Research Fellowship Project
May, September 2019
Project Title: Fields of View Object Explorer
One of the key questions this project team is interested in is how people interpret and connect objects with their metadata (museum records, archival files, associated audiovisual material, and/or related data visualisations such as maps and graphs). This project involves experimentation with the ways in which a user can unlock these associations through natural interactions with the object in a virtual reality space. Central to this investigation is a key question of research through design, asking how can the unique affordances of virtual reality be used to design experiences that reveal and make tangible open and cross-disciplinary metadata schemas?
Dr Andrew Burrell is a lecturer in Visual Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. His research explores virtual and digitally mediated environments as sites for the construction, experience and exploration of memory as narrative. His ongoing research investigates the relationship between imagined and remembered narrative and how the multi-layered biological and technological encoding of human subjectivity may be portrayed within, and inform the design of, virtual environments.
Dr Rachel Hendery is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University. Her research focuses on how language and culture change over time, especially when multiple languages and cultures come into contact with each other. Through the use of new technologies, she investigates these questions using mapping, modelling, simulation and data visualisation in virtual reality.
Kate Richards is a media artist, collaborator, producer and Senior Lecturer/PG Co-ordinator Creative Industries at Western Sydney University. Richards’ electronic art works have been shown at Sydney Opera House, ACMI, AGNSW, Australian Centre for Photography, The Performance Space, ISEA Sydney, Museum of Sydney, Justice and Police Museum, and Carriageworks (Winter 2019), as well as internationally. As a producer, Richards has devised and delivered media installations for museums (eg. Historic Houses Trust, Australian War Memorial), architects (eg. Landini Associates, Otto Scheharmi) and clients such as National Parks and Wildlife Services and Sydney Olympic Park. During the MAAS residency, Richards researched a new VR art project, FLOOD, based on the Richmond (Hawkesbury) Lowlands, with First Nations consultants in place. In FLOOD, the audience stands in floodwaters and are able to see, grasp and examine objects in these waters. The objects come from a variety of eras and generally comprise natural materials value-added by human intervention: handling the objects triggers stories derived from/about the objects.