Carson Center faculty presentations and exhibitions
calendar icon09 Sep 2021
Lincoln, Neb.--Faculty from the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts have recently participated and presented at these major conferences and exhibitions:
• Megan Elliott, founding director of the Carson Center, was a panelist in Education in XR (held in AltSpace) speaking about how the Carson Center used XR for teaching and learning during the pandemic.
• Anna Henson, assistant professor of practice in emerging media arts, has her latest VR experience “Far Field” being exhibited at The Reach at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., as part of their fall 2021 season. Learn more about The Reach at https://go.unl.edu/6mbw.
“Far Field” is a collaborative work by Henson and multidisciplinary performance duo slowdanger (Anna Thompson and Taylor Knight). The work is accessible via VR headset and desktop/mobile, experienced inside the 3D online platform Mozilla Hubs.
For more on “Far Field,” visit https://go.unl.edu/q3nc.
• Ash E. Smith, assistant professor of emerging media arts, had her proposal “Real-Time Collectivity: Speculative Design, Storytelling and LARPing (while remote),” a talk about how the Carson Center pivoted to use Mozilla Hubs during the Covid 19 pandemic, has been accepted to be a keynote at the Zip-Scene Conference on Oct. 2 in Budapest, Hungary. The conference will be at the MOME Innovation Center at the University of Art and Design Budapest.
LARP is live-action role playing.
• Robert Twomey, assistant professor of emerging media arts, was the keynote speaker and guest artist at the Robotics x Arts Exhibition: Opportunities and Issues in Robotics Applied in the Arts in July. More information on the exhibition is available at https://go.unl.edu/e3ms.
Twomey’s exhibition was titled “Three Stage Drawing Transfer.” This project creates a visual-mental-physical circuit between a generative adversarial network (GAN), a co-robotic arm and a five-year-old child. From source training images to the latent space of a GAN to pen on paper and a final human interpreter, it establishes a flow of visual communications between a number of human and non-human actors. Enmeshed together, these discrete translational stages juxtapose advanced emerging technologies and childlike expression.
“In this project and other related work, I am interested in children’s drawings as a subject matter not just for being outside of taste, convention and learned expression, but for how they show representation and visual language in their moments of genesis,” Twomey writes in the exhibition description.
Learn more at https://go.unl.edu/0zit.
• Twomey and his co-organizers curated a Frontiers Workshop at SIGGRAPH 2021 on measurable creative artificial intelligence (AI). He also moderated a live discussion during the virtual conference on Aug. 11 from noon-1 p.m. CST. All materials were published on the mCreativeAI website after the event at http://mcreativeai.org/siggraph/.
The half-day workshop for SIGGRAPH pulled from the industries of games/vfx, artists, manufacturing, tech company labs and academics to give a wide view on what “creative AI” means in practice and what people’s goals and aspirations are in the space.
• Twomey hosted a workshop for ICER 2021, the ACM International Computing Education Research conference on Aug. 14. “Exploring Virtual Reality and Embodied Computational Reasoning” was for computer science educators and scholars about VR and Embodied Code. Learn more at https://go.unl.edu/i8c4.