Output details
35 - Music, Drama, Dance and Performing Arts
Middlesex University
RESCEN website materials 2009-13
The ResCen website details the research processes and outcomes undertaken by members of the ResCen Research Centre. The website addresses a key concern of the ResCen mission to ‘make these materials, musings and critical reflections available to others’. Using web presentation allows ResCen’s research to be current as well as a documentary record, to be widely available to a range of audiences and to link audiences at live events with others who may be in remote locations.
As the Head of ResCen, writer and editor in chief I am responsible for leading major projects, which are documented in ways that best represent artistic and academic impulses. Shobana Jeyasingh’s Home meets home exemplifies this curatorial approach which is intended to frame contributions from a range of participants in a range of registers, and which also enables collaborative contributions.
Generating and curating the production of website material includes the blogs written by academics, overcoming the reluctance of academics to open their thinking processes to a wider audience – an understandable initial reaction given the unfamiliarity of some of the material and experiences we were encountering. The allowance of the conditional, the contingent the spontaneous in the blogs has sparked interest and the website has attracted over 11,000 unique visitors in one month.
The steady flow of web postings shown in the portfolio document indicates the attention that is required to communicate effectively with those accessing the site, to make sense of the temporal location of the posting and to enable navigation that is logical and yet allows the creativity of the artist to be exemplified. Since 2009, contributions from over 25 academics and a range of artists have been added. A bank of more traditional scholarly articles is developing, located within a context that is accessible to wider audiences.
As this is an ongoing research outcome please see portfolio outlining the assessable materials within the period.