Next week, CRCA and b.a.n.g. lab researchers Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas are heading out to Durham, North Carolina to do a performance and artist talk at Duke University. They will also be meeting with the Experiencing Virtual Worlds interdisciplinary research group at Duke to discuss some of their recent writing.



technesexual
a mixed reality performance
1/25 @ 6pm, SoundSense Studio, CIEMAS

Erotic Mixed Reality Performance
an artist talk
1/27 @ 4pm, Nasher Museum Auditorium

Sponsored by:
The Experiencing Virtual Worlds Working Group
Information Science + Information Studies
Art, Art History and Visual Studies
Women's Studies

...

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Join the UCSD Sustainability Solutions Institute and the Campus Water Collaborative Wednesday, Nov. 18 for their second technical seminar, "Inexpensive Desalination: Harnessing Natural Forces."

The hour-long seminar begins at 4 p.m. in Atkinson Hall Room 4004 and features Michael Motherway, President of DXV Water Technologies. The agenda includes a 25-minute presentation, followed by an open discussion with question and answer opportunities. Refreshments will be served.

Seating is limited so please RSVP to msession@ucsd.edu.
 
SSI encourages faculty, researchers, ...

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Calit2 artist/researchers working with the b.a.n.g. lab have had a number of reviews and articles published about their work this month. The new article Micha Cardenas co-authored with Felipe Zuniga entitled "IO NON HO NIENTE DA DIRE (I HAVE NOTHING TO SAY)" is in the current issue Digimag, an italian new media magazine. Since its only in Italian, you can find english text here. The article discusses the Emergency - Emergent Agency / Emergencia - Agencia Emergente project, which Ricardo Dominguez was also a part of, for the Dialogos y Interrogantes portion of the Proyecto Civico exhibition at CECUT in Tijuana.

Gabriel Menotti wrote a really interesting review of Artivistic TURN*ON for Furtherfield.org ...

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CRCA researchers Micha Cardenas and Elle Mehrmand will be doing a performance entitled Technesexual that uses DIY biometric sensors that were made by hand to create live audio which will be heard in real space and virtual space at the same time. It is a Mixed Reality performance exploring relationality between people and between people and technology.

Cardenas and Mehrmand will be performing Technesexual in Tijuana at Entijuanarte on Oct 4th, in San Francisco at Arse Elektronika on Oct 2nd and in Montreal at Artivistic. They will also be doing a 3 day workshop in Montreal from Oct 15-17th, sharing the technology used for the performance with workshop participants including DIY electronics, ...

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A number of classrooms at UC San Diego have received a new addition -- just in time for the 2009-2010 academic year.

LED digital signs have been installed in five classrooms in UCSD's Center Hall, with 13 more expected to be installed throughout campus in the coming months. Initially, the signs will display the time and, at the top of the hour, information about the course itself, including the professor's name and the course title. ("That gets asked about a million times a day on the first day of class," says the project's lead, Calit2 Principal Development Engineer Doug Palmer.)

But eventually, the signs will be used to alert students during emergency situations, such as during a fire or in ...

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b.a.n.g. lab researchers at Calit2 have been very busy and have a handful of upcoming and recent exhibitions! Follow these links to find out more!

Transborder Immigrant Tool tool at ISEA 2009

The Transborder Immigrant Tool will be exhibited in 'Space is the Place' exhibition at the Gallery of the National College of Art & Design in Dublin, as part of the program of ISEA 2009 which takes place in Belfast and Dublin Ireland this year. The exhibition will run from the 27th August - 1st September 2009. The exhibition includes a number of video poems written by Amy Sara Carroll and designed by Calit2 researchers Ricardo Dominguez, Micha Cardenas, and CRCA researcher Elle Mehrmand. The voice ...

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The recent joint annual meetings in Boston of the Radio Frequency Integrated Circuits conference (RFIC 2009) and the International Microwave Symposium (IMS 2009) had researchers and students from Calit2 and UC San Diego out in force -- 17 UCSDers were on hand (five of them at left). UC San Diego was also the only university showing off hardware at their exhibit booth, staffed by a team led by Calit2's Javier Rodriguez Molina. They demonstrated technologies including Calit2's Gizmo, CalMesh, CalRadio and much more.

Meanwhile, on the conference side, UCSD graduate students came home with bronze and silver medals for research papers presented at the two meetings. As we reported in our roundup ...

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Check out this project by Calit2 researchers Micha Cardenas and Chris Head, CRCA researcher Elle Mehrmand and UCSD MFA grads Katherine Sweetman, Felipe Zuniga and UCSD Undergrad alumni Camilo Ontiveros.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The Freephone is an art project that aims to provide people just deported
from the US with a free phone call. To achieve this, a group of UCSD
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) students and graduates are coming together to
present the phone at the Lui Velazquez gallery in Tijuana, just a few feet
from the turnstiles where people who are deported are dropped off by the
border patrol. The project is by the artists Chris Head, Micha Cardenas,
Elle Mehrmand, Katherine Sweetman, ...

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A group of multi-disciplinary researchers affiliated with the UC San Diego division of Calit2 convened in Atkinson Hall yesterday for the launch of GRAIN, the Global Responsibility and Innovation Network.

The founders of GRAIN seek to connect academic institutions, non-governmental agencies and industry to generate projects and products that "are successful and sustainable -- culturally, economically and environmentally -- from idea to implementation."

"Were talking about the most multidisciplinary effort you could ever think of," said co-founder Garrett Smith, a bioengineering Ph.D. candidate. "We want to facilitate a way for the UCSD community to engage with industry and NGOs to design technologies ...

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UCSD Graduate Student in Visual Arts Elle Mehrmand and Calit2 Artist/Researcher Micha Cardenas were recently awarded the Emerging Fields Award grant from the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts. Their proposed project is called "mixed relations" and it explores mixed reality performance with two performers in actual and virtual space producing live audio. The timeline for the project includes workshops in the fall of 2009 and performances in the spring of 2010.

Read more about the project here:

mixed relations by Elle Mehrmand and Micha Cardenas

"The partners do not precede their relating: all that is, is the fruit of becoming with."
-Donna Haraway, When Species Meet

mixed ...

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Come out to the auditorium at Calit2 tomorrow for this important symposium, including Calit2 researcher Micha Cardenas, UCSD Faculty Brian Goldfarb and numerous other UC faculty. The symposium is being held in conjunction with Carlos Trilnick's artwork on anti-personell mines in the gallery@calit2.





Violence, Technology and Public Intervention: Two UCDARnet Panels

http://ucdarnet.org/

April 24, 2009
From Noon to 5pm

Sponsored by UCDARnet and gallery@calit2
CALIT2/Atkinson Hall Black Box Theater
Free and Open to the Public
A Reception after the panels
For Directions and information: http://gallery.calit2.net

Noon -Introduction - Brian Goldfarb

12:10 - Carlos Trilnick - Keynote

12:30 - Panel ...

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Becoming Dragon
a Project Discussion by Micha Cardenas

Wednesday, April 15, 2009 @ 6PM
Refreshments will be served.

Teleport to the performance in-world:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Seventh%20Eye/144/39/235

New Media Lounge / Cal(IT)2,
UC San Diego, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla, California 92093

The New Media Lounge is excited to bring MFA Candidate, Micha Cardenas for an exclusive motion capture demonstration in the Performative Computing Lab at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA). Micha will be discussing her recent project Becoming Dragon, a 365 hour, (2 week long) performance in Second Life. The performance is believed to be the first of its kind in Second Life, ...

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Pick up a copy of this week's San Diego Reader, the largest weekly publication in San Diego. Becoming Dragon, a project by myself and a number of other UCSD graduate and undergraduate students is featured on the cover. The project was supported by Calit2, CRCA and the UCSD Visual Arts department, which are all mentioned in the article. You can read the article online here as well. While I have my criticisms of the article, I appreciate that the author quoted me at length on the core issues of the performance.

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Calit2's composer in residence at UC San Diego, Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Reynolds, is getting a rare concert honor: On March 29, "Roger Reynolds and his Proteges" will echo through a concert hall in Toronto, Canada, as part of the New Music Concerts 2008-2009 season. The aforementioned proteges include composers David Felder of SUNY Buffalo, Israel's Chaya Czernowin, Juan Campoverde from Ecuador, and Brazilian Antonio Borges-Cunha. All of the proteges are well-known composers who earned their Ph.D.'s under Reynolds in the UC San Diego Music graduate program in Composition.

The concert by the New Music Concerts Ensemble (with David Swan on piano and Robert Aitken on flute ...

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UC San Diego graduate student Micha Cardenas, creator of the "Becoming Dragon" virtual reality performance in Second Life, will be presenting documentation of the project at 9:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 26. as part of the College Art Association's 97th annual conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

For the show -- titled "@" -- Cardenas created in Second Life an installation of objects that people had given her during her immersive performance. When users approach one of the objects, they replay conversations she had through text chat, making them appear as if they are recurring in the exhibition space in Second Life.

A reception will follow the event at 9:30 p.m., at SCI-Arc, 960 East Third ...

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Micha Cardenas, creator of the durational, immersive Second Life project known as "Becoming Dragon," will present her research findings at the SPIE Photonics West Conference in San Jose, Calif., Dec. 22.

Cardenas, a Calit2-affiliated graduate student with the Department of Visual Arts at UCSD, will present a lecture as part of a session titled "Evoking Environments through Artful Distinctiveness." The presentation is scheduled to begin at 11:10 a.m. in the San Jose Convention Center, and is one of about 20 conference lectures sponsored by SPIE, an international society advancing light-based research (SPIE was founded as the Society of Photographic Instrumentation Engineers).

Read more about ...

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San Diego CityBeat picked up the story about Micha Cardenas and her "Becoming Dragon" performance for its current issue, placing particular emphasis on the potential psychological dangers of the project. Cardenas, a UCSD grad student in visual arts, will spend 365 consecutive hours totally immersed in the Second Life virtual world as a means of questioning the one-year requirement for "real-life experience" that transgender people must fulfill in order to receive gender confirmation surgery (Micha is currently undergoing hormone replacement therapy).

For more about the performance, check out Micha's daily blog, browse the "Becoming Dragon" project Web site or read an article on the Calit2 main ...

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N Art Magazine, a new program on ABC in San Diego that documents the local arts scene, visited CALIT2 and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts recently. For a program that is mostly familiar with traditional art forms, touring the digital art laboratories at CALIT2 and CRCA proved to be quite an experience for N Art Magazine. The final video (seen below) aired on Sunday, October 26th.



The video features Beatbox360, a 4K video art piece created by myself, Mike Toillion; Sanctuary, a percussion composition by Pulitzer prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds; and Scalable City, a 3D multimedia video game, to name just a few.
...

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The US election cycle is in its last week. Anticipating crowding at the polls, many have already cast their ballot through early voting. The rest of us will wait in line on Tuesday. However, while the political campaigns are drawing to a close, the analysis has just begun.

Over the summer, other members of the Social Code Group and I developed metaViz, a system that analyzes potential conceptual metaphors in political blogs (see the press release for details). The goal is to allow users, particularly those who read political blogs, to see large trends within a blog or across a blog, trends that might not be noticeable when looking at individual posts, and consider what these trends might mean. ...

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Last week my students and I had a journal article accepted to the MIT Press journal "PRESENCE: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments." The article is titled "Richly Connected Systems and Multi-Device Worlds," and will come out early next year sometime. The paper describes a conceptual framework for building multi-device systems, and uses my group's EcoRaft project (which was made possible by a grant from Calit2) as a primary example. The framework is based on the creation of multiple channels of real and apparent connectivity among devices: for example, multiple kinds of data networking, cross-device graphics and sound, and embodied mobile agents that inhabit the multi-device ...

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If you've ever wandered through a museum exhibition and wished you could have helped put it all together, you won't want to miss this opportunity from Calit2's Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3).

CISA3 is inviting student volunteers to help install its forthcoming exhibition entitled 'Masters of Fire -- Hereditary Bronze Casters of South India', which will open at UCSD's Geisel Library on October 5, 2008. Julie Gay, an exhibition designer and preparator from the San Diego Museum of Man, will be installing the CISA3 exhibit from September 26 to 30 at the Geisel Library (and the exhibition itself runs through January 25). Ms. Gay, who has a distinguished ...

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"Origami optics" developed at UC San Diego may be what it takes to get cameras with zoom capabilities so slim that they fit into cell phones and other portable electronics. Electrical engineering Ph.D. student Eric Tremblay, one of the developers of the origami optics technology, presented his team's recent work at SIGGRAPH 08. The origami optics get their name from their ability to "fold up" incoming light so that the space required for light focusing -- the focal length -- is effectively reduced. The design "folds" the light entering the aperture by forcing it to bounce back and forth between mirrored surfaces within the optic. It is during this bouncing/folding that the light is focused, ...

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"Network World," the premier provider of information and insight for network and IT executives, has published an article in both its print and online editions about research conducted by UCSD Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) Professor Amin Vahdat.

The article -- titled "Could 'fat-tree' switch setup be key to trimming data center costs?' -- discusses Vahdat's research findings, which he presented last week at the annual meeting of SIGCOMM, the Special Interest Group on Data Communications. In his paper, Vahdat and co-authors Mohammad Al-Fares and Alexander Loukissas (both UCSD grad students in CSE) explain how companies with large data centers can save money and enhance performance ...

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New curators at the San Diego Museum of Art visited Calit2 on Thursday to look at some of the cool capture and visualization technologies being developed for our Center of Interdisciplinary Science for Art, Architecture and Archaeology (CISA3). SDMA and CISA3 are partnering on a long-term project to develop digital clinical charts as a conservation tool for major works in SDMA's permanent collection, and the work will be part of a permanent exhibit scheduled to open next January in time for a meeting of the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) in San Diego. The visitors included John Marciari, Curator of Italian and Spanish Paintings and head of provenance research at SDMA, as well as ...

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The autonomous underwater vehicle known as the "Stingray" recently participated in this year's Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International competition and held up pretty well against its rivals. Building it, however, required a little bit of high-tech, a little bit of a low-tech and a whole lot of "black magic," says Gideon Prior, president of the UCSD-based iBotics engineering group that created the craft.

At one end of the spectrum are the Stingray's high-tech "guts." It's equipped with Voith-Schneider propellers, forward- and down-looking cameras, a high-intensity lighting apparatus, a piezoelectric film-based sonar system, inertial navigational sensors and custom-designed software. ...

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As part of its series examining what life might be like in 2020, CNN.com has run a story about Intelligent Tutoring Systems that features UCSD Machine Perception Lab researcher Jacob Whitehill's work to create a facial remote control.

Despite the benefits of having a robot in the classroom (infinite patience, for one), it seems not everyone is convinced. Writes one commentator: "LOL don't think so... at least not anytime near soon.... Think how fast kids would hack their teacher."

At any rate, it seems Calit2 has its finger on the pulse of the up-and-coming zeitgeist: CNN's series also looks at the future of telemedicine, virtual classrooms, energy solutions, and virtual worlds -- all well-established ...

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Larry Smarr, G.P. Li, and Shellie Nazarenus came by our lab today to check out a new project being made by two students in our group, Informatics PhD candidate Eric Baumer and Informatics undergraduate Jordan Sinclair. Here's a blurb about the project:

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The communications media are undergoing democratization. Rather than receiving news from large corporations, many individuals now use various forms of new media as their primary source of information. One such medium is political blogs (or weblogs), which contain political news and commentary, often with a very distinct personal voice and readily apparent political affiliation or ideology. As more members ...

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Ola! I am reporting live from the Electronic Language International Festival (FILE 2008) in Sao Paulo, Brazil. On the 4th of August, Calit2 and the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) made history by hosting the first official 4K Digital Cinema presentation in all of South America.

The show, entitled "Two Thousand and Eight Million Pixels," was attended by the Brazilian Secretary of New Media, artists, academics, and videophiles from all over the world. Journalists were in high concentration as well, and included television networks such as Globo, TeleCultura and Oy.

The show featured such works as Scalable City by CRCA Director and UCSD professor Sheldon Brown; Era ...

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Our colleague Sheldon Brown, director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), is at the FILE new-media art festival in Sao Paulo, Brazil, along with others from Calit2 and CRCA: Peter Otto, Todd Margolis and Mike Toillion. He says his Scalable City installation and festival of 14 4K films have been well-received. "For the first time, the interactive installation of Scalable City is seen side-by-side with its 4K film version, creating a more complete experience of its multiple media forms," writes Brown from the festival. "CRCA and Calit2 have worked with FIOLE to create the first 4K film screening in Brazil. Along with the Scalable City film, 4K fare such as Mike Toillion's ...

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I'm in Milwaukee, WI, for the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting. I'm not an ecologist, but I'll be presenting to a group of them tomorrow. My research group has been collaborating on a project called "EcoRaft" with UCI Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Professor Lynn Carpenter and her students, with support from Calit2. The project was selected for presentation at the ESA meeting this year.

Here's the abstract, from http://eco.confex.com/eco/2008/techprogram/ P10884.HTM

"While sciences such as physics and chemistry lend themselves to compelling opportunities for interaction (explosions, reactions, objects in motion), restoration ecology is more challenging for children ...

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Multitouch technology has spread rapidly in the research community and is starting to appear in consumer products like the Apple iPhone. In collaboration with other Calit2 researchers, my students and I are building a number of large multitouch tables. In our lab we are exploring a large projection desk for novel interaction with video. We are also collaborating on the design of a multitouch interface for the Calit2 HIPerSpace Wall. Both systems make use of Frustrated Total Internal Reflection (FTIR). We shine infrared LEDs into the edges of a large sheet of acrylic placed in front of a rear-projection display screen. IR light leaks out the back of the acrylic every place it is touched. ...

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If you missed seeing the interactive installation of ATLAS in Silico at SIGGRAPH 2007 here at Calit2 in San Diego, you'll have to travel to Cleveland if you want to see its latest instantiation. The piece will be shown tomorrow, Saturday and Sunday at Cleveland's Ingenuity Fest, which calls it "a beautiful, interactive 3D experience that uses a participant's movement to trigger mesmerizing, life-size audiovisual effects inspired by the Global Ocean Survey". The GOS marine metagenomic data is housed in the CAMERA project servers on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. A team from the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), including Todd Margolis, Iman Mostafavi and Joachim Gossman, ...

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Loss of hearing is a common problem that can result from noise, aging, disease, and heredity. Approximately 28 million Americans have significant hearing loss, and of that group, almost six million are profoundly deaf. A primary form of communication within the United States deaf community is American Sign Language. ASL is not a visual form of English; it is a different language with its own unique grammatical and syntactical structure. Sources estimate that ASL is the fourth most commonly used language in the U.S. While ASL is widely used in the U.S., no one form of sign language is universal.

ASL interpreters play a central role in enabling face-to-face communication between many deaf and ...

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On July 16 and 17, the Center for Networked Systems held its semi- annual research review at UCSD. The Center brings together the CNS member companies, currently Cisco, Google, Hewlett Packard, Network Appliance, Qualcomm, and Sun Microsystems, with Center faculty and students. The review featured progress reports on ongoing CNS projects, proposals for new 2-year projects, and final reports on projects launched in 2006. There were lively discussions with the 30+ industrial visitors (some pictured at left) and 3 industrial talks from Google, Qualcomm, and Sun.

The next CNS research review will be held in January 2009. More information is available from the CNS website http://cns.ucsd.edu.
...

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Calit2's Advanced Network Sciences (ANS) group at UC San Diego, in collaboration with the Jacobs School's Electrical and Computer Engineering department, will bring five top scholars in network theory to UCSD. They'll be "in residence" the week of Aug. 18-22, some for the entire week, some just for two or three days. The speakers include Princeton's Bill Massey, USC's Amy Ward, Sean Meyn of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Nick Bambos of Stanford, and Caltech's Adam Wierman. Each will give two, 90-minute talks over two days, in addition to meeting with faculty and graduate students "to foster discussion and collaborations." The specific topic of each short course will be announced ...

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An educational video from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will feature UCSD post-doc researcher and Calit2-affiliate Jurgen Schulze in an effort to show young students that science can be cool.

A NSF video crew will be in Atkinson Hall Tuesday morning to take footage of Schulze (pictured) in the StarCAVE virtual reality system, where he will conduct research on a test subject as part of a virtual-reality experiment in navigation and "way-finding." The project, which is a multidisciplinary effort to study human neurological responses to built environments, is being conducted in collaboration with UCSD's Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience. (Read more about the Navigation/Way-Finding ...

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It's no exaggeration to say that Visual Arts graduate student Micha Cardenas will have to spend 30 days locked away in a single room to complete her MFA project. Cardenas, a researcher for the Center for Research in Computing an the Arts (CRCA) in Atkinson Hall, will be using a head-mounted display (HMD) and a Vicon motion-capture system to create long-durational performances of non-human characters in Second Life, an Internet-based virtual world imagined and created by its "residents."

Cardenas intends to fully immerse herself in Second Life for the month of November, waking and sleeping in the physical world (a single room at Calit2's Atkinson Hall) as the motion capture system tracks her ...

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Calit2 today announced that its HIPerSpace display system on the 2nd floor of Atkinson Hall takes top honors among high-resolution displays for scientific visualization. The lab of prof. Falko Kuester (pictured below in middle of front row) expanded the first HIPerSpace, making it 30 percent bigger in terms of total pixels. At nearly 287 million pixels, the HIPerSpace tiled wall boasts more than one active pixel for every U.S. citizen, based on the 2000 census.
The second-highest-res display, hyperwall-2, was installed recently at NASA Ames, with nearly 256 million pixels of screen resolution. Other runners-up in order are: Calit2's HIPerWall at UC Irvine (204.8 million pixels); Calit2's ...

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Read more about the project or watch a video that shows the technology in action. (Says Whitehill in the video: "In the current day and age of using Botox to improve one's facial ...

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UCSD's Biomedical Library hosted a free "Extreme Googling" workshop today that featured some Google Scholar tips Calit2 researchers should find especially helpful:

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