The Hybrid Arts Laboratory [HAL], is an arts and technology studio directed by iARTA Professor David Stout. This interdisciplinary project space merges the activities of a traditional artist’s studio or atelier with parallel R&D activities often associated with a science or engineering laboratory. HAL serves as an umbrella for the creation of interactive video installations and interdisciplinary performance works, as well as a software development hub for advancing networked audio-visual synthesis and exhibition systems. Prof. Stout coordinates a small team of graduate students and creative research associates. This team is engaged a in variety of activities including the exploration of simulation techniques as a means to create innovative works across the disciplines of cinema, music, visual and performing arts. The team examines new instrumentation for electronic media performance, novel visual display applications and sonification possibilities for implementation in museum and theatrical exhibition contexts. HAL’s location within the UNT College of Music is in keeping with the cross-fertilization between music, visual art and cinema that underlies the historic lineage of visual-music and the coevolution of extended performance techniques within electronic and electro-acoustic music. In addition to hardware and software development projects, graduate students also work with Prof. Stout to examine and rethink curatorial and exhibition practices for hybrid and interdisciplinary art-forms at the digital nexus of art, science and humanities.

HAL is a small but flexible environment equipped with a lighting grid, modular video-wall, multi-screen projection, multi-speaker sound, interactive sensor technology, real-time animation and video post-production capabilities.