Illuminating Virtual Reality Creative Practice: Three Case Studies in the Context of Australian Art Museums

Contemporary immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies present significant potential for artists to expand their creative repertoire, and for art museums to facilitate exhibition delivery and visitor engagement. To date, studies in the field focus predominantly on identifying the affordances and constraints of VR for art museums and examining visitor experience in the virtual context, with little attention paid to artists as creators of VR works and their realities in the creative process. Illuminating artists’ experiences of ideation and creation helps develop insider’s perspectives beyond what can be determined from solely inspecting the finished works or their reception, and understand how the potentiality and novelty of VR are negotiated in practice and translated into meaningful installations. This research seeks to cast light on the creative practice with VR through three selected projects in the context of Australian art museums as case studies, exploring why and how the artists employed VR in their particular situations. Adopting a qualitative research paradigm and naturalistic inquiry approach, each case study follows a two-phase research design, conducting a review of literature that critiques the project and semi-structured interviews with artists in each phase respectively. Thematic analysis is applied to analyse interview data to derive meanings, patterns and embedded ideas from artists’ accounts. Within-case analysis has generated a detailed presentation of each project regarding its context, VR work(s) produced and the creative process. Led by the research questions, cross-case comparative analysis has established a range of themes and sub-themes (as manifestations of the themes in the case studies), which are integrated and presented as a table. These themes concern the affordances of VR valued by the artists that lead to their employment of the technologies, significant factors influencing their creative process, and key considerations underlying their conceptualisation of VR works and adoption of corresponding approaches. This research contributes new knowledge to understanding artist’s practice in making VR installations, by revealing a range of significant and commonly encountered elements characterising the creative practice, and their contextualised manifestations in the particular case projects. The findings provide art practitioners with a set of considerations for future engagement with VR

Re-presenting China in Digital Immersive Art: Virtual Reality, Imaginaries, and Cultural Presence

The thesis explores how digital technology, in particular virtual reality and augmented reality, is playing a role in China’s rejuvenation, especially in relation to cultural displays, performances, and art exhibitions. This project examines how audiences, both in China and globally, respond to ‘Digital China’, a concept describing how people’s everyday lives in China are becoming superconnected by digital technology. Qualitative methodology with a multi-perspectival approach is applied to advance the aim of the project

Transforming the museum-community nexus with technology : a virtual museum infrastructure for participatory engagement and management

Museums play an important role in society as the custodians of heritage, and advances in technology have brought about opportunities for curating, preserving and disseminating heritage through virtual museums. However, this is not matched by an understanding of how these technologies can support these functions, especially given the varying levels of resources that museums have at their disposal. To address this problem, a hybrid methodology which combines underpinning theory and practice has been adopted. Initial investigation of the problem takes place through a contextualisation of museology and heritage studies, followed by exploratory case studies that yield design objectives for a Virtual Museum Infrastructure (VMI). A design of the VMI is proposed based on these objectives, and the VMI is instantiated, deployed and evaluated in real-world scenarios using a combination of quantitative and qualitative techniques. The findings of this investigation demonstrate that the use of technology provides new opportunities for engagement with heritage, as experts and community members alike can create, curate and preserve content, which can then be disseminated in engaging ways using immersive, yet affordable technologies. This work therefore demonstrates how technology can be used to: (1) support museums in the creation, curation, preservation and dissemination of heritage, through a VMI that provides support for all the stages of the media life cycle, (2) facilitate active use, so that content that is created once can be reused on multiple platforms (for example on the web, on mobile apps and in on-site installations), and (3) encourage connectivity by linking up local museums using a location-aware interface and facilitates the consumption content using digital literacies available to the public. The aforementioned points, coupled with the system instantiations that demonstrate them, represent the contributions of this thesis

The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication

Museums today find themselves within a mediatised society, where everyday life is conducted in a data-full and technology-rich context. In fact, museums are themselves mediatised: they present a uniquely media-centred environment, in which communicative media is a constitutive property of their organisation and of the visitor experience. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication explores what it means to take mediated communication as a key concept for museum studies and as a sensitising lens for media-related museum practice on the ground. Including contributions from experts around the world, this original and innovative Handbook shares a nuanced and precise understanding of media, media concepts and media terminology, rehearsing new locations for writing on museum media and giving voice to new subject alignments. As a whole, the volume breaks new ground by reframing mediated museum communication as a resource for an inclusive understanding of current museum developments. The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication will appeal to both students and scholars, as well as to practitioners involved in the visioning, design and delivery of mediated communication in the museum. It teaches us not just how to study museums, but how to go about being a museum in today’s world

Virtual reality tourism : the new frontier or the end of the journey?

Prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, the tourism industry was a mega-industry. Although virtual reality (VR) is a relatively new development in tourism, due to COVID-19 it has literally transformed and improved the industry, particularly in the fields of marketing, sustainability and virtual worlds. VR is held to provide tourists with the “ultimate” tourist experience. The reason is that tourists no longer have to experience any of the negative aspects associated with conventional tourism. Despite the benefits and popularity of VR, a key question arises: will VR be the end of conventional tourism or can it be considered as a new tourism frontier? Therefore, the main purpose of the study is to address this question by focusing on the role of VR in tourism, especially in the context of South Africa. In addition, the study provides a detailed background of VR in general and in terms of tourism; types of VR tourism; the benefits and drawbacks of VR in tourism; and finally, the study compares conventional tourism models with VR in order to highlight the similarities. It concludes that VR does not in essence substitute conventional tourism, but rather it can be considered as a tourism niche in its own right, even if only as a futuristic prospect. For this to actualise, there are three major concerns that need to be addressed in the future; physical interaction; a full sensorial experience and the question of revenue.Thesis (PhD (Heritage and Cultural Tourism))--University of Pretoria, 2021.Post grad UP fundingHistorical and Heritage StudiesPhD (Heritage and Cultural Tourism)Unrestricte

J. Paul Getty Trust - 2008 Annual Report

Contains board chair's message; president's message; information on the museum, research institute, conservation institute, and the foundation; grants highlights; grants list; publications list; lists of directors and staff; and financial statements

Screen Space Reconfigured

Screen Space Reconfigured is the first edited volume that critically and theoretically examines the many novel renderings of space brought to us by 21st century screens. Exploring key cases such as post-perspectival space, 3D, vertical framing, haptics, and layering, this volume takes stock of emerging forms of screen space and spatialities as they move from the margins to the centre of contemporary media practice.Recent years have seen a marked scholarly interest in spatial dimensions and conceptions of moving image culture, with some theorists claiming that a 'spatial turn' has taken place in media studies and screen practices alike. Yet this is the first book-length study dedicated to on-screen spatiality as such.Spanning mainstream cinema, experimental film, video art, mobile screens, and stadium entertainment, the volume includes contributions from such acclaimed authors as Giuliana Bruno and Tom Gunning as well as a younger generation of scholars

China's iGeneration

Collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture. This innovative collection of essays on twenty-first century Chinese cinema and moving image culture features contributions from an international community of scholars, critics, and practitioners. Taken together, their perspectives make a compelling case that the past decade has witnessed a radical transformation of conventional notions of cinema. Following China's accession to the WTO in 2001, personal and collective experiences of changing social conditions have added new dimensions to the increasingly diverse Sinophone media landscape, and provided a novel complement to the existing edifice of blockbusters, documentaries, and auteur culture. The numerous 'iGeneration' productions and practices examined in this volume include 3D and IMAX films, experimental documentaries, animation, visual aides-mémoires, and works of pirated pastiche