Faculty Projects
For almost two years, the Institute for the Arts and Humanities has worked with faculty to seed collaborative projects in digital arts and humanities. While some of these projects are new, and some are tried and true, there's something for everyone.
Click each project name to view a full description, the team members and the time/venue you can see the project in action. In addition, view our Exhibitions by Venue listing to see when and where to check out each project.
Virtual Performance Factory
This “virtual performance factory” will be a live and virtual simulation of a video game. As audience members move through the performance space and interact with live actors and virtual experiences, like a video game, their actions affect the performance.
The Bathysphere: Motion Capture as Art
The Bathysphere is an underwater opera and an interactive game in which the old and the new are combined: a motion-capture system and multiple projections will be installed in Gerrard Hall, a building originally erected in 1822. Picking up a beach ball, for instance, will cause an octopus to appear, while waving a wand will direct a school of fish around the space. A musical score to rounds out the Bathysphere experience.
Psychasthenia: Game Engine as Artistic Medium
Psychasthenia is an immersive artwork and psychological diagnostic environment. Therapeutic clients plug in to the system's sensors and navigate an expressive interior space that changes according to their actions and responses to multimodal stimuli. The system's media elements and user experiences are inspired by historical and contemporary diagnostic literature of the psychasthenic psychological disorder, which is characterized by phobias, obsessions, compulsions or excessive anxiety. The experience of voyaging through the system reveals the unique character of the client's inherent pathology and its lived expression, culminating in a summary diagnosis to carry back into daily life and interactions.
The Architecture of Association
The Architecture of Association is a large-scale, generative artwork that draws associative links between media elements to form an evolving visual collage. The Architecture of Association v2.0 develops the original concept to create rich media landscapes from real-time associative processes. The work will use keywords, metadata and custom clustering algorithms to make “informed” selections from the databases, bringing associative material into proximity for a particular duration.
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart is a series of eight generative software works that illustrates the enchanting fragility of social systems. Created using the Processing programming language, the pieces visualize the changing relationships among different social network simulations, each with unique initial conditions and social rules. The resultant imagery represents a visual history of these dynamic behaviors, with colors, forms, and motions varying as the relationships unfold across each system.
Humanities in Touch
Humanities in Touch (HIT) will bring a new level of accessibility and interactivity to the use of digital humanities collections through an innovative large-screen multi-touch surface called Scout. Scout will provide an attractive and easy-to-navigate doorway into multiple archives, while also allowing users to annotate, connect and otherwise mine humanities information. HIT is an inter-institutional effort between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the North Carolina Humanities Council.
A Collaborative Visual and Musical Piece on the Topic of War
The project team is creating an innovative, collaborative composition on the topic of war that will be performed an electro-acoustic concert Feb. 16, 2010. The team will develop a custom interactive environment to generate, trigger and alter sounds as well as drive a visual display of war imagery. The musical composition will provide a flexible musical framework and incorporate UNC faculty performers who will interact in real-time with the images, each other and the interactive environment. The sounds and visuals will be part of a larger system including sensors such as visible and audible analysis of the audience. Featured event of Festival on the Hill.
Maurice Remembered
A key performance at the electro-acoustic concert is a world premiere of a musical composition: pianist Thomas Otten of the UNC department of music has commissioned Frances White to compose a piece of music for piano and voice based upon Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit with a text drawn from E.M. Forster’s novel, Maurice. Known as a leading composer of computer music, White will combine computer-generated sonority with the live acoustic performance in her composition. Otten will perform both the vocal and piano parts of White’s composition.
Then/Now: 3-D Virtual Space as Temporal Telescope
Then/Now is a 3-D interactive digital world featuring various parts of downtown Raleigh. This interactive space allows viewers to freely explore the virtual downtown while encouraging them to interact with virtual multimedia “kiosks” featuring archived image, text and audio of historic buildings, spaces and events. These digital kiosks are strategically placed in the same camera location and orientation as the original archived photos, allowing viewers a chance to both see multimedia displays of the past and participate in a new, virtual space.
Internet Archive of African-American Performance Art
In fall 2009, performance artist Clifford Owens visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for two weeks to meet with students, work with John Bowles’s graduate seminar and develop a performance to debut. This performance included a live, interactive Web component that will be archived as part of a new performance art archive that Bowles and his team of graduate students are creating. The team has created a Web archive of African-American performance art, featuring an online exhibition with the capacity to support a variety of media, from texts and photographs to audio, video and Web-based artworks.
The William Blake Archive
The Blake Archive is public Web site that provides unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity and extreme fragility. Advanced principles of design allow the Blake Archive to integrate editions, catalogues, databases and scholarly tools into one electronic archival resource. It supplies reproductions that are more accurate in color, detail and scale than the finest commercially published photomechanical reproductions and texts that are more faithful to Blake's own than any collected edition has provided.
Future Talk
Wenhua Shi created a site-specific installation, Future Talk, dealing with archival recording that explores a physical interaction with virtual information/historical data. Future Talk uses found objects and sound and re-imagines the 1972 chat between China's Chairman Mao and former U.S. President Richard Nixon. Source materials include the archival gramophone recording of the Mao and Nixon speech/debates.
Virtual Painting
Choose your brush, mix your colors and paint a virtual masterpiece using the "dAb" virtual painting system. “dAb” provides the user with the traditional tools of a painter, allowing the user to control a virtual brush as he or she would a real brush. This project explores the benefits of recreating the “sight, touch, action and feeling” of the artistic process itself.
Virtual Symphony
Virtual Symphony is a touch-enabled virtual instrument system that can be used to emulate various musical instruments, including the xylophone, drums, Chinese gong, keyboards and others in the percussion family. A multi-touch table developed by RENCI is the input device for users to play the virtual instruments and allows users to play the virtual instrument using their hands in an intuitive way as they typically would with the real musical instruments. This system also facilitates both bimanual and collaborative playing among multiple performers.
IdeoRhythm: Real-time software/video installation
IdeoRhythm is the artist’s unique homage to the Chinese script system, exploring the ideographic writing’s extreme possibilities in expression in this “post-handwriting” era of global culture. IdeoRhythm is a real-time software algorithm system projecting animated Chinese characters on large projection screens or gallery walls.
Click each project name to view a full description, the team members and the time/venue you can see the project in action. In addition, view our Exhibitions by Venue listing to see when and where to check out each project.
Virtual Performance Factory
This “virtual performance factory” will be a live and virtual simulation of a video game. As audience members move through the performance space and interact with live actors and virtual experiences, like a video game, their actions affect the performance.
The Bathysphere: Motion Capture as Art
The Bathysphere is an underwater opera and an interactive game in which the old and the new are combined: a motion-capture system and multiple projections will be installed in Gerrard Hall, a building originally erected in 1822. Picking up a beach ball, for instance, will cause an octopus to appear, while waving a wand will direct a school of fish around the space. A musical score to rounds out the Bathysphere experience.
Psychasthenia: Game Engine as Artistic Medium
Psychasthenia is an immersive artwork and psychological diagnostic environment. Therapeutic clients plug in to the system's sensors and navigate an expressive interior space that changes according to their actions and responses to multimodal stimuli. The system's media elements and user experiences are inspired by historical and contemporary diagnostic literature of the psychasthenic psychological disorder, which is characterized by phobias, obsessions, compulsions or excessive anxiety. The experience of voyaging through the system reveals the unique character of the client's inherent pathology and its lived expression, culminating in a summary diagnosis to carry back into daily life and interactions.
The Architecture of Association
The Architecture of Association is a large-scale, generative artwork that draws associative links between media elements to form an evolving visual collage. The Architecture of Association v2.0 develops the original concept to create rich media landscapes from real-time associative processes. The work will use keywords, metadata and custom clustering algorithms to make “informed” selections from the databases, bringing associative material into proximity for a particular duration.
Things Fall Apart
Things Fall Apart is a series of eight generative software works that illustrates the enchanting fragility of social systems. Created using the Processing programming language, the pieces visualize the changing relationships among different social network simulations, each with unique initial conditions and social rules. The resultant imagery represents a visual history of these dynamic behaviors, with colors, forms, and motions varying as the relationships unfold across each system.
Humanities in Touch
Humanities in Touch (HIT) will bring a new level of accessibility and interactivity to the use of digital humanities collections through an innovative large-screen multi-touch surface called Scout. Scout will provide an attractive and easy-to-navigate doorway into multiple archives, while also allowing users to annotate, connect and otherwise mine humanities information. HIT is an inter-institutional effort between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) and the North Carolina Humanities Council.
A Collaborative Visual and Musical Piece on the Topic of War
The project team is creating an innovative, collaborative composition on the topic of war that will be performed an electro-acoustic concert Feb. 16, 2010. The team will develop a custom interactive environment to generate, trigger and alter sounds as well as drive a visual display of war imagery. The musical composition will provide a flexible musical framework and incorporate UNC faculty performers who will interact in real-time with the images, each other and the interactive environment. The sounds and visuals will be part of a larger system including sensors such as visible and audible analysis of the audience. Featured event of Festival on the Hill.
Maurice Remembered
A key performance at the electro-acoustic concert is a world premiere of a musical composition: pianist Thomas Otten of the UNC department of music has commissioned Frances White to compose a piece of music for piano and voice based upon Maurice Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit with a text drawn from E.M. Forster’s novel, Maurice. Known as a leading composer of computer music, White will combine computer-generated sonority with the live acoustic performance in her composition. Otten will perform both the vocal and piano parts of White’s composition.
Then/Now: 3-D Virtual Space as Temporal Telescope
Then/Now is a 3-D interactive digital world featuring various parts of downtown Raleigh. This interactive space allows viewers to freely explore the virtual downtown while encouraging them to interact with virtual multimedia “kiosks” featuring archived image, text and audio of historic buildings, spaces and events. These digital kiosks are strategically placed in the same camera location and orientation as the original archived photos, allowing viewers a chance to both see multimedia displays of the past and participate in a new, virtual space.
Internet Archive of African-American Performance Art
In fall 2009, performance artist Clifford Owens visited the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for two weeks to meet with students, work with John Bowles’s graduate seminar and develop a performance to debut. This performance included a live, interactive Web component that will be archived as part of a new performance art archive that Bowles and his team of graduate students are creating. The team has created a Web archive of African-American performance art, featuring an online exhibition with the capacity to support a variety of media, from texts and photographs to audio, video and Web-based artworks.
The William Blake Archive
The Blake Archive is public Web site that provides unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity and extreme fragility. Advanced principles of design allow the Blake Archive to integrate editions, catalogues, databases and scholarly tools into one electronic archival resource. It supplies reproductions that are more accurate in color, detail and scale than the finest commercially published photomechanical reproductions and texts that are more faithful to Blake's own than any collected edition has provided.
Future Talk
Wenhua Shi created a site-specific installation, Future Talk, dealing with archival recording that explores a physical interaction with virtual information/historical data. Future Talk uses found objects and sound and re-imagines the 1972 chat between China's Chairman Mao and former U.S. President Richard Nixon. Source materials include the archival gramophone recording of the Mao and Nixon speech/debates.
Virtual Painting
Choose your brush, mix your colors and paint a virtual masterpiece using the "dAb" virtual painting system. “dAb” provides the user with the traditional tools of a painter, allowing the user to control a virtual brush as he or she would a real brush. This project explores the benefits of recreating the “sight, touch, action and feeling” of the artistic process itself.
Virtual Symphony
Virtual Symphony is a touch-enabled virtual instrument system that can be used to emulate various musical instruments, including the xylophone, drums, Chinese gong, keyboards and others in the percussion family. A multi-touch table developed by RENCI is the input device for users to play the virtual instruments and allows users to play the virtual instrument using their hands in an intuitive way as they typically would with the real musical instruments. This system also facilitates both bimanual and collaborative playing among multiple performers.
IdeoRhythm: Real-time software/video installation
IdeoRhythm is the artist’s unique homage to the Chinese script system, exploring the ideographic writing’s extreme possibilities in expression in this “post-handwriting” era of global culture. IdeoRhythm is a real-time software algorithm system projecting animated Chinese characters on large projection screens or gallery walls.
