A range of installations and exhibitions, as well as a cyber fashion show and screenings of student animations and music, will mark tonight’s Digital Music and Arts Exposition.
A collaboration between the Digital Arts, Leadership and Innovation lab as well as the music, computer science and theater departments, DMAX will bring together and showcase different mediums of digital art.
“There are just going to be all these opportunities for people to play with and explore digital arts and digital music,” said DALI executive director Lorie Loeb, who helped organize the 2012 and 2013 Digital Arts Expositions.
Though in previous years these expositions and the New Music Festival have been separate events, Loeb said this year, the two will be combined.
“There are a lot of things that are happening all across campus where students are working on things at the intersection of art and technology, and it just seems that it is important to showcase that,” Loeb said.
DMAX will showcase the “cool and creative interplay” between computer science and engineering technology and the artistic and visual arts, said associate dean for the sciences and computer science professor David Kotz.
Event coordinator Hannah Williams ’14 noted the event’s scope and variety. DMAX is an exhibition of collaborative works from undergraduates, graduate students and some professors.
“It’s a really cool sampling of student work from undergraduates and graduates, and there are some faculty collaborations as well,” Williams said. “I think having that art and music showcased to the school helps everybody realize what we are all capable of and gives a lot of people who didn’t know that the digital arts department is here, or that digital music is here, an insight into what fun things they can do.”
In previous years faculty members have run the event. This year, undergraduates and graduate students were responsible for organizing the exposition, Loeb said.
Coralie Phanord ’16, the event’s marketing and design student producer, said that DMAX allows students to present their work, exposing the campus as a whole to the College’s digital music program and student artwork.
“People can learn about the [digital arts] minor, and people get a chance to be creative, if their major isn’t, and so they step out of their comfort zone to try different things,” Phanord said.
The cyber fashion show will feature clothes that incorporate blinking lights and wearable technologies. “Amulet,” a bracelet that uses applications to monitor health, will be part of the show, as well as a 3-D printed dress and a motorcycle jacket that lights up and can function as a turn signal, Loeb said.
Williams said this year’s event has the most diverse array of media.
The concert will include various musical pieces by students and graduate students in the digital music program. Carlos Dominguez, digital music graduate student and the concert and screening production manager for DMAX, said that the digital music graduate program tends to focus on experimental music.
DMAX will also feature an Oculus Rift virtual headset with a student-created 3-D walkthrough of the College, Loeb said.
The event serves to open up the digital arts community and incorporate various departments and students into one large showcase.
“You get a bunch of people contributing to it who come from different backgrounds, whether it be computer science or more composition people or electronic musicians or visual artists,” Dominguez said.
The interactive applications, installations and exhibits, along with a reception, will begin at 6:30 p.m. at the Top of the Hop and the Hop Garage. The digital fashion show will take place at 7 p.m. at the Top of the Hop, and the digital animation screening and digital musics concert will take place at 8 p.m. in Spaulding Auditorium.
Beginning tomorrow, the Hop will host a series of fabrication lab workshops that will culminate in a 24 hour Make-a-thon and Hack-a-thon.
