School of Digital Arts (SODA) Research Hub

Description

The SODA Research Hub seeks to support excellence at local, national, and international levels to effect positive change in cultural, technological and innovation contexts.

SODA’s approach to research is collaborative, interdisciplinary and publicly engaged.

SODA’s research aims to amplify marginalised voices and channel them into modes of creative agency, challenging the status quo and helping new stories, policies and alliances to emerge. The Hub draws on established strengths in practice-based research to explore innovative narrative dynamics and new forms and functions of storytelling.

Research groups in SODA include:

• Speculative Technologies explores emergent, audience-facing technologies and their uses in the arts and education. Often using speculative research methodologies to define, examine and imagine the affordances and ethical considerations of emerging technologies such as XR, AI, game engines and OBM in future storytelling.
• Media, Culture and Society develops new and divergent technology-based methods and creative cultures that better represent the pressing needs and rights of global publics as subjects, co-creators, participants and audiences. Research explores the relationship between digital culture and society, investigating the ways in which technology is developed within and in response to societies.
• Embodied audiences explores concepts emerging from expanded practices and process-based technologies that set up situations for an embodied active audience. Research encompasses immersive environments, expanded filmmaking, user experience, sonic bodies, spatial strategies and creative display processes.
• Digital storytelling explores immersive and interactive storytelling techniques as a core part of narrative creation within emergent technologies and via a range of platforms. Research draws on established strengths in practice-based research to explore innovative narrative dynamics and new forms and functions of storytelling which challenge concepts of authorship and the role of the audience through experimental forms of media production.

SODA delivers contract research, consultancy, develop industry partnerships and create KTP opportunities in the following areas:

• NFTs
• Games
• Object Based Media
• Music and Sound

Offers funding

No, this infrastructure does not provide funding.

Contact details

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University affiliation(s)

Manchester Metropolitan University
Manchester