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Living cameras : a study of live bodies and mediatized images in multi-media performance and installation art practice

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.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:511441
Date January 2000
CreatorsRye, Caroline
ContributorsDavies, Huw
PublisherEdinburgh Napier University
Source SetsEthos UK
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation
Sourcehttp://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/5886

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