These research groups are for Winter - Fall 2013.
This collaborative research cohort will create tangible user interfaces
for interactive art, design and performance with Professor Jennifer
Parker through The OpenLab Network. OpenLab facilitates innovative, creative and collaborative research with art, community, design, and science at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Research projects developed by the Mechatronic’s project group will stem from Professor Parker’s systems based approach for fabricating functional experimental art and education devices that combine principles of kinetics, electronics, motion control, sensors, actuators, motors, and other control devices with Arduino Boards and Make Boards with Max/MSP/Jitter and Processing as the primary programming languages. The fabrication methods include, woodwork, metalwork, mold-making, and rapid prototyping to build and advance iterations of the mechatronic platform. The conceptual framework of the projects created by the Mechatronic’s project group will be developed in relation to the research topic chosen by the group to develop. [read more]
The Art and Globalization Working Group explores new media in relation to an era of rapid economic, cultural and political globalization. Students will undertake projects that exploit the potential of new technologies to convey diverse experiences, address social problems and facilitate broader participation in global culture and politics. Participants will work individually and collaboratively, while engaging in regular critiques, seminars and workshops that foster innovation around art, technology and globalization. [read more]
Those wishing to join this project group must indicate Participatory Culture in the area of study (drop down menu) of their application. Please specify ART AND GLOBALIZATION in your statement of purpose.
Students in this research project group will work on SIERRA NEVADA: AN ADAPTION, an initial work in the Force Majeure Series, a 50-year collaboration between the Harrison Studio and the Center for Art + Environment at Nevada Museum of Art. The intention of this work of art is to explore and then create the methodologies that might demonstrate how to buffer the drought and erratic weather, which will inevitably impact the Central Valley of California as well as the high grounds of the Sierra Nevada. The term 'The Force Majeure' refers to the inexorable force of human-forced global warming acting in transaction with our vast processes of extraction and CO2 production.
Environmental artists who have collaborated since 1971, the Harrisons' work develops collaborative dialogues to uncover ideas and solutions which support biodiversity and community development. It involves proposing solutions and involves not only public discussion, but extensive mapping and documentation of these proposals in an art context. [read more]
Those wishing to join this project group must indicate Participatory Culture in the area of study (drop down menu) of their application. Please specify SIERRA NEVADA: AN ADAPTATION in your statement of purpose.
Over the last 40 years we have seen a blossoming of new models of play. From the rise of the New Games movement and the emergence of the role-playing game (in the 1970s) to the current moment’s opportunities for pervasive, gestural, networked, and potentially deeply responsive computer games, we are changing who plays, how we play, and what play can mean.
This project group invites those who want to invent and explore new play spaces. It seeks participants who will take play-oriented approaches to storytelling, ideology, sociality, performance, and other rich areas of human life. The goal is to find those who have their own talents and approaches, but who also desire meaningful collaboration. Ideal candidates will have backgrounds that are already interdisciplinary, especially including two or more of: game design, creative writing, computer science, digital arts, other arts, and game studies.
Peer Gynt, Ibsen's 1867 masterpiece, has waited a century and a half to be staged with 21st-century technology. The proscenium theater of Ibsen's day launched this sprawling verse epic, but it also could not accommodate its true scope. We want to produce this play with all the multidimensional adventure it demands.
We propose to take over a building—one with advanced technological capacities and multiple levels and rooms—and inhabit it with the adventure of Peer Gynt. Drawing on the play's roots in medieval plays, this production will move the audience through different spaces as Peer roams through Norway. We will take some episodes that are usually cut due to the difficulty in staging them—such as the shipwreck scenes—and bring them to life in rooms crafted from video, digital animation, and non-human performers. We will intersperse such digital tableaux vivants with scenes of utmost simplicity, such as a single human performer peeling an onion in an empty room. The world of the dream, the tall tale, the adventurer, the vulnerable boy, the jaded man, the sweep of the fjords, the claustrophobia of the bog, the overlapping layers and stages of life will be evoked in this production. The process is collaborative and multi-disciplinary in its conception. Scenes and "rooms" (tableaux vivants, installations) will be assigned according to interest.
Students in this project group will be invited to propose scenes and determine their sphere of participation. Certain scenes and decisions are tentatively in place. [read more]