PhD research
Using a range of practice and theory based methods the group is concerned to make apparent evidence of human desire and cultural imperatives as they are manifested in the way that science and technology is practiced, innovated by entrepreneurs and interpreted by its users. Topics currently being researched concern the historical and philosophical aspects of nineteenth century media and contemporary digital technology, early cinema and the technological imaginary, cognitive issues of industrial design (esp. ageing), affective interaction and instrumentation, perceptual aspects of audio-visual media, the concept of space and the representation of the sublime, software ubiquity and affect, intellectual property and creativity, the global distribution of sound, the significance of space exploration for particular communities of users, and the interaction between experimental, advertising and amateur film in the mid twentieth century.
All supervisory teams include members with substantial track records of practice in the arts, design or filmmaking who also have significant publishing profiles in at least one other academic discipline. These currently include Film and Cinema Studies, Media Philosophy, Digital Media, Media Anthropology, Design Theory, Interaction Design and Interactive Art. Registered students currently hold full doctoral research grants from AHRC, EPSRC, UoP, and Brazilian and Portuguese Research Councils. Transtechnology Research also holds and oversees Post-Doc research grants from the EU.
For further information prospective candidates are advise to contact Professor Michael Punt in the first instance. (Michael.Punt@plymouth.ac.uk)
Ongoing and recently completed PhD Research titles:
Advertising and Experimental Film: Synergies and Differences in the Context of European Exchange.
Affect and the cognitive models: the cultural implications of software
Affective Wearables: for a technoecology of fashion.
Ageing Futures: Towards cognitively inclusive digital media products.
Changing Space: the social and experiential culture of spacecraft and the public domain.
The Cinema and its Spectatorship: The Spiritual Dimension of the ‘Human Apparatus’
Copyright legislation and the re-use of archival footage.
Earthsound: listening to The Planet
Enacted Creativity and Audio Visual Media
Gestalt Biometrics and their Applications
Khora and the essence of Space
Laughter, Curation and the Infrathin
Modelling the Moving Image: moving image archives; illustrating, documenting and eliciting radical conceptions of representation, perception and knowledge.
Research Seminars