Lana Pericic
About the researcher
Lana is a creative technologist, educator, and PhD student whose research explores how digital photographs shape family memory and identity. Through creative methods such as coding, photogrammetry, and participatory workshops, her work questions visual abundance and investigates more meaningful ways to curate digital family archives.
Alongside her research, Lana has experience working as an Associate Lecturer, teaching and leading modules on the undergraduate Digital Media Design course at the University of Plymouth and internationally at Nanjing University of Arts. She has also worked as a research assistant on community engagement projects, facilitating workshops, curating archival exhibitions, and developing installations.
Research interests
- Memory and digital memory
- Creative Coding
- Photogrammetry
- Digital heritage
- Autoethnography
- Role of photography in family heritage
- Visual culture
PhD abstract
Thesis title
Visual Abundance, Absence and Place: Rethinking Family Archives in the Digital Age
Abstract
This study explores how digital technologies are reshaping the ways family archives are created, experienced and preserved. It explores their role in a digital culture setting and the effect visual abundance has on memory and heritage. Drawing on Foucault (1972) and Derrida (1995), it questions the control and authorship roles within digital family archives and the importance of erasure and selection. Following Barthes’s theory of the punctum, an emotionally piercing detail, it challenges the emotional value of digital photographs. Yates (1966) and Massey (1994) further position archives as spatial entities, connecting places with memory and identity.
The methodology is separated into three phases. In the first phase, I got to understand the importance of family archives in my own family through a participatory workshop where we discussed the most important concepts of this research. In the second and third phase, the discussion is taken to the wider audience, young families, where, through making artefacts, participants will be discussing their relationship with family archives at home. The third phase consists of semi-structured interviews with photographers, heritage specialists and archivists to understand the institutional notions of archives.
The relationship between visual abundance and archives is also explored through a series of practice-based experiments using methods such as programming and photogrammetry to critique and question our interaction with these notions. The projects mostly act as critical provocations for reflection on how digital tools shape the act of remembering and the construction of family identity.
The research proposes more intentional and spatially grounded approaches to digital archiving. By combining theory and practice, it contributes to the fields of digital heritage, visual culture, and photography studies, reimagining the family archive as a spatial and emotional construct.
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Qualifications |
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Year |
Qualification |
Awarding body |
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2023 |
MRes Digital Art & Technology |
University of Plymouth |
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2022 |
BA Digital Media Design |
University of Plymouth |
Teaching:
- February 2023 – July 2025 - Associate Lecturer - Teaching on various modules on the BA Digital Media Design and MA Experience Design (University of Plymouth). Leading the Advanced Creative Coding module at Nanjing University of the Arts as part of the partnership between the two universities.
- October 2022 - July 2023 - Teaching assistant - Teaching and assisting in lectures
Research:
- Collaboration with Discovering42 museum on the Immersive Technologies strand. Design Researcher in Residence. UK Shared Prosperity Fund: Good Growth, Cornwall and Isles of Scilly.
- Modern methods of construction for community building: a demonstrator project with Whitleigh Community Trust, Plymouth. Research Assistant, 2024-25, Get Involved Awards (University of Plymouth), £6,945.
- Modern methods of construction for the common good (internationalisation). Research assistant, 2024, R1 Funding, University of Plymouth, £5,260.
- Far South West Immersive Cluster project. Research Assistant, 2023-24, Get Involved Awards (University of Plymouth).
- Digital National Marine Park project (member of the digital engagement team). Research Assistant, 2023-24, Heritage Fund.