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Technology and the arts come together in this innovative research cluster. Faculty across the arts, engineering and sciences explore new media applications based on shared expertise and evolving technologies. Concepts from diverse disciplines partner to create compelling expressions: dancers wired with sensors perform an interactive concert; media artists incorporate robotics and surveillance hardware in a social context; musicians compose complex scores based on math equations; computer-artists animate visual models from biological data. Experimental process and inquiry energize research and lead to new frontiers. The use of new technologies in art often acts as a laboratory for subsequent industrial and commercial applications. iARTA's affiliate journal, Moebius, gives critical insight to these emerging interdisciplinary practices in an international context.

Latest News

David Stout, Cory Metcald, Jenny Vogel, and Morehshin Allahyari will be partiipating in Currents festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico:

El Umbral by David Stout and Cory Metcalf

David Stout and Cory Metcalf, iARTA research artists, present the world premiere of El Umbral, an interactive video installation at the CURRENTS International media arts festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The work pays homage to twentieth century surrealist painting in the form of an anti-monument to the deepening surveillance state.

The Beauty of All Things Falling by Jenny Vogel, xerox animation, 2011, 4:30 min.

A narrative of glitches and beautiful failures. This video explores the terrifying as well as the creative potential of error.

Over There Is Over Here by Morehshin Allahyari

Over There Is Over Here explores the dialectics of time, space, real and unreal to define and critique the position of those who have left Iran in the last 4-5 years in relation to current political prisoners in Iran. The project uses 3D animation and data glitch as a way to illustrate presence-less presence and to show the passage and collapse of the time. In my recent trip to Iran, I found a picture of political prisoners, which is at least 100 years old. Looking at the prisoners chained to each other, I saw a tragic relationship between the past and the present of Iran; a shared pain from the same soul, generation after generation. In my animation, the concept of time is used as a non-linear and collapsed concept in which the past and present have come together in order to create an "unreal" reality. The animation starts with the images of the previous political prisoner but call the names of those prisoners who are currently in solitary prison in Iran. They also happen to be in Azadi square (azadi meaning freedom), where in the green movement protests in 2009 so many people were killed by the government. Through a self-reflexive narrator, Over There Is Over Here alternates between the literary definition of a third person narrator to my actual, physical "third person" role outside Iran as narrator of the story. The narrator explores my relationship with imprisoned friends and classmates. In this relationship, I am the outsider who will always fail to understand the reality of a prisoner's life. The more I live outside Iran, the more I will forget details of the "reality" of life inside Iran. For these reasons, the animation is a deliberate mix of real and unreal, fake and genuine.