Through the Wardrobe: Exploring the potential of headset augmented reality to provide a Thirdspace immersive media experience

This research investigates the potential in employing headset augmented reality (AR) for interactive documentary when the contributors are collaboratively involved in the production process. This research has grown out of the intersection of interactive documentary (incorporating methods from documentary production more broadly), immersive media studies, gender studies and social and visual anthropology.The research explores how headset AR invites a complex interaction amongst the immersant, the physical objects of a place, the physical affordances of the device and the virtual content that is activated. Headset AR affords a porous ‘diegetic bubble’ that integrates multisensory stimuli with physical and virtual elements in a storyworld. Presenting marginalised voices in a headset AR documentary can facilitate a Thirdspace, a hybrid space where physical materiality and virtual media come together simultaneously offering potentially radical and transformative ways of understanding and experiencing the world.To investigate the use of AR headsets for interactive documentary, I conducted research through dialogically engaging with both practice and theory. The research has been practice-based through the process of developing, iterating and exhibiting a headset AR documentary installation, Through the Wardrobe. The production process involved the collaboration of four nonbinary/genderqueer contributors. In addition to contributing their stories, they participated in the processes of interaction design, installation and exhibition of the work. Feedback from immersants also dynamically shaped the iterative process of exhibiting the installation.Both this written thesis and the resulting practice output, the headset AR installation Through the Wardrobe, demonstrate the rigour in my practice-based research

Walking away from VR as ‘empathy-machine’: peripatetic animations with 360-photogrammetry

My research partakes in an expanded documentary practice that weaves together walking, immersive technologies, and moving image. Two lines of enquiry motivate the research journey: the first responds to the trope of VR as 'empathy-machine' (Milk, 2015), often accompanied by the expression 'walking in someone else's shoes'. Within a research project that begins on foot, the idiom’s significance demands investigation. The second line of enquiry pursues a collaborative artistic practice informed by dialogue and poetry, where the bipedals of walking and the binaries of the digital are entwined by phenomenology, hauntology, performance, and the in-betweens of animation. My practice-as-research methodology involves desk study, experimentation with VR, AR, digital photogrammetry, and CGI animation. Central to my approach is the multifaceted notion of Peripatos ̶ as a school of philosophy, a stroll-like walk, and the path where the stroll takes place ̶ manifested both corporeally and as 'playful curiosity'. The thread that interweaves practice and theory has my body-moving in the centre; I call it the ‘camera-walk’: a processional shoot that documents a real place and the bodies that make it, while my hand holds high a camera-on-a-stick shooting 360-video. The resulting spherical video feeds into photogrammetric digital processing, and reassembles into digital 3D models that form the starting ground for still images, a site-specific installation, augmented reality (AR) exchanges, and short films. Because 360-video includes the body that carries the camera, the digital meshes produced by the ‘camera-walk’ also reveal the documentarian during the act of documenting. Departing from the pursuit of perfect replicas, my research articulates the iconic lineage of photogrammetry, embracing imperfections as integral. Despite the planned obsolescence of my digital instruments, I treat my 360-camera as a ‘dangerous tool’, uncovering (and inventing) its hidden virtualities, via Vilém Flusser. Against its formative intentions as an accessory for extreme sports, I focus on everyday life, and become inspired by Harun Farocki’s ‘another kind of empathy’. Within the collaborative projects presented within my thesis, I move away from the colonialist-inspired ideal of ‘walking in someone else’s shoes’, and ‘tread softly’ along the footsteps of my co-walkers

EVA London 2022: Electronic Visualisation and the Arts

The Electronic Visualisation and the Arts London 2022 Conference (EVA London 2022) is co-sponsored by the Computer Arts Society (CAS) and BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, of which the CAS is a Specialist Group. Of course, this has been a difficult time for all conferences, with the Covid-19 pandemic. For the first time since 2019, the EVA London 2022 Conference is a physical conference. It is also an online conference, as it was in the previous two years. We continue with publishing the proceedings, both online, with open access via ScienceOpen, and also in our traditional printed form, for the second year in full colour. Over recent decades, the EVA London Conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts has established itself as one of the United Kingdom’s most innovative and interdisciplinary conferences. It brings together a wide range of research domains to celebrate a diverse set of interests, with a specialised focus on visualisation. The long and short papers in this volume cover varied topics concerning the arts, visualisations, and IT, including 3D graphics, animation, artificial intelligence, creativity, culture, design, digital art, ethics, heritage, literature, museums, music, philosophy, politics, publishing, social media, and virtual reality, as well as other related interdisciplinary areas. The EVA London 2022 proceedings presents a wide spectrum of papers, demonstrations, Research Workshop contributions, other workshops, and for the seventh year, the EVA London Symposium, in the form of an opening morning session, with three invited contributors. The conference includes a number of other associated evening events including ones organised by the Computer Arts Society, Art in Flux, and EVA International. As in previous years, there are Research Workshop contributions in this volume, aimed at encouraging participation by postgraduate students and early-career artists, accepted either through the peer-review process or directly by the Research Workshop chair. The Research Workshop contributors are offered bursaries to aid participation. In particular, EVA London liaises with Art in Flux, a London-based group of digital artists. The EVA London 2022 proceedings includes long papers and short “poster” papers from international researchers inside and outside academia, from graduate artists, PhD students, industry professionals, established scholars, and senior researchers, who value EVA London for its interdisciplinary community. The conference also features keynote talks. A special feature this year is support for Ukrainian culture after its invasion earlier in the year. This publication has resulted from a selective peer review process, fitting as many excellent submissions as possible into the proceedings. This year, submission numbers were lower than previous years, mostly likely due to the pandemic and a new requirement to submit drafts of long papers for review as well as abstracts. It is still pleasing to have so many good proposals from which to select the papers that have been included. EVA London is part of a larger network of EVA international conferences. EVA events have been held in Athens, Beijing, Berlin, Brussels, California, Cambridge (both UK and USA), Canberra, Copenhagen, Dallas, Delhi, Edinburgh, Florence, Gifu (Japan), Glasgow, Harvard, Jerusalem, Kiev, Laval, London, Madrid, Montreal, Moscow, New York, Paris, Prague, St Petersburg, Thessaloniki, and Warsaw. Further venues for EVA conferences are very much encouraged by the EVA community. As noted earlier, this volume is a record of accepted submissions to EVA London 2022. Associated online presentations are in general recorded and made available online after the conference

ECLAP 2012 Conference on Information Technologies for Performing Arts, Media Access and Entertainment

It has been a long history of Information Technology innovations within the Cultural Heritage areas. The Performing arts has also been enforced with a number of new innovations which unveil a range of synergies and possibilities. Most of the technologies and innovations produced for digital libraries, media entertainment and education can be exploited in the field of performing arts, with adaptation and repurposing. Performing arts offer many interesting challenges and opportunities for research and innovations and exploitation of cutting edge research results from interdisciplinary areas. For these reasons, the ECLAP 2012 can be regarded as a continuation of past conferences such as AXMEDIS and WEDELMUSIC (both pressed by IEEE and FUP). ECLAP is an European Commission project to create a social network and media access service for performing arts institutions in Europe, to create the e-library of performing arts, exploiting innovative solutions coming from the ICT

Audience-generated traces: audience experience in performance documentation

This thesis explores whether and how audience-generated content produced from and about audiences’ experience and during and as part of a live performance might become part of a theatre and performance work’s archive. It sets out to examine both the challenges as well as the documentational opportunities that this material might afford. The thesis is influenced by Gabriella Giannachi’s articulation of digital technologies as archival interfaces and Sarah Bay-Cheng’s convergence of live performance and documentation. It examines the function of audience-generated content during three case studies and postulates that audiences can be regarded as co-producers of performance documents. To do so, it analyses how Speak Bitterness by Forced Entertainment, Karen by Blast Theory, and Flatland by Extant request that their audiences activate the live performance or augment its experience by using a digital technology, and how by doing so they leave digital traces behind. Building upon this condition the thesis interrogates how the three company casestudies archive these works’ audience-generated traces. In addition, it investigates how digital traces are perceived by institutional theatre and performance collections. Through interviews with the case-study practitioners, the curator of the British Library Sound Archive and the archivists of the National Theatre and Victoria and Albert Museum the thesis reveals a set of technical and organisational challenges involved in this process. Although audience-generated traces are considered valuable marketing and research material they also unsettle established notions and structures of performance documentation and its archive. Rethinking the established notion of the performance document and the form of files through which it conveys knowledge, the thesis returns to Ricoeur’s theory of the trace so as to expand ideas of how performance documentation enables ways of knowing a past performance. It argues that, as direct remnants of the live performance moment originating in the participant, audiencegenerated content offers solutions to ‘presencing’ the audience in documentation and novel ways for revisiting a past performance work from within its unfolding

Sensory Urbanism Proceedings 2008

This book contains papers from the January 2008 conference, Sensory Urbanism, held by the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK. Papers deal with issues surrounding the sensory perception of urban design and how to design better for all the senses. The book is illustrated throughout, and contains 26 papers from fields including architecture, urban design, environmental psychology, urban design, planning, sound design and more

The Future of Media

How do we combat post-truth in the news? Are social media influencers the journalists of today? What is it like to live in a smart city? Does AI really change "everything"? The Future of Media investigates the future of media industries and technologies (journalism, TV, film, photography, radio, publishing, social media), while exploring how media shape our future—on a political, economic, cultural and individual level. Issues of diversity, media reform, labour, activism and art take the discussion into a wider social context. Through this, the book celebrates the importance and vitality of media in the modern world. The Future of Media is also an experiment in collaborative modes of thinking and working. Co-authored by theorists and practitioners from one of the world's most established media departments, it offers a radical, creative and critical take on media industries—and on world affairs