After a national competition, two recent PhD graduates from UCSB have been selected as Emerging Voices Fellows by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) for 2020.
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Media Arts and Technology Program
UC Santa Barbara Art professor Sarah Rosalena Brady recently presented her work with the National Museum of the American Indian and Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an event sponsored by the Media Arts & Technology Department. Brady is a multi-media artist who combines computer craft like coding & 3D modeling with traditional art-forms like clay sculpting.
Space architect and researcher Barbara Imhof spoke at UCSB about her current and past projects exploring human habitation of space. Her talk “The Stars Look Very Different Today (David Bowie)” was part of the Seminar series hosted by Media Arts & Technology.
“Understanding programming can really help shape science, help shape production, help shape art and culture,” says Lisa Jevratt, an art professor who teaches in UC Santa Barbara’s Media Arts and Technology Program and is part of the university’s Center for Information Technology.
Jevbratt’s work, which has included the Zoomorph app, research projects, and collaborations with MAT students, offer us a picture of the future of technology. In this interview with Writing student Vinny Leonelli, ,she answers questions about the future and her achievements in her field.
Imagine if you could explore the world of atoms, fly through the human brain, and come face to face with the surface of the moon. After years of collaborative research, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin and her team of scientists, artists, and engineers have made this possible here at UC Santa Barbara.
The AlloSphere, a 3-story-high spherical research instrument, takes data too small to see or hear and visually and sonically magnifies it to the human scale, allowing scientists and engineers to interact with complex data like artists: creatively and intuitively.
In a recent interview, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, a professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music who is director of the research lab, discussed the importance of holistic thinking and a return to the learning-by-doing that the AlloSphere enables.
Art and technology have often been thought of as separate domains. But in recent years, artists have been integrating more technology in their work. “Computation shapes the way people make things,” said Stanford Computer Science researcher Jennifer Jacobs to a crowded room in Elings Hall during a Media and Art Technology seminar last week.
Although computational tools and computer programs are used more now than ever it can be difficult to fully integrate technology into art and design because of how different each artist is. “Developers of computational tools struggle to provide appropriate constraints and degrees of freedom to match the needs of diverse practitioners,” Jacobs said.
The Media Arts and Technology Program (MAT) at UC Santa Barbara presents its End of Year Show 2018, a celebration of the year's research in electronic music, emergent media, computer science, engineering, and art. The theme for this year is Invisible Machine, which represents the way that transformation is jumpstarted through the Media Arts.
The MAT conducts research in the art of the “invisible becoming visible,” a process that can range from revealing the abstract processes between the input and output of a machine, to turning complicated scientific data into shapes and colors. Its technologists and artists seek to create new works that transcend the way that we currently view the world.
Weihao Qiu, a UC Santa Barbara Media and Technology student, had to work quickly to design and modify his data visualization project for exhibition at the Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation.
In the end, his hard work paid off. In a recent interview, he described how exciting it was to receive the commission for his piece and how thrilled he has been by the reaction of visitors who have interacted with it.
“When it was exhibited, I saw people playing with it, and that moment was very special,” he said. “You already know the tricks but they don’t. So you can see the process of them gaining knowledge to understand the piece.”