Re-viewing history: antiquaries, the graphic arts and Scotland's lost geographies, c.1660-1820

This thesis examines topographical art depicting Scotland’s natural scenery and built environments, architecture, antiquities and signs of modern improvement, made during the period 1660 to 1820. It sets out to demonstrate that topography and topographical art was not exclusively antiquarian in nature, but ranged across various fields of learning and practice. It included the work of artists, geographers, cartographers, travel writers, poets, landscape gardeners, military surveyors, naturalists and historians who were concerned with representing the country’s varied, and often contentious, histories within an increasingly modernising present. The visual images that are considered here were forms of knowledge that found expression in drawings, paintings and engravings, elevations, views and plans. They were made on military surveys and picturesque tours, and were often intended to be included alongside written texts, both published and unpublished, frequently connecting with travels, tours, memoirs, essays and correspondence. It will also be argued that topography was a social practice, involving networks of artists, collectors, publishers and writers, who exchanged information in drawings and letters in a nationwide, and often increasingly commercial enterprise. This thesis will explore some of the strands of such a vast network of picture-making that existed in Scotland, and Britain, between 1660 and 1820, as visual images were circulated, copied, recycled and adapted, and topographical and antiquarian visual culture emerges as a complex, synoptic form of inquiry.

Close encounters: international exhibitions and the material culture of the British Empire, c.1880-1940

Apparitions of empire and imperial ideologies were deeply embedded in the International Exhibition, a distinct exhibitionary paradigm that came to prominence in the mid-nineteenth century. Exhibitions were platforms for the display of objects, the movement of people, and the dissemination of ideas across and between regions of the British Empire, thereby facilitating contact between its different cultures and societies. This thesis aims to disrupt a dominant understanding of International Exhibitions, which forwards the notion that all exhibitions, irrespective of when or where they were staged, upheld a singular imperial discourse (i.e. Greenhalgh 1988, Rydell 1984). Rather, this thesis suggests International Exhibitions responded to and reflected the unique social, political and economic circumstances in which they took place, functioning as cultural environments in which pressing concerns of the day were worked through. Understood thus, the International Exhibition becomes a space for self-presentation, serving as a stage from which a multitude of interests and identities were constructed, performed and projected. This thesis looks to the visual and material culture of the International Exhibition in order to uncover this more nuanced history, and foregrounds an analysis of the intersections between practices of exhibition-making and identity-making. The primary focus is a set of exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-1880s and early-1900s, which extends the geographic and temporal boundaries of the existing scholarship. What is more, it looks at representations of Canada at these events, another party whose involvement in the International Exhibition tradition has gone largely unnoticed. Consequently, this thesis is a thematic investigation of the links between a municipality routinely deemed the ‘Second City of the Empire’ and a Dominion settler colony, two types of geographic setting rarely brought into dialogue. It analyses three key elements of the exhibition-making process, exploring how iconographies of ‘quasi-nationhood’ were expressed through an exhibition’s planning and negotiation, its architecture and its displays. This original research framework deliberately cuts across strata that continue to define conceptions of the British Empire, and pushes beyond a conceptual model defined by metropole and colony. Through examining International Exhibitions held in Glasgow in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, and visions of Canada in evidence at these events, the goal is to offer a novel intervention into the existing literature concerning the cultural history of empire, one that emphasises fluidity rather than fixity and which muddles the boundaries between centre and periphery.

Photography and sociology: an exercise in serendipity

This thesis examines the relationship between photography and sociology as offering complementary ways of understanding ourselves and the world we live in. Drawing from the work of Pierre Bourdieu and Raymond Williams, I examine the idea of a ‘field’ of photography within the field of cultural production more generally. The practises of documentary photography, photojournalism and fine art photography are explored with specific reference to images of war. In this arena, the politics, aesthetics and ethics of representing the body in pain are addressed.

Art, sex, and institutions: defining, collecting, and displaying Shunga

In Edo-Japan (c.1603 – 1868) shunga, sexually explicit prints, paintings and illustrated books, were widely produced and disseminated. However, from the 1850s onwards, shunga was suppressed by the government and it has largely been omitted from art history, excluded from exhibitions and censored in publications. Although changes have taken place, cultural institutions continue to be cautious about what they collect and exhibit, with shunga largely remaining a prohibited subject in Japan. Since the 1970s there has been a gradual increase in the acceptance of shunga outside Japan, as evidenced in the growing number of exhibitions and publications. The initial impetus behind this thesis was: Why and how did shunga become increasingly acceptable in Europe and North America in the twentieth century, whilst conversely becoming unacceptable in post-Edo Japan? I discuss how and why attitudes to shunga in the UK and Japan have changed from the Edo period to the present day, and consider how definitions can affect this. My research examines how shunga has been dealt with in relation to private and institutional collecting and exhibitions. In order to gauge modern responses, the 2013 Shunga: Sex and Pleasure in Japanese Art exhibition at the British Museum is used as an in-depth study – utilising mixed methods and an interdisciplinary approach to analyse curatorial and legal decisions, as well as visitor feedback. To-date there are no official or standardised guidelines for the acquisition, cataloguing, or display of sexually explicit artefacts. It is intended that institutions will benefit from my analysis of the changing perceptions of shunga and of previous shunga collections and exhibitions when dealing with shunga or other sexually explicit items in the future.

Integrated visual perception architecture for robotic clothes perception and manipulation

This thesis proposes a generic visual perception architecture for robotic clothes perception and manipulation. This proposed architecture is fully integrated with a stereo vision system and a dual-arm robot and is able to perform a number of autonomous laundering tasks. Clothes perception and manipulation is a novel research topic in robotics and has experienced rapid development in recent years. Compared to the task of perceiving and manipulating rigid objects, clothes perception and manipulation poses a greater challenge. This can be attributed to two reasons: firstly, deformable clothing requires precise (high-acuity) visual perception and dexterous manipulation; secondly, as clothing approximates a non-rigid 2-manifold in 3-space, that can adopt a quasi-infinite configuration space, the potential variability in the appearance of clothing items makes them difficult to understand, identify uniquely, and interact with by machine. From an applications perspective, and as part of EU CloPeMa project, the integrated visual perception architecture refines a pre-existing clothing manipulation pipeline by completing pre-wash clothes (category) sorting (using single-shot or interactive perception for garment categorisation and manipulation) and post-wash dual-arm flattening. To the best of the author’s knowledge, as investigated in this thesis, the autonomous clothing perception and manipulation solutions presented here were first proposed and reported by the author. All of the reported robot demonstrations in this work follow a perception-manipulation method- ology where visual and tactile feedback (in the form of surface wrinkledness captured by the high accuracy depth sensor i.e. CloPeMa stereo head or the predictive confidence modelled by Gaussian Processing) serve as the halting criteria in the flattening and sorting tasks, respectively. From scientific perspective, the proposed visual perception architecture addresses the above challenges by parsing and grouping 3D clothing configurations hierarchically from low-level curvatures, through mid-level surface shape representations (providing topological descriptions and 3D texture representations), to high-level semantic structures and statistical descriptions. A range of visual features such as Shape Index, Surface Topologies Analysis and Local Binary Patterns have been adapted within this work to parse clothing surfaces and textures and several novel features have been devised, including B-Spline Patches with Locality-Constrained Linear coding, and Topology Spatial Distance to describe and quantify generic landmarks (wrinkles and folds). The essence of this proposed architecture comprises 3D generic surface parsing and interpretation, which is critical to underpinning a number of laundering tasks and has the potential to be extended to other rigid and non-rigid object perception and manipulation tasks. The experimental results presented in this thesis demonstrate that: firstly, the proposed grasp- ing approach achieves on-average 84.7% accuracy; secondly, the proposed flattening approach is able to flatten towels, t-shirts and pants (shorts) within 9 iterations on-average; thirdly, the proposed clothes recognition pipeline can recognise clothes categories from highly wrinkled configurations and advances the state-of-the-art by 36% in terms of classification accuracy, achieving an 83.2% true-positive classification rate when discriminating between five categories of clothes; finally the Gaussian Process based interactive perception approach exhibits a substantial improvement over single-shot perception. Accordingly, this thesis has advanced the state-of-the-art of robot clothes perception and manipulation.