Edinburgh Napier University

  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.