The Arts, Media and Engineering program, a hybrid of the arts and technology, is receiving national attention for its innovative works.

motione ^e

In Spring 2005, AME premiered its work, motione ^e, as part of ASU Public Events’ New Times Beyond Broadway series. A week later, one of the pieces, How Long Does the Subject Linger at the Edge of Volume, premiered at New York’s Lincoln Center. The premieres culminated three years of cooperative work among internationally renowned choreographers Trisha Brown and Bill T. Jones.

The project combined live dance, sound and visual imagery. As each dancer moved, the computer motion-capture and analysis system used the movements to select accompanying sounds and images, influencing what the audience saw and heard. The result was an innovative art form where human and computation merged. The presentation of motione ^e was the first time this technology had been applied in real time to choreography.

“Technology became a collaborator in the choreography,” said Brown, who took her piece to Lincoln Center for the 35th anniversary celebration of the Trisha Brown Dance Company. “I had to change my approach to creating movement. Rather than working in individual units, I’ve had to create a field of dance. The restraints of gravity and precision are gone with the computer interface.”

The motione ^e performances received national media attention, including coverage in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, The Village Voice, Dance magazine and Dance Teacher magazine. In addition, motione brought grants from the National Science Foundation, City of Tempe Cultural Services and the largest National Endowment for the Arts grant ever awarded to ASU, plus an on-going partnership with Academy Award-winning Motion Analysis Corporation.

IGERT

AME’s innovative work and possible real-world applications resulted in a $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation for an Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training program. The NSF IGERT grant provides five years of graduate fellowships to create a new class of media scientists.

“IGERT will help AME train a new generation of hybrid media scientists-artists who will bridge the gap between computation and physical experience to produce technological advances for education, health, communication, arts and culture, and everyday living,” said Thanassis Rikakis, AME program director.

Funding will support Ph.D. students pursuing an AME concentration in Electrical Engineering, Computer Science & Engineering, Psychology, Education, Bioengineering or Kinesiology.

This is the second large NSF grant for the young AME program. In 2004, the program received a $1.1 million grant to study real-time motion analysis.

“Thanks to AME’s collective efforts, ASU is at the forefront of advancing experiential media and one significant step closer to realizing its potential,” said ASU President Michael Crow.

The principal investagator for this NSF award is Thanassis Rikakis. The co-principal investigators are Hari Sundaram (Computer Science & Engineering), Andreas Spanias (Electrical Engineering), Jiping He (Bioengineering), Wilhelmina Savenye (Education) and Michael McBeath (Psychology).

AME is a program co-managed by the Herberger College of Fine Arts and the Fulton School of Engineering, which focuses on experiential media to produce hybrid media artists-engineers-scientists. The program graduated its first five students in May 2005, all at the master’s level. More than 20 graduate students are currently enrolled.

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