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.

Separate landscape is a research that combines a theory and practice through the examination of 'non-place'. Non-places such as airports, waiting lounges, car parks, shopping malls have been defined as places which lack a sense of history, social relations, and identity.

Facial information can reveal the emotional status of individuals. Although traditional cameras can capture this information, such cameras struggle to acquire the necessary information in extreme lighting conditions. This thesis aim to investigate whether High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging can capture human facial expression under complex lighting conditions, and in doing so, enhance Facial Expression Recognition (FER) performance. The techniques presented in this thesis focus on developing a baseline for images captured in scenes with harsh lighting conditions, where Low Dynamic Range (LDR) images have difficulty capturing the full range of light in a single exposure. The thesis considers unprocessed images and a variety of pre-processing methods to examine whether reducing the impact of large lighting variations could improve the quality of an input image. In addition, realistic facial data plays a key role in validating facial expression analysis systems. Today, the majority of FER algorithms are evaluated only on images generated in highly controlled laboratory environments. The variability of a facial appearance in an image could be dominated by changes in head pose and illumination conditions. This can effectively hide features that are necessary to discriminate different subjects or different facial articulations. New HDR imaging techniques are thus introduced to help ensure that all the details in a scene is captured no matter what the lighting conditions present, and all this detail is then available to the FER algorithms. This is also investigated on Face recognition algorithms.

Submitted by Automa??o e Estat?stica (sst@bczm.ufrn.br) on 2017-01-03T21:40:09Z No. of bitstreams: 1 IageTerraGuedesDeOliveira_DISSERT.pdf: 1463923 bytes, checksum: 19dff760e791d43564091519748df937 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Arlan Eloi Leite Silva (eloihistoriador@yahoo.com.br) on 2017-01-09T15:13:05Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 IageTerraGuedesDeOliveira_DISSERT.pdf: 1463923 bytes, checksum: 19dff760e791d43564091519748df937 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2017-01-09T15:13:05Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 IageTerraGuedesDeOliveira_DISSERT.pdf: 1463923 bytes, checksum: 19dff760e791d43564091519748df937 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-08-31 / Os ecossistemas de ?gua doce tem um importante papel na ciclagem global de carbono, uma vez que recebem cerca de 2,9 Pg C ano-1 advindo dos ecossistemas terrestres, processando e/ou estocando at? 2,6 Pg C ano-1.Desses, at? 2,1 Pg C ano-1 s?o mineralizados na coluna d??gua em grande parte pelas bact?rias planct?nicas. Essas s?o os organismos planct?nicos mais numerosos nos ecossistemas aqu?ticos continentais, por isso sendo respons?veis por grande do processamento do carbono. O seu papel dentro da ciclagem do carbono ir? variar de acordo com v?rios par?metros, agindo como fatores regulat?rios. O principal objetivo desse trabalho ? de avaliar o metabolismo bacteriano em dois reservat?rios do semi?rido tropical. Foram coletadas trimestralmente amostras de ?gua nos reservat?rios Santa Cruz e Umari entre fevereiro de 2013 e e novembro de 2014. Foram analisados par?metros f?sico-qu?micos e biol?gicos. O metabolismo bacteriano mostrou-se bastante vari?vel e com pouca previsibilidade. Isso ocorre devido a grande diversidade de fatores regulat?rios existentes que atuam em momentos e em locais diferentes, conjunta e separadamente. Frequentemente, se torna dif?cil prever os valores reais pois em diferentes momentos o metabolismo tanto pode ser influenciado pelas caracter?sticas f?sicas do sistema, bem como da concentra??o de nutrientes e suas implica??es nas intera??es. Sendo assim, mostram-se ind?cios de que o metabolismo bacteriano sofre bastante influ?ncia tanto bottom-up como top-down, podendo sofrer a partir de mudan?as, direcionadas ou aleat?rias, na estrutura da comunidade.