Re-habituation

Their work lives between the virtual and the actual, the real and the possible. And it will be on display in “Re-habituation,” the year-end show presented by the Media Arts and Technology (MAT) Program at UC Santa Barbara.

Set for Friday and Saturday, May 19 and 20, the show encompasses the work of more than 50 artists and researchers from the MAT program, the AlloSphere Research Facility, the Experimental Visualization Lab, Four Eyes Lab, MIRAGE Lab, Re Touch Lab, Systemics Lab and transLab.

It will take place at two locations, the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCSB and the Santa Barbara Center for Art, Science and Technology (SBCAST, and is free and open to the public.

“The Media Arts and Technology Program is very much excited by the selection of projects to be featured in this year’s End-Of-Year Show,” said George Legrady, program chair. “We have a broad range of projects that explore the intersections of computation, research, prototyping and aesthetics. It is a unique output as most academic programs tend to emphasize one approach over another due to the challenges of engaging with both arts and engineering in a non-trivial way. Our aim is to merge these different worlds together and to hybridize. This approach trains our students to be leaders and the inventors of tomorrow.” 

The event kicks off at 2 p.m. May 19, with opening remarks by Legrady. A panel discussion will follow, and the exhibition — the “main event” — will begin at 5 p.m. All will take place at the CNSI, located on the first floor of Elings Hall.

The panel participants include Peter Edwards, an American artist, teacher and inventor working in the field of creative electronics; Ben Hooker, a designer and artist involved with interactive media in and about urban contexts; Kasper Kovitz, an Austrian artist whose work uses the visceral aspects of non-traditional materials to look at iconic imagery; and Laila Shereen Sakr, an assistant professor of film and media studies and a faculty affiliate in feminist studies and Middle East studies at UCSB, and co-founder of Wireframe, a new digital media studio.

Visitors to the exhibition also will have an opportunity to take a guided tour of the AlloSphere, the only immersive research instrument/lab of its kind in the world.

The End-of-Year Show will continue May 20 at the CNSI with critique sessions from 9 a.m. to noon and 1 to 4 p.m.

At 6 p.m., Curtis Roads, a professor of media arts and technology at UCSB and associate director of the campus’s Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology, will give a live performance joined by current MAT students. The concert will be held at SBCAST, 513 Garden St.

According to the organizers, “Re-habituation” is aimed at confronting the challenge of refocusing critical attention on significant signals in an environment of increasing noise. It recovers lost habits of attention and discernment, and proposes new forms of artistic expression and creative engagement.

The exhibition centers on the critical and creative minds of the participating artists and inventors and their abilities to reconfigure themselves in response to the shifting territories of art, technology and humanity. This diverse group — composed of artists, engineers, musicians, architects and computer scientists — seeks to depart from the existing frameworks of theories and ideologies.

More information about the year-end show can be found at http://show.mat.ucsb.edu. Questions can be directed to the Media Arts and Technology Program office at (805) 893-5244.