The 2018 North Texas Digital Fabrication Symposium was hosted at Texas Woman’s University April 20–21, 2018. Artists, researchers, makers and students came together at TWU to discuss digital fabrication, its practice, pedagogy and curation. The theme Humanizing the Digital inspired fascinating proposals from artists and researchers working with digital fabrication in a variety of applications.

The symposium events were organized around three sub-themes: Embodiment & Technology, Adaptation & Play, and Process & Practice. This two-day symposium brought together an exciting group of artists and researchers to share their work through moderated panel presentations, workshops, roundtable discussions and a corresponding group exhibition.

iARTA Participant Marco Boungiorno Nardelli's MaterialsSoundMusic project creates data-driven music through an algorithm that maps a material’s energy bands onto the 88 keys of a piano. Buongiorno Nardelli, who is now a professor of physics at the University of North Texas (UNT), conceived his project at the time of the Materials Genome Initiative, which the White House launched in 2011 to accelerate the discovery of new materials. As part of this initiative, he participated in the development of AFLOWLIB—an online database cataloging the properties of millions of existing or theorized materials. Researchers around the globe can freely access the database to fish for a superconductor, metal, or ceramic that best suits their application.

In developing this database, Buongiorno Nardelli pondered two questions. The first had to do with sifting through AFLOWLIB’s massive amounts of data. How could the properties of a material be represented so that researchers can quickly perceive and evaluate them? The second was an outreach challenge. Materials aren’t as sexy as black hole mergers or the “God particle.” How could electronic properties or crystal lattices be made more appealing to the public’s imagination? For Buongiorno Nardelli, who’d been playing and composing music since the age of six, the obvious answer to both questions was to use sound...

Faculty composer Joseph Klein will present an academic paper titled "Practical Applications of D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form on Musical Materials and Structures" at the On Growth and Form Centenary Conference, 13-15 October 2017 at the University of St. Andrews (Scotland).  The paper includes an analysis of three original compositions that are related to Thompson's research: the road in its unfoldings, Occam's Razor, and Interstices.  

Marco Buongiorno Nardelli has started the miniature opera project from the idea of making space become an interactive score and of allowing the audience to create unique musical sequences by acting directly on a physical art piece. These installations are designed as a large interactive electronic “game boards” made of numerous “electronic tiles” that can be connected to each other in a completely reconfigurable way. Each tile contains a light sensor that triggers a unique sound event when covered. Among the electronic tiles, we place “word (or guide) tiles”, typically marked with specific words or characters’ names, to provide the participants with a stage for an operatic libretto. The audience is then invited to create connections between guide tiles by placing bean bags on the tiles of their choice, thus activating the light sensor circuit and starting the associated musical gesture. The miniature opera project installations are first and foremost “games” for the audience, whose reward is the creation of a unique piece of music that they will be able to bring home on their own portable device.