Gabriella Giannachi on collaboration, creativity, and the power of digital heritage

Gabriella Giannachi is a Professor in Performance and New Media and Director of the Centre for Intermedia and Creative Technology, a centre which has pioneered thinking on computer human interaction at Exeter and has been funded by EU, EPSRC, RCUK, Nesta, and the Heritage Lottery Fund.

Over the years I have worked with artists, mostly artists who create performative works through new technologies; computer scientists, often those who develop these technologies; and museums and arts organisations who preserve these works for the future. I have spent several years working in collaboration with the computer scientist Steve Benford from the Mixed Reality Lab at the University of Nottingham with whom I have coauthored several award-winning papers for ACM journals and conferences. Among others, I have worked in partnership with Tate, The Natural History Museum, The Science Museum, The Imperial War Museum, LI-MA (a Dutch art conservation centre), the Photographers Gallery, Imperial War Museum, and, locally RAMM.

Over the last 20 years (this is 20 years that I have been based at Exeter) I have worked, with Professor Nick Kaye, on projects about what constitutes presence in virtual and mixed reality, and, with Steve Benford and several other researchers and partners on the digital footprints we leave behind in the digital economy. I have collaborated with Tate, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Photographers Gallery, and LI-MA on how to best document and preserve performative and digital art. I just completed an AHRC BRAID project where I worked with Steve and National Archives on how to use AI in creating generative dynamic archives. I am also an environmentalist and I am working on a Green Transition project led by University of Bath in collaboration with Cardiff University which involves a large team of architects, engineers, designers and geographers, as well as me, retrofitting a set of properties in Bristol and Swansea. In this project I work with Cat Butler from geography and my former PhD student, Lucy McFadzeen, and the communities in Swansea and Bristol, as well as with the Future Observatory at the Design Museum.

I generally work with documents, often documents to do with the past, to gain a better understanding of who we are and where we come from in the present. Likewise, I try to document the present to create future memories. This may have to do with art, but also heritage, including complex and difficult forms of hybrid tangible and intangible heritage. So, my stakeholders are artists, museums, archives, audiences, but also, as has been the case for three projects developed with ECFC, football fans who would like to preserve and share their heritage, or war veterans, who try to understand novel ways to engage with society through heritage. My book Archive Everything is key in explaining this approach which I am in the process of evolving in a collaboration with the archaeologist Michael Shanks at Stanford University on a book on AI.

My work has always been industry-facing. When the impact agenda was set by RCUK and the REF some 15 years ago I started to collaborate with Sean Fielding and the then Deputy VC for Research Nick Talbot by leading an impact strategy group. For that I received an impact award by the then VC Steve Smith. As Chair of the Impact Strategy Group I learnt a lot about the amazing work of our colleagues at Exeter and we developed more and more far reaching strategies to support them. The workshops created to support academics with Knowledge Exchange are part of the strategy we put into place at that time.

I love collaborating with researchers and communities of various kinds. On 1 July 2024 I was in a co-design workshop at the Phoenix Centre in Swansea in which we worked with the families whose houses we are about to retrofit. I learnt so much about the process from the architects, designers, engineers and from the families. For me, this is how I continue to grow as a researcher and so also as a teacher, administrator, colleague, and as a person. There are always challenges. We are facing many of them right now. But it’s how we help, enable and empower different communities, including our students, to understand and deal with the challenges that matters the most.