Project archive
Gabriella Giannachi was Principal Investigator in Exeter Time Trails, REACT HEIF-funded and developed in collaboration with Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery, Exeter City FC Supporters Trust and 1010 Media. Time Trails is an app prototype that facilitates the generation of time-based tours linking sites in the Museum, Exeter and Devon with objects in the Museum's collection and Exeter City FC's archive. This time trail app gives users the opportunity to engage creatively with history, heritage, collections and archives. The app was first tested and then adopted by the Kick Start programme at Exeter City FC.
To find out more about the project, please see the Exeter Time Trails blog.
Gabriella Giannachi was Principal Investigator in Moor Stories, developed in collaboration with Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery and 1010 Media with funding from REACT HEIF. Moor Stories is a web app that aims to facilitate creative encounters between objects in RAMM's collections pertaining to Dartmoor (primarily flints, pottery, drawings, paintings, wood and stone carvings) to prompt memories about them among the communities that live where the objects were originally found. Using data and images from RAMM’s collections, objects are placed back in their 'original' location on Dartmoor. Moor Stories aims to facilitate creativity and encourage the sharing of historical knowledge between museum curators, local history societies and museums on the moor.
For more information, see the Moor Stories blog and interactive website.
Gabriella Giannachi was Principal Investigator, commissioned by AHRC, Nesta and Arts Council, to research Imperial War Museum's SICE project (2012), which explored how social media models can be applied to museum collections, offering new frameworks for engagement and social interpretation. The SICE project was mentioned in the Guardian and the final report can be downloaded from the NESTA website.
Gabriella Giannachi was mentor to Watching the Detectives. Investigations of the Event, its Record and the Aesthetics of Witnessing (2008–11) led by Hugo Glendinning, funded by the AHRC. This project looked at the role of the photographer in generating performance documentation.
Professor Gabriella Giannachi worked on this project along with Professor Steve Benford, Dr Duncan Rowland and Dominic Price from the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham.
In collaboration with artist company Blast Theory, Stanford Libraries, British Libraries, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Ludwig Boltzman Institute Media.Art.Research, and Sheffield University, the project aimed to find a way to document and archive mixed media experiences, and culminated in the development of the CloudPad interactive archive.
This project is the successor to the Riders Have Spoken project below.
Gabriella Giannachi was Co-Investigator for Riders Have Spoken. Dr Jonathan Foster (Information Studies, University of Sheffield) was the Principle Investigator of this project, with Professor Steve Benford (Computer Science, University of Nottingham) as Co-Investigator (2010-11). The project generated a framework for the annotation of mixed media resources. Find out more about the project at Beyond Text.
This project was succeeded by the above project, The Documentation and Archiving of Mixed Media Experiences: the Case of Rider Spoke.
Professor Nick Kaye was Principal Investigator and Professor Gabriella Giannachi was Co-Investigator in this AHRC-funded project developed in collaboration with University College London (Computer Science) and Stanford University (Metamedia Lab). The Presence Project aimed to combine expertise from performance archaeology and computer science to investigate means by which 'presence' is achieved in live and mediated performance and simulated environments.
The Presence Project ran from October 2005 to June 2009. For more information about the project, see the Presence Project website.
Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye were investigators for PRESENCCIA, subcontracted to UPF Barcelona (2006–7), EU funded. Presenccia researched presence in virtual environments.
In collaboration with the Computing Department of Goldsmiths College, University of London, the Centre for Intermedia was awarded an AHRC/BT Pilot Research Networking Scheme award for 'Digital Reconstruction in Archaeology and Contemporary Performance'. Dr Marco Gillies (Goldsmiths) was Principle Investigator and Professor Nick Kaye was Co-Investigator.
The project initiated new interdisciplinary collaborative research around digital technologies for reconstructing and accessing lost cultural sites and events. These cultural events ranged from archaeology to contemporary performance.
It brought academics, practitioners and technologists together to explore the use of established technologies across traditional discipline boundaries as well as applications of new and emerging technologies. The workshops it hosted were focused on generating new concrete research collaborations and proposals.
Professor Nick Kaye was Co-Investigator in 'Performing the Archive: the Future of the Past'. This project was developed in collaboration with Bristol Arnolfini and the Drama department of the University of Bristol.
The project explored the re-animation of the Live Art Archives, the UK's leading archival resource on live and performance art. It developed the interactivity between the archives and communities of practitioners, scholars and audiences. Research explored how academics and artists can use and re-use documents of past events, to inflect and inspire their own performance practice and their critical thinking or writing.
This project ran from 2007-2010, and was funded by Great Western Research.
Stephen Hodge was PI in 2nd Live (2007-8), which explored live performance in Second Life®, the 3D online digital world imagined and created by its 10 million plus residents. 2nd Live was hosted by the Exeter Phoenix and funded by Arts Council England
 (Lottery Funded).
For more information, visit the project website.
Professor Gabriella Giannachi was Founding Director of the Information Society Network, along with Dr Alison Harcourt (Politics) and Janet Borgerson (Business and Economics). The Network ran a seminar series that brought researchers from a number of different disciplines together to work on issues relating to the theme of the information society. These events were intended to encourage academic and public debate, and to work towards joint publications and research projects.
The Network was active from 2006-2009.
Grecian Voices is a collaboration with Exeter City FC Supporters Trust and 1010 Media to generate an online community archive of the history of Exeter City Football Club and Exeter City Football Club's Supporter's Trust, 1904 to today.
Find out more about the project at the Grecian Voices blog.
Professor Gabriella Giannachi is developing the ArtMaps project in collaboration with the Tate.
Over the course of 2013, the ArtMaps project will develop one or more crowdsourcing applications for use on smart phones that will allow people to relate artworks to the places, sites and environments they encounter in daily life. ArtMaps users can pinpoint the locations of particular images, identifying the viewpoints used by artists, and allowing others to find out more about the location they are in, and the artworks themselves.
This project has involved workshops with local primary school children, as well as public engagement activities in London in collaboration with the Tate. It was exhibited at Tate Britain's 'Looking at the View' Exhibition between February and June 2013, and in Exeter through an event organised by Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery.
ArtMaps is an interdisciplinary project between Tate, the Centre for Intermedia, and the University of Nottingham's Department of Computer Science. It is funded by RCUK.
2013 Exeter Impact Awards winner
ArtMaps has been announced as the winner of the 'outstanding impact in arts and culture' category of the Exeter Impact Awards. The awards were announced at a Gala Dinner on 10 December attended by the nominees. Awards were presented across eight different categories, and ArtMaps was among five strong nominees in the arts and culture category.
AHRC Knowledge Exchange Hub
REACT (Research and Enterprise in Arts and Creative Technology) is one of four knowledge exchange hubs awarded nationally as part of a £16 million investment by the Arts and Humanities Research Council for knowledge exchange projects between research academics, creative industry partners and businesses. It will run February 2012-16. Nick Kaye is Co-director of the REACT Hub, with Robert Bickers (University of Bristol), the Hub Director, Jon Dovey (University of West of England), and Clare Reddington for Bristol iShed. The Hub is a partnership between the universities of Bristol, Exeter, UWE, Cardiff and Bath. Contributing partners include BBC, Tate, English Heritage, Hewlett Packard, National Trust, SlingShot, and Welsh National Opera. REACT is supported by an award from the AHRC of £3.9million, with a total project value of £5million. REACT will have two physical locations: at the Watershed in Bristol, and at the Centre for Intermedia at the Innovation Centre at Exeter. Over its 4 year duration, REACT will invest over £3million on up to 70 knowledge exchange projects in the South West and nationally.
For more information, read the university news story and see the REACT webpage.
Dr Paul Clarke (Bristol, Drama) Prof Simon Jones (Bristol, Drama) and Prof Nick Kaye (Exeter, English) have been awarded £429,000 for a three year project that will create collaborations between research academics, creative artists and curators in the use of performance archive.
Many archives of live art and performance have been or are being produced, as this contemporary form becomes valued by museums or collections internationally gaining significant cultural capital. AHRC funding has or is enhancing a number of key resources, through conservation, cataloguing and digitization, making them accessible to potential user-groups: e.g., Bristol's recently completed project to digitize the National Review of Live Art Video Archive and the award for 'It was forty years ago today...': Locating the Early History of Performance Art in Wales 1965-1979. Performing Documents will research and facilitate a further significant advance in the understanding, engagement with and use of these archival materials and performance archives more widely. Where traditional scholarship has tended to appraise archives in relation to art-historical narratives and read documents as the textual remains of past events, this project will produce models for the investigation of this archival material through practice-as-research. Thus the project will advance an understanding of existing archival holdings through their relationship to current and future creative practice, in ways that will deepen academic, professional and public engagement with what remains of this ephemeral work. Specifically, the project will explore the potential for knowledge transfer from the Live Art and Arnolfini Archives; it will develop practical models for the future use of this material for a wide range of communities of professional users, including scholars, practitioners and curators. It will also develop strategies for the exhibition of these materials and ephemera, such that culturally significant, event-based art can be understood and communicated across generations of artists and scholars, as well as to a broader public.
Practical approaches to historiography will be explored through three distinct dialogues between renowned professional practitioners and scholarly practitioner-researchers, and between academic and cultural industry partners. The first workshop will focus on artists' re-use of their own archival materials; the second on artists' use of other artists' documents; the third on the exhibition of documents and performance ephemera using curatorial practice as its mode of enquiry. Each enquiry explores a distinct approach to engaging with these documents: they model a set of experimental tools for future creative use and re-use. The project will enable audiences, scholars and professional practitioners to access these workshops through a series of symposia and showings, which will make these processes public, alongside ongoing online documentation. The third workshop concludes with a two-day conference that will be synchronized with an exhibition and performance of selected outcomes. This will draw out and make public significant discussions and comparative reflections from the previous symposia and add a wider call for international academic engagement with the project's questions. A co-authored and edited book, combining DVD, will compile documentation and reflection on the practical inquiries, essays from the investigators and developed conference papers. Published by a leading publisher, this will be distributed internationally across the various sectors involved.
Collaboration between the Department of Drama & Theatre Collection (UOB), the Drama Department of Exeter University & cultural-industry partners Arnolfini & Inbetween Time Productions (Bristol) will provide extensive access & dissemination to the various academic & creative-industry constituencies as well as major public engagement. The project's impact will be enhanced by its exhibition and performance outcomes being included in the Arnolfini programme and Inbetween Time international festival of live art (2012). This festival will include a contextualizing archival display and additional commissioned re-enactments by national and international artists.
This research project is a part of the College of Humanities Visual Culture initiative.
Gabriella Giannachi is Co-investigator for Performance and Audience in Movement-Based Digital Games: An International Research Network, funded by AHRC, PI Patrick Dickinson (Computer Science, University of Lincoln) which explores the use of methodologies and practices from theatre and performance for the design of video games.