UGA Arts Collaborative

eco-log

2002-2003 ICE Project Grant
Kate Ross
MFA Candidate
Lamar Dodd School of Art

A collaborative arts project between artists and community members that explores local ecology and the impact of urban sprawl.

eco-log was developed through community workshops and culminated in a series of May performances at the Canopy Studio Movement Arts Center in Athens. Catherine Ross (M.F.A. candidate, Printmaking) was the Artistic Coordinator and Producer. This ambitious and intensely collaborative project synthesized aerial performance (trapeze), dance, spoken word poetry, projected digital video, sound, installation and fiber arts. Sculptural forms and instruments were created from non-recyclable materials during the workshops, which reinforced the non-hierarchical, participatory methodology of the project. In addition to UGA students and volunteers from the Athens community, the performances featured the Gemini Twins, a professional aerial arts team formerly of the Cirque du Soleil and the reading of an original poem contributed by Scottish author John Wallace. Eco-log was supported in part by a project grant from ICE and received additional support from R.E.M., the Canopy Studio Movement Arts Center and the Lyndon House Arts Center.

Photography by Tish Payton

Mobile Media Project

ICE and the New Media Institute (NMI) supported the collaborative development of four projects for handheld wireless devices in the Wireless Athens Georgia (WAG) zone in downtown Athens. Mark Callahan and Zane Wilson created an experimental interface called Latitude in a remote collaboration between Athens and Longmont, Colorado. Christian Croft (B.F.A., Digital Media) created a net artwork and performance that parodies the US Department of Homeland Security web site entitled Afterready. Kit Hughes (B.F.A. candidate, Digital Media) developed a project called Tagging that allows participants to draw virtual graffiti on locations within the WAG zone and collects the images in an online image gallery. Tara Rebele created an interactive hypertext-narrative project called Athens Wireless Escorts that explores social space and the handheld computer as fetish and companion. The projects were realized with the assistance of NMI students and faculty and premiered during the Go Mobile or Go Home wireless technology conference held in April, 2003.

Mark Callahan and Zane Wilson “Latitude”

A Good Man is Hard to Find

2002-2003 ICE Project Grant
George Contini, Professor, Drama
David Volk, PhD. Candidate, Music

A chamber opera based on the story by Flannery OConnor.

This modern chamber opera, based on Flannery O’Connor’s short story masterpiece of the same name, is a collaborative effort that brings together talents and ideas from across the state of Georgia to participate in this unique theatrical experience. O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man Is Hard to Find, is about a Georgia family, traveling to Florida on vacation, who come across a serial killer, the Misfit. Their confrontation raises questions about redemption, faith, grace and common humanity in this dark comic parable.

The opera, which is an adaptation of O’Connor’s short story, is composer David Volk’s doctoral dissertation at UGA.

“This project has been a twenty-year dream that started in my undergraduate and masters program at FSU,” Volk says. “I was in an electronic music class at UGA when the idea to revive the project suddenly struck me. We were listening to Stockhausen’s “Gesang der Jungerlinge” and I suddenly realized that an electronic score would be a very effective way to set “Good Man” operatically.”

The opera does not rely on electronic music alone. There will be a full chamber orchestra to accompany the cast that will be conducted by Dr. Mitch Turner, a music professor at LaGrange College.

Ellen Ritchey, a soprano who is playing the Grandmother, received her Doctor of Musical Arts degree from UGA and is an adjunct instructor of music at Gainesville College in Gainesville, Georgia.

The opera is directed by George Contini, a professor in the Department of Drama and Theatre at UGA who last directed “The Laramie Project”. He says that the production is unique because every element from the design to the writing to the singing is a product of the southern American region.

“I think a college audience will really respond to O’Connor’s dark, grotesque humor,” Conini says. “Her skewed view of religion and ethics can be seen as a precursor to the warped work of Tarantino and Lynch. I applaud ICE funding such projects.”

Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1925 and died from lupus in Milledgeville, Georgia in 1964. In those thirty-nine years, she contributed a brief, powerful canon (two novels, thirty-two short stories, plus reviews and commentaries) that continues to be studied. O’Connor is considered to be one of the most important voices in American literature.

The opera has been performed at the Seney-Stoval Chapel in Athens, Piedmont College in Demorest, Georgia, and was the featured event at the International Flannery O’Connor Conference at Georgia College in Milledgeville, Georgia.

The cast and crew are made up of UGA students, as well as professors from UGA and other Georgia colleges. A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a collaboration of the Department of Drama and Theatre and the School of Music and is supported by an ICE Project Grant and the Mary Flannery OConnor Foundation.

ICE Collab 3: Steve Dietz

Steve Dietz is the former Curator of New Media at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, where he founded the New Media Initiatives department in 1996, the online art Gallery 9 and digital art study collection. He also co-founded, with the Minneapolis Institute of Arts the award-winning educational site ArtsConnectEd, and the artist community site mn artists.org with the McKnight Foundation.

Dietz has organized and curated new media exhibitions including Beyond Interface: net art and Art on the Net (1998); Shock of the View: Artists, Audiences, and Museums in the Digital Age (1999); Digital Documentary: The Need to Know and the Urge to Show (1999); Cybermuseology for the Museo de Monterrey (1999); Art Entertainment Network (2000); Outsourcing Control? The Audience As Artist for the Open Source Lounge at Medi@terra (2000); Telematic Connections: The Virtual Embrace (2001-02); a nationally traveling exhibition;Open_Source_Art_Hack (2002), with Jenny Marketou, at the New Museum, New York City; Translocations (2003), part of How Latitudes Become Forms at the Walker Art Center; State of the Art: Maps, Games, Stories, and Algorithms from Minnesota at the Carleton Art Gallery (2003); Database Imaginary (2004), with Anthony Kiendl and Sarah Cook, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Center for the Arts; Fair Assembly, web-based projects for Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005), with Peter Weibel and Bruno Latour, ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany; The Art Formerly Known As New Media (2005), with Sarah Cook, Walter Philips Gallery, Banff Centre, Container Culture (2006), with Deborah Dormer-Lawler, Zhang Ga, Alice Ming Wei Jim, Gunalan Nadarajan, Ellen Pau, Johan Pijnappel, Soh Yeong Roh, Yukiko Shikata, ZeroOne San Jose, Edge Conditions(2006), at the San Jose Museum of Art, and is curating selected projects for the Ingenuity Festival in Cleveland, Ohio, July 19-22, 2007. The next ZeroOne San Jose Global Festival of Art on the Edge will take place June 4-8, 2008.

Dietz speaks and writes extensively about new media, and his interviews and writings have appeared in Parkett, Artforum, Flash Art, Design Quarterly, Spectra, Salmagundi, Afterimage, Art in America, Museum News, BlackFlash, Public Art Review, Else/Where and Intelligent Agent; in exhibition catalogs for Walker Art Center, Centro Parago, Site Santa Fe, San Francisco Art Institute, and aceart; and in publications from MIT Press, University of California Press, and Princeton University Press.

He has taught about curating and digital art at California College of the Arts, Carleton College, the University of Minnesota, and the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Prior to the Walker Art Center, Dietz was founding Chief of Publications and New Media Initiatives at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and editor of the scholarly journal, American Art.

www.yproductions.com

ICE Collab 3

ICE Collab_3 has three main components:

1. A presentation and public lecture by Steve Dietz, Director of New Media Initiatives at the Walker Art Center. Steve Dietz has played a seminal role as a curator of digital culture, from the founding of the Digital Arts Study Collection http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/ at the Walker in 1998 to the upcoming exhibition “Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time”, marking the tenth anniversary of the New York Digital Salon to which he also contributed an essay entitled “Ten Dreams of Technology”.

2. Informal presentations and roundtable discussions featuring UGA students, faculty and local practitioners. Topics include emerging technologies, current works in progress, web standards, usability, aesthetics, open source movements, collaborative filtering and speculation!

3. Temporary Media Lab. ICE Collab_3 participants can work together to create impromptu Web content that tracks and represents the discussions that ensue over the 3 days of the workshop.

Presentations

Projects from Gallery 9
Steve Dietz, Director of New Media Initiatives, Walker Art Center

Gallery 9 is a site for project-driven exploration, through digitally-based media, of all things “cyber.” This includes artist commissions, interface experiments, exhibitions, community discussion, a study collection, hyperessays, filtered links, lectures and other guerilla raids into real space, and collaborations with other entities (both internal and external).

Web Standards: Usability and Aesthetics
Tom Cona and Mark Callahan

Tom Cona teaches Web design at the New Media Institute. Mark Callahan teaches Web design at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. Tom and Mark will each discuss their top five considerations for approaching Web design and face off on usability, aesthetics and web standards.

eco-log: ICE Project in Progress
Kate Ross, Tom Black and eco-log participants

eco-log is a collaborative arts project between artists and community members that explores local ecology and the issue of urban sprawl. Kate Ross and Tom Black will show how they are integrating digital technology in this exciting new multimedia project.

Performance and Technology: Virtual Vaudeville
David Z Saltz

David Z Saltz, a Professor of Drama at UGA, will present a collaborative work in progress that uses computer gaming and motion capture technologies to recreate the experience of attending a live theatrical performance from the past.

ideasforcreativeexploration.com: Conceptual Site Development
Joe Willey, Mark Callahan and ICE Collab 1 participants

An overview of the ICE Web site and how it developed from concept to a dynamic code-driven site integrating Flash, XML, PHP and MySQL.

Digital Media Projects
Students from the Digital Media area of the Lamar Dodd School of Art will show works.

Bryan Rogers

Bryan Rogers, Professor, School of Art & Design, University of Michigan
Dean, School of Art & Design, University of Michigan

Bryan Rogers served as head of the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University from 1988 through 1999. Prior to that, he was professor of art at San Francisco State University, where he founded the Conceptual Design Program. Rogers has also held appointments at the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at M.I.T. and the University of California at Berkeley. From 1982 to 1985, he was editor of the international art-science-technology journal Leonardo. He completed a year of post-graduate work at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich on a fellowship from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst. He has also held fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

At Carnegie Mellon, Rogers led the development of a number of innovative programs in art and design, stressing the importance of connections to other fields of inquiry. As founding director of the Studio for Creative Inquiry, an interdisciplinary outreach center dedicated to fostering ambitious, experimental, advanced-technology projects in the arts, he significantly strengthened Carnegie Mellon’s interactions with regional and international communities. He also served as principal investigator on major NSF and NASA supported projects.

At Michigan, Rogers has led the complete restructuring of the educational programs within the School of Art and Design. A major thrust of this effort has been to firmly engage the School with the University and the broader community, both local and global. Focused on creative work and infused with contemporary information and imaging technologies, the new programs endeavor to unite the domains of art-making and designing.

In addition to his administrative accomplishments, Rogers is a sculptor and installation artist whose work has been widely exhibited in the U.S. and internationally. His work explores conceptual intersections of art, science and technology, often manifesting in complex, interactive installations of kinetic objects.