Faculty Projects
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.
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.
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.
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.
