Gone to Earth: Cinematic Encounters with the British Rural Landscape

Through a synthesis of critical and practical research, this thesis looks beyond semiotic approaches to film landscape which consistently view the representation of countryside in film as a metonym for the national. My research is concerned instead with an interaction with land which is experiential, embodied and felt. Considering the ways in which landscape imprints itself upon our physical and spiritual selves, the thesis investigates rural space through the sensorium of the body, engaging with both the elemental properties of soil and stone and the substrata of myth, memory and dream to formulate a model for an embodied and enchanted British landscape cinema. Within a framework of film phenomenology, the thesis questions aesthetic readings of film landscape borrowed from art history and looks instead to anthropological conceptions of landscape as dwelt space, the result of a persistent communion between occupant and land. Considering landscape and the natural sublime from gendered perspectives, as products of a male gaze reinforcing men’s domination over women and nature, the thesis proposes an alternative conception of landscape and sublimity which are rooted in material immanence rather than transcendental distance. Through this process, the work advocates a new kind of occupation of the British countryside which challenges human sovereignty over nature and resists the colonial hegemonies of ownership and possession. My practical enquiry into landscape and rurality is informed by my work as cinematographer, sound recordist and sound editor. Through this multidisciplinary approach, the research questions the primacy of vision in cinema’s representation of countryside. Contributing to discourse on soundscape, film sound and field recording, the thesis contends that ocularcentric interpretations of landscape often estrange and exile us from the land whilst sound-led filmmaking approaches invite us towards it. The thesis enquires about cinematic rural space from perspectives of film realism and proposes an alternative, hybridised model of realism to account for our occupancy of the countryside. Drawing from diverse magical realist film texts as well as existing discourse on magical realism, my work speculates that the imbrication of realism and fable grants access to long repressed systems of thought within the countryside and, crucially, places human creative imagination at the centre of our sensorial engagement with rural space. In their different approaches to sounding and visualising the countryside, the two films which comprise my practical research enable us, as filmmaker and viewer, to consider how imaginary, non-naturalistic representations of the rural help to reclaim the British countryside for ourselves

Sensory Urbanism Proceedings 2008

This book contains papers from the January 2008 conference, Sensory Urbanism, held by the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Papers deal with issues surrounding the sensory perception of urban design and how to design better for all the senses. The book is illustrated throughout, and contains 26 papers from fields including architecture, urban design, environmental psychology, urban design, planning, sound design and more

The Literature of Bio-Political Panic: European Imperialism, Nervous Conditions and Masculinities from 1900 to 9/11

This thesis examines selected literary representations of personal and political panic in the period 1899-2005, with a particular focus on the way in which literary languages are able to mediate issues around embodied experience. The main emphasis of this thesis is to demonstrate how nervous conditions, informing embodied phenomenological experience and existentialist insights, can be politically subversive in their un-learning of interpellated knowledge. In its opening section, this work studies a novel published in 1899 that depicts contemporary fears about nervous degeneration and offers an interrogation of the ideology of masculinity corresponding to the expansionist era of European imperialism. The trauma of First World War shell-shock and the nervous anxiety of colonial ‘white’ masculinist performance feature in the second and third sections respectively. These study literary texts that juxtapose masculinity crisis with the politics of identity and the articulation of the related problematic of agency. The final section studies a novel that depicts neo-Darwinism and genetic determinism in an age of political terrorism and counter-terrorism post-9/11 and before the 2003 Iraq War. It investigates the novel’s suggestion that bio-political reifications may be resisted by the exercise of emotional empathy and existentialist ambivalence. The thesis as a whole explores how masculinity and existentialist crisis can produce emotional and epistemic interruptions in ideologies that inform normative bodily and social behaviour. In order to offer deeper analyses of nervous conditions and cultural cognition, this work attempts to incorporate various tenets and experimental findings of modern neuroscience with ideas and theories from philosophy of mind. Through a study of selected literary texts, the thesis is offered as a small contribution to the understanding of the nature of human agency, empathy and identity in the changing political world of the last and the current century

The Arts of the Street: Sense Perception, Creativity and Resistance in Everyday Urban Life

In this dissertation, I examine questions concerning space, perception, everyday creativity, and the social ordering of the senses, and go on to describe a class of creative urban practices that I name the arts of the street. These include, but are not necessarily limited to, street performance (busking), street art in the usual sense (graffiti, murals, postering, etc.), punk, hip hop culture, and skateboarding (street skating). As disparate as they seem, all of these practices share certain key characteristics: they are forms of everyday creativity that claim space according to their own intentions, in opposition to the dominant socio-political order. They act as forms of resistance that suggest other ways of understanding, experiencing, and (re)producing the shared spaces of everyday life. Although concerned with concrete everyday practices and forms of knowledge, this work is nonetheless primarily a theoretical investigation. As such, I construct a basis for my claims by putting the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty in conversation with Henri Lefebvre’s critical analyses of space and everyday life in the context of late-stage capitalism. Additionally, I engage with a wide range of anthropological, sociological, and philosophical literature to argue that these diverse arts, which are directly tied to the concept of ‘the street’—itself a transitory and undetermined space of possibility—offer opportunities to enact other spaces of encounter and exchange, and that they exemplify a fundamental creative capacity that exceeds the managerial logic of capitalism. I show that these everyday arts represent the minor practice of bricolage, of the amateur, and of a collective sense of creativity that is fundamental to our perceptual experience but that never assumes formal properties, never acquires an identity. The arts of the street draw upon the common human abilities of curiosity, experimentation, and ordinary speech, and can draw our attention to a pre-reflexive corporeal presence that binds us to the world and each other. They thus demonstrate that it is possible to perceive, conceive, and live (in) urban space in different, possibly more equitable, ways

Ensounded bodies, making place in London's East End

En aquest projecte, estic investigant la relació entre el so urbà i fer lloc a l'Est de Londres. Exploro com 'ensounding' el nostre cos (Ingold 2007) i una escolta participativa del so urbà pot posar el nostre cos emocional i sensorial al primer pla de la nostra experiència urbana. Examino la unió entre les discussions sobre lloc, emoció i so urbà, posant el 'cos sentient' com a pivot articulant-les des del seu centre. Els sentits són una manera important d'adquirir informació, de desxifrar els significats que es despleguen al nostre voltant a través de miríades de manifestacions. Per tant, argumento per a una metodologia sensorial que permeti fer una cartografia de la ciutat que creix des dels cossos cap enfora i també per a la seva fluïdesa. Una metodologia inclusiva que convidi a realçar la permeabilitat de les membranes al voltant dels Estudis Urbans i a incloure als sentits dins el que es considera recerca acadèmica.En este proyecto, investigo la relación entre el sonido urbano y hacer lugar en el Este de Londres. Exploro como el 'ensounding' de nuestro cuerpo (Ingold 2007) en conjunto con una escucha participativa puede situar nuestro cuerpo emocional y sensorial en el primer plano de nuestra experiencia urbana. Examino la unión entre las discusiones sobre lugar, emoción y sonido urbano, poniendo el 'cuerpo que siente' como el pivote central que las articula. Los sentidos son una forma importante de adquirir información, de descifrar los significados que se despliegan a nuestro alrededor a través de una multitud de manifestaciones. Por lo tanto, argumento por una metodología sensorial que permita hacer una cartografía de la ciudad que crezca desde nuestros cuerpos hacia el exterior y también por su fluidez. Una metodología inclusiva que invite a realzar la permeabilidad de las membranas alrededor de los Estudios Urbanos y a incluir los sentidos dentro de lo que se considera investigación académica.In this research, I investigate the relationship between the urban soundscape and the making of place in London's East End. I explore the ways in which ensounding our bodies (Ingold 2007) and listening participatively to the soundscape can bring our sensuous and emotional bodies back to the forefront of our urban experience. In doing so, I examine the junction between the discussion around place, emotion and the soundscape, placing the sensuous body at its centre as its articulating pivot. The senses are an important way of gathering information, of deciphering the meanings that unfold around us through a myriad of different manifestations. Therefore, I am arguing for a sensuous methodology for the making of a cartography of the city, growing from the bodies outwards and for this methodology to be as fluid as sound can be. An inclusive methodology that, in turn, will enhance the permeability of the membranes around Urban Studies and invite the senses into what is considered a scholar way of researching

Sonic, infrasonic, and ultrasonic frequencies : the utilisation of waveforms as weapons, apparatus for psychological manipulation, and as instruments of physiological influence by industrial, entertainment, and military organisations

This study is a trans-disciplinary and trans-historical investigation into civilian and battlefield contexts in which speaker systems have been utilised by the military-industrial and military-entertainment complexes to apply pressure to mass social groupings and the individuated body. Drawing on authors such as historian/sociologist Michel Foucault, economist Jacques Attali, philosopher Michel Serres, political geographer/urban planner Edward Soja, musician/sonic theorist Steve Goodman, and cultural theorist/urbanist Paul Virilio, this study engages a wide range of texts to orchestrate its arguments. Conducting new strains of viral theory that resonate with architectural, neurological, and political significance, this research provides new and original analysis about the composition of waveformed geography. Ultimately, this study listens to the ways in which the past and current utilisation of sonic, infrasonic, and ultrasonic frequencies as weapons, apparatus for psychological manipulation, and instruments of physiological influence, by industrial, civilian, entertainment, and military organisations, predict future techniques of sociospatialised organisation. In chapter one it is argued that since the inception of wired radio speaker systems into U.S. industrial factories in 1922, the development of sonic strategies based primarily on the scoring of architectonic spatiality, cycles of repetition, and the enveloping dynamics of surround sound can be traced to the sonic torture occurring in Guantanamo Bay during the first decade of the twenty-first century. Exploring the use of surround sound speaker techniques by the FBI during the Waco Siege in Texas, this argument is developed in chapter two. In chapter three it is further contended that the acoustic techniques utilised in the Guantanamo torture cells represent the final modality and the logical conclusion of these strategies that have evolved between civilian and military contexts over the past 80 years. In chapter four, the speaker system instrumentality of the HSS ultrasonic beam - occurring post Guantanamo - comes to symbolise an epistemic shift in the application of waveformed pressure; the dynamics of directional ultrasound technology signalling the orchestration of a new set of frequency-based relations between the transmitter and the receiver, the speaker system and architectural context, and the civilian and war torn environment. The concluding proposition of the study submits that a waveformed cartography - mapping the soundscape's territorialisation by the military-entertainment complex - needs to be composed and arranged so that forms of recording, amplification, and resistance can be made coherent. Given the new set of non-sound politics announced by the HSS, this philosophy of frequency-based mapping will have to re-evaluate the taxonomy and indexical nature of spatial relations. This discipline will be a waveformed psychogeography; a frequency-based modality that heuristically charts the spatial concerns of the neural environment as well as the environs of the material and the built. As a field of research it will have a wide-ranging remit to explore the spatial, psychological, physiological, social, economic, and sexual effects that waveforms have upon our subjectivity. Its methodology - as suggested through the structuring of this study - will be multi-disciplined and multi-channelled. It will create new forms of knowledge about LRADs, iPods, Mosquitos, I ntonarumori , loudhailers, and Sequential Arc Discharge Acoustic Generators - the meta-network of speaker systems through which rhythms and cadences of power are transmitted, connected, and modulated

Observations and experiments in architecture and corporeality

Tese de Doutoramento em Arquitetura, com a especialização em Teoria e Prática do Projeto, apresentada na Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade de Lisboa para obtenção do grau de Doutor.N/