- Participatory Art
- Media Art & Public Health
- Real-time visualisations
- NeuroArt
- Presence
AHRC funded ECR research p_ART_icipate research (ongoing) 2022 - 2024:
p_ART_icipate, an AHRC - Early Careers research project, investigates the potential for participatory art to promote and foster social inclusion, social connectedness and wellbeing for the public remotely. Based on existing practice-based research on the impact of immersive, collaborative art engagements, this research project is anchored in a wider discourse around the cultural and societal impact of participatory arts within the Arts and Humanities. In the context of Covid-19, we are facing an urgent need to mitigate health and societal implications such as social isolation, loneliness and sensory deprivation. This research examines how innovative art and technology can encourage social connectedness online, through collaborative, multi-sensory art strategies. In collaboration with experts in Arts & Health and Arts Therapy (CNWL NHS Foundation Trust, Brunel University), p_ART_icipate offers immediate use cases for participatory arts in a public health context, resulting in guidelines for artistic practitioners and healthcare professionals. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of collaborative online digital art interventions to help individuals affected by social isolation, whether in a private or professional context
AHRC-funded research project ArtOp - led by Doctor Paula Callus 2021 - 2022
Still and moving images have historically played a key part in the articulation (visually and textually) of political ideas and have constructed positionings and discourses on the politics of elections. ArtoP sets out to capture these articulations through the images produced by Nigerian artists (and respective creative industries) at a critical time around the Nigerian presidential elections in February 2019.
As a multi-sited research project, ArtoP will identify the creators of artistic content that engage with political discourse across regions in Nigeria. It will focus upon the types of images that are being created with a view to collect and curate and analyse evidence of this for an archive. In particular it focuses upon how artists operate within and outside of official networks in Nigeria and within contested spaces on social media around the elections in 2019.
AHRC-funded project ReSpace 2020 - 2021 - Dr. Paula Callus et al.
ReSpace investigates how concepts of space/place, through arts-based participatory methods, can engage the ‘post-memory’ generation (Hirsch, 2008) in Rwanda and Kosovo to reimagine specific sites of memory and significance.
With partners from University of Rwanda, African Digital Media Academy, University of Prishtina, and AniBar, Bournemouth University worked on devising a project that saw collaboration with young people to explore a range of artistic methods in young people’s surroundings – these methods draw from anthropology, architecture and the arts, including animation and immersive technologies.
The project consisted of visiting places that were identified sites of interest in order to consider how a place bears witness to often-silenced, everyday histories of, for example, civic resistance and societal cohesion, before or after war and violence. By adopting the architectural concept of the ‘site survey’, young people used different methods to explore these spaces and reimagine them. The methods were connected to the project themes: Virtual Spaces, Past/Present Spaces, Designed Spaces, Reclaiming Future Spaces.
