Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre

E-Dance

A key problem in the academic field of dance is how to capture and document the incremental development of ideas and their material manifestation in the creative process within practice-led research. In improvisational, embodied investigation, the mode of engagement is generative, pre-verbal, intuitive, experiential and fluid. This militates against types of cognitive engagement necessary for analysis, critique and reflection. The problem is most acute in the context of dance: however it is pertinent to all arts-based disciplines. This project is predicated on dialogic processes between dance and e-Science and the fluidity of concepts as they transverse the two domains, making use of recent advances in the visualisation and representation of spatio-temporal structures and discourse.

E-Science for the Arts Infrastructure

The 'Building the Wireframe: E-Science for the Art Infrastructure' workshops scope out the potential future use of Grid technologies and works on the community awareness. The Midlands E-Science Centre and the Visualization Research Unit at the Birmingham Institute of Art and Design will work in partnership to familiarize the arts community with the new possibilities of Grid technologies and the new way of thinking that e-Science brings about. The project involves hands-on training for interested groups in e-Science technology to enable future independent research in the area.

Performativity, Place, Space

The series of workshops 'Performativity, Place, Space' (PPS) based in Bristol creates a space for arts researchers to explore the use of several Grid technologies in collaboration among performative artists and researchers. Access Grid, Semantic Web technologies and Storage Resource Broker are used in PPS to facilitate data discovery through Grid technology. The project builds upon a Semantic Web project called 'Practice as Research in Performance' (PARIP), which uses the Friend-Of-a-Friend paradigms of semantic integration in user communities to develop links between arts researchers in a database of performance. A web-based interface showcases how research into performance can be queried.

Associated Motion Capture User Categories

'Associated Motion Capture User Categories' (AMUC) is a project to create a virtual collaboration demonstrator for the arts. AMUC is an excellent example of how arts and humanities projects in e-Science can help a wider community. It is based in Newcastle and jointly run by the Culture Lab at Newcastle University and the North East Regional e-Science Centre. AMUC targets the tracking and capturing of motions that go beyond the everyday use of human bodies. Grid technologies provide the infrastructure to adjust motion capture data to specific user needs and to distribute it across multiple research sites. AMUC will make the first step in enabling access to costly data to a wider range of users in the arts and humanities.