About the Exhibition

ACE 2010: Transmissions from Inside is a technology-mediated art exhibition featuring the artwork of the students in the Arts Computation Engineering (ACE) program at the University of California, Irvine (UCI).

Following the exhibition opening is the 2nd Annual Integrated Composition, Improvisation, and Technology (ICIT) Concert: An Evening of New Graduate Work. There will be a joint reception during the exhibition opening.

Dates, Location and Directions

Location: Beall Center for Art + Technology at the University of California, Irvine.

Directions: Directions to the Beall Center are available on the Beall website.

Exhibition Opens: Thursday, May 13, 2010 at 6:00pm - 8:00pm.
(ICIT concert immediately follows at 8:00pm in adjacent Winifred Smith Hall.)

Exhibition Closes: Thursday, May 20, 2010 at 8:00pm

About the Artwork

The Uncanny Dream Machine by Sean Voisen:
The Uncanny Dream Machine is an exploration in computer-generated dreamlike narrative. An artificial intelligence (AI) system conceived as a project of “expressive AI,” The Uncanny Dream Machine employs various databases and algorithms to “re-mix” a collection of its creator's own dream transcripts into novel dream narratives in real-time. Embodied as a 1940's-era wooden radio, viewers listen to the machine as it reads its dreams over the airwaves. Knobs on the radio allow viewers to “tune in” to streams of consciousness delineated by various emotions — fear, anger, curiosity, joy, anxiety, worry, etc. — provoking conversations about the nature of emotion and consciousness in an otherwise unemotional, unconscious, and disembodied machine.

CounterCiv by Johnson Yen:
CounterCiv is an interactive computer game designed to be a criticism of strategic computer simulations. The game is meant to be reminiscent of FreeCiv, an open source version of the popular commercial computer game Civilization, and so uses the graphics found from that game. This project is an attempt to examine in detail the way strategic computer simulations, otherwise known as “god games”, and specifically Civilization, represent the world that they simulate. These so-called god games play to the human psychological need to impose order on a chaotic world through the use of abstract simulations of the world. But the real problem with god games is the Western bias … (read more) … of the abstraction. The simulations employed by these simulation games utilize a Western perspective of the world. World systems is presented and interpreted in terms of Western understandings and notions. God games are essentially concerned with the exercise of power and due to the Western bias this exercise is portrayed through a Western understanding in the form of colonialism and imperialism. In other words, the abstracted, simulated world is interpreted in terms of colonial and imperialistic concepts and visions of the exercise of power. Therefore, control of the game world is exercised in terms of imperialistic notions such as conquest and exploitation. CounterCiv is meant to serve as a counter to this tendency and offers a way for the player to undo the damaging effects of rampant expansionism. In other words, CounterCiv takes FreeCiv and inverts the players’ relationship with the game transforming him from explorer and conqueror to an activist for change.

Undulating Flux by David Resnick:
What does it mean to feel music? Can feeling music facilitate a deeper experience for the listener and even be therapeutic? What are the potential applications of a feeling-enhancing system for the deaf and hard of hearing? Undulating Flux explores these questions by setting up a new type of music performance environment that sends music-synced motor vibrations into the audience’s bodies. A “vibrationist” acts as a realtime intermediary between the music and the audience, performing a custom-developed kinetic language to create the vibratory experience. The vibrationist’s aim is to connect her movements to the music and to the audience’s experience of vibrations in such a way as to envelop the audience in heightened layers of sensation.

Machine: Affecting Effect by Eric Mesple:
The ideas explored in Machine: Affecting Effect are the possibilities for interactivity between humans and electro-mechanical objects and how to engage people in play through kinetic sculpture. A magnetically-responsive material called ferrofluid is also explored in this piece. The ferrofluid lies in a reservoir at the base of a three-foot diameter stainless steel sphere mounted on a pedestal. When the viewer approaches the sculpture, it responds by swiveling the fluid toward the viewer, displaying liquid metal-like morphing geometric patterns according to the magnetic field. Affecting Effect was designed to surprise viewers with the object following them, make the viewer wonder how a fluid levitates around a sphere, and awe the viewer with the obscure properties of the ferrofluid.

Guitamaton by Ian Hattwick:
Guitamaton is a computer controlled musical instrument which explores the percussive and resonant qualities of the acoustic guitar. It melds the precision of microprocessor control with the unpredictability of vibrating metal and wood, and brings an added level of embodiment to computer based music by placing the sound creation process firmly in the physical world.

About ACE

Emerging technologies create contexts for new social and cultural practices. ACE set out to provide the best training for producers, practitioners theorists and managers of such new forms. Being new, it follows that no existing discipline has all the necessary tools. ACE seeks to provide the optimum education via a radically interdisciplinary combination of training in arts and cultural practice, rigorous technical training and rigorous historical and theoretical contextualisation, all combined in graduation by linked project and thesis.