School of The Arts

The Arts in Isolation project examines the challenges of creating art during an era of social distancing.

Funded by the Ferens Education Trust and led by Dr Andrew King, the project has begun creating artistic works to share online with arts organisations and regional schools. The project also investigates the context of working in this way when considering collaboration, audience engagement and performance in isolation.

The project began in September 2020 and works with external partners including Absolutely Cultured, BBC Introducing, Polyphony Arts, the Hull Music Recital Club and Virtual Concert Halls.

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Arts in Isolation

Chinese Whispers is an intercultural and creative project. It develops intercultural awareness, competence and citizenship among local members of the community of all ages to facilitate respectful interaction between people from different cultural backgrounds. The project also promotes the learning of language and culture, specifically Mandarin Chinese, through singing.

The Chinese Whispers research cluster explores a number of different aspects:

• educational – including the development of the ‘singing curriculum’
• psychological – to investigate cultural, emotional, experiential and intellectual aspects of learning Chinese in the context of music-making
• creative – to explore issues of translation and cultural fusion through music composition.

The Chinese Whispers project team is chaired by Music staff Dr Elaine King and includes PhD students Yanyi Lu, supervised by Dr Elaine King; Eloise McCann, supervised by Dr Elaine King and Dr Shane Lindsay; and James Rushworth, supervised by Dr Rowan Oliver and Dr Alexander Binns.

The research cluster is funded by the University of Hull Scholarship Scheme and supported by the Confucius Institute at the University of Hull.

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Chinese Whispers

The University is part of Connected Campus, a group of Yorkshire universities working in collaboration with Screen Yorkshire to strengthen the links between higher education and the regional screen industries. The partnership provides guidance, training, and employment information and opportunities to students.

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Connected Campus

Colleagues in the School of the Arts led by Jason Hayhurst have been working with Team GB to create 3D-immersive environments of some of the spaces that athletes will experience when attending the 2021 Tokyo Olympics.

This 3D-virtualisation of facilities is helping to orientate athletes before flying out to Japan. The project includes 360-degree videos displaying tourist attractions in Japan for athletes to better understand the area. It also includes a virtual-reality immersive experience of 3D-rendered rooms in the performance lodge.

Securing support from the Higher Education Innovation Fund has helped bring this virtual reality experience to life. Six student interns helped design the project by modelling and texturing the branded 3D assets and creating unity playable levels.

This work with Team GB also led to a collaboration with the Department of Psychology and the University Sports Centre. Dr Terry Westby-Nunn was the leader of the positivity theme for this collaboration; this included research, writing, film shoots, and video editing.

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Read more: Immersive technology helps Team GB Athletes go for gold

The Forest is an innovative project that engages young children and their families with research in environmental resilience. This interactive engagement space features specialist activities, scenography and an immersive 360 soundscape of forest noises from different areas to virtually ‘transport’ visitors across the world.

A collaboration between the University’s Drama department and the University’s Energy and Environment Institute, The Forest provides a quiet, reflective space for families to create, read and discuss environmental issues

The Forest is integrated into the Energy and Environment Institute’s Earth Arcade project which engages the public with the institute’s research by creating exciting and innovative themed spaces. Though the Earth Arcade is typically high energy, The Forest is deliberately quiet, built on principles of mindfulness and child-led engagement developed through theatrical dramaturgy, scenography and storytelling.

The space was premiered in full at the 2019 Hull Freedom Festival following Research and Development sessions at Earth Arcade events during 2018.

Designed and led by Dr Amy Skinner and Dr Cat Fergusson Baugh, The Forest includes storytelling and activity facilitation by undergraduate and postgraduate students from Drama and the Energy and Environment Institute. Initial reflections on The Forest, collaborations between drama specialists and environmental scientists, and the use of scenography principles in Science Communication were presented at the 2020 General Assembly of the European Geoscience Union.

Led by Dr Christian Billing, arts staff and postgraduate students have used practice-as-research methods to devise movement-based, spoken-word and creative sonic outputs to address the problems of global plastics pollution. Working as part of the Circular Plastics project the team utilise art-based methods to replicate the complexity of a holistic and nuanced approach to plastic pollution.

Alongside researchers in economics, logistics, social geography, chemistry and education, the arts team is now using new writing, immersive sound design and musical composition with the award-winning storyteller and sound artist Hana Walker-Brown to distil important science research into a downloadable podcast.

The Circular Plastics project is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council.

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Circular Plastics