our Research
themes

Digital Embodiment

This theme negotiates new methodologies in exploring the body through the affordances of digital technology. Research into modalities of visualising the body via Motion Capture, Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, CGI, and other digital forms that ally with discourses on posthumanities, feminism and subjectivity. We engage with these methodologies that extend, augment, and evolve existing arts practices.

Digital embodiment will be explored through projects featuring:

• Motion capture in acting and dance.
• Embodied practices with mixed reality and virtual reality.
• Robotics and Artificial Intelligence in confluence with dance, creative writing and acting.
• Virtual film production.
• Engagement with local and international film, gaming, and Virtual Reality production industries.
• Exploring ways in which performance and archiving of the performing arts can be digitally captured.

Arts in Health

Flinders University has brought our arts and health colleges together in an alliance to generate a robust commitment to furthering research in the growing domain of arts in health. This new alliance will draw from the existing body of evidence that demonstrates the integral role that the arts play in the health and wellbeing of our society. Assemblage will foster unique interdisciplinary collaborations that push the boundaries of this burgeoning field.

A component of our vision is also to think about arts and health education programs that can be delivered at scale via tiered training, harnessing the latest technology to ensure this learning is widely available.

In the forthcoming three-year period Assemblage will foster a host of projects such as the use of verbatim theatre in addressing the challenges of ageing; music and its role in diminishing nausea in chemotherapy; interactive video and its application in neurological rehabilitation.

Transformative Storytelling

The most significant works of fiction capture the zeitgeist of a cultural moment, whether they are created for the page, screen, the stage, or digital simulation environments such as virtual, augmented, or mixed reality and gaming. Such stories imagine and re-imagine contemporary concerns, examine cultural values, and engage in complex and dynamic conversations between artist, audience, industry, histories, and futures. They are significant social barometers as well as agents of change, leading the viewer/reader/listener through transformative, interactive experiences.

Indigenous Creative Arts Praxis

Decolonising Indigenous Creative Arts praxis within Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences examines critical anti-racist and transformative creative work through language, poetry, song, visual arts, film, and performance created as a means to respond, reframe, and transform impacts of colonisation. This praxis is grounded in Indigenous creative activism with an emphasis on wellbeing, healing, and knowledge repatriation through understandings of Indigenous sovereignty. An inter-disciplinary approach intersects Cultural Studies, Pacific Studies, Creative Arts, History, Sociology, Gender Studies, Linguistics and Philosophy, with Indigenous knowledge centred decolonising scholarship, and responding to institutions of power through creative research interrogations.

Cultures of Archiving the Arts

This theme will develop new approaches to understanding the way we remember, value, and categorise the arts, including new ways of archiving performing arts data and engaging critically with performing arts archives in terms of sources, cultural dominances and issues of how archives are constructed. Within this examination the theme investigates who is recognised in traditional means of archiving performing arts practices as well as the ways in which the information is accessed and by whom. Following on from this work, the theme explores the creative arts contributions to the digital humanities applying the benefits of digital humanities research methodologies to creative arts and cultural economy. It extends the College’s work on cultural evaluation to develop new partnerships with Industry.

Ecological and Climate Crisis

As various governments around the world continue to stall on climate action and as we witness massive loss of species coupled with environmental degradation on a daily basis, artists are making their calls to action through creative expression. Our researchers in creative writing, film, virtual production, drama, dance and Indigenous arts praxis are all manifesting their own unique responses to the most pressing and urgent issue of our times.