Computer Arts and Technology Research Group

The Computer Arts and Technology Research and Knowledge Exchange group is an interdisciplinary collective bridging creative arts, design, and cutting-edge technology. It embodies a forward-facing ethos, committed to cultural awareness, ethical innovation, and crafting immersive experiences that engage and inspire.

Drawing on diverse expertise and driven by experimentation and critical inquiry, the group employs creative practice and interactive design to tackle contemporary challenges and explore evolving relationships between people, technologies, and environments through imaginative, immersive methods whilst being mindful of social impact and inclusivity.

We foster collaborations that reach beyond disciplinary boundaries, inviting diverse voices into shared acts of discovery. From immersive installations that activate cultural memory to speculative media that envision alternative futures, our research interrogates what it means to create ethically, engage responsively, and communicate with purpose. We believe that digital practice is not just a means of production, but a site of reflection, social presence, and storytelling.

The group is committed to shaping real-world impact through creative technologies – whether preserving cultural heritage, transforming learning experiences, or provoking public discourse. Our research doesn’t just observe the world; it actively engages with it, seeking to make visible, playable, and performable the questions that define our time.

Area of focus

Embodied and performative interaction

• Interactive experiences emphasising kinaesthetic awareness, social presence, and human-technology dialogue through gesture, movement, and immersive performance.

Modes of play

• Exploration of ludic design, critical play, and applied games to challenge norms, provoke reflection, and foster engagement across educational, cultural, or speculative contexts.

Critical making

• An emergent practice blending technological experimentation and conceptual critique, where makers construct hybrid realities to interrogate systems through hands-on inquiry.

Digital heritage

• Digitally preserving and reinterpreting cultural memory, enabling access to historical narratives through immersive media, participatory archives, and extended reality tools.

Narrative, convergence and speculative futures

• Storytelling across convergent media that embraces transmedia techniques, narratological frameworks, and speculative design to imagine transformative cultural possibilities.