This thesis interrogates partnership working between galleries and youth organisations involved in a four-year, Tate led programme called Circuit (2013-2017). This programme sought to build sustainable networks with youth organisations and services across England and Wales in order to ‘improve access and opportunities for harder to reach young people’ who may not otherwise engage with galleries and museums (Circuit, 2013a). Reflecting on the similarities and divergences that characterise practice in gallery education and youth work, this research untangles the historic barriers and tensions that have affected relationships between practitioners, organisations and the youth and visual art sectors. Mobilising Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical framework, galleries and youth organisations are conceptualised as part of distinct ‘fields’, and their particular traditions, customs and internal contests are analysed. An exploration of the fields’ development under successive governments and changing policy priorities reveals that art organisations benefit from a greater affordance of agency and autonomy than youth organisations, which contributes to the uneven power dynamics that often exist in these cross-sector alliances. Reports from engagement with sector events also highlight how concepts of art and creativity frequently deviate between the fields. Through an ethnographic approach to the research context, participant observations and interviews produce data about Circuit’s programmatic decisions, and its efforts to shift problematic habitual practices. A series of in-depth site studies illustrate different ways for organisations to work together, as well as the challenges of collaboration in pressured political and economic circumstances. Cross-site analysis allows for further deliberation on the compatibility of Circuit’s wider peer-led programme agenda with the comparative agenda and practice of youth organisations. The ambition for young people to continue an independent relationship with the galleries’ programmes is shown to be hindered by a number of sometimes-misrecognised factors that unintentionally alienate certain communities of young people, particularly from working class backgrounds. The final stage of the analysis studies the identity, attitudes and positions of various youth sector agents working and participating within Circuit, and the specific ‘capital’ they bring to the temporary programmatic field. In discussing the implications for practice and research, this thesis asks whether (beyond programmes such as Circuit) it would be possible to establish a permanent collaborative or cooperative field between the youth and gallery sectors. I argue that this would only happen if a range of systemic changes were made, such as the development of national and regional structures to support integrated practice sharing; deeper engagement with the meaning and repercussions of partnership working; a determination to work collaboratively to address social urgencies facing young people, and a fundamental commitment to shift pervasive inequalities in the visual art sector.

This practice-based research sets out to explore new ways of visualizing and conceptualizing the notion of aura in art. It departs from Walter Benjamin’s widely known critique of aura, the thesis of which is that aura as ‘uniqueness’ of an artwork decays with the rise of technological reproducibility. Benjamin affirms with the decay of aura also the loss of the transposition of religious projections of distance onto fascist politics. His thesis had a major influence on contemporary critical theory where aura is still approached with great reservations. These concern a relapse into religious structures, which mirror, so the thesis argues, the fact that aura has been, also in Benjamin’s ambivalent conceptualization, left ‘territorialized’ in a regime of transcendence in art. The main research question has been: What could aura mean for painting in the expanded field, especially in relation to digital imaging? The outcomes of this research are paintings, works on paper (both involving the input of digital sources), digital films and writings. The thesis develops a reading and visual ‘mapping’ of aura in the framework of Gilles Deleuze’s (and Félix Guattari’s) ontology of immanence where difference and its repetition as differentiation replaces the static metaphysics of ‘origin’ or ‘essence’. Splendor Solis, a series of book illuminations from the Northern Renaissance proved to become a major visual source for experimentation. Aura is introduced in this alchemical work as the ‘splendour’ of Becoming, the deframing power of the differential processes that accompany individuation. As a sensation experienced in intuitive art practice, aura affects and is affected by a field of interacting multiplicities and the potentiality of temporal differentiations, which reach beyond any ascertained subjectivity into virtual collective questions and problems. Aura suggests as an ‘echo’ of Becoming an involvement with affects, and the research follows strands between qualitative intense moments that activate a ‘wound’ and extend to what Deleuze calls a ‘wound that existed before me’, an experience related to the synthesis of future, which confronts an individual with its emerging double. Constructing, or ‘mapping’ aura as visuals on an axis that involves media of ‘uniqueness’ and digital technology gives those outcomes an ontological status of ‘simulacra’ or assemblages, far from the traditional associations aura would evoke. Touching both experience and experiment, so the thesis argues, aura in immanence can provide an access to the virtualities of the ‘new’ in art practice. The research introduces a visual scenario or ‘conceptual persona’ for intuition, which as method of this research folds both practice and writing. Friedrich Hölderlin’s unfinished play Empedocles at Etna, provides a metaphor or metamorphosis encompassing aura’s and intuition’s involvement with immediacy and duration. The practice documentation of the thesis reflects the strands of the research as plurality of its differentiations, allowing the dynamics of its method in action to reflect the dynamics of aura.

In recent years, many American independent films have become increasingly engaged with popular music culture and have used various forms of pop music in their soundtracks to various effects. Disparate films from a variety of genres use different forms of popular music in different ways, however these negotiations with pop music and its cultural surroundings have one true implication: that the 'independentness' (or 'indieness') of these movies is informed, anchored and embellished by their relationships with their soundtracks and/or the representations of or positioning within wider popular music subcultures. Independent American cinema, often distinguished from mainstream Hollywood cinema in terms of the separateness of its production or distribution, or its thematic and/or formal transgressions, can also be seen as distinctive in terms of its musical expression. This thesis will investigate the impact that these popular music cultures have had on contemporary American independent film since the 1980s. The primary objective of this thesis is not to discuss how these films are positioned within the industry (this has been done elsewhere), nor is it the aim to scrutinise a film's independentness (or 'unindependentness') in terms of its production, but rather to assert how music functions in these films and how a notion of independence (indieness) can be measured from the relationship between the film, its soundtrack, and a wider music culture. This will involve textual analyses of how popular music has been used to score a selection of key independent films (ranging from Blue Velvet and Do the Right Thing through to Ghost World and Juno), how popular music trends and subcultures have been represented on screen (such as dance music culture in Go), and how the film and music worlds have interacted, particularly through collaborations between directors and pop musicians (such as Darren Aronofsky and Clint Mansell).

This thesis was instigated through a consideration of the views held by many film scholars who predicted that the political handover that took place on the July 1 1997, whereby Hong Kong was returned to the sovereignty of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from British colonial rule, would result in the “end” of Hong Kong cinema. From that day onwards, Hong Kong cinema would no longer enjoy its previously unfettered and uninhibited revolutionary creativity and the Hong Kong film industry could thereby be perceived as being “in crisis”. In considering whether these predictions have actually come to pass, this thesis sets out to focus on exploring representative Hong Kong filmmakers’ activities and performances following Hong Kong becoming a Special Administrative Region (SAR) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) from 1997 onwards. The exploration of the chosen filmmakers’ activities and performances includes examining the filmmaking practices that they have embraced and analysing the exhibition and distribution patterns adopted by the films that they have produced. The intention is to examine to what extent the political transition has shaped these filmmakers’ filmmaking practices and to observe the characteristics exhibited by the distribution and exhibition aspects of the films since the handover in order to specify any connection they may have with the momentous political handover. This thesis intends to show how Hong Kong cinema has responded to the challenges of an age of transition and globalisation through in-depth analyses of the activities of these key industry personnel that have elevated Hong Kong cinema’s position of regional and global popularity, and the commercially and critically significant films that they have made, covering the wider spectrum of genre, including those of action, comedy, realistic, horror and romantic drama. It is the aim of this thesis to present a new perspective that contributes to the study of post-colonial Hong Kong cinema.

Current discourse about internet based art practices brings renewed interest to the materiality of the art object and the exhibition event. Digital and internet artists reflecting on the institutionalisation of the internet find that the turn away from the world of the institutionalised gallery has become untenable, and now create artwork that functions in both realms: the gallery and online. My research acknowledges this dual approach and proposes that accordingly areas of interest, such as negation and the material condition of the art object within conceptual art, institutional critique, and internet art should be reconsidered. By means of a practice-led artistic research methodology and based on the above context, the artist-researcher initiated a research process focused on how the distribution of art can enable us to rethink the traditional status of the art object. Integrating theory and practice led to an approach to art practice where distribution is integral to the doing and making of art. In my proposal, dispersal – or spreading the art object over multiple platforms, some of which lies beyond the exhibition event – is seen as an act of self-determination by the artist and a means to create objects with an ambiguous ontology or material condition. This proposal is developed and tested in several situations inside and outside the gallery, online, and as tools applied to text. From my research emerged a new practice I call a dispersal practice, and the dispersed object becomes a project that consists of multiple entities that are located on, or circulate through, different platforms. Some entities might appear in different forms at different times. My research finds that the functioning of the dispersed object within the artworld raises permanent questions about the status of the art object in terms of its materiality and status as art. My research finds also that the dispersed art object needs to be seen as both process and object. The dispersed object can be authorised by the artist to have the following characteristics: distributed, unlocated, circulating and ambiguous, a hybrid object structured through modularity. It becomes exposed and performed through a succession of events in different configurations. These are the temporary conditions of the dispersed art object. The research concludes with a project in collaboration with the John Hansard Gallery that demonstrates the dispersed object. Keywords: art object, dispersion, dispersal practice, distribution, institutionalisation, status of the art object, conceptual art, institutional critique, digital, internet, process, materiality, hybrid, ambiguous object, digital object, symbiosis, archive, aggregation.

This PHD project has been based on 100% studio practice; the original title for the research programme was Between Reality and Fiction and aimed at exploring the construction of reality and truth in our society, a society strictly controlled by the mass media. Whilst developing the first project within this body of research - Isolation (an attempt to contrast a real life experience of a visit to a prison with existing institutional information obtained through second and third hand sources - readings, media, films ...), a range of other more pertinent concepts arose, causing a shift from those initial ideas to ones incorporating control, displacement and space, understanding this, not only as a physical entity, but also as a socio-political construction. Based on the different projects that form the basis of my research, I explored the concept of control and how that is exercised on individuals in free/democratic societies- from spatial control (access/no access), economical, cultural (oneself/others), medical/technological, or media control (the creation of public opinion). This research attempts to question/reflect public awareness of these control measures, in order to assess their limitations, whilst investigating any existing gaps in the system which could potentially subvert it. What has been particularly relevant has been the exploration of issues relating to space, understood not only as a physical entity, but also as a socio-political construction, how space is organised, divided and controlled in an era of globalisation, and whether, or why access to certain ‘spaces’ is either severely restricted or completely denied. Work developed during the PhD has consisted of: Practical studio research (mainly installations, video and photography), site specific visits/trips relevant to particular themes within the project (HMP Winchester, Strait of Gibraltar, Canary Islands, container depots, airports ...); related readings; compilation of explicit news reportage; and the construction of an extensive archive that includes all printed and digital matter tracking the entire research process and its methodology. Personal experience has also been a main factor, influencing the development of specific research: temporary/precarious housing, part-time jobs, or in general, the situation of living abroad with all that that implies in the way of physical and cultural displacement.

The project has engaged critically and reflectively in a series of investigations through Deleuzean theory and fine art practice. It has explored the functions of the diagram in relation to direct images of time, identifying novel perspectives on these aspects of Deleuzean theory through interconnections and a reciprocally transformative engagement with art practice. The research offers fresh insight into the complicated temporal shifts that become apparent through practice by layering visual and discursive elements. The work is concerned with the interrelation and transformation of different temporalities across surfaces and screens, and is situated in the intersections between text, film and drawing. <- Text functions in, about and as practice, and theory feeds and folds through processes of making. The interactions between analogue and digital, and the superposition and overlaying of the surfaces of drawings with projection are of particular importance. Digital film projections are traced and drawn, and the resulting layered surfaces are filmed again, repeatedly marked over and superimposed. The research addresses how these complex interrelationships might be understood as time images, and how different functions of the diagram can be seen to activate or make possible these direct perceptions of time. The diagram, in a Deleuzean sense, is characterised by a continual splitting that is simultaneously a divergence. Coming apart just as it runs together, the diagram is a marking out or working through that is provisional, temporal and engages with what is yet to be. The time image is identified as an instance in film where the virtual, or pure past and possibility, is perceived in the present. A stable, interwoven structure is developed through Bergson's theories of perception, recognition and memory, and this acts as a surface across, on and within which the main body of the text takes place. This is separated into three parts and each section proposes the interrelationship of a different diagrammatic function and a particular imaging of time. These are seen to arise through: slips, or loose, errant linkages; splits, or simultaneous bifurcations between

My area of research is the peplum, a cycle of mythological action films produced in Italy from 1957 to 1965, and its influence on both contemporaneous and subsequent filmic depictions of mythical heroes. I argue that this genre is a significant cinematic form which has been marginalised in the fields of film and cultural studies. My thesis reassesses the peplum in terms of its representations of heroic masculinity and the ways in which these relate to wider debates on masculinity. Critics such as Richard Whitehall (1963), Gianni Rondolino (1979) and Richard Dyer (1996, 1997) have noted that the cycle began with Le fatiche di Ercole (Hercules, Pietro Francisci, 1958), which established the peplum ground rules. Taking this film as my starting point, I trace the evolution of the genre through a series of case studies, including Romolo e Remo (Duel of the Titans, Sergio Corbucci, 1961), which offers contrasting forms of heroic masculinity, and counter representations of Herculean masculinity in Jason and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), an American production made partly in response to the success of the peplum, and Ercole alla conquista di Atlantide (Hercules Conquers Atlantis, Vittorio Cottafavi, 1961). I also discuss later reconfigurations of the peplum hero in the American-financed Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982) and 300 (Zack Snyder, 2007), which draw on the iconography and aesthetics of the peplum to markedly different effect. Previous peplum scholarship has characterised the genre as endorsing the value of white male physical strength in the context of a reactionary patriarchal status quo. I argue that the depiction of masculinity in these films is more varied, problematic and contradictory than this over-generalised reading would suggest. It is my contention that the peplum’s diverse representations of masculinity offer a notable contribution to ongoing debates on maleness as centred on and expressed by the body—within film studies, academia and the wider culture—that has been largely unexplored and unappreciated. My re-evaluation of the peplum also underlines the cultural value of Italian and indeed European genre cinema, fields still overshadowed in film studies by the dominant Hollywood models.

This dissertation takes as its point of departure, the claim that difference, not identity, is the primary quality of language. This difference is initially argued to be an 'uncommon sense'; one which does not emerge from a ground, origin, or operate within a dialectic of essence/appearance, but which consists of an economy of acoustic surfaces/timings/spatialities: diffuse, interpenetrative, and unclassifiable: a 'sensual' logic, not a logic based on identity, or metaphysics. Traditional philosophies of language tend to flatten out and simplify the space/time /material relations of language, in favour of a stable, timeless, fixed identity, which makes logical thought possible, through fixed, linear, disciplinary forms. They claim that language is able to unambiguously locate concepts, concretely, in time and space, unproblematically supporting thought. In contrast, it is the original contribution of the thesis to extend and complicate categories of logic, to include doubt, paradox, infinity and 'unstable' forms of understanding, as evidence of difference as the primary quality of language: a "mimetologic" as Lacoue-Labarthe has termed it, or what Adorno calls an anti-system, or Negative Dialectic. The 'difference' which paradox, in its ability to be this/not this, embodies, shows us the limits of representational thinking; as it strains against that limit, while simultaneously (and paradoxically), retrieving the intensity of thought. Part I draws on the key historical debates within philosophy, as they concern language, logic, and an account of sense. Part II shows that in the search for what Wittgenstein has called "the subliming of our account of logic", wherein signs equal facts in a relatively simple, way, aporias are inevitable, becoming viral in any system, such logical paradoxes and antinomies undermining any stable, determinable, ground for language. In Part III an 'acoustic' logic is posed as an alternative to logics based on visual paradigms, which cannot capture the dynamics of paradox and art, or account for their non-identical 'surfaces'. Part IV points towards art, literature, and performance in which the mimetological surfaces of language form [Un]disciplined gestures, constituting a praxis of [Un]common sense, whose logic is acoustic. Finally, communication itself is seen to be comprised of acoustic, paradoxical, mimetological surface(s), and an acoustic logic is offered as an a-representational, sensual form of understanding.

This practice-informed research establishes points of intersection between reanimative practices within moving image work and queer theoretical positions. It frames this within autoethnographic understandings of memories pertaining to my adolescent experience of gay acculturation via textual sources. A bricolage methodology deriving from the work of Kincheloe and Berry (2004) is used. Multiple methods of investigation are employed including alternative archive creation, moving image tests and prototypes, processes of reading and re-reading and autoethnographic, reflective and academic writing practices. Analysis and evaluation are informed by selected queer theoretical concepts which correspond to the broad structural phases of reanimation. Research outputs deriving from these processes are i) moving image tests, ii) autoethnographic vignettes, iii) a moving image piece entitled Unbounded and iv) a written thesis. The research aims to build on current understandings of the term “reanimation” (Cholodenko, 1991, 2004, 2007a, 2007b, 2007c, 2009; Skoller, 2013; Wells, 1998; Wells & Hardstaff, 2008), particularly within moving image practices using “found” material, and to articulate these within a queer perspective. A contextual review assesses previous work on reanimation in research, scholarship and queer-related animation. A series of moving image tests establish a relationship between animation, deanimation and reanimation which, I propose, constitutes the reanimative process. I consider this practice-informed understanding in relation to analogous patterns and motifs in queer theoretical literature. Finally, evaluation of the evidence from my practice tests and the terminal piece, Unbounded, corroborate a proposed set of intersections. The conclusion offers a conceptualisation of the process of reanimation in my moving image practice and establishes that the reanimated outcome attests to its reanimated status through the “temporal composite” (Skoller, 2013). I build on work concerning queer forms of evidence (Muñoz, 1996, 2009), alternative archive creation (Cvetkovich, 2003), queer temporality (Freeman, 2010; Rohy, 2009; Stockton, 2009) and futurity (Bansel, 2012; Edelman, 2004; Muñoz, 2009) to demonstrate that this reanimative principle is reflective of contemporary queer concerns with historicity. This practice-informed research contributes to knowledge by extending a modest body of animation literature addressing sexuality (de Beer, 2014, 2015, January 21; Griffin, 1994; Halberstam, 2011; Padva, 2008; Pilling, 2012b; Takahashi, 2014; Wells, 1998; Wood, 2008) through its focus on the formal aspects of reanimation and interconnections with the queer, as opposed to the more frequently addressed issue of queer representation.