International Journal of Creative Media Research
Not a member yet
109 research outputs found
Sort by
Lorenz Factor: improvising algorithmic music
Get PDFSoundcloud link: Lorenz Factor: an algorithmic improvisation
The authors reflect upon Lorenz Factor, a musical performance developed for the Everyday is Spatial conference at the University of Gloucestershire in June 2022. The piece involves tracking the movements of the audience in order to spatialise the sound and provide streams of data that the performers use to control synthesisers or generate patterns. Further methods drawn from algorithmic composition and data sonification are deployed to give the musicians elements to respond to and perform with. The authors consider the nature of immersion in musical performances, proposing an approach to immersion that draws upon disciplines including gaming and theatre, and is less technology-driven than some current trends. Considering the use of space, the nature of the instrument and the role of the audience in Lorenz Factor leads to a discussion of Simon Water’s “performance ecosystem” and Christopher Small’s “musicking”, which provide an expanded conceptualisation of musical instruments, performance and audience participatio
[Making and Faking the News] Truths Under the Carapace?: Historical Fact and Fiction, the Metahistorical Sublime and the Insane Rationality of the Bomb in Tangled Saviours: A Novel
No full text
Inspired by several key concepts and conventions from the Marxist, post-structuralist, post-colonial and Annales schools of historiography and the attributes of what Amy J. Elias calls the "metahistorical romance", I want to argue that my novel Tangled Saviours, due to be published in December 2025, is a form of practice-based research that, using the broad palette of literary-fictional tropes and devices, can provide insights into the nonlinear, multiplicitous and dialectical nature of history, and into how historical events can be creatively and dramatically recreated in order to contest dominant Western narratives and epistemologies about the Second World War that are riven with distortions, fabrications and a susceptibility to what Alfred de Zayas calls “fake history”. Moreover, Tangled Saviours dissents from hegemonic trends in both historical fiction and historiography by exploring the interpellation of subaltern individuals and populations in Southeast Asian colonial and neo-colonial contexts, and ruminating on the “insane rationality” – to adapt a critical phrase from the philosopher Herbert Marcuse – of the Cold War nuclear age
Nazaré and Immersive Media: New Approaches to Cultural Heritage through Mixing Old and New Media
No full textThis article focuses on immersive representations of Nazaré, starting with stereoscopic photos from the early 20th century and finishing with 360º videos from the early 21st century. Located in central Portugal, the coastal town of Nazaré has inspired many visual representations by painters, photographers and filmmakers. During the first half of the 20th century, perhaps no other photographer captured Nazaré and its inhabitants as richly as the amateur photographer Álvaro Laborinho (1879-1970), who also experimented with stereoscopic photography. Today, immersive media are somewhat different from these stereoscopic photos, certainly with a greater degree of technological sophistication, but probably with less durability over time, given the quick obsolescence of current immersive technologies. More than a hundred years after the creation of these stereoscopic photos we arrive at 360º videos like Surfing with Pedro Scooby in VR and Nazaré, Mais que Mar é Mulher, produced respectively by Red Bull Brazil and by Marina Oliveto.
Yet another kind of representation is offered by the trans-disciplinary exploratory project Nazaré Imersiva (Nazaré Immersive) from Lusofona University, based on the stereographic photos of Álvaro Laborinho, whose images were remediated and repurposed for the current immersive media technologies. This project aims to contribute towards the promotion of Nazaré’s cultural and natural heritage in an innovative way, mixing traditional and contemporary representation technologies. Furthermore, the project addresses current issues such as pollution and the impact of tourism, challenging its participants to speculate about possible futures for Nazaré – that is to say, for other similar coastal towns in Portugal – and beyond
Dis_place: Reflections on Creating Mixed Reality Performance using Virtual Reality Technologies
No full textDis_place is a mixed reality performance that takes audiences on a journey using a range of virtual reality (VR) technologies, immersive sound, and live dance performance. Through close analysis of my practice as research project, this article presents reflections on the developing creative strategies and approaches to making VR-based mixed reality performance. It traces the creative process in the making of the work, combining links to the VR artwork, video footage of the live performance, and images from the project. This is combined with my observations and analysis of audience feedback. Through this analysis, the writing assesses the affordances of using VR technologies within immersive performance practices, addressing some of the technological, practical, choreographic, and conceptual concerns. Concluding that these technologies have huge potential for offering audiences new embodied encounters that can shift perspectives and produce transformational, intimate, emotive, and unsettling experiences. Dis_place VR should be viewed on a head-mounted display (HMD). It can be accessed through itch.io here and Viveport here
Grounded Places: Mediating Emotion and Environment
No full textIn line with the original intent of the grounded theory method, the creative practice presented within this multi-piece portfolio seeks to reach an experiential truth by combining the empirical context of the artwork being experienced with both the sense memory of place and the mediated consideration of embodied context evoked by the work. In doing so, we bring this element of approach into a hybrid conceptual model of reception. It is a model that relies, not only on mediated and augmented relations to real and virtual place, but also on the extremely hybridised media forms of virtual reality and locative media installation. These hybridised media forms blend gaming, cinema, sound art, visual arts and extended forms of narrative thereby creating multimodal experiences. The two works discuss, In a Minor Key and Libration Song, both of which were realised through different, mediated forms, provide contexts for audiences to connect a sense of place to emotions of loss and mourning as well as to an enhanced awareness of what it means to contemplate the grounded environmental reality of the sites we inhabit
Audience as Co-writers: Using Conversational AI to Deliver Audience Agency in a Participatory Drama
No full textThis article will offer a glimpse into the elusive holy grail for participatory dramatists: a way to offer audience members a role within the narrative and to give them genuine agency over events and even the outcome. I will describe the use of a ‘conversational artificial intelligence’ as both a character in, and the co-writer with the audience of, a live theatrical drama, called I am Echoborg. This approach represents a novel and powerful means of delivering to audience members both narrative agency and the ability to take on a role in the drama. It also demonstrates how, in the right conditions, an AI can be a plausible and compelling dramatic character. I will explore some of the psychological mechanisms exploited in the creation of this immersive event such as breaching environments and projection of theory of mind. I will look at how some of the affordances of the technology can be exploited for dramatic purposes such as redirection. I will discuss some of the particular issues faced by makers of participatory narratives and methods to overcome them. I will trace the development of the show and look at some examples of other artworks that rely on user generated content and how they deal with quality control. Finally, I will look at the importance of structure as a means of balancing authorial voice and audience agency
Non-Linear Documentary and Museum Exhibition Design: Interdisciplinary Inspirations
No full textAn Internet connected, data and software driven, computerized environment dominates contemporary media production, distribution, exhibition and consumption (Murray, 2011). Given the non-linear and interactive affordances of this ‘new media’, what disciplines can linear filmmakers look to, to work in this space? This article interrogates the intersection of the representation of the real between documentary and museum exhibition. Museums share documentary’s claim to the representation of the real (Pearce, 1999; Kidd, 2014). But unlike linear documentary, museum representation takes place in a non-linear setting. I explore how museums represent the real in this spatial and nonlinear setting. I will also interrogate how contemporary museum exhibition design includes the affordances of the digital medium into the representation of the real, and what of this theory and practice may assist in the design of non-linear and interactive documentary
Breathe: A Digital Ghost Story
No full textBreathe is a literary experience, a work of experiential storytelling – a ghost story for the smartphone that uses data pulled from the reader’s phone to personalise the story to every reader. Funded by the AHRC’s larger Ambient Literature project, Breathe builds on much of Pullinger’s earlier research into new ways of creating fictional forms native to the smartphone. Specifically, it explores the question of how the affordances of smartphone technology can be used to create literary works that are situated in time and space in relation to the presence of a reader, making use of three APIs (application processing interfaces) – weather, time, and location – so to access data via the reader’s phone in ways that subtly alter the story for every reader
Configuring the 15 Second Dancers: Distributed Creativity in Design for Postdigital Media
No full textThis article draws on research for the DanceTag project, which set out to develop a location-based gaming app for Pavilion Dance South West (PDSW), a publicly-funded dance development organisation in the south west of England. The research interests of this project concern design for creative behaviour, and more specifically playful behaviour. That is, how aesthetic, cultural, and technical decisions taken throughout the design, development and testing of digital media platforms, software and devices interact with each other in the process of anticipating and shaping their future playful behaviours and creative events. In the case of DanceTag, my question from the start was how a putative, rather nebulous, notion of a new audience for the dance sector might be attracted, constructed, or more precisely, configured, through the design, prototyping, testing and iteration of a game. I take the notion of configuration from Science and Technology Studies, and will employ it to explore the integral role in the achievement of creative projects and behaviour of nonhuman (technological, environmental) actors as well as human designers, producers and users. Throughout the article I aim to decentre the prevailing notion of creativity as a wholly human attribute and capability, and instead explore its achievement through networks of people and technologies, bodies and devices, environments and infrastructures
Fiction Machines: Oporavak
No full textIn this statement I consider the single screen video work Oporavak (2016), a work that has been shown in galleries, film festivals and media art biennales. The video is part of an ongoing research project called Fiction Machines where I interrogate how fictional methods can be used to produce works that propose new forms of machine that are able to escape, subvert and re-write contemporary control technologies, their content and modulation mechanisms. I begin by providing the theoretical context for Oporavak, highlighting the new forms of virtualised and biopolitical control that are enabled by networked computational writing machines powered by informatics and affective modulations. I then look at the fictional methods deployed in the production of the work including the speculative recycling of appropriated material and the deployment of the video as a form of subversive re-writing machine that both enhances and destabilises control mechanics. Finally, I consider how the video uses affective tactics to perform on, and manipulate, the expectations of the audience and their own conscious/unconscious control desires.