Other UNSW

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
  • (2012) Blackmore, Margaret; Freeland, Pam
    Conference Paper

  • (2022) Zhou, Hao
    Thesis
    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.

  • (2022) Osmond, Wendy
    Thesis
    The ways in which museums construct and negotiate visitor experience are being challenged by expanding and converging modes of spectatorship and representation. This thesis models the relationship between live performance and its exhibition through an examination of the recently emerged genre of the rock music exhibition. The study explores historical antecedents, contemporary practices and explanatory models relating to this phenomenon, arguing that while museums continue to be gathering places for shared encounters and immersive spectatorship, design choices for modes of representation are subject to rapid changes in sound and imaging technologies, and associated meanings of fidelity. Exhibition development practices in museums lack a shared language that accounts for the changing paradigms of knowledge production driving the popular music exhibition phenomenon, meaning that new approaches are required from designers. A case study analysis of the travelling exhibition The Making of Midnight Oil (2014–2017) examines one such project from my designer-researcher’s perspective. Interviews with members of the creative team in different venues, analyses of visitor contributions and design documentation, and a reflexive approach to the theory-practice nexus produce a granular account of the mediation of experience from production to reception. The rock exhibition is examined as a site of negotiable discourses of liveness, authenticity and power, in which design is a key agent of meaning-making. A blended social semiotic framework, newly applied to exhibition design, is used to describe the re-presentation of source phenomena in this emblematic multimodal space. The outcome is an explanatory model of possible responses to the challenge of mediating liveness in the museum, in which exhibition experience is modelled as a dialogic co-construction of gradable meanings between members of a multidisciplinary team, visitors, and institutional and social contexts that are distributed across on-site, off-site, and online places. By identifying how different design choices select certain truth criteria for fidelity of representation, this thesis provides a shared design lexicon of broadened choices for the mediation of live events: a re-imagining of the exhibition design brief as a Modality question. It is designed to foster increased understanding and cross-modal experimentation in interdisciplinary creative teams.

  • (2023) Samarasekara, Inoka
    Thesis
    This research argues for the importance of the preservation, renewal and remaking of traditional craft culture of Sri Lanka impacted by colonisation and globalisation. In response to the erosion of the craft culture and the dearth of research on Sri Lankan cultural heritage conservation, this research explores practice-based research methods that may safeguard the richly textured Sri Lankan jewellery heritage for future generations. Continuous waves of migration, trade, invasions, colonisation by the Portuguese, Dutch and British, globalisation and the recent civil war have resulted in an increasing precarity for the craft culture of Sri Lanka. As an island comprising diverse cultures, the cosmopolitan cultural identity of Sri Lanka has been contested since the country declared independence from British colonial rule in 1948. The competing modernities that have emerged since independence are based on widening social divisions between the valuing of modernisation by the elite ruling class and the commitment to local traditions of the wider population. These tensions are broadened with the recent globalisation eroding the cosmopolitanism embodied in the island’s craft culture. To address the complexities of competing modernities in Sri Lanka the research draws on the proposition that the social imaginary is a collective social practice that produces a sense of locality, as defined by Arjun Appadurai and Charles Taylor. Within the framework of social imaginary, this research documents and reflects on a range of practice-based methods to counter the destruction of local craft traditions and the global dispersal of Sri Lankan artefacts. Through renderings I record and preserve the cosmopolitanism evident in traditional bridal regalia associated with the Kandyan period (1592-1815). In a series of necklace designs based on the symbolism of traditional Kandyan bridal regalia I renew the cosmopolitanism of the Sri Lankan craft culture for the contemporary context. In a second series of renderings and a suit of necklace designs that are based on heirlooms, keepsakes and interviews with the Sri Lankan diaspora of Sydney, I explore the remaking of Sri Lankan cosmopolitan imaginary in a diasporic context. The purpose of the research is to provide resources and models of practice for future generations of Sri Lankan craft culture.