<i>Double Vision: A practice- led investigation of art and differential perception</i> is a series of five interrelated practice-led research studies into artistic expression controlling perceptual experiences between audiences of varying visual acuities. Significant refinements  occurred between the first and second, and second and third studies. The last four studies were conducted with the aim of understanding vision’s influence on perception. <i>Double Vision’s</i> lead methodological approach was artistic practice. Other methods were employed according to the needs of that practice. They included iteration, collaboration, exhibition and testing. The research questions of <i>Double Vision</i> were refined in response to the results of artistic practice. That evolution resulted in two interrelated questions: <i>Can artwork be intentionally created to be experienced differently dependent on one’s visual abilities? </i>and<i> If so, can those experiences be shared?</i> A further question, <i>‘Can an analogy to colour deficient vision be created that engages both those with colour vision deficiency and the typically sighted?’, </i>concludes the investigations. Artwork was realized through printmaking, animation and multimedia formats. Its context and content derived from many forms, notably the Ishihara <i>Test for Colour Deficiency</i>, writings of William Blake, contemporary music and philosophy. Augmented reality was employed to facilitate the translation of visual perceptions between targeted audiences. A number of exhibitions were held exploring these themes.

This research explores how human values and concerns are manifested and negotiated through the process of design. In undertaking this study, a variety of design interventions were explored to facilitate how values can be articulated and discussed amongst project stakeholders during the design process. These design interventions will be referred to as projects within the exegesis. In this exegesis, I will argue for the importance of a dialogic process among project stakeholders in the creation of a human-centred design practice in communication design. This exegesis explains the central argument of the research and how the research questions were investigated. It presents a journey of the discoveries, learnings and knowledge gained through an inquiry of the research questions. The total submission for this research consists of the exegesis, exhibition and oral presentation. Through each mode of delivery I will share and illuminate how the research questions were investigated.

The key focus of this research project is the marginalisation of radical and alternative politics in modern democratic societies, how they have been presented in a mainstream theatrical context and what strategies a political playwright can employ to present the issues of those politics while overcoming such marginalisation. Referencing cultural theorists including Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein and Howard Zinn, this study argues that contemporary cultures operate within the boundaries of an internalised conservative value set propagated through systems of coercion utilised by the media, governments and corporations. With a specific interest in contemporary theatre, this study proposes that this internalisation functions as an efficient and nearly invisible censor, rendering more complex the task of the political playwright in communicating with a wider and more inclusive audience and that by examining the methods used in the manufacture of consent and then returning to the strategies utilized by political playwrights in the past and at present, we can better identify how to bypass that internal censor and do something more than " preach to the converted." This project comprises two interrelated components; one is an original full length play script, Pornography: The True Confessions of Mandy Lightspeed; the other is an exegesis which compliments and augments the play. The play script represents %60 and the exegesis the remaining %40 of the examinable output of this project, although both are considered integral (and integrate) parts of the whole. Central to both these texts is the question; " How has political theatre been presented in the past and what strategies can the playwright employ to make issues of radical or alternative politics more accessible to a mainstream theatre audience?"

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.

‘Practices of tactility, remembering and performance’ is a practice-led inquiry in which performance-making and writing are equal partners. The thesis comprises a performance folio and a dissertation. The folio comprises two performance works. / the backs of things: This 35-minute work for two dancers had a public season mid-way through the candidature (September 8th – 11th 2005). A DVD documentation is submitted with the dissertation. / here, now: This 50-minute multi-modal performance was presented for assessment during a public season of six performances (March 22nd – 25th 2007). It is a solo piece in which I perform. The work was attended by the examiners and a DVD documentation is submitted with the dissertation. / The dissertation provides a ‘narrative of a practice’ focused on tactility, remembering and performance. It elucidates what has arisen through the dual modalities of performance-making and writing. The dissertation is not an exegesis of the performance folio. Rather, it is a critical and reflective account of the practice within which the performances reside. / The arc of emergent meaning in the narrative of practice comprises three phases: Precedents; Choreographic Tactility; and Intercorporeal Remembering. In the first phase, I discuss the precursors to my subsequent practice of tactility and remembering. I detail how I sought to diminish the effects of the objectifying gaze by staging a series of interventions into the visual field of the dance. In the second phase, I articulate my use of touch, naming it a practice of choreographic tactility. I outline the connectivity of touch and suggest that it fosters an understanding of the intercorporeal nature of selfhood. I posit practices of tactility as arenas for a relational ontology. / In the third phase, I take the notion of intercorporeality thus established and show how it engenders an embodied knowledge of remembering. I define a range of heuristic devices that I established so as to craft remembering in my performance practice. Finally, I draw the discussion of tactility and remembering towards what I term an ‘aesthetics of tactility’. I describe this as a performance domain where intercorporeal remembering is privileged. This is instantiated in the poetic remembering of here, now with which the dissertation closes.

This doctoral project examines the knowledge economy as understood under the hypothesis of cognitive capitalism and its impact on contemporary social art practice, in particular the educational turn in art, taking account of its conditions of production within the local site of official art education at an elite university. In a counter movement, this research searches for the 'becoming cognitive of labour', a peculiar quality of the present transition, where knowledge production and the reconfiguration of labour intersect within the overshadowing hypothesis of cognitive capitalism. In response to contemporary approaches assigned to knowledge production, appropriation of the general intellect and the educational paradigm, as a practice-led research project, I devised three performative interventions premised on aestheticised withdrawal (taking account of exodus theorists) and agonistic tendency (radical negativity) to take risks and to 'struggle within and strategically against' the institution, drawing on the radical pedagogy of Paolo Freire who created an approach to emancipatory education through which to transform systems of oppression and inequality, the self-governing frameworks of the educator Ivan Illich, and Jacques Ranci&egrave;re who locates oppression and subjection in the noble act of 'explication'. Drawing on this, I've pursued a novel form of 'writing as activism' that allowed me to unravel dividing points between the practice of art and its theory, critically engaging with and dismantling the academic form of essay through a process of streaking, rupture and montage. As a 'work of words', this allowed me to integrate the practice and theory in one, where the thesis is withdrawn and does not make an appearance. The practice of art determines the theoretical conditions and critical context, but is not subordinate to these conditions. In this way I could construct something meaningful and complex in an unconventional way that requires other ways of reading and interpretation. I disembark from the recent field of expanded academia and the 'educational turn' in art and curating, approbated by cultural theorists and artists since the mid 1990's. While addressing the current crisis in neoliberal education and its direct link to cognitive capitalism's knowledge enclosures, in which the doctorate in art was fiercely debated, these modes of emancipatory educational 'turning' seldom found traction inside the official educational art institution itself. Rather, as an expanded idea of the academy, these critical strategies were articulated through the global museum and biennale. However, if we are to maintain that the university is the critical core of the public realm, rather than escaping it or allowing ideological contention and dissensus to be smoothed over and disciplined, this research - in and through art as 'struggle' and as 'a process of intelligibility' - re-thinks the educational turn in art by opening up and maintaining a space of crisis and critical relationship with its institutional conditions of production and the forms of labour sustaining it as it emerges from academia itself. Using a gendered agonistic research method with its attendant discourse of resistance, I expose how gender is made invisibile within the flattening paradigm of immaterial labour and its overarching frame of cognitive capitalism. I explore how the production and reproduction of knowledge can be organised and made common and how it might break with capitalist capture, how a resistant form of knowledge production might be found on the frontier of the university. Through a dramatisation of practice that is a compelling instance of the theory, I explore an alternative production of knowledge - a (becoming) learning process where the subject 'I', who is constituted in language, talks back, a mode of counter speech as a condition of my agency and potentiality. It is in, at, and around the official educational site of the university that I make an inquiry into the economic and political tendencies at work, and locate non-compliant labour as a way to open up an educational 'turn' towards regimes of discipline, authority and control. By conclusion, if the educational 'turn' in art is to fully realise its emancipatory dimension it must not only align itself to the extra-institutional realm of the artworld, but must forge a counter turn inside the official educational art institution, the primary site of education's struggle and agency. Art production inside the educational institution is profoundly fundamental to a political and philosophical 'turning' towards a critique of contemporary arts new relations of production and reception under capital, to renew once more arts political and transformative potential. This research is an emphatic refusal of fatalism about the status of the official educational institution whose ailments I diagnose throughout. It is an original contribution to the debate on the educational turn and demonstrates when educators and students together, and in common, 'turn' in struggle within and against the institution, they can create transformative strategies of engagement with the institution of knowledge. It is not yet the time to abandon the official education institution entirely.

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

Crossing the Cartography of Exile explores ideas of territoriality, hybrid identity and transculturation. The thesis and exhibition is the result of two years of Practice-Led Research, which is the performative research methodology, carried in the La Chapelle Woodshop of the 100 Laurier Avenue East Building of the Department of Visual Arts. The building was the former Juniorat du Sacré-Coeur of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate built in 1893-94. The Woodshop is the former chapel of the seminary therefore has references to a place of prayer and worship and for my praxis became a place to re-enact the ancient trade of Joseph the Carpenter. The La Chapelle Shipyard inside the woodshop as mnemonic site became a performative site-specific platform specialized in creating small-scale sculptures with recycled and repourposed shipping pallets and a place in which to connect memory with the ancient trade of a shipwright or shipbuilder. Small-scale sculpture then became a symbolic marker for the intimacy of a personal and free territory made of repurposed shipping pallets. Therefore, by working with recycled changeable materials I fashioned a poetic visual language to enchant the wound of exile.

This thesis presents an investigation into the potential of digitally enhanced exhibition spaces to foster the engagement of children within family groups with museum objects on display, i.e. where physical contact is prohibited. The main focus is on the influence of digital enhancement on visitors’ engagement with artefacts and not on the digital elements themselves. This study has taken the mixed methods approach. It combines ethnographicallyinformed field studies with a design intervention within an overarching methodology of action research. In the review of literature, research from multiple fields including museum studies, interaction design and play research was brought together and examined from the perspective of exhibition design. This led to the development of the Social Dream Spaces Model. This model, which describes how visitors engage with museum objects, was used as the basis for a design intervention aimed at enhancing children’s engagement with exhibited artefacts. In-gallery participant observations were carried out in Bantock House Museum, Wolverhampton. Insights, based on data analysed from the perspective of the Social Dream Spaces Model, were used to develop a prototype of a digitally enhanced space, which was implemented into the existing exhibition. Data gathered in observations before and after the design intervention were compared in order to determine any changes in visitors’ responses to the exhibition. This study demonstrates the benefit of using the Social Dream Spaces Model for designing digitally enhanced exhibition spaces that promote children’s engagement with artefacts and social contact around them. The findings also confirm that designing subtle and nonintrusive digital enhancement can facilitate intergenerational interaction in exhibition spaces.

A social etiquette has emerged around the consumption of food in the West which requires the use of cutlery – knife, fork and spoon. It is the spoon that is the subject of this thesis, a utensil so familiar as to have become almost invisible. The significance of the spoon should not be underestimated and it is employed in this study as a device to offer insight into material practices, examine theoretical issues in relation to design and explore the culture of representation that has developed around objects in the contemporary field of visual and material culture. In this sense this thesis can be seen as located in the blurred boundaries of art, craft and design and as constituting a text which contextualises and supports a collection of artefacts developed in the course of a 'practice led' Art and Design PhD. The spoon exists not only as an object whose usefulness transcends time but also in terms of a metaphorical singularity; as an idea with an infinite number of possible interpretations and material manifestations. This thesis originates in the idea of a reflective cross-disciplinary enquiry intended to explore fundamental questions around what the author defines as “spoonness”, articulating that which might otherwise be articulated through (and subsumed in) the making of the object itself. Significantly, by tracing the journey of the authors film „Emilie Eating Soup‟ together with the various objects, exhibitions and catalogues developed in the course of this research, this thesis also contributes to current critical discourse from the perspective of the practitioner - a voice that in the past has often been absent from academic discourse. It opens up the creative processes to scrutiny and further comment, and serves as a model of analysis to others in the field of material culture to aid reflection upon their own practice and generate new modes of innovation. A critical reflection upon the works subsequent reception at a series of prestigious international exhibitions and events is made throughout this thesis. These materials, together with this text, combine to represent the broad arc of this author‟s creative practice and collectively define the innovative nature of this PhD.