In a dark room on the eighth floor of the Run Run Shaw Creative Media Centre, Professor Jeffrey Shaw perches under a spotlight on a swivel stool. He's surrounded by a panoramic cinema screen, on which different stories play at the same time. Smiling, Shaw tilts his head back and takes in the environment.
'I am in a state of constant distraction,' he says later, even though his roster of achievements suggests otherwise. Shaw has been at the forefront of new media, as an artist and researcher, for 50 years. An early triumph was the design for the cover of Pink Floyd's Animals (1977), one of the most iconic in music history. It shows a pig floating eerily among indigo clouds above Battersea Power Station in London. Shaw created the pig as a piece of inflatable art. It was a futuristic work in its day.
'Back then, I was already interested in the idea of audience participation,' says the Melbourne native. 'You can't do much with a bronze or stone sculpture. But I was working with inflatable structures. People could jump on them and throw them around.' This idea of interactivity, he explains, is one of the central aspects of new media.
There is a legend that Pink Floyd's pig came loose and flew over the city, in a great accidental publicity coup for the band. 'It's not a legend, it's true,' Shaw says, his eyes brightening. 'It landed far, far away in a farmer's field.'
Shaw recalls living in London in the heyday of pop, before the Conservative government moved in and 'literally switched the Swinging Sixties off'. Since then, he has lived in Amsterdam, Karlsruhe in Germany, and Sydney, where he pioneered the creative use of digital media technologies in a number of visual artistic fields.
He moved to Hong Kong in 2009 to take up the deanship of City University's School of Creative Media, which currently holds some 800 students. Gallery 360, says Shaw, is one of the most mature developments of his life's work. The compact space, in a slick new facility on the university's campus in Kowloon Tong, is home to AVIE (Advanced Visualisation and Interaction Environment) or the world's first 360-degree stereoscopic projection screen.