John James Marshall thesis.pdf - OpenAIR @ RGU - Robert Gordon ...

3.5 A public exhibition and symposium
While there are aspects of this research that can be explored through published
material - some of the most important information was likely to emerge in
discussion with practitioners. It was intended that through conducting a public
exhibition the researcher would: obtain specific qualitative information from a
sample of contemporary practitioners; obtain general information relevant to
this thesis; and gain insights by making comparisons between qualitative
statements made by practitioners.
The researcher secured £30,000 from Arts Council England (ACE) and £5,000
from the Manchester Institute for Research and Innovation in Art and Design
(MIRIAD) to develop an exhibition titled ‘Perimeters, Boundaries and Borders’
(PBB) and a symposium about how computer-based tools are impacting across
the 3D art and design disciplines. This exhibition ran from 29 th September –
21 st October, 2006 in Lancaster. The exhibition venue (CityLab) was a group of
historic buildings in the centre of Lancaster that had been newly redeveloped to
provide one thousand five hundred square metres of new office space for
technology-based start-up businesses.
The exhibition and symposium allowed the researcher to expose the wider
public and peers to the research proposition. Case studies were developed
around participants in the exhibition to provide an opportunity to capture
qualitative statements by surveys and interviews (see section 4.5.4). Visitor’s
experiences of the exhibition were captured by exit surveys (see section 4.5.5).
Interviews were also conducted with the project partners (see section 4.5.6).
References to the exhibition in print and online were collected by the researcher
(see section 4.5.7). The purpose of collecting these press citations was to note
the disciplinary perspectives that regard works to be of interest to see which
works that were most discussed and by which disciplinary communities.
A few of the participants 51 in the exhibition were invited to present at a
symposium based on the contribution they would potentially make to the
discussion, previous experience of presentations they had given and their
availability on the day of the symposium. These events allowed the researcher
51 Tavs Jorgensen Aoife Ludlow, Justin Marshall, Lionel T. Dean and Human Beans.
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