Project Title: InSTORE: Close Encounters in Retail Space. Exploring how art and design experiment with physical computing interfaces can provoke meaningful, inclusive encounters between communities and retail space.
Project Code: INSTORE - 40202931
Project Description:
InSTORE explores how creative art and design practice with ‘physical computing’ interface technology can examine and re-imagine community experiences of retail space in the West Midlands. By making new artwork with communities, InSTORE will explore aspects of the political, social and aesthetic dimensions of retail space. Retail space is designed for profit, but it also embodies an expression of exchange as social interaction, factors which drive our desire to re-animate retail space in spite of decline. This project is situated in andseeks to find new modes of practice in histories of critical spatial practice, immersive digital spectaculars, collaborative practice and digital arts.
Physical computing interfaces enable ways to explore intimate, close relationships betweenindividual and group, bodies, spaces and materials. InSTORE will involve the development of collaborative ways of working with chosen formal or informal groups in particular retail spaces, from the large corporate chain to market or local shop (depending on consent). Works will be developed in labs, workshops or small fieldwork encounters. Relationships will be built with the support of local groups and art organisations. An iterative process of making new works and sharing them will enable us to:
• Understand and capture the specific intimacy of engagement with retail encounters
• Re-imagine relationships between retail space and the bodies that interact with it
• Challenge the tendencies for retail encounters to exclude rather than include.
• ‘Touch’ the deeply particular experiences of specific communities, and to generate new relationships and forms of collective working and learning.
Anticipated Findings:
The proposed project will:
• Examine the ways that creative digital practice with physical computing interfaces can
explore and communicate relationships between bodies, groups, material and digital space.
• Generate insight into the ways that communities can be engaged with creative technology, and the resulting forms of collectivity that can result.
• Explore the potential for creative technologies to change how communities feel about and occupy retail space.
• Enable a greater understanding of the ways that creative digital practice can work to find new territory in the current debates about the digital spectacular vs social critique.
• Generate findings that materialise this understanding in both the form of artworks, and in a written thesis. The contribution to knowledge made by this study creates a new relationship between a number of fields of knowledge.
• Contribute to the progression of practice and study of creative technology design and art, building on artists and designers working in retail contexts.
• The focus of this research is on intimate encounters, using haptic interfaces to reflect on the experiences of bodies in space, contributes to physical computing research, especially digital and analogue hybrid environments.
• The research will bring this body of work into connection with social science and artist researchers who explore exclusion in public and private spheres. This may connect and build upon literature that explores forms of exclusion including decolonising research and critical studies.
• Develop insights into experiences of retail space in the UK, and explores the value of
creative practice research to sense and communicate relationships
Contact (and Director of Studies for this project):
Prof Becky Shaw – Becky.Shaw@bcu.ac.uk
Application Link: https://www.bcu.ac.uk/courses/art-and-design-phd-2024-25