I am excited to begin this new collaborative research project. It’s working with Britten Pears Arts (when we began the bid process, I was working with Snape Maltings, but they’ve now merged into bigger organisation).
The project is called Innovative Practice in Living Archives, Digital Creativity and Music Making. It’s mostly funded by Enabling Innovation: Research and Application (EIRA), a consortium of regional universities, businesses and other organisations established with a grant from Research England. One of EIRA’s three fields of activity is Digital Creative, and our project is part of that.
We have a postdoctoral research associate working on it at UEA, Dr Ross Cole. Welcome, Ross–looking forward to working with you. Here is some information about him:
Ross Cole is a Fellow of Homerton College Cambridge, where he works on the politics of popular and experimental music. He received his PhD from Cambridge in 2015, funded by the AHRC. Prior to this, he studied at York and Oxford, where he was awarded the Gibbs Prize. He writes on a range of topics from Steve Reich to vaporwave. Under contract with University of California Press, his monograph The Folk: Music, Modernity, and the Political Imagination traces a new genealogy of vernacular song from 1870 to 1930, and beyond to the contemporary alt-right. He is co-editor of Remixing Music Studies: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Cook (Routledge).
The aim of the project is to inform the future shape and practice of Snape Maltings Creative Campus digital interface in order to understand more about how artists will engage with the interface, which technologies could be implicated, and how they engage with their audience.
The primary work of the project is a desk-based piece of research, which will will seek 10-15 examples of best practice and thinking by cultural organisations in online creativity and living archives from across the world and critically analyse them to identify key components and innovations in practice.
This data will be used in two ways. Firstly, to inform a final report outlining the landscape and giving insight into artists’ approach to digital interfaces and also to make recommendations, which Snape Maltings can use in the development of their interface. Secondly, to form the core material for an academic article published in a digital humanities journal focused on questions and interweaving of creative (musical) practice, digital technology and developments in living archives.
