Convenors: Dr Christina Clarke, Mr Roderick Bamford, Dr Erica Seccombe

The Materiality, Agency and Data research group is concerned with relationships between materiality, data and their agencies in art, craft, design and the humanities.

Researchers investigate materially embedded data and how its digital abstractions are activated, mediated, organised and communicated through creative disciplines, examining how those practices engage communities and influence historical and contemporary cultures irrespective of time and space. At a global and local level, members initiate and collaborate to investigate the ways tangible and non-tangible knowledge, experience and information intersect with the systems, processes, networks, collections, interpretations and psychosocial transformations associated with the manipulation of materials and data.

By questioning why these things matter, group projects explore the types of conditions under which materiality and data are created, disseminated and consumed in order to create new meanings. The diversity and tensions arising from different interpretations of and encounters with materiality and data also provide sites for negotiation, leading to outputs that test current concerns in the world through scalable propositions. Critical issues are raised through understandings of materiality and data, in both physical and electronic forms, and encompass many areas of interest including practice-led research in art, craft and design, music and performance, art history and art theory, museum studies, digital humanities, collective imaginaries, cultural histories and social networks.

Members:
Dr Erica Seccombe, Mr Roderick Bamford, Dr Christina Clarke, Dr Rohan Nicol, Lucy Irvine (PhD candidate ANU), Assoc. Professor David Hansen, Dr Robert Wellington, Dr Julie Brooke, Dr Kate Murphy, Blanche Tilden.

Statement on Research Hub Outputs:

• New forms of archival documentation activating three dimensional and virtual experience.
• New forms of material artefacts.
• New models for material hermeneutics that theorise ways that scientific data is transformed and communicated.
• New models of how embodied material and process knowledge informs decision making in demographic and psychographic population segments.