Creative Practice Research Research Articles

Imaginative storytelling – novel immersive production practices and processes for mobile cinematic, interactive 360-degree and real-time VR

ABSTRACT This article adopts creative practice research to explore novel Virtual Reality (VR) production practices and processes for mobile cinematic VR (MCVR), parallel interactive narratives in VR (PIN VR) and real-time VR (RT VR). As a result of Creative Practice research, Imaginative Storytelling analyses and describes these original production approaches and processes for immersive storytelling and illustrates emerging aesthetic formations, which shape new imaginative experiences in VR. These diverse representations of VR are examined through three case studies, A New Dawn [A New Dawn. 2021. Dir. Schleser (VR). Australia. Swinburne University of Technology.], Table for Two [Table for Two. 2022. Dir. Remedios (VR). India. Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad].) and Phases of Motion [Phases of Motion. 2021/2023. Dir. Berrett (VR). Australia. Swinburne University of Technology]. Each experience focuses on exploring innovative production processes for moile cinematic, interactive 360-degree and real-time VR. By means of outlining three distinctive approaches to VR production, contemporary developments and new directions in immersive storytelling are demonstrated. This research contributes to the expansion of storytelling and storyliving approaches in which navigators become co-creators of VR experiences.

The Participants

While universities increasingly offer institutional support for academic filmmaking, in the specific case of ethics this support can sometimes become an impediment to creativity. The requirement to follow comprehensive university ethical procedures - which are usually developed with great care and attention to the needs of researchers but with little or no focus on creative practice research - might stymie the artistic practice of filmmakers. My video The Participants: a reflection on the ethics of smartphone filmmaking as research aims to offer a provocation intended to challenge university practitioner-researchers to consider the ethics of their practice, but also, at the same time, a provocation to university ethics protocols and procedures. Specifically, the films seeks to encourage the viewer to reflect on the ways in which filmmaker researchers working in in public places might better consider the ethical issues raised by their practice, especially when subsequently employing (and manipulating) footage of individuals who have not given their consent to be filmed. For The Participants I used an iPhone 11 to capture video images of tourists videoing with their smartphones at Grand Central Station, New York.

Identities and Methodologies of Doctoral Candidates Undertaking Audiovisual Research-by-Practice

“Identities and Methodologies of Doctoral Candidates Undertaking Audiovisual Research-by-Practice” comprises a triptych of video essays, crafted by the co-organisers of the inaugural B-Film Creative Practice Colloquium at the University of Birmingham. In each video, the creators reflect upon data collected during this event (including a videographic exercise, digital questionnaires, and filmed interviews). Through analysing how attendees described and executed their practice and methods, the three videos jointly and separately interrogate: • relationships of process and product in audiovisual research-by-practice; • the place of experimental filmmaking in academia; • opportunities for, and impediments to, the adoption and development of filmmaking in the academy. These works have a specific focus on postgraduate researchers and thus may provide guidance for both supervisors and future students working in creative practice research.

A Filmmaking Research Continuum

Exploring aspects of the development of filmmaking research within the Academy over past decades, this article focuses on creative practice-based methods and the establishment of filmmaking as a legitimate research endeavour. It delves into the nuances of filmmaking research methodologies, specifically the rearticulation and repositioning of research practices to encompass both the work of filmmaking production and further filmmaking engagement with its reception. The importance of research statements in elucidating scholarly contributions made by films and other screen works, like scripts and video essays, is emphasised, alongside discussions of peer-review processes and the role of creative practice research journals in fostering critical dialogue within the filmmaking research community. Despite ongoing tensions between academic and industry requirements, the article argues for the progress of filmmaking research as a distinctive discipline with distinct methodologies, highlighting the need for continual refinement in quality assessment metrics to reflect the evolving nature of the field.

Looking at things strangely: Defamiliarisation as a design approach for media literacy education

Design methods have long been proposed as educational devices and, increasingly, as approaches for engaging with societal issues. While media, cultural and political narratives continue to debate best practices for challenging disinformation, with some countries embedding media literacy within formal education, this article speculates on how design approaches might be repurposed for media literacy education. Drawing on theories of defamiliarisation from creative practice and design research, the article postulates graphic design’s intrinsic communicative nature as a potential approach for engaging with media literacy. By interweaving diverse academic discussions, alongside case studies, the article scrutinizes defamiliarisation’s efficacy, alongside graphic design, as a research and pedagogical tool, foregrounding innovative design strategies that may be responsive to contemporary media literacy challenges. In doing so, the article speculates how such practices might be combined, leveraged, and repurposed as educational tools for media literacy, as well as for future interdisciplinary discussions and social design research.

Research, practice, knowledge: introducing the creative knowledges enabling framework

ABSTRACT Amongst a myriad of articles, chapters and books that argue for different ways to understand and conduct creative practice research – or as it is otherwise known, artistic research, arts-based research, practice-led research, practitioner-based research, and so on – this article goes to the heart of the affordances of creative practice research and offers what the authors believe is more generative model for this work, with more productive terminology. By focusing on a process of research enabling, as opposed to research being led by, based on or taken through practice (and vice versa), the article seeks clarity on the relationship between research questions, research design and methods; where a contribution to knowledge resides; how, accordingly, a research project might be written up; and who, indeed, creative practice researchers are. From our experience of undertaking, supervising and evaluatingcreative practice research, we have come to realise that some of the fundamental challenges of this work reside in a basic understanding of what, why, how and by whom. We believe that some of the definitions and models of creative practice research are a contributor to these challenges, hence a new model with alternative terminology to help untangle some of the intellectual complexities we have seen. The discussion uses screen practice as its disciplinary site, encompassing media/screen production and screenwriting.

(Extra)ordinary images: photography, memory and creative documentary – Rwanda and Argentina

This essay is a reflection on two creative documentary films produced as outputs of projects supported by the British Academy: The Faces We Lost (2017) and (Dis)Appear (2023). Both films focus on the commemorative and memorial functions of domestic and ID photographs – The Faces We Lost in relation to the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda and (Dis)Appear in relation to the civic-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976–1983). The essay outlines the importance of domestic and ID photographs in each context and discusses some of the conceptual, formal and creative decisions behind the two documentaries. But it also attempts to contribute to the conversation about creative documentary filmmaking, and creative practice research more generally, as a form of academic enquiry. Lastly, it asks questions about the opportunities and limitations of making films within the academic rather than commercial environment, especially films made in and about the Global South.

Surmounting the Skepticism: Developing a Research-Creation Methodology

This paper was written to help address the tenuous status of research-creation at the University of Toronto, where I am a Doctor of Musical Arts candidate. There, I devised a “feedback saxophone” system in which I combine the tenor saxophone with various microphones and speakers to encourage and control acoustic feedback. The DMA program at U of T is classified as professional, so the premise of centering my thesis around my feedback saxophone practice was met with some healthy skepticism. This was not because it was viewed as uninteresting, but because creative practice is not typically considered a justifiable form of research in thesis writing. To therefore bolster research-creation as a legitimate form of scholarly inquiry and to build a model for my own research in music, I aim to answer two questions, insofar as they pertain to my research-creation project: (1) “How is creative practice research?” and (2) “What methods are appropriate for carrying out my creative practice as research?” In answering the first, I draw from the literature to demonstrate how research-creation is a form of knowledge gener- ation that complements conventional modes of investigation. Following this, I examine different categories of research-creation and illustrate them on a music research “compass” to facilitate comparison and understanding. To answer the second question, I discuss two relevant research-creation methodologies and combine them to construct my own “problem-practice-exegesis” approach. I conclude by detailing how I carry out my research using this methodology. Through this work, I endeavor to provide a practical model for graduate artist-researchers who are interested in integrating their creative practices with thesis writing and to contribute to the validation of research-creation within Canadian graduate music programs and beyond.

Scoring Loss in a Contemporary New Zealand Musical

This paper functions as an exegesis of a recent New Zealand musical, Mum’s Kitchen. The show was a creative practice research project and involved a collaborative writing/composition process with a team of four creatives. The article explores explore the confluence of musical voices within the work with a focus on the distinct musical choices made in relation to particular narrative themes. Taking a cue from Murphy (2014), we analyse the songs in Mum’s Kitchen that directly express loss and nostalgia. We suggest that the two composers have their own strategies for “scoring” this theme: use of “anachronistic” styles (such as a country ballad) to evoke a past era, and a collection of contemporary harmonic devices (open chord voicings, harmonic ambiguity) that evoke emptiness and uncertainty. We then argue that [author] as orchestrator both unified these voices through a consistent sound palette, while also emphasising these themes through his sonic choices.

Arts–Research Collaboration: Reflections on Collaboration as Creative Method

What is arts–research collaboration and how does it work? What does arts–research collaboration as method for qualitative inquiry do? What is the effect of collaboration on creative practice and academic research? Drawing on a collaboration between an anthropologist and an artist, this article addresses a surprising lack of qualitative inquiry into collaboration between creative practitioners and academic researchers. By recounting how the authors developed and used collaboration as method, the article identifies and analyzes underpinning qualities of how they worked together through arts–research activities. It advances existing debate by agitating for more theoretically grounded accounts of collaboration, including those that take a processual view on making and creativity to argue for considering collaboration, itself, to be materials from which creative practice and outputs emerge.

Biohybrids: Textile fibres provide scaffolds and highways for microbial translocation.

Introduction: Living materials (biohybrids, textile-microbial hybrids, hybrid living materials) have gained much attention in recent years with enormous potential for applications in biomedical science, the built environment, construction and architecture, drug delivery and as environmental biosensors. Living materials contain matrices which incorporate microorganisms or biomolecules as the bioactive components. A cross-disciplinary approach, operating at the intersection of creative practice and scientific research, incorporated textile technology and microbiology to demonstrate textile fibres providing microbial scaffolds and highways during this study. Methods: The study evolved from previous research which showed bacteria utilising the water layer surrounding fungal mycelium for motility, termed the 'fungal highway', which led to the investigation of the directional dispersal of microbes across a range of fibre types (natural and synthetic). The application of the study centred around the potential for biohybrids to be used as a biotechnology to improve oil bioremediation through seeding of hydrocarbon-degrading microbes into polluted environments via fungal or fibre highways, therefore treatments in the presence of crude oil were tested. Furthermore, from a design perspective, textiles have huge potential to act as a conduit for water and nutrients, essential to sustain microorganisms within living materials. Using the moisture absorption properties of natural fibres, the research explored how to engineer variable liquid absorption rates using cellulosics and wool to produce shape-changing knitted fabrics suitable for adaptation to oil spill capture. Results: At a cellular scale, confocal microscopy provided evidence to show that bacteria were able to utilise a water layer surrounding the fibres, supporting the hypothesis that fibres can aid bacterial translocation through their use as 'fibre highways'. A motile bacterial culture, Pseudomonas putida, was shown to translocate around a liquid layer surrounding polyester, nylon, and linen fibres, yet no evidence of translocation was apparent on silk or wool fibres, suggesting microbes elicit different responses to specific fibre types. Findings showed that translocation activity around highways did not diminish in the presence of crude oil, known to contain an abundance of toxic compounds, in comparison to oil-free controls. A design series demonstrated the growth of fungal mycelium (Pleurotus ostreatus) through knitted structures, highlighting the ability for natural fabrics to provide a scaffold to support microbial communities whilst retaining the ability to undergo environmentally responsive shape-change. A final prototype, Ebb&Flow, demonstrated the potential to scale up the responsive capacities of the material system using locally produced UK wool. The prototype conceptualised both the uptake of a hydrocarbon pollutant by fibres, and the translocation of microbes along fibre highways. Discussion: The research works towards facilitating the translation of fundamental science and design into biotechnological solutions that can be used in real world applications.

Bad News

The short film Bad News (2023) is the result of a creative practice research project that sought to explore role-playing and simulation as an institutional and corporate training device. The objective was to create, stage and document a fictional leadership training session as the narrative structure for a short film.

(Un)doing home: exploring home-making and identity – an example of a project in a London higher education classroom

In this article we discuss the lived, embodied experience of home-making in relation to identity and belonging through the example of a service-learning project conducted during the Covid-19 pandemic in a higher education setting in London, UK. We also explore the notion of belonging-not-belonging as a cultural, material and embodied construct, inspired by critical pedagogy. We draw on posthumanism, new materialism, intercultural studies, (auto-)ethnography and creative practice research as possible lines of flight in deconstructing the dichotomy between home and a ‘foreign’ territory-other-than-home that sits at the core of intercultural discourses. We present this project as a possible alternative discourse to (un)do more traditional considerations of home-making as a much more complex construct; in the encounter with new territories, humans and other-than-human artefacts, objects, machines and landscapes, we argue that home-making is a continuous, never-finished process that moves the learner and their teachers continuously. We aim to bring to the forefront new emerging considerations of intercultural studies at the intersection with interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary and cross-institutional discourses, breaking away from a more traditional and neoliberal view about what belonging means within the context of higher education.

Inducing, introducing

It seems fitting to explore an alternative form of introduction to an issue that promises other interior worlds. It also seems fitting to take up the opportunity to experiment with digital interfaces, word processing software and audio-visual media to exploit the static state of the page in favour of the spatial, the temporal and the audible. “introducing, inducing” is a product of fabulation, and evidence of the journal’s commitment to push the boundaries of the multiple practices it reflects and the modes of making creative practice research public. The cover image created by Sophie Forsythe forms the first layer — a doorway, a threshold — that articulates a stretched, warped, morphed and fragmented world of many dimensions, unfettered by the tired binary of inside and outside. Its textures, surfaces and ethereal colours wrap space akin to spring pea tendrils, reaching towards luminosity with heliotropic determinism, and pushing through the flat page like new potatoes. References to each article contained in this journal issue lurk amongst this visual dissonance, slipping in between its layers, like English Numbers Stations, giving themselves up to forces other than gravity and voices other than human.

Digital Literary Creative Practice and COVID-19

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic caused great upheaval to working artists, with performance venues and public exhibitions having to close. Yet despite these new restrictions, digital literature has thrived during this time. Digital literature refers to works that are ‘native to the digital environment’ [Rettberg, S., 2019. Electronic Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press: 6]. In this sense, digital literature is distinguished from works that are simply digitally disseminated (for example, e-books) in that they require a computer/code to exist, and cannot be represented by traditional print. This dependence on a digital environment made digital literature exhibitions and festivals better able to adapt to restrictions imposed by COVID-19. In this article I examine the relationship between digital literary creative practice and COVID-19. From these interrogations, I reveal unique qualities of digital literary creative practice and practice-led research [Smith, H., and Dean, R., 2009. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press], with a particular focus on the immediacy and urgency with which these works have been produced and disseminated, as opposed to other artistic practice and media.

Deindustrialization Without End: Smokestacks as Postindustrial Monuments

This photographic essay explores how obsolete smokestacks were recast as postindustrial monuments in the urban design-led “reconstruction” of Barcelona since the 1970s. Within the context of the “long goodbye” of deindustrialization, the accompanying text traces how industrial chimneys were re-signified and monumentalized. The images, result of a photographic survey of all remaining smokestacks in the city, frame these industrial obelisks within the transformation of their surrounding landscapes. They constitute a key element of an ongoing investigation melding creative practice and qualitative research, in which I argue that serial photography and participatory curatorial practice can elucidate the ambivalent experiences of deindustrialization.

Construction of Interactive Virtual Reality Simulation Digital Media System Based on Cross-Media Resources.

The combination of video and music is the most typical combination form in interactive multimedia works, which focuses on the audio-visual presentation characteristics of interactive art. Since both creative practice and theoretical research are still in the development stage, we focus on the creation of audio-visual integration in interactive multimedia works. Theoretical achievements are still very rare, and the guidance of creation theory plays an important role in the improvement of the aesthetic level of works. Therefore, for the development of interactive multimedia works creation, creating a new audio-visual relationship research path has important theoretical value and application value. It also has a certain historical significance for promoting the maturity of this art form. Through interactive virtual reality technology, this paper conducts an in-depth discussion on the simulation of digital media system across media resources. It is more suitable for the user's preference than the PC machine side. From technical means to artistic aesthetic characteristics and practical application, the application field and industry influence of digital media art carried by virtual reality are expounded, and the problems and solutions faced at this stage are proposed. By analyzing the application of virtual reality aesthetics in interaction design, the relationship between the visual level and the experience level of virtual reality aesthetics is discussed. Starting from the basic concepts of virtual reality aesthetics and interaction design, this paper analyzes the virtual reality space architecture and aesthetic dimension of interaction design in the era of artificial intelligence, and the value of virtual reality aesthetics in interaction design. Most interactive multimedia works rely on the open programming environment and have highly open creation tools to realize cross-media creation. The interactive integration of multimedia art and visual communication is the trend in design development. It follows the law of formal beauty and uses visual language to guide the content. Visual communication adapts to the needs of multiplatform media communication, adds multimedia art elements, and promotes the integration of scientific and technological progress and artistic development.

Tracing the minor gesture in painting: a shift from reflection to diffraction

ABSTRACT It is commonly assumed that we come to know the world best by observing it and that innovation is a human centred phenomenon. However, the objective of this review is to synthesise literature that emphasises the under examined, yet crucial, role that materials and tools exert in generating embodied perception; a diffractive pattern experienced as a passage of intensity sensed in the body of the painter when interacting with the material aspects of painting. Drawing on new materialist philosophies, recent creative practice research and the practices of three contemporary painters: Bracha Ettinger, Jude Rae and Paul Ching-Bor, this review examines how this complex phenomenon, known as the ‘minor gesture’, occurs in the painting process. It concludes that common painting strategies activate this phenomenon and demonstrates that innovation has its origin, not only in the intentional acts of the painter, but also in embodiment during the painting process.

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

The Study of Australian Jazz and the Issue of Methodological Nationalism

Smart storytelling

ABSTRACT While there are several publications in the field of documentary studies that deal with the digital disruption and innovations, the sub-field of emerging media needs constant re-examination as modes of production, dissemination and exhibition are exposed to significant changes and interact with documentary film in its various established and new facets. Smart Storytelling leverages contemporary digital transformations in Film and Screen Production, Screen and Digital Media and the Creative Arts more generally and synchs these with documentary studies. This special issue also explores creative practice research projects in order to demonstrate novel approaches in documentary storytelling with a focus on online, network and multilinear non-fiction and documentary practice. Particular emphasis is placed on accessible storytelling approaches, illustrating often overlooked creative processes, such as audio in cinematic VR documentary, and exploring current developments and trends such as AI for documentary media.