Digital Creativity and Contemporary Performance (with Foundation Year)

DIGITAL CREATIVITY

This course will educate students towards creating work that bridges the gap between traditional creative practices and their modern technologically facilitated counterparts from gaming, to graphic design to music and dance. It responds to the continuing appropriation of emerging digital technologies by artists with the aim of discovering new approaches for creative expression, often referred to under the umbrella term ‘Creative Convergence’. The course responds to the teaching and research interests of staff within the subjects of Music, Performance and Visual Arts, as well as colleagues in the areas related to Computer Science. You will learn how to use a variety of technologies and realise assessed projects; these may include motion capture, haptic feedback, interaction design, data sonification & visualisation, animation & sound design, and coding/scripting in relevant languages strictly for creative output. The practical seminars will act as laboratories to experiment with these technologies and enhance your skillsets, working towards a signature practice that primes them for the digital creative sector. The lectures provide a theoretical basis for you to critically position your work, further developed through student-led discussions in tutorials. The lecture content also informs the seminars, ensuring you are able to perceive the practical application of these ideas. In your first year of study, you will be introduced to the key practitioners and practices who demonstrate the ways digital technologies enrich the creative potential of traditional art forms.

CONTEMPORARY PERFORMANCE

On this course you will be making work that physically brings the audience into the performance environment. It is about exploring drama and performance through the interactions between bodies and environments and how different technologies can facilitate this. How can light function as an actor? What are the merits and limitations of devising a performance for an audience of one person? What staging possibilities does virtual reality and video gaming provide the performance-maker? Here you will learn about the different approaches to creating your own immersive performance environments as well as gaining an important understanding of the digital creative sector.

Located within the Creative Campus, this community of artists, musicians and performers is a vibrant and exciting environment to create work. Throughout your studies you will be equipped with the relevant technical knowledge and skills to realise and manage your own projects, supported by a team of highly qualified tutors. These will include acquiring skills in digital coding, lighting design, audio and video editing, 360 film and sound recording, motion capture and projection mapping. In addition to making performances, you will present ideas verbally, as well as enhancing your skills in critical and reflective writing.

Your three years begins with an introduction to immersive performance practices before you journey into the exciting challenges of audience participation and interaction. Moving outside of the campus, the city of Liverpool itself will become a site for performance, echoing the work of immersive practitioners such as Punchdrunk, dreamthinkspeak and Shunt. Your final year will involve a push into new and experimental performance technologies, presenting performance projects in virtual worlds. This will culminate in you selecting either to complete a placement within an arts organisation or to take the lead as project manager of a major performance project of your own devising. This final year will also require you to complete an independent research project on a topic of your own choice.

This course is for those interested in making innovative and dynamic worlds for their audiences to interact with and explore. It will appeal to students interested in contemporary performance and its overlaps with creative technologies.