One of the primary focuses in the works presented and discussed herein is the juxtaposition of many disparate musical styles, recordings, and sound worlds within each individual piece. This juxtaposition extends to combining live improvisation meticulously created non-realtime elements, and elements of generative processes in the creation of individual works. A secondary theme is my attitude to accessibility and how this informs my work with audiovisual elements.

This thesis emerges from and responds to certain recent philosophical writings on conceptual art, in particular from the British analytic tradition. Having identified a recent tendency implicit within this tradition towards an increasingly phenomenological reading of the ontology of the conceptual artwork, I aim to develop such ideas through an analysis of Heidegger's theory of art, and through a subsequent enquiry into its applicability to conceptual art. This will involve a lengthy analysis of several conceptual artworks on the basis of this theory. The thesis consists of three substantive chapters. The first is a critical examination of certain recent philosophical texts on conceptual art. This chapter takes a series of philosophical texts representing a range of positions with regards to both the specific role and, by virtue, the significance accorded to the material in the constitution of the conceptual artwork. The second chapter looks at Heidegger's phenomenological enquiry into the ontology of the artwork, and specifically at the role of the concepts of Earth and World in this ontology. On the basis of this study of Heidegger, the third chapter engages with a range of conceptual artworks. Each artwork is shown to exemplify a general tendency of conceptual artworks to explore of the bounds of the artwork as such and its relation to its context.

A recent pattern has emerged amongst some of the top television production companies in the world – a global investment in a new style of television show format. Food television show formats such as Channel 4’s The Great British Bake Off in the UK and Fox’s Hell’s Kitchen in the US have consistently topped television ratings and attracted millions of viewers in every episode aired in their home counties and abroad. A range of publications argue that there has been a global demand for factual television formats, yet existing literature has focused primarily on dramas, talent shows and game show television format genres. From a production perspective, this thesis aims to respond to these industry changes and the gap in the literature by examining the media branding techniques employed by media managers that have contributed to the development of international food television show formats. It analyzes the distinct challenges and opportunities food television format producers of shows such as Endemol Shine Group’s MasterChef undergo when adapting food formats in international markets. Furthermore, it investigates production decisions around multi-platform strategies. This includes the adaptation of food television show formats onto multi-platform distribution channels such as catch up television like Netflix, Amazon Prime, format brand websites and social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram in order to acquire additional revenue streams. This thesis examines the managerial decisions that have helped aid the cooking show into becoming a successful, global television format. The research findings are based on a mixed-method qualitative approach featuring 15 qualitative interviews with industry experts from major production companies such as Endemol Shine Group and FremantleMedia and celebrity television chefs, such as BBC One’s MasterChef’s Gregg Wallace and former Food Network star, Paula Deen. The outcomes of this research provide an empirical analysis of the complex relationship between new media technologies, food television and the internationalization of global television formats. Furthermore, this thesis provides a snapshot of a specific and current media trend that exists within a wide scope of media industry practices and aims to provide valuable insights and build on existing media management, multi-platform, and media production theory.

The visual culture of Victorian Protestant missionaries is an under-researched area, despite the current interest in art and religion, and the implications of missionary imagery’s legacy in a post-colonial world. Looking specifically at British missionaries to southern Africa, this thesis proposes that visual culture, comprised of art, image, and their corollaries in personal and collective imagination, be recognised as an appropriate framework through which to re-examine a group predominantly associated with the Word. In particular, it argues that visual resources were not only communicated with originating missionary societies and home supporters, but were utilised as tools for evangelism and education, and the development of self-identity for men and women operating far from home. Beginning with a theoretical defence of visual culture as an appropriate and meaningful lens through which to investigate mission, the thesis goes on to consider the formative visual culture of prospective missionaries, identifying how and why evangelical Protestants accessed images. Key themes of landscape and portraiture are identified, and the varied media through which these were encountered investigated, including printed publications, gallery art, domestic ephemera, and ecclesial decorations. A detailed examination of the popular religious periodical The Sunday at Home brings together the exploration of these diverse themes. The second half of the thesis transitions from visual influences on prospective missionaries at home, to the visual culture of foreign missionary practitioners, pivoting on the activity of missionary training. An exploration of training reveals a disconnect between the importance of art and image in popular religious life, and a failure to address adequately their evangelistic applications. Moving into the final sections of the project, art and image re-emerge as significant, though the lack of guidance on their use is shown to have limited their co-ordination and effectiveness. Nevertheless, archive research in the UK, and field research in Malawi and South Africa, yielded sufficient material to demonstrate the particular importance of the landscape genre, and of the magic lantern as a crucial visual medium. Although visual materials were significant in the construction of missionary identity, and were heavily utilised in mission contexts, there was a widespread lack of engagement with, and distrust of, the visual, creating the complex and ambiguous interactions with which this thesis is ultimately concerned.

This paper explores artistic interpretation of a script's theme to its visual, estetic representation and meaning. The purpose is to reflect on the topic, and to enhance our understanding of how an interpretation from written intention to visual representation can form. The aritstic production used in this artistic research is an animated feature film for children 10+ and the character design of its lead female character.

Framing the Sacred revisits the significance of ekphrasis, the verbal rendering of a visual representation, in modern and contemporary American poetics. Although a seemingly marginal strain of lyric poetry, ekphrasis is a literary crucible in which the problems of representation converge, catalyzing a unique process of enchantment and disenchantment. Through an examination of a number of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poems, I argue that this enchantment has bearing on how we envision the import of religion in twentieth- and twenty-first-century America and its literature. On account of its liminal status--a text that is "betwixt and between" the verbal and visual--ekphrasis does not need to meditate explicitly on spiritual, sacred, or religious objects to undermine and destabilize our definitions of such terms. Each chapter in Framing the Sacred examines the manifestation of a single trope of containment--the figure of the frame, the genre of still life, the genre of the self-portrait, and the acts of collection and curation--and discovers the various ways the ekphrastic work of William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Charles Wright, A.E. Stallings, and Jorie Graham constructs and deconstructs such tropes. The pattern that emerges from a number of dramatically different ekphrases reveals the generative value of loosening the frames through which we consider the sacred in the study of literature and the visual arts.

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The research is developed through sculptural artworks that seek to raise the question of their being. They do this through their indeterminate presence, which often awakens people to ask ‘What is it?’ I ask how sculpture can encourage people to wonder about what things are, and how the relationship/s we form with art can then lead us to reflect upon our other more worldly relationships. I also pursue the questions of what is sculpture, and what is contemporary art, in order to map out an understanding of the domain of my practice, and the issues at stake regarding the making and display of sculpture. Through a reading of the ideas of Martin Heidegger and other Continental philosophers, I have focused upon the way our (Modern Western) relationship with things in the world is problematic, and how art can help us to address some of these problems. It is through art’s poetic ambiguities that our usual determined and closed relationship with the world can be opened up to other readings. An investigation into contemporary art practices reveals several issues that put the artwork into context and shed light upon difficulties facing contemporary artists particularly in terms of: what am I to do, why should I do it and how should I proceed? My artworks are aimed at raising questions for the viewer about being, sculpture and contemporary art. I have developed the coopering technique of wooden construction to make unusually shaped wooden container-like sculptures. I have also investigated other semi-industrial working methods to construct sculptural objects that oscillate between various possibilities for the viewer. These artworks operate in the field between the familiar/unfamiliar, functional/non-functional and the known/unknown. They resist the viewer’s efforts at stilling the oscillation between possible readings and evade some of the common roles of contemporary art such as being a site for social and political dialogue or being a reflection of contemporary/pop/consumer culture. This project contributes to the dialogue already in play between several Post-Minimal sculptors whose work touches upon constructed and or manufactured ambiguous forms. It further develops the language of how to discuss these issues through my philosophical readings. It extends the coopering technique beyond the simple cask form to discover the technical possibilities for this method of construction. It brings to the gallery visitor an actual experience of what Heidegger writes about art, particularly in terms of his ideas about ‘the truth of being as revealing/concealing’. The research also develops our understanding of the nature of contemporary art through questioning several aspects of it and through adopting outmoded and laborious methods of making that are at odds with our digital age. The artworks are the result of working toward a position of indeterminacy that is alluring, by partially resisting the viewer’s efforts to know them.

This research seeks to establish visual principles present in modern media and compare their usefulness. The visual principles will be explained and presented. Then they will be analyzed within two game trailers of commercial games. A correlation will then be extrapolated and then presented if the results create the presented and expected outcome.

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