Charles Csuri showcases work at Gigaconference II
Some of the newest high-definition artwork by Charles Csuri, professor emeritus (ACCAD) -- such as Masks -- will be showcased at Gigaconference II, a Chicago-based high-definition videoconferencing event on Tuesday, Dec 5, 5-7 pm. The Ohio Supercomputer Center will provide the technical expertise, equipment and networking to send Csuri's presentation to the conference, and also will be a remote participant. Csuri will be on hand at the Supercomputer Center (BALE Conference Room, 1224 Kinnear Rd) to provide a short discussion about the development of his computer artwork. Other participating institutions include the Chinese Academy of Science, Indiana University, MIT, National Institutes of Health, Texas A & M, University of Helsinki, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and more. For more information, contact Dan Downing at 688-3949. ACCAD Artist in Residence Charles Csuri will be presenting his current works at Gigaconference II, the large-scale demonstration of high-definition videoconferencing technology and Internet2.
For more information about Charles Csuri and his recent works: http://www.csuri.com
For more information about Gigaconference II: http://commons.internet2.edu/gigaconference

Lane Kuhlman, a first-year graduate student from the Department of Design currently studying at the OSU Advanced Computing Center for the Arts & Design (ACCAD), is one of 10 female students from across the US to be named a Microsoft Research Female Academic All-Star. The scholarship will allow Lane to attend the Serious Games Summit in Washington DC in late October. Awarded to 10 female students, the funding allows them to attend the summit, meet with industry experts to discuss issues facing female game developers and learn about career opportunities.

The All-Stars will also attend more than 60 sessions, lectures and roundtable discussions, learn about key issues in the marketplace, get a sneak peek at upcoming serious games and enjoy networking opportunities. Her travel is supported by ACCAD, and the College of the Arts Diversity Fund.

MFA students Matthew Bain (Design), Jason Banks (Theater), and Matthew McCarren (Theater) have received an invitation to show their work at the Prague Quadrennial International Exhibition of Scenography and Theatre Architecture on June 14 - 27, 2007. The work, a performance and installation piece based on a haiku, was created as part of ACCAD and Theatre's Digital and Physical Lighting course. The installation involved a live performance by actor Anthony Trujillo, theater lighting, and projections. The environment is a circular shape used to emulate the shape of the moon, and it also refers to the "circle of life and death" that the haiku relates to. Faces were placed on the floor to illustrate the immense cross-section of society as a whole and remind the viewer that everyone dies or experiences death. Structural pieces were covered in camo netting and play sand lined the circle of faces to give the space an organic feel.

Csuri Exhibition Catalogue Available at the Wexner Center for the Arts, OSU
Charles A. Csuri: Beyond Boundaries, 1963 – present, an exhibition featuring the art of pioneering computer artist Charles A. Csuri, opened at the SIGGRAPH 2006 conference in Boston in late July. The Beyond Boundaries exhibition catalogue, which accompanies the exhibition, is now available for purchase at the Wexner Center for the Arts Bookstore.

The 176 page full-color catalogue historically contextualizes and critically examines Csuri's art from 1963 – present. The catalogue includes an introduction, scholarly essays, critical entries for select works of art, a biographical sketch, and a historical DVD with voiceover by the artist. The DVD includes early animations from the late 1960s, Real-time Art Objects, recent Generative Movement works from 2006, and more. Other features of the catalogue include Csuri's first plotter drawing, Dignified Lady (1964-65), previously unseen samples from the artists' sketchbook (1964-65), a recreation of the previously lost Random War (1967), and other award winning works, such as Sine Curve Man (1967), Mask of Fear (1989), and Gossip (1991). Janice M. Glowski, Ph.D., ed. Cost: $39.95.

ACCAD Animation Airs on Science Channel
ACCAD's animation for "Jane: Mystery Dinosaur" premiered on the Science Channel July 24th. The 1 hour show featured short story segments that included 10 minutes of animation designed by ACCAD and CCAD students. ACCAD students modeled, textured, rigged, animated, lit, rendered and composited segments that brought Jane to life. "Jane: Mystery Dinosaur" is based on a 66 million year old skeleton discovered by The Burpee Museum of Natural History in Rockford, Illinois. ACCAD worked on this project with producer Dave Monk from Brave New Pictures (Chicago).

ACCAD's Work with the Burpee Museum of Natural History Wins AAM Award
American Association of Museums honored the Burpee Museum with the 2006 Excellence in Exhibition Award for "Jane: Diary of a Dinosaur". This competition recognizes outstanding achievement in exhibits from museums, zoos, aquariums, and botanical gardens across the country. ACCAD students and staff created interactive exhibits, graphics and animation that are a part of this exhibit. Additionally Burpee received Honorable Mention in the AAM MUSE Science catagory for the interactive exhibit "Meet the Researcher: Dr. Greg Erickson" that ACCAD produced through this collaboration. The MUSE awards competition recognizes outstanding achievement in museum media.

SIGGRAPH 2006 to present Charles Csuri Retrospective
ACM SIGGRAPH announces that SIGGRAPH 2006, the 33rd International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques, 30 July - 3 August at the Boston Convention & Exposition Center in Boston, Massachusetts, will present a retrospective of the Charles Csuri's pioneering work in computer art. This will be the first time that Professor Csuri's work, from the first plotter drawing to his most current animations, will be displayed in one venue. Bonnie Mitchell, SIGGRAPH Art Chair will be organizing this show with Dr. Janice Glowski will be curating the works of Professor Csuri. OSU is planning an alumni reception during the conference in celebration of Professor Csuri's accomplishments. For more information email accad@accad.osu.edu.

Fifth-Third Bank Supports Digital Animation Summer Program
Fifth-Third Bank, Columbus, OH has generously committed $7,000 of grant support to the 2006 Digital Animation: A Technology Mentoring Program for Young Women. Digital Animation is a free summer program for 8th and 9th grade girls. Each year the program selects fifteen young women with exhibited artistic potential to work with mentors from arts and technology fields at The Ohio State University. For two weeks, the select group of young women works with women mentors using problem-solving skills and collaborative learning to create digital animation projects.

New Video Game Production Course offered in Spring.
This spring ACCAD will be offering a unique video game production class. Over the course of the quarter, a small group of students will work in teams composed of artists, programmers, and sound engineers to create a video game. They'll be implementing the game on a real arcade cabinet built by instructor, Peter Gerstmann. "I've built an arcade cabinet to showcase the students' work" says Peter. "It's very similar to the old arcade machines of the 80's, except it houses a modern computer inside, and runs our games. the arcade machine is full-size (about six feet tall) with a 27" monitor, and can support up to four simultaneous players, each with a joystick and four buttons." This course is offered as Arts Col 753 (02370-2) for Spring quarter.

Alan Price Presents Sun Dagger Project
Professor Alan Price will be presenting a co-authored paper with researcher Dr. Anna Sofaer (Solstice Project) on "The Sun Dagger Interactive Project" at The 10th Biennal Southwest Symposium on Ritual, Landscape, and Historical Archeology, in Los Cruces New Mexico this month. Alan will also be presenting another co-authored paper with Dr. Sofaer on the same project at the Society for American Archeology, San Juan, Puerto Rico in April.

Landing/Place featured in University's Annual Research Report
Prof. Bebe Miller and ACCAD have been recognized for their work on Landing/Place in OSU's Office of Research annual report. Click on Annual Report and scroll to page 8.

This report recognizes the research, scholarly work, and creative work of faculty on our campus. "Ohio State dance professor Bebe Miller's rich sensuous choreography is combined with layers of projected imagery derived from motion-capture technology and computer animation-using the resources of the university's Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD). The spoken word and live music are also part of the presentation that opened on campus in September. The collaborative dance/animation performance will travel to Cleveland, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco. A portion of the funding for this project came from the Office of Research and Colleges of the Arts and Sciences Multidisciplinary Grant Program."

ACCAD Presents At MegaConference VII
ACCAD and the Burpee Museum of Natural History will present their collaborative project Jane: Diary of a Dinosaur to a worldwide audience at MegaConference VII on December 12th. Like any professional conference, presenters and audience members will discuss current projects and developments. Unlike other conferences, hundreds of participants will gather simultaneously from all continents of the world using advanced networks, from universities, K-12 schools, and organizations. Presentations will discuss and demonstrate how groups use videoconferencing in real-world applications. ACCAD and the Burpee Museum used videoconferencing as the main source of communications in their 6-month project.

ACCAD and Dance offer New Ground for Winter 2006 This new interdisciplinary course is open to a small group of graduate students from art, dance, architecture, music, theater, design, computing, communications and other allied fields. Co-taught by Dr. Matthew Lewis and Prof. Norah Zuniga Shaw, this first Cycle of New Ground will focus on creative concepts in interactive performance.

ACCAD and CSE offer Procedural Animation for Winter 2006 Professors Rick Parent and Maria Palazzi will guide collaborative, multidisciplinary groups of students in creating computer animation using procedural methods for modeling, rendering and animating 3D computer generated objects, environments, and characters. The use of techniques such as particles, CSG, L-systems and behavioral interaction will be studied to create animations that emulate physical phenomena and properties.

Virtual Environments and Virtools this Winter 2006

Professor Alan Price will be teaching Building 3D Virtual Environments using Virtools, an intuitive software for developing work in the areas of VR, simulation, or gaming without the overhead of intensive programming and development. The course is an introduction to the creation and implications of single and multiple participant 3D virtual environments.

ACCAD welcomes new faculty member - Alan Price
ACCAD is pleased to announce that Alan Price will be joining ACCAD in the Fall 2005. Prior to joining ACCAD and the Department of Design, Professor Price was an Associate Professor in the Visual Arts Department at UMBC. He teaches animation and directs research in the areas of visualization and immersive environment technologies. His work appears on national PBS documentaries, children's educational programming, The Baltimore Museum of Art and numerous international film festivals.

Bebe Miller Company presents Landing/Place
Columbus-based choreographer Bebe Miller and her dancers present one of their most ambitious projects and the first since the 2001 Bessie Award–winning Verge. Landing/Place employs digital motion capture imagery, computer animation, live music, video projection, and exquisite dancing to explore themes of sensory, spatial and cultural dislocation. Miller, a professor in Ohio State's top-rated Department of Dance, collaborated with ACCAD staff Animation Specialist Vita Berezina-Blackburn to develop the piece's digital imagery which is derived from motion captured data. Miller utilized the resources of the Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) motion capture lab and the expertise of ACCAD staff member Brian Windsor to capture the company's movements. Developed with support from the creative residency program of the Wexner Center for the Arts, as well as from the Advanced Computing Center for Art and Design (ACCAD) and the College of the Arts at The Ohio State University, Landing/Place opens September 30th at the Wexner Center and is touring nationally.

The Builder's Association Presents SUPER VISION
The Builders Association is a New York-based performance and media company that exploits the richness of contemporary technologies to extend the boundaries of theater. Their newest project, SUPER VISION, will explore the ambiguous and changing nature of our relationship to living in a post-private society, where personal electronic information is constantly collected and distributed. ACCAD and The Wexner Center for the Arts were Lead Co-producers on this project. SUPER VISION opens at the Wexner November 2-6, 2005.

Jane the dinosaur may have lived 66 million years ago . . . but a group of students from The Ohio State University’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) have helped bring the young Tyrannosaurus rex to “life.”

The students, led by ACCAD Director Maria Palazzi and Graphics Research Specialist Matthew Lewis, were engaged by a small museum in Rockford, IL, to help create a technological-savvy, interactive exhibit spotlighting the museum’s remarkable new inhabitant. Jane – an incredibly well-preserved skeleton of a juvenile T. rex – was discovered in 2001 in Hell Creek, Montana, by staff members and volunteers from Burpee Museum of Natural History. The group returned a year later and began painstakingly excavating the dinosaur bones to take them back to Rockford. Over the next two years, they spent more than 10,000 hours gingerly picking Jane’s bones out of rock, and planning a new, permanent exhibit that would tell Jane’s story and feature her fully restored skeleton.

That exhibit – “Jane: Diary of a Dinosaur” -- opened June 29 at Burpee Museum in Rockford, about 60 miles west of Chicago. The 2,000-square-foot exhibit tells visitors Jane’s tale, and features hands-on interactive stations, computer-generated animation, colorful graphics and, as its centerpiece, Jane’s fully restored skeleton, which is the most complete juvenile T. rex on display anywhere in the world.

press release (pdf)

Çudamani

Jeffrey Katzenberg visits ACCAD

Guest Speaker Lecture by Steve Anderson

Guest Speaker Lecture by Dr. Ben Shneiderman

Dr. Hanspeter Pfister, MERL Research Lab

Dr Lizbeth Goodman, SMARTlab

The Builders Association and dbox in residence

Performance by Chara Huckins and Andy Noble

Vanitha Rangaraju of PDI/DreamWorks Visits ACCAD

Capturing Muybridge, Kangaroos, and Cartoons by CHRIS BREGLER

Dancing for the Digital Age: Merce Cunningham and Computer Technology
by ROGER COPELAND- adapted from his new book, "Merce Cunningham: The Modernizing of Modern Dance"

Collaborating Across Disciplines to Merge Live Motion Capture and Video with Theatrical Dance by Scott Meador

Acting Coach ED Hooks Gives 2-Day Workshop for Animators

ACCAD Offers Student Workshops

Jude Adamson from Rhythm & Hues Visits ACCAD

ACCAD Alumni Presentations

The Human Figure Motion Synthesis, Analysis, and Animation Symposium

The Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) Annual Spring Open House

Fellowship Presentations

MoCap Lab featured in OSU Alumni Magazine

John Donkin from Blue Skys Studios Visiting ACCAD

Bebe Miller Company performs in Motion Capture Lab

Dan Lu's images shown in Siggraph's Art Gallery

Ian Butterfield, Todd Fechter and Scott Swearingen's animation, "Gladden" receives accolades from Kodak's Campus Beat!