Motion Capture--The Journey Begins!

An exciting step forward over in Bob King's media lab in Workplace West III today on the UNCSA campus. Ever since ARTStemmers traveled over to Duke University's data visualization and adjacent "sound" lab last August, multiple among us have spoken often of how we might be able to experiment with something like this. Thanks in particular to Bob and Jason Romney, who have met and consulted together a couple of times, a little package of inexpensive equipment was purchased recently--a little software (QLab?), some MIDI cables, some motion capture switches, MIDI board, etc. Today, Bob, Jason, and Dean Wilcox came together to try a first setup and were kind enough to invite me to watch (truth be told--we watched Jason work, with no small degree of awe; best thing is--Jason's a great and patient teacher, so he was able to explain the basic organization of switches, cables, input data, etc.) Long story short--within an hour and half, we had motion sensors feeding data into a computer, and even triggering different sorts of events each time the switch was triggered!

The opportunities for pedagogy and serious play (is there a difference?!) are endless. For Jason, this isn't fancy technology. For me (I won't speak for the others) it's cutting edge and imagination-capturing. The idea of turning human MOTION into DATA and DATA into an EVENT/S . . . that is stunning to me. Do I have a firm idea of what to DO with this? Nope. And we all left the room today saying, "Now we just have to figure out what to do." What could be better?

I know one idea we all agreed on: once we've figured the technology out a little better and do some experiments with it here, we'd love taking the setup over to Reynolds and collaborating w/ our ARTStem colleagues and their students.

Some pix! Enjoy, especially, the sheet of numbers. That's the legacy of Jason teaching us about "bites" and "bits" . . .

Building a Better Teacher

Alli George, Reynolds math faculty and ARTStem participant, sent this article on recently.

"Building a Better Teacher" (March 2, NYTimes)

I just got around to reading it, and, wow!, it's fascinating. I'll admit, at first I feared it might be another of the all-too-common screed that places a disproportionate amount of responsibility for public education's struggles on the the already overburdened shoulders of teachers. But it's really quite fascinating.

Would be interested to know what others think. Feel free to reply below . . .

Art as Science Communication--cartoon, film, theater . . .

A flurry of noticings about art and scientific communication from the past week.

Last week’s American Association for the Advancement of Science and the National Science Foundation announced winners of their annual Visualization of Science and Engineering contest. Some great stuff–including a collaboration between a WFU neuroscientist and a cartoonist. The press release about the winners makes some interesting points, such as:

“. . . By making science aesthetically appealing, science becomes more accessible to people, said Hoon, who won first place in the Photography category with team members Boaz Pokroy and Joanna Aizenberg of Harvard University. “Public outreach has always been a weak side of science,” he added. “By adding art and metaphors to our research portfolio, we, as citizens, can send a clear message to the world: Science—at its core—is focused on the problems of societal importance. This will work better than detailed (and often incomprehensible) scientific debates...” [continue reading . . .]

Put simply, science has a moral charge of engaging with issues of importance and distributing knowledge to broader publics. And art–the wielding of metaphor and narrative–is the medium through which that is done. Here’s a link to the National Science Foundation’s website and the winners.

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/winners_2009.jsp

Note that you can see the videos for a few of them. I recommend this one in particular:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/scivis/follow_money.jsp

The title is opaque but it’s got a lot to to do w/ the study of complex networks that we read about in August. Finding ways to illustrate orderings/structures that emerge out of these seemingly chaotic networks—we’re all going to have to get better at it to be bringing students into engagement with new knowledge frontiers, aren’t we? Whether we’re teaching about the brain, social change, or the algorithmic basis of natural systems . . .

How to represent BIG IDEAS visually. A how-to guide produced by a Lemelson-MIT collaboration. Communicating through cartoons. Beautifully done.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/02/19/howtoons-visual-comm.html

Last week’s American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in San Diego featured this panel on THEATER as a mode of public communication. What’s that mean? Seems to me an important claim: that theater/performance is PART OF the scientific method! Coverage of the panel here:

http://scienceblogs.com/worldsfair/2010/02/aaas_meeting_-_science_in_the.php

Complexity, Chaos, Friendship, Calculus, Teachers, Students

Mike Wakeford is ARTStem's Project Director and a member of the Undergraduate Academic Program faculty at UNCSA.

. . . Came across a flyer about a new book by Steven Strogatz, The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life while Corresponding about Math. Strogatz is a major math guy and a leader in complex systems (remember our ARTStem reading from the summer?), chaos theory, etc. From the sound of it, the book is part Tuesdays With Morrie, part math problems; but as you sense in the radio story about the book, it helps blur the line between math, narrative, and the personal histories of human beings and their relationships. To me, that's a big part of why I think artists should be actively reaching out into the math and sciences world, more aggressively seeking collaborations, etc. But it also expresses the idea that deep math contains with in it descriptions of the world, stories of existence, and powerful ways of "seeing" the human condition for what it is. Anyways, it's a pretty beautiful little radio story worth listening to:

ARTStem Participant Takes SCRATCH Into Classroom

Ashley Witherspoon sends us some links to student SCRATCH projects.

First, what's SCRATCH, again? Back in November, ARTStem collaborated with the Center for Design Innovation— for a hands-on SCRATCH workshop that was part of the CDI’s roster of events during the Winston-Salem Arts Council’s recent “6 Days in November.” SCRATCH is a free, downloadable computer programming language/application designed by folks at the MIT Media Lab, who explain that “Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.”

Thanks, Ashley, for taking what we learned there, experimenting with it in the classroom, and sharing some of the first results. They're shared freely here, since they're already posted to the public SCRATCH website. (**note: if you want to explore the kind of coding that the students learned while creating these projects, follow the instructions to download the free application and view the projects in Scratch)

http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/odoylerules/851070
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/flammingsacks/811916
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/Babyt/845105
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/allenpapismith/845181
http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/hell0destini/829987

Science, Hollywood, etc.

Really interesting article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education about the increasing collaboration between academic science and Hollywood. ARTICLE. Particularly important--this isn't just about filmmakers mining scientific knowledge and know-how, but about science recognizing it's own existence within mediated fields of knowledge and its dependence on film (and other media) as a key shaper of debates and public understanding.

David A. Kirby is one of the scholars mentioned. Here's his website, which features some interesting essays about the interaction between science and cinema.

Also of interest, the National Academy of Sciences 2-yr-old program--The Science and Entertainment Exchange. Check out the website here. Related video below, featuring Seth Macfarlane.


Other related notes:

Recent symposium at the UPenn Annenberg School of Communication on the "performative" dimension of science--featuring "a wide range of scholars and leading practitioners in the area of the history of performance, science and scientific performance to discuss how persuasive rhetorical skills and public performance are central to the business of making scientific knowledge real."

ARTStemmer Takes Paperfolding From Big Screen to the Classroom

Camie Bell teaches Algebra II and Pre-Calculus at RJ Reynolds High School. She is an ARTStem participant.

". . . Right now we are studying right triangle and oblique triangle trigonometry. When a paper crane or any other design is folded then unfolded, the result is wonderfully symmetric design of the triangles we are studying. When I saw the film Between the Folds this summer with the ARTStem group, I realized that watching the film might help students visualize some of the mathematical concepts. During the segment on the math professor that folds the "bugs," they flash several trigonometric functions that are used to recreate the designs for the bug foldings. Students don't often get to see the application of the trig formulas. Without the ARTStem group, I would not have made the connection. Students actually watched the film. I think they enjoyed it. One of my students recognized Eric [Demaine], the young man from MIT. He is her cousin's boyfriend. [He once folded paper napkins for her while waiting to be served at a restaurant]. That helped add to the interest level. The people in the film became real. Small world! I have really enjoyed having my perspective altered a little bit! It wouldn't have happened without ARTStem."

Above, Camie refers to the film we screened over in the UNCSA Film Village during the ARTStem seminar in August, Between the Folds. Here's a trailer:



And here's Camie Bell in action in the classroom.

Crossing the art/math "canyon" (literally!)

**Those familiar with the UNCSA campus might know that the campus is split down the middle by a kudzu-filled creek bed, "Kudzu Canyon." One one side, the home of the Undergraduate Academic Program offices and classrooms, on the other the various arts schools and the high school academic program. This is just a little story about how ARTStem helped two UNCSA teachers, both ARTStem participants, cross two canyons . . . the kudzu one AND the one that sometimes exists between the worlds of art and mathematics. . .

This winter term, Dean Wilcox is introducing a new academic elective he created called "Chaos Theory and the Arts." His syllabus reads:"It has been well over a decade since James Gleick's book Chaos: Making a New Science made the mathematically dense world of chaos accessible to lay-people producing everything from Jurassic Park to fractal art to Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. This course is designed to explore the basic ideas behind chaos theory and how they have generated artistic criticism and expression. . . " [Download Dean Wilcox's "Chaos Theory and the Arts" syllabus here!]

A few weeks ago, Wilcox wrote of seeking out some help from fellow ARTStemmer, Jill Lane (Dean of the High School Academic Program, and math faculty member):

"I'm moving toward the "iteration and phase space" section of my Chaos class – and I wanted to spend some time looking at a few of the notable equations with my students. So – not having had a math class since the Reagan administration I had a number of questions about how such things work. What I find most fascinating about these sort of higher math problems is that folks discovered certain things about how the world operates by basically playing with the equations. A kind of what-happens-if-I-do-this? scenario. . . . which is not too far off from how I think about the arts. This is totally different from my high school math experiences where there seemed to be an acceptable answer for every problem. What is the fun in that? In any case, Jill Lane made a number of these questions and issues regarding these ideas much clearer. For further info, we actually discussed these two specific problems: the Lorenz attractor and logistic map. I have no idea what to expect in dealing with these in a “humanities” class, but I do feel that I understand them better now."

Dean Wilcox is a faculty member and Assistant Dean of the Undergraduate Academic Program at UNCSA, and an ARTStem participant.

ARTStemmers Explore the Art and Science of Sound

On December 18th, 2009, ARTStem participants Ashley Witherspoon (Science, RJ Reynolds High School) and Jason Romney (UNCSA, Design & Production) spearheaded a teaching collaboration that ended up reaching approximately 140 Reynolds students in six different classes (physics, physical science, tech theater). Here are their reflections on the collaboration, along w/ some pictures and video!

Ashley Witherspoon teaches Earth and Environmental science, and Physical Science, at RJ Reynolds High School. She is an ARTStem participant.

" . . . At our last [ARTStem] meeting Jason was talking about some of the things that he was doing with his students . . . and hearing about what he was teaching his students made me realize how he could really relate to my upcoming "wave" topic in Physical Science. . . .Physical science doesn't get a great deal of guest speakers, so to be working on a collaboration with someone who really works in the arts field with so much physical science tied into it was just an extraordinary find. . . . Jason did an excellent job giving the students a more practical example of how waves are related to something they love—MUSIC! They really found his presentation interesting, and I thought it was great how he had them up moving about the room finding quiet spots due to "wave cancellation" . . . And they really were hooked at the end when he played the hottest new song, "Fireflies," by Owl City. He played the song and let the students tell him when they were hearing sound changes due to phase changes in waves. This made the students realize that waves are not just something "boring" that I talk about in my class, but something that they listen to and are used by their favorite artists to get different sounds and cool effects in their songs! I especially loved how Jason talked about the problems or creative effects that different arenas have for stage designers and musicians and how they have to take all their surroundings into account when they are planning a performance."



Jason Romney is a faculty member in the School of Design and Production at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and an ARTStem participant.

" . . . Ashley invited me to come as a guest lecturer to four physical science and one physics class. They had been learning about the basic science of waves (Ashley can explain that part better than I can) and Ashley asked if I could come and show them some practical application for what they had learned. I gave a presentation on sound wave interaction. There were several demonstrations that allowed them to both see and hear sound waves interacting destructively as a result of phase differences. We heard what it sounds like when the waves combine out of phase electronically and then how it sounds when they combine out of phase acoustically in the air. Once they were familiar with how this interaction sounded, the conversation shifted to how we might assign a value to this information. The science can demonstrate and prove that the sound waves are interacting destructively or constructively but the science doesn't tell you whether that is good or bad. I explained that it is an artist who decides whether this is good or bad, right or wrong, a problem or a solution. For example, if we were doing a live performance of a play and the actor's voice was interacting with it's own reflection destructively, it might make it difficult for the audience to understand the words. In that case, we would decide that we have a problem that we should try and solve. If we're producing a music track, we might decide that this problem is an appropriate artistic effect. I then played an example of a popular song where the artist is purposely causing destructive interactions with the sound of his voice. The concept of wave interaction is used as an artistic effect in most popular music today. Depending on the style of the effect it might be called "flange", "filtering", "chorus", "phasing", etc. But all these involve manipulating the way the sound waves interact constructively or destructively to create the sound the artist is looking for. Overall, the students seemed to really enjoy the presentation. They were very engaged and asked good questions. They really seemed to like the part at the end when we started talking about applying meaning to the science. They were all heading out to fire up their iPods and listen to all their music to identify these effects. Some were particularly interested when I told them how many of my students get fun and interesting jobs using this information. . . . Personally, I really enjoyed it. It's fun to see high school students get excited about learning this stuff!"

Still interested? Here's some video from Jason's presentation.

Faculty Members Bringing ARTStem Experiences Back to Classrooms

Bob King, a faculty member in UNCSA's Undergraduate Academic Program, writes . . .

. . . I've already directly applied some of what I gained from the ARTStem conversations and materials in the required "Digital Media for the Artist" class this year (**"Digital Media for the Artist" is a course required of all UNCSA undergraduates during their first year). . . . I decided to incorporate a short film we'd watched during the summer ARTStem session, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives (for more on this, see ARTStem participant Matt Bulluck's reflection). After they saw the film, I was surprised and delighted to see the significant traction that developed around it in terms of students wanting to talk more about, and learn more about, this concept. Ostensibly, this material had nothing to do with preparing them to be art professionals, etc., yet they were just plain interested. Of course I'm sure it helped that the protagonist is a musician, the film was well edited, etc. But even these factors sort of underscore the point that good current content in the sciences, well-presented and appropriately used in our courses, could be a huge plus for students. Anyway, I mention the movie in two course documents. One in the introduction to a digital-story I tell students in order to talk with them about the Liberal Arts, and also to provide an example of the type of digital-story they will be involved in telling later in the class. This mention is at: http://sites.google.com/site/mediastudiesnow/storylines-and-heartstrings. I also reference ARTStem in my DMA Instructor's Blog -- the post is called Electric Soup: http://digital-bob-class.blogspot.com/2009/09/so-were-having-conversation.html

Mid-Year Reflection from ARTStem participant, Diego Carrasco Schoch

Diego Carrasco Schoch is a dance faculty member at UNCSA. He writes . . .

So far, my participation in ARTStem has been a wonderful opportunity to grow as an instructor and will have lasting effects on the way I view my material and the manner in which I teach that material. Getting together with other instructors, from both UNCSA and Reynolds High School, and being forced to talk about education and the act of educating within a prescribed context within a formal setting is something that I find invigorating and necessary, although it happens all too rarely. In fact, I have never participated in such a format before and I imagine that this is unique. It’s been an honor to meet the teachers of Reynolds High. While I was delighted by some and frustrated or challenged by others, they all earned my respect. Hearing them talk reminded me of how privileged I am to be teaching the select group students who attend UNCSA. . . . Getting such a disparate group of people focused on a particular issue and looking at that issue through a particular lens is difficult at best, impossible if one thought rationally. The value of ARTStem – the formal conversations, the various lines of inquiry, exposure to particular readings, etc. – should not be minimized and will, at least for me, continue to reverberate. I feel confident that the value of the ArtStem Project will continue to express itself in me in surprising and subtle ways in both my teaching and my creative work. Lastly, as a new instructor at UNCSA, ArtStem has been providing a much needed opportunity to get to know colleagues I would never have otherwise had contact with and I treasure the burgeoning friendships I have formed.

November 20th and 21st--ARTStem Weekend

On November 20^th and 21^st, ARTStemmers joined together for our autumn weekend of learning and fellowship, for our first whole-group gathering since the summer workshop in August.

First up, on Friday afternoon, was ARTStem’s collaboration with the Center for Design Innovation—a hands-on SCRATCH workshop that was part of the CDI’s roster of events during the Winston-Salem Arts Council’s recent “6 Days in November.” SCRATCH is a free, downloadable computer programming language/application designed by folks at the MIT Media Lab, who explain that “Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create and share Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively.”

Participants, most of whom had no prior experience with SCRATCH, spent the afternoon learning the basics of creating "games" or short animations with the application, and had the added benefit of Winston-Salem State University arts faculty member, Scott Betz, being there to help us troubleshoot. Thanks, Scott!

". . . ARTStem had an immediate impact on our work . . ."

This post is by Angell Caudill, ARTStem participant and Director of the Arts for Academics magnet school at R.J. Reynolds High School

ARTStemming at R.J. Reynolds High School—Wordles Gone Wild and Much, Much More!

As a magnet school, R.J. Reynolds “Arts for Academics” offers a student greater opportunities for creativity, originality and critical thinking by integrating the arts into math, science, social studies, English Language arts, and all elective courses. Numerous studies have shown that schools integrating arts into the core curriculum experience academic gains across subject areas. Last March, thirty large display boards were placed throughout the campus to showcase evidence of students’ integrated curriculum and have become a source of pride for students, parents and faculty. Only one problem, at the beginning of this year, of course, there was no student work! Since the Magnet Office Staff did not want thirty blank boards for our school opening, we took on the task of coming up with the displays. Wordles to the Rescue!!! Having talked about different ways to visualize information in the ARTStem summer institute and seen a demonstration of Wordles, or word clouds, we realized we could create attractive, meaningful displays by feeding in articles about our progam elements. The text we used included writing about Arts Integration, ARTStem, the Winston-Salem Arts Council, R.J. Reynolds High School, and Professional Learning Communities. We placed a word cloud on each board and surrounded the graphic with photographs of currents students and additional graphics depicting various content areas. The displays look great and convey information about our program and intent to all our stakeholders. Additionally, we included wordles as part of our staff development on creating Professional Learning Communities and several teachers have also reported using wordles in their academic classes. For now, R.J. Reynolds – “Arts for Academics” is a Wordles Gone Wild environment!

Not only has ARTStem had an immediate impact on our work, but as teachers plan their arts integrated units for this term, I have often heard our ARTStem faculty members describing this summer’s activities to colleagues. I wouldn’t be surprised to see more origami, discussion of virtual reality, movement/sound interpretation, or parallel universe theory discussions in some of our classrooms. As to complexity theory – I’m not even ruling that out!

—Angell Caudill

ARTStem featured in September's UNC Tomorrow Newsletter

ARTStem is profiled in this month's newsletter on the theme of "global readiness".

An excerpt:

". . . Exactly fifty years ago, the British writer C.P. Snow famously likened the arts and the sciences to “two cultures” so alienated from one another that it imperiled humanity’s ability to intelligently address the world’s problems. Today, the “two cultures” diagnosis is still valid. In this spirit, a new program called ARTStem, a program of the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, confronts UNC Tomorrow’s mandate for “global readiness” by spotlighting the need to innovate teaching and learning practices that harness together the power of the arts and STEM disciplines of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. . . "

View the profile in its entirety HERE.

". . . My curiosity has been sparked and this is good since I happen to believe that curiosity is the source of creativity."

This post is by Diego Carrasco Schoch, a faculty member in the School of Dance at the UNC School of the Arts and an ARTStem participant.

It is healthy to occasionally be nudged and prodded so that our perceptions, biases, and habits shift a little. So it was for me as a result of my attendance at the recent ARTStem summer seminar. As a result of four days of discourse regarding art, science, and curriculum, there has been a distinct shift in my everyday outlook. This shift has manifested in such a way that I find myself in a period of greater awareness and mindfulness about scientific ideas that unexpectedly pop up in my life. Have these ideas been popping up all along and I just haven’t been noticing them? I don’t know, but I’m fairly certain that I have encountered more scientific ideas in the past two weeks than I’m use to encountering in six months.

For example, I was recently at the house of a friend’s parents and I caught sight of a book called “50 Mathematical Ideas You Really Need to Know” on the shelf and I thought to myself, “Hmm, I should get my hands on a copy of that and take a look.” A day later at another friend’s house I see a book entitled “50 Physics Ideas You Really Need To Know.” Apparently it’s a series. And a popular one at that.

Needless to say, much to the consternation of my friend, I had my nose in the physics book excitedly telling my (unexcited) friend that I just saw a documentary about this guy and “…here he is, right here—Hugh Everett! He was a physics prodigy and used some really complicated math to postulate parallel universes and it flew in the face of these Copenhagen guys and the status quo and nobody really took him seriously until a whole lot later in his life just before he died. And all this was seen from the perspective of his musician son who never really understood science and math. It was really cool!”

I borrowed the book for a night.

I learned that the difference between weight and mass is that weight is the measure of force (gravity) that pulls mass down; mass measures the number of atoms in a body. This was interesting because I talk about the body’s mass all the time in my classes. And, luckily, somewhat correctly. Oh, and Einstein essentially proved energy and mass are interchangeable. But the first thing that actually really resonated with me was literally on page 4, Chapter 1, 3rd paragraph: “… Like graph paper, Newton’s space contained an engraved set of coordinates and he mapped all motions with respect to that grid.”

Geez, thought I, that’s pretty much what I do as choreographer or even as a dancer improvising – I map out motions (and shapes and gestures) and engrave my body onto that particular space at that moment. Reading on, I discover that: “… [Ernst] Mach, however, disagreed, arguing instead that motion was only meaningful if measured with respect to another object, not the grid.”

Wow. Some might say, as the late Merce Cunningham did, that meaning in dance is created by having two or more bodies in space together.

My point is that I am noticing things and taking an interest in things I may not have previously noticed. My curiosity has been sparked and this is good since I happen to believe that curiosity is the source of creativity. (I have other things to say about the notion of creativity, but that’s for another day.) My awareness of the world has shifted slightly and this also is good, since I believe that without these regularly occurring occasional shifts, my thinking would become intransigent and stagnate. What this may produce only time will tell.

—Diego Carrasco Schoch

" . . . the Concept of Parallel Universes Has Been Chasing Me. . . "

This post is by Matt Bulluck, a faculty member from the School of Drama at the UNC School of the Arts and an ARTStem participant.

Parallel Universes

I found the work we did this summer during the ARTStem seminar challenging and exciting. The readings asked of us made me question and think. I loved the documentary film on paper folding, enjoyed the trip to Duke, and got a lot out of our discussions. However, it was the film "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" and Hugh Everett's proposal of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics that captured my imagination most completely. Indeed the concept of parallel worlds has been chasing me ever since we finished the session.

The concept of parallel worlds or alternate realities has been of great interest to many artists: H.G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, C.S. Lewis, and Jorge Luis Borges have all explored this in their fiction. An alternate reality and a portal in which to travel into it seems to jump start the imagination and open up new possibilities for artists.

Ten days after our first ARTstem work session, I picked up my copy of Michael Chabon's "The Yiddish Policeman's Union." The book had sat on my bookshelf since I picked it up at Border's a year ago, awaiting the moment when I could find time to read it. I liked his novel "The Wonder Boys" and loved the Pultzer Prize-winning "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," one of the best books of the century.

"The Yiddish Policeman's Union" is a detective story set in a parallel universe. It takes place in the Federal District of Sitka in the Alaskan panhandle, a land which for sixty years has been a safehaven for Jews in the wake of the Holocaust and the collapse of the state of Israel. Chabon's remarkable reworking of history in a land where Yiddish has replaced English as the native tongue is a dazzling mystery. Imagine a world where the events of the past have completely
changed the future: there is no Jewish state of Israel and the Federal District is about to revert to Alaskan control. Where is the promised
land?

Last night I took a break "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," stopped thinking about parallel universes, and went to the $2.50 movie theatre to see "Star Trek. However, the makers of "Star Trek" are also interested in parallel universes, and getting away from ARTstem is easier said than done. When I sat in the beat up movie theatre, the smell of popcorn triggered memories of my youth, not unlike Proust and his madeleine. Then, as I watch a young Spock meet an old Spock, I am began to think that there is no getting away from the discussions that Mike Wakeford led at ARTstem. For me, thoughts of parallel universes and alternate realities are everywhere.

In the upcoming weeks, after I finish "The Yiddish Policeman's Union," I am planning on putting together a list of novels, plays and films dealing with science. I am curious as to what alternate reality I would be living if I had not spent four days this summer exploring the concepts we examined at ARTStem.

--Matt Bulluck

Visualizing Knowledge

During the first ARTStem seminar, we talked quite a bit about the power of various art forms to give visual, tangible form to the knowledge that humans discover and create, including scientific knowledge. One of the places this came up was over at Duke University where we visited their immersive virtual environment and sound labs. In both, art (combined with technology)was helping translate one type of knowledge into a different form. Movement into sound, history into image, etc. But ultimately, one of the challenges I think most the group recognized by seminar's end came down to this question: How do we translate the playful, free-wheeling, imaginative conversation that the 4-day event allowed for into something more enduring? Put another way, if we created meaningful knowledge during the seminar (knowledge of each other, of our two institutions, of the different 'disciplines' we represent, how do we represent (i.e. RE-present, present again) and even recreate it in other places, even in our classrooms? That's a tough nut to crack, and one I suspect we'll be playing with a lot in the months to come.

However, one of the other participants, Jason Romney (a sound designer at UNCSA), had a cool idea on the last day of the seminar. He copied-and-pasted the text from some of the group's correspondence and blog material into a "word cloud generator." Word clouds are pretty interesting things, because they effectively take something fundamentally non-visual--a conversation--and turn it into an image. The terms used most often in a conversation (minus the usual suspects of "a," "an," "the," and other mundane words like that) are given more prominence and weight in the image. So a quick look at the cloud tells you a lot about the focus of the conversation. It's not a perfect, seamless translation. But thinking about how this little technological process both captures and fails to capture the intricacies of human conversation is, itself, worth thinking thinking about more.

Using the free online application, Wordle, I tried to recreate Jason's spontaneous image-creation. Here it is as a .jpg. I think it does a pretty good job illustrating the ideas that flowed during the seminar. (image credit: http://www.wordle.net)

Does evolutionary psychology explain why we make art?

On August 3rd, ARTStem participants visited the UNCSA Academic House where Dr. Rick Miller, Dean of the Undergraduate Academic and Graduate Programs, led a lively discussion about how a recent generation of evolutionary psychology is challenging older understandings of the origins of art.

Why are these people playing musical chairs?

On July 31st, participants in the ARTStem summer seminar visited Duke University’s Immersive Virtual Environment (DiVE) and adjacent Sound Studio. Here’s a snippet of video of some us figuring out the Sound Space, and a few pix from Days 1 and 2 of the summer seminar . .

ARTStem Film Screening—Between the Folds

Members of the campus community are invited to attend a free screening of the new documentary film, Between the Folds, on Thursday, July 30th at 1PM in the Gold Theatre of the UNCSA film village. The film lasts 1 hr.

The film’s director, Vanessa Gould, writes in the Director’s Statement: “At its heart, Between The Folds is a film about potential. The potential of an uncut paper square. The potential of a wild scientific idea. The potential to see things differently. For as long as I can remember, the concepts of art, science and math have seemed deeply connected - three ways of interpreting our experiences in a language that's universal. When I first learned about the strange phenomenon of artists, scientists and mathematicians from all over the world working in the very same medium of origami, I knew there had to be something special about it - that in the simplicity of a square must be hiding some untold potential for creativity and new ideas . . .” For more on the film, visit: http://www.greenfusefilms.com/statement.html

The screening is part of a four-day ARTStem Summer Seminar. ARTStem is a new year-long initiative bringing UNCSA faculty together with public school educators to explore teaching and learning at the intersection of the arts and STEM disciplines of science, math, engineering, and technology. ARTStem is a project of the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, whose mission is to incubate projects that sustain artists at every point in their creative development through strategic partnerships that capitalize on visionary thinking in the arts. For more on ARTStem, see http://artstem.blogspot.com