Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts

Simon Penny, innovative arts and robotics expert joins iARTA's esteemed advisory board.

Submitted by Charles Underriner on Thu, 04/18/2013 - 5:32pm

The UNT College of Visual Art and Design in collaboration with the iARTA
research cluster recently hosted a lecture and follow up round-table
discussion with UCI arts professor, Simon Penny.

Penny was appointed Professor of Arts and Engineering at University of
California Irvine (a specially-created joint appointment between the Henry
Samueli School of Engineering and the Claire Trevor School of Arts) in
2001 (with an appointment also in Information and Computer Science).
He was architect and founding director of the interdisciplinary graduate
program in Arts, Computation and Engineering, established 2003 (ACE,
see www.ace.uci.edu). He is ‘humanist at large’ for the University of
California Council on Research. Prof. Penny was previously an Associate
Professor of Art and Robotics at Carnegie Mellon University (a joint
appointment between the College of Fine Arts and the Robotics Institute);
1993-2001. During 2000-01 he was European Professor of Interactive
Environments at the University of Portsmouth and the Merz Akademie,
Stuttgart, and a member of the central committee of the EU ESPRIT
project CIRCUS. He established the Electronic Intermedia Program at
the University of Florida 1989-93. Prior to his arrival in the US, he held
a range of academic positions in Australia. He is a guest professor for
the Interdisciplinary Master in Cognitive Systems and Interactive Media
(CSIM), Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, 2008, and 2009.

iARTA Participant Ruth West gives keynote talk for the iConference 2013

Submitted by Charles Underriner on Mon, 04/15/2013 - 10:25am

iARTA Participant Ruth West gave a keynote talk for the iConference 2013, held in Fort Worth, February 12 - 15, 2013.

In her keynote talk for the iConference 2013, Ruth West discussed art work that interrogates the challenges of the digital age within cross-disciplinary collaborations to create new kinds of engagement, insight, and cultural forms through hybrid research that blurs boundaries between disciplines in purposeful and productive ways:

"Whether generated by terrestrial observatories, automated genomic sequencing, social media, high-resolution sub-cellular imaging, surveillance video, financial transactions, or the emerging 'quantified self' movement 'big data,' is here to stay. The richness of these massive repositories is such that we can generate an enormous amount of interpretations to address human concerns spanning the personal to the global over an equally wide range of disciplines. Yet the abstraction of nature and culture into vast and abstract data present challenges for the articulation and representation of linkages between the invisible and the visible - the immaterial scale of digital artifacts and the physical scales and dynamic states they represent. We face a crisis of representation."

UNT Art-tech research cluster launches online journal of theory and practice

Submitted by awb0055 on Fri, 02/08/2013 - 2:44pm

The UNT-based research cluster Initiative for Advanced Research in Technology and the Arts (iARTA) has launched an online journal in partnership with the UNT Libraries. Moebius explores international art trends and issues at the intersection of theory and practice and is one of thecritical scholarship activities that supports iARTA’s focus on hybrid research, technologies, and new media applications.

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