Geography’s engagement with art has a long and varied history which, consistent with broader disciplinary developments, has progressed beyond a focus on the representational content of art products to consideration of artistic practices and experiences. However, persistent tendencies to consider artist, artwork and artistic spatiality as distinct and essential render the ‘geography of art’ under-equipped to address the emergence through artistic practice of particular, contingent, mutable and excessive spatialities and subjectivities. With its emphases on practice, affect and experimentalism, I draw on geographical and psychological non-representational thinking – philosophically, methodologically and analytically – to generate an account of such emergent spatialities and subjectivities. I explore artistic, material and implicit means through which they emerge, from within artistic practice, on both an experimental and auto-ethnographic basis. Working alongside participating artists, I varied the spatial and material conditions of our respective practices to encourage participants to do, think about and articulate their artistic practices differently, and employed interview techniques intended to facilitate access to and articulation from implicit or pre-reflective understanding. Four substantive papers consider different aspects of artistic practice in the context of different theoretical literatures. Through these papers, I argue that artistic practice is a form a mythological thinking without explicit mythic content, and identify paired reciprocal processes of interrogation through which spatialities and subjectivities emerge. I propose that the combination of experimentalism and particular material affects within artistic practice sustains a skills-challenge imbalance, which drives further experimentation and generates increasingly individualized practices. I also argue that artistic practice provides both access to and articulation from implicit understanding, allowing the conveyance of implicit meaning both on its own artistic terms and by facilitating explication into linguistic form. I conclude that, collectively, these varied aspects of artistic practice constitute interpenetrative processes whereby the material and implicit function as one, and that by attending to these processes through the creative and analytical means introduced here, geography’s capacity for a non-representational understanding of artistic practice is greatly enhanced.

La représentation du mouvement – Representational Momentum (Freyd & Finke, 1984) – est la tendance qu’a un observateur à se souvenir de la position spatiale d’une cible en mouvement plus loin dans la direction du mouvement qu'elle ne l'est en réalité. La conséquence de la représentation du mouvement (RM) est donc une anticipation. La question de recherche qui traverse l’ensemble de cette thèse concerne l’impact des connaissances acquises ontogénétiquement sur la RM. Les recherches expérimentales réalisées abordent la RM en se focalisant sur la familiarité ou l’expertise de l’observateur vis-à-vis de situations dynamiques naturelles dans lesquelles il est immergé. Cette thèse comprend quatre articles : une revue de question et trois articles expérimentaux. Les résultats expérimentaux obtenus dans ces travaux montrent que les connaissances spécifiques développées par l’observateur sont décisives pour élaborer une RM efficace. En effet, moins ces connaissances sont disponibles moins l’anticipation est importante. Cependant, les connaissances spécifiques n'ont une influence sur la RM que si les scènes dynamiques sont suffisamment proches des situations qui en ont permis le développement. Enfin, ces connaissances spécifiques apparaissent en partie liées à l’action, car plus l'observateur est impliqué dans l’action, plus il anticipe la dynamique des scènes perçues. L’ensemble de ces travaux suggère que la RM est composée, non seulement de processus génériques, mais aussi de processus spécifiques élaborés à partir des situations qui sont régulièrement rencontrées. / Representational Momentum (RM) refers to the tendency of participants to "remember" the stopping point of an event as being farther along in the direction of movement than it was in reality (Freyd & Finke, 1984). The consequence of RM is anticipation. The research question that runs through this thesis concerns the impact of knowledge ontogenetically acquired on RM. The experimental research undertaken in this thesis addresses the RM focusing on the observers' familiarity or expertise about natural dynamic situations in which they are immersed. This thesis includes four articles: a review of literature and three experimental papers. The experimental results obtained show that specific knowledge developed by the observers is crucial for developing an efficient RM. The more specific knowledge is available, the stronger the anticipation. However, specific knowledge has an influence on RM only if the dynamic scenes are sufficiently similar to the situations that have led to its development. Finally, specific knowledge seems partly linked to action because the more the observer is involved in action, the more he anticipates the dynamics of the scenes. As a whole this work suggests that RM is composed of generic processes, as well as specific ones that are built up from the situations regularly encountered.

By examining the donations by the local nobility to the local church, this thesis aims to study the church as a public room. By analyzing the donations of the nobility in relation to Habermas concept of the public sphere and the concept of conspicuous consumption the donations to the churches can be viewed as manifestations of power. This thesis studies all donations to the churches that leaves material and visual remnants in the church room. The results shows that there was a conscious strategy for the nobility to use the church for manifestation and representation of power. The nobility used their donations to manifest their power and to represent the power towards the people. This was done by filling the church with their names and coats of arms. By donating liturgical objects, church silver, chapels and coats of arms used for funerals the nobility was able to symbolically place themselves in the religious rituals. The church as a room was a symbolically and hierarchical place, and by connecting themselves with this room by donations the nobility could manifest their position in society, both locally and nationally.

In order to contribute to our understanding of how technologies can be used to visualise physical phenomena in order to support teaching and learning of the phenomena at hand, this licentiate thesis explores the ways in which visual representations created with GeoGebra can be used in upper-secondary physics education. In addition, this thesis provides a new model that can be used to characterise students’ representational competence. This thesis is a compilation of two journal articles. The first article is a systematic review of the current literature on how GeoGebra can be used to support physics education in upper-secondary schools. The second article explores students’ use and interpretation of a provided representation, a GeoGebra simulation of friction, and generation of their own representations.  The systematic literature review identifies three major ways in which teachers and researchers report using GeoGebra in physics education—namely, (1) to design custom-made computer simulations, (2) to augment real experiments with virtual objects, and (3) to engage students in constructing GeoGebra simulations.  The second study shows how students used improvised representations, in the form of gestures, enactments, and drawings,  in their interpretation of links between microscopic aspects of friction and the provided GeoGebra simulation. The study also reveals how, during engagement with provided representations, students spontaneously move across modalities, shifting between provided and self-constructed representations, between physical and digital representations, and between modes of communication (including gestures, spoken language, and enactment).  In addition, a reanalysis of selected examples of data shows that GeoGebra can facilitate transformations of mathematical representations, supporting the structural role and technical role of mathematics, whereby students are enabled to focus on the physical phenomena at hand and the parameters that influence it. / This thesis explores the ways in which visual representations created with GeoGebra can be used in upper-secondary physics education. In addition, this thesis provides a new model that can be used to characterise students’ representational competence. The thesis is a compilation of two journal articles. The first article identifies three major ways in which teachers and researchers report using GeoGebra in physics education. The second article explores students’ use and interpretation of a provided GeoGebra simulation of friction. The study shows how students used improvised representations in their interpretation of links between microscopic aspects of friction and the provided representation. The study also reveals how students spontaneously move across modalities, shifting between provided and self-constructed representations, between physical and digital representations, and between modes of communication (including gestures, spoken language, and enactment). The reanalysis of selected examples of data shows that GeoGebra can facilitate transformations of mathematical representations, supporting the structural and the technical role of mathematics, whereby students are enabled to focus on the physical phenomena at hand.

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The development of an AJAX-based web application involves several challenges as the webpage is updated by using the AJAX calls without reloading the entire page as in any traditional webpage. This prevents one from going back to the previous view of the page as the browser does not reload the entire page; instead it only updates the page. My hypothesis is that if an AJAX-based application is designed by using the software architecture style called the Representational State Transfer (REST), then it is possible to overcome these challenges, which cannot be handled by using web-services. In order to investigate this, the Material Properties Repository, an AJAX-based application was redesigned by using REST. The results support my initial hypothesis. In this process of designing MPR using REST, a generalized software engineering process was created for designing an AJAX-based application RESTfully.

A mobile application is typically divided into two sides that communicate with each other: the front-end (i.e. what the user can see and interact with on the phone) and the back-end (the hidden ”server” side, which processes requests from the front-end). Ways to improve their production cycle are constantly investigated by corporations such as Applidium, which is a French startup company specialized in mobile applications. For instance, the firm often has to deal with external back-ends that are not properly documented, which makes the development of products intricate. Furthermore, test and documentation files for certain parts of projects are manually written, which is time consuming, and are all largely based on the same information (back-end descriptions). Hence, this information frequently finds itself scattered in different files, sometimes in different versions. Having identified issues that most regularly disrupt the work of the company’s employees, a certain number of goals to solve these are set, such as, notably, centralizing all back-end-related information into one authoritative source, and automatizing the generation of test and documentation files. A tool (in the form of a web application) allowing users to describe back-ends, called Pericles, is then proposed as the outcome of the master thesis, to deal with the described problems and materialize the defined objectives. Finally, a qualitative evaluation is performed through a questionnaire designed to assess how users feel the tool helps them in their work, which constitutes the metric for this project. The evaluation suggests that the implemented tool is relevant with respect to the fixed goals, and allows to infer its propensity to help Applidium’s developers and project managers by making the development and validation of projects easier.

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