Visual, Digital, Material Research Group

This research initiative takes film, art and exhibition making as a means of engaging communities and the wider public with questions around global transformation and social creativity. It draws together themes of collaboration, new public anthropologies, material culture, visual culture, and art as ethnography.Working at the intersections of the digital, material and visual culture, researchers in this group are variously involved in film making and other forms of image-based work, building curatorial partnerships with museums and cultural organisations, and using digital media to expand ethnographic methods and insights.

The program is closely associated with The Cairns Institute's Anthropological Laboratory for Tropical Audiovisual Research (ALTAR) which runs public film screenings that explore the intersections of ethnographic film, Indigenous media and experimental film. A key element of this research group involves an on-going collaboration between JCU and the Moesgaard Museum and Aarhus University in Denmark, led by Associate Professor Jennifer Deger and Professor Ton Otto, both of whom bring a strong emphasis on practice-led research methods involving film-making, new media and/or exhibition as research method. 

2018 Events

16 March 2018 | Creative Ecologies | One day workshop
16 March 2018 | Plasticene Marine | Exhibition
28 March 20918 | Art, Science and Community Working Together | Video from Creative Ecologies workshop and the Plasticene Marine art exhibition

2017 Events

27 February 2017 | Researching positive youth development in the shanty towns of post-colonial Haiti | Seminar by Kristine Andreassen
26 October 2017 | Life after death: An anthropologists’ cine-dialectic | Seminar and presentation by Ton Otto and filmmaker/editor Gary Kildea

2016 Events

26 September | The Playful - and Problematic? | HDR student seminar
27 September | Critical/creative Practice-led Research | One day workshop
12 October | Exhibition, Video Art and Performance as Interventionist Research Method | HDR Workshop
26 October | Motorkite Dreaming | ALTAR film screening at The Tanks
3 November | Digital Humanities@JCU