High Performance Computing in the Arts (HiPArt)

The Scientific Computing and Visualization group will be participating in Boston Cyberarts Festival 2009 with a virtual environment, Unnatural Disasters, and with the panel discussion, Navigating Cyberworlds: Creative Practice in Virtual Reality.

Unnatural Disasters

Unnatural Disasters explores the themes of financial meltdown, interspecies conflict, cultural disaster and planetary exhaustion. It is a new work by Boston University College of Fine Arts students. It will be shown on Boston University's Deep Vision Display Wall, a 15'x8', high-resolution, 12-tile, rear-projected, passive stereoscopic display system with 8-way directional sound. Visitors will wear 3D glasses and navigate with a game controller.

Saturday, April 25 2-4
Monday, April 27 5-7
Wednesday, April 29 4-6
Saturday, May 2 2-4
Wednesday, May 6 4-6
Saturday, May 9 2-4

Office of Information Technology
Computer Graphics Lab
111 Cummington Street, Room 203
Boston, MA 02215
phone 617.353.7800

Free, wheelchair accessible

Navigating Cyberworlds: Creative Practice in Virtual Reality

Monday, April 27 7-9

Photonics Center
8 Saint Marys, Room 206
Boston, MA 02215

Free, wheelchair accessible

SCV and HiPArt

The Scientific Computing and Visualization group has been collaborating with artists for over 25 years. Approximately eleven years ago, we received funding through the National Computational Science Alliance with which we could form the High Performance Computing in the Arts (HiPArt) project and design and build some infrastructure (a.k.a. DAFFIE) for supporting the creation of distributed virtual environments. Since then we have collaborated with a variety of artists primarily creating immersive virtual environments using SCV's DAFFIE for the Display Wall and previously the ImmersaDesk. Extensions of these environments have included hooking up several distributed nodes with DAFFIE (ArtWorld, 1998), integrating physical kinetic sculptures to interact with the virtual environment (Spirited Ruins, 1999), and interacting from the Access Grid by drawing or navigating in the virtual environment (Tracer, 2001; Soft, Fluffy, and Virtual, 2001). We have shown HiPArt works at venues across the country as well as overseas.

Of note: the first two art installations on the Access Grid were during the Boston Cyberarts Festival in April 2001; Tracer by Deborah and Richard Cornell and Soft, Fluffy, and Virtual by Cindy Ludlam.

HiPArt is an outreach program coordinated by the Scientific Computing and Visualization group at Boston University fostering a collaboration between software developers and artists and making high performance computing, networking, and graphics resources available to the art community. HiPArt is supported by the Scientific Computing and Visualization Group within the Office of Information Technology at Boston University.