PUBLICATIONS Inside Illinois Vol. 25, No. 6, Sept. 15, 2005

Arts-technology hybrids grow out of ‘Seedbed’

By Melissa Mitchell, News Bureau Staff Writer
217-333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

This is the second installment in a three-part series that focuses on creative intersections between the arts and technology. (Go to Part 1)

When Mike Ross arrived at the UI from New York in 1997 to direct the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, he was excited to find that many of his new colleagues radiated a “natural energy to work with creative thinkers in other domains.”

“When I came to this campus, I was really struck by the openness with people I’d meet across campus,” Ross said. In particular, he recalls early conversations he had with art and design professor Donna Cox, a discipline-bending arts-and-technology pioneer known for her supercomputer-rendered scientific visualization work with the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and colleagues at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science. “Donna and I immediately started talking about exploring deeper, broader ideas of collaboration.”

Through the years, Ross never stopped talking. Instead, he kept the conversation going – simultaneously and in all directions – with just about anyone interested in engaging with him.

Click photo to enlarge Photo by Dan Merlo Mike Ross

“I started viewing the whole campus as an environment for cultural collaboration,” Ross said. “And while many important things have been accomplished in various domains on this campus – in the sciences, technology, the humanities … the arts, too – it began to become clear to me that what’s more and more called for are the tools to make individuals feel like they’re able to connect with each other.”

Before long, Ross earned a reputation for being the campus’s unofficial minister of culture and creative transformation. Part cheerleader, part catalyst, he became known as a first-string, go-to-guy whenever and wherever innovative projects began to percolate. So it was only natural that former Chancellor Nancy Cantor and then-Provost/now-Chancellor Richard Herman tapped Ross to break ground for what would become known as the Seedbed Initiative for Transdomain Creativity: Exploring the Human Experience Through Art and Technology.

“I was asked to write a white paper on ‘The Arts in a Technology-Intensive World,’ ” Ross said, “and to help shepherd a process” aimed at rethinking the ways in which the campus does creative work. Part of the process involved convening a broad-based steering committee, composed largely of individuals who were already working far outside the usual bounds.

The goal of the committee’s task, he said, was “to view the trial not as highly partitioned, but rather, as potent blending.”

The resulting Seedbed Initiative was envisioned as a “project facilitator” for nurturing creativity and transforming the university through the development of a new approach to learning. That approach seeks not only to blend academic disciplines, but to develop more symbiotic means of integrating the institution’s traditional core missions of education, research and public engagement.

Click photo to enlarge Visualizing movement Guy Garnett, UI music professor, demonstrates computer tracking of performance gestures -- in this case conducting gestures. The time-lapse photo is a visualization of what the computer sees, through hand-mounted sensors, when tracking an orchestral conductor.

The Seedbed is not a physical center, but rather, an incubator for interdisciplinary projects based at “hub sites” – labs, offices, performance spaces and other venues. Those sites include – but are not limited to – the Siebel Center, Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Krannert Art Museum, Krannert Center for the Performing Arts, School of Music and South Research Park.

Other seedbed “hub sites” under way include the Intermedia Lab, a collaboration involving the Krannert Art Museum, School of Art and Design, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology; the CANVAS, a virtual reality CAVE installation space at the museum, created by Beckman’s Integrated Systems Laboratory in collaboration with Art and Design; and a center for computing in humanities, art and social sciences, directed by history professor and NCSA researcher Orville Vernon Burton.

Seedbed projects can also take shape in even more fluid terms. For example, the premiere of multimedia artist Mikel Rouse’s “End of Cinematics” at Krannert Center on Sept. 17, is being co-produced by the center, in part, with Seedbed partnership and support. (See related story below).

Another Seedbed spin-off is the computer science department’s Cultural Computing Program, co-directed by music professor Guy Garnett and Roy Campbell, the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi Professor of Computer Science. Established last year, the CCP is the outgrowth of earlier informal collaborations between Campbell and Garnett. The program was created to spark similar collaborations among a broader sector of students and faculty members in computer science, the arts and humanities, with a goal of “creating and transforming culture with computers.”

“Such collaboration will drive innovation better than models wherein either computer science serves the humanities and arts, or humanists and artists must become computer scientists,” said Garnett, who has firsthand knowledge of how this works. He has been working with computers in music since 1981, and before collaborating with Campbell, designed The Virtual Ensemble and The Virtual Score – computer-aided tools for composing and conducting – with support from NCSA and Beckman.

“From the moment I arrived on campus in 1996, I have been looking for ways to connect the music/art community with the science/technology community,” Garnett said.

Campbell’s desire to get right- and left-brain types together on the same bus springs from what he sees as a need to shift the focus from what technology can do to how we use it and why.

“The big thing, really,” Campbell said, “is (to gain a better understanding of) how computer science influences the art world … the social world. Marshall McLuhan was always talking about how the medium was the message. Well, when you look at a computer, it’s a lot more complicated than just looking at your television set. It’s communicating a huge number of things besides just what’s on the screen. And that’s going to affect society immensely.”

Though still in its infancy, the CCP already has generated interest from faculty members campuswide. Each semester, the program offers different team-taught courses that provide student access to a lab at the Siebel Center equipped with an Avid video editing suite, motion-tracking system and large displays.

One major theme to emerge from the CCP is the development of gaming as an art form. The Game Research Program, spearheaded by Campbell, Garnett and speech communication professor Dmitri Williams, has evolved in part from some of Campbell’s earlier work. It encompasses the development of new computing technology as well as the study of the cultural impact of gaming and “game reception” – in other words, understanding computer games in cultural, social and psychological contexts.

Campbell and Garnett said a primary goal of the work is “to develop computer games as distinct, and distinctive, art forms.” One way they hope to distinguish the UI work from what’s being done commercially is through the creation of games that focus “less on battles and warfare than on the arts and other aesthetic trajectories.”

Other areas of interest to the CCP team include the design of so-called intelligent instruments and intelligent performance spaces. Last spring, for example, Garnett and Campbell co-taught a course that incorporated video, music, motion-capture andgesture-tracking devices. All of these components were coordinated using multiple computers, projectors and video screens, resulting in a final, live performance.

This fall, Garnett is teaching a course called “Art in Virtual Worlds.” He said the main task of the class would be “to create a persistent, online environment where people working from different computers over the network come together in a virtual 3-D world to make and experience art.

“We will try to create a performance aspect in some way, so it will be somehow making a game-like experience that will be a performance,” he said. “It will be up to the students to define exactly what that is.”

Next in the series: Arts go north, technology goes south as traditional campus dividing lines dissolve.

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