Being one of the youngest of the immersion fellows, this experience has been a first for me. I would like to encourage recent graduates in the creative arts to take the risk of applying to networks such as this, and apply their education to a practical and impactful project. Below are a few notes, images and videos from my time on the fellowship, and a recap of what we did in our first few workshops together!
This opportunity has allowed me to develop as a researcher, to make invaluable connections with practitioners and receive the support I needed to facilitate my career.
Workshop 1
The first workshop ‘meeting your fellows’ was held in Plymouth, with the first day taking place at Mount Edgecombe, and the second at Ocean Studios. The image above was taken from a workshop, in which we were asked to write down any resources (people, equipment, venues etc) that we have a connection with in the Southwest. These will later be compiled to create a database of resources that we are able to make use of during our time with the fellowship cohort. After a series of discussions regarding our topics of study, we were asked to perform a short show and tell, demonstrating a key aspect of our research projects. In preparation for this task, I chose to display a range of items that represented my research interests, including a series of books that I had read over the summer and that ultimately sparked my interest in the relationship between music and neurology.
Oliver Sacks – Musicophilia
Daniel Levitin – This is your brain on music
Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis – The psychology of music: A very short introduction
I also presented my undergraduate dissertation as an example of previous work and played a series of videos from live events I have conducted, to contextualise my background within the popular music industry. On the second day, we were asked to partake in group discussion, generated from the questions we had about conducting research in the field of immersion. We then categorised the topics presented within the discussion to create threads on the collaboration tool Slack, so conversions may continue between fellows. We then took part in several immersive experiences, including a virtual reality game created by Triangular Pixels, a software company from Cornwall. This experience has been incredibly beneficial to my work. By exploring differing media forms such as game design, documentary filmmaking and VR/AR, I feel my there is a broader opportunity for developing my research methodology and shared outcomes.
Workshop 2
The second conference I attended for the Southwest Creative Technology Network fellowship was held at Pervasive Media Studios in Bristol. This workshop was primarily experience based, to allow us to become more familiar with the current virtual, augmented and mixed reality products available for immersive experience. Before this workshop I had little knowledge about immersive technologies, however this has now opened up opportunities for my research that I would not has considered. For my final project I will be analysing musical experience and their effect on the mind. This workshop has allowed me to think creatively about how I could design my methodology for this study. In this session we were asked to consider the following questions…
How will you stay in touch with your producer?
Is there an area you would like to up-skill?
How may your research be shareable?
Workshop 3
The third and final fellowship meeting was held at Kalider Studios in Exeter. During this conference, we would be partaking in a number of sharing opportunities, to discuss our progress within the deep thinking phase of the fellowship. Prior to the meeting, we were asked to collate our ideas into something that we may be able to share internally, to the other fellows and the SWCTN team. We were put into groups and given the opportunity to present our research for 45 minutes each. The focus of the sharing session was to share an early version of your piece of knowledge on immersion. For this sharing session I chose to show a trailer of the documentary I am going to be working on for my project with the fellowship and final project for university. During the past three months, I have put together a production team and collection of musicians, who I will work with to create a documentary entitled ‘music cognition and the embodied mind’. This feature length documentary will explore the relationship between cognitive music listening and the mind. At the presentation, I discussed my work in relation to the idea of immersion, and how I plan to develop my documentary. Afterwards, we openly discussed how I may improve my project and how I may begin to look for opportunities to share my outputs.