Teilw. zugl.: Cottbus, Univ., Diss., 2002.

Diss. Naturwiss. Bern. / Literaturverz.

München, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2001. / Computerdatei im Fernzugriff.

München, Techn. Univ., Diss., 2001. / Computerdatei im Fernzugriff.

München, Techn. Universiẗat, Diss., 2001.

Universiẗat, Diss., 2000--Kiel.

University, Diss., 2004--Kiel.

This thesis is concerned with multi-media performance and installation art practices which foreground the live body in combination with mediatized images. The research is conducted through the making and examination of a number of the researcher's own art works. Practical multi-media performance and installation projects are analysed within the context of specific performance and visual cultural theories in order to advance their contribution to critical and cultural fields. The research champions a symbiotic relationship between theory and practice. Practical works were undertaken and exhibited as solo or collaborative art projects. These works then formed the basis for individual ‘case studies' and were subjected to a critical review informed by a variety of theoretical frameworks including feminist, psychoanalytic and poststructuralist philosophy. This practice-based methodology is contextualised by the mapping of historical and contemporary critical discourses for the field of multi-media performance. The ‘reflection-on-action' results in an understanding of the mechanisms and effects of multi-media performance as a cultural practice. Specifically this thesis aims to answer the question as to whether multimedia performance can form the basis for an ‘interrogation' of our contemporary media dominated society? Through a practice-led enquiry it unpacks the dynamics between a meeting of live bodies and mediatized images, concentrating on the differences and similarities of their experiential sensory qualities. The research then extends these findings into social and political contexts through a comparison with other ‘reality' and ‘identity' re/producing cultural practices. The study concludes that cameras and recorded images used within live and/or time based art contexts can counteract the conventional constitution of mediatized images. To the extent that mediatized images can also be said to reflect and in turn constitute human subjectivity, multi-media performance, therefore, can provoke a re-evaluation of culture and its associated human activities and behaviours.

This thesis is a critical examination of my own creative practice through my published works in the moving image: a short film, commercials and a television series title sequence. My creative approach has been to use a hybrid of digital and heritage practices to create original works for television, advertising and film. I define ‘heritage' as traditional, analogue and handmade practices that predate or overlap digital technology. I consider ‘digital' as a description of the means of production and also a medium of communication. Educational research, as a qualitative and quantative study in lens-based media also contributes to this thesis and forms an argument for future directions in art and design practice. The thesis explores the ways I fused heritage and digital practices to create works that were original at publication. A second aim is to recognise the different skills required by artists and designers to embrace a multiplicity of technologies, skills which can provide sites of resistance to technological and socio-economic change. Lastly, the thesis proposes a pedagogical imperative to ensure that heritage skills do not atrophy, but develop and are reinvigorated with new possibilities combined with digital practices and platforms of communication. Many of my works have been broadcast to a global audience, but I have also published through traditional academic journals. In the thesis I analyse the production methods that created the range of work presented here. My narrative of production unmasks the processes of illusion and argues that hybrid techniques can offer a more ‘human' expression that carries greater ‘authenticity' and a broader capacity of meaning than an entirely digitally created technique. Stimulated by a range of theoretical discourse I examine human relationships with technology in the creative industries. I also examine the conditions of production from a political economy perspective. The reflective and critical commentary on my published works argues for an urgency to this study. I conclude that to avoid ‘sleepwalking' into a digital conformity, heritage processes must be celebrated and advocated as areas of difference particularly in education. Taken together, I consider my creative practice and my educational work as a pedagogic intervention to explore a multiplicity of creative expression rather than enclose moving image in a solely digital medium.

Using my family experience as an auto-ethnographic case, I consider how photography creates postmemory and counter-memory and how it has come to adopt the position it currently holds in funereal rituals in Athens. My historical examination begins from the Byzantine creation of the cult of relics and the cult of saints. Through the history of the Orthodox religion and the creation of the Neohellenic state, I regard concepts of visual representation of death and identity. I examine the trends and tensions which have shaped death practices in relation to the semantic nature of and cultural impositions in the photographic artefact. These are the dominant factors which have constituted the photograph as a representation of death and counter-memory. I consider the cultural need to create visual representations and I examine such images as cultural products of communicating the thoughts and anxieties of the group which installs them; as such, photographs are representative of the mutability of death. In a secular age, the photographs of the deceased are treated by the living so they become quasi-sacred representations of symbolic capital and operate under a different system of values, according to the era in which they are produced. I argue that the way photographs in graveyards are currently transcending the roles Orthodox funereal doctrine bestowed upon them and the manner in which the photographic installations are accelerating in funereal practices, is a compensatory reaction to the postmodern disaffection of urban death. Keywords: photography, death-ritual, post-memory, identity, individualisation, Orthodoxy, Athens.