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.
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. 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.