Lizzie Muller

• UNSW Sydney

In this video, Andrew Martin (Education), Lizzie Muller (Audience Experience and Museums), and Sean Choo (Architecture) speak with Prof Claire Annesley (UNSW Dean of Arts and Social Sciences) about the innate value of Social Science, Design, Arts, and Humanities degrees, the distinctive attributes of graduates in these disciplines, and the importan...

This article identifies the distinctive nature of arts-based psychosocial enquiry and practice in a public mental health context, focusing on two projects delivered as part of The Big Anxiety festival, in Sydney, Australia in 2017: ‘Awkward Conversations’, in which one-to-one conversations about anxiety and mental health were offered in experimenta...

Visual matrix methodology has been designed for researching cultural imaginaries. It is an image-led, group-based method that creates a “third space” research setting to observe audience groups re-enacting lived experience of an event or process that takes place in the third space of a cultural setting. In this article, the method is described thro...

In our research, two groups of people living with memory loss due to mid-stage dementia were invited to view a film installation, centred on the experience of a woman with a brain lesion and dense amnesia. The groups, recruited from day-care and support settings, were living at home. One included informal care-givers. After the film, each participa...

Harald Szeemann’s 1967 exhibition Science Fiction is ripe for re-examination. Insights gained from unpublished handwritten notes reveal Szeemann’s endless list-making as a connective curatorial methodology that sought to re-create an expansive science fiction ‘state of mind’. The resulting exhibition of over 3,000 diverse objects stands in contrast...

The locus of encounter between art, science and the public can be conceptualized as third space – a generative site of shared experience. This article reports on a group-based psychosocial method led by imagery and affect --- the visual matrix --- which enables researchers to capture and characterize knowledge emerging in third space, where discipl...

Museums and galleries have always been recognized as creating wellbeing outcomes. This paper builds upon this existing discourse with a study that is speci c to the curation of digital art-works addressing the topic of mental health. It documents my own practice based research and audience response to the exhibition: Group Therapy: Mental Distress...

Theorists and practitioners in the overlapping fields of media art and Human Computer Interaction have been working together for many years to understand digital objects, which often display a kind of “liveliness”. However there has been less joint consideration of the curatorial implications of these lively objects – many of which challenge tradit...

CP Snow’s mid-century idea that a “third culture” might come into being to connect arts and science is perhaps most publically realised today through art-science - a heterogeneous field of creative research and production, characterised by the collaboration of artists and scientists and by research combining scientific and aesthetic investigation....

This article describes interdisciplinary research undertaken by a group of artists, designers, curators and somatic bodywork practitioners to explore a human-centred approach to the potential of touch, movement, balance and proprioception as modalities for interactive art. Somatic bodywork methodologies such as the Feldenkrais method provide highly...

In this paper, we outline a pilot project aimed at exploring the role of contextual factors in the facilitation of creativity and innovation within a range of South African art forms. Interviews with 11 people who have rich experience of the South African art domain delivered an insightful perspective on the contextual factors driving lifelong crea...

The Take Part workshop explores the philosophical, ethical, political and methodological crossovers that exist between artists and designers working with participatory processes. The workshop brings together artists and designers who have developed innovative and compelling methods for collaborating with audiences and end-users. It aims to actively...

The paper describes a programme of research and practice in which the evaluation of interactive artworks in a public space is undertaken as part of the creative process. It explores the different perspectives involved in the research process of Beta_Space, a public exhibition and evaluation facility in the Powerhouse Museum Sydney. The three viewpo...

This paper describes a new approach to documenting media art which seeks to place in dialogue the artist’s intentions and the audience’s experience. It explicitly highlights the productive tension between the ideal, conceptual existence of the work, and its actual manifestation through different iterations and exhibitions in the real world. The...

This paper explores the idea of the exhibition as a living laboratory in the making and curating of interactive art. It suggests that museums can act as living laboratories where curators, artists and audiences collaborate in real-world settings. Such laboratories are shown to be essential for the study of the audience experience of interactive art...

This paper describes an action research project based on the process of designing the visualisation of heart and breath rate data for the interactive artwork Cardiomorphologies. The project aimed to realise the affective goals of the artist as closely as possible by studying the audience experience of the visualisations and incorporating the findin...

This position statement describes a method called "Experience Workshops", developed by the authors for working with expert audiences in the design of an interactive artwork. Based around the participants' experience of a high-fidelity prototype, the workshop aims to generate experiential language, draw together the artist's goals and the participan...

Abstract This paper describes the development,of laboratory concepts,in the making and curating of interactive art, in which the exhibition becomes a site for collaboration between curators, artists, and audiences. It describes Beta_space, an experimental public venue that seeks to realise the concept,of the exhibition as living laboratory through...

This paper describes a study into the situated experience of interactive art. The study was conducted with audiences of the artwork Iamascope and is framed by the four categories of embodied experience that have been proposed by its artist Sidney Fels. The video-cued recall method we employed was shown to reveal rich detail about situated interacti...

This research project draws together two areas; interactive art and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). This paper describes the data collection of audience behaviour in a variety of museum and gallery locations. Subsequent data analysis leading to persona and scenario design illustrates how empirical data can inform the design of a movement-based in...