Submitting Institution
Bath Spa UniversityUnit of Assessment
Music, Drama, Dance and Performing ArtsSummary Impact Type
CulturalResearch Subject Area(s)
Studies In Creative Arts and Writing: Film, Television and Digital Media, Performing Arts and Creative Writing
Summary of the impact
Professor Joseph Hyde's research explores the role of music and sound in
a broader
performing/digital arts context, through installation and performance
works using interactive
technologies. Impact is generated through active participation by audience
members as a way to
embody the research. This work often engages a broader audience than
purely music/sound work,
reaching the wider arts, creative industries, education and
science/engineering communities. Two
recent projects illustrate this. me and my shadow was
commissioned by MADE, a European
Commission-funded initiative exploring mobility for digital arts. It ran
simultaneously in London,
Paris, Brussels and Istanbul, and formed the basis for a European
Commission White Paper.
danceroom Spectroscopy was a collaborative arts/science
crossover project, which attracted
attention in both arts and science communities. Both projects attracted
substantial funding (c.
€400,000 and £165,000 respectively), reached large audiences (5000 and
20,000 physical
attendees) and had wide press coverage.
Underpinning research
Project 1: me and my shadow
me and my shadow was the 2011/12 commission by MADE
(Mobility for Digital Arts in Europe), a
consortium of four European arts organisations: the Centre Des Arts
(Enghien-les-Bains, Paris),
body>data>space (London), Transcultures (Mons, Belgium) and boDig
(Istanbul). The consortium
was commissioned by the European Commission to produce a white paper on
arts mobility and co-production
over an intensive two-year programme of workshops and public events across
Europe,
centring on a large-scale digital art commission. Hyde's project won this
commission, and explored
a unique combination of motion capture and telepresence. It consisted of
four installations, one
hosted by each of the MADE partners. Each of the installations comprised
an innovative motion
capture system which captured full 3D information about the users and fed
these digital `shadows'
in real time into a virtual space (viewable continuously online) where
users from the four
geographically-separated installations could meet. The project developed
over four two-week
residencies between September 2011 and June 2012, one hosted by each
partner in their home
city. The finished installations ran from 9-26th June 2012 in London,
Paris, Brussels and Istanbul.
Further details of these installations and residencies are given in
section 3 below.
Project 2: danceroom Spectroscopy
danceroom Spectroscopy was initiated by Dr David Glowacki, a
computational chemist then at
the University of Bristol. Over the year 2011-12 it grew into a larger
collaborative project involving
three key partners, Dr Glowacki himself, Laura Kriefman (Director,
Guerrilla Dance Company), and
Joseph Hyde. The key research aim of the project was to produce an
accessible visualisation and
sonification of the particle systems and behaviours that are the subject
of Glowacki's research.
The work consisted of an installation in which users were presented as
energy fields and given the
opportunity to interact with a vast cloud of particles, which exhibited
complex behaviours true to
particle physics. In addition to producing the sonification for the
installation, Hyde acted as a
mentor in exploring the artistic possibilities of the project and the
`placing' of it within the digital
arts/music world, starting with a week-long workshop for 20 invited
artists which he led at the
Arnolfini in June 2011. He also proposed and drove the expansion of the
installation into a large-
scale dome format using six channels of HD video and 8-channel audio. He
facilitated the
partnering of Glowacki with choreographer Laura Kriefman and a corps of
five professional
dancers (Kriefman and several dancers took part in the Arnolfini
workshop), and with Plymouth
University's ICCI (Innovation for the Creative and Cultural Industries).
Hyde's involvement
culminated in the production of a performance piece using the danceroom
Spectroscopy system,
entitled Hidden Fields. This work, incorporating 5 dancers,
was conceived by Laura Kriefman and
Joseph Hyde, who also provided the sound design/music for the performance.
Both danceroom
Spectroscopy and Hidden Fields went on to receive
considerable further public exposure, as
detailed in section 4.
Position held at Bath Spa University: Joseph Hyde (Senior Lecturer
09/2001 - 11/2011, Professor
12/2012 - present)
References to the research
• Practice-Led Research: Hyde, J. (2012) me and my shadow.
Public installation project
consisting of four installations running in four European cities,
connected telematically to each
other and to a virtual space, also viewable online.
• Glowacki, D., Hyde, J., (2011) danceroom Spectroscopy. Public
installation. Interactive
installation designed for large dome environment with 5 channels of full
HD video and 8
channels of audio. Hyde produced all sonic aspects of the installation.
• Glowacki, D., Hyde, J. Kriefman, K. (2012) Hidden Fields. Dance
media performance based
on danceroom Spectroscopy interactive technology with 5 dancers, 3
channel video, 4 channel
sound. Hyde produced all sound/music.
• Book Chapter: D. R. Glowacki, P. Tew, T. Mitchell, L Kriefman,
J. Hyde, L. J. Malcolm, J. Price,
and S. McIntosh-Smith "Sculpting molecular dynamics in real-time using
human energy fields,"
in Molecular Aesthetics, Prof. Dr. Peter Weibel (ed), MIT Press 2013,
ISBN: 9780262018784.
• Conference Paper: D. R. Glowacki, P. Tew, T. Mitchell, J. Hyde,
J. Price, and S. McIntosh-
Smith, "danceroom Spectroscopy: Interactive quantum molecular dynamics
accelerated on
GPU architectures using OpenCL," UK Many Core Development Conference 2012
(UKMAC
'12)
• Evidence of Quality: The book chapter and conference paper have
been through a rigorous
peer-review process. Hyde was commissioned by MADE/European Commission for
me and
my shadow after a competitive application process. danceroom
Spectroscopy was awarded a
prize by the Royal Television Society (2012, Best Digital Innovation) and
a Mention from Prix
Ars Electronica (May 2012, Hybrid Arts category).
Details of the impact
Project 1: me and my shadow
1) Impact on public audiences. The project reached non-traditional arts
audiences through
participatory experience in venues such as the National Theatre foyer
(during their 'Inside Out'
festival) and the Galleries Royales Saint-Hubert in Brussels (a busy
shopping street in the very
centre of the city).
2) Education. Both the Centre de Arts and the National Theatre had
extensive school visit
programmes, covering all age groups.
3) Impact on other practitioners (across music, digital arts, technology
and creative industries
sectors). The four project residencies directly involved over 100
participants (as listed in the
MADE white paper), and were designed to engage local arts and technology
communities through
talks, workshops, 'hack days', and process showings to share technical and
aesthetic
developments arising from the research.
4) Technical innovation. The installation was a worldwide first in
combining full-body Kinect-based
motion capture with telepresence, and as such attracted considerable
attention from the tech
sector, as evidenced by exposure in Microsoft (manufacturers of the
Kinect) in-house publications
and tech TV shows such as BBC Click and BBC Arabic 4Tech.
5) Influence on public policy. The MADE project was funded in part by the
European Commission,
and its findings on Artist Mobility in the Digital Arts were presented in
the form of a white paper
(details below).
Indicators
- Footfall for the four (single-user) installations conservatively
estimated at around 5000 visitors.
- The me and my shadow website blog recorded just under 3500
discrete visits during the
exhibition period.
- Visitor feedback was overwhelmingly positive — a small number of the
thousands of comments
collected can be found at http://madeshadow.wordpress.com/feedback
- The MADE White Paper was presented to the European Commission by lead
author Philippe
Baudelot at a public event at Europe House, London, on 19/09/12. http://www.we-made.eu/fr/wp-content/uploads/maquette.pdf
- A multimedia exhibit based on me and my shadow was presented
in Europe House's 12 Star
Gallery from 19-28/09/12.
Selected Press
Funding
The MADE project attracted c.€400,000 in funding. The majority came from
the European
Commission, but other matched funding came from the Arts Council of
England, the National
Theatre, the City of Mons, The City of Enghien-les-Bains and The
Brussels-Wallonia Federation.
Project 2: danceroom Spectroscopy
1) Impact on audiences. To date, over 20,000 people have attended danceroom
Spectroscopy
and Hidden Fields events. Web statistics show over 40,000 hits for
related content, and Googling
`danceroom spectroscopy' gives more than 200 pages of hits. Notable live
events include:
- Shambala Arts Festival (27-28 August 2011)
- Bristol's Arnolfini (21-22 July 2012)
- London 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Weymouth (4-5 August 2012)
- London's Barbican Arts Centre (3-4 November 2012)
- London's Big Bang science/engineering fair (14-17 March 2012)
- Watershed danceroom Spectroscopy festival, Old Passenger Shed, Bristol
Temple Meads (24-26
October 2013)
A recently awarded grant from the Arts Council of England, along with
additional funding from
NVIDIA will facilitate further development and a Europe-wide tour from
Autumn 2013 to Spring
2014. Confirmed dates include the Barbican (01-02.03.14) and the Zentrum
für Kunst und
Medientechnologie (Karlsruhe, 04.01.14).
2) Education. Both the Centre de Arts and the National Theatre had
extensive school visit
programmes, covering all age groups. The Big Bang fair has an explicitly
educational role.
3) Impact on other practitioners. danceroom Spectroscopy and Hidden
Fields have had substantial
impact on our non-academic collaborators. Laura Kriefman (choreographer)
has enjoyed
significant exposure, with invitations to conduct workshops with
institutions including the Royal
Academy of Dance (London) and Northern Ballet. Phill Tew (programmer) has
boosted his
international reputation as a generative digital artist. He was awarded a
Watershed Pervasive
Media Studio residency, which led to his participation in other high
profile projects such as the
REACT project The Secret Lives of Books. Nathan Hughes and Jacob Parish
(film-makers)
produced a series of documentaries on the project. One of these was
shortlisted for a $100,000
Forward Focus prize sponsored by GE. The five dancers have gained valuable
experience at the
collaborative frontiers of art and science, and learnt strategies for
incorporating technology into arts
practice.
4) Technical innovation. danceroom Spectroscopy represents the
first ever real-time 360°, 3D
depth-capture system, and has yielded a state-of-the-art GPU accelerated
framework for carrying
out quantum molecular dynamics. The latter has attracted interest from
science and computing
communities, indicated by a sponsorship relationship with leading
graphics-card manufacture
NVIDIA.
5) Commercial impact. On the basis of the technical innovations developed
through this project,
David Glowacki, Phill Tew and and Laura Kriefman have formed a spin-off
company, Interactive
Scientific Ltd. with a projected turnover of £100k during 2013 - 2014.
6) Broader cultural impact. danceroom Spectroscopy was
highlighted by the newly appointed Arts
Council England chair, Sir Peter Bazalgette, during his inaugural lecture
in March 2013. The
project's impact has been strengthened considerably through connections to
Bristol's Pervasive
Media Studio (Watershed) and Arnolfini Art Gallery. The Watershed has used
danceroom
Spectroscopy as a Talent Development Case Study detailing successful
examples of cross-
fertilization between media organisations and the academic sector, and
built their 2013 showcase
event around it.
Indicators
Awards
- Royal Television Society 2012 `Best Digital Innovation'.
- Mention, Prix Ars Electronica (Hybrid Arts category), May 2012.
- University of Bristol 2013 public engagement award.
- On the basis of his work on danceroom Spectroscopy, Glowacki won a
nine-year Royal Society
Kohn Award `for excellence in engaging the public with science',
starting October 2013.
Selected Press
Funding
Orr-Ewing, Ashfold, et al, New Horizons in Chemical and Photochemical
Dynamics, EPSRC
EP/G00224X/1, 2008-13, £5,934,426
Glowacki, Ashfold, et al., danceroom Spectroscopy: collectively generating
music from movement,
EPSRC, EP/I017623/1 £20,000
Glowacki, EPSRC Pathways to Impact Funding, University of Bristol, £37,000
Glowacki, Arts Council England, £57,234
Glowacki, NVIDIA Academic Partnership Grant, £10,000
Glowacki, Artist residency from Bristol Arnolfini, £19,500
Glowacki, New Talent Residency from Bristol's Pervasive Media Studio,
£17,500
Sources to corroborate the impact
me and my shadow
-
Individual: MADE concept, editor in chief of the MADE white
paper (Consultant).
-
Individual: Creative Director, body > data > space,
London
-
Individual: Lead Digital Creative, National Theatre, London
- Click, BBC World Service, 19 June 2012, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00t7x3x
-
Report: Bosco, R. and Caldana, S. (2012) 'Cuatros portales para
entrar en un mundo virtual'.
News: El Pais, 21 June 2012: http://blogs.elpais.com/arte-en-la-edad-silicio/2012/06/cuatros-portales-para-entrar-en-un-mundo-virtual.html.
-
Report: MADE White Paper: http://www.we-made.eu/fr/wp-content/uploads/maquette.pdf
danceroom Spectroscopy
-
Individual: Researcher, University of Bristol, danceroom
Spectroscopy concept
-
Individual: Artistic Director, Bristol Old Vic
-
Report: Perks, S. (2012). `Molecular dance set to make waves
across the pond', Chemistry
World, 5 March 2012: http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2012/March/danceroom-spectroscopy-video-science-art-visualisation.asp
-
Report: `Dancing in the Quantum World', Physics World,
1 November 2011:
http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/multimedia/2011/nov/01/dancing-in-the-quantum-world