We all surf the web for education, gaming, and shopping. The web is a massive set of data and information that we can see on our computers in the form of simulated pages. Pages contain text, audio, images, and video and so the web appears as a type of glorified, interactive book. But does it always need to look like a book with pages and paragraphs?

Dr. Paul Fishwick

Professor Paul Fishwick doesn’t think so, and he is wrapping up a Spring class called Virtual Analog Computing. In that class, computer scientists, artists and designers work together in teams much like people do in the game and film industry.

The goal of the class for students to explore the normally hidden, or obscure, artifacts of computer science but within game engines that simulate physical reality. The students are using Minecraft, a hugely popular game where players collaborate and mine for blocks–similar to Lego but with far more expressive capability.

The players enter the world and are first greeted with a Minecraft version of the new Arts & Technology (ATEC) building being constructed at The University of Texas at Dallas. ATEC is poised as a new venture envisioned and designed by Dean Dennis Kratz and ATEC Director Thomas Linehan. The building connects arts, humanities, engineering, science, and technology within a 160,000 sq. ft. building on campus. Faculty and students from these disciplines will work closely with each other.

Back to the concept of the web and its pages of information. What if the web was immersive and you could walk or fly through it? This is a core assumption within Dr. Fishwick’s class. The virtual ATEC building within the Minecraft environment serves to anchor the player in a land of multiple virtual machines representing computer science (CS) concepts, vital to the national push toward STEM (Science Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education. A player can walk around the virtual building and then be transported to areas exhibiting virtual machines.

For example, within the Sound Lab, the player can explore models and programs whose function are related to sound and music. Rather than the programs being shown as text, they take on physical, analog, form. Thus, the virtual ATEC building with its teleport-enabled model areas becomes a next generation web page. The page becomes immersive. The hyperlinks become teleports between locations.

Fishwick, who holds faculty appointments in ATEC and Computer Science says that this exhibition shows what is possible when blending disciplines to assist in STEM education. Since there are millions of MineCraft players, the idea is to bring the STEM content directly into their pre-existing cultural space.

“When you get CS and ATEC students working together in this way, we can reinvent the web, how we interact with it, and how people can learn core CS concepts”, Fishwick says. “The students in the class have made all of this possible. They worked together in teams at first, and then as a complete class to build the environment in Minecraft. We are also grateful to Hunt Construction company for working with us in obtaining the basic design files for the new building.”

There are immediate plans to host this space, including the Minecraft virtual environment, via the ATEC web page. Get ready to surf the immersive web.

This is article is part of the Philosophy Sandbox series authored by Paul Fishwick.

Sam Tuggle is an ATEC graduate student and a member of Tuesday Society Games, the creators of Grapple, a 3D platforming computer game currently open to voting on Steam Greenlight. Here, Tuggle provides insights into the development of Grapple and discusses his future plans and takeaways from the process.

More information and a downloadable demo of Grapple can be found at grapple-game.com.

Q: Please summarize the game in a paragraph or two.

A: My favorite one-sentence description of Grapple is “Spider-Man in Space.” Grapple is a third person 3D platformer where you get to play as a ball of goo in space. The goal is to get to the black hole at the end of each level.

The ball of goo has two incredibly powerful abilities at his disposal: the ability to walk on any surface, floors, ceilings, and walls, and the ability to project parts of itself to grab on to surfaces and swing around. Using these abilities, the player must navigate the huge and sparse levels and get through progressively more difficult levels.

Q: Who are all the team members working on the project, and what are their roles?

A: The team members are as follows:

Following the live pitch sessions on March 22, five projects were selected to go into production in the Fall 2013 session of GameLab. Prospective production team members who are accepted into GameLab will be assigned to one of these five projects according to need.

Body Shop

From creative director Kelly Weeren: “Body Shop is a 3D space-opera RPG in which the player starts out as a disembodied head. As the player explores the world, they are able attach or remove additional body parts at will, allowing the player to become a head with a leg, a head with multiple arms, an average human, or something more unique.”

Castor and Pollux

From creative director Steven Zapata: “Castor and Pollux is a side-scrolling, physics-based, two player puzzle-platformer/action-platformer wherein both players are given a unique character, each with a different skill-set and play style and are asked to work together to achieve a common goal.”

Control Room

From creative director Joshua Miller: “Control Room is a 2D real time, top down stealthy strategy game with puzzle elements. The player is a double agent control room operator in an advanced military facility. He or she must guide a group of AI controlled infiltrators through the facility in order to blow it up while avoiding suspicion.”

The Fast and the Fjorious

From creative director Caroline Curley: “The Fast and the Fjorious is a 3D, two versus two racing game featuring sprinting cartoon Vikings on a mad dash to obtain Thor’s glorious hammer, which has fallen from the sky… a good distance from the player’s home village, with dense, harsh forest in the way… You and a friend have to navigate through the forest and reach the hammer before the two members of your rival village.”

Zarathustra: Sea Station to the Impossible

From creative director Harry Lesser: “Zarathustra is an isometric 2D turn based strategy game with roguelike elements. …The player controls a squad of soldiers sent down to the undersea research station “Zarathustra” in an attempt to quell a Lovecraftian crisis. Players will guide their squad… through rooms generated in a procedural, roguelike fashion… and ultimately sacrifice the squad to empower one soldier with the ability to defeat the unknown terror.”

Student-made games from this semester’s Game Production Lab, as well as selections from Game Pipeline Methodologies, Games and Gallery Art, and Experimental Game Lab, will be on display and playable as part of the Spring Arts Festival.

The event is open to the public and will take place Friday, May 3 between 6:30-8:30 p.m. in the Visual Arts Studio (AS).

Applications are required to enroll in any of three new, advanced game courses being offered in the fall: Game Development 2, Game Design 2, and Virtual Environments 2.

The deadlines for interested students to submit their applications have been extended, and are now rolling deadlines, which means the applications will be reviewed as soon as they are submitted.

The required paperwork can be downloaded below, picked up outside Dr. Monica Evan’s office, ATEC 1.908, or picked up from any of the ATEC advisers.

• Download the application for ATEC 4367: Game Development 2
• Download the application for ATEC 4368: Game Design 2
• Download the application for ATEC 4373: Virtual Environments 2

It is requested that students submit their completed applications as soon as possible on the ATEC server, following the instructions on the application forms. Game Development 2 and Game Design 2 applications may also be submitted via e-mail to Dr. Monica Evans (mevans@utdallas.edu). Due to the size of the attachments required by the Virtual Environments 2 applications, those applications may only be submitted to the server, not via e-mail.

Students will hear back regarding their application status by May 1, May 15, and periodically throughout the summer. Applications will be reviewed up to August 15, 2013.

Any questions should be directed to Dr. Evans or an ATEC adviser immediately.

As of September 1, 2013 the ATEC and EMAC programs at The University of Texas at Dallas will have three new tenured associate professors: Monica Evans, Todd Fechter and David Parry.

Monica Evans

Monica Evans

As a faculty member in the Arts and Technology program, Monica Evans‘ focus is to expand the game studies curriculum, particularly at the graduate level. This year she created the Game Production Lab within the ATEC program, a series of courses in which students design, develop, and produce original games and gaming content at both the graduate and undergraduate level.

Monica Evans has recruited many industry members to donate equipment and resources to the ATEC program, offer internships to ATEC students, teach ATEC courses as adjuncts, and advise students through seminars, guest lectures, and as judges for the UT Dallas CGEC. Companies include Pixelux Entertainment, iStation, Gearbox Software, Barking Lizards, MumboJumbo, iD Software, and Texas Instruments, as well as investor Hughes Ventures.

Evans’ personal research is focused on narrative for games and other interactive systems, which she is currently publishing as articles, book chapters, and conference submissions; and on meaningful play, serious games, educational games, and simulations, for which she is both publishing articles and submitting multiple grant proposals. She is currently working on a series of proposals for new research in virtual medical simulation, and proposals have been sent to the American Heart Association, Pediatrix, Children’s Medical Center in Dallas, and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) granting agency.

As to the significance of her work: Game studies is a brand-new, continuously evolving field, and few universities are pursuing significant academic research in the area. Evans’ long-term goal is to seed top-level game studios with our undergraduate students at higher than entry-level positions (in other words, positions where they have influence over design, content, and innovation); to seed top-level universities with our masters and doctoral students as the next generation of game studies scholars; and to provide a place for students to incubate independent game studios, research projects, or to follow other academic inclinations in the field.

Todd Fechter

Todd Fechter

Todd Fechter‘s professional background is in the field of 3D computer animation. He has experience working on both television and film productions, which he gained while employed at DNA Production, Inc from September 2002 through June of 2006. There he held the position of Head of Environment Modeling, where he led a team of eight modelers in the planning and creation of all environments and props.

After leaving DNA Productions he worked as a freelance 3D artist providing both modeling and texturing services for various companies including Jeep, Ember Studios, Reel FX Entertainment and NASA.

In October 2006 Fechter accepted a position at Element X Creative as Head of Modeling. There he worked on various projects ranging from promotions to a direct to DVD animated series.

Fechter is currently an Assistant Professor of 3D Computer Animation at UT Dallas. During this time he has been able to integrate his production experience and expertise into his teachings with the goal of better preparing students to reach their professional aspirations. This includes the creation of the first online Arts and Technology computer animation digital class material archive where students have unlimited access to course materials and examples that allow for off campus learning and review.

Fechter’s current interests are in the continued redesign and growth of the ATEC 3D animation curriculum. Two new courses will focus more on the planning and development of 3D animation rather than the actual execution. Students will then be able to fully realize production timelines and methodologies to focus skills learned in other ATEC courses and create of their own complex animations. In return these works will be submitted to festivals and other showcases.

David Parry

David Parry

David Parry has taught as an assistant professor since August 2007, and has helped to grow and shape the EMAC program. His work centers on understanding the complex cultural transformations brought about by the change from an analog archive to one whose substructure is a digital network. His current area of research is focused on understanding how the digital network produces a different type of public and alters civic practices, analyzing how power structures and relations between people and governance are altered in the digital era.

Currently he teaches courses on writing in the digital era, digital culture, and civic media. His presentations and published writing include works on digital games, web technologies, digital literacy, and the emerging networked public.

David writes for several online resources including his own blogs, Profound Heterogeneity (www.profoundheterogeneity.com), and Academhack (www.academhack.com), and has been featured in The Chronicle for his work on microblogging as pedagogical practice. He also is regularly invited by organizations to speak about digital literacy and the changing cultural landscape.

Nick Lindsay, Journals Director for The MIT Press will speak on “The Evolution of Scholarly Publishing” as part of the Art Rendevous Science (ARS) Research Colloquia series on Wed., April 17 at noon in the ATEC Conference Room, ATEC 1.606.

Abstract

“Publishing is about to go through 25 years of evolution in a five year span.” Said in 2008. This is a fairly accurate description of what’s happened in scholarly journals publishing over the last five years. This talk will cover what’s worked, what hasn’t, and try to make some predictions about what may come. What are publishers concerned about and how are changes in publishing technology altering how scholars do their work are among the topics to be discussed.

About Nick Lindsay

Nick Lindsay has been working in the scholarly communication trenches for almost a decade. First at the University of California Press and now at The MIT Press where he oversees the Press’ journals department. MIT publishes journals that range across the arts and humanities to the social sciences and hard sciences. He is a past chair of the Scholarly Journals Committee of the Association of American University Press.

The ATEC/EMAC Colloquium Committee welcomes suggestions for speakers visiting the metroplex or from the metroplex. Please send your suggestions to one of the Colloquium Committee Members: Professors Roger Malina and Mihai Nadin; co-chairs: Andrew Famiglietti, Paul Fishwick, Mona Kasra and Bonnie Pitman.

Students who will be getting an M.A., M.F.A. or Ph.D. on a subject related to the intersection of art, science and technology are encouraged to submit an abstract of their thesis to LABS (Leonardo Abstract Services).

This peer-reviewed database has been in existence for over 10 years and functions as a way for international artists and scholars to learn about the work of the next generation.

The LABS peer reviewers for this year:

• Yiannis Colakides is the co-director of NeMe (New Media), Limassol, Cyprus.
• David Familian is the artistic director of the Beall Center for Art and Technology at University of California Irvine, Irvine, California.
• Tom Leeser is the Program Director of the Art and Technology Program in the School of Art and the Director of the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California.
• Emmanuel Mahe is the director of research at ENSAD which recently launched a Ph.D. in “Science and Art Creation Research,” which includes several art schools.
• Andrea Polli is an associate professor of Fine Art and Engineering at the University of New Mexico Albuquerque.
• Lea Rekow is founder of Green My Favela, a land use reclamation project based in the Rocinha favela of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and on the advisory board for UrbanIxD, a European research network that builds data-rich urban environments through focusing on human activities and experiences.
• Edward Shanken is a researcher at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and a member of the Media Art History faculty at the Donau University in Krems, Austria.
• Charissa N. Terranova, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Aesthetic Studies, School of Arts & Humanities, The University of Texas at Dallas.

The top-ranking LABS authors each year are invited to publish their work in Leonardo Journal and Leonard Education and Art Forum. The database can be viewed at leonardolabs.pomona.edu. Inquiries should be made to Sheila Pinkel.

Paul Fishwick, Distinguished Endowed Chair of Arts and Technology and Professor of Computer Science, will be presenting on Computing-Inspired Roles of Language and Culture in the 21st Century as part of the Art Rendevous Science (ARS) Research Colloquia series on Wed., April 24 at noon in the ATEC Conference Room, ATEC 1.606.

Dr. Paul Fishwick

There have been recent offline and informal discussions on the role of computing in the arts and humanities, especially with regard to computing’s role as a discipline in characterizing the nature of language.

This discussion, and debate, is most timely as I believe it corresponds to an emerging recognition of elements of computing (e.g., computational thinking) as being central not only to science and engineering, but also to the arts and humanities and all other disciplines. ATEC and EMAC, playing leading roles for this emergence, have an opportunity to reinvent the academy through trans-disciplinary collaboration and engagement.

There are many questions. What is computational thinking or computer science? What are the humanities? What is culture? What is language? How do we, the faculty, envision our new roles within the university, and can we expand traditional concepts of culture and language?

The exponential increase in the use of computing technology over the past half-century has radically augmented our traditional understanding of culture. For example, we have cultures based on specific types of communication (e.g., cell phone), social networking, game, and web technologies. These technology-inspired cultures hold equal weight to cultural classifications based on genetics and geographic boundaries. Technology-based culture augments—not replaces—traditional cultural taxonomies.

A core component of culture is language. Modern living requires knowledge of navigating menus and options for consumer goods. A formal description of this navigation is a type of language whether visually or textually expressed. It is not possible to operate a phone, for example, without understanding the language (i.e., grammar, semantics, and pragmatics) of menu/option specification. Grammar defines the syntax through which parsing occurs, semantics defines the encoded meaning, and pragmatics involves the human interface that elevates context into an interactive manifestation of the semantics.

Languages such as these are integral to every device, component, and piece of equipment that we use on a daily basis. Such devices are increasing in speed, decreasing in size, and becoming not only prostheses, but also integral parts of our bodies. The devices help us to re-define ourselves, and our relationships to everything else. It is not possible to operate a microwave oven without an understanding of deep computing concepts such as state, event, transition, relation, and function even though these abstract terms may not appear in the user’s manual. Knowledge of the abstract concepts underlying these languages is essential to form the knowledge base of the average person living in the twenty-first century. It is entirely insufficient to limit this knowledge only to those obtaining degrees in science and engineering.

In 1957 (with “Syntactic Structures”), Noam Chomsky, a linguist by training, provided the following definition of language: “Language is a set (finite or infinite) of sentences, each finite in length, and constructed out of a finite state of elements.” Based on Chomsky’s prescient and prolific research, those who obtain Computer Science (CS) degrees are presented early with his language hierarchy. This hierarchy guides us to a deep understanding of language that is present not only in the manual for how to operate a microwave oven, but also in general purpose languages such as Java, FORTRAN, and C++. Why aren’t others outside of CS provided with this knowledge? There is the issue of degree or depth, since not everyone needs to understand the deep mathematical relationships present in the formal hierarchy. And yet, there are ways to impart these universal language concepts to the masses. Thus, an understanding of the fundamental principles of language cannot possibly occur without balancing concepts present in both artificial and natural language. Without this hybrid understanding, we in the academy will be generating a host of students who learn traditional modes of narrowly defined forms of human communication without a corresponding comprehension of how our modern world functions.

I’ll be addressing some of these issues at an upcoming talk that I’ll give on April 24th at 12pm in ATEC 1.606, and would enjoy your feedback, critique, and comments. I envision a future for ATEC and EMAC faculty that is not only highly integrative, but is also singularly situated to break artificial divisions that may currently exist regarding culture and language.

—Dr. Paul Fishwick

Find out more by attending Dr. Fishwick’s Lecture or by contacting him directly. This is the first column in a series called Philosophy Sandbox.

The Leonardo Education and Art Forum (LEAF), The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) and the College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales (UNSW) announce a:

2013 CALL FOR CONTRIBUTIONS

INTERNATIONAL CALL FOR EXAMPLES OF INTER-DISCIPLINARY ART-SCIENCE-ENGINEERING-HUMANITIES CURRICULA

Leonardo Executive Editor Roger Malina and UT Dallas doctoral student Kathryn Evans are interested in examples of courses and curricula that are in the art-science-humanities field such as courses on art and biology, music and mathematics, art and chemistry, dance and environmental sciences, etc. Other educators interested in collaborating to develop these resources should contact Kathryn Evans at kcevans@utdallas.edu.

This is a follow-up to a similar call in the summer of 2012.  Full syallbi should be sent to Paul Thomas at p.thomas@unsw.edu.au to be included in a cloud wiki at artsci.unsw.wikispaces.net. The working group includes Meredith Tromble of the San Francisco Art Institute.

We are interested in the broad range of all forms of the performing arts, including music, dance, theatre and film, and the visual arts; and connecting to all the hard and social sciences. We are including art and new technologies (eg: nano tech) but in general not new media curricula unless they include an art-science component, or art and engineering.

Individuals who have taught an art-science-humanities course at the university or secondary-school level, in formal or informal settings, are invited to contact Kathryn Evans, with details of their curriculum, at kcevans@utdallas.edu.

Please send the title and number of the course(s), a short description, the level offered (graduate or undergraduate) and the department(s) in which the course(s) was offered.  We are also interested in the “history” of your course – when it was offered, if you had any issues with approval, and how you developed the course.

Please include permission to include your course on the CDASH website, “Breaking Down the Silos: Curriculum Development in the Arts, Science and Humanities.” The site also lists programs and centers that are devoted to Art- Science-Humanities research and curriculum.