An exhibition of photographs inspired and informed by neuroscience opens at the Mellon Institute on Thursday, May 3! Join members of the community for a reception at 4:00pm in the Institute’s 4th floor lobby.

Join the students in Prof. Golan Levin’s “Interactive Art and Computational Design” class and the students in Prof. Ali Momeni’s “Digital Fabrication for the Arts” for their final show this Thursday, May 3 in the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry!

Golan Levin‘s course in Interactive Art and Computational Design is an advanced studio course in arts-computing and new media practice. Topics surveyed include: experimental interface design, information visualization, game design, computational form-generation, image processing and vision-based interactions, augmented reality, dynamic typography, mechatronic and device art, physical computing and more. Teaching Assistants: Dan Wilcox & Patrick Gage Kelley.

Ali Momeni‘s course in Digital Fabrication for the Arts introduces students to the tools, work-flow, aesthetics and communities surrounding computer-aided fabrication and its creative applications within art practice. The CAD/CAM process is particularly well-suited for certain tasks, including the creation of multiples, for fabrication of functional/kinetic components, iterative prototyping of complex structures, scalable design, construction of large structures from repeated simple components, and other ingenious digital-physical work-flows.

Featuring projects from 37 students, spanning sophomores to doctoral students, from nine different departments:

From Golan Levin’s class, Interactive Art and Computational Design: Alex Rothera • Alex Wolfe • Billy Keyes • Blase Ur • Craig Fahner • Deren Guler • Duncan Boehle • Eli Rosen • Evan Sheehan • Heather Knight • Joe Medwid • John Brieger • Jonathan Ota • Ju Young Park • Kaushal Agrawal • Kelsey Lee • Luci Laffitte • Luke Loeffler • Madeline Gannon • Mahvish Nagda • Nicholas Inzucchi • Nir Rachmel • Sam Lavery • Sankalp Bhatnagar • Sarah Keeling • Varvara Toulkeridou • Xing Xu • Zack Jacobson-Weaver ///// AND ///// From Ali Momeni’s class, Digital Fabrication for the Arts: Caroline Record • Alan Herman • Paul Miller • Justin Lin • Alex Rothera • Alex Mallard • Max Perim • William Crownover • Nathan Trevino

Poster design: Eunice Chung

As part of a sculptural commission for the Friends of the High Line in New York, STUDIO Fellow Kim Beck created “The Sky Is the Limit” — a series of fleeting messages from billboards and signage written by a skywriting plane.

When in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway a crowd gathers to read letters in the sky, the spectacle unites disparate groups, as they cluster together to find meaning in the urban landscape. As phrases unfolded above New York City, people looked up to spell out the words. Where some found mere advertising, others considered the implications of messages detached from their original contexts. In the midst of an economic recession, the skywriting caused people to look up at the sky, the most potent symbol of longing and hope. Skywritten phrases included “LOST OUR LEASE”, “LAST CHANCE”, and “NOW OPEN”.

For more information click here: idealcities.com/skynyc.html

presented by The Friends of the High Line and Mixed Greens, NYC, with support from the Studio for Creative Inquiry

TRANSFORMER - Pablo Garcia and Spike Wolff, Festival Curators

Physical laws dictate that something cannot be made from nothing. In the 21st century, however, magic and alchemy seem commonplace. Devices in your pocket can span the world and perform wondrous feats. But art and craft have long made the impossible manifest through ingenuity, skill, perseverance and inspiration. The greatest works of art began as art supplies yet transform into masterpieces through human ingenuity.

wats:ON? 2012: TRANSFORMER looks not at cutting-edge technological magic but at amazing transformations from the most humble beginnings. A piece of paper, or cloth, or even the human body can transform into something never seen before–right before your eyes.

Thu 12 Apr, 5:00pm
Giant Eagle Auditorium (Baker Hall A51)
Lecture and Demonstration: ‘Expressive Electronics: Sketching, Sewing, and Sharing’
LEAH BUECHLEY
Director, High-Low Tech Research Group
Professor, MIT Media Lab
Cosponsored by the Human- Computer Interaction Institute’s Z-Axis Seminar Series

Fri 13 Apr, 5:00pm
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
Talk and Demonstration
NORTD LABS
Addie Wagenknecht and  Stefan Hechenberger
Cosponsored by the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry

Fri 13 Apr, 8:00pm
Alumni Concert Hall, College of Fine Arts
‘Body Music Rhythm Studio – an interactive rhythmic event’
KEITH TERRY
Director, Crosspulse Project
Director,International Body Music Festival

Sat 14 Apr, 2:00- 5:00pm
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
TRANSFORMER WORKSHOPS
2:00  Paper Airplanes with Ben Saks
3:00  Hacking Objects with Nina Barbuto
4:00  Lasersaur Workshop with Nortd Labs

Sat 14 Apr, 6:00pm
STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
Reception and Artists Talk
WADE KAVANAUGH and STEPHEN B NGUYEN
“Tug O’ War”, an Installation in the CFA Great Hall

The 2012 wats:ON? Festival is made possible by the generous support of the Jill Watson Family Foundation.
Additional support provided by: the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, CMU College of Fine Arts, the Human-Computer Interaction Institute, and the CMU School of Architecture.

Beck lives in Pittsburgh where she teaches art at Carnegie Mellon. She has exhibited widely including at the High Line in New York, the Walker Art Center, the Carnegie Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, Socrates Sculpture Park, Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum. She received her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and BA from Brandeis University. She is represented by Mixed Greens, NYC and Pentimenti in Philadelphia.

At the STUDIO she worked on her recent project, The Sky is the Limit: NYC.

At the STUDIO George is collaborating with STUDIO fellow Jonathan Minard on their project, Point Cloud Portraits.

Point Cloud Portraits (2011-) by STUDIO Fellows James George and Jonathan Minard, is a computational documentary featuring 25 international new-media artists in conversation about code and culture, the shaping of technology and the future of cinema.

Interviews with the artists are collected in a new format, called “RGB+Depth”, in which traditional high-definition color video is paired with 3-dimensional point-cloud information from a Kinect depth sensor. The result is a volumetric moving-image in a 3D space where virtual cameras can view the subject from any vantage point. After being recorded as point clouds, each of the artists has been given free reign to program expressive modifications of their own data, resulting in a collection of imaginative and interpretive self-portraits that straddle a continuum between realism and abstraction. Pointcloud Portraits is a work-in-progress; in the final presentation of the movie, real-time generated sequences of the artists’ talking heads will play in a non-repeating loop, linking questions and answers in an infinite conversation.

The new medium of “depth video” takes inspiration from the ideas of science-fiction visionary, Bruce Sterling. In one lecture, Sterling presaged the camera of the future as a passive device for capturing all the photons in a space, turning the act of photography – selection of angle, exposure and composition – into a purely computational problem. The subsequent release of the Microsoft Kinect has, for the first time, made implementations of this notion attainable.

More picture on Flickr

Press about the Point Cloud Portraits
1. Gizmodo – This Is What Happens When You Cross a Kinect With a DSLR – 5/2/12 or as PDF
2. The Verge – DSLR and Kinect combine to produce dream-like visuals – 5/2/12 or as PDF
3. Tested News – RGB Toolkit Skins DSLR Photos to Kinect Depth Maps – 5/2/12 or as PDF
4. CNET – Point cloud portraits bring ghostly 3D images to movies – 5/2/12 or as PDF
5. Tec Mundo – Programa Combina Camera Digital e Linect Paracriar Filmes Video – 5/2/12 or as PDF
6. Creative JS – Depth Cam – 2/28/2012 or as PDF
7. The Creators Project – Golan Levin Ups The Ante For Reddits IAmA – 2/1/12 or as PDF
8. Creative Applications Network – Kinect and RGB+Depth Filmmaking – 1/2/12 or as PDF