With Dan Ashton I have recently set up the Transforming Creativity Research Group at WSA. We are waiting for the official website to be launched, but have a news and events blog up and running:
https://transformingcreativity.wordpress.com/
We have already run the After VR: the archaeology and potential of immersive media symposium, and Dan and I have been working with colleagues from across the University of Southampton and beyond on an AHRC Creative Industries Clusters bid.
The Transforming Creativity research group at WSA addresses contemporary change in the cultural and media industries, everyday and activist media cultures, critical making, and playful, critical and speculative design for cultural experience. Taking a critical approach to notions of creativity and imagination as a focus – and the our home within an art school as an inspiration – we foreground on the one hand the professional and political generation of ideas and cultural products and on the other everyday consumption, play, activism and participatory culture. We emphasise the transformations of media, design and cultural industries and their creative practices wrought by digital media and social networks, and the playful, political and bottom–up cultures they facilitate.
Throughout, the group keeps an eye out for the distributed, the political, the experimental, the affective, the queer, the playful, the transgressive and disruptive within creative industry and the everyday.
