ICE is pleased to announce the awards from the 2007-2008 ICE Grants call for proposals. The awards reflect a range of emerging interests in the arts at UGA, including projects that involve collaboration across disciplines, experiment with new technology and address current social and environmental issues while engaging the community, service learning and undergraduate research. ICE will support the new projects through various stages of development with funding from the Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR).
Water: Drought
Mirla Criste
Assistant Professor
Theatre and Film Studies
Water: Drought initiates a series of works in Contact Theatre, a performance modality that explores the intersection between theatre and contact improvisation, a movement approach primarily practiced in modern dance environments. Professor Mirla Criste, who has a background in drama and modern dance, will collaborate with UGA alumnus and Georgia professional performer John Jenkinson. They will develop a work that responds to the current water shortage in Georgia, exploring ideas of water that are both concrete and symbolic, such as thirst, growth and birth. Lori Teague, Professor of Dance at Emory University in Atlanta and Julie Rothschild, contact improvisation professional, will serve as consultants.
Water Body
Michelle Penland Dodson
Graduate Candidate
Theatre and Film Studies
Water Body is a community project that brings together artists to create an original work combining video projection, aerial performance, spoken word, and a soundscape. Michelle Penland Dodson, who has a background in visual arts as well as theatre, will feature the project in her MFA research employing the use of video media in a performance setting with live performers. Water Body involves the collaborative efforts of Dodson, Susan Murphy, Creative Director of Canopy Repertory Company, and Janisse Ray, renowned environmental author and activist. Citing art as vehicle of change, the performance will celebrate water while encountering the prevalent disregard of its precious life-giving qualities.
Dynamic Reading
Margot Ecke
Assistant Professor
Lamar Dodd School of Art
Dynamic Reading grew out of an ICE-sponsored discussion and workshop with visiting artist Buzz Spector about the role of the narrative in contemporary culture and the dilemma of making language a visual experience. Professor Margot Ecke will be joined by Dr. Jed Rasula, Helen S. Lanier Distinguished Professor of English, and Jordan Dalton, a UGA Foundation Fellow pursuing an Honors Interdisciplinary Studies degree combining Computer Science, English, and Digital Media. The project will engage in a series of collaborative experiments at the printing press and the Web, exploring how different formats influence the reading of text.
“Girls Talk” Program for the Tanzania Service Learning Program in Ukerewe, Mongella Initiative
Koqunia LaTrice Forte
Graduate Candidate
Theatre and Film Studies
Girls Talk will investigate the importance of identity, community and personal growth in the minds of adolescent girls through participation in the Tanzania Service Learning program, sponsored by Ambassador Gertrude Mongella, the African Studies Institute, College of Family and Consumer Sciences, the School of Social Work, and the Carl Vinson Institute of Government. Koqunia LaTrice Forte, an MFA candidate and Graduate Advisor in the African American Cultural Center, will use recorded media and transcripts to compose a solo performance piece for American audiences about the needs and passions of Ukerewe youth.
The Biomechanics of Conducting Music
Tim Foutz
Professor
The Faculty of Engineering and Biological and Agricultural Engineering
The Biomechanics of Conducting Music will develop new methodologies to quantify skills in the mechanics of conducting music. Dr. Tim Foutz, working in collaboration with Dr. F. David Romines, Associate Director of Bands and Assistant Professor of Music, will employ motion capture camera systems to model accelerated gestures that are difficult or impossible to observe with the naked eye, enabling music faculty and students at the Hugh Hodgson School of Music to evaluate conducting with greater scrutiny.
Race and Children’s Literature of the Gilded Age
Amanda Gailey
Assistant Professor
English
Race and Children’s Literature of the Gilded Age will create a digital archive of illustrated American children’s literature published between the end of the Civil War (1865) and the foundation of the NAACP (1913), beginning with Joel Chandler Harris, author of Uncle Remus tales, who lived in Eatonton, Georgia. Professor Amanda Gailey, working in collaboration with Dr. Gerald Early, Merle King Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University, will use the project to help students and scholars examine how adults wanted children to think about racial difference during this pivotal period in American history. The project brings together methods in humanities computing, literary criticism, art history, illustration and printing technology to form an interactive database for cross-disciplinary study.
Our New Silence
Jean Kidula
Associate Professor
Hugh Hodgson School of Music
Our New Silence is an ambitious project that will provide Athens musicians with the opportunity to work with a new palette of sounds from Indonesia and let them rework, reinterpret, and personalize this music culminating in a public performance. Dr. Jean Kidula, a professor of Ethnomusicology, will work in collaboration with Kai Riedl, an instructor in the department of Religion and accomplished musician with firsthand expertise in the music of Indonesia through multiple visits to Java. The project will pair students in music, religious studies and the community with individualized tracks, loops and samples from Indonesia to create new compositions that will be available on the Web along with original source material.
A New Dissonance: Translating Ben Johnston’s 10th String Quartet
Jon Roy
Graduate Candidate
Lamar Dodd School of Art
A New Dissonance will document the preparation, rehearsal and performance of Ben Johnston’s 10th String Quartet, providing insight to the creative process of Johnston and his unique notation methods. Ben Johnston was born in Macon, Georgia in 1926 and studied with music legends Harry Partch, John Cage and Darius Milhaud. Johnston is currently Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Illinois, where he taught composition and theory from 1951-1983. Jon Roy, an MFA candidate in Art, will combine his background in visual art, film and music to enable a historic staging of the composition by the Kepler Quartet in Madison, Wisconsin. Performed only once before, the 10th String Quartet has been developed further by Johnston using computer-generated MIDI realizations. Roy will translate the composition’s microtonal acoustical principals to other disciplines, such as film and color theory, making the the results available via the Web and DVD.
Sound Source: Jason Freeman
Rick Silva
Visiting Assistant Professor
Lamar Dodd School of Art
ICE will host artist and composer Jason Freeman during Sound Source, a two-day workshop, public presentation and collaborative community performance organized by Professor Rick Silva. Freeman is an Assistant Professor of Music in the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology whose work employs cutting-edge technology and unconventional notation to transform audiences and musicians into compositional collaborators.
The Athens Heritage Project
Paul Sutter
Associate Professor
History
The Athens Heritage Project will share the uniquely varied history of Athens and its neighboring communities through a series of oral history-based theatrical productions. Professor Paul Sutter will work in collaboration with the Rose of Athens Theatre to conduct interviews with Athens residents representing many communities: African-American, Faith, Immigrant, Music, Old Town Athens, the University of Georgia and more. Their stories will be crafted into dramatic compositions using text, music, media and movement, creating an enduring living history for the city and its region.
Descending: Part Three of “Mechanical and Metaphysical Phenomena”
Martijn van Wagtendonk
Assistant Professor
Lamar Dodd School of Art
Professor Martijn van Wagtendonk’s studio research combines his background in animation and sculpture to create installations with kinetic elements, interactive video, music, electric motors and audience-triggered mechanical events.Descending proposes to extend this research to the realm of engineering, referencing what engineering does and how it influences lives and society as a form of problem solving that describe a tale. The project is a continuation of Mechanical and Metaphysical Phenomena, previously funded by a UGA Research Foundation Junior Faculty Research Grant.
Satellite Dishes, Moveable Walls, and a Snowscape
Jonathan Vance
Undergraduate Candidate
Computer Science
Satellite Dishes, Moveable Walls, and a Snowscape will explore the potential of multi-point interactive whiteboards using the Nintendo Wiimote, used in conjunction with live performance. The project will bring together a group of dancers, musicians, set builders, costume designers and lighting technicians, organized by Jonathan (BS candidate, Computer Science) and Maryn Vance (BFA Dance).
2012, the Instruction Manual for Living in Post-Apocolypsus
Edward Whelan
Undergraduate Candidate
Lamar Dodd School of Art
Spearheaded by Edward Whelan (BFA candidate, Digital Media), Margaret Allgood (BA candidate, Art History), and Mariquita Davis (BFA Digital Media and 2006 ICE Fellow), 2012 will examine public fascination with apocalyptic themes through the production of a video “field guide” for post-apocalytic living. Using a documentary approach, the team will travel the United States conducting interviews with experts in a vast range of disciplines including communications, horticulture, technology, political science, religion, survival skills, sociology, astronomy, Scientology, weather and climate and Mayan history.
Georgia
Andrew Zawacki
Assistant Professor
English
Georgia is a collaboration of Creative Writing Professor Andrew Zawacki, visiting Dance faculty member Denise Posnak, acclaimed percussionist Seth Hendershot and Digital Media BFA candidate Jocelyn Negron. The quartet will conduct a formal exploration of the parallels and interferences between ear and eye, proceeding from the short lyric poem “Georgia” by Surrealist writer Philippe Soupault and culminating in a series of short performances in locations throughout the state.