Interactive Arts & Technology Lab

One of the primary goals of the i @ lab is to create performance and gallery environments to incorporate the defining qualities of broadband systems including Internet2. We examine the essential and unique aspects of networks through artistic experiment and performance in the context of point-to-point and multi-point communications.

Current uses for Internet2 range from teleconferencing and remote file sharing for large databases to tele-controlled devices for robotics applications. Recent Internet2 initiatives have begun focusing on innovative approaches to content delivery. This "content-based traffic" includes advanced object forms, such as video, audio, and multimedia streams.

The i @ lab integrates these technologies by sharing expertise in video and interactive multimedia, music and image visualization systems. The lab seeks collaborations to develop new methods of human/machine interfacing that combine visual and aural - sound and voice activated systems bridging physical places with the practical and symbolic aspects of cyberspace.

Projects

The research includes a series of lectures, video conferences, as well as conceptual projects and technical broadband tests. Latency, echo and compression artifacts in various scenarios are tested to design video and audio processes and content. The World-Nets, world-networking initiatives focus on global online projects intentionally seeking diverse cultural and geographical locations by partnering with distant sites in the US, Australia, Asia and Europe. In order to move beyond the graphical user interface (GUI), the i @ lab researches new methods of human/machine interfacing that combine the visual and aural - sound and voice activated systems - within physical and virtual spaces.

With the rapid and fluid migration of culture across tribal boundaries, political states, and continents, the construction and reconstruction of an individual and a group identity bound by a particular place and time may be eroding. Understanding the respective roles played by the complex mixture of technological variables demands new theoretical schemata. No unified theory yet accounts for all of the variables. More appropriate models rest on multiple layers with each emblematic of one part of the equation. Historical and critical explorations range from memory theaters and the panopticon - to cyber surveillance and the creation of new virtual communities.