Devoted to the creative possibilities in sound and vision, from the study of contemporary and classic cinema to the practice of digital artistry right at the cutting edge of technology.
Dr Matthew Sansom is a successful sound artist who works with specific locations, either through the installation of acoustic sculptures or the on-site recording and manipulation of ambient sounds.
With a background in improvised and experimental music as well as the music of the Sheffield club scene of the 1990s, Matthew is able to fuse expertise in sound and music with novel and unusual acoustic technologies as a practice-led researcher. As well as devising innovative techniques with audio-visual software to improvise soundscapes, Matthew has also created his own versions of the parabolic acoustic-amplifier dishes that were originally designed to listen for enemy aircraft before the perfection of radar. He has installed examples of these dishes as interactive public artworks in the Yorkshire countryside and an urban setting in Liverpool.
Matthew, who is also lecturer and Creative Music Technology programme director in the Department of Music and Sound Recording, has worked with colleagues from across the University on theMindBeat performance project, which uses sound, image and text to look at the nature of the collaborative process. He is a member of landscapequartet, a group of four sound artists and musicians conducting sonic investigations into the natural environment, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Movement is a fundamental condition of the human experience. To sense movement, or to feel ourselves in motion, is to connect with the universe's restless state. In one strand of his work, interdisciplinary cultural theorist and performance practitioner Dr Nicolas Salazar Sutil focuses on the inscription of movement in symbolic representation (as mathematics, for example), and also its representation through human bodies. He looks at movement within the cultural context of our technologised society, influenced by the revolutionary use of ‘vision in motion’ in historical avant-gardes such as cubism, futurism, constructivism and Bauhaus.
Using motion-tracking technology and time-lapse video, Nick is able to capture movement in real time to create beautiful, original, figurative visualisations of moving bodies that give extraordinary insight into our dynamic relationship with the space and temporalities in which we move.
Together with Professor Rachel Fensham of the University of Melbourne, Nick founded the MoVe (Movement Visualisation in e-Culture) independent research platform to support the development of novel methods in movement analysis and visualisation, and to experiment with inventive uses of motion-tracking technology in movement research and performance. He is also the founder of C8, a collaborative performance group that focuses on choreographing mathematical objects and spaces.
Personal experiences often inspire artistic endeavours, but they can also inform an academic’s choice of research topic.
For Dr Milton Mermikides (composer, musician and lecturer in the Department of Music and Sound Recording) the personal, the artistic and the academic came together in his BloodLines project.
For this, he took daily blood-test results generated during his own treatment for leukaemia and translated them via digital creative technology into an electronic composition that forms an extraordinary autobiological work, with each second of music representing a day of treatment.
BloodLines grew out of Milton’s Hidden Music: Sonic Translations of the Biological World project, and also forms the pilot for Science Through Art: A Chimera of Cultures.
Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Science In Culture scheme, Science Through Art allows Milton to support an international research network of scientists, writers, choreographers, musicians and artists. Collaboration across these disciplines helps science and art to understand each other better, and encourages each to help the other communicate in new ways to new audiences.
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