Our world is edging more and more towards digital environments. What are the societal and cultural implications? Does it change the way we think? The way we feel? Virtual Unreality, a new interactive exhibition in the Exploratorium's Seeing Gallery, brings together three digital artworks by internationally-known artists that use game technology to explore the unreality of virtual landscapes. The works are Life Spacies II by Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, Scalable Cities by Sheldon Brown, and Oceans (2000-2007) by Dan Torop. Virtual Unreality is open to the public from September 14, 2007-January 7, 2008.
Scalable Cities explores and creates an urban/suburban/rural environment at a rapid pace. As you move along, you literally "paint" the flying landscape with highways, buildings, and automobiles. Each step in this data visualization pipeline builds upon the previous, amplifying, exaggerating, and adding on the landscape algorithmically and exponentially. This interactive virtual artwork provides equal measures of delight and foreboding, creating a vision of cultured forms that you -- the participant -- are (too) rapidly creating. While the project neither indicates nor embraces the future you build, it offers an extrapolation of its own tendencies, heightening awareness of the aesthetics and underlying logic of the game and how it determines much of our cultured existence.
Around 70AD a horrible destruction occurred in ancient Judea. Was it a will of God? Or was it human wrong decisions and malevolent emotions? UCSD music department's Steve Schick and Philip Larson will present the ancient story in a highly avant-garde cultural setting that is meant to teach as much as entertain. In a multi-functional presentation that combines playing, acting, interacting, and debating, the universality of the dilemmas present in the story will be analyzed from modern research perspectives by experts and with public participation. Information technology and hypermedia are used to link ancient Rome and Jerusalem to Cuban missile crisis, conflict resolution, limits of human rationality, emotions and belief.
Project directed by Shlomo Dubnov
Design and Production Manager: Jose Ignacio Lopez Ramirez-Gaston
Technical Development: Toby Algya
Debate Research: Benjamin Kay
The project is sponsored by Calit2 and by the Chancellor Collaboratories Program and supported by CRCA. Collaboratory faculty include Shlomo Dubnov, David Goodblatt, Eli Berman, Joel Sobel and Shahrokh Yadegari.
Special thanks to Morana Alac and her students.
This is an invitation-only event, and pre-registration is required.
For more information: (858) 534-5941, or http://kamzabarkamza.com, or email Lynda Tran at lynda@ucsd.edu.
transitional use of urban space
March 28, 2008
8:00-10:00 pm
1122 11th Avenue
Downtown San Diego
Participants:
Jose Ignacio Lopez Ramirez-Gaston [sound improvisation]
Jason Ponce [visual improvisation]
Camilo Ontiveros [landscape intervention]
Felipe Zuñiga
Creatividad 2 Workshop by Melania Santana (Universidad Iberoamericana, Tijuana)
In the framework of the San Diego Vacant Properties Program, the purpose of SEDIMENT 0.1 is to generate site-specific multimedia interventions at various abandoned or vacant spaces and by doing so, to bring attention to the existence and adaptive reuse possibilities for these urban environments.
The first stage of the project includes 6 events in different vacant properties in San Diego. On March 28th a first pilot of the project will be presented at an abandoned gas station in downtown San Diego. It will include the participation of students from Visual Arts and Music at UCSD, the results of a workshop at Universidad Iberoamericana, Tijuana, and UCSD Public Culture, with the expertise of Norma Medina, San Diego Vacant Properties Program Coordinator, on the conceptual framework. This event will be sponsored by CRCA researcher Ignacio Lopez, who hopes this will set a precedent for the viability of a project of this nature.
Abandoned or obsolete spaces, empty buildings, structures in process of development and other vacant, neglected or deserted areas are a common occurrence in any contemporary urban environment.
These abandoned, residual and non-spaces are not only hard to define and ambiguous by definition, but they represent an area of the collective consciousness of a community and their contemporary value is hard to asses. They were at one time relevant to the daily life of the city but their potential is now invisible and the references that once justified their existence have dissolved with time.
These ‘vague’ spaces will be activated by the art-driven transitional and nomadic interventions to its regular non-active status. I will attempt to engage the community, for a brief period of time (the event), in the generation of a collective invisible link between the people present and their newly appropriated public space, the ‘stage’ that is the city itself.
The ambiguity of the staging for these non-specific and non-specialized areas will permit a rediscovery of the process of space utilization and space appropriation.
The goal of the project is to maintain the existence of SEDIMENT 0.1 as a ‘mobile’, “shifting forum” that, with the help of the City of San Diego and the Music department at UCSD, will utilize other vacant properties generating new interactions by different multimedia sound and video artists.
SEDIMENT 0.1 will be a permanent and continuous strategy that would constantly change location. Public life and art will embed itself in any space available.
Special Thanks to: Todd Carson; The Neighborhood Code Compliance Division; Miller Puckette; CRCA; UCSD Department of Music; Universidad Iberoamericana, Tijuana; City of San Diego.
'Scalable City’ Installation Anchors Grand Opening of gallery@calit2
The Scalable City is a continually developing project which explores how our world is re-imagined and transformed by the ever-increasing use of computation. The work is displayed across media, including game installations, sculptures and digital prints.The central piece of the installation on display in the gallery@calit2 is an interactive computer game involving users, data and algorithms as applied to urban development. As Brown describes it, "My work creates an urban environment via a data visualization pipeline. Each step in this pipeline builds upon the previous one, amplifying exaggerations, artifacts and the patterns of algorithmic process."
Scalable City has appeared in multiple forms since its premiere as an interactive installation in 2006 at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria. "It has appeared as a series of movies, as an installation, as prints, as objects, and soon as a downloadable online game," said Brown. "Within each of these there are variations - the interactive installation is configured differently for each venue - but at each venue and for each form, I am bringing forward particular qualities of the work."
Support for the development of Scalable City comes from IBM, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Vicon, High Moon Studios, the UC Discovery Grant program, CRCA, as well as the UCSD division of Calit2.
Students have played a critical role in the development of Scalable City. Graduate and undergraduate students - from both the Visual Arts and Computer Science and Engineering departments - assisted Sheldon Brown on various phases of the work. They have included: Erik Hill, Daniel Tracy, Kristen Kho, Robert Twomey, Christopher Head, Prakhar Jain, Alex Dragulescu, Carl Burton, Mike Caloud, and Joey Hammer.
Alex Dragulescu's Spam Architecture and Spam Plants digital print series were selected to be exhibited at the Seoul Museum of Art during the 2006 International Media Art Biennale in Seoul, South Korea (http://www.mediacityseoul.or.kr/en_index.html). A DVD recording of a live VJ performance is also part of the program. Part of the performance was generated using Brecht, a VJ tool written in Java and OpenGL that uses SQL (Structured Query Language) queries and Java code to trigger and mutate live visuals -- text and images stored in a MySQL database.
An unique feature of Brecht is the command shell which is superimposed over the visuals generated live from junk data. Queries and code typed in real-time, logs of server transactions and syntax errors transcend their textual form and become narrative gestures. The process of navigating the database becomes transparent, contrasting the way databases exist today: an ubiquitous, yet hidden cultural form.
For more images and information on Dragulescu's research projects, visit http://www.sq.ro
Cell Broadband Engine (Cell/B.E.) is an innovative solution whose
design was based on the analysis of a broad range of workloads in
areas such as cryptography, graphics transform and lighting, physics,
fast-Fourier transforms (FFT), matrix operations, and scientific
workloads. This is a hands-on workshop aimed at providing a jump start
to Cell/B.E. programming, starting with an overview and architectural
details, covering the programmability concepts and code optimization
techniques to exploit good performance results, tools, techniques, and
development environment, with some code examples.
REGISTRATION:
The event is FREE but registration is REQUIRED. Please contact Helena
Bristow (bristow@ucsd.edu) DEADLINE EXTENDED: Please register by 12 noon THURSDAY, MAY 24 to reserve your place in the workshop.
All participants must come to the workshop with the following virtual
machine image pre-installed on their laptops:
Please indicate when you register if you are unable to provide a
laptop with the required SDK simulation environment for your use
during the workshop. We will have a limited number of machines
available for participants who do not have laptops, but these will
need to be reserved in advance.
If you have trouble performing the installation, please contact Helena
no later than 1pm THURSDAY and we can make arrangements to assist you.
Hosted by the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA)
Contrabassist and CRCA researcher Mark Dresser participates in a collaborative "telematics" concert and cumulation of a research collaboration at UCSD with colleagues at UC Berkeley and Stanford.
The public performance at UCSD will include UCSD Music Department faculty Mark Dresser (contrabass), Philip Larson (voice), and Billy Mintz (drums), who will be joined in-person by UCI Music Asst Professor Michael Dessen (trombone). Joining via high-speed connection from Berkeley will be CNMAT Director David Wessel (electronics), Asst Professor of Music Myra Melford (piano); and from Stanford, CCRMA Director Chris Chafe (cello & celleto).
The group will be collaborating and exploring the musical potentials and limitations of latency in musical time, electro-acoustic processing at distance, and collaborative exploration of the medium.
Co-presented by CRCA and the UCSD Music Department, with support from Calit2
The University of California, San Diego will host three days of digital art performances and installations by international artists and technologists who illuminate the role digital media play in shaping, extending, and reflecting our view of the world. The cutting-edge program will take place August 4-6 at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at UC San Diego.
The innovative, new-media performances and site-specific installations are part of the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery: Global Eyes, a component of SIGGRAPH 2007, to be held this year at the San Diego Convention Center August 5-9. Registration for the conference and exhibition is open to the general public and will attract approximately 25,000 computer graphics and interactive technology professionals from around the world to San Diego.
“Calit2 has invested heavily in facilities to enable artists and engineers to explore the world of new media,” said Ramesh Rao, director of the UCSD division of Calit2. “We are delighted to be working with SIGGRAPH to showcase multimedia performances and installations, and we hope that new engagements will emerge among researchers at UCSD, the artists and scientists selected from a very competitive field to show their work here, and visiting academics and corporate representatives who may be seeing UCSD for the first time.”
"This is a wonderful opportunity to bring some of the world’s leading performance artists to these state-of-the-art venues for a comprehensive program that will lift the eyebrows of even the most discriminating performance art critics," stated Vibeke Sorensen, SIGGRAPH 2007 Art Gallery Chair from the University at Buffalo. "Global Eyes is an exciting forum for showcasing alternative ways to think about nature and art, and how the two interact."
The Art Gallery showings will be split between UCSD and the Convention Center. CRCA director Sheldon Brown, for instance, will be showing his interactive multimedia piece, ScalableCity, at the Convention Center, where he is also organizing an art panel on “Local Concerns, Global Art.” Joining him on the panel will be three artists affiliated with both CRCA and Calit2 at UCSD: visual arts professor Ricardo Dominguez; Experimental Game Lab manager Alex Dragulescu; and musician Shahrokh Yadegari, a professor of theater and dance who is also organizing the SIGGRAPH @ UC San Diego events. [The art panel will take place from 9-10:45am on Monday, August 6, in Room 30A at the Convention Center.]
“There are very few facilities in the entire country that could do justice to the imaginative and daring works that will be staged during this three-day period,” said Yadegari, who is also the SIGGRAPH Art Gallery Performances Subcommittee Chair. “Calit2 and CRCA have contributed facilities, funding and personnel to spotlight these performances and installation, and we expect that many attendees at SIGGRAPH—and members of the public—will make the trip to UCSD to see these works staged in a venue designed to showcase new media arts.”
A second art panel at the Convention Center will be moderated by Bill Tomlinson, a Calit2 participate from UC Irvine. The August 9 panel on “Global Environment and Digital Media” will include Yadegari, UCSD visual arts professor Natalie Jeremijenko, UCSD graduate student William Brent, SIGGRAPH 2007 Art Gallery Chair Vibeke Sorensen from the University at Buffalo and other experts. They will explore the use of graphical and interactive technology for art relating to global environmental issues.
Free shuttle buses will be available to Atkinson Hall from the Hall B Lobby of the Convention Center. SIGGRAPH attendees are able to register at the Convention Center, and the events are open to the general public as long as they register as a SIGGRAPH attendee at one of several registration levels.
Some seats at all performances at UC San Diego will also be reserved for UCSD faculty, students and staff free of charge, but advance registration is required. UCSD affiliates only are asked to register to attend specific performances by going to the SIGGRAPH @ UCSD website at http://siggraph.calit2.net and clicking on the Register tab. A full list of showtimes and event descriptions can be found at the website. For all other Art Gallery and general SIGGRAPH information, visit www.siggraph.org/s2007/.
S O C I A L A R C H I T E C T U R E S
t h e e x h i b i t i o n
:::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
@ t h e l a b y r i n t h
::Receptions::
Brie and Tea, WEDNESDAY 4-6PM, June 6
Double Cream Brie and Tea Reception, FRIDAY 5:30PM, June 8
Special Lecture/Performance by Derek Lomas, FRIDAY 6-6:45PM
The Labyrinth, a meandering 25 room structure built of translucent plastic sheeting, is available for viewing and utilization this week only, and is found in the center of the central UCSD Eucalyptus Grove.
The Labyrinth is the venue for the exhibition of the Social Architectures class: 20 students who constructed 10 architectural interventions on the UCSD Campus, each of which was designed to observably affect social movement.
On Wednesday and Friday, Derek Lomas will give a Special Lecture/Performance about the Social Movement Laboratory, the Social Architectures class, and present his own Art-Science practice. Open discussion will follow, along with refreshments.
::Description of Selected Projects::
More at www.socialarchitectures.com
Labyrinth:
From the mechanically regular grids of UCSD's Eucalyptus trees, a soft translucent structure spirals into an set of 25 rooms and passageways. The material construction of the Labyrinth enables it to act as a student-operated gallery, performance theater, and informal social space. By UCSD Visual Artists Marko Manriquez, Shawn Yourd, and Marjory Loh.
Bus Stop Living Room:
Buying $500 worth of Target patio furniture, Christine Liou and Diego Mejia temporarily constructed a highly vibrant social arena for commuters waiting at the Gilman Bus Stop--and then returned all the furniture the next day.
Architecting Play:
Joshua Segura and Christopher Allan have installed a series of 9 brightly colored-tree and tire swings across the UCSD campus in order to stimulate an environment of play and informal learning.
Mobile Percussive Experiments:
Alexis Gabrielson and Justin Gutierrez have organized a series of informal drum circles on campus, utilizing dozens of cheap (yet acoustically useful) plastic paint buckets. The project explores the affect of music on social interaction. Whereas Nietzsche said that 'architecture is frozen music', the inverse is explored here: that music is liquid architecture, governing the structure of social behaviors.
George Wynne Jr. Memorial:
Christin Turner and Sasanna Yee use video and large screens to re-situate the George Wynne Jr. Memorial from a hidden eucalyptus grove into Revelle Plaza, the space where the UCSD student self-immolated himself in protest of the Vietnam war. Pamphlets and a candlelit vigil strengthen the institutional memory of this event, and acknowledge the role of his death as a tipping point in campus architectural planning--amid the broader social movements of the Vietnam war, George Wynne's death influenced campus administrators to consciously build public space designed to inhibit large social congregations.
Experimental Bench Group:
A large group of students, led by Marjory Loh, have constructed a series of experiments in public seating. Sarah McClelland is building an "ipod bench" that will fill the local environment with sound, when anyone plugs in their ipod. Other students (Morgan Chee, Ben Lotan, Sasha Moldovsky, and Anne Chen) have studied how different campus environments will affect the production of graffiti on benches--and subsequently, whether a bench covered in graffiti affects the use of that bench by passersby.
Mobile Garden:
Natan Malllinger and Ricky Aubrey have created a mobile garden that relies upon pedestrians to water it according to the provided schedule. Through the simple act of watering the communal plants on their way to class, participants gain a sense of ownership and belonging to a larger community. The emergent community formed can unite students in other activities advertised through the garden which they share.
Anti-Normalizer:
A GPS-equipped mobile phone announces social scripts that, when followed, will disrupt the normal structures of social behavior within a given space. This project was developed by Brett Stalbaum's mobile phone programming class.
The Social Architectures class was funded by the Open Classroom Challenge Grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA). The class was produced by the Social Movement Laboratory, which is supported by the Center for Research in the Arts (CRCA) and Calit2.
"PROFILING" Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art
Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave.
New York, NY 10021
June 8 - September 9
Lobby Gallery / Lobby
Two public art installations that explore the use of automated systems for "profiling" people comprise Profiling, an exhibition that begins on June 8 and runs through September 9, 2007, at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Addressing issues surrounding surveillance, protection, privacy, and identity, the exhibition is organized by Christiane Paul, the Whitney's adjunct curator of new media arts.
The connection between surveillance and entertainment is at the core of SVEN - Surveillance Video Entertainment Network (2006-present), by Amy Alexander, Wojciech Kosma, Vincent Rabaud, Jesse Gilbert, and Nikhil Rasiwasia. SVEN humorously subverts the use of surveillance technologies ordinarily directed at profiling "suspicious subjects." This project asks the question, "If computer vision technology can be used to detect terrorists, criminals, or other undesirables, why can't it spot rock stars as well?" SVEN tracks visitors, detecting their characteristics, and analyzing their "rock star potential." The resulting video and audio are displayed on monitors, interrupting the standard security camera display each time a potential rock star is detected. The idea is to examine and demystify concerns about surveillance and computer systems not in terms of being watched, but in terms of how the watching is being done -- and how else it might be done if other people were at the wheel.
David Rokeby's surveillance installation Taken (2002) provides two readings of the activities in the museum: a continuously accumulating history of movements of visitors that is both a statistical plot of gallery activities and a record of each act of each visitor; and a "catalog" of visitors' head shots with classifying adjectives randomly attributed to them (i.e. 'unsuspecting', 'complicit', 'hungry'). Taken addresses the increasing use of automated systems for profiling people as
part of the "war on terrorism" and was conceived as an attempt to help ask questions about appropriate uses of technology.
Ludbots are simple mechanisms for playing acoustic instruments with digital precision. A fundamental motivation behind the project is to achieve acoustic complexity that is not possible with sampled sound played back over loudspeakers. Planned applications include performance projects that use real time performance information from human percussionists to guide the behavior of the robotic units, and installations which take on complex sound spatialization without the use of loudspeakers. The units, circuitry, and control software were built by William Brent, using MIDI circuit designs and MIDI parsing code written by Kevin Larke. Photo by Matt Jenkins.
Upcoming performances at the Carlsbad Music Festival:
Friday, September 19, 2008 8:00 PM
Calder Quartet, Red Fish Blue Fish and Build Satellite Concert @ Zipper Hall , 200 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, California 90012
Saturday, September, 27 2008 8:00 PM Pre-concert talk 7pm with Steve Schick Red Fish Blue Fish Schulman Auditorium 1775 Dove Lane, Carlsbad, California 92011
The website for the festival is www.carlsbadmusicfestival.org.
The Performance Area of the UCSD Music Department, with support from CRCA, is proud to present
artist and composer Alison Knowles. One of the most distinctive
voices from the very beginnings of Fluxus, Alison has long
established a creative identity completely independent of Fluxus,
while continuing to animate and enrich its fundamental ideas.
Knowles studied painting with Josef Albers and Richard Lindner,
graduating from Pratt in 1954. Already in the '50's she began a long
and productive relationship with John Cage, originally centered
around mushrooms, and resulting in the co-edited volume "Notations"
(1968).
Her work has taken numerous forms: print-making, automated poetry,
events, collaged diary, sound works, objects, sculpture. Her
materials: food (especially beans), clothing (shoes), hand-made
paper (especially flax paper), one's immediate surroundings. Not so
coincidentally, Alison was the wife of Dick Higgins and continues to
be the mother of Hannah Higgins, distinguished young art historian
Alison's recent and upcoming projects include the Tate London, the
Guggenheim, the Kitchen, the Whitney, the Drawing Center in New York,
Musee des Moulages Lyon, Harvard University, etc.
The schedule:
Monday, 2/11, 6pm: Open Discussion, Mandeville B-152
Tuesday, 2/12, morning: VisArts studio visits, VAF
Wednesday, 2/13, 12-2: Music 201-F, Mandeville B-210
Thursday, 2/14, 12-2: "Shoreline", Black's Beach
"Shoreline", which receives its Pacific Ocean premiere, is a very
recent piece. Discarded clothing and other items such as purses,
blankets, stuffed animals and whatnot will be sewn together into a
long line parallel to the shore. Spectators are encouraged to search
through their wardrobes, garages and storage units, and to take this
opportunity to dispose of no-longer-usable items. You can bring them
directly to the event and hand them personally to Alison Knowles at
the sewing table; then watch as they become part of a colorful
imaginary seashore.
UCSD Music Professor Charles Curtis and the graduate students in Ensemble Realizations of
Unconventionally Notated Scores, with the assistance of the
undergraduates in Music 114, will supplement "Shoreline" with
realizations of Chieko Shiomi's "Mirror", Yoko Ono's "Sweep Piece",
Simone Forti's "Huddle Piece" and Walter de Maria's "Beach Crawl".
Our established view on 'nature' needs reconsideration. Nature, in the sense
of trees, plants, animals, atoms, or climate, is getting increasingly
controlled and governed by man. It has turned into a cultural category. At
the same time, products of culture, which we used to be in control of man,
tend to outgrow us and become autonomous.
We seem to be living in a time in which the Œmade¹ and the Œborn¹ are
fusing. The hypoallergenic cats are already on the market. Plants are used
as sensors, information displays and chemical factories. Animals are being
augmented and branded. Young girls are provided with hypernatural vaginas,
modeled after the photoshopped vaginas seen in playboy magazine. In response
to donor organ shortage, researchers are working on a 3D organ printer. Real
nature is not green. It is out of control. Our technological world has
become so intricate and uncontrollable that it has become a nature of its
own. Games have become jobs. Second life is not sustainable. Digital world
metaphors are boomeranged into our physical environment. Everyday robots
give massages and take care of the children. RFID chips open doors, they
might be infected, but nonetheless are edible.
The 'natural powers' seem to shift to another field. Nature changes along
with us. Wild systems, genetic surprises, calm technology, autonomous
machinery and splendidly beautiful black flowers.
MIEKE and KOERT are currently VISIONARIES IN RESIDENCE at the Media Design
Program of Art Center college of Design in Pasadena. In Spring 2008 they
will organize a Biggest Visual Power Show - an intellectual show that blends
a conference and a pop concert - in Los Angeles.
Mieke Gerritzen was born in Amsterdam. In the early 1990s Gerritzen was one
of the first designers involved in the development of digital media in the
Netherlands. She makes designs for all media and works with many different
designers, writers and artists. Her highly acclaimed books include Catalogue
of Strategies, Everyone is a Designer, Mobile Minded, Style First, and Next
Nature. Gerritzen is head of the design department of Sandberg Institute in
Amsterdam where she runs a graduate program in design. She is also a
co-director of All Media Foundation. Mieke Gerritzen received many prizes
and gives lectures and presentations worldwide.
Much or Koert van Mensvoort's work investigates the relations between
people, media and technology. Among his works are the Datafountain (an
internet enabled water fountain connected to money currency rates), the TV
documentary 'The Woods smell of Shampoo' (about the tensed relation between
reality and simulation) and the 'Fake for Real' memory game. He is a
co-organizer of the Visual Power Show, a co-director of the All Media
Foundation, and a visiting Professor at the Eindhoven University of
Technology (Industrial Design Department)
Screening and Performance Program
Saturday, 3/15 7:30 PM
UCSD Cal-It2 Auditorium
More info:
http://icamshow.info
L.I.V.E. is presented by CRCA, Calit2, and the UCSD Visual Arts
Department. Special thanks to Amy Alexander, Candy Harris, Brett Stalbaum,
Helena Bristow and Todd Margolis
Stay The Hand
A dazzling fusion of dance, design
and Persian music & poetry!
April 4-13, 2008
WORLD PREMIERE
Birch North Park Theatre
2891 Imoversotu Avemie. Ste 1
Created and directed by:
John Malashock and Shahrokh Yadegari
619-260-1622. www.malashockdance.org
box office at (619) 239-8836
Stay the Hand is a collaboration between two leading artists living in San Diego, Emmy-winning choreographer John Malashock and renowned Persian composer Shahrokh Yadegari. This stunning work explores ancient Persia's influence on our understanding of conflict and harmony and illuminates how people's shared origins can lead to cultural conflict or peaceful co-existence.
Media Embodiment Technology Abstraction (META) presented by ICAM 160B Students
Opening night: Friday March 16, 2007 from 6-9p
with reception
Open Gallery: Monday, March 19, 2007
through Thursday, March 22, 2007
from 3-6p daily
Where: Room 1613, Atkinson Hall, University of California, San Diego
What:The Senior ICAM 160B graduating class of Steve Boyer is presenting their final projects in a gallery space at CRCA for one week. This is unusual as most senior projects are presented in a virtual gallery space on the internet, you tube, or within the class.
Abstract: META is about Digital Technology as an Abstraction of Reality and the consequences that this has upon society.Everyday our lives get a little less real as we interect with and embrace digital technologies that are becoming ever-more ubiquitous and imagined in our routines. By making its way further and futher into our lives, the digital has evolved from a supplement of reality into an abstraction of it. More than ever before, our communications, our entertainment, our awareness, our sense of aesthetics is mediated by machines. META exposes and explores these relations through paint, electronics, music, programming and animation.
This event is sponsored by ICAM, CRCA, and Calit2.
The Possibility of an Island: A Collaborative Performance Event
Friday and Saturday, April 6-7, 8pm. Atkinson Hall Black Box Theatre.
An hour-long hybrid performance created through a process of interdisciplinary creative response. Two choreographers, seven dancers, a light designer, a visual artist, a musician and sound designer converged interests to present a piece resulting from three months of translating ideas from one aesthetic medium into another.
Philipp Danzeisen is a first year M.F.A. student in the Theater and Dance Department’s graduate sound design program. Trained as a jazz drummer, Philipp plays and composes music. He studies with Sharokh Yadegari and particularly pursue electronic manipulation of sound. He plays percussion with simultaneous electronic manipulation of sound.
Moriah Evans is dancer and choreographer as well as a third year PhD student in the Visual Arts Department at UCSD. She recently completed her M.A. thesis on the significance of speed and accident in the choreographic strategies of William Forsythe. Choreographically, her anti-proscenium recent work concerns abstract, graceful, and abject states of embodiment and attempts to complicate questions of vision with embodiment.
Rebecca Bruno is a Sixth College student majoring in Dance. She just returned to UCSD from Israel where she was studying dance at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. Her previous work as a choreographer concerns develops abstract physical languages from personal sources concerning biography and identity.
Veronika Bauer is a third year M.F.A. student in the Visual Arts Department working in mixed media. Much of her work derives from an exploration of cinematic language- the ways in which images and sounds are reinforced or destabilized through their passage or disappearance. She is interested in the reconfiguration of these relationships in an actual, performance or installation space. Her work often deals duration, potential range of motion, relationships between interior and exterior, and notions of translation.
Friday, June 8, 2007 @ 4PM
Atkinson Hall Main Auditorium
Student teams from the CSE 125 Games Design course present and demo the distributed, real-time, 3D, multiplayer games they have built from scratch in 10 weeks. Co-sponsored by CRCA, Calit2, and CSE.
The groups in the Spring 2007 CSE 125 class will be presenting and demoing their projects in the Atkinson Hall Main Auditorium (Calit2). The demo is open to a general audience, and we would like to invite everyone to join us (and a few to participate!). See below for directions.
The goal of CSE 125 is for the students to experience the design and
implementation of a large, complex, distributed software system with
real-time constraints, and do it in large groups. For motivation, the
project assignment was to build a distributed, real-time, 3D,
multiplayer game...in 10 weeks.
This course was also an opportunity for the students to take
everything that they have learned in their classes over the years and
apply it to one project in one quarter. As you'll see, they have
learned a tremendous amount: the projects are amazing. For a preview,
see the group web pages for screenshots:
Each group web page also has a project design, project specification,
weekly status reports, and more screenshots -- together, these
documents chart the progress of the groups and the evolution of their
projects throughout the quarter.
At the demos we will start with a brief introduction to the course,
and then each of the groups will present and demo their project.
During each demo, people from the audience will have the opportunity
to play as well.
BRIEF OVERVIEW
Many blogs have become books - from The Baghdad Blog to Belle de Jour.
But Grand Text Auto is the first blog ever to become a gallery exhibition. It opens October 4th and runs through December 15th at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art and Technology. The exhibition features the work of Grand Text Auto members Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and their collaborators.
Grand Text Auto is a blog about the potential of digital media, from literary websites to experimental computer games. At the exhibition, the blog members will put these ideas into practice, showing a variety of cutting edge works. Some use the latest in artificial intelligence technology, such as Mateas and Stern's interactive drama Façade - of which The New York Times says, "This is the future of video games." The Beall exhibition will feature the first public showing of a life-sized "augmented reality" version of Façade, created in collaboration with Georgia Tech's GVU Center. Virtual reality is also on display, as with Wardrip-Fruin's collaborative work Screen, a literary game played with 3D text - never seen before outside of a research lab and presented with support from UC San Diego's Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. On the other hand, some works in the exhibition use decidedly do-it-yourself techniques, such as Montfort and Rettberg's Implementation, an experimental novel distributed around the world on mailing labels. Others are quirky, such as Flanagan's [giantJoystick], a replica Atari 2600 joystick so large that two people must work together to play (this has its North American debut at the Beall show).
In addition to the gallery show, the members of Grand Text Auto are working together with the Beall Center to present a live symposium and performance evening, both on October 5th. The afternoon symposium (1-5 p.m.) will discuss the power of collaborative blogging, new directions for computer games, and the place of language in digital media. The evening performance (6-8 p.m.) will feature the disturbing and humorous interactive cinema experience Terminal Time (which automatically creates outrageously biased documentaries of the past millennium) and a live performance of the award-winning hypertext novel The Unknown (which tells the tale of a rollicking cross-country book tour).
Online, Grand Text Auto (http://grandtextauto.org) is a blog with more than 200,000 visitors a month, collectively authored by six artists and scholars. Offline, Grand Text Auto members have been shown in major art museums, been written about in leading national periodicals, and shipped games that have met wide acclaim and sold millions of copies. The Grand Text Auto exhibition is the first time that these artists will show their work together. Delve into Grand Text Auto's digital depths October 4 - December 15, 2007 (closed November 22-26) and witness the live debut of blog-meets-reality.
What happens when every object and space has a life of its own? That's the question taken up by The New Ecology of Things (NET) and this talk. In an era of ubiquitous computing, The New Ecology of Things provides a framework of ideas and tools for addressing the complex challenges of a world of networked, computational things. NET is a project of the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design that began with a studio, and has evolved into a transmedia publication, a set of tools, and an on-going discussion.
Philip van Allen is an interaction designer and technologist for experimental information and entertainment systems, with a research focus on interactive objects & spaces and interactive audio. With a background in music recording. software development, and cognitive psychology his current research focus in on The New Ecology of Things - the emerging landscape of ubiquitous, networked objects & spaces - and models for designing in it. As a co-author, he recently published a book on the topic that includes his ideas for productive, embodied, and mythological interaction. Principal: Commotion New Media - Clients: Infiniti, Acura, George P. Johnson, Interval Research, Philips, Yahoo/Launch Media, Nestlé, U2, The Germs. Teacher: Art Center College of Design, Santa Monica College, McGill University. Interactive art collaborations: Yoko Ono, Kim Abeles. Exhibitions: Nucleus Gallery, SIGGRAPH Virtual Lounge. Publications: The New Ecology of Things (2007), Founded mid-nineties magazine ArtCommotion.com, DIS 2004 ACM conference proceedings, USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review.
Lunchtime at CRCA: Intricate complexities - art&science&technology
Nina Czegledy, media artist, curator and writer, has collaborated on international projects, produced time-based and digital works, and participated in workshops, forums and festivals worldwide. She has exhibited her work with ICOLS and toured with the Girls&Guns collective. Resonance, the Electromagnetic Bodies Project, Digitized Bodies Virtual Spectacles and the Aurora Projects reflect her art-science-technology interest. Resonance has been exhibited at five major European venues and in Canada. These projects focus on the changing perception of the environment and the human body and are presented via on-line and on-site events. The Aurora Feast Public Art Collaborative Project has premiered at Heureka the Finnish Science Centre (2006) and presented at Govett-Brewster Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2006) and the Waves Festival, Latvia (2006). Czegledy curated Code Zebra and White Wall (2008) for the Women Arts Resource Center, Toronto (2005) and the Reconnaissance for InterAcces, Toronto (2006) Czegledy curated over 35 digital art/video programs presented in more than 25 countries and initiated Points of Entry, the first Canadian/Australian/New Zealand digital arts collaboration. Her academic lectures and international conference presentations lead to numerous publications in books and journals worldwide. Czegledy is the president of Critical Media, a Canadian-based Knowledge Institute. She is a member of the LEAuthors as well as the Leonardo SpaceArt Network. An advisor to the UNESCO DigiArts Portal, a Yasmin group moderator, Nina Czegledy is a Senior Fellow at KMDI, University of Toronto, Honorary Fellow at the Moholy Nagy University Budapest and Adjunct Associate Professor at Concordia University, Montreal. Czegledy is the outgoing Chair of the Inter Society for the Electronic Arts (ISEA).
What: ICAM.best_of
Where: The Auditorium in Atkinson Hall
When: June 11, 2007 from 7 pm to 10 pm
Refreshments will be served in the pre-function area at 7 pm. Formal presentation to follow in the auditorium.
ICAM.best_of is a showcase of the exquisite talent of ICAM seniors who have been working in the interdisciplinary world of technology and art. Utilizing their imagination and the skills honed from the multiple methods of expression which makes up the ICAM program, these students share pieces from static art to robots in this exhibit. This is the next generation of artists - the electronic impact upon the culture. The projects exhibit the very best of combined technology, art and culture. Please join our graduating class of 2007 for this one of a kind presentation.
This event will provide the UCSD and Calit2 communities with an insider's view of the continuing development of "Sanctuary", which premiered last fall at the National Gallery of Art. Sections of the three-movement work will be performed by the UCSD graduate ensemble red fish blue fish, and commentary will be provided by the composer, Roger Reynolds, and UCSD music professor Steven Schick, who co-commissioned the work. Reynolds is the Composer in Residence for the UCSD Division of Calit2.
In February, Calit2 staged a one-time-only screening of the world premiere performance of "Sanctuary" at the National Gallery, shot in high-definition video. The composer will talk about the evolution of the work since the premiere, and current plans to stage the full three movements publicly for only the second time next fall in the Louis Kahn-designed courtyard of the Salk Institute.
Reynolds was only the second experimentalist to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. (The first was Charles Ives in 1947.) He took home the award in 1989 for Whispers Out of Time, a composition for string orchestra commissioned by Amherst College.
Spending time in a high-tech environment is nothing new to this composer. He earned an undergraduate degree in engineering physics from the University of Michigan, and worked briefly as a systems development engineer in the defense industry.
An accomplished pianist, Reynolds returned to the same university’s School of Music. After earning his Master’s degree in musical composition in 1962, and writing his first theater piece (The Emperor of Ice Cream), Reynolds and wife Karen began a 7-year migration through international hotbeds of experimental music—Germany, France, Italy and, finally, Japan.
In 1969, he was lured from Tokyo to a tenured position on the fledgling UC San Diego faculty. Two years later, Reynolds became the founding director of what today is called the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), located on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. [Coincidentally, the current CRCA director, Sheldon Brown, is Calit2’s first Artist in Residence, and last year the institute appointed UCSD film professor Jean-Pierre Gorin its first Filmmaker in Residence.]
Reynolds’ oeuvre is both vast and variegated, and few composers have been more willing to experiment with new technologies and methodologies. This prolific composer often integrates other art forms into his composition—dance, theater, video, literary texts—along with computer hardware and software as well as the perspectives of experimental psychology. He is a pioneer among composers using multichannel sound and pushes the boundaries of spatialized audio. Reynolds’ Watershed, released in 1998, was the first DVD in Dolby Digital 5.1 with music “composed expressly for a multichannel medium,” i.e., five independent channels of audio.
Throughout his career, Reynolds has experimented with eclectic mixes of musical forms to produce some of his most memorable pieces. One example is JUSTICE, which features a soprano, an actress and a percussionist; text adapted by Reynolds from Aeschylus and Euripides; full, theatrical production; as well as computer sound and real-time spatial audio designed specifically for the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, which commissioned the work for its bicentennial in 2000.
“We have agreed that I will present at least two public events a year—the first preliminary and explanatory in nature, and the second a culmination involving performance,” said Reynolds. “Calit2 is committing significant resources, including substantial stretches when I will be able to evolve my work in the black-box space on a daily basis, without interruption.”
Over the next 12 months, that work will focus on the development of an evening-long, three-movement piece titled Sanctuary. Reynolds and his colleagues will use facilities at Calit2 and UCSD’s music department to refine the motion capture, machine intelligence, spatialization and digital signal processing elements that are a part of the work. Called Chatter/Clatter, the first section is an extended solo for UCSD music professor and percussionist Steven Schick. It is an entirely new sound world evolving not just from novel instruments, but also from new ways of using the performer’s hand motion. As captured by piezo-electric sensors and pattern recognition algorithms, the motion patterns of Schick’s fingers themselves add a rich new layer of computerized audio to the acoustic dimension.
“He’s learning to do things with his hands that he’s never done before,” explained Reynolds. The project began development last fall at UCSD and McGill University's CRIMMT facility, and also involves Ian Saxton, a graduate student in computer music research and member of CRCA’s Music Information Processing Interest Group.
The second section of Sanctuary, titled Oracle, was written in 2004, and has been performed in various national venues since then. It also incorporates percussion, specially constructed instruments, lighting design, as well as real-time computer processed and spatialized sound.
Over the summer Reynolds is composing Sanctuary’s third and final section, and plans to begin rehearsing it in Atkinson Hall this fall with the resident UCSD graduate-student percussion ensemble red fish blue fish.
Chatter/Clatter will be showcased this fall in the Calit2 theater, prior to the official première of the full, three-movement Sanctuary in the atrium of I.M. Pei's East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, which co-commissioned the work. Performances by Schick, the red fish blue fish ensemble, grad student Saxton and music department senior recording engineer Josef Kucera will take place Nov. 16 and 18 in Washington, D.C.
“Especially in the West, the model has been that the composer creates material and the performer instantiates or manifests it. For the last couple of centuries, it’s been that way,” explained Reynolds. “Because of percussion’s unique variability—the contemporary percussionist never plays the same geometry twice—we are able to take uniquely interesting and challenging risks, allowing the piece to evolve and rediscovering how the performer can contribute to the creation of new work. With its facilities, Calit2 will help us push this experiment further—and people at Calit2 will get to see the work evolve over time.”
According to Reynolds, the black-box theater at Calit2 is important primarily if it is used to mount what he calls “dangerous enterprises.” “You have to give artists the time to show whether they’ll fail or succeed,” said Reynolds. “Normally in the arts there is never enough time, so we always can say we failed because we didn’t have enough time.” To make sure that is not the case, Calit2 will block out two full weeks in the fall and again in the spring, so Reynolds and his colleagues have plenty of time to practice the work in the location where it will be performed.
The venue itself could become part of the experiment. “What’s the ideal relationship between a performance and an audience?” asked Reynolds. “How big should the audience be, and how will the performance change as the audience size varies? We are interested in tackling this as an issue.”
Reynolds is already looking beyond the National Gallery premiere of Sanctuary, to next spring. In his role as Composer in Residence, he will bring together most of the people involved in the Sanctuary project to refine further the technology and inter-medial aspects, and to bring together audio and video materials from previous performances.
“It is our plan that the Sanctuary project will continue to evolve, carrying with it, as part of new presentations, aspects of prior instantiations,” said Reynolds. “In the spring we are planning an informal workshop performance of the entire Sanctuary, and separately a formal presentation of the technological and performative issues in the project.”
Reynolds has never been only a composer. He is also a prolific teacher and writer. His first of four books, Mind Models, was written while he was The Miller V isiting P rofessor at the University of Illinois. The composer’s latest book, Form and Method: Composing Music, was published in 2002 and resulted from a year during which he was a guest composer at The Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University in the early 1990s.
As one reviewer summed up Reynolds’ career to date: “For over 40 years, Roger Reynolds has produced an extraordinary body of original, thought-provoking and inspiring compositions.” Now some of that work will also originate in Calit2’s high-tech facility on the UC San Diego campus.
Sponsored by Calit2, with support from CRCA and the UCSD Department of Music
Sunday May 11th, 8:00pm
"A wave and waves" for 100 percussion instruments, by Michael Pisaro presented by Greg Stuart, percussion; and Ben Hackbarth, audio projection. Paper ripping, maracas turning very slowly, bowed woodblocks, hulled millet falling on snare drums and pebbles moving in a metal bowl. These sounds (and many more) come together to create the world premier of Michael Pisaro's "A wave and waves." This 74-minute composition for 100 percussionists is based on John Ashbery's epic poem, "A Wave." UCSD percussionist Greg Stuart has recorded all of the parts, nearly 3'500 separate events, which will be played back in a beautiful 16-channel mix compiled by CRCA's Ben Hackbarth.
Monday May 12th, 2-5pm
Composition masterclass with 5 UCSD graduate composers: Carolyn Chen, Aaron Helgeson, Ian Power, Nick Deyoe and Rick Snow. Michael will spend time with each composer discussing one of their pieces.
Monday May 12th, 6-8pm
Lecture on the new piece "A wave and waves" as well as a few other projects that Michael and I have been working on over the past few years.
Support provided by by CRCA, Calit2, and the UCSD Music Department
Like "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea" for the scientific set, "ATLAS in silico" is a beautiful, interactive 3D experience that uses a participant's movement to trigger mesmerizing, life-size audiovisual effects inspired by the Global Ocean Survey. ATLAS in Silico is a new media artwork that reflects upon humanity's long-standing quest for an understanding of the nature, origins, and unity of life. It explores new ways of representing nature in the era of metagenomics.
San Francisco, CA, October 25, 2006 -- For the first time anywhere, 2K and 4K resolution digital motion pictures and 24-channel digital audio were streamed from three different locations in real time using CineGrid™, then mixed live for an audience of audio and video professionals at the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco.
CineGrid™ is a virtual network for extreme media collaboration running on advanced research IP networks. CineGrid was one of the first major research projects at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2). Overseen by Pacific Interface, joint CineGrid research between Calit2, the Research Institute for Digital Media and Content, Keio University (Keio/DMC), and the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (USC/SCA) laid the groundwork for the CineGrid@AES demonstrations.
2K images have roughly 2,000 horizontal pixels and 4K images have roughly 4,000. 4K offers approximately four times the resolution of the most widely used HD television format, and 24 times that of a standard broadcast TV signal. 2K and 4K are particularly significant new image formats because they will be widely used for future digital cinema theatrical distribution under new specifications proposed by Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC, a consortium of the major Hollywood studios.
“The CineGrid@AES event showed that high-quality, real-time remote collaboration is possible with current equipment and technology. It is our hope that all of us working together in the industry will adopt systems like this, which will eventually decrease costs while increasing efficiency and creativity for everyone,” said Craig Mirkin, manager for Media Systems Engineering at Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), a Lucasfilm Ltd. Company and housed at LDAC.
At this AES event, the picture and sound streams originated in real time from CineGrid server nodes in Los Angeles, San Diego and Tokyo, carried at the speed of light over more than 10,000 miles of CineGrid virtual local area networks (VLAN). The streams were synchronized and then mixed “live” in full fidelity for an audience of 250 audio experts, cinema professionals and international technology leaders gathered in the Premier Theater at LDAC.
“The concept of distributed post-production for high-end audio has long been a dream of audio engineers,” explained Peter Otto, Music Technology Director at UCSD’s Department of Music and a member of the AES Technical Committee for Network Audio Solutions. “The CineGrid@AES demonstration proved that multi-channel, non-compressed cinema-quality audio streaming over IP works well, sounds good, and is now feasible for real-world applications.”
Chris Sarabosio, a sound designer at Skywalker Sound, a Lucasfilm Ltd. Company, said: “With the experimental system used at the CineGrid@AES event, I was able to control playback and mix 24-channel audio interactively while watching the synchronized picture on the big screen just like I do normally, only this time the audio servers were 500 miles away connected by CineGrid. This approach clearly has the potential to eliminate distance as a barrier to collaboration.”
Working with engineers from ILM and Skywalker Sound, the CineGrid team re-configured the LDAC Premier Theater, normally used to show traditional movies, to enable network delivery of up to 10 Gigabits per second (Gbps) for real-time playback and control of 4K digital motion pictures and 24-channel digital audio from three remote sites: the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) division of Calit2; Keio/DMC in Tokyo; and USC/SCA in Los Angeles.
Calit2 Director Larry Smarr, the Harry E. Gruber professor of computer science in UCSD’s Jacobs School of Engineering, said that CineGrid’s long-term goal is to “create a global experimental infrastructure for extreme digital media like 4K, using it to drive innovative applications from scientific research to global digital cinema production."
“Given the long-standing relationship between USC and Lucasfilm, it was particularly meaningful for me to be able to connect our facility in L.A. to the Lucasfilm campus at the Presidio in San Francisco and stream digital cinema quality movies using CineGrid,” said Richard Weinberg, Chief Technologist at USC/SCA. “The CineGrid@AES presentation brought into clear focus CineGrid's potential for ultra-high-quality collaboration over long distances for education, science and entertainment.”
“The CineGrid@AES demonstration showed the potential to leverage advanced networking in support of economic and cultural development, such as the San Francisco Digital Sister Cities initiative, a city-to-city partnership between education, industry and community-based organizations in the digital media sphere,” said Joaquin Alvarado, Director of San Francisco State University’s Institute for Next Generation Internet (SFSU/INGI) and a member of San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom’s Digital Media Advisory Committee (DMAC).
The program for the CineGrid@AES special event was structured in four acts, each demonstrating a different facet of the CineGrid philosophy of networked extreme media. In Act 1, a sequence of 4K “digital shorts” at 24 frames per second (fps), together with fully mixed synchronized audio, were pulled in real time from network-connected servers in Los Angeles and San Diego. In Act 2, 4K telepresence was used for interactive video-conferencing and ultra-realistic reproduction of a classical music performance from Tokyo. Acts 3 and 4 were designed to prove the concept of networked, remote audio post-production for digital cinema by creative teams spread around the world, who demand the highest-quality production values. In Act 3, 4K motion pictures were sent compressed from Tokyo, and 24-channel non-compressed digital audio was streamed from San Diego. In Act 4, the performance system was re-configured to use uncompressed 2K motion pictures coming from ILM servers in the LDAC facility, synchronized to 24-channel, non-compressed digital audio streaming from San Diego. (The full program is attached.)
Akinori Ito, producer at Tokyo University of Technology’s (TUT) Creative Lab, said: “CineGrid@AES was a good test of the CineGrid concept of using 4K cameras and multi-channel, non-compressed audio to present ultra-realistic ‘live’ experiences of music concerts and other kinds of performing arts to distant audiences in theaters connected by high-speed networks. I look forward to refining this concept further with my CineGrid colleagues around the world.”
“I believe the very high-speed optical networks such as now being deployed by research organizations will become an essential infrastructure for digital cinema production and distribution,” said Tomonori Aoyama, Professor at Keio/DMC and Chairman of the Digital Cinema Consortium of Japan (DCCJ), “But, we still have to learn how to integrate systems that creative people can use to make beautiful 4K content – picture and sound – in new ways appropriate for the 21st century. Demonstrations such as CineGrid@AES force us, in a good way, to learn by doing.”
At 8 million pixels per frame, uncompressed streaming of 4K motion pictures requires more than 6 Gbps bandwidth. However, in many places, the signal must be carried over 1 Gbps circuits. To do so efficiently, the CineGrid@AES demonstration utilized 4K real-time JPEG 2000 codecs originally designed by NTT Network Innovation Labs to compress and decompress 4K digital video at streaming bit rates of 400-500 Megabits per second (Mbps).
Compressed 4K motion pictures were transported in real time over CineGrid to the theater in San Francisco, decompressed on-the-fly, and projected onto a 30-foot screen for the audience using Sony Electronics’ SXRD 4K digital projector. 4K live content shown to the AES audience was shot in Tokyo with Olympus SH-880TM digital motion picture cameras. In-theater audio mixing was performed using a Yamaha DM2000 digital audio controller. A Christie DLP digital projector was also used to screen 2K digital cinema excerpts.
Jim Dolgonas, President and CEO of CENIC, which provided the network connectivity for this event in California over its California Research & Education Network (CalREN), said: “Using a new generation of cyberinfrastructure featuring multiple 10 Gigabit and 1 Gigabit lightpaths over optical fiber, we were able to extend CineGrid to the Letterman Digital Arts Center in San Francisco for the first time. CineGrid@AES and other ongoing CineGrid experiments are helping network operators better understand the requirements for large-scale digital media collaboration.”
CineGrid@AES Event Organizers
CENIC/CalREN
Industrial Light & Magic, a Lucasfilm Ltd. Company
NTT Network Innovation Laboratories
Pacific Interface, Inc.
Research Institute for Digital Media and Content, Keio University
San Francisco State University, Institute for Next Generation Internet
Skywalker Sound, a Lucasfilm Ltd. Company
Tokyo University of Technology Creative Lab
University of California, San Diego
- California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
- Center for Research in Computing and the Arts
University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts
CineGrid@AES Contributors
Digital Cinema Consortium of Japan
Immersive Media Research
Keio Wagner Society String Ensemble
National Institute of Information and Communications Technology (Japan)
Meyer Sound Laboratories
Olympus Corporation
Recombinant Media Lab
San Francisco State University, Cinema Department
Sony Electronics, Inc
Tatsunoko Production Co., Ltd.
University of Illinois at Chicago Electronic Visualization Laboratory
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s National Center for Supercomputing Applications
Yamaha Corporation of America
CineGrid@AES Program
October 8, 2006
Letterman Digital Arts Center, Premier Theater
San Francisco Presidio
Opening Remarks
• Elizabeth Cohen, AES
• Craig Mirkin, Industrial Light & Magic
• Larry Smarr, UCSD/Calit2
• Laurin Herr, Pacific Interface Inc.
Act 1: 4K Playback with Synchronized Sound from Los Angeles and San Diego
• 24 Flowers Per Second, by RichardWeinberg, USC/CSA
• Time Boiler, by Mitsuru Kaneko, TUT and Tatsunoko Productions
• Tornado, by Donna Cox and Robert Patterson, NCSA
• Monterey Bay, by Donna Cox and Robert Patterson, NCSA
Act 2: Live 4K Telepresence from Tokyo
• Interactive dialog between Keio/DMC and LDAC, with 4K-over-IP from Keio to LDAC and DV-over-IP from LDAC to Keio
• Eine Kleine Nacht Musik, by Keio Wagner Society String Ensemble, pre-recorded 4K “live” musical performance
Act 3: Digital Cinema Networked Audio Post Production for 4K
• A Study of 4D Julia Sets by Sandin, UIC/EVL and music by Stephan Vankov, UCSD/CRCA with live mix of “sound to picture” by Peter Otto, UCSD Calit2/CRCA
• Galaxy by Cox and Patterson, UIUC/NCSA and music excerpted from “On-Iron” by Philippe Manoury, with a live mix of “sound to picture” by Peter Otto, UCSD Calit2/CRCA
Act 4: Digital Cinema Networked Audio Post Production for 2K
• Lucasfilm’s Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith excerpt with a live mix of “sound to picture,” by Chris Scarabosio, Skywalker Sound.
Closing Remarks
• Tomonori Aoyama, Keio DMC/DCCJ/DCTF
Collective Art Practice - Performative and Networked Approaches to
Challenging Power
Public Lecture Series, as part of VIS198 Directed Study Group
A series of talks looking at the how groups are using collective
practice and online public space to confront social issues embodied in
the San Diego/Tijuana border region. All lectures will be held at
Calit2, Atkinson Hall, 2nd Floor, Wednesday nights from 6-7pm. This
lecture series is sponsored by UCIRA. If you have questions or are
interested in registering for this class, email Micha Cárdenas at
mcardenas (at) ucsd.edu.
Week 1 - April 2: A Class Without A Teacher? Critical Pedagogy and Intro
to Collective Practice
Presenters: Members of the Groundwork Books Collective,
http://groundwork.ucsd.edu
Week 2 - April 9: A Rich Legacy of Collective Practice
Presenters: Brett Stalbaum, Ricardo Dominguez speaking on Electronic
Disturbance Theater and particle group, http://pitmm.net
Week 3 - April 16: Social Sculpture, society is the sculpture,
collectively creating change
Presenters: The Boredom Patrol of the
Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, http://circasd.org
Week 4 - April 23: Transnational corporations, transnational resistance
Presenters: Colectivo Zapatista (tentative) and
Simon Sedillo of El Enemigo Comun, http://elenemigocomun.net
Week 5 - April 30: Gaming Theory, "In Game" Resistance
Presenters: Adriene Jenik, http://adrienejenik.net
Week 8 - May 21: Gender, Sexuality and Erotic Art Practice – Presenters:
the Sharing Is Sexy collective, http://sharingissexy.org
Week 9 - May 28: DIY, Self-Publishing, Craftivism
Presenters: Grrrl Zines A Go-Go, http://gzagg.org
Week 11 – Friday, June 6th, 6pm, Presentation of Group Projects from VIS198
The flyer with more information about the public talks can be found here (pdf)
Vis 198 - Directed Group Study
Collective Art Practice - Performative and Networked Approaches to
Challenging Power
If you have questions or are interested in registering for this class,
email Micha Cárdenas at mcardenas@ucsd.edu.
This class has three main foci:
- to introduce students to collective practices
- to facilitate student understanding of social issues embodied in the
san diego / tijuana borderlands
- to explore online space as public space, its limitations and
possibilities
Throughout the class, students will meet art and activist collectives
from the San Diego/Tijuana border region and discuss their approaches to
collective practice and their motivations for using it. Two of these
collective presentations will take place in Tijuana, in order to
facilitate collaboration with students at the Autonomous University of
Baja California (UABC) in Tijuana. The presenting groups may include:
Groundwork Books at UCSD, The Boredom Patrol of the Clandestine
Insurgent Rebel Clown Army, Grrrl Zines A Go-Go, Bulbo.tv, Lui
Velazquez, San Diego Indymedia, Colectivo Zapatista and Sharing Is Sexy.org.
The main goal will be for students to create collective projects
responding to social issues existing in the San Diego / Tijuana border
region building on this understanding of collective practice and,
ideally, begin long term sustainable collectives within which to
continue the practice. The projects will be collaborative engagements
with real-world issues, consisting of performance in the online public
space of Second Life. Students will consider the nature of public space,
the lack of physical space and the opportunities for online spaces to be
public spaces.
This class will take place in the Spring 2008 quarter at UCSD, on
Wednesday nights from 5-8pm. The class is supported by an Open Classroom
grant from UCIRA and is receiving support from CRCA.
Becoming Dragon is a mixed reality, durational performance
Becoming Dragon will run for 365 hours, with available viewing hours from 11 AM to 7 PM. daily during the hours of operation at Atkinson Hall. For the entire duration of the performance Micha will stay in both the physical space of room 1613 and concurrently in the virtual space of Second Life.
Calendar of Events:
Dec 3rd, 3pm,
Voice Chat with Sandy Stone
"Gender and Desire in Virtual Worlds"
http://sandystone.com
Dec 5th, 5pm
"Something is Happening"
UCSD Symposium on Performance and Affect http://visarts.ucsd.edu
Dec 8th, 6pm
Voice Chat with Stelarc
"The Body in Transmission/Transition: Learning to Live in Mixed Realities"
also streamed in Tijuana live at Lui Velazquez http://www.stelarc.va.com.au http://luivelazquez.com
Dec 10th, 2pm
Voice Chat with Brian Holmes and Rubaiyat Shatner "Imagining New Worlds, Biopolitics and Self-Governance in SL"
http://arsvirtua.com
http://brianholmes.wordpress.com/
Second Life is an online 3D virtual world, where users can create their own avatars in whatever form they like. It is not a goal oriented game, so its users refer to it as a metaverse or a MUVE, Multi User Virtual Environment. There are over 15 million registered users of Second Life. More information is available at http://secondlife.com
This performance is Micha Cárdenas' final MFA project.
More information is available at:http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/186/12/35
Contact: Micha Cárdenas, 619-750-8851, mcardenas@ucsd.edu
CRCA Researcher Robert Twomey presents his MFA exhibition show - on view today through December 15, 2007 at the Gallery at Calit2, Atkinson Hall, UCSD. There will be a reception TONIGHT, Friday evening, November 30, from 8-10pm.
DRIFT
an animation by Carl Burton
Tuesday, June 12, 2007, 7-9pm
Atkinson Hall Main Auditorium
Carl Burton, CRCA researcher and Visual Arts graduate student, will present his MFA project, "Drift". This high-definition, animated short will screen at 7:00pm on the 4K projector. After the initial screening, the animation will loop continuously in the auditorium until 9:00pm. Refreshments will be served. Running Time: 10 minutes.
CRCA Audio Spatialization Lab
Saturday, May 19, 1pm - 8pm
Sunday, May 20, 1pm - 8pm
Parking Lot Music is a semi-immersive, interactive, audio-visual environment.
Augmenting the realities of urbanized landscapes, fracturing the perception of space into interconnected places and situations, a layered narrative evolves along video and GPS recordings.
What is the space and what do we bring to it, where does reality end and where does the story begin?
SPECFLIC VERSION 2.0 - DISTRIBUTED SPECULATIVE CINEMA
SPECFLIC is speculative distributed cinema: a cinematic form which envisions and performs our near future through the lenses of our current technological landscape.
SPECFLIC 2.0 projects 30 years into the future of significant public environments to create site-specific speculative narratives that unfold over the course of a week-long multi-media event.
SPECFLIC 2.0 uses cutting edge transmission and display technologies to expand a critical dialogue (begun in science fiction literature and cinema) about the social effects of these very technologies. Live ambient performances streamed through mobile video platforms, monitoring and sensor networks, and an array of asynchronous media forms will be "mixed" and clustered by myself as "director" and projected throughout the building, to produce a new form of cinematic experience; one that is distributed across space and time.
The SPECFLIC 2.0 takes place in 2030. The Public Library has been incrementally transformed into the Universal Knowledge Repository known as the InfoSphere. The InfoSphere is a generally accessible, multi-lingual digital archive that expands exponentially on an hourly basis. The public accesses the InfoSphere independently of the library building, and the role of the library and librarians has shifted to accommodate these changes: local public libraries now assist people in locating the bits they need in this overwhelming the data flow. They also issue reading licenses, which are necessary to access various tiers of knowledge, and enforce information access filters.
Now that book objects are seen as an inefficient way to access, store, distribute and further utilize knowledge, they have fallen out of daily use by the public. With the advent of e-books, books themselves became more a state of mind and since the Great Silverfish Attack of 2012, book objects have become relics of history needing preservation for the ages. In 2030 there still exist people who have passionate memories of "book culture" and see it as important to maintain even in its increasingly anachronistic state, so the Library building still exists. But instead of the bustling lending library and IT access site we know today, it is now a museum for book objects. The entire of the libraries book holdings have been designated a "special collection" which can only be accessed via the on-site InfoSpherian.
TROYANO Collective presents their publication Art and Digital Culture
TROYANO’s members, Alejandro Albornoz, Ignacio Nieto, Italo Tello and Ricardo Vega, will discuss their past projects which have made possible their recent publication. Moderator for the panel is Eduardo Navas.
TROYANO is an artist collective from Chile which formed in 2005 to do interdisciplinary research on art and digital culture. Their recent publication, Art and Digital Culture, brought together work from contributors as diverse as artists and theorists from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Russia, Slovenia, and the U.S. This publication grew out of two major conferences TROYANO organized in 2005 and 2006 with the support of the Spanish Cultural Center and the Museum of Contemporary art in Santiago, Chile: Elena (2005) and Updating, Art and Technology (2006).
TROYANO’s presentations in Southern California are made possible by the joint efforts of:
ISIM 2007 Lecture/Performance Series on Improvisation: Part 4
Improvisation workshop and performance by renowned harpist Susan Allen
William Brent:: Segundo Piso, plus a pre-concert talk on remote networked improvisation
A native of Santa Barbara, California, Susan Allen is well known throughout the Americas, Australia, Europe, Russia and Asia for her world premiere performances of new and improvised music for harp. Susan's work in improvised music has taken her to the Verona Italy Jazz Festival and the Stockholm Jazz and Blues All Star Festival, in many instances in collaboration with jazz great, Yusef Lateef. Her musical creations have been called “daring improvisations…fascinating” by Jazz Journal International (UK).For this event Susan leads an improvisational ensemble of UCSD grad students and faculty performing on western and non-western instruments
William Brent will also present a lecture on improvisation with remote performers through the use of electronic networking systems, and perform live with David Cecchetto,who will be networked through the internet.
This installment of the ISIM UCSD Performance / Lecture Series is a collaboration with Etcetera, the UCSD Music Department spring festival. Other Performances include music by Alan Lechuzsa and Arnold Schoenberg, and an installation by Joachim Gossman.
Sunday, May 20th, 8pm
Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA)
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive
La Jolla, CA 92093
the International Society for Improvised Music (ISIM)
presented in conjunction with::
UCSD Center for Research and Computing in the Arts (CRCA)
Etcetera, the UCSD Music Deparment Spring Festival
VJ: LIVE CINEMA UNRAVELED is one of the first books to offer a fresh perspective of VJing and VJ culture. Probing into topics such as technological mobility, audience, environment, and codes of the medium, it explains the various dimensions of this emerging practice.
Part design, speculative theory, reference and practical guide, this book links live cinema with its historical origins, and then describes the various offshoots and branches that are occurring now in the twenty-first century on a global scale.
Timothy Jaeger is a media artist, CRCA Researcher, Visual Art graduate student at the University of California, San Diego. He has performed and presented work at various venues internationally including ISEA 2004, PixelACHE '05, and the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, and his writings on performance and digital media have been published by Routledge.
Center for Research in Computing and the Arts University of California, San Diego 9500 Gilman Drive La Jolla, California 92093-0037 tel: 858.534.4383 fax: 858.534.7944 email: crca [at] ucsd [dot] edu
