Locating Postdigital Places: future directions for virtual worlds in art history and museology

Presenter: Andrew Yip

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?

Dr 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.