New media art: curating social justice in contemporary art museums and arts organizations

My research project includes case studies in which I interviewed nine new media art curators and directors whose curatorial practices offer historical analyses and theoretical perspectives that address the dynamics of social justice by using new media art. I investigate the ways in which social justice is presented in museums and arts organizations. Central to this project is an examination of museum practices where the use of new media art becomes a central platform to showcase issues of social justice

Beyond Exhibitions

Over the last two decades, as the contemporary artworld grew to a planetary size—more galleries, more fairs, more art-selling websites, bigger museums, new biennials, and digital platforms—it seems that, along with it, a new cultural figure emerged: the international curator. Moreover, the practice of curation has metastasized into unconventional spaces and formats. Exhibitions are no longer confined to museums. They are no longer focused on art and artifacts but are often held at unlikely venues (physical and digital) and have grown to include other by-products of a culture such as architecture, design, and content. But what is the future of Curatorial Practice, and how would the international, independent curators of the future have to design and deliver compelling exhibitions that would connect to—and resonate with—a global audience? The following Major Research Project (MRP), examines the trajectory of Curatorial Practice as well as the role of curators, and their influence, as creators of exhibitions, on human development. It will analyze the trends, patterns, and signals of change in the contemporary artworld, foresighting the future of the practice and the role of curators in directing its development. The examined theory in this MRP is as follows: curators and their role have evolved to be major influencers in the global artworld. Moving forward, their future is hinged on how they tell stories about contemporary culture. It is a departure from their role in the past as merely 'organizers' of physical exhibitions where they collected the art and artifacts, placing them in museums. In the near future, the exhibitions must move away from having Curatorial Statements. Instead, they would benefit from connecting with their audience through a Curatorial Narrative, telling the story of the development of the content. These cultural figures, curators, need to understand the development of contemporary content from an intimate perspective and tell the story if its progress through the literary device of Reliable Narrator. This strategy, a subtle shift, will transform the design and delivery of the content for an exhibition. Narratives will also resonate with the future audience, presenting and documenting the current times, telling the stories of contemporary culture in the social, global context

D4.2 How-to manual for the implementation of SO-CLOSE's digital storytelling tools

A guide for future users in the implementation process of the SO-CLOSE tool

The Archigram Archive

The Archigram archival project made the works of seminal experimental architectural group Archigram available free online for an academic and general audience. It was a major archival work, and a new kind of digital academic archive, displaying material held in different places around the world and variously owned. It was aimed at a wide online design community, discovering it through Google or social media, as well as a traditional academic audience. It has been widely acclaimed in both fields. The project has three distinct but interlinked aims: firstly to assess, catalogue and present the vast range of Archigram's prolific work, of which only a small portion was previously available; secondly to provide reflective academic material on Archigram and on the wider picture of their work presented; thirdly to develop a new type of non-ownership online archive, suitable for both academic research at the highest level and for casual public browsing. The project hybridised several existing methodologies. It combined practical archival and editorial methods for the recovery, presentation and contextualisation of Archigram's work, with digital web design and with the provision of reflective academic and scholarly material. It was designed by the EXP Research Group in the Department of Architecture in collaboration with Archigram and their heirs and with the Centre for Parallel Computing, School of Electronics and Computer Science, also at the University of Westminster. It was rated 'outstanding' in the AHRC's own final report and was shortlisted for the RIBA research awards in 2010. It received 40,000 users and more than 250,000 page views in its first two weeks live, taking the site into twitter’s Top 1000 sites, and a steady flow of visitors thereafter. Further statistics are included in the accompanying portfolio. This output will also be returned to by Murray Fraser for UCL

Building audiences: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts

Building Audiences examines the barriers to and the strategies for increasing audiences in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander arts sector. This research investigates the attitudes, beliefs and behaviours of current and potential audiences. What is in the report? The findings reveal the key barriers facing audience attendance include: uncertainty about how to behave at cultural events and fear of offending lack of awareness with audiences not actively seeking information about Indigenous arts and outdated perceptions of the sector – that it is only perceived as ‘serious or educational’. Building Audiences also considered several strategies to build audiences for Indigenous arts: providing skills development, advice and resourcing to Indigenous practitioners within the arts sector; increasing representation of Indigenous artists in the main programing of arts companies by including more Indigenous people in decision making roles; promoting relationships between Indigenous arts and non-Indigenous companies to present their work to wider audiences; introducing children and young people to Indigenous arts through schools and extracurricular activities; allowing audiences to feel comfortable engaging by creating accessible experiences; implementing long-term strategies to change negative perceptions of Indigenous arts. The project was commissioned by the Australia Council for the Arts and funding partners include Australia Council for the Arts; Faculty of Business and Law and Institute of Koorie Education, Deakin University; Melbourne Business School, The University of Melbourne

Empowering cultural heritage professionals with tools for authoring and deploying personalised visitor experiences

This paper presents an authoring environment, which supports cultural heritage professionals in the process of creating and deploying a wide range of different personalised interactive experiences that combine the physical (objects, collection and spaces) and the digital (multimedia content). It is based on a novel flexible formalism that represents the content and the context as independent from one another and allows recombining them in multiple ways thus generating many different interactions from the same elements. The authoring environment was developed in a co-design process with heritage stakeholders and addresses the composition of the content, the definition of the personalisation, and the deployment on a physical configuration of bespoke devices. To simplify the editing while maintaining a powerful representation, the complex creation process is deconstructed into a limited number of elements and phases, including aspects to control personalisation both in content and in interaction. The user interface also includes examples of installations for inspiration and as a means for learning what is possible and how to do it. Throughout the paper, installations in public exhibitions are used to illustrate our points and what our authoring environment can produce. The expressiveness of the formalism and the variety of interactive experiences that could be created was assessed via a range of laboratory tests, while a user-centred evaluation with over 40 cultural heritage professionals assessed whether they feel confident in directly controlling personalisation

CREATe 2012-2016: Impact on society, industry and policy through research excellence and knowledge exchange

On the eve of the CREATe Festival May 2016, the Centre published this legacy report (edited by Kerry Patterson & Sukhpreet Singh with contributions from consortium researchers)

Exhibition Season: Annual Archaeological Exhibitions in London, 1880s-1930s

Annual archaeological exhibitions were a visible symbol of archaeological research. Held mainly in London, the displays encapsulated a network of archaeologists, artists, architects and curators, and showcased the work of the first generations of trained archaeologists. The exhibition catalogues and published reviews of the displays provide a unique method for exploring the reception and sponsorship of archaeological work overseas and its promotion to a fascinated, well connected and well moneyed public. The exhibitions were a space in which conversation and networking were as important as educational enrichment. This paper analyses the social history of the “annual exhibition” in archaeology, highlighting the development and maintenance of the networks behind archaeological research, the geography of London as a way to examine influence in archaeology, and the utility of exhibitions for archaeological publicity during this period of exploration

Sites Contested, Ideas Connected: Networked Media in Exhibitions of Contemporary Significance

The purpose of this research is to examine the effectiveness of networked media strategies in museum exhibitions about important contemporary issues. An extensive 2006 research project found that museums have a responsibility to present contemporary issues, providing visitors are given a meaningful opportunity to contribute to that discussion. This thesis builds upon that finding to evaluate the effectiveness of networked media – digital communication technology – in fostering discussion between visitors about issues such as climate change, refugees and terrorism. To test the capability of this strategy, visitors to an exhibition about Australian immigration policies were asked to use an iPad application to provide their own views on the exhibition’s content and interact with other visitor contributions. The results demonstrate widespread support from visitors for the use of this type of technology. Museum staff also reacted favourably to findings that show visitors using networked media engage more deeply with exhibition content. However, the research also reveals a set of problems relating to the use of networked media in exhibitions about contemporary issues. These problems are categorised into two analytical chapters in this thesis. The first considers the extent to which museum staff must curate or moderate the contributions of the visiting public. The second considers the ethical and logistical issues relating to the digital dissemination of museum content. The conclusions stemming from this analysis show that networked media strategies can be highly valuable communicative tools in difficult exhibitions, provided that they are carefully designed and implemented by museum staff. Strategies shown to be effective include the integration of physical and online museum spaces, through mobile devices and standalone applications. The opportunity for meaningful visitor contribution is afforded by facilitating continuing debate outside the museum, and the active involvement of museum staff and other experts in discussions. Museums also benefit from the creation of digital partnerships, with other museums, institutions and the interested public to meaningfully engage with the contemporary issues that are critically important to visitors

The exhibition as knowledge production

A exposição de arte contemporânea, desde o seu aparecimento no contexto museológico e curatorial, tem sofrido diversas alterações de carácter social, político e económico, influenciadas pelo período histórico e artístico onde se inserem. A figura do curador, igualmente em constante transformação, tem vindo a assumir um papel de mediador que estabelece e fortalece as relações entre os artistas, o público, os profissionais dos museus e outras instituições culturais. Recentemente, este conjunto de mudanças contribuiu para um diluir de fronteiras institucionais entre profissões, departamentos e disciplinas, que resultou na elaboração de projectos curatoriais baseados no trabalho colaborativo e em rede. É enquanto efeito destas inovações que a presente dissertação pretende estudar a exposição como produção de conhecimento. A análise dos projectos Academy (2004-2006), The New Model: An Inquiry (2011-2015) e Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime (2015), que tiveram lugar no contexto europeu dos últimos quinze anos, é o ponto de partida para uma reflexão sobre a exposição e a dimensão curatorial enquanto instrumentos de comunicação, colaboração e mediação.The exhibition of contemporary art, since its emergence within the museological and curatorial context, has experienced social, political and economic changes influenced by the historical and artistic in which they are inserted. The figure of the curator, equally in constant transformation, has come to play a mediating role that establishes and reinforces the relationships between artists, audience, museum professionals and other cultural institutions. Recently, this set of changes contributed to the dilution of institutional boundaries between professions, departments and subjects, which resulted in the elaboration of curatorial projects based on collaboration and networking. It is as an effect of these innovations that the present dissertation intends to study the exhibition as knowledge production. The analysis of the curatorial projects Academy (2004-2006), The New Model: An Inquiry (2011-2015) and Under the Clouds: From Paranoia to the Digital Sublime (2015), which took place in the European context of the last fifteen years, is the starting point for the study of the exhibition and the curatorial as instruments of communication, collaboration and mediatio