“Bridging the divide: emergent digital literacies and collaboration” presented by Briggs
Symposium:
Session Title:
- Transformative Creativity - Participatory Practices I
Presentation Title:
- Bridging the divide: emergent digital literacies and collaboration
Presenter(s):
Venue(s):
Abstract:
Abstract
Collaboration: background
A collaborative research project was advertised in the UK press in May 2006 naming two participating institutions, proposing the title: Visual Art Practices: Digital Literacies and the Construction of Identities in Northern Ireland, and stating that the research topic proposed must be in some area of visual art practice in the space of education.The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) for the United Kingdom offers collaborative awards in an attempt to bridge the research divide between academic and non-academic institutions, such as museums and media organisations, both commercial and public. As a knowledge transfer initiative it aims to generate fruitful research and knowledge in an area where synergies between potential partners exist but where benefits to the non-academic institution may not be apparent. Funding was secured in the scheme’s second year by Interface, Centre for Research in Art Technologies and Design at the University of Ulster in Belfast, to develop a project with the Nerve Centre in Derry/Londonderry.
My own art practice had transformed in response to teaching fine art media and graphic arts – as digital technologies were introduced into art colleges in the early 1990’s. A project exploring the stories of one globally dispersed family became the spur for a wider-angled ‘multimedia’ work in 2000. Weird View explored the family’s wider social network in Lucan, Co. Dublin as a dual-screen, ‘interactive narrative’. It recounted the interlaced social histories of a terrace of houses, told by residents past and present, and shared with wider publics via art gallery, local town hall, and the web. My research proposal outlined a collaboratively generated, multiple platform piece to be developed with young people at the Nerve Centre.
