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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.
Furtherfield has inspired and supported new forms of collaborative practice and expression at the intersection of arts and technology cultures to co-create critical, contemporary public platforms and contexts for arts in networked society.
Furtherfield's innovative programmes have advanced practices and theories of collaboration, remix, and openness; inspiring and informing thinking in the UK Arts sector and international digital arts culture. This work has worldwide cultural and social impact. It reaches and engages new audiences through public gallery programmes, online collections, websites, and other award-winning virtual platforms, acknowledged by artists, curators and critics for their contribution to emerging digital art contexts.
Since 2005, Dr Quick has created a series of practice-as-research projects and educational workshops to increase understanding of how new media-based performance is created and understood. Key beneficiaries have been young people, teachers, theatre practitioners, mixed media artists, and cultural organisations. Five new works have impacted through the introduction of innovative practice performance to new audiences, nationally and internationally (including central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Brazil and Taiwan); pioneering new uses of digital technology as creative practice, and sharing such innovation with both established and new theatres and groups.
This case study focuses on the impact of Professor Adrian Heathfield's research. Heathfield curated numerous multi-form research exchanges with his Performance Matters Co-Directors over a four-year period, expanding non-academic beneficiaries of performance research, influencing prevailing professional discourses as well as creative and curatorial practices across the arts sector. Workshops, collaborative dialogues, symposia, talks, films, screenings and performances were conceived, realised and hosted by major cultural sector partners, involving an international array of leading academics, artists, activists and curators. Direct impacts for the non-academic partner-organisation — Live Art Development Agency (LADA) — were the expansion of its educational, archival and media activities, and user community. Specific professional development effects were delivered for a culturally diverse group of participating established and early-career artists.
Professor Christopher Bannerman conceived this large-scale project as an extension of the ResCen mission to connect academia more intimately with the arts profession. The project promotes international communication and understanding between the UK, China and Taiwan linking Middlesex University with the Beijing Dance Academy (BDA), China National Academy for Arts Research (CNAAR) and Taipei National University of the Arts (TNUA), amongst others. Through collaborative dance-making between choreographers and dancers from these countries, artists exchange perspectives and artistic and cultural paradigms, and present work to international audiences. In China and Taiwan, this develops platforms for experimenting with European artistic methods, and in the UK, it raises the profile of East Asian dance, art and culture, where these endeavours have been under-represented. Through online forums, discussions, seminars and conferences, the project opens dialogue about encounters with, and understandings of, the other. The project achieves reach and significance in conversation with policy-makers and producers in three sectors beyond HE: arts professional practice, cultural policy, and civil society. At its first stage the project was named Danscross, evolving into Artscross as further partners were involved. The project has taken the form of a series of intensive workshop/performance periods including discussion groups, lectures and symposia, linked by ongoing communication and exchange. Danscross 2009 and ArtsCross 2012 took place in Beijing, and ArtsCross 2011 and 2013 in Taipei and London respectively. See an overview published in Arts Professional (Bannerman 2013): http://www.artsprofessional.co.uk/magazine/268/article/bringing-it-all-back-home.
For this case study our impacts include high levels of community engagement, innovative pedagogy, engagement with large and broad audiences (in real life and via an array of broadcast and print media), prize winning activities and quality outputs and publications. Our approach is trans-disciplinary, progressive and experimental and impacts in a local, national and global context. This case study refers to the group of researchers at Leeds Metropolitan University whose work is practice-based, practice-led and often collaborative. This type of innovative and progressive research has characterised the subject at the University since the establishment of Leeds Polytechnic in 1970.
Earth Forum, a citizens' practice (2011 on-going) with global grassroots take-up in South Africa and Europe, demonstrates cultural and educational impacts through Sacks' 40-year social sculpture and connective practices enquiry. It incorporates insights from the Exchange Values project, whose 12 venues, since 1996, offered thousands of consumers an arena for exploring `fairtrade' and their relationship to the global economy. Participatory social sculpture processes with Caribbean farmers inform methodologies and connective aesthetic practices in all later commissions including, University of the Trees and Ort des Treffens. Sacks' internationally recognized pedagogies, commissioned lecture-actions, writing and projects extend Joseph Beuys' social sculpture ideas into a coherent and widely accessible set of understandings and practices.
i-DAT has developed an open infrastructure for `harvesting' and visualising data to support collaborative interdisciplinary projects in environmental, social and cultural contexts. Framed as a series of `Operating Systems' this research contributes to the strategic activities of not-for-profit, public, private and community sectors, including Arts Council England, Plymouth City Council, UNESCO Biosphere and World Heritage Sites. Through i-DAT's National Portfolio Organisation status, this research delivers significant audience numbers and new work and contributes to and can be measured against impacts in relation to civil society, cultural life, policy making, public services and, to a lesser extent, economic prosperity.
Studio for Electronic Theatre (SET) is a group of researchers examining the relationship between technological advance and creative practice. They examine how technology can change the nature of performance environments in specific spaces and address social and political issues in distinct places. Specific performances have:
Additionally, the work being carried out engages directly with non HEI partners and has resulted in members of the group being invited to communicate with a range of interested partners beyond the academy: Greenwich Theatre, Albany Deptford, Kids Company.
Bournemouth University (BU) research by White (BU 2003 to present) focuses on the relationship between art, technology and culture. Exhibitions, workshops and presentations across the UK, Europe and in the USA have provoked societal reflection on critical topics such as genetics and germ warfare, among other controversial ethical issues. The work examines how sites, technologies and events shape our ideas of culture, political and personal life, whilst exposing audiences to ordinarily inaccessible information. Beneficiaries include the arts organisation with whom White has collaborated, and their participants, but more widely, those benefiting from his contribution to socially engaged art. The work has also furthered art-science discourse, providing impetus and critical breadth to the development of art and science as a cultural sector in the UK.