[IP] Researchers Look to Create a Synthesis of Art and Science for the 21st Century
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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: November 5, 2005 10:29:25 AM EST
To: Dewayne-Net Technology List <dewayne-net@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Researchers Look to Create a Synthesis of Art
and Science for the 21st Century
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November 5, 2005
Researchers Look to Create a Synthesis of Art and Science for the
21st Century
By JOHN MARKOFF
<http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/05/arts/05lab.html?
ex=1288846800&en=aa5efaf84e49bac4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss>
SAN DIEGO, Oct. 29 - As an actor and a founder of the politically
active Electronic Disturbance Theater, Ricardo R. Dominguez is an
unlikely faculty member at the nanoscience, wireless and
supercomputing laboratory that opened its doors here on the campus of
the University of California, San Diego, on Oct. 28.
However, Mr. Dominguez and an eclectic group of computer musicians,
computer game designers and nanotechnology artists are very much a
part of the futuristic research "collaboratory" being assembled by
the astrophysicist Larry Smarr, director of the California Institute
for Telecommunications and Information Technology, or Calit2, a $400
million research consortium assembled over the last five years.
Mr. Smarr's idea can be discerned even in the architecture of the new
Atkinson Hall, which is connected via 155 fiber-optic cables to the
rest of the campus and to a smaller partner laboratory 75 miles away
at the University of California, Irvine, as well as to research
centers around the world.
The six-story Calit2 laboratory, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean,
is designed for 900 faculty and student researchers. Two separate
wings extend from the main building. On one side is an ultrasterile
set of nanotechnology clean rooms designed for making devices like
sensors for detecting pollutants, biological warfare agents and
cancer cells. On the other side is a new digital media arts center
composed of auditoriums and computer visualization laboratories,
where the Calit2 scientists, engineers and artists can display their
projects.
For Mr. Smarr - who as director of the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications in the 1990's oversaw the development of
Mosaic, the first World Wide Web browser - this synthesis of art and
science is vital in light of the role he expects artists to play in
designing the future.
"Part of the artist's insight is to be able to interpret the future
earlier than anybody," he said during an interview in the small
hideaway conference room adjacent to his office. "We regard the
artist as fully equal with any scientist at Calit2."
That idea, which is anathema to some in the engineering-driven world
of science and technology, influenced the thinking of the building's
designers in the San Francisco office of NBBJ, the international
architectural and design firm.
"We put the clean room and the media artists as close as possible so
we could see the artists talking to the physicists and telling them
what to do," said Mark Whiteley, an NBBJ director in San Francisco.
Artist-scientist collaborations include work being done by the
neuroscientist Mark H. Ellisman and Sheldon Brown, who is in charge
of the New Media Arts group at Calit2. Dr. Ellisman's group was
involved in the construction of a wall-size tiled computer capable of
displaying 100 million pixel images of the brain, making it possible
to view vastly more information than on a standard monitor.
However, the group found that it needed to design a new control
language to deal with the huge amounts of visual information, and the
scientists and artists are cooperating on ideas for visualizing
scientific information.
Natalie Jeremijenko, who refers to herself as an "artist
experimenter," is a former member of the engineering faculty at Yale
interested in how society interacts with and uses toys. A current
project is to create a pack of "feral" robotic dogs with artificial
intelligence capabilities and let them loose in a San Diego
neighborhood. The robots could be assigned some socially useful
function, like searching for or "sniffing out" pollution.
Last year Ruth West became the first artist in residence linking the
biological sciences and the arts here. As part of the Calit2 Research
in Computing and the Arts project earlier this year, she unveiled a
collaborative project, Ecce Homology, to explore the relationship
between genetics and culture. Named after Friedrich Nietzsche's "Ecce
Homo," the project explored human evolution by visually comparing
genes from humans and rice plants. The installation was interactive,
tracking the hand gestures of visitors standing in the gallery and
allowing them to interact, using body movements, with an enormous
projected wall display screen. They were able to discover
similarities between the portions of the rice and human genomes
stored in a computer database.
The juxtaposition of digital art with next-generation science and
technologies like wireless networks, biosensors and optical
supercomputers gives Calit2 a degree of panache that has largely been
lost in the American scientific and corporate research worlds in the
face of financial cutbacks over the last decade.
The project and the new Atkinson building invite comparisons to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Laboratory, founded by
Nicholas Negroponte in 1980, which came to define a broad vision
about the possibilities inherent in computing and technology through
the rise of the dot-com era.
Now, however, it is possible that the torch of a new technology for
the 21st century will be passed to Mr. Smarr and his laboratory.
"When I first heard about Calit2, I thought it was Media Lab West,
but the context is so much larger," said Shahrokh Yadegari, a member
of the music faculty who also has a degree in electrical engineering
and is a former M.I.T. Media Lab student.
Having overseen the creation of the Web browser and watched its
ensuing impact, Mr. Smarr has a good sense of the profound effect new
technology can have on society.
[snip]
Weblog at: <http://weblog.warpspeed.com>
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