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In an increasingly instrumentalised world, the C-suite's zombie-like pursuit of the enshittification of Higher Education - knowing the cost of everything but the value of nothing - sacrifices the intrinsic qualities of play, pedagogy, and practice on the altar of groupthink, vacuous metrics, and visionless planning. i-DAT ruptured in the summer of 2025 with the system.exit (via Voluntary Redundancy) of key research staff: Peter Quinn Davis, Dr Jane Grant, Prof Mike Phillips, Dr Andy Prior - and Prof Dylan Yamada-Rice relocation to Falmouth University (see the People page).
Where data should have been the canary in the coal mine, it was instead an albatross worn around the necks of senior managers: a perverse stuffed carcass of a fashion accessory, a ruffled plumage of gobbledegook statistics. This website and the i-DAT server will trundle on until August 2026, at which point it will die, leaving a digital ghost in the wonderful Internet Archive WayBackMachine here: https://web.archive.org/web/20251005125746/https://i-dat.org/ and there: https://www.mike-phillips.net/i-dat/
The Digital Art & Technology staff that remain in the School of Art Design & Architecture are focusing on the successful Game programmes developed by i-DAT and may well, in time, fork the i-DAT identify. Elements will no doubt linger on the University website: https://www.plymouth.ac.uk/research/i-dat Thank you... Patricia Connolly
concerned with making ‘data’ palpable, tangible and accessible and are outlined below… i-DAT’s Core Research Themes were: Digital Heritâge: recognises that history is a pile of debris, some of which is digital or can be transfigured through digital processes. i-DAT’s PGR Community was…
i-DAT was an Open Research Lab for playful experimentation with creative technology and consists of two entangled parts: i-DAT Research and the i-DAT Collective. We thought deeply and differently about how we intertwingle with data and computational systems in an increasingly technologically mediated world.
i -DAT’s Projects were delivered by the i-DAT Collective, a collaborative group of interdisciplinary artists, technologists, and researchers. These provocative prototypes were rooted in i-DAT’s core research themes which were
Cultural Computation: audience behaviours, environments, ‘things’ and Artificial Intelligence.
Behaviourables & Futuribles: the Internet of Things, remote sensors, robotics, Props & Wearables – (everywareables?).
Interactive & Immersive Environments: The digital Umwelt – new experiences in enhanced physical, augmented & virtual spaces.
Ludic Systems: Playful subversion – real-time social gaming and playful soft-hard-ware.
donald.rodney: autoicon
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