Grounded Places: Mediating Emotion and Environment

Abstract

In line with the original intent of the grounded theory method, the creative practice presented within this multi-piece portfolio seeks to reach an experiential truth by combining the empirical context of the artwork being experienced with both the sense memory of place and the mediated consideration of embodied context evoked by the work. In doing so, we bring this element of approach into a hybrid conceptual model of reception. It is a model that relies, not only on mediated and augmented relations to real and virtual place, but also on the extremely hybridised media forms of virtual reality and locative media installation. These hybridised media forms blend gaming, cinema, sound art, visual arts and extended forms of narrative thereby creating multimodal experiences. The two works discuss, In a Minor Key and Libration Song, both of which were realised through different, mediated forms, provide contexts for audiences to connect a sense of place to emotions of loss and mourning as well as to an enhanced awareness of what it means to contemplate the grounded environmental reality of the sites we inhabit.