Towards Pervasive Media
January 2010 - May 2011

Participants
Svenja Adolphs (English Studies)
Steve Benford (PI, Computer Science)
Ron Carter (English Studies)
Paul Grainge (Institute of Film Studies)
Jonathan Hale (Built Environment)
Mike Jackson (Centre for Geospatial Science)
Roberta Pearson (Institute of Film Studies)
Gary Priestnall (Geography)


Funding
EPSRC

Project Overview
Towards Pervasive Media’ is a new initiative to foster collaborations between the Arts, Humanities, Science and Engineering at Nottingham. The broad topic of Pervasive Media, refers to new media forms in which the public contributes as well as consumes content, is available anytime and anywhere, and is ever more deeply interwoven into our daily lives. Pervasive media first emerged as a focus for new cross-disciplinary research at Nottingham from a series of informal discussions. With the aid of a pump-priming grant awarded by the University in 2006, this lead to the Pervasive Media Group being established. This research network has since grown to include academics from many disciplines. The group has now secured £200K of pump-priming funding from EPSRC, under the Cross-Disciplinary Feasibility Account programme.

There are three broad themes to the project, namely:
Theme 1: Meaningful context for both humans and computers (led by Carter, Adolphs and Jackson)
Theme 2: The production and consumption of pervasive entertainment (led by Pearson and Grainge)
Theme 3: Curating the Landscape – Museum, City, Country, Community (led by Priestnall, Hale, and Jackson)

Summary of Curating the Landscape theme:
The use of location-based technologies to create ‘mediascapes’ in which digital media are attached to physical landscapes has the potential to transform our experience of the everyday world in domains as diverse as tourism, education and games. However, the widespread adoption of mediascapes beyond is limited by a lack of understanding of how digital media can best be mapped onto their physical counterparts and how the ‘curatorial voice’ can guide the viewer to successfully contextualise digital media as part of an overall experience. Moreover, we need to gain these understandings across a range of sites and spaces, from indoor settings such as museums, to the outdoor environments of city, countryside, and wilderness. We also need to connect our insights into the nature of mediascapes to the particular subjectivities of viewers and users and to comprehend the range of cultural factors that shape perceptions and experiences among different communities, drawing on research into migration, identity and social cohesion. This theme will foster new collaborations with researchers from Geography, Architecture, History and Classics (including Nick Baron and Katharina Lorenz) who bring new perspectives on these issues and settings. Feasibility projects might explore questions such as: to what extent can heritage information be delivered to people to engage them in a meaningful way? How do people contextualise this information in terms of both their physical and cultural location and their relationship with the ‘curatorial voice’? and how do people construct knowledge from various types of media in a particular context? The results will inform the development of location-aware applications, distributed platforms, and interfaces and lead to new understandings within the arts and humanities of how individuals and social groups experience the landscape.

Through this theme I am involved with hosting three academic 'troubadours' (Nick Baron from History, Mark Rawlinson from Art History, and Katharina Lorenz from Classics), and will also be hosting Jeremy Gardiner as an artist in residence. Jeremy is a practicing artist based in Bath, and since his early appointment in the Media lab at MIT has combined interests in digital media with contemporary landscape representation, a recent example being the Light Years project (www.jeremygardiner.co.uk/projects/lightyears), pictured on the right.

In this case images were taken from highly textured paintings on wood, representing Corfe Castle and its landscape context, particularly in relation to the geological formations of Dorset’s Jurassic coastline, and embedded within an interactive 3D virtual model featuring site-specific audio and dynamically changing atmospheric effects fed by near real-time sensor data. Jeremy has also developed an interest in the possibilities for 3D printing from digital data and has recently undertaken a review of the technologies and their applications.

Jeremy intends to develop these ideas further and some of the discussions around landscape representation work that has been undertaken at Nottingham led to the idea of using the English Lake District as a subject. Much of the interest at Nottingham has related to alternative representations of landscape, often hidden (geology or sub-surface mining), or relating to historical and cultural perspectives (such as the influence of Viking culture on landscape, and lesser known romantic literature) often overlooked by present day touristic media portrayals.

Research Outcomes

Related Links
Towards Pervasive Media Site