Digital Art - Digital Culture
Underpinning the strategic importance of this area, a highly international Digital Media cluster has been constituted incorporating staff based in Fine Art and Culture Lab.
CultureLab director Sally Jane Norman is experienced in digital technology and has led numerous interdisciplinary research initiatives internationally. Areti Galani with dual expertise in museology and computing science, brings from her Equator IRC networks know-how in mixed-reality systems which she investigates in relation to museum visiting experiences and through her contributions to the AHRC-funded series of workshops on ‘Museums and the Semantic Web’. Practitioners Lise Autogena, Atau Tanaka and Jayne Wallace joined us in 2007 These staff are energetically building on Digital Media work undertaken by AHRC Fellows who pioneered research in web-based streamed events and real-time digital graphics Jorn Ebner and Monica Ross and sonic art David Cunningham.
The cluster optimises Culture Lab infrastructure and technical competence by promoting collaboration in selected thematic areas positioned at the crossroads of core Newcastle research strengths. Data visualisation and retrieval research has brought designers, artists and computing scientists together across an AHRC-EPSRC e-science demonstrator (PI Sally Jane Norman). Data visualisation was also core to an international interdisciplinary conference, ‘Architecture in the Space of Flows’, where artists and designers engaged with architects, sociologists and scientists.
Digital heritage research includes an ongoing FP6 Interactive Storytelling project targeting the museum and educational community, and has produced several international workshops with academic, heritage specialist and industry-based participants A project initiated by Areti Galani produced an original Culture Lab exhibition of regional museum artefacts embedded with mobile and pervasive computing infrastructure to facilitate access for disabled people, led in collaboration with wireless technology experts from Civil Engineering.
Artistic applications of wearable technologies have been discussed in guest lecturers, addressing interdisciplinary researcher cohorts engaged in design, mobile computing and microelectronics. Embodied interactive systems is likewise a theme underpinning performance technologies research developed jointly with Brunel, leading to the first of a series of planned interdisciplinary graduate seminars.