This transnational study explores histories and representations of wet-nurses, migrant domestic workers and sex workers in Latin(x) American photography, film, literature and digital culture from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It explores the similarities and differences between these kinds of work by analysing them as forms of immaterial labour, which is work that creates immaterial products, including social relationships, emotional responses and bodily feelings -- also termed 'affects'. This project is the first to ask: what does an analysis of Latin(x) and Latin American cultural productions featuring these workers contribute to our understanding of the links between these forms of labour, and to a public appreciation of these kinds of work, which are often marginalised or denigrated. To answer this question, it responds to the following four interdisciplinary research questions: 1) Which creative techniques do artists use to explore the challenges faced by Latin American and Latinx migrant workers employed in these forms of affective and immaterial labour? 2) How does an analysis of these creative works enable us to compare and contrast between different forms of affective and immaterial labour, such as wet-nursing, sex work and domestic work? 3) How can artistic depictions of affective and immaterial labour raise awareness of exploitative employment practices and contribute to a public understanding of the economic, social and cultural value of care work? 4) How can artists, academics and activists collaborate effectively and ethically with individuals involved in forms of affective and immaterial labour? It is the first study to trace the historical, geographical and thematic continuities (and differences) between artistic representations of archetypal forms of immaterial labour in Latin(x) American culture including wet-nursing, domestic work, migrant labour and sex work. The research comprises four strands, which analyse: (1) photographs and paintings of Afro-descendant and indigenous wet-nurses produced in Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (2) documentaries and a literary testimony that record the experiences of Latin American women working as live-in nannies and domestic workers in modern-day Europe; (3) several films, documentaries and a novel that portray the experiences of female sex workers from across Latin America from the 1940s until the present day; and (4) a film, documentary and digital artworks that explore the invisibility and immateriality experienced by Mexican and Central American migrant workers in the US. These research questions will be answered by the following six outputs: 1. An open-access book that addresses the four research strands identified above and draws on my own analysis of the chosen primary texts, as well as on interviews with the artists who produced them. 2. A peer-reviewed journal article - authored by the PDRA - that analyses a series of photographs of Afro-descendant and indigenous wet-nurses taken between 1879 and 1913, which were found at an archive in Lima. 3. A video essay - made in collaboration with an experienced video artist - that explores and illustrates the connections between visual representations of Latin American wet-nurses, nannies and domestic workers from the late nineteenth century until the present day. This output will be submitted to a peer-reviewed open-access video essay journal. 4. A policy advisory document that serves as a blueprint for effective, ethical forms of collaboration between academics, artists and activists and paid domestic and sex workers. This will represent the key output of an online workshop that unites these stakeholders. 5. A series of public film screenings and expert Q&As on the theme of 'Labour in Latin American Film' held at Watershed cinema, Bristol (subject to Covid-19 regulations). 6. An online platform featuring blogs, photographs and the video essay.

The proposed project seeks to explore the ways in which the power of social media and social interactions-whether online or in the real world-can be harnessed to create digital music. The core methodology of the project is to develop a mobile app, Pet Sounds, which will be used to study these interactions. Pet Sounds will enable users to create a musical self-portrait or 'musical selfie', a musical representation of the user that reflects social experiences. In order to modify this composition, users must engage in different kinds of social interactions. These interactions might take place via social media like Facebook or Instagram. For example, chatting with another user might result in one kind of musical outcome, while tagging friends in a photo might result in another kind of musical outcome. The composition can evolve only through these kinds of social interactions, as well as by undertaking real-world social activities with friends. The musical selfie logs these interactions via different kinds of compositional transformations. For example, the composition might grow longer or shorter in duration; it might add a new voice or voices; it may change timbral qualities, tempo, rhythms, harmonies, and so on. The sounds and music will be generated almost entirely via social activities. Users will be able to share their musical selfies with each other, and collaborate with other users in developing their compositions. This study entails an interdisciplinary collaboration that spans musicology, ethnography, and composition and software design. The researchers will develop Pet Sounds in the context of workshops with diverse groups of participants who have varying backgrounds in music, music technologies, and social media use. The app will be designed to appeal to specialist and non-specialist users alike. While the app itself will not be released as an output during the lifespan of the project, its prototyping will provide the basis for studying socially-based musical interactions. These interactions will be studied via critical perspectives in musicology, sound studies, composition, and interaction design. The outputs of the project will include a co-authored journal article, conference paper, public presentations and performances that will examine the many creative, critical/theoretical and technical dimensions of the research. The research team will be based at the Sonic Arts Research Centre at Queen's University Belfast, the University of Oxford, and the University of Bristol. Workshops will take place at the Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed, Bristol. This non-academic partner will be important in attracting a diverse community of creative practitioners, technologists, and general audiences. At Watershed, the research team will conduct a series of Design and Play Workshops, and a Lunchtime Talk. In Belfast, the research team will partner with the Junior Academy of Music to reach music educators and young people aged 12 to 17 years in the context of workshops on 'App-ifying Music'. Other key elements of impact will include hosting a panel for media artists and technologists at an international media arts centre, and a presentation for creative industry professionals at a major industry event. The aim of the research is to show how music making can evolve as a social activity using new digital technologies. The proposed project will be playful, collaborative, interactive, participative and fundamentally social. In this way it diverges from projects in music technology that either require a great deal of skill on the part of the performer or expertise on the part of the listener. Pet Sounds will show that 'new music' and digital music cultures can be inclusive, engaging, and friendly. It will further show that users or participants themselves can play a large role in collaboratively creating compositions that are musically interesting and that draw upon users' own experiences in meaningful ways.

Understanding the fundamental patterns and rules that govern how the world functions at a molecular scale drives research in chemistry. In particular, chemical physics is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, and spectroscopy is a fundamental tool for obtaining information about the behaviour and structure of quantum mechanical systems. Spectroscopy is the use of light to obtain information about matter, and has applications in a number of fields including process control, analytical methods, astrophysics, and medicine. In the last 50 years, spectroscopic techniques have been revolutionized by a mathematical method called the fast Fourier transform (FFT). The FFT permits time dependent signals to be easily converted into frequency spectra, and this has lead to tremendous advances in a number of fields, including a number of subject areas within the EPSRC research remit: chemical physics, quantum mechanics, biochemistry, organic chemistry, analytical chemistry, laser physics, biomedical imaging, and digital signal processing. The Danceroom Spectroscopy project offers an innovative and experiential format for engaging members of the public with the science of frequency spectra, FFT and wavelet analysis, and quantitative feedback. In Danceroom Spectroscopy, the movements of a crowd of dancing people will shape the music they hear. Using cutting-edge robotics imaging technology, computing, and mathematics, an electronica artist (or DJ) will effectively source a 'vibe' from the crowd, which he/she will then be able to incorporate into the dance music. Danceroom Spectroscopy will use three dimensional imaging cameras suspended above a dance floor to track movements in the room, much as if the heads of the participants were making ripples and waves on the surface of a pool of water. Using FFT and wavelet methods, the patterns of these ripples and waves in the gyrating crowd will be transformed to frequency spectra, which will then be fed into music software that the electronic artist can translate into beats and sounds - thus generating music from movement and feeding that music back to the crowd.This project fits with the objectives of the PPE scheme: researchers will carry out public engagement activities that connect directly to their research interests (DRG and MNRA), and training and learning opportunities will be built into the project, providing an innovative manner in which members of the public will engage with a cutting-edge and impactful area of research whose applications saturate our modern lives.Mathematics and science drive much of the progress in the modern world; however, few attempts have been made to explore meaningful ways in which these subjects can interact with live art to engage the public. While recent EPSRC public engagement funding is oriented toward exploring the boundaries of science and art (e.g., the Heart Robot project, and the Everything and Nothing project), the Danceroom Spectroscopy project is unique insofar as it seeks to create a truly interactive and symbiotic experience that immerses public participants in the frontiers between science and art. The Danceroom Spectroscopy project also engages with contemporary societal and cultural issues:(1) People are increasingly subject to surveillance, and Danceroom Spectroscopy is an interesting exploration of these technologies: three dimensional 'surveillance' is effectively the medium for interaction between the crowd and the electronica artist, in order to facilitate shared, meaningful and enjoyable experiences amplified by collective action.(2) Digital technology is being exploited to offer people increasingly individualised experiences that they can control (e.g., iPods, the 'silent disco', etc.). Danceroom Spectroscopy, relying as it does on forms of collective motion and coherence, thus represents a meaningful response to trends in which musical experiences are increasingly atomized

This transnational study explores histories and representations of wet-nurses, migrant domestic workers and sex workers in Latin(x) American photography, film, literature and digital culture from the late nineteenth century to the present day. It explores the similarities and differences between these kinds of work by analysing them as forms of immaterial labour, which is work that creates immaterial products, including social relationships, emotional responses and bodily feelings -- also termed 'affects'. This project is the first to ask: what does an analysis of Latin(x) and Latin American cultural productions featuring these workers contribute to our understanding of the links between these forms of labour, and to a public appreciation of these kinds of work, which are often marginalised or denigrated. To answer this question, it responds to the following four interdisciplinary research questions: 1) Which creative techniques do artists use to explore the challenges faced by Latin American and Latinx migrant workers employed in these forms of affective and immaterial labour? 2) How does an analysis of these creative works enable us to compare and contrast between different forms of affective and immaterial labour, such as wet-nursing, sex work and domestic work? 3) How can artistic depictions of affective and immaterial labour raise awareness of exploitative employment practices and contribute to a public understanding of the economic, social and cultural value of care work? 4) How can artists, academics and activists collaborate effectively and ethically with individuals involved in forms of affective and immaterial labour? It is the first study to trace the historical, geographical and thematic continuities (and differences) between artistic representations of archetypal forms of immaterial labour in Latin(x) American culture including wet-nursing, domestic work, migrant labour and sex work. The research comprises four strands, which analyse: (1) photographs and paintings of Afro-descendant and indigenous wet-nurses produced in Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; (2) documentaries and a literary testimony that record the experiences of Latin American women working as live-in nannies and domestic workers in modern-day Europe; (3) several films, documentaries and a novel that portray the experiences of female sex workers from across Latin America from the 1940s until the present day; and (4) a film, documentary and digital artworks that explore the invisibility and immateriality experienced by Mexican and Central American migrant workers in the US. These research questions will be answered by the following six outputs: 1. An open-access book that addresses the four research strands identified above and draws on my own analysis of the chosen primary texts, as well as on interviews with the artists who produced them. 2. A peer-reviewed journal article - authored by the PDRA - that analyses a series of photographs of Afro-descendant and indigenous wet-nurses taken between 1879 and 1913, which were found at an archive in Lima. 3. A video essay - made in collaboration with an experienced video artist - that explores and illustrates the connections between visual representations of Latin American wet-nurses, nannies and domestic workers from the late nineteenth century until the present day. This output will be submitted to a peer-reviewed open-access video essay journal. 4. A policy advisory document that serves as a blueprint for effective, ethical forms of collaboration between academics, artists and activists and paid domestic and sex workers. This will represent the key output of an online workshop that unites these stakeholders. 5. A series of public film screenings and expert Q&As on the theme of 'Labour in Latin American Film' held at Watershed cinema, Bristol (subject to Covid-19 regulations). 6. An online platform featuring blogs, photographs and the video essay.

Digital technology is everywhere, from the cinema to the living room, from the classroom to the shopping precinct. Our children have digital phones with cameras attached, and iPods that can store their school calendars so that they can listen to their music, anywhere, anytime whilst finishing their homework. Shopping precincts and underground stations, airport lounges and urinals all now carry methods of display to bring the digital world home to us - wherever we are. These technologies are now central to how we live our lives.\n\nLarge media corporations, whose success depends on introducing new commodities into the world, have begun unveiling a new range of high resolution equipment which is the vanguard of much higher levels of resolution. This current technology has fundamentally four to five times the resolution of preceding broadcast technology which means that a viewer can no longer see the line structure inherent in the video image when projected on a cinema screen. This apparently simple, and apparently inevitable, technological development makes the gold standard of feature film production / 35mm film / far more widely available than ever before. It also brings in its wake image resolution which is finer than the eye can perceive. Thus the context and the nature of moving image making has the potential to change fundamentally. \n\nWe are already witnessing the beginnings of a sea change in the nature of film production on one hand but also the beginnings of the change of domestic production in which more and more people are enabled to produce and circulate very high quality images.\n\nThe aim of this two year project is to transfer the practices and theories researched by Terry Flaxton, previously a professional cinematographer, in his completing three year Arts and Humanities Research Council Creative Research Fellowship in high resolution imaging at Bristol University, to the image making sectors of the South West of England.\n\nThis project will encompass a series of strategies to transfer this knowledge, using conferences, workshops, surgeries, articles and also with visits with young film-makers of the region to centres of excellence of image capture and data processing.\n\n\n