The Age of Experience: Professor Jeffrey Shaw (Dean of the School of Creative Media, City University, Hong Kong)

ABSTRACT


This presentation examines new paradigms for developing embodied museum experiences, based on the practices of New Media Art. The talk will explore innovative interactive applications and fully immersive visualization systems that were jointly developed by Professor Jeffrey Shaw (City University Hong Kong) and Professor Sarah Kenderdine (University of NSW, Sydney).

Imaging data at world heritage sites is fundamental to cultural conservation and preservation, but little of it finds its way into the public domain. Immersive interactive visualization environments offer the opportunity for this data to be experienced in forms that have significant impact on visitors’ experience and cognition. The pioneering installations described in this lecture include the world heritage sites of Dunhuang in Gansu Province China and the monuments at Hampi in South India. The research also involves visualization of cultural collections including massive volumes of televisual broadcast data, the web-based WW1 archives of Europeana and over one hundred thousand objects from the collection of Museum Victoria. These works will be contextualized within the framework of a longstanding art practice that explores the potentialities of virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems, interactive narrative and the application of omni-spatial visual analytics to humanities and sciences datasets.

Professor Jeffrey Shaw (Hon.D.CM) has been a leading figure in new media art since the 1960s. In a prolific oeuvre of widely exhibited and critically acclaimed works (www.jeffrey-shaw.net) he has pioneered and set benchmarks for the creative use of digital media technologies in the fields of virtual and augmented reality, immersive visualization environments, navigable cinematic systems and interactive narrative. Shaw was the founding director of the ZKM Institute for Visual Media Karlsruhe (1991-2002), and in 2003 he was awarded an Australian Research Council Federation Fellowship to co-found and direct the UNSW iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research. Since 2009 Shaw has been Chair Professor of Media Art and Dean of the School of Creative Media at City University in Hong Kong (www.cityu.edu.hk/scm) where he is also Director of the Centre for Applied Computing and Interactive Media (ACIM) and the Applied Laboratory for Interactive Visualisation and Embodiment (ALiVE). Shaw is a Visiting Professor at the Imperial College Institute of Global Health Innovation.