IMMERSIVE ATOMS - 2018
EVENT OPERATIONS | EXPERIENCE DESIGN | BRANDING | SOCIAL MEDIA
TIMELINE: 9 MONTHS
I was brought onto Immersive Atoms, an art and tech based collective for their spring exhibition as a board member and contributing artist. This past summer I was promoted to Creative Director. I collaborated with the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center on an installation for their NextNOW Festival: a celebration of the future of music and arts.
Why does the intersection of art and tech matter?
Technology is at the forefront of all fields. Art is a means of visual communication that uses many mediums. Often times, especially in academic settings, artists and people in the technology field are presented as being at odds. Art is seen as unprofitable save for a select few by STEM majors while being in the field of STEM is seen as giving into corporate slavery by artists. What the original Immersive Atoms team saw was an opportunity to bring these two groups together. Artists wanted to learn to work with tech and techies wanted to learn how to create art using their skills.
How does NextNOW Fest help?
NextNOW is an Arts Festival at the University of Maryland College Park that is free and open to students, faculty, staff and our local community members. It is hosted in the Clarice Performing Arts Center and describes its purpose as:
“Co-curated with student groups and campus departments, NextNOW Fest creates an unexpected festival experience at the creative hub of the performing arts at the University of Maryland.”
NextNOW aligned with our mission in giving a unique arts experience by and for students. As we recruited new art hackers for our fall show, we kept these core values in mind.
Rebranding + Planning the Show
We took a look at what branding assets we had. We were lucky enough to have an incredible design team come up with the original logo.
The Spring 2018 show took a lot of inspiration from 1980s vapor waves, which I decided to incorporate into the Fall 2018 design. The Spring 2018 flyers were designed by the incredible Elise Nichols.
We then took a look at the NextNOW Festival’s branding and incorporated it into the final redesign for our event.
NextNOW Fest Logo and Promotion for the 2018 festival
Promotion for Immersive Atoms show with NextNow during the 2018 festival
Getting Proposals
After creating the promotional materials and posting around social media, we began reaching out to different student groups and individuals we thought might be interested. During this show, we got a lot of Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science major students to contribute. You can see the breakdown in the spreadsheet below with some of the proposal information. Names and personal information have been omitted.
We had a variety of project ideas including:
A TV projecting old VCR tapes through a pyramid prism
An LED cube programmed with changing animations
Blacklight paintings with a hidden message
An interactive data visualization of participants’ secrets
A music visualizer
Rotating painting panels
A 3D animation projected onto a bridge
Final Products
Below are some images of the final products that students made.
Below is a video of an LED strip that responds to the flow of water.
What did I learn?
Be flexible to change. The weekend of NextNOW fest was during a massive thunderstorm. The Immersive Atoms exhibit was originally outdoors but had to be quickly redistributed inside the performing arts center. And because of the use of technology, a few projects endured malfunctions or even broke. We had to be flexible and quick on our feet.
Managing people is difficult. My role was primarily to make sure that art hackers completed their projects in addition to coordinating with the marketing team of NextNOW Fest on where the Immersive Atoms experience would be located and how the layout would be presented. Coordinating with both sides was a challenge but I learned how to delegate my role by listening to both sides.
What is Immersive Atoms up to now?
The executive team recently did a workshop at Technica 2018 to teach young women in computer science how to hack art. We walked through what an art hack is, our process, and had the girls do an exercise to create an idea for their own art hack.
We are also in the process of regrouping for our next show!