: 1. That 3-D CGI is definable as a unique mode of production and can be classified as distinct from other digital modes of image production. That the result of the research will point towards a conceptualisation for 3-D CGI where as a process it has the capacity and the influence to be considered as a unique, discreet mode of production. That the qualities and the self-styled artefacts that emerge from the digital mass can be determined as definable products linked to a specific process.

Voice is an inconstant yet constantly performative material; it is our internally-housed, liminal technology. ‘Processes of voice’ is the term I develop throughout the text of this thesis to articulate materialities of voice and methods of address within processes of practice in artists’ moving image that ‘give voice’ to material and non-material forms. I interrogate this in relation to key concepts in Philosophy of Mind to address the complex ways in which bodily skills and action inform perception and thought to explore an account of perception and process in relation to voice. I examine the liminal, inconstant, and uncertain in subjective experience, and the ways in which this is extended into the social through a politics of embodied practice harnessed in moving images. I make a case for the uncertain I-voice, which engages the fully embodied and openly subjective, to challenge established narratives and conventions of address, and the power and knowledge dynamics that structure them. I come to focus on the uncertain acousmatic I-voice in moving image, which through its presentness, intimacy and acknowledgement of uncertainty relinquishes the acousmêtre’s threat of control to share a liminal territory of destabilized authority with the viewer. This is also explored in and through my own moving image work, A Desire For Organic Order (2015), a single screen video, which contributes to the overall thesis.

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This thesis examines the interconnected relationship that exists between sound and moving-image in the music-video. The flow of images used in many music videos often carries no definite meaning. Rather, the viewer must perceive the physiological sensations of the video's audiovisual expression to make sense of it. Thus, both the expression and the perception of music-video is a cross-modal process. Using Vivian Sobchack's theory of cinesthetics as a framework, the thesis contends that the music-video produces an aural visuality in which sound can be cinesthetically expressed and perceived as image and the image perceived and expressed as sound.

This thesis is a practical project which involves moving images and paintings together as a medium that explores phenomena of contemporary China relating to personal identity, independence and its relationship with the traditional importance on collective groups, group centredness and interdependence. The project’s approach draws on sociological research on Western thought, values and beliefs naturally occurring in China since the “Open Door” policy as raw data to focus on the transition and transformation of contemporary Chinese individuality, and translates these data to form the concepts underpinning the metaphoric method of my artwork. Bubbles are the main visual symbols that metaphorically imply the incessantly transformable Chinese individuality and social cultural identity. My aim has been to portray this phenomenon through artistic practices on screens. By reflecting and engaging with moving images and paintings, underpinned by theoretical research and methods including data collecting, self-reflecting on data, practical manifestation and self-inquiry, I have attempted to unfold the phenomenon of contemporary Chinese individuality through my art practice. The thesis is composed as a creative work of moving images accompanied by an exegesis component. The moving image represents a nominal 80%, and the exegesis 20% of the final submission.

Double Bind: Splitting identity and the body as an object is a research project consisting of studio-based practice presented mainly in video installation format. This work looks at hysterical symptoms as a performance of a body’s split identity. The project draws on the Lacanian theory of Mirror Stage which proposes that the self experienced by the subject, and the image of that self (represented in a mirror-like reflection, or an image) are different to each other, and the development of self-awareness as misrecognition of one’s self. As a conspicuous example of split body, Chapter One describes how the hysterical body, in clinical and artistic representation, is dissociated into multiple selves. In Chapter Two, I discuss some examples of contemporary performance artists who use themselves as subjects, but whose bodies become objects that do not portray the self. In the final chapter I explain how, in my video work, I objectify my own body and how I assess whether this is a mode of self-portraiture. / During the course of this research, I studied a wide range of medical resources and psychoanalytical literature, much of which employed visual illustration and documentation. For example, I have drawn inspiration from Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographic documents of female hysterics whom he treated as patients at the French hospital of La Salpêtrière in the late 19th century; in particular the figure of his most famous patient, known as Augustine. My research also involved studio-based investigation, such as experimentations with the performance of my own body in video format, and the contextual study of artistic and critical texts relating to contemporary media art. / The aim of this research is to demonstrate the ways in which my video performances split the body, creating an Other within one body that can be compared with the hysterical body of a patient, like Augustine, performing for her doctor. In this condition, I perform as the subject and the object of the gaze at the same time. My self-portrait is split in this way: it creates a body double, which I misrecognise as myself. But in doing so, I am both the director and the performer of the image. This is the double bind that my video work puts me into.

Double Bind: Splitting identity and the body as an object is a research project consisting of studio-based practice presented mainly in video installation format. This work looks at hysterical symptoms as a performance of a body’s split identity. The project draws on the Lacanian theory of Mirror Stage which proposes that the self experienced by the subject, and the image of that self (represented in a mirror-like reflection, or an image) are different to each other, and the development of self-awareness as misrecognition of one’s self. As a conspicuous example of split body, Chapter One describes how the hysterical body, in clinical and artistic representation, is dissociated into multiple selves. In Chapter Two, I discuss some examples of contemporary performance artists who use themselves as subjects, but whose bodies become objects that do not portray the self. In the final chapter I explain how, in my video work, I objectify my own body and how I assess whether this is a mode of self-portraiture. / During the course of this research, I studied a wide range of medical resources and psychoanalytical literature, much of which employed visual illustration and documentation. For example, I have drawn inspiration from Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographic documents of female hysterics whom he treated as patients at the French hospital of La Salpêtrière in the late 19th century; in particular the figure of his most famous patient, known as Augustine. My research also involved studio-based investigation, such as experimentations with the performance of my own body in video format, and the contextual study of artistic and critical texts relating to contemporary media art. / The aim of this research is to demonstrate the ways in which my video performances split the body, creating an Other within one body that can be compared with the hysterical body of a patient, like Augustine, performing for her doctor. In this condition, I perform as the subject and the object of the gaze at the same time. My self-portrait is split in this way: it creates a body double, which I misrecognise as myself. But in doing so, I am both the director and the performer of the image. This is the double bind that my video work puts me into.