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The Institute organises its research in four clusters: Languages of Process; Languages of Form; Culture, Theory, Context; Environments. They provide focus, visibility and network opportunities for individual and collaborative research. Each is linked to programmes of workshops, seminars, lectures, performances and exhibitions.
The unifying theme is the advance in critical understanding of art, film, music, new media, and theatre in the 20th and 21st centuries, through interrogations alert to both shared and particular features of their cultural, social, political and theoretical contexts. Modern and contemporary creative practices have been profoundly shaped by historical and theoretical concepts and debates about, for example, race, gender, popular culture, within modernist and postmodernist contexts. A rigorous investigation of these topics and discourses underpins the cluster's research.
A recurring question, across the different media and conceptual and critical discourses, is that of the adequacy and appropriateness of theory, given the rapidly changing requirements of practice in light of changes in political, cultural and technological environments. Lancaster has an outstanding reputation for its research in this area/
The activities of this research cluster are varied and staff engage with: socio-political issues of gender, practice, race and culture; the relationship between history, feminism, ideology and politics; work in contemporary performance exploring performance and its cultural significance, and the investigation of play and theatre, invoking a politics based on possibility and imagination; twentieth-century and contemporary art, architecture and new media and the examination of the cultural effects and meanings of technology and media, in relation to art, theory and philosophy; and the historical and cultural significance of twentieth-century and contemporary music and its composers.
Research is directed towards environmental knowledge and awareness in dialogue with community groups and wider users. It aims to articulate concerns and debates in the public sphere, regionally and internationally. Cross-disciplinary work focuses on the landscape of natural and constructed spaces, and the production of products and services necessary for environments of the 21st Century. Environmental quality, spatial practices and socially responsible product design are considered essential for the continued health, security and prosperity of human and natural life. There are two research groupings: People, Products and Places and Landscape and Space.
People, Products and Places generate new understanding of the roles for designers. Work includes: the identification of the significance of the contemporary designer, not only as a maker of products but also of meaning and culture; theoretical connections between corporate social responsibility and design, advocating that design take a leading role in social responsibility; the designer's capacity to envision and interpret social, cultural, technological, and economic futures; design and sustainability; and the relationship of historical development, aesthetic critique, and tacit knowledge in design processes to provide a new perspective.
Landscape and Space is concerned with natural and human landscapes. Critical theory provides the intellectual ground for re-evaluations of discourses of performance concerned with place, whilst practice-based research develops new forms of expression through engagement with landscape in dance, site-based theatre, sound, video, and photography and art installations explore social and technological environments. Projects have international audiences, as well as connecting with local community groups and school children.
The cluster's research topic is materials and forms as elements of creative language. Materials, techniques and technology are tested, manipulated and applied in combination with informed aesthetic enquiry. Innovative methods of process and production in sound and image explore memory, aesthetic self-consciousness, and sensory immersion using digital technology, with outcomes disseminated widely to large and varied audiences.
Exhibitions: Socially-engaged drawings that invent new hybrid possibilities of form, appropriating non-fine art genres of drawing to articulate political issues; the development of new forms of expression through an interrogation of the boundaries between fine art, decoration, drawing and paintings; investigations of the juxtaposition of representational photographs and abstract, optically-active shapes to create new languages of form; video investigations exploring how technical advances in digital imaging and sound can be combined with aesthetic properties in new and emotionally compelling ways.
Music computation and composition: Computational accounts of musical structure and the development of the first prototype software to derive a Schenkerian reduction from a musical score; expanding the paradigms of electro-acoustic composition with the incorporation of multi-media elements; works whose function diverges from the customary role of music with a focus on an inherent logic of sonic formal properties underlies the compositional technique; form-breaking possibilities of sonic art underlie and sonic art as portrait rather than 'musical event'.
Performances: Hotel Methuselah examines digital representations of classic filmic narratives to explore notions of duration and memory; a string trio acoustic composition premiered by the New Llano Quartet in Los Angeles; Rai's compositions were performed in Japan, Sweden, USA, Spain, Germany, France; Saario's work was performed in internationally.
The common research theme is the interrogation of the relationship between thinking and making in the context of specific creative practices and the artefacts that result from them. Among the issues investigated are explicit and implicit criteria applied in practical decision-making, processes and methodologies of creative practice, the role of languages of explanation and justification in creative activity, and the role of cultural values in shaping creative practices. There are three research groupings within Languages of Process:
Visual Intelligences explores ways of documenting intention and critical judgement within different approaches to creative practice in visual art, and the 'intelligence' embedded in artefacts of visual culture, in addition to their aesthetic and other properties. Creative and theoretical work included exhibitions, symposia, critical and contextual essays, and collaborative projects.
Design Processes researches into the role of the designer in changing technological and social conditions. This includes design forecasting and technological innovation and its application. Activities include EPSRC supported comparative analysis examining the role of the designer; the contribution of design to the field of design forecasting; capabilities and possible applications of new technologies in interactive TV.
Contemporary Performance Practice explores new methodologies of contemporary practice in performance, dance, live art, installation and inter-media, and examines processes of creative practice, placing the artist as a central figure in the interrogation of contemporary performance. Distinctive methodological approaches span critical and historiographical study as well as practical creative research.
