Museums and the virtual world

Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts based at Flinders University

Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts

Public talk by Andrew Yip on  using digital technologies to support the telling of stories in museums with responses by a panel of experts

Flinders University, Victoria Square

Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts at Flinders University and the History Trust of South Australia are delighted to host a public talk by Dr Andrew Yip from the University of New South Wales together with a panel of respondents on the topic of telling stories in museums with digital technologies. Andrew will lead an exploration of the complex relationship at the heart of 21st Century museum practice, between conservation and display of material culture and the transformative effects of ‘the digital’. Then a panel of museums experts and researchers will respond to Andrew's provocations with considered thoughts from their own contexts.Talk: ‘In defense of the unreal: museums in the virtual world’ Dr Andrew YipMuseums have always been virtual realities, with intricate systems of knowledge, navigation and paths of interaction through the ordering of physical objects. I contend that it is for this reason that ‘the digital’ is often seen as a threat to scholarly museology - not for its lack of materiality or potential affect, but because its interactions distribute authority and agency to its users and away from the ‘authoritative museum’. Contemporary methods of creating, consuming and sharing visual cultures are innately post-digital, meaning that formerly novel technological methods for instant communication, socialisation and interaction have been normalised to the point of social invisibility. This has supported the shift, already well underway, from traditional top-down models of museum pedagogy even more rapidly towards constructivist models of user-led meaning making. In this talk I ask how practitioners of digital humanities can respond to the particular affordances of interactive digital environments to both respond to this cultural moment while serving the philosophical aims of the museum to preserve, present and protect heritage. How, by considering digital worlds as innate, real ‘places’, can we begin to look at immersive media not as an ersatz novelty, but as a habituated medium for engaging with visual cultures?Panel of respondents: Dr Kristy Kokegei, Head of Audience and Experience at the History Trust of South Australia, Jason Bevan, Senior Lecturer in Visual Effects and Entertainment Design at Flinders University, Dr Ben Stubbs, senior lecturer in journalism and creative writing at UniSA.Facilitator: Dr Tully BarnettBiosDr Andrew Yip is an immersive designer, new media artist and art historian whose practice explores the use of embodied and interactive visualisation to cultural heritage research. Andrew lectures in Simulation and Immersive Technologies at UNSW and is lead designer at the iCinema Centre for Interactive Cinema Research. His installations have been shown at major galleries including at the Art Gallery of NSW, Heide Museum of Modern Art, The Powerhouse Museum, South Australian Maritime Museum and internationally.Dr Kristy Kokegei is Head, Audience and Experience at the History Trust of South Australia. She is a digital historian and strategist, managing the development of the History Trust’s digital presence and oversees the organisation’s public engagement activities in the digital, community museum and learning and education spheres and spearheads the Trust’s evolving role in supporting and enabling South Australia’s state-wide community history network, in designing and delivering 21st century learning and education experiences for students, and in providing strategic guidance to the digitisation and engagement activities of all History Trust museum branches.Jason Bevan is a Senior Lecturer in Visual Effects, a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and practitioner in Visual Effects, Postproduction, Animation, and Film. Jason graduated as a stop-frame animator and developed a career in Animation and Postproduction, before developing curriculum in Visual Effects. Jason has been a Programme director/ Course Leader in Visual Effects associated subjects for over two and a half decades. He spent 2019 working as an Associate Professor in Visual Effects at XJTLU in Suzhou, China, setting up a new State of the Art Film School before joining the VFX team at Flinders University in January 2020. He now teaches Visual Effects alongside researching for his Ph.D. in Virtual Production and Motion Capture, developing pipelines for Integrating Production Technology in this genre.Dr Ben Stubbs is a senior lecturer in journalism and creative writing at the University of South Australia. He has written four non-fiction books on topics including the Australian socialist colony in Paraguay and vertical travel in South Australia. Ben created the VR Storytelling course and the Immerse VR editing app at UniSA in 2018 and was awarded an innovation in journalism award by The Guardian. He is now working with the South Australian Museum to re-imagine aspects of their mega fauna and Australian Aboriginal Cultures Gallery using augmented reality (AR) installations.Dr Tully Barnett is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Arts at Flinders University. She is Interim Director of Assemblage Centre for Creative Arts. She holds a DECRA Fellowship for a project looking at digitisation as a cultural practice and publishes regularly on digital textual cultures. She is Deputy President of the Australasian Association for Digital Humanities (aaDH).

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