We're looking at how computers, media and social lives come together.
The Centre for Creative And Social Technology (CAST) aims to foster interdisciplinary research and collaboration around technology and its relation to society and creative practice. In particular it draws together social science and cultural research with computing research and arts practices.
CASTs aims to provide an effective umbrella for existing interdisciplinary research across the college and to foster new collaborations. CAST will consist of a number of autonomous research clusters that span different departments. It will provide a means for these clusters to collaborate and a way of fostering new interdisciplinary research both within goldsmiths and with external partners.
The activity of CAST is organised around four thematic areas.
Social Media and Social Technologies
Lead by Dhiraj Murthy (Sociology). This research cluster creatively explores digital aspects of the social. We are particularly interested in applying emergent methods to better understand social media as virtual sociotechnical systems. Members of the group study the use of social media in disasters, art, health, journalism, and everyday life.
Creative uses of technology
Lead by Matthew Fuller (Centre for Cultural Studies) Computational and networked digital media mesh with and reorganise the aesthetic and cultural life of all art forms. Thematically, we are concerned with understanding and intervening in this condition in an integrated way as computational forms rearticulate the condition of writing, composition, design, dance, economics, photography and activism amongst others. In taking such a view, we aim to provide critical and practical grounds for re-thinking technologies as a fundamental part of culture.
Social life of the digital
Lead by Mirca Madianou. This research cluster explores the uses and consequences of digital technologies in a range of social, cultural and political contexts. The group aims to advance our understanding of the intersection of the digital and the social through comparative and ethnographic approaches that pay equal attention to cultural specificities and technological affordances.
Democratising and visceralising data
Lead by Marco Gillies.This cluster aims to develop new ways of accessing data that demystifies big data analytics and opens it to public audiences. Drawing from both the domains of Human Computer Interaction and Computational art we aim to make interactive data analytics both usable by a wide public and engaging, as well as problematizing traditional views of data, so as to reveal the algorithmic processes that result in supposedly factual result. We use novel interaction techniques to go beyond screen based displays to the embodied, tangible, auditory and visceral.