3D3 Institutions & Research Units

i-DAT

i-DAT is a lab for playful experimentation with data and has been delivering world-class cultural activities since 1998, pushing the boundaries of digital arts and creative media practice. As a networked organisation and cultural broker, i-DAT’s experimental and transdisciplinary agenda fosters open innovation, knowledge transfer and mutually beneficial relationships between companies, institutions, communities and individuals at a local and international level.

i-DAT’s underpinning research concerns are making ‘data’ generated by human, ecological, economic and societal activity tangible and readily available to the public, artists, engineers and scientists for artistic expression with a cultural and social impact. It involves designing and constructing networked interactive hardware/software to focus on the significance that harvesting, processing and the manifestation of data can play in contemporary culture. This practice-based approach engages pragmatically with people, communities and institutions through collaborative and participatory design methods and is supported by grant funding and industrial partnerships, such as IBM and NESTA. i-DAT’s core supervisory team have more than 20 PhD completions in a broad range areas which are bound by a digital agenda, such as wearables, performance, architecture and immersive FullDome environments.

i-DAT is interested in receiving PhD proposals that include an element of research or work placement with Fulldome UK or IBM Smarter Planet. Please see below under ‘Partners’ for further details.

Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR)

Music postgraduate students at University of Plymouth enjoy a well-resourced creative environment underpinned by research of international significance conducted by the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR) and the annual Peninsula Arts Contemporary Music Festival. ICCMR is renowned for developing musical research informed by science and new technologies. Our students have the opportunity to harness their musical practice through collaborative and interdisciplinary projects with theatre, dance and cognitive sciences. ICCMR is based at The House, a purpose-built Performance Arts Centre that opened in 2014, and is affiliated to the Centre for Research in the Humanities, Music and Performing Arts (HuMPA) and the Cognition Institute.  The impact of the research developed with our postgraduate students has been reported in Nature, BBC World Service, BBC Radio 3, The Gramophone, New Scientist, CNN, Scientific American, TV Globo, France Music and Polskie Radio to cite but a few.

Internships and residencies for 3D3 students based in ICCMR are currently available  at NOTAM (Oslo) and the National Institute for Music Research (Berlin). Please see below under ‘Partners’ for further details.

Performance. Experience. Presence (P.E.P)

The P.E.P research group at Plymouth focuses on issues of embodiment, representation, culture and identity through the making and analysis of performance in a wide variety of genres (including theatre, somatic practice, live art, & popular performance forms across digital and material spaces). All members engage in practice-as-research, and the group champions the value of rigorous reflexive practice and embodied knowledges at all levels of a research career, especially in interdisciplinary areas that stretch our understandings and expectations of performance and discrete genres. Our areas of expertise include the body in performance; performance sites, spaces and environments; lived experience and performance; and performer training. The group’s many national and international collaborations and partnerships work to celebrate diversity and increase access to performance.

We host innovative, friendly conferences which aim to engender research dialogue between academics and people who operate outside the academy, including therapists and teachers, performance artists and storytellers, curators and tour guides. These events have included the annual TaPRA conference (2009); the Live Laboratory Symposium (2010), with Plymouth Arts Centre and the Marina Abramovic Institute; an International Research Forum on Guided Tours, co-organised with Halmstad and Gothenburg Universities (2011); and symposia on the Hidden City and site specific practices (2008), Mela and cultural identity in performance (2012), and Zombies and Performance (2013). In 2014, the University opened a new multi-million pound Performing Arts Centre, The House, with dedicated theatres and rehearsal spaces.

Transtechnology Research

This is a transdisciplinary research group whose constituency is drawn from historians, philosophers, anthropologists, artists and designers. It proceeds from a historical and theoretical perspective with the objective of understanding science and technology as a manifestation of a range of human desires and cultural imperatives. Its aim is to provide a doctoral and post-doctoral environment for researchers who undertake academic research informed by their own and others creative practice. Its overarching research project concerns the historical and philosophical aspects of science and technology and the popular arts.

Underpinned by current thinking in the cognitive sciences, the research is informed by a media archaeological approach to understand the significance of creative agency in the process of technology acquiring meaning both before, and after, it enters into the public domain. Using a range of practice and theory based methods, the group is concerned to make apparent evidence of human desire and cultural imperatives as they are manifested in the way that science and technology is practised, innovated by entrepreneurs and interpreted by its users. Transtechnology Research hosts the UK offices of Leonardo (MIT Press) and is a leading collaborator with the Cognition Institute and the CogNovo Marie Curie programme at Plymouth.

Transtechnology Research is interested in receiving PhD proposals that include an element of research or work placement with Leonardo (MIT Press), or Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art (Gdansk). Please see below under ‘Partners’ for further details.

Partners

We would welcome project proposals that involve either an element of research or an internship at one of the following partners. In all cases your PhD stipend might be extended for 1-2 months to take into account a period of work placement during your programme of study.