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Papers by Jill Bennett

Social Sciences

This article analyses audience responses to two creative works inspired by traumatic loss—the fir... more This article analyses audience responses to two creative works inspired by traumatic loss—the first, a performance presentation, recounting events from the author’s adolescence; the second, a short film about a suicide in the filmmaker’s family. Both were shown in 2017 as part of a mental health arts festival, attracting audiences with affinity for the lived experiences portrayed. Given the potential for such works to give rise to negative feelings and/or to retrigger trauma, the objective of this research was to understand firstly whether audiences could process the trauma conveyed in a contained and facilitative setting and, secondly, how the specific aesthetic modality of each work supported this processing. The psychosocial methodology adopted consisted of a group-based, image-led associative method—the visual matrix—which invites participants to express their sensory-affective and felt responses to a creativework. In the case of both works, the visual matrix gave rise to a dist...

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022

Social Science, 2023

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020

This paper outlines a research and dissemination protocol to be undertaken with specific groups o... more This paper outlines a research and dissemination protocol to be undertaken with specific groups of marginalised women in Australia. Women impacted by significant mental distress, disability, or refugee status are among society’s most vulnerable and disenfranchised groups. They can experience significant social exclusion, marginalisation and stigma, associated with reduced help seeking, deprivation of dignity and human rights, and threats to health, well-being and quality of life. Previous research has assessed the experiences of discrete groups of women but has to date failed to consider mental health–refugee–disability intersections and overlaps in experience. Using body mapping, this research applies an intersectional approach to identify how women impacted by significant mental distress, disability, and refugee status negotiate stigma and marginalisation. Findings on strategies to cope with, negotiate and resist stigmatised identities will inform health policy and yield targeted ...

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

This paper discusses the use of pre-engagement as a method to introduce EmbodiMap, a Virtual Real... more This paper discusses the use of pre-engagement as a method to introduce EmbodiMap, a Virtual Reality (VR) tool to a group of South Sudanese refugees in Sydney, Australia. The aim of the pre-engagment is to understand how currently available support for the mental and emotional wellbeing of the refugee population can be further supported through psychosocial engagements using purposefully developed tools. The EmbodiMap tool and experience, developed by the felt Experience and Empathy Lab (fEEL) at UNSW Sydney, is a creative approach that potentially offers a transformative experience as participants virtually reach into their bodies and draw or register their immediate or persisting feelings, sensations and emotions. As an arts-based approach, EmbodiMap provides an innovative alternative to approaches that rely heavily on words, thus helping amplify the participants’ self-expression. Pre-engagement is used as a psychosocial engagement method, allowing for a small group of participant...

Frameless, 2020

EmbodiMap VR. A tangible and immersive body-mapping EmbodiMap VR. A tangible and immersive body-m... more EmbodiMap VR. A tangible and immersive body-mapping EmbodiMap VR. A tangible and immersive body-mapping experience. experience.

Social Sciences

Through a psychosocial lens, informed by relational psychoanalysis, this article discusses the de... more Through a psychosocial lens, informed by relational psychoanalysis, this article discusses the design, delivery, and impact of The Big Anxiety’s 2022 festival in Warwick, Queensland—an arts-based program that engages with lived experiences of trauma, distress, and suicide, and in this case with the devastating impact of youth suicide, disproportionately affecting First Nations communities. It describes the festival’s methods of creative engagement, examining how these create conditions for the transformation of trauma and for experiences of growth.

Cultural Trends, 2019

Lynn Froggett has a Social Sciences/Humanities background. She researches socially engaged arts i... more Lynn Froggett has a Social Sciences/Humanities background. She researches socially engaged arts in clinical, community, cultural, arts and health and art-science contexts. Recent topics include memory loss, pain, disabilities, robotics, technology and civic renewal. She is Professor/Co-Director of the Institute for Citizenship, Society and Change at the University of Central Lancashire and Executive Chair of the Association for Psychosocial Studies.

In diesem Artikel berichten wir von zwei Gruppen, in denen Menschen mit Gedachtnisverlust infolge... more In diesem Artikel berichten wir von zwei Gruppen, in denen Menschen mit Gedachtnisverlust infolge einer fortschreitenden Demenz eingeladen wurden, einen Film anzusehen, der von den Erfahrungen einer Frau mit Hirnlasion und Amnesie handelte. Zugang zu den Personen, die alle zuhause leben, erhielten wir uber Tagespflegeeinrichtungen; in einer Gruppe nahmen zusatzlich informelle Betreuer/innen teil. Nach der Prasentation wurde mit jeder Person eine visuelle Matrix erstellt, ein gruppenbasiertes Verfahren zur Erhebung emotionaler Assoziationen infolge asthetischer Stimuli, um das gemeinsame Erinnern zu fordern. Wir nahmen an, dass aus dem assoziativen Charakter der visuellen Matrix ein sinnvolles Engagement der Teilnehmenden mit Demenz resultieren wurde. Im Beitrag diskutieren wir die Teilhabe- und Selbstreflexionsprozesse, die durch die genutzte Methodik mit Blick auf soziale Fertigkeiten erleichtert wurden, auch bezogen auf Unterschiede zwischen beiden Gruppen, die (Nicht-) Anwesenhei...

Dementia Lab 2021: Supporting Ability Through Design

This is a comprehensive analysis of the ground-breaking T_Visionarium media art project. It shows... more This is a comprehensive analysis of the ground-breaking T_Visionarium media art project. It shows how this immersive interactive environment generates new insights into the workings and consumption of televisual media, extending the boundaries of both art and media studies. The breakthrough presented by this digital media experiment, developed at UNSW's iCinema Centre, is that it revolutionises search techniques, looking at the underlying structure of images and making previously unseen links between them.

2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), 2020

The Visit is an interactive real-time Virtual Reality experience, developed from a ground-breakin... more The Visit is an interactive real-time Virtual Reality experience, developed from a ground-breaking research project conducted by artists and psychologists working with women living with dementia. Visitors are invited to sit with Viv, a life-sized, realistic animated character whose dialogue is created largely from verbatim interviews, drawing us into a world of perceptual uncertainty, while at the same time confounding stereotypes and confronting fears about dementia. The character is sensitive to the motions of the viewer, she is aware of the presence in her home by making eye-contact and directly addressing the visitor. The characterisation has scientific validity but also the qualities of a rich, emotion-driven film narrative. The point of the work is to draw the viewer into the emotional/perceptual world of Viv. Like the women who co-created her, Viv experiences various dementia-related symptoms, including hallucinations and confabulation, but she is also insightful and reflecti...

Dementia

The Visit, an immersive participatory artwork (viewed on a screen or virtual reality headset), wa... more The Visit, an immersive participatory artwork (viewed on a screen or virtual reality headset), was produced as part of a research programme investigating the subjective experience of dementia and the relational dynamic between people with dementia and others. It invites viewers to engage with a digital human character, ‘Viv’, as she shares her experiences of living with dementia. The experiences that Viv recounts are based on verbatim accounts from in-depth interviews with four women living with dementia. The artwork was designed with the combined aim of generating insights into the lived experience of dementia and establishing conditions under which viewers might cultivate empathy for the character portrayed. Viewers engaging with Viv were invited to complete pre- and post-engagement measures of state empathy alongside an assessment of emotional distance. State empathy was significantly greater after engaging with The Visit, and correspondingly, there was a significant decrease in ...

A Companion to Feminist Art

Gerontology

Background: Wearable camera photographs have been shown to be an effective memory aid in people w... more Background: Wearable camera photographs have been shown to be an effective memory aid in people with and without memory impairment. Most studies using wearable cameras as a memory aid have presented photographs on a computer monitor and used a written diary or no review as a comparison. In this pioneering study, we took a new and innovative approach to wearable camera photograph review that embeds the photographs within a virtual landscape. This approach may enhance these benefits by reinstating the original environmental context to increase participants’ sense of re-experiencing the event. Objective: We compare the traditional computer monitor presentation of wearable camera photographs and actively taken digital photographs with the presentation of wearable camera photographs in a new immersive interface that reinstates the spatiotemporal context. Methods: Healthy older adults wore wearable or took digital photographs during a staged event. The next day and 2 weeks later, they viewed wearable camera photographs on a computer monitor or in context on an immersive interface, or digital photographs. Results: Participants who viewed wearable camera photographs in either format recalled more details during photo viewing and subsequent free recall than participants who viewed digital photographs they had taken themselves. Conclusion: Wearable camera photographs are an effective support for event memory, regardless of whether they are presented in context in an experience-near format.

Journal of Applied Arts & Health

Social Sciences

Bloomsbury Academic eBooks, 2022

Social Science, 2023

International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2020

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

Frameless, 2020

Social Sciences

Cultural Trends, 2019

Dementia Lab 2021: Supporting Ability Through Design

2020 IEEE Conference on Virtual Reality and 3D User Interfaces Abstracts and Workshops (VRW), 2020

Dementia

A Companion to Feminist Art

Gerontology

Journal of Applied Arts & Health

What happens when artists are asked the questions usually addressed to planners and administrator... more What happens when artists are asked the questions usually addressed to planners and administrators? In this book, artists, architects, writers, designers, and curators come together to reimagine Sydney’s relationship to its environment. They envision a future where public art plays a vital role in Sydney’s food, water, energy, and waste management, and explore new collaborative and creative planning practices.

FCJ-203 Creative Robotics: Rethinking Human Machine Configurations—Petra Gemeinboeck FCJ-204 Degr... more FCJ-203 Creative Robotics: Rethinking Human Machine
Configurations—Petra Gemeinboeck
FCJ-204 Degrees of Freedom—Elena Knox
FCJ-205 Life and Labour of Rovers on Mars: Toward Post-Terrestrial Futures of Creative Robotics—Katarina Damjanov
FCJ-206 From Braitenberg’s Vehicles to Jansen’s Beach Animals: Towards an Ecological Approach to the Design of Non-Organic Intelligence—Maaike Bleeker
FCJ-207 Game On: A Creative Enquiry into Agency and the Nature of Cognition in Distributed Systems—Michaela Davies
FCJ-208 This Machine Could Bite: On the Role of Non-Benign Art Robots—Paul Granjon
FCJ-209 Indigenous Knowledge Systems and Pattern Thinking: An Expanded Analysis of the First Indigenous Robotics Prototype Workshop—Angie Abdilla and Robert Fitch
FCJ-210 Falling Robots—Lian Loke
FCJ-211 Embodying a Future for the Future: Creative Robotics and Ecosophical Praxis—Keith Armstrong

Cultural Trends, 2019

Visual matrix methodology has been designed for researching cultural imaginaries. It is an image-... more Visual matrix methodology has been designed for researching cultural imaginaries. It is an image-led, group-based method that creates a “third space” research setting to observe audience groups re-enacting lived experience of an event or process that takes place in the third space of a cultural setting. In this article, the method is described through its use in relation to an art-science exhibition, Human+ Future of the species, where three audience groups with investments in technology worked with exhibition material to achieve a complex ambivalent state of mind regarding technological futures. The visual matrix has been designed to capture the affective and aesthetic quality of audience engagement in third space by showing what audiences do with what is presented to them. We argue that such methodologies are useful for museums as they grapple with their role as sites where citizens not only engage in dialogue with one another but actively re-work their imaginaries of the future.

KEYWORDS: Visual matrix, third space, cultural imaginary, aesthetic third, civic museum, technology

CP Snow’s mid-century idea that a “third culture” might come into being to connect arts and scien... more CP Snow’s mid-century idea that a “third culture” might come
into being to connect arts and science is perhaps most publically realised today through art-science - a heterogeneous field of creative research and production, characterised by the collaboration of artists and scientists and by research combining scientific and aesthetic investigation. This paper reports on the development of a new method for investigating the value of third culture collaboration for both the expert collaborators involved (artists and scientists) and the audiences who engage with the work. The visual
matrix is a recently developed psychosocial method for evaluating aesthetic experience, which has been used in various socially engaged and site-specific art contexts. In 2014 it was experimentally applied to two art-science exhibitions staged in the UNSW Galleries, Sydney: Amnesia Lab and Body Image. This paper discusses the unique potential of this method to capture the shared, complex, emergent and transformative aspects of the experience of these exhibitions. In particular it highlights the ability of the method to capture the emergence of a “third space” at the intersection of art and science in the public domain – a site of trans disciplinary engagement, enquiry and knowledge production
that plays a vital role in the contemporary research landscape.