[spectre] fwd: PhD studentship NEoN Digital Arts with University of Glasgow and University of Edinburgh

[Andreas Broeckmann]

NEoN Digital Arts Festival (Directed by Donna Holford-Lovell), Prof. 
Sarah Cook (Glasgow) and Dr. Drew Hemment (Edinburgh) are seeking 
outstanding practice-based research candidates for a collaborative 
doctoral award fully funded for three years by the SGSAH to start in 
October 2020. Prospective candidates should submit their applications by 
3 July.

https://www.gla.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/findaphd/

NEoN (North East of North) is Scotland’s first digital art festival, 
based in Dundee. It aims to advance the understanding and accessibility 
of digital and technology-driven art and design forms and to encourage 
high quality within the production of this medium. For over ten years, 
NEoN has organised exhibitions, workshops, talks, conferences, live 
performances and public discussions and established itself as a platform 
to showcase national and international digital artists.

Over the past 30 years, digital culture festivals including NEoN have 
provided a key site through which the digital turn has been critically 
questioned and creatively explored together with diverse audiences. 
These festivals have incubated novel approaches and methods for 
commissioning, presenting and preserving digital art. However, their 
often grassroots character has limited the documentation and study of 
these phenomena. This project seeks to address this gap through a novel 
combination of archival/curatorial practice methods, evaluating how 
commissioning digital art at such events stimulates digital creativity 
and might secure the legacy of digital art.

The project has three key aims with distinct methods, subject to a 
decided research focus from the candidate:

a) Archival and historical research, including stakeholder interviews 
will consider the current public records of the activities of festivals 
that have previously commissioned digital art experiences. Alongside 
NEoN, this will also include a focus on FutureEverything (which Hemment 
founded in 1995 as the UK’s annual digital culture festival) and case 
studies from a range of other festivals and new media or digital arts 
organisations, focusing on which commissions are valued and which not in 
the existing historical records, from the different points of views of 
makers/artists, curators and viewers.

b) Using practice-based curatorial methods and working within NEoN 
Festival, the researcher will seek to uncover the changing conditions of 
commissioning digital art experiences, identifying current good 
practices and testing forms of validation, such as forms of 
documentation, collaborative authorship, or audience feedback, crucially 
throughout all steps of the commissioning process.

c) Drawing together the archival work and the evaluation of the practice 
research, the project will identify and share ways in which festivals 
could work with the wider cultural sector to ensure the legacy of the 
digital art experiences they commission, leading towards concrete 
proposals for exhibition, collection, and preservation of once fleeting 
digital art experiences. This could inform plans for a national digital 
art collection, for example.

The project will investigate the implications for the practices of 
artists, arts professionals and cultural organisations, and also ways in 
which festival curation and arts practice can address the consequences 
of technological change for society at large.

We invite applications from candidates with a strong practice-research 
and academic background in curatorial/museum and gallery studies, 
cultural and creative industries, information and media studies, design 
research, art history (new media and digital art and design) and cognate 
disciplines, with archival / curatorial skills, with a clear and 
engaging research proposal that can be developed through the available 
research supervision.

The candidate must have an excellent command of English, both spoken and 
written. Successful applicants are expected to have a good first degree 
(at least 2.1, or international equivalent) in a relevant field of arts 
and humanities, and have obtained, or are currently working towards a 
Master’s degree at Merit or Distinction level or international equivalent.

The successful candidate will be funded by AHRC via the Scottish 
Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. This covers fees and a stipend 
at UKRI level (£15,285 for 2020/21) for 3.5 years.

Please note that full awards are only available to those who meet UK 
residency requirements. Students from EU countries may be eligible for a 
fees-only award. This studentship has a residency requirement set by UK 
Research Innovation (UKRI) detailed below. Contact the College of Arts 
Graduate School at University of Glasgow 
(Lesley.watson at glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:Lesley.watson at glasgow.ac.uk>) if you 
have any queries about your eligibility.


Sarah Cook
Professor, Museum Studies
Information Studies, School of Humanities, College of Arts
University of Glasgow
11 University Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QQ
Tel: +44 (0)141 330 5104
sarah.cook at glasgow.ac.uk<mailto:sarah.cook at glasgow.ac.uk>
The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401