Dr Linda Candy

Keynote Speaker at ArtsIT 2019

Dr Linda Candy lives and works in England and Australia as a writer and researcher. Her subject is creativity in art, technology and science with a focus on practice-based research. She has a BA (University of Adelaide), a Masters by Research (De Montfort University) and a PhD in Computer Science (Loughborough University). She is a co-director of ArtworksrActive (ArA) an independent consultancy which conducts audience studies and advises on the evaluation of art systems. She is active in promoting awareness about creativity in the arts, computing and design communities and has been guest editor of special issues for Leonardo, Design Studies and the International Journal of Human Computer Interaction. She has edited and contributed chapters to several books including: Interacting: Art, Research and the Creative Practitioner and Interactive Experience in the Digital Age: Evaluating New Art Practice, and Explorations in Art and Technology which reveal a rich source of knowledge drawn from the experiences of creative practitioners working with new technologies. Her next book is The Creative Reflective Practitioner to be published by Routledge in 2020.

Keynote Speech: Creating with the Digital as Tools, Mediators, Media and Partners

Digital technology is ubiquitous and all pervasive in everyday life from mobile phones and domestic appliances to communications satellites and transportation vehicles of every kind. The generation born since the year 2000, has known nothing else and learning to program computers is part of a normal education. Even so, for a majority of people, how the various manifestations of digital technology are designed and constructed remains a mystery. Being able to customize one’s personal devices is possible but usually at a relatively surface level. Digging deep into the software and hardware is a skill that only a minority possess. This has implications for the type of relationship between human and machine and how we think about the role of the digital in practice. That sense of control over the technology is different if people are able to design and construct the tools for themselves. Practitioners everywhere are amplifying their creative processes and the artefacts they make with digital technology. In this kind of creative practice, the technology is often the material of the creative works as well as the means by which they are made. It can enable a vast range of aesthetic qualities as well as facilitate different kinds of audience experience. Digital technology is manifested in artefacts and works of enormous variety, be they visual artworks made with drawing or painting tools, dance performances mediated by sound and motion capture systems, sculptural forms embedded with moving light and sound, or musical performances in partnership with digital instruments.

In this talk, I will focus on four kinds of creative amplification in which the digital role is differentiated as tool, mediator, medium and partner. The discussion is informed and illustrated by the ideas and works of established creative practitioners in the field for whom digital technology is integral to the way they work.