Department Member, Informatics
Research Fellow in Virtual Environments for the Arts (Edinburgh College of Art)
About
I am interested in the relationship between technology and culture. In particular the design of new forms of digital media.
The cultural significance of technology is its power to create new forms of embodied and embedded interaction with the world and each other. In doing so it brings into existence new way of doing, thinking and being. For the arts and creative industries this means the digital is not just a way to conduct practice by other means but an opportunity for radical evolution of that practice. I am interested in the process by which this happens. The creativity, innovation and exploration inherent in the design process plays a central role here. Rather than the analytic requirements capture of some approaches or the passive ethnographic study of existing practice we use design interventions as a research tool to embed technology into complex social contexts and thus to reveal something about those contexts.
Mobile and Locative Media:
Using image matching and similar technologies we have been able to turn urban spaces into "tagscapes" which allow the design of social applications based on new signifying practices.
Haptic Design Media:
A great deal of the skill of the artist and creative practitioner is "tacit" in the interaction of their bodies with the world. Haptics allows the transfer of tacit knowledge into digital tools which are currently largely disembodied. We have created new tools for design and animation using this approach and other applications in heritage. We are also using haptics to explore embodiment in dance practice.
Narrative:
In "Walking the City" De Certeau describes the people moving through the city as invisible authors unaware of the "text" they write across the face of the urban landscape. Mobile and other networked digital media make it possible to see this "text" and make it available as new forms of parallel interactive narrative media.We are exploring the possibilities of these new media for new forms of storytelling and memory practices.
Virtual and Real Worlds:
We conceptualise the virtual not as a seperate "place" but as a set of parallel universes constantly avialable to augment and communicate with the real world. We have explored the use of social network, media repositories and the metaverse second life as "memory spaces" linked to the real world through mobile and web technologies.
Knowlege Transfer;
I have been involved in the creation of two spinouts in mobile and haptics.I see knowledge transfer as an important element leading to continued collaborations and new concepts.
Present Role:
Presently I pursue these research interests in a joint post between Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art.
Professional Activities and Bodies:
I am a guest editor for International Journal of Arts and Technology (IJART), Special Issue on: "Creativity and Interdisciplinarity – a Discursive Tension?"
I am a co-founder of Eurohaptics the European level haptic research body and am on the steering committee.
I am on the steering group of the World Haptics which is the international body for haptics research. I was Co-Chair of Eurohaptics, the leading European Conference on Haptic (touch) technologies. I am a member of ACM Siggraph
Contact Information
Twitter: http://twitter.com/dr_mark_wright
