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ARIEL: supporting academic/artistic research in global contexts
Artistic
Research for
Inspiration
Experimentation and
Learning
ARIEL is UCL’s Centre for Creative Practice Research, a collaboration between UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and UCL School of Creative and Cultural Industries (SCCI).
Bridging UCL’s Bloomsbury campus, with its world-leading departments in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and its extensive art and heritage collections, to UCL East, with its state-of-the-art facilities for experimental research, education and community engagement, ARIEL offers the following:
- a dedicated intellectual and physical space for UCL academics from any discipline to work with creative practitioners on specific research projects, to pool experience and to share best practice.
- a gateway to connect people in the creative and cultural industries with cutting-edge academic research and resources at UCL to inform and fertilize their creative work.
- a forum to stimulate scrutiny of the artistic-academic divide and to support collaborative research projects leading to new ideas, methods, outputs, and pedagogies.
The name ARIEL evokes the transformative touch of the spirit on The Tempest’s magical isle, while grounding our work in postcolonial readings of that play which remind us that creativity is never free or neutral but comes bound in ideologies and structures of power.
In the belief that the two common meanings of “culture” - artistic production and shared belief systems - can only be understood in relation to each other, ARIEL provides a dedicated intellectual and physical space for thinking about how these questions play out in diverse contexts, both here in London and in societies around the world.