About

This website chronicles the activities and progress of the Art and Science Immersive Media class in the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.  The first class was offered during the spring 2013 semester. On this blog you will find the course syllabus, resources, journal entries by students, staff and faculty, and images and videos of our creative process.

The students in this course explore topics of scientific inquiry and produce a live event to be presented in an immersive full dome video projection environment at the Hayden Planetarium at the Museum of Science in Boston. The design of the live event emerges from the artistic exploration of science topics. Students have the choice to focus their activities around several different facets of the live event (sound, light, movement, public relations, conceptual development, project management). The class shares readings, discussions and examples of the interrelationships of art and science as well as immersive media.

The SP13 students organized around three research topics and the final product is a collaboration between these 3 groups.

• Perception Group
• Creative Process Group
• The Unexplored Brain Group

Please watch our final Fulldome video from the spring 2013 semester on the FullDome Database >> Sentient.

“I was completely blown away by the quality of the entire show! I am so impressed and amazed that your students created such a great piece in such a short amount of time. Thank you again for allowing me to screen this show here in our dome!”   Ben Gondrez, Digital Dome Specialist, Fort Collins Museum of Discovery

Sentient has been screened in the following venues:

• Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF).  Melbourne Planetarium, Museum Victoria
• Fort Collins Museum of Discovery, Fort Collins, Colorado
• Science Center & Arvin Gottlieb Planetarium, Kansas City, Montana

Sentient by Studio for Interrelated Media @ MassArt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License

 

MassArt Faculty SP13:

• Nita Sturiale, Professor and Chair, Studio for Interrelated Media >> www.nitasturiale.com
• Lina Maria Giraldo, Planetarium Event Project Manager >> www.linamariagiraldo.com
• Eric Freeman, Studio Manager, Studio for Interrelated Media
• Karina Tovar, Course Teaching Assistant and Graduate Student Studio for Interrelated Media

 Museum of Science Charles Hayden Planetarium Staff:

• David Rabkin, Farinon Director for Current Science and Technology
• Dani LeBlanc, Producer
• Jason Fletcher, Science Visualizer
• R. Berred Ouellette, Sound Engineer
• Darryl Davis, System and Technical Coordinator

 

History

MassArt has a long history teaching the interconnections between Art and Science. Faculty Emeriti Harris Barron, John Holland, Donald Burgy and Lowry Burgess have been teaching on this topic in the Studio for Interrelated Media (SIM) at MassArt since the early 1970’s. For over 20 years, John Holland and Donald Burgy co-taught “Nature, Science and Art” – one the school’s most popular courses.  Both professors have retired from MassArt but have since made the curriculum for this course available on John Holland’s website   http://naturescienceart.org. Art and Science Immersive Media is inspired by Nature Science and Art and will use many of the readings from John’s site.

 
Background Image Credit: Artist’s Concept/NASA/ESA/STScI