Media Research Centre
Research Centre Leader: Dr Felicity Colman
The Media Research Centre supports research into exploratory and critical theories and practices, across multiple media platforms (time-based, theoretical and historical). The group is comprised of artists, designers, filmmakers, theorists, writers, photographers and performers. Research is on process, practice, and the production of media forms. The research outcomes include exhibitions, events, documentaries, films, journal articles, books, seminars and conferences.
Media research encompasses all types of informational and artistic platforms, and a range of historical and convergence technologies. The critical use of media forms engage and produce some of the most visible, dominant and contentious cultural ideas for every contemporary society that hosts that media form. The centre engages the term 'media' from the sense of work that uses a technical object or idea (this could be a chalk drawing, a recorded sound or image, a mass of information stored online or a film or computer game) as a starting point for investigation. This research is productive not of forms of instrumentality, but of forms and encounters with potential or historical knowledge or concepts. This centre encourages its members to test their ideas in process, to seek collaborative international as well as local connections and feedback, and to share their findings in as many constructive formats as possible. Current research projects engage a wide range of media, including: animation, photography, embroidery, exhibition, Web 2.0, analogue and digital media forms of television, film, radio, music, performance, speech, words, critical theory, laughter and thought.
Research Projects
- Louise Adkins is curating 'Between', hosted by International3 Gallery, Manchester UK March 2011 to March 2012.
- Felicity Colman is researching a book project on Media, theory and philosophy. This continues work she previously completed on Film, theory and philosophy.
- Joe Duffy is researching 'Reconstructions', working with model environments and with model makers to construct imaginative spaces as constructs that refer to recent and historical disasters.
- Steve Hawley is continuing research on projects completed in 2010 including the premiere of his generative narrative video at the Australian International Experimental Video Festival in May ; and work on the generative narrative, paper presentation at the International Society for Narrative conference in Cleveland Ohio in April
- Johnny Magee is continuing research projects with WARLI art in India and in its transitional context outside of India. His project also considers the contexts from which Warli Painting has emerged as a documentation art, and the ethical circumstances relating to documentation practices.
- Gavin Perry and David Penny are exhibiting the anatomy institution project (2005-2010). Using a 19th century studio plate camera, they have created a modern archive of the university worker of the 21st century, Holden Gallery MMU, November 2010.
- Andrea Zapp is curating 'Analogue is the New Digital?' with Clinton Cahill as associate adviser on conceptual development. The exhibition is part of the AND Festival (Abandon Normal Devices), October 2010.
