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Join us for a conversation featuring artist Cy Keener, landscape researcher Justine Holzman, climatologist Ignatius Rigor, and scientist John Woods, who collaborated over a four year period to create the work in our current exhibition Arctic Ice: A Visual Archive (on view through February 15, 2023). Their work is the result of the integration of field data, remote satellite imagery, scientific analysis, and multimedia visual representation and documents Arctic ice that is disappearing due to climate change. What is unique about this art based on scientific data is that Keener and Holzman were involved in the design and construction of the tools that collected the data as well as their placement in the environment. With this work, their goal is to make scientific data tangible, visceral, and experiential. They ask how artistic and creative practices can contribute to scientific endeavors while making scientific research visible to the public.

Agenda:

6:00 – 6:30 p.m. Doors open, audience takes seats in NAS Building Fred Kavli Auditorium

6:30 – 6:50 p.m. Event begins with welcoming remarks and community share, Fred Kavli Auditorium

Anyone in the audience working at the intersection of art and science will have 30 seconds to share their work. Please speak at one of the aisle mics in the room and present your work as a teaser so that those who are interested can seek you out during social time following the event.

6:50 – 7:40 p.m. Panelists presentations (12 minutes each)

Cy Keener, artist and assistant professor of sculpture and emerging technology, University of Maryland, College Park

Justine Holzman, landscape researcher and historian of science PhD student, Princeton University, New Jersey

Ignatius Rigor, climatologist at the Polar Science Center, Applied Physics Laboratory, and an affiliate assistant professor, School of Oceanography, University of Washington, Seattle

John Woods, retired US Navy Meteorology and Oceanography Officer, current Deputy Director for US Navy International Engagements, Washington, D.C.

7:40 – 8:20 p.m. Discussion

8:20 – 9:00 p.m. Reception in the Great Hall and Upstairs Gallery

About DASER

This program is co-sponsored by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences (CPNAS), Issues in Science and Technology Magazine, and Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. DASER fosters community and discussion around the intersection of art and science. The thoughts and opinions expressed in the DASER events are those of the speakers and do not necessarily reflect the positions of the National Academy of Sciences or of Leonardo.

COVID-19 Policy and Operating Status

This is an in-person event with the option to watch the webcast. A government-issued photo ID (such as a driver’s license or passport) and proof of up-to-date vaccination against COVID-19 per CDC guidelines are required. Masks are optional. For more details about the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s operating status and COVID-19 vaccination policy, visit this webpage.

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Wednesday, March 15, 2023 - 5:00 PM

Arts for All is pleased to announce the second—and expanded—round of ArtsAMPlification collaborative grants. Please note, we now have different kinds of grants for different stakeholders. If you have questions or would like feedback on your project, please contact us at arts@umd.edu.

11/28/22

By Jessica Weiss ’05

Images of massive chunks of ice collapsing from Greenland’s glaciers into the ocean have become emblematic of a changing climate and the need to drastically reduce global carbon emissions.

University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Art Cy Keener is working to characterize some of these icebergs—capturing their unique identities and the ways they change as they drift in the sea.

His collaborative “Iceberg Portraiture” series is part of an exhibition now on view at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in Washington, D.C., which Keener created with landscape researcher Justine Holzman, climatologist Ignatius Rigor and scientist John Woods. It’s the result of almost four years of trips to the Arctic in which they placed trackers onto the ice to collect data with the hopes of making that information tangible and visceral.

Cy Keener art exhibition

At NAS, the 7-foot-tall digital ink-and-pastel portraits provide a glimpse into the life of four icebergs with vastly different scales and shapes—some the size of a car and others a third of a mile wide—observed and recorded in August 2021 in western Greenland.

“Each of these [icebergs] is a piece of 10,000- to 40,000-year-old ice coming off the Greenland ice sheet into the ocean,” Keener said. “In this exhibition we understand them as living things, falling apart in front of your eyes, constantly changing. We show their diversity and beauty.”

Keener’s efforts began with the development of a low-cost, open-source buoy to collect meteorological and oceanographic data to use in his work. He first traveled to the Arctic in Spring 2019 with Rigor, a senior principal research scientist at the University of Washington and the coordinator of the International Arctic Buoy Program, whose members maintain a network of buoys across the expanse of the Arctic Ocean.

At VisArts Gallery in Rockville, Maryland, he and Holzman created “Sea Ice 71.348778º N, 156.690918º W,” an installation that used hanging strips of 6-foot-long, blue-green polyester film to reflect the thickness and color of the Arctic ice based on the buoy data.

He also created various versions of “Digital Ice Core,” a sculpture piece that used electronics, data and satellite communication to link a remote field site with a digital light sculpture, made up of 1,000 LED lights. Viewers were then able to see a recreated version of the ambient light in the air, ice and ocean in close to real-time.

In 2020, Keener received a $200,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to continue his work. And in Spring 2021, he spent nine days on a Danish navy ship on the west coast of Greenland.

In addition to the iceberg portraits, the NAS exhibition includes a continuation of Keener’s work to represent the thinning of sea ice. The nearly 8-feet-tall “Sea Ice Daily Drawings,” made of aluminum, acrylic, paper and ink, are based on some 27,000 data points that come from sensors buried meters into the ice. They show subtle temperature and color variation throughout a vertical profile of air, sea ice and ocean.

The drawings, while visually appealing, are yet another stark reminder of the inexorable changes occurring in the Arctic, Keener said: Before the 1980s, the surface of the Arctic Ocean was thoroughly covered with this thick, multi-year ice. Now it’s predicted to vanish by the middle of the century.

“As an artist, I get to go out there, be in this environment and stand on this ice before it disappears, and then try to bring life to that through installation, drawing and sculpture,” Keener said. “I’m using data not to get more statistics, but to make these things that are on their way out physically real—to extend the experience through time and tell a longer story.”

 

Ground Works, a2ru's peer-reviewed platform for arts-integrated research, announces a call for submissions to a special themed issue entitled Creating Knowledge in Common. With this issue, we seek to lift up university-community partnered research and inquiry that center the arts. We invite submissions that deepen our understanding of how the structures, processes, and outcomes of such partnerships result in reciprocal relationships that advance new knowledge. In addition, submissions should make clear how the shared work benefits both the academic and the community partners. 

Ground Works encourages a wide array of submission types that incorporate multimedia to tell the story of creating knowledge in common. All submissions must be received and flagged for consideration in this special issue by January 31, 2023. Read the full call for submissions, and contact a2ru-editorgw@umich.edu with any questions.

11/2/22

By Maria Herd M.A. ’19

 

Fitness trackers and smartwatches are widely used to monitor health, activity and exercise, but they’re pretty sedentary themselves. They stay strapped on your wrist or clipped to your clothing despite the fact it’s more effective to monitor different areas—your upper body for breathing, for example, or your wrist to track typing or writing.

Now, researchers at the University of Maryland are putting wearable sensors on track to do their best work—literally—with a miniature robotics system capable of traversing numerous locations on the human body.

Their device, called Calico, mimics a toy train by traveling on a cloth track that can run up and down users’ limbs and around their torso, operating independently of external guidance through the use of magnets, sensors and connectors. Their paper describing the project was recently published in the ACM Journal on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies and presented at UBICOMP, a conference on ubiquitous computing.

 

closeup of wearable sensor on wrist

“Our device is a fast, reliable and precise personal assistant that lays the groundwork for future systems,” said Anup Sathya M.S. ’21, who led Calico’s development for his master’s thesis in human-computer interaction. Sathya is now a first-year Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Chicago.

Most wearable workout devices are limited in the type of exercises they can monitor, but Calico is versatile. For example, it can track running on a user's arm, move to the elbow to count push-ups, to the back for planks, and then to the knee to count squats.

And unlike other devices, Calico moves quickly and accurately without getting stuck on clothing or at awkward angles. “For the first time, a wearable can traverse the user’s clothing with no restrictions to their movement,” said Huaishu Peng, an assistant professor of computer science who was Sathya’s adviser at UMD.

Peng, who also has an appointment in the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS), sees a future in which mini wearable devices like Calico will seamlessly integrate with humans for interaction, actuation and sensing.

He recently took Calico in a creative direction by establishing a new collaboration with Jonathan David Martin, a lecturer in Immersive Media Design; and Adriane Fang, an associate professor at the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies.

The interdisciplinary team is combining dance, music, immersive media, robotics and wearable technology into a novel and compelling series of interactive dance performances that are choreographed in real time through Calico.

First, Peng’s research group programmed Calico to instruct a dancer to execute specific movements using motion and light. Then, using their smartphones, the audience gets to collectively vote on how Calico should instruct the dancer.

The project is being funded with a $15,000 award from the Arts for All initiative, which leverages the combined power of the arts, technology and social justice to make the University of Maryland a leader in addressing grand challenges.

“The idea is to explore the dynamics and connections between human plus robot and performer plus audience,” said Peng. “In this instance, Calico will and act as the ‘mediator’ to broadening art and tech participation and understanding.”

Calico’s original creators include Jiasheng Li, a second-year Ph.D. student in computer science; Ge Gao, an assistant professor in the College of Information Studies with an appointment in UMIACS; and Tauhidur Rahman, an assistant professor in data science at the University of California, San Diego.

VIDEO: Calico: Relocatable On-cloth Wearables with Fast, Reliable, and Precise Locomotion

Wednesday, October 26, 2022 - 2:00 PM to 3:00 PM
9/30/21

By Christine Zhu

The University of Maryland is debuting an immersive media design major this semester, the first undergraduate program in the country that synthesizes art with computer science.

There are two tracks available in the program: an art track leading to a bachelor’s of arts degree from the college of arts and humanities, and a computer science track leading to a bachelor’s of science degree from the college of computer, mathematical and natural sciences.

The program works with creating virtual and augmented realities, offering a wide variety of courses for whichever track a student wants to take. 

One of the classes, Introduction to Immersive Media, covers history and research in the field. Its projects involve sensors, augmented reality and virtual reality.

Another class, Introduction to Computational Media, teaches students about the computing that’s required for each type of media. For example, imagery deals with computer graphics and sound deals with synthetic audio.

“We’re investigating ways to use modern technology and media to take the place of information that you would perceive with your senses in a natural environment,” said Stevens Miller, an adjunct lecturer in the department of computer science. 

As a result, students can create artificial environments where they control interactions with the senses — sight, sound and even touch and smell in some cases.

Studio arts lecturer Mollye Bendell used the Artechouse, an art center in Washington, D.C., as an example of a virtual reality experience that uses immersive media design. 

“[It’s] a gallery that specializes in the intersection of art and technology,” she said. “[An example is] an augmented reality application where you’re looking through the camera on your phone and … you see a 3D model appear.”

An immersive media design exhibit was held at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center as a part of NextNOW Fest in mid-September. About 15 students displayed their projects, Bendell said. 

In one student’s project, people were able to play chess remotely with others around the world, Miller said. 

“Instead of being limited to a two-dimensional point and click-with-your-mouse way of interacting with the chessboard, you actually saw a three-dimensional chess set in front of you that you could manipulate even though it doesn’t actually exist,” he added.

While all immersive design students need to have coding ability, the computer science track covers more of the technical components while the art track focuses on the perceptive side, Miller said.

Sophomore Maggie Letvin, a studio art major and hopeful immersive media design major, is planning on the art track. She’s used to approaching projects from the angle of an artist, and said that programming was hard for them.

“[With] programming, you have to know what you want to do ahead of time,” she said. “I approach art from a standpoint of, ‘I have the materials, I’m just gonna work with my hands and figure out what happens,’ but you can’t exactly do that with coding.”

In later years, students from the art track are paired with students from the computer science track. As a result, students are able to work with a partner from a different background and learn more from each other.

Wednesday, November 03, 2021 - 9:00 AM to Friday, November 05, 2021 - 5:00 PM

Alliance for the Arts in Research Universities (a2ru) hosts its annual conference Sharing Stories: The Case for Art.

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