Toby Castles
Website: tobycastles.com
Email: t.castles@unsw.edu.au
Supervisors: John McGhee, Teresa Crea
Toby Castles is an artist, educator, and practice-based PhD candidate at UNSW Art & Design. His work combines immersive media, physical objects, and mixed-media installation to explore the relationships between embodied experience, place, ecology, and community. Supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program Scholarship, he holds a Master of Simulation and Immersive Technologies with Excellence and a Bachelor of Media Arts with Honours from UNSW. Toby began his practice in media arts, working with video, sound, and still imagery, and has since developed an experimental, transdisciplinary approach. His project Quiet, Light, Energy combined projected video, sound, and physical artefacts to investigate the embodied human connection through differing cultural understandings of place.
- Research area
- Research outputs
Toby’s current research extends this practice through immersive media, including virtual reality and digital artefacts. His socially-engaged artworks examine how embodiment, abstraction, and materiality shape relationships with ecologically significant Australian sites and the communities connected to them. Working alongside communities, he explores how artists can trace emotional connections to place and bring situated forms of knowledge into view.
His project QR Collaborate uses QR codes in flood-affected Australian communities to enable residents to share ideas about disaster preparedness. It was featured as an award-winning case study in the paper !Do Something: Provoking Sustainable Behaviour Change Through Collective Design Initiatives, published for and presented at the 2023 World Design Organization Research and Education Forum in Tokyo.