Beverley Hood
Beverley is an artist and Reader in Technological Embodiment and Creative Practice, Director of Research and Unit of Assessment REF Coordinator for Design, at Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh, working with colleagues from diverse disciplines including Design Informatics, Performance Costume, Film, Graphic Design and Jewellery. Her teaching responsibilities include students across the Design, ECA and School of Health and Social Science disciplines from undergraduates, postgraduates, through to PhD candidates. She studied Sculpture and Electronic Imaging at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, Dundee and Nova Scotia College of Art & Design, Halifax, Canada.
Her research practice interrogates the impact of technology on relationships, the body and human experience, through the creation of practice-based projects and writing. A longstanding research interest is live performance using technology and interdisciplinary collaboration. She has developed projects involving a range of practitioners, including medical researchers, scientists, writers, technologists, dancers, actors and composers.
Outputs include Eidolon, an intimate, site-specific, immersive live performance, VR experience, and monograph, developed at the Scottish Centre for Simulation & Clinical Human Factors (SCSCHF), at the Forth Valley Royal Hospital, Larbert. The project was funded by the Wellcome Trust (£30K), Creative Scotland (£5K) and University of Edinburgh. Eidolon was performed at The World Congress on Biomedical Ethics, Edinburgh Art Festival, the Scottish Centre for Simulation & Clinical Human Factors, Larbert, transimage2018 and at the Clinical Skills & Assessment Centre, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary as part of Professional Development courses for Advance Practitioner Nurses, studying at Edinburgh Napier University. Eidolon360, a VR experience created from the performance, has been exhibited at British HCI 2017, TEI2018, xCoAx2018; talks about the work have been widely presented including SESAM Paris 2017 and Consciousness Reframed, DeTao University, Shanghai.
In 2014 Beverley was Co-Investigator on Spatial Memories (£80K), a SBRI Assistive Technology Award, aimed at using mobile technologies to enable people with disabilities to become more independent and less reliant on others by spatially aware reminders and hints, undertaken in collaboration with EDINA and Artlink Central. She was also Co-Investigator on Moving Targets, a £3m Scottish Funding Council project (2010-13) bringing together universities, agency, audience and industry to develop new models for new media audiences in the creative media industries.
She is a member of the RAFT (materiality and digital technologies) research group at ECA and the Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry at the University of Edinburgh, which fosters innovative ‘creative-relational’ qualitative research.
