Google’s Martin Wattenberg to deliver keynote
Connecticut College’s Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology will present the 13th biennial arts and technology symposium March 1-3. The symposium brings artists and researchers together to share ideas and present new works, research and performances, all addressing one or more forms of fusion between technology and the arts.
Keynote Speaker
Martin Wattenberg, co-director of Google's "Big Picture" visualization research group in Cambridge, Mass., will speak on Friday, March 2, at 9:30 a.m. in Evans Hall, Cummings Arts Center. Wattenberg is renowned for his visual explorations of culturally significant data. His visualizations of the stock market and baby names are considered Internet classics and his visualization-based artwork has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, London Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Multimedia Concerts
At the end of each day of the symposium, the Ammerman Center will present a multimedia concert featuring up to 10 short performances that incorporate everything from music — using traditional and nontraditional instruments — to dance, video, narration and more. The concerts take place in Evans Hall, Cummings Arts Center, with Thursday and Friday shows at 8 p.m. and Saturday’s finale at 4:30 p.m.
Gallery Show and Reception
For each of its biennial symposiums, the Ammerman Center commissions new works that combine at least one area of creative expression with a major technology component. The four works commissioned for this year’s symposium will be unveiled on Thursday, March 1, at 4:30 p.m. in the galleries of Cummings Arts Center. They include an interactive work for piano with computer-generated audio and imagery, based on the song "The Greatest of These is Love," composed by New London native and Connecticut College alumna Roberta Bitgood; an improvisation between piano and fret-less guitar with interactive electronics referencing the early 20th century Telharmonium; a musical and theatrical performance incorporating visual media and interactive electronics to represent a relationship tainted by an omnipresent media stream; and a dance, visual and sound collaboration which utilizes 3D motion capture sensor and Kinect technology to tell the story of Lilith from Jewish tradition.
Immersive Installation
Harkness Chapel is both the setting and focus of a site-based immersive installation called “Deep/Place” that will be on display Friday, March 2, at 3:30 p.m. It consists of diverse media elements which draw on historical and contemporary materials about Harkness Chapel to explore architecture, cultural geography and geology in a dynamic interactive experience.
For more information about the symposium, visit http://www.conncoll.edu/CAT/sym2012/index.html.
ABOUT CONNECTICUT COLLEGE
Situated on the coast of southern New England, Connecticut College is a highly selective private liberal arts college with 1900 students from all across the country and throughout the world. On the college’s 750-acre arboretum campus overlooking Long Island Sound, students and faculty create a vibrant social, cultural and intellectual community enriched by diverse perspectives. The college, founded in 1911, is known for its unique combination of interdisciplinary studies, international programs, funded internships, student-faculty research and service learning. For more information, visit www.connecticutcollege.edu.
