The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram

This thesis identifies and analyses the key creative protocols in translocal performance practice, and ends with suggestions for new forms of transversal live and mediated performance practice, informed by theory. It argues that ontologies of emergence in dynamic systems nourish contemporary practice in the digital arts. Feedback in self-organised, recursive systems and organisms elicit change, and change transforms. The arguments trace concepts from chaos and complexity theory to virtual multiplicity, relationality, intuition and individuation (in the work of Bergson, Deleuze, Guattari, Simondon, Massumi, and other process theorists). It then examines the intersection of methodologies in philosophy, science and art and the radical contingencies implicit in the technicity of real-time, collaborative composition. Simultaneous forces or tendencies such as perception/memory, content/ expression and instinct/intellect produce composites (experience, meaning, and intuition- respectively) that affect the sensation of interplay. The translocal event is itself a diagram - an interstice between the forces of the local and the global, between the tendencies of the individual and the collective. The translocal is a point of reference for exploring the distribution of affect, parameters of control and emergent aesthetics. Translocal interplay, enabled by digital technologies and network protocols, is ontogenetic and autopoietic; diagrammatic and synaesthetic; intuitive and transductive. KeyWorx is a software application developed for realtime, distributed, multimodal media processing. As a technological tool created by artists, KeyWorx supports this intuitive type of creative experience: a real-time, translocal “jamming” that transduces the lived experience of a “biogram,” a synaesthetic hinge-dimension. The emerging aesthetics are processual – intuitive, diagrammatic and transversal

Communities of Abundance: Sociality, Sustainability, and the Solidarity Economies of Local Food-Related Business Networks in Knoxville, Tennessee

This dissertation examines the socio-economic and eco-political dimensions of contemporary localist food movements in Knoxville, Tennessee. More specifically, it explores the implications of the mutualistic and networked socio-economies (solidarity and/or community economies) of such movement expressions as they are experienced, embodied, and understood among the small-scale, independent food-related business owners who often serve as the interpellators of such movements. This study is likewise concerned with ways in which movement actors are actively shaping/creating place (via the processes of emplacement), and relatedly, the way place—as an entity possessive of its own accretions of environmental, historical, cultural, economic, and political identities—shapes actors, therefore determining the textures of particular localisms in return. Such processes and expressions, while explicitly oriented toward the recovery and reassertion of the “local,” however, are also necessarily embedded in the structural matrix of neoliberal globalization. Indeed, it is precisely from the negotiation of such global/local dialectics that localist food movements draw their oppositional political value. Accordingly, the study is also preoccupied with the ways in which localist food movements, particularly in their contestational positioning vis-a-vis the global industrial food system, are also actively producing new, and perhaps critical-neoliberal subjectivities that bridge post-Fordist symbolic and cultural economies on the one hand, with affective solidarity economies on the other

‘Slow Hope’ and Nuclear Knowledge Management in Nuclear Fiction: On ‘Hope Narrative’ in Communicating a Nuclear Disaster

Non peer reviewe

Design and semantics of form and movement (DeSForM 2006)

Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM) grew from applied research exploring emerging design methods and practices to support new generation product and interface design. The products and interfaces are concerned with: the context of ubiquitous computing and ambient technologies and the need for greater empathy in the pre-programmed behaviour of the ‘machines’ that populate our lives. Such explorative research in the CfDR has been led by Young, supported by Kyffin, Visiting Professor from Philips Design and sponsored by Philips Design over a period of four years (research funding £87k). DeSForM1 was the first of a series of three conferences that enable the presentation and debate of international work within this field: • 1st European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM1), Baltic, Gateshead, 2005, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. • 2nd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM2), Evoluon, Eindhoven, 2006, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. • 3rd European conference on Design and Semantics of Form and Movement (DeSForM3), New Design School Building, Newcastle, 2007, Feijs L., Kyffin S. & Young R.A. eds. Philips sponsorship of practice-based enquiry led to research by three teams of research students over three years and on-going sponsorship of research through the Northumbria University Design and Innovation Laboratory (nuDIL). Young has been invited on the steering panel of the UK Thinking Digital Conference concerning the latest developments in digital and media technologies. Informed by this research is the work of PhD student Yukie Nakano who examines new technologies in relation to eco-design textiles

Ethics as Harmony and Improvisation in Responsive Equilibrium: the Core Psychophysical Process as a bio-logical foundation for ethical engagement

In this thesis I address the ethics of corporeal being at a foundational level. Rather than starting the discussion of ethics at an abstract level founded in propositions and logical arguments about principles, I offer an holistic view of human engagement that recognises sensori-motor processes and our embodied engagements with the world as foundational to and integral with cognition and higher functions and social skills. I propose that the capacity of human beings to act in an ethically responsible way is built into our biological, psychosocial natures, and that ethical interaction is informed and enhanced by intentionally cultivating a particular psychophysical process. The Core Psychophysical Process (the CPP) that I have identified naturally underlies our interactions in the world as vertebrate creatures, grounds our primary and ongoing developmental and learning processes, and is integral with the process of developing our ethical ‘second nature.’ The CPP is expressed at a fundamental level in a reflexive neuro-musculo-skeletal expansive and contractive process that is integral with an experiential sequence of perception, reaction, and reflection leading to choice of action. There is a constant ebb and flow of contraction and expansion throughout the body which resonates with, in and through all of our experiences. It is integrated into processes of reasoning, interpretation, intentionality, emotion, valuing and habit, all of which, along with the abilities to inhibit, deliberate, and choose, are foundational to ethical action. Elements of the CPP are active at every level of corporeal being, from the fluent maintenance of equilibrium at neuronal level through to the dynamics of ethical deliberations and negotiations between people in society. In this thesis the Alexander Technique and processes in the Arts provide exemplars wherein the foundational intrinsic aspects and expressions of the CPP can be understood. In order to fully explore the impact of the CPP in human experience, I examine both theoretical and practical experimental experience with the CPP in relation to: historical and contemporary readings from different cultures in bioethics, ethics, philosophy, feminist philosophy, and the philosophy of mind; empirical investigations in cognitive science, physiology, and neuroscience; and Susan Hurley’s Shared Circuits Model. This is a phenomenological study, from a feminist and arts-based perspective. Arts Phenomenology starts with the question: ‘What is the experience of being with, acting with, with the intention to?’ That perspective leaves behind subject/object, mind/body dualities to understand human experience as extended and grounded in the embodied interactions of social being. I offer alternate conceptions of embodiment, and explore Bodily ‘I’dentity that reflects multi-sensory meaning-making grounded in experience

Growing together: exploring the politics of knowing and conserving (bio) diversity in a small conservancy in Cape Town

This dissertation is based on research conducted at a small state-managed conservancy called the Edith Stephens Nature Reserve (ESNR) situated in the low-lying flatlands of the Cape Town metropolis. By tracing some of the complex and varied ways in which different ways of knowing and valuing urban "natures" and practices of conservation co-constitute each other, this dissertation critically engages with the social power relations at work in the continual making and unmaking of Cape Town's "natural" heritages. In doing so, I argue for recognizing the ways in which Cape Town's urban "natures" remain entangled with the epistemological, ecological and spatial legacies of colonialism and apartheid. Moreover, by focusing on the ESNR, I explore the current material and discursive practices by the state in relation to urban "nature" conservation. In recent years, the discursive framework of biodiversity conservation was mapped onto ESNR through the state apparatus. At the same time, ESNR was identified as pilot site for an experimental partnership project that was called Cape Flats Nature (CFN), a project that ran from 2002 till 2010 which explored what biodiversity conservation would mean within marginalized, poverty-stricken and highly unequal urban landscapes. By engaging with ESNR's historically constituted material- discursivity, this dissertation argues that, during this time, a particular relational knowledge emerged which, in turn, co-crafted and configured the emerging poetics, politics and practices at ESNR. In doing so, I foreground my main argument - that urban "nature"conservation, far from only being about conserving and caring for nonhuman life worlds, is rather simultaneously about conserving a particular relation to the world, to others and to oneself

Artistic Cartography and Design Explorations Towards the Pluriverse

This edited volume uses an interdisciplinary approach to art and design that not only reframes but also repositions agendas and actions to address fragmented global systems. Contributors explore the pluriverse of art and design through epistemological and methodological considerations. What kinds of sustainable ways are there for knowledge transfer, supporting plural agendas, finding novel ways for unsettling conversations, unlearning and learning and challenging power structures with marginalised groups and contexts through art and design? The main themes of the book are art and design methods, epistemologies and practices that provide critical, interdisciplinary, pluriversal and decolonial considerations. The book challenges the domination of the white logic of art and design and shifts away from the Anglo-European one-world system towardsthe pluriverse. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, arts-based research, and design studies