iARTA News

Melinda Levin's recent film directed and premiered in Mongolia and was featured on KERA PBS. Mongolia: Earth and Spirit, is a documentary on a Mongolian Tibetan Buddhist monk, and illustrates his commitment to ecological protection of the brittle landscape near the Siberian border.

This short documentary follows Tibetan Buddhist Lama Delgar Mondoon, a Monk whose surprising life straddles urban and rural, and being a monk with having a wife and children. He attempts to save the trees, sometimes literally one at a time. In this poetic, character-driven, documentary, we see the beautiful landscapes, the traditional ceremonies, and the interactions of the everyday people of Mongolia who are on the front lines of grassroots environmental change and stewardship.

February 20, 2019

5PM — Merrill Ellis Intermedia Theater — Music Building (MU1001)

UNT Music Composition Division Chair Dr. Joseph Klein discusses his interest in literature as a composer, and his various approaches to written and spoken text—including vocal settings, instrumental renderings, theatrical interpretations, and intermedia performances. Writers of influence include: Franz Kafka, Christina Rossetti, W. S. Merwin, Elias Canetti, and Alice Fulton. This event is open to the public, and welcomes students with interests in music and/or literature, and especially those fascinated by the synthesis of different artistic disciplines. 

Klein presents the following works:

    • Goblin Market (after Christina Rossetti), for trombonist, prepared piano, and intermedia (1995)
    • Leviathan (after W.S. Merwin), for male voice, bass trombone, and intermedia (1998)
    • Zwei Parabeln nach Franz Kafka, for narrator, mixed choir, and computer music (2006)
    • Cornell Set — poetry reading with computer music (2011)
    • Die Schadhafte (The Defective) — character study after Elias Canetti, for solo violoncello (2015

View Event Poster

Presented by the Sigma Tau Delta English Honor Society

 

October 26, 2018

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 “Known Unknown” is included in “Language a Medium” exhibition at the University of Arkansas (exhibition includes works by Jenny Holzer, Kay Rosen, Lawrence Weiner and other great artists)

This neon infinity mirror flashes on and off to reveal the phrases "known known, known unknown, unknown unknown, and unknown known."

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.

November 02, 2018

iARTA is very pleased to announce that artist Carola Dreidemie will visit UNT in a residency November 2–16. She will be working on a research project as well as presentations and meetings with arts/technology students in the College of Music and College of Visual Arts.

Carola Dreidemie is Associate Professor and Researcher at UNRN Universidad Nacional de Río Negro, located in the town of Bariloche, in Patagonia - Argentina. She is Director of the Laboratory of Visualization and Creative Coding LVCC at UNRN. Carola is a visual artist working with code (mainly Processing PDE and Max MSP Jitter/Pure Data) and animation tools to create visual art. She is currently leading an interdisciplinary project with scientist from University of La Rochelle that formulates artwork from data collected from bee hive tracking done in Argentina and in France. Her background is in sculpture (MFA 1993 Pratt Institute, NY-USA) and photography (MFA 2003 Texas Woman’s University, TX-USA).

 

April 20, 2018

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.

James Thurman's work was featured at the 2018 American Association of Woodturners Annual Symposium. Although the final form is a basic plate with a stand, a variety of non-traditional approaches are incorporated into it. The plate is made of “Thurmanite®,” a material I developed which is made of layers of recycled paper epoxied together with an eco-resin (this particular plate is made from different sections of a World Atlas). Then laser engraved with a pattern inspired by Charles Rennie Mackintosh, as a tribute to this major figure in the Symbolist Movement.  The hammerformed copper stand emphasizes the importance of the handwork throughout all of the processes utilized in this piece.

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...

iARTA Affiliate Seth Shafer's "the machine is the artist is the artist the machine" is an interactive, web-based timeline of art history. This is a collection of artwork and writings about artwork made in collaboration with machines given some degree of autonomy. This art goes by many names – cybernetic art, computer art, telematic art, generative art, algorithmic art, etc. – but share many common features in their use of a machine as an active, creative agent. The machine, too, has many names – the mainframe, the personal computer, the laptop, the microcontroller, the embedded microchip, etc. – but all share the commonality of extending the abilities of human creativity.

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