Category Archives: atec

The opening of the new Arts and Technology (ATEC) Building at UT Dallas in 2013 will bring global attention to North Texas as a hub of research and innovation in this emerging field. This $60 million, 155,000-square-foot facility will provide an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment for students, scholars and industry. Here they will apply the principles of visual arts, computer science and engineering to solutions impacting fields as diverse as medicine, education, journalism, social media and more.

Thomas Linehan, to be joined by Roger Malina, Sandra Thomas and Dan Kuenster in a discussion panel concerning the impact of ATEC on the DFW Metroplex

Learn more about this innovative program from two UT Dallas faculty members as well as from executives from Istation, a successful local technology company that has already discovered the value of ATEC’s research and graduates. Presentations will include ATEC projects and Istation’s educational animation programs, which are available to Texas public school students from third to eighth grade.

Dr. Thomas Linehan
Arts and Humanities Distinguished Chair and Director of the ATEC Program

Dr. Roger Malina 
Arts and Technology Distinguished Chair and Professor of Physics

Sandra Thomas 
President and Chief Operating Officer, Istation

Dan Kuenster 
Executive Vice President of Design and Animation, Istation
Winner of the 2004 Emmy Award for Individual Achievement in Storyboarding

A light breakfast will be served starting at 7:30 a.m. with a panel discussion following from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m.

Communities Foundation of Texas
5500 Caruth Haven Lane
Dallas, Texas 75226

Detailed agenda is located at http://www.utdallas.edu/development/board

Limited seating is available; please register at devrsvp@utdallas.edu or 972-883-6504. This event is free and open to the public.

Roger Malina, Distinguished Professor of Arts and Technology and Professor of Physics at UT Dallas, will lead a discussion at Hexagram-Concordia Centre for Research-Creation in Media Arts and Technologies and attempt to shed light on the concepts of efficiency and acceleration when researchers from the arts, humanities and engineering work collaboratively.

Dr. Roger F. Malina

Malina will discuss what is new in the emerging and rapidly growing field of art-science collaboration, and examine some of the obstacles and opportunities that are appearing. The discussion will be held Friday, Nov. 16.

This event is the first of Hexagram | CIAM’s 2012-13 public programming with a new partnership with PHI Center, which focuses on their complementary mandates, bringing academic research-creation and quality dissemination to the Montreal community.

Dr. Roger F. Malina, distinguished professor of arts and technology in the School of Arts and Humanities, and professor of physics in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, has been named Associate Director of Arts and Technology.

Dr. Roger F. Malina

Malina is a physicist, astronomer and executive editor of Leonardo publications at MIT Press.

“I am delighted to accept the appointment as ATEC Associate Director at a very exciting time for our program,” Malina said. “The hire of 5 outstanding new faculty in 2013 and our upcoming move into the new ATEC building at the center of the campus offer real opportunities for our areas of concentration in both research and education to have a real impact internationally.”

In this position Malina will focus his attention on four specific components of the ATEC program:

1. Educational and research projects at the intersection of the arts and sciences, including the development of a partnership with the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.
2. International partnerships.
3. Participation in the STEM to STEAM initiative, which seeks to integrate the arts, design and humanities into science, technology, engineering and math related fields.
4. Overseeing the development and administration of the EMAC program.

Malina is a former director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence (OAMP) in Marseille, and a member of its observational cosmology group, which performs investigations on the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

He is also a member of the Mediterranean Institute for Advanced Study (Institut Méditerranéen de Recherches Avancées, IMERA), an institute he helped to organize. IMERA seeks to contribute to trans-disciplinarity between the sciences and the arts, placing emphasis on the human dimensions of the sciences.

Malina was also a member of the jury for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge 2011, which awards a prize to those who create strategies with potential to “solve humanity’s most pressing problems.”

Malina’s specialty is space instrumentation. He was the principal investigator for the NASA Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer satellite at the University of California, Berkeley. The satellite was the first orbiting observatory to map the sky in the extreme ultraviolet band. The team at UC Berkeley had to invent new cameras, telescopes and data analysis techniques to accomplish the task. The team was one of the first university groups to take over operation of a NASA satellite and operate it from a university with teams of students.

For 25 years, Malina has been involved with the Leonardo organizations, which his father founded in 1967. Malina earned his bachelor’s degree in physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972 and his doctorate in astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley in 1979.

CentralTrak, the University’s artist residency and gallery, takes another look at new media and sonic art  this week and also plans a one-night showing of video game designs created by UT Dallas students.

The CentralTrak gallery and residency are both located at 800 Exposition Ave. in the historic neighborhood of Deep Ellum, near downtown Dallas. For more information, check the CentralTrak website or call (214) 824-9302. These events are free and open to the public.

Next Topic — Thursday, Nov. 8 at 7 p.m.

CentralTrak Talk Series: Next Topic aims to culminate in-depth discussions about art and art practices. This fall, Next Topic examines new media art.

New media artist Alejandro Borsani will discuss his works, which explore the nature of perception and media representation. Borsani holds a MFA in electronic arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY, and an MFA in electronic visualization from the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

ex mus – Friday, Nov. 9 at 8 p.m.

ex mus is an experimental music concert series that will highlight the works of both local and international composers and musicians.

The collective of experimental musicians, Andrew Jordan Miller, Jonathan Jackson, Chaz Underriner and Martian Back will kick off the series with their interpretations of Anatassis Phillippakopoulous, a contemporary Greek composer.

This event will be live-streamed at ustream.tv/channel/ex-mus.

Tiny Thumbs — Saturday, Nov. 10, 5-8 p.m.

CentralTrak will present a one-night-only showcase of game design from UT Dallas students. Tiny Thumbs is a pop-up video arcade of sorts, curated by PhD student Kyle Kondas.

Arts and Technology alumnus Willie Baronet recently spoke at TEDxSMU, an all-day event ranging from personal discussions of physical and mental journeys to demonstrations of high-tech gadgetry.

Willie Baronet is an artist, professor, and life coach in Dallas. For 15 years he owned and managed an advertising design firm, which he sold in 2006. He graduated in 2011 with an MFA in Arts and Technology from UT Dallas. He currently teaches full time in the Temerlin Advertising Institute at SMU.

Willie has been buying and collecting signs from the homeless since 1993, beginning with his discomfort over dealing with people on street corners asking for money.

What transpired was a personal journey that changed the way he felt about the homeless, as he began to get to know them as people. While getting his MFA, he began creating art utilizing these signs (video, installation, interventionist performances and other mixed media), and has now participated in several group and solo exhibitions. The process of collecting the signs and of making art with them continues to transform him.

As the Arts and Technology program continues to grow, three new faculty will join the program in spring 2013. A variety of new courses will be offered. View the full listing of ATEC and EMAC courses on CourseBook.

New Courses

A variety of new courses will be offered at the undergraduate and graduate level.

Visual Evidence is a multidisciplinary course, where we will look at exemplary visualizations in the broadest sense – from classic artworks, such as Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander, to the latest scientific plots and info-graphics. Besides analyzing visualizations much like art historians traditionally do with artworks, the course will also include some practical exercise in producing and criticizing visualizations, ideally based on examples from the student’s original focus of study.

Participants will acquire essential skills of critical seeing, enabling them to persuade with better visualizations by applying the principle of creative destruction in a cognitive way.

Integrating visualization and visual studies, the course will include introductory lectures, multidisciplinary guest speakers from ATEC and beyond, as well as collaborative projects and talks by the students.

Students from ATEC, EMAC as well as Arts and Humanities will bring in their specific skills and are encouraged to learn from each other. We will cross-fertilize literature work, critical seeing, as well as data science skills (such as acquisition, cleaning, analysis, and visualization). Programming and math skills are not necessary but very useful.

ATEC 6389 Ecology of Complex Networks
Maximilian Schich

The Ecology of Complex Networks is a fundamental phenomenon that permeates data across multiple disciplines. This course will provide an introduction to this multidisciplinary phenomenon with a (non-exclusive) focus on the arts, humanities and culture. The course will provide an overview of the emerging state of the field and it’s connections to other relevant areas, such as biology, computer science, economics, engineering, math, physics, social science, technology, and others.
Participants will acquire a basic understanding of complex network phenomena in a variety of fields, including what is currently known as data science and digital humanities.

In addition to introductory lectures and multidisciplinary guest speakers from ATEC and beyond, students will form small teams to analyze, visualize and interpret complex network data. Students from ATEC, EMACS as well as Arts & Humanities will bring in their specific skills and are encouraged to collaborate and learn from each other. We will cross-fertilize literature work, critical seeing, as well as data skills (such as acquisition, cleaning, analysis, and visualization). Basic to advanced skills in programming, statistics and math are not a requirement but very useful. Requires permission of instructor.

ATEC 6389 Virtual Analog Computing
Paul Fishwick

How would you represent computer data (big and small), equations, and code if you were told to build rather than to write software? This is the question we will explore in this seminar. Most computing has been analog until fairly recently, and our representations of software artifacts has been limited by cost of deployment.

A Petri net machine encoded in the game of Minecraft

While our computers are digital, we are analog. Recent research in neuroscience and embodied cognition indicates that we “simulate” when we read and think. This suggests a new approach to software design where we evolve new embodied media to design and build software. This media includes 3D games, mixed reality, physical computing, and 3D printing. The idea is to explore new machines in virtual spaces, and to re- envision “software” by making it analog, more accessible, and engaging, for a wide audience.

The course will involve instructor lectures, invited lectures, student talks and projects. Both ATEC and Engineering (especially Computer Science) students are encouraged to take the class. The main prerequisites are a knowledge of at least one programming language, and an interest in arts-based design.

More information about this course

ATEC 6389 Translation of Spaces and Time
Frank Dufour and Rainer Schulte

The conceptual frame of the seminar will be based on the paradigm of translation. Together with the students, the instructors plan to build the vocabulary necessary to perform complex descriptions and analyses of representations of space and time in films, poems, music, novels, plays, and interactive narratives. George Steiner’s statement that all acts of interpretation and communication are acts of translation can serve as an entrance into the study of time and space.

By its very nature, translation establishes dynamic interactions from texts to texts and cultures to cultures. Thus, students will be able to identify and describe specific aspects of representations of space and time as they relate to cultural and artistic contexts. Furthermore, the instructors will make students aware of the existence of digital tools and techniques specially designed for the analysis of textual and multimedia contents. In addition, students will gain experience in the use of such tools to build models for the recording of the representation of time and space in literature, film, music, and theater. The seminar should be of particular interest to students in arts and technology, aesthetic studies, arts and performance, and world literature.

The ultimate goal of the seminar will be the work toward recommendations for digital software that would facilitate the dynamic representations of time and space in multimedia environments.

New Faculty

Three new faculty members will be joining Arts and Technology in spring 2013: Paul Fischwick, Maximilian Schich and Scott Swearingen.

Paul Fishwick
Distinguished Endowed Chair of Arts and Technology and Professor of Computer Science

Paul Fishwick is joining the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in January 2013. He will be Distinguished Endowed Chair of Arts and Technology (ATEC) and Professor of Computer Science. Paul has six years of industry experience as a systems analyst working at Newport News Shipbuilding and at NASA Langley Research Center in Virginia.

He has been on the faculty at the University of Florida since 1986, and is Director of the Digital Arts and Sciences Programs there. His PhD was in Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania. Fishwick is active in modeling and simulation, as well as in the bridge areas spanning art, science, and engineering. He pioneered the area of aesthetic computing, resulting in an MIT Press edited volume in 2006.

He is a Fellow of the Society for Computer Simulation, served as General Chair of the Winter Simulation Conference (WSC), was a WSC Titan Speaker in 2009, and has delivered over fifteen keynote addresses at international conferences. He is Chair of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group in Simulation (SIGSIM). Fishwick has over 200 technical papers and has served on all major archival journal editorial boards related to simulation, including ACM Transactions on Modeling and Simulation (TOMACS) where he was a founding area editor of modeling methodology in 1990.

Maximilian Schich
Associate Professor

Dr. Maximilian Schich is an art historian, joining The University of Texas at Dallas as an Associate Professor for Art and Technology in January 2013. He works to converge hermeneutics, information visualization, computer science, and physics to understand art, history, and culture.

Recently, Maximilian worked on complex networks in the arts and humanities with Dirk Helbing, FuturICT coordinator at ETH Zurich (2012), and Albert-László Barabási, complex network physicist at Northeastern University in Boston (2008-2012). He was a DFG Research Fellow (2009-2012) and received funding from the Special Innovation Fund of the President of Max-Planck-Society (2008).

Previously, Max obtained his PhD in Art History from Humboldt-University in Berlin (2007), and his MA in Art History, Classic Archaeology, and Psychology from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich (2001). Besides, he looks back at over a decade of consulting experience, working with (graph) data in libraries, museums, and large research projects (1996-2008).

Maximilian is the organizing chair of the ongoing NetSci symposia series on Arts, Humanities, and Complex Networks, as well as an Editorial Advisor at Leonardo Journal (MIT-Press). He publishes in multiple disciplines and is a prolific speaker, translating his ideas to diverse audiences across academia and industry.

Teaching at UT Dallas, Maximilian Schich aims to raise visual literacy (Visual Evidence) and provide students with a multidisciplinary perspective (Ecology of Complex Networks in Arts, Culture, and Beyond). Both aspects count on Art and Technology as key ingredients to further our understanding of our increasingly complex world.

Scott Swearingen
Associate Professor

Scott Swearingen is an artist, developer, and educator who creates interactive multimedia spaces that blur the boundaries between the virtual and practical. He has been working at the intersection of art and technology for nearly 20 years specializing in the categories of digital imaging, kinetic sculpture, video games, and virtual environments.

His work has been widely published and has garnered recognition from the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences as well as the Game Developers Choice Awards. He has collaborated on several award-winning franchises including Medal of Honor, The Simpsons, Dead Space and The Sims.

As a professional designer, Scott is responsible for deploying game systems, prototyping mechanics, and crafting the overall user experience. He has partnered with and been featured by such notable companies as CompuServe, Electronic Arts, and MAXIS.

Scott has also instructed on Game Design and Virtual Environments at The University of Texas at Dallas as an Assistant Professor. Since then, many of his former students have gone to excel in academia and at various industry studios including iD Software, Gearbox Software, and DreamWorks Animation SKG.

His personal interests bridge installation art with short-form game design. While Scott’s early work embodied this in spaces contextually bound to themes of navigation, his art is becoming increasingly haptic-driven in concept.

John Pomara, professor of visual arts in the School of Arts and Humanities, produces art that is unique to the digital age. His most recent work is on display at the Barry Whistler Galleryin Dallas until Nov. 24.

John Pomara

The exhibit, titled off-Key2, showcases Pomara’s artistic approach fusing art, science and technology – a style that has developed over time.
In 1998, Pomara was a newly-hired professor who didn’t want anyone to see what he was working on. After dark, when no one was around, he returned to the Visual Arts Building to use the copy machine.

For months, Pomara photocopied paint drips patterned to resemble microbiology photographs of cell structures.

“I collected dozens of biology books, anything that had any kind of microphotography or DNA gene scan,” Pomara recalled. “I wanted to make these images into 6-foot hand-painted images – I wanted to make 6-foot photocopies.”

Pomara’s late-night project led to an exhibition of large-scale paintings and photographs that appeared as photocopies at the Dallas Museum of Art, and to a deeper investigation of how art, technology and science interact.

Today, Pomara is lauded for his ability to blend technology and traditional art. Some call him a “new media artist.”

Mis-aligned

The University’s Arts and Technology program is a good fit for him, he said, because his interactions with students who use video, digital photography and painting make him approach art differently. And his collaborations with faculty sometimes force him to re-examine his work.

“My work explores the tension between mechanical detachment and personal engagement,” Pomara said. “I’m investigating the link between abstract paintings and photography, printing and digital imaging.”

Pomara’s artwork currently involves making computer stencils of magnified digital images, which he then paints by hand, pulling industrial enamel across aluminum surfaces. The finished paintings look like an electronic screen, with a cool reflective surface, blurred as if the forms are moving rapidly or hovering like a photographic ghost.

“The work is a visual dialogue about the intimacy of touch and how it’s evolving in an ever-increasingly faster world of electronic imaging,” Pomara said. “Maybe I’m just a new media artist who keeps on painting.

Popular Mechanics

In some of his most recent work, Pomara manipulates technology to produce art. He calls it “capturing glitches” and he learned this new medium quite serendipitously. In a design class, a printer malfunctioned on one of the professor’s students. Instead of throwing the print away, Pomara scanned the image back into the computer and started working with it.

“I magnified, distorted and remade the glitch. And, I realized I could even glitch the images myself, intentionally,” Pomara said. “I’ve broken a few printers.”

CentralTrak, UT Dallas’ artists residency in Deep Ellum, has launched a bi-weekly talk series titled Next Topic. Each session features an artist and culminate with an in-depth discussions between artists, art enthusiasts, and art students and educators from across the Metroplex.

This fall, Next Topic will examine new media art.

Please join us this upcoming Thursday, Oct. 25 for a talk by new media artist Paula Gaetano Adi. Gaetano Adi is an artist and researcher working in sculpture, performance, interactive installation and robotic agents. Using the human and nonhuman body as a point of departure, her work deals with different cultural studies of technoscience, particularly in regard to human subjectivity and how they can be reflected through art. Gaetano Adi holds a MFA with emphasis in Arts & Technology from The Ohio State University. She is currently Assistant Professor of New Media in the University of North Texas – College of Visual Arts and Design.

Ken Maruyama

Arts and Technology

Guest Presentation

Ken Maruyama Vice President of Recruiting and Academic Relations of Sony Pictures Imageworks will present “Five Key Job Categories in Sony’s Pipeline: What They Are, What They Do, and What We Look For in Reels.”

Wednesday, November 7th. 1 p.m. – 1:45 p.m.
Multipurpose Room.
UT Dallas Residence Hall North 2F.

CentralTrak, UT Dallas’ artists residency and gallery in Deep Ellum, is launching a series of talks among artists, art enthusiasts, and art students and educators from across the Dallas area.

Not So Indifferent is a multi-media collaboration between Arts and Humanities faculty members Frank Dufour and Thomas Riccio.

This year’s series, which is titled Next Topic, will examine new digital media art. The series opens Thursday, Oct. 11, at 7 p.m. with UT Dallas School of Arts and Humanities professors Frank Dufour and Thomas Riccio. They will be discussing their collaborative multi-media exhibition Not So Indifferent, which is currently on display in the CentralTrak gallery. The exhibit combines digital media with site-specific design to create an existential drama – a performance that features the viewing public as lead actors in the projected video.

“The exhibit can be experienced as an interactive multimedia poem. A film is continuously read and analyzed by a program installed on three computers. Each computer generates sounds extracted from the film, or inspired by it, and displays images from a large database of clips that represent our collective visual and televisual memory,” said Dufour.

The bi-weekly art talks scheduled for this fall also include:

• Oct 25: Paula Gaetano Adi, an artist and researcher working in sculpture, performance, interactive installation and robotic agents. Using the human and nonhuman body as a point of departure, her work deals with different cultural studies of technoscience, particularly in regard to human subjectivity and how they can be reflected through art. Gaetano Adi holds a master of fine arts (MFA) with emphasis in arts and technology from Ohio State University.

• Nov 8: Alejandro Borsani,  a new media artist whose work explores the nature of perception and media representation. He holds a MFA in electronic arts from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., and a MFA in electronic visualization from the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Chicago

• Nov 29: Brittany Ransom, an artist and educator working in interactive installations, electronic art objects, and site-specific interventions that probe the lines separating human, animal, and environmental relations while exploring emergent technologies. She received her MFA with a focus in new media arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

CentralTrak is located at 800 Exposition Ave. in the historic Deep Ellum neighborhood near downtown Dallas. For more information, check the CentralTrak website or call (214) 824-9302. These events are free and open to the public.