Moore Family Fund for Underwriting Creativity, Knowledge, Experimentation, Research and Yumminess
The Moore Family Fund for Underwriting Creativity, Knowledge, Experimentation, Research and Yumminess is a new endowed award from the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, established to support anti-disciplinary undergraduate research. By providing funding across the arts, sciences, humanities, and emerging interdisciplinary fields, the award aims to foster innovative and diverse experimentation that transcends traditional academic boundaries. The prize will awarded at the annual undergraduate research conference at CMU, Meeting of the Minds. In addition, a portion of the fund’s draw will support the annual STUDIO-hosted B*A presentations, offering this student-led event the stability of an annual operational budget.
Future students’ work will feature their names inscribed in the growing cellular design of the award’s plaque, prominently displayed in the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.
About Dan Moore
Dan Moore, now a senior technical artist/technical director at NVIDIA, is investing in the STUDIO that nurtured his growth through the newly endowed Moore Family Fund for Underwriting Creativity, Knowledge, Experimentation, Research and Yumminess. Inspired by his own transformative experiences building community with an informal cohort of creative technologists in the STUDIO, Moore hopes the Moore Family Fund will offer future students the same opportunities for collaborative exploration and boundary-pushing innovation.
As a student, Moore was a frequent leader and collaborator on multiple interdisciplinary creative research projects supported by the STUDIO. One of the products of his research and participation was the ofxRobotArm and ofxURDriver add-ons for doing creative things with robot arms, as depicted in the video below. There, viewers see and hear the curious and childlike whirring motors of the robotic arm at the STUDIO hum and twist, sporting heavy green spectacles with rolling googly eyes. These open-source creative tools have enabled many creative researchers to bring robots to life and continue to make the STUDIO’s robot arm available as a resource to future students.
The Moore Family Fund awardees will be inscribed in a custom artwork by Nervous System, a design duo who have long been part of the STUDIO’s extended creative network. Nervous System is a design studio nestled in the foothills of the Catskill Mountains; their work bridges science, art and technology. Designers Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg employ computer simulation to generate designs and digital fabrication to realize products. Nervous System explains that their work “combines scientific research, computer graphics, mathematics, and digital fabrication to explore a new paradigm of product design and manufacture. Instead of designing objects, we craft computational systems that result in a myriad of distinct creations.”