Arts and Humanities E-Science Support Centre

This workshop, led by JISC and the Arts & Humanities e-Science Support Centre, aims to stimulate discussion around the creative and research uses of e-Science tools and methods (so-called grid technologies, and technologies integrated with them such as data-mining, simulation and visualization) in the Arts & Humanities within the UK.

The half-day workshop will focus on how the take-up of e-Science is developing new areas of research in the Arts & Humanities community, including the performing arts and humanities research.

There will be three plenary sessions to introduce key topics and provide contextual background information to a variety of work being undertaken. A set of presentations will further offer demonstrative examples of activity by projects funded by JISC, AHRC and EPSRC under the e-Science ‘umbrella’.

Organizers

Ann Borda (JISC – Joint Information Systems Committee)
Stuart Dunn (AHeSSC – Kings College London)
Tobias Blanke (AHeSSC – Kings College London)

Programme

Introduction: e-Science and the Arts (Tobias Blanke - AHESSC)

Performing Arts

• e-Science and Creativity (Gregory Sporton -Birmingham)
• AMUC project (Sally Jane Norman –Culture Lab, Newcastle)
• CSAGE Project (Martin Turner – Manchester)

Intersections between Arts and the Humanities – (Stuart Dunn – AHESSC)

• London Charter: principles for the use of 3D visualisation by researchers, educators and cultural heritage organizations (Graeme Earl - Southampton)
• Real-Time Expansion: the potentials of e-Science technologies within Contemporary Arts practice. (Michael Takeo Magruder – King’s College London)

Presentations

Gregory Sporton (UCE)

e-Science and Creativity

Presentation on the issues and value of e-Science processes in the Visual Arts based on a series of workshops which both explored and broke new ground in these areas, including a demonstrator of a dancer used as an HCI device. Gregory Sporton is based at the Visualisation Research Unit.

Sally-Jane Norman (University of Newcastle)

AMUC project

Use of motion capture tools in the performing arts underpins activities ranging from staged productions to screen-bound works, choreographic notation and archiving, pooling artistic skills with competence from sectors including biomechanics, sensor development, information processing and display. Today's affordances opened up by Grid developments make motion capture a valuable area for interdisciplinary investigation twenty years after the animation industry first teamed up with biomechanics experts. In this project, users of motion capture resources from different disciplines are collectively devising novel annotation and retrieval methods for grid-enabled data; we thus hope to enrich the broader scientific debate with concepts and potential services enriched by Arts & Humanities perspectives.

Martin Turner (University of Manchester)

CSAGE: Collaborative Stereoscopic Access Grid Environment

This paper discusses research undertaken by an interdisciplinary team of academic researchers from the fields of dance and e-Science. The ‘Stereo-bodies’ project focused on exploring the ways in which choreographic practice and in particular live dance performance could engage with a stereoscopic Access Grid environment.

Graeme Earl (University of Southampton)

London Charter: principles for the use of 3D visualisation by researchers, educators and cultural heritage organizations

Michael Takeo Magruder (King’s College London)

Real-Time Expansion: the potentials of e-Science technologies within Contemporary Arts practice.

Although Contemporary Arts practice has embraced the utilisation of computer and communication frameworks for the creation of artistic products and outputs, work in this field is often limited by the potentials of mainstream technologies. This talk considers how the utilisation of HPC (high performance computing) can facilitate the progression towards complex, real-time artworks by providing an infrastructure that vastly exceeds the current computational facilities of consumer-level systems.

Stuart Dunn's plenary presentation to the main EVA conference summing up the day's proceedings.