Institutional Presentation Statement
CoLab is a newly established interdisciplinary creative technology centre built on a core partnership between AUT University [Auckland University of Technology (New Zealand)], a public university and MIC Toi Rerehiko, a charitable arts trust. It aims tc facilitate and promote creative practices, research and development, knowledge sharing, innovatior and collaboration.
CoLab brings together arts organizations, practitioners, educational institutions, commercial enterprises, technology developers, industry bodies and communities. It supports the development and public dissemination of hybrid ideas, research and creative practices through converging technologies, innovative formats, modes and networks. In so doing, it forms a community of enquiry and a physical meeting-ground for creative expression, new media industries and trans-disciplinary educators.
CoLab is a core partnership research initiative between AUT University’s Faculty of Design and Creative Technologies which brings together Schools of Art & Design, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, Engineering and Communication Studies, and MIC Toi Rerehiko as New Zealand’s leading contemporary creative media and interdisciplinary arts centre. CoLab is working to build a strong social network of partners and associated organisations.
Key research strands include:
- Interactive & Performance Technologies: engaging with responsive environments, audience interaction, pervasive, sensory and ambient computing, animatronics and virtual worlds.
- Mobile, Spatial & Locative Media: focusing on social interaction with place and technology through the use of mobile devices, site-based systems and environmentally responsive installations.
- Digital Storytelling and Community Media Practices: enabling diverse communities to access, develop and extend cultural and social dialogues through new media.
- Visualisation: exploring modes of conceiving, organizing and representing information, knowledge and data structures, digital ontologies, collective intelligence and topological networks.
- Realtime 3D: deploying graphical communications technologies and software applications for business, education and research, interactive web3D, rendering and real-time algorithms, complex virtual worlds for both real-time and offline domains.
- Critical interfaces: interrogating the theoretical, philosophical, political and cultural implications of emerging technologies and forms of practice.
- Cord: a networked group of researchers involved with and interested in graphic programming environments. It serves as a hub for development, dissemination and debate of issues and techniques related to interactive technologies and real-time audio and video manipulation.
Current CoLab projects will be discussed in depth in light of the hybrid model that is applied – moving across not-for-profit, academic and industry sectors as well as across multiple technology platforms.
- Deborah Lawler Dormer, CoLab, New Zealand