Angela Piccini
My work investigates place and visual culture. I am interested in the production of place and space in small-screen broadcast and experimental documentary - from the ways in which screen media actively and ‘performatively’ make place through to the fluid materialities of production and reception contexts. To that end I am specifically interested in the ways in which archaeology, heritage and material culture are produced and received across television and convergent media; media audiences and reception; technological change and media, especially the impact of new database technologies on moving image material; and screen practice-as-research into place, material culture and narrative. In short, I am interested in how archaeology is a mode of creative action rather than a static artefact.
These interests have been expressed through a range of projects, from funded research through to community involvement. From 2006-08 I was principal investigator for a creative research network that explored transdisciplinary and mixed-mode research approaches to site, with a specific focus on the performative processes of emptying (http://humanitieslab.stanford.edu/materialworld/11). I am also co-investigator on the JISC-funded STARS (Semantic Web Tools for Screen Arts Research) project, with principal investigator Nikki Rogers (University of Bristol’s Institute for Learning and Research Technology) and project partner Watershed Media Centre. The project is developing
leading-edge approaches to online moving image applications to enable search, play, annotation and re-use functionality. And from 2002 I have been active in the Brislington Neighbourhood Partnership (Bristol, UK), working as Secretary and then Chair, and this has found expression in my video practice and in more prosaic relationships around planning applications and community action planning.
From January-September 2009 I am a Visiting Scholar at the University of British Columbia, in the Centre for Cinema Studies and in the Department of Anthropology. I am researching the ways in which media produced alongside the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympic Games harnesses material culture and place in the production of specifically civic identities. I will also be collaborating on a participatory video project with Vancouver communities, which aims to produce alternative narratives of place.
Featured in: SIGNAL Artist Talk: The Land
www.bris.ac.uk/drama/staff_research/angela_piccini
