Faculty composer Joseph Klein's An Unaware Cosmos—the premiere performance of the complete cycle of nineteen solo and chamber works— in UNT's Winspear Hall. This performance was made possible by a faculty fellowship from the UNT Institute for the Advancement of the Arts, and features faculty, student, and guest performers, including members of the International Contemporary Ensemble in residence at UNT. The individual works in this modular cycle were composed between 2012 and 2018, and are intended as a celebration of humankind’s quest for knowledge through skepticism and critical inquiry, and to those freethinkers who have devoted their lives to such noble pursuits. The mutable arrangements of the works in this cycle are intended to explore a variety of relationships—timbral, spatial, conceptual, structural—both within and between modules. In performance, music from these distinct modules is fragmented, dislocated, suspended, disrupted, and penetrated, often in unpredictable ways, thus challenging our teleological assumptions regarding musical form. 

The nineteen soloists and chamber ensembles that comprise the work are distributed throughout the entire performance space; in order to coordinate all of these disparate forces, iARTA fellow Christopher Poovey developed a Max patch cuing system that uses a central router to send performance information to the various performers through their laptops, tablets, or smart phones.

Alicia Eggert's public art exhibition “You are (on) an island” was installed in the Hilton Head Airport in Hilton Head, South Carolina.

This neon sign's message is animated by the word "on" flashing on and off at regular intervals, transforming an initially obvious statement into a reflective and philosophical inquiry.

The sculpture was originally made in 2011 for the Sacred and Profane Art festival on Peaks Island, Maine. Neon Workshops invited Mike Fleming and I to bring "You are (on) an island" to the UK in 2013, and to present it as a mobile billboard. We installed the sign on the back of a flatbed truck, powered it with a small generator, and toured the sculpture around the UK for two weeks. The project culminated in a limited-edition publication.

The 2018 North Texas Digital Fabrication Symposium was hosted at Texas Woman’s University April 20–21, 2018. Artists, researchers, makers and students came together at TWU to discuss digital fabrication, its practice, pedagogy and curation. The theme Humanizing the Digital inspired fascinating proposals from artists and researchers working with digital fabrication in a variety of applications.

The symposium events were organized around three sub-themes: Embodiment & Technology, Adaptation & Play, and Process & Practice. This two-day symposium brought together an exciting group of artists and researchers to share their work through moderated panel presentations, workshops, roundtable discussions and a corresponding group exhibition.

iARTA Participant Marco Boungiorno Nardelli's MaterialsSoundMusic project creates data-driven music through an algorithm that maps a material’s energy bands onto the 88 keys of a piano. Buongiorno Nardelli, who is now a professor of physics at the University of North Texas (UNT), conceived his project at the time of the Materials Genome Initiative, which the White House launched in 2011 to accelerate the discovery of new materials. As part of this initiative, he participated in the development of AFLOWLIB—an online database cataloging the properties of millions of existing or theorized materials. Researchers around the globe can freely access the database to fish for a superconductor, metal, or ceramic that best suits their application.

In developing this database, Buongiorno Nardelli pondered two questions. The first had to do with sifting through AFLOWLIB’s massive amounts of data. How could the properties of a material be represented so that researchers can quickly perceive and evaluate them? The second was an outreach challenge. Materials aren’t as sexy as black hole mergers or the “God particle.” How could electronic properties or crystal lattices be made more appealing to the public’s imagination? For Buongiorno Nardelli, who’d been playing and composing music since the age of six, the obvious answer to both questions was to use sound...