University College Falmouth staff & students leading in their Research

Academic staff and students from across various disciplines at University College Falmouth (UCF) have been pushing the boundaries of research through creative exploration and imaginative collaborations with major industry names, international partners and other academic institutions.

The calibre and breadth of recent research conducted through extensive regional and international networks firmly supports UCF's position as an active and dynamic participant in the global arts community and enhances its long-standing culture of excellence in teaching and learning.

Susanne Thomas, Field Director of Choreography, is currently conducting a series of research projects with her site-specific dance and performance company, seven sisters group. The research is based on a new concept that blends site-specific performance and hand-held technologies including iPods and mobile phones.

These involve viewers taking an interactive tour of particular spaces guided by video footage and voiceovers on the handheld screen. Viewers are able to synch the image on their screen with the real environment in front of them and at certain times, live performers resembling the characters on screen move the virtual, seamlessly into reality.

These projects stem from three years' research into performance and technology, site and audience, entitled Behind the Scenes. The research was funded by The Arts Council of England and supported by a series of partners including the South Bank Centre; Tate Modern; the Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A); York Theatre Royal; Homo Ludens in Korea; and Teatre Municipal de Rosas in Spain.

A first pilot, Asterion, was commissioned by the V&A in London in 2008 and was re-staged for the London Design Festival in 2009, with sponsorship by Apple.

Following the success of Asterion, seven sisters group will take their new performance walk, Atalanta to the Ashmoleon Museum of Art & Archeology, Oxford in late July. Commissioned by the Creative Campus Initiative in relation to the Cultural Olympiad, Atalanta includes three cross-disciplinary workshop labs for professional artists and graduates from performance, design architecture and sports backgrounds , to take place in museums and galleries across the South East.

Further pilots are being developed.

Susanne is also continuing her interest in performance and architecture and has been invited to develop scratch performances in the Spiral Booths at the V&A in June, as part of their 1:1 Architecture Exhibition. Spiral Booths is an open platform for theatre and dance comprising six booths and a spiral staircase that condenses performances, fragmenting the stage into six and breaking the performance space's continuity, thus creating new relations between the public and artists.

Susanne will also teach a site-specific performance master-class in the Portavilion 2010: ROSY (the ballerina) in May.  ROSY (the ballerina) is a new mobile, bubble-shaped pavilion by German Art & Architecture collective, raumlaborberlin, that will tour London from May to September transforming over fifteen parks and green spaces, and playing host to a dynamic programme of events.

Jerome Fletcher, Acting Field Director of Writing and award leader for the MA Performance Writing, has received a research grant of £75,000 as part of an academic consortium of seven European Universities. The project will research e-literature and has a global value of nearly a million euros.

The three year research project, Developing a Network-Based Creative Community: Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice, is funded by the Humanities in the European Research Area Joint Research Programme.

Focusing on electronic literature practitioners, the project inquires into how creative communities of practitioners form within transnational, transcultural, globalised and distributed contexts and will seek to gain insight into and understanding of the social effects and manifestations of creativity.

In addition to organising a seminar and a survey of performance contexts for e-literature, Jerome will be editing an issue of Performance Research Journal and curating a programme of performance based electronic literature as part of the final exhibition and conference in Edinburgh.

Dr Justin Marshall, Research Fellow in 3D Digital Production, Autonomatic, is involved in a collaborative research project between University of Central Lancashire, University of Surrey, Newcastle University, Dundee University and UCF, entitled Bespoke and funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council. Bespoke is a multidisciplinary project investigating how digital systems and devices can increase social inclusion and improve lives.

The project functions at neighbourhood level, helping people to tell their own stories through hyper local news production, and then using these stories to inspire radically simple bespoke design solutions, created with, and for, people.

Justin's research focuses on mapping extended family relationships in areas of Preston through a "family hedge that provides a tangible and engaging means of digitally recording and linking stories and experiences with family photos and treasure objects."

Tavs Jorgensen, who is also a Research Fellow in 3D Digital Production, Autonomatic, continues to maintain his successful research profile, having been invited to deliver presentations to the World Design Congress in Beijing, The Tallinn Applied Arts Triennial in Estonia and The Digital Design and Art Symposium at De Montfort University in the UK.

Tavs has also delivered a paper to The Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI 2009) at Churchill College Cambridge, along with guest lectures at the Open University Computer Science Department and The Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham. Furthermore his work has been exhibited internationally at venues including The Museum of Art and Design in New York, the Lotz Design Festival in Poland and the Gardiner Museum in Toronto, Canada.

Dr Deborah Sugg Ryan, Senior Lecturer in Histories & Theories of Design has taken part in a live discussion on the history of dressing tables on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour, drawing on her research for a book that she is currently writing named The Inter-War Home: The Suburban House and the Middles Classes in Britain, 1919-1939 (Manchester University Press).

Deborah is a member of the Advisory Group for the V&A Exhibition, Designing Britain 1948-2012 as well as for Edwardian Opulence 1901-1910 at the Paul Mellon Yale Center for British Art at Yale University.

Deborah has participated in a two-day symposium on the themes of a chapter that she has contributed to the book, The Edwardian Sense: Art, Design and Performance in Britain, 1901 to 1910 (Yale University Press, to be published June 2010) and has been appointed to the Arts and Humanities Research Council's (AHRC) Peer Review College. The Peer Review College is a group of around 900 experts in subject areas across the AHRC's remit. They offer specialist advice via peer reviews, and so provide valuable assistance to the Peer Review Panels in evaluating proposals.

Deborah is also Books Review Editor of the Oxford University Press Journal of Design History.

In addition, research student Angela MacDonald, supervised by Dr Deborah Sugg Ryan and Professor Michael Depledge (Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry) has been awarded £10,000 by Maggie's Cancer Caring Centres towards research expenses for her PhD titled The Restorative Paradigm; Gardens and Well-being.

Maggie's Centres offer free information, benefits advice, psychological support, courses and stress reducing strategies in order to help with any of the problems associated with cancer. Angela's research will focus on the role of the restorative garden in contemporary design in the UK. The core research question asks what makes an authentic restorative garden and will consider the roles gardens can play in the design of healthcare facilities and how contemporary garden designers address the health needs of people in the 21st century.

Second Year PhD student, Ellen Bell, has held an exhibition that posed the question: How do you communicate with your lover? As an integral element of her PhD research and coinciding with Bath's Literary Festival, Ellen produced a series of book, paper and text-based drawings and installations exploring the use of emotional language within familial and intimate relationships. These works were exhibited at the Chapel Row Gallery in Bath.

Ellen is also working as part of the Performance Writing Research Group at UCF. Earlier this month, she presented her work at the PW10 symposium for performance writing and cross-artform textual practice, hosted by the group at the Arnolfini in Bristol.

As part of the Lingua Franca season, Arnolfini collaborated with UCF to create the weekend's events. Interdisciplinary approaches to language, textuality and environments for writing performances were explored through talks and readings as well as through digital, audio and visual work. http://www.ellenbell.co.uk/projects/talk_to_me_2010.htm 

Isabelle Risner, a third-year PhD student within Autonomatic, the 3D Digital Production Research cluster, and an alumnus of BA(Hons) Contemporary Crafts, will have a light box installation of translucent porcelain ceramic panels exhibited within Out of Hand - an exhibition of work from students and alumni from UCF courses in Textile Design, 3D Design and Contemporary Crafts that will take place at The Glove Factory in Appledore from 3 to 6 June 2010.

The work forms part of Isabelle's PhD study into the use of digital processes within designer-maker practice and was made in collaboration with Dr Larissa Naylor, who is based in the University of Exeter's School of Geography at Tremough. It is based on data collected on the movement of boulders across a rocky shore platform and is represented by a map that has then been overlaid with coastal related imagery, which is the overarching theme of this exhibition. Isabelle's work considers the potential of collaborative engagement opened up by digital practices within craft.

For further information about Research at University College Falmouth, visit www.falmouth.ac.uk/142/research-15.html

University College Falmouth is the only independent Higher Education institution in Cornwall with the powers to award degrees in its own name.  It has two campuses in Cornwall - at Woodlane in Falmouth and Tremough in Penryn (which it owns, and jointly manages with the University of Exeter) - and a third campus at Totnes in Devon, following its merger with Dartington College of Arts in 2008.

This merger created a new institution focusing on the expansion of Falmouth's expertise in Art, Design and Media and Dartington's expertise in Choreography, Music, Theatre, Art and Writing.  The Devon-based courses will relocate to a new, high-specification Performance Centre at Tremough in 2010, paving the way for a new specialist Arts University in Cornwall by 2013/2014 that will be unique to the South West.

The University College is a founding partner in the Combined Universities in Cornwall (CUC), a unique initiative to promote regional economic regeneration through Higher Education, funded mainly by the European Union (Objective One and Convergence), the South West Regional Development Agency, and the Higher Education Funding Council for England, with support from Cornwall Council.

Ends

For further information about University College Falmouth, please contact Jilly Easterby Dip CIPR MCIPR, Head of Public Affairs, Telephone: 01326 213792, or email:  jilly.easterby@falmouth.ac.uk

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