A key component of the festival is the exhibition of projects that
faculty, staff and students will work on leading up to the festival.
Here are some of the projects currently underway (click the titles
to view full project descriptions):
A live/virtual performance that
approximates the experience of a video
game
This “virtual performance factory” will be a live
and virtual simulation of a video game. As audience members move
through the performanc space and interact with live
actors and virtual experiences, like a video game, their actions
affect the performance.
The Bathysphere:
Motion Capture as
Art
The Bathysphere is an "underwater opera"
and an interactive game. 3-D animations and projections on
the walls, ceiling and floor of the space will create under- and
above-water worlds: Sometimes you'll dive deep in the water, amazed by
alternating light and shadow, and sometimes you'll fly in the sky,
water rolling beneath you. Picking up a beach ball, for instance,
you will see an octopus appear, thanks to two motion-capture systems
deployed in the space. Wave a wand, and a school of fish will
follow. A sound designer will contribute a musical score to round out
the Bathysphere experience.
An art
video game shown in the immersive dome at the Renaissance Computing
Institute
This project explores the possibilities of game engines as
an artistic medium, using custom-made sensors and input devices to
govern how a user interfaces with the game environment. The project
will be displayed and accessed through the immersive dome at RENCI's UNC engagement site. The dome is a
video-projection environment with an ultra-wide field of view (160°)
that gives a viewer a sense of total immersion.
The Architecture of
Association
The Architecture of Association, led by a Duke University
research team, is a large-scale, generative artwork that draws
associative links between media elements to form an evolving visual
collage. The Architecture of Association v2.0 develops the original
concept to create rich media landscapes from real-time associative
processes. The work will use keywords, metadata and custom clustering
algorithms to make “informed” selections from the databases, bringing
associative material into proximity for a particular duration.
Going to the Show/Main
Street, Carolina
Going to the Show is an online digital library
project that documents and illuminates the history of the experience of
cinema in North Carolina between 1896 and 1930. Main Street,
Carolina grew out of the system devised for electronic stitching
and georeferencing Sanborn Fire Insurance maps for Going to the Show.
Main Street, Carolina will be a flexible, user-friendly,
Web-based platform that will allow local libraries, schools, historical
societies, neighborhood and community organizations, heritage and
tourism offices, and preservation groups in 45 communities across the
state to build densely-layered historical maps of their downtowns.
OnSite
This project explores the construction of Hybrid Reality
Games (HRGs) for entertainment and educational purposes. HRGs are
location-based games that take place simultaneously in two spaces: a
virtual online space and a physical environment. Equipped with
GPS-enabled mobile phones, players at the physical location access
location-based information about that space and interact with online
players through text messages and voice communication. At the same
time, online players track the real-time movement of physical players
on an online map that represents the physical location while
communicating with the players in the physical space.
Happening/TheatrePiece#1
The team will stage a modern “Happening,” a theatrical
event with minimal script and no plot, in the performance tradition of
American avant-garde artist/musicians John Cage and Allan Kaprow. This
re-conceptualization of a Happening involves technologically captured
media as an essential part of the event itself: tools for both
capturing and remixing audio and video will be put in the hands of the
audience/participants, and both the original captured media and the
remixed versions will be stored after the event.
Carolina Digital
Storyboard
The Carolina Digital Storyboard is a collaborative public
interface enabling users to search, browse and interact with digitized
historic documents and images. In its initial release, it draws from
two digital libraries hosted by UNC’s Digital Library: Documenting the American South and
the North Carolina ECHO
Statewide Digitization Program. The storyboard takes the form of
large, touch-screen monitor intended for display in shared spaces such
as libraries, schools and museums around North Carolina. Users will
interact with the historic materials through a custom interface
designed specifically for this project.
A
collaborative visual and musical piece on the topic of
War
The project team is creating an
innovative, collaborative composition on the topic of war that
will be performed an electro-acoustic concert Feb. 16,
2010. The team will develop a custom interactive environment to
generate, trigger and alter sounds as well as drive a visual display of
war imagery. The musical composition will provide a flexible musical
framework and incorporate UNC faculty performers who will interact in
real-time with the images, each other and the interactive environment.
The sounds and visuals will be part of a larger system including
sensors such as visible and audible analysis of the audience.
Featured event of Music on the Hill.
Then/Now: 3-D Virtual Space As
Temporal Telescope
Then/Now is a 3-D interactive digital world
featuring various parts of the North Carolina State University campus.
This interactive space allows viewers to freely explore the virtual
campus while encouraging them to interact with virtual multimedia
“kiosks” featuring archived image, text and audio of historic
buildings, spaces and events related to NCSU’s campus. These digital
kiosks are strategically placed in the same camera location and
orientation as the original archived photos, allowing viewers a chance
to both see multimedia displays of the past and participate in a new,
virtual space.
Internet Archive of
African-American Performance Art
This project team, comprising a UNC faculty member and his
graduate seminar, will create a Web archive of African-American
performance art, featuring an online exhibition with the capacity to
support a variety of media, from texts and photographs to audio, video
and Web-based artworks. During a two-week visit to campus in fall 2009,
New York performance artist Clifford Owens will debut a performance to
be archived on the Web site.
