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Computing and Creativity Cultural CollaborationThis goal of the Cultural Informatics project involves facilitating collaboration within the arts and between the arts and sciences to result in interdisciplinary innovation in the arts and sciences leveraged by advanced technologies. This will be accomplished by harnessing collaboration tools and methods being developed and used by NCSA and University of Illinois scientists, as well as through new areas of research and new infrastructure that will be driven and developed specifically for the arts. In order to meet the challenges of collaboration, the arts need a significantly greater investment in tools for collaborative creation, design, and production. We will adopt, adapt, and develop new tools in several ways. Each collaboration project has a set of requirements that often lead to research in basic principals of design, interface design, and collaboratory challenges. Specifications for each new project will be identified that will engender potential research among computer scientists and artists. ICI will expand upon existing NCSA tools and infrastructure when possible. Artists and scientists will work together to solve existing problems that face the arts and sciences. The results will be freely shared, published, and will provide new ways of creating art forms. We anticipate new tools for "pre-visualizing," designing, sharing, annotating, and staging installations, performances, and artworks. To facilitate distance collaboration, we will develop an ArtsGrid collaboratory. The ArtsGrid will provide the underlying facility for a distributed collaborative environment for University of Illinois faculty and visiting artists on campus or elsewhere. Part of the infrastructure for the ArtsGrid will be a suite of extensible tools for sharing aural, visual, and kinetic experiences over networks. Creating this ArtsGrid will require us to leverage NCSA's high-bandwidth networks and cyberenvironments. We will collaborate with the Krannert Art Museum's CANVAS (Collaborative Advanced Navigation Virtual Art Studio). The CANVAS brings together writers, humanities researchers, musicians, and visual artists to create spatial hypertext/intermedia projects that range from spatial/kinetic poetry, virtual stages for performance, and tele-presence works with other institutions. The CANVAS will also provide a venue for exhibitions, performances, and demonstrations. Technology developed for scientific collaboration has the potential to be used in cultural collaboration as well. The capabilities being developed in NCSA's Cyberenvironments and Technologies (CET) Directorate may be particularly amenable to this since they have been designed from the start to be agnostic as to the types of artifacts being shared and the disciplinary vocabulary used. This project will be able to deploy the latest capabilities developed in CET. As CET researchers explore new features—such as support for social tagging of artifacts, automated format translation, and provenance capture—participants in the Cultural Informatics project will be able to explore the potential of the new capabilities and provide feedback on design issues as well as best-practices that could be adopted in scientific research as well. Two projects, TEEVE and mWorlds, will be developed to create new collaboration tools for the arts. These will be combined with existing NCSA technologies such as Virtual Director and will use software elements from CET. TEEVE will develop low-cost teleimmersive capabilities that will leverage advanced networking and video technologies to enable video-based collaborations by reconstructing the 3D environment. TEEVE and related projects have already been found useful in dance and music performance. Similarly, the mWorlds project will develop highly flexible 3D environments for previsualizing, developing, and disseminating works. The mWorlds platform will provide 3D persistent synthetic world creation tools with multimodal input and output devices and will seek to address scalability issues to enable large-scale collaborations and even larger scale "performances" or "installations." As another example, one ongoing project, CO-ART, seeks to leverage creativity theory, combined with an understanding of principles of collaboration, to develop new interfaces, tools, and systems that enable and encourage communities of creative practice to assist each other or work collectively together to enhance artistic outcomes. These tools would be particularly beneficial during the early phases of projects, when artists are first grappling with trying to understand and conceptualize their vision. CO-ART will also develop interactive histories to allow artists to better reflect on their own work processes and allow community-based reflection of art practice. One of the first outcomes we expect is a virtual Digital Artists Colony, supported by technology from the ArtsGrid, TEEVE, and mWorlds. In this Digital Artists Colony, academic scholars and artists will gain initial exposure to new technologies and their potential for cultural impact, will collaboratively develop those ideas with IACAT faculty and staff, and will eventually disseminate all or some of those ideas in public presentations. This will be coupled for maximum effect with a new visiting artist line funded jointly by IACAT, Krannert Center for Performing Arts, and Krannert Art Museum. Visiting artists will use the ArtsGrid for collaboration before, during, and after their residency to maximize our contact and the sharing, development, dissemination, and documentation of ideas. The general outcome of the virtual Digital Artists Colony will be to produce innovative, leading-edge artworks that will be recognized worldwide. |