Congratulations to Professor Jenna Ng for winning two awards for The New Virtuality: A Creative Website on Disappearing Media Boundaries
Professor Jenna Ng wins The John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology, and the Practice Based Research of the Year Achievement Award.
Professor Jenna Ng (with Oliver Tomkins, research student at the School of Arts and Creative Technologies) was awarded the John Culkin Award for Outstanding Praxis in the Field of Media Ecology at the Twenty-Fourth Annual Convention of the Media Ecology Association. The convention was held in New York City in June 2023. The theme of this year's convention was “Arts/Symbol/Context/Meanings.”
Professor Jenna Ng also won the Practice Based Research of the Year Achievement Award from the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) during their 2023 Annual Conference. This year, the conference was held in Glasgow in September 2023. The theme of this year's conference was Connected Futures?
Both awards were awarded for The New Virtuality: A Creative Website on Disappearing Media Boundaries, an online multimedia research project which presents various ideas on our understanding of reality from contemporary virtual re-creations. Specifically, the project used the connective pages of the website for a unique methodology that combines argument with creative work consisting of fiction; images; clips; interactive story; and video essay.
The MeCCSA judges commented on the work as follows: "An entertaining interactive multimedia work that playfully presents academic insights about the blurring of boundaries between the real and the virtual across a broad spectrum of cultural experiences, from social media to architecture, in a comprehensive and accessible appraisal of the current cultural landscape in which virtuality exists alongside the real, impacting our understanding of reality. The use of fiction in this work is engaging and provides a more emotive perspective on issues arising from the new virtuality leading the viewer to make connections between this and the scholarly text to arrive at a deeper understanding."
Professor Jenna Ng said: "I am thrilled to have our project (made with a School of ACT research student, Oliver Tomkins) honoured at MeCCSA. The New Virtuality explores the significance of computational mixed realities as a cultural literacy today which orientates truth values and identifies our moral spaces. We are pleased to reflect on these developments in our project, and delighted with its reception by the Association."