On April 20, 2011, the UT Dallas Conference center filled with students and community members eager to see what our fellow Art & Technology (ATEC) and EMAC students have been cooking up.

The front of the Center was lined with computers featuring interactive, ready-to-play games created in ATEC’s Game Lab (led by Dr. Monica Evans) – and they only killed the power twice! ATEC started off the show with reels featuring some of the best student projects coming out of the ATEC program; they showed off everything from 2D animation to 3D shorts and advanced 3D modeling, texturing, lighting and rigging.

Neil Garcia; photo by Dean Terry

EMAC took the second half of the show with projects from 10 different EMAC students. Neil Garcia (pictured above) showed a short class project video about life – and FUN – in Oak Lawn and shared a little about the challenges of finding the right interview dynamic. Meagan Dahl showed her poetic, short film about living a life you don’t love, then Samuel Lo showed his short piece featuring WFAA’s Jason Whitely on the integration of social media into traditional broadcast media models.

EMAC undergrad Keith Demele (pictured below) presented a short video piece about motocross in Texas. Undergrad Meagan Buchanan‘s fabulous stop-motion cupcake-baking film was shown, and EMAC grad student Lacy Mahone (also pictured below) showed a film documenting a bicycle trip from Dallas to Austin (available online).

Keith Demele; photo by Dean Terry

Tommy Truong presented on the Cameras Everywhere project, which investigated the location and status of every camera on campus, and graduate student Ben Redfield introduced the audience to a concept that connects skillful ATEC and EMAC students with people who need those skills. EMAC grad students Alex Hays and Bradley Griffith rounded out the night presenting on a twitter bot that accepted anonymous tweets to build an identity (or destroy the notion of identity completely) and a fake twitter account that manipulated the source code of tweets so they appeared to be coming from all over the world.

Lacy Mahone; photo by Dean Terry

See you all at next year’s showcase!

On April 15, 2011, French new media philosopher Bernard Stiegler stepped into the ATEC building to a room jam-packed with professionals, educators and students awaiting his arrival. Thanks to Stiegler’s long time friendship with sound design pro Professor Frank Dufour, he happened to be passing through Dallas and agreed to give a talk entitled “Forming and Deforming Attention”. The talk centered on the discussion of the importance of education in early development of attentional forms.

Dr. Stiegler is currently the Director of the Georges Pompidou Institute of Research and Innovation in Paris, which aims to anticipate changes in human behavior brought about by the evolution of technology. He also holds an assistant professorship at the Goldsmith College in London and at the University of Compiegne.

Last week, Girl Scout troop #2599 paid a visit to EMAC’s Kim Knight to learn about the EMAC program.

Kim explained what EMAC is, at least right now, to the troop. They discussed everything from the workings and requirements of the EMAC program to what you can do out in the real world with an EMAC degree. The girls seemed to clearly understand that technology is more than something you use on the side – it’s an integral part of everything and everyone.

They even had some great (and quite advanced) questions at the end for Kim, including “Do you think Facebook is safe?” At the age of roughly 12, these girls know how social media works (though only one has her own Facebook account), and they already have a sizable concern about their privacy online. These girls offer us a view into the future of the “emerging media” landscape – what is still “new media” to some is fast becoming “old media”.