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

The design of accessible, usable and meaningful content. Volume 1: Explanatory Essay

This Explanatory Essay discusses the 31 papers which I have authored, or made a substantial contribution to, and submitted for a PhD by Prior Publication. The Essay presents these publications in the light of their original contribution to an emerging theme of concern, Content Design, which I will argue is the deliberate design of content so that it is accessible, usable and meaningful. Content is any type of information carrying material that is produced in any medium or mixture of media, for human, as opposed to machine, consumption. As such, content has always played an important role in our lives. In the Information Age, however, the importance of this role is becoming critical. This may be attributed to many factors, including: the inexorable proliferation of digitally produced content of all types; the increased possibilities, even expectations, to interact with content; and our growing reliance upon information. Thus, there should be a renewed attention to design of content, particularly its accessibility, usability and meaningfulness. There are many research areas that deal with aspects of content. I believe that deliberate attention to the composition and structuring of content can benefit from all of these. Content Design represents a multifaceted 'problem space' that draws on a wide variety of disciplines, from the humanities to the sciences. It also has lessons to learn from traditional ways of meaning-making, particularly literary studies and rhetoric. This problem space is a place to pull together knowledge and expertise that is needed in the digital age to help to design content so that it is consumable by humans. In this Essay, my publications are situated within three strands of research that offer such knowledge and expertise: Discourse Studies; the Uses of Metadata; and the Accessibility of Content. Broadly speaking, my work contributes, within these strands, to the design of content in terms of composing, packaging and making content apprehendable

From chef to superstar : food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web

Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-338).This thesis examines representations of food in twenty-first century media, and argues that the media obsession with food in evidence today follows directly from U.K. and U.S. post-war industrial and economic booms, and by the associated processes of globalisation that secure the spread of emergent trends from these countries to the rest of the so-called Western world. The theoretical frame for the work is guided in large part by Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1967), which follows a Marxist tradition of examining the intersection between consumerism and social relationships. Debord's spectacle is not merely something to be looked at, but functions, like Marx's fetishised commodity, as a mechanism of alienation. The spectacle does this by substituting real, lived experience with representations of life. Based on analyses of media representations of food from the post-war period to the present day, the work argues against the discursive celebration of globalisation as a signifier of abundance and access, and maintains, instead, that consequent to the now commonplace availability of choice and information is a deeply ambiguous relationship to food because it is a relationship overwhelmingly determined by media rather than experience. It further argues that the success of food media results from a spectacular conflation of an economy of consumerism with the basic human need to consume to survive. Contemporary celebrity chefs emerge as the locus of this conflation by representing figures of authority on that basic need, and also, through branded products (including themselves), the superfluity of consumerism. The subject of the work, therefore, is food, but the main object of its critique is media. Food media from World War 2 to the World Wide Web is about the commodification of history and politics, through food, and the natural (super)star of this narrative is the modern celebrity chef

Public perception, justification and motivation of development aid. The Feasibility of Peter Singer's Culture of Giving

351 p.En esta tesis se discuten y contrastan las implicaciones éticas, psicológicas y práticas del altruismo efectivo de Peter Singer con el fin de responder a la pregunta de qué papel deben tener las donaciones y la recaudación de fondos en el contexto del alivio de la pobreza extrema global. Se examinen las consideraciones del punto de vista maximalista moral de Singer, que se basa en la responsabilidad individual de cada cuidadano de los países ricos de dedicar lo más posible a la erradicación de la pobreza extrema en apoyando las organizaciones más efectivas con sus ingresos. Esta posición es rechazada como demasiado exigente, ya que deja poco espacio para el desarrollo de la persona y de otras actividades valiosas. Per contra Singer capta una importante intuición ética, que es que parece irresponsable que la riqueza global se distribuya de tal manera que parte de la ponlación viva en la abundancia, mientras que otras sufren. Se demustra que hay maneras en que las instituciones globales y el estilo de vida occidental prejudica a la gente que vive en los paises en via de desarollo. Entonces se puede establecer un deber de actuar contra la pobreza global. Pero un análisis estadistico de los niveles de donaciones y del comportamiento de los donantes demuestra que las apelaciones como la de Singer pueden aumentar las donaciones solo de manera temporal. Las limites cognitivas y intuiciones conflictivas prevalecerán a largo plazo. Nuestra simpatía se centra en individuos que percibimos como cercano, inocente y similar a nosotros. La caridad puede incluso ser perjudical, ya que a menudo se centra en las simpatias y opiniones de los donantes. Por lo tanto, la posición de Singer ¿ que la evaluación de proyectos es necesaría ¿ es todavía más importante. Un análisis comparativo de las diferentes intervenciones concluye que el apoyo financiero directo es la mejor manera de ayudar a la gente en pobreza extrema. Debido a los mecanismos psicológicos y una desconfianza institucionalizada hacia los pobres, es poco probable que sea financiado a través de donaciones. Se propone como una solución un impuesto global sobre riqueza extrema, empresas multinacionales y recursos naturales