Gray Literature

Publications

Research

machine listening

Director

Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded, and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology.

He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC, and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall 2013.

Roger Malina

February 2020, the University of Texas at Dallas&nbsp;ArtSciLab&nbsp;appoints Jacob Hunwick as Lab Ambassador for the duration of his study abroad program in Germany. He starts at Phillips University Marburg on February the 18th and finishes on June the 12th. In addition, lab director Roger Malina appoints Jacob as an intern representative for the Leonardo Journal in Europe.&nbsp;



Jacob will work to research, discover and document exemplars of art-science and well-being. Through his studies in ATEC at UT Dallas, Jacob has found a passion for technologies that prioritize the preservation and promotion of healthy habits and lifestyles.&nbsp;



Through his weekly blog posts, he will report on interviews, events, and interactions with new organizations and people related to technologies that prioritize human health.&nbsp;



The following is a summary of his research interests that he will pursue and write about in his weekly blog.



<h2>Research Goal for Lab Ambassador Position</h2>



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote is-style-default">Ideally, interaction designers want interfaces designed for everyday use to develop into healthy habits. Unfortunately, screen-based interfaces and modern city infrastructure trends promote sedentary habits.&nbsp;&nbsp;Infinitely scrolling pages and endless content tunnels enable users to over-dose on screen-time. Common use of screens for education, entertainment, and leisure time encourage people to abandon physical activity. And lastly, American city infrastructures discourage walking with a hyper focus on the automobile.&nbsp;Through my research, I seek interfaces with modern technology that improve human well-being. I seek infrastructure that empowers us to&nbsp;rely on our legs, not motors, to travel and navigate urban environments. I seek products that involve motion and break through the 2-dimensional touch screen barrier. I seek educational tools that encourage children to learn through active motion and participation rather than passive consumption.&nbsp;&nbsp;Trough the theories of embodied cognition, designers know that external objects can influence our cognitive processes. Now, the field of interaction design has realized the power that designed objects and experiences has over how we understand the world.&nbsp;While abroad, I will search for and document exemplars of health-conscious technologies that use the theories of embodied cognition to build healthy habits.&nbsp;To those interested in my research goal contact me via email at&nbsp;<a rel="noreferrer noopener" href="mailto:jmh170830@utdallas.edu" target="_blank">jmh170830@utdallas.edu</a>. I look forward to traveling all around Europe in pursuit of my mission.&nbsp;-Jacob Hunwick&nbsp;</blockquote>



ArtSci Abroad logo created by Jacob Hunwick.

UTD ARTSCILAB Lab Ambassador Appointed to enable ArtSci connections Abroad

roger-malina

The CDASH (Curriculum Development in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities) website was established in 2012 by Kathryn Evans and Roger Malina as both a resource for faculty who engaged in or were interested in engaging in art-science-humanities curriculum; and as a data collection point where these types of curriculum could be surveyed for innovation and sustainability. Our new site will include graduate, undergraduate, primary/secondary and informal curriculum.

Our new website allows you to easily enter your course and all the relevant details. Please log in or register before you submit your course. You may also access the other areas of the site. Those who submit syllabi will be admitted to the Cloud Curriculum, where you can download other syllabi and resources.

For more information, contact <a href="mailto:cdash@utdallas.edu">cdash@utdallas.edu</a>.

CDASH

Experimental Publishing and Curation

This Esport Cyberathlete Development project launched by the University of Texas at Dallas’ ArtSciLab aims to contribute to design one of the first new sports of the 21 st century.

Esport Cyberathlete Development

Art-Science

Experimental Publishing and Curation Assistant

Maisha is an Applied Cognition and Neuroscience graduate student at UT Dallas. She works in memory and aging research at the Lifespan Neuroscience and Cognition lab. She’s passionate about writing and talking about behavior, cognition, and tech. She hopes to use her background in research and her work at the ArtSciLab to help further science communication among diverse audiences.

Maisha Razzaque

by Maisha Razzaque



“Noom isn’t just your average dieting app. It’s
goal-oriented psychotherapy that helps you think critically about the food
you’re eating.” I heard this pitch a few weeks ago during a radio ad, and I
thought: wow, I like that way of looking at food tracking. I’d totally use
this app. 



Except I already have. 



Here is a comprehensive list of apps I have used, am using, or have downloaded with the idea of future usage in order to regulate and maybe even improve my productivity, diet, and overall physical and emotional health: Noom (food and exercise tracking), Clue (period and ovulation tracker), doc.ai (personalized health data), Calm (mood tracking), Sayana (mood tracking), 30 Day Fitness (exercise tracking), Lifesum (Macro Tracker), Flora (habit tracking), Reflectly (anxiety tracking), Focus Keeper (time management)— I’ll stop here. You get the point; there are a lot. 



Reading a book, going for a run, eating a meal, and
relaxing are all supposed to be pretty uncomplicated activities for most
people. Yet, I — and I suspect an alarming number of others — have
overcomplicated it to a point of chaos. The question remains: why did I
convince myself that I need a billion apps to regulate my life?



Six years of being in school has taught me to look
to the research. According to the Health and Wellness Foundation, 60 million
people in the United States are using some sort of mobile health app. And, as
studies indicate, a majority of those users are female millennials. The promise
of these apps basically can be boiled down to something called the Health
Belief Model. Developed in the
1950s, the Health Belief Model is a systemic method that identifies health
behavior; the main gist of it is that an individual’s intention to “engage in
health behavior” (positive or negative) is directly related to how vulnerable
to health threats they believe themselves to be. The user will act according to
his/her own perceived strengths and weaknesses. Health apps enable
self-monitoring which, in theory, should lead to some positive effects. Mobile health apps are
essentially a user-friendly tracking journal on your phone, and for the most
part you don’t have to analyze your own data because the app does it for you.
It can even be helpful to bring this sort of data to your healthcare provider
if you’re trying to manage a chronic condition (e.g. blood sugar, blood
pressure, heart rate, etc). 



When it’s put that way, it doesn’t sound so bad, so
what could go wrong? It turns out, a lot. 



What starts out as helpful information from well-intentioned apps can turn into data overload. As a result, this can exacerbate health anxiety — a phenomenon in which a person has an irrational preoccupation with possible health threats. For people with certain proclivities to obsess over calorie/exercise tracking, these apps can actually be enablers of unhealthy behaviors. There is also the question of validity. Many mobile health products are self-report models. What if you don’t know the exact calorie count in a home-made meal or the “intensity level” — something a version of MyFitnessPal has asked users to report — of your cardio exercise? Without valid data, the analysis provided by these apps is not useful to managing health at all!



Last of all, we have
to look at the money. 



In 2019, the mobile health app industry made $3
billion in sales. A lot of this money is coming from advertising, but what the
average user might not know about is the amount of personal data being
harvested and sold to third party companies. In 2018, several period app companies
including Glow and Flo got into hot water because they were
selling personal data about people’s menstrual cycles to companies that were,
in turn, using them to create targeted ads. Suddenly, aggressive online ads for
baby clothes and cribs would coincide with a missed period. But is hot water
the right way to describe the backlash? There were no legal consequences; In
fact, most of these apps have tiny, tiny print stating that you’re allowing
them to do whatever they want with your health data the moment you tap
“install.” 



But surely, you’re thinking, there are some legal
standards to protect people from this kind of predatory data mining. 



That’s just the thing. Mobile health apps have
taken the market by storm and seemingly transforming how people are looking at
health management overnight. The legislation has simply not had the time to
catch up. The sheer vastness of the mobile health market makes it hard for the
average user to judge quality. The FDA’s oversight of mobile health products
has been met with a lot of handwringing. Pushback from the industry has been
hanging on the argument that overregulation could hamper growth and innovation.
Nathan Cortez, a law professor at the Southern Methodist University, has suggested
broadening the FDA’s jurisdiction. In a 2014 article about FDA regulation of
mobile health apps, he argues that the existing legislation that limits the
FDA’s involvement is bad for doctors and dangerous for health app users. He
proposes that Congress should consider allowing a professional third-party to
evaluate the algorithm and quality safeguards outlined in an FDA regulatory
guides. Since then, a 2017 redraft of the FDA’s regulatory guidelines has
tightened regulations of diagnostic apps — ones that physicians use to aid with
making clinical diagnoses. The wheels of government regulation turn slowly —
so, so slowly — but surely.



What I’m piecing together from this crash course on mobile health products is that these too-good-to-be true apps might not work, may be using my personal data, and aren’t being closely regulated. But why did I convince myself I needed so many of them in the first place? The answer, as you may expect, isn’t quite so simple. It can be broken down into a few pieces. Maybe I may have not been the one doing the convincing. If everyone is touting the newest and best app that’s transforming their lives, it’s natural that I should want in. When my favorite disembodied nutrition podcast host voice tells me to take control of my life by downloading Noom, I just may do it. Perhaps, I — and the aforementioned millions of users — have fallen prey to the phenomenon of “too much data”; it’s very easy to rationalize that somehow having “more” apps is the same thing as having “better” apps. Then before you know it, you’ve used up all your phone storage on six different AI Mindfulness apps. Despite all this, I haven’t reached the conclusion that the apps are bad. After all, people just want to take an active role in their health. Understanding mobile health apps can help us critically think about which ones can better meet our needs and which ones are just unnecessary noise.







Sources:



<ul><li><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6090170/">https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6090170/</a></li><li><a href="https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMhle1403384">https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMhle1403384</a></li><li><a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/9fe47476-ad1f-414c-a925-cf078a2145a8">https://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/article/9fe47476-ad1f-414c-a925-cf078a2145a8</a></li><li><a href="https://time.com/5066561/health-data-tracking-obsession/">https://time.com/5066561/health-data-tracking-obsession/</a></li><li><a href="https://healthinformatics.uic.edu/blog/do-health-apps-work/">https://healthinformatics.uic.edu/blog/do-health-apps-work/</a></li></ul>

There Is An App For That!

Researcher

Frank Dufour

Dr. Frank Dufour will be pursuing research at the intersection of transdisciplinarity, learning, and emerging technologies through the ArtSciLab's existing projects, such as HERMES and Experimental Publishing.



Frank is a researcher and artist exploring in both scientific and artistic practices the poietic aspects of perception. In a recent publication, “Musical composition as a lived experience”, he proposes a description of the particular perception of time arising during the process of composing music. 



<a href="http://links-series.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/La-composition-musicale-comme-exp%C3%A9rience.pdf">http://links-series.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/La-composition-musicale-comme-exp%C3%A9rience.pdf</a>



Frank is currently developing a phenomenological method
to study the relationships and exchanges between Arts, Technology, and Sciences.
As part of this project, he is interested in imagining a radically new approach
to interdisciplinary education.



Frank is the co-founder with xtine burrough of the
Laboratory for Synthetic and Experimental poetry, LabSynthe.



Portfolio: <a href="http://agence5970.com/frank-dufour-portfolio">http://agence5970.com/frank-dufour-portfolio</a>

Frank Dufour joins the ArtSciLab as a Researcher

Frank-Headshot

Project HERMES looks at how researchers and expert practitioners work together in interdisciplinary (across institutional departments) and transdisciplinary (across stakeholder communities) contexts through the framework of Transdisciplinary Intelligence. The framework includes knowledge and aptitude metrics, good practices, and transdisciplinary training modules to improve collaboration among artists, designers, engineers, scientists, and other experts in order to boost innovation through tool sharing and idea exchange. Project HERMES is currently underway internally at the University of Texas at Dallas among its 100+ research groups and will expand to industry partners in 2020. 

HERMES

Managing Editor

Chaz is interested in alternative modes of scholarship and publishing. As a PhD student in the ArtSciLab, he is designing experiments that tease out new ways of knowledge production, curation and dissemination.

Chaz Lilly

chaz-lily-300x300

<h1 style="text-align: center">Arteca</h1>
ARTECA is a digital space that supports scholarly materials that explore the intersection of arts, humanities, science, and technology. The portal serves as a virtual art-science community resource and critical content provider for scholarly and experimental publications, including gray literature.

The project is a collaboration of The MIT Press, Leonardo/ISAST, and the ArtSciLab at UT Dallas.

ARTECA acts as a valuable hub for academic librarians and researchers, and aids in raising the art, humanities, science, and technology community’s visibility when other monodisciplines have already established such services.

ARTECA

Deputy Co-Director of Transdisciplinary Strategy & Innovation

Thanks to more than a decade of experience working in the realm of film entertainment (ranging from film festival management to independent film production) and in the entrepreneurial world (in the tech, non-profit, and media sectors), Garcia Topete's research and practice cover and converge in three main areas under the broader scopes of Art-Science and Experimental Publishing of the ArtSciLab: transdisciplinary intelligence, innovation and collaboration theory, filmmaking research, and public engagement design.

Alex Garcia Topete

Cyber security refers to
the body of technologies, processes, and practices designed to protect
networks, devices, programs, and data from attack, damage, or unauthorized
access. Cybersecurity may also be referred to as information technology
security. These cyberattacks are usually
aimed at accessing, changing, or destroying sensitive information; extorting
money from users; or interrupting normal business processes. 



As we continue in our Redesign phase, we have established
the idea of having a cybersecurity team. We have so much vulnerable files and
data which are prone to serious attack. I was informed about the recent attack
on Creative disturbance, where the hacker demanded bitcoin payment. If we had a
Cyber security plan, we would have had better methods of not only handling the
attack, but also preventing the lab from future attacks. 



Cybersecurity is typically divided into two parts. The software, and the human behavior. The latter is the more difficult part. This plan will not only touch on software, but also the human behavior, teaching lab members what to do in order to prevent attacks, and generally safe computer and internet practices.



<div class="wp-block-file"><a href="https://dev.atec.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2020/04/ASL-Cybersecurity-Plan-v1.pdf">ASL-Cybersecurity-Plan-v1</a><a href="https://dev.atec.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2020/04/ASL-Cybersecurity-Plan-v1.pdf" class="wp-block-file__button" download>Download</a></div>

Cybersecurity in the Times of Pandemic

alex-garcia-topete-1-450x450

A collection of multidisciplinary exemplars of science, engineering, art, design, and humanities.

The SEAD Exemplars exhibit will comprises a collection of exemplar works demonstrating effective intersections among the sciences and engineering with art, design, and the humanities. The works represent international diversity as well as diversity of practices and disciplines. The sections of the exhibit reflect the different purposes and impact of the exemplars:
<ul>
 	<li>Pioneering: Individuals and groups whose careers have transcended disciplines and paradigms.</li>
 	<li>Exploring: Projects that have pushed the boundaries of both arts and sciences.</li>
 	<li>Bridging: Projects that seamlessly connect and merge the arts and the sciences.</li>
 	<li>Engaging: Projects that seek to express and communicate to the public at large.</li>
 	<li>Questioning: Projects that ponder about the implications of arts and sciences themselves.</li>
 	<li>Educating: Projects meant to both teach and encourage learning.</li>
 	<li>Innovating: Projects that led to discoveries and inventions.</li>
</ul>

SEAD Exemplars

ArtSciLab Colleagues:



I would like to draw your attention to the Recent YASMIN WWWASP discussion (the Who, what where of our artscience community of practice)- Led by Guillermo Munoz with several colleagues across the world (see at end of this post). The YASMIN list is an international list of artscience professionals and amateurs and observers.



The discussion is now open to any colleague on the Tasmin list- we look forward to your thoughts: If you aren't on <a href="https://ntlab.gr/mailman/listinfo/yasmin_discussions_ntlab.gr">YASMIN</a>: 



I just posted this to YASMIN



"I would like to pick up on Salome Cuesta proposal for ‘micro-actions’ in our art-science communities of practice, and Diamond Berverly’s idea of a ‘continous conundrum (see below).



After 30 years as Executive Editor of Leonardo, for the first time I am now deeply engaged as a practitioner in art science collaborations. I like
 to joke that astrophysics was so easy ! We all agreed on the success 
criteria and used the same concepts, methods and terminology. Plus we 
were very well funded in comparison with artscience research.



 Thanks to Guillermo Munoz and colleagues at the University of Valencia I received a PhD in Art, so I am now an ArtScience ‘postdoc’ with a PhD in astrophysics and a PhD in art !



As James Leach pointed out in his Leonardo article <a href="https://cnrs.academia.edu/JamesLeach">(Extending Contexts, Making Possibilities: An Introduction to Evaluating the Projects - James Leach)</a> many many art science collaborations ‘fail’ in achieving their original objectives.



In our ArtSciLab we have been arguing that there is a very big step between inter/multi disciplinary collaborations and ‘trans’ disciplinary collaborations which bridge very very different disciplines with very very different personal and collective success criteria, and very very different often contradictory methods, concepts , terminologies-



These are in Diamond Berverly’s term ‘conundral;- see Merriam Webster



“The exact origin of conundrum isn’t known with certainty. What is known is that the word has been in use since the early 1600s, and that it had various spellings, such as conimbrum, quonundrum, conuncrum, and quadundrum, before the current spelling was finally established sometime in the mid-17th century. One theory of origin suggests that the word was coined as a parody of Latin by students at Oxford University, where it appears to have enjoyed particular popularity in its “word play” or “pun” sense. While the prevalent sense in this century is that of the seemingly unanswerable question or problem, frequently applied to heady dilemmas involving ethics, sociology, or economics, the word is sometimes so loosely applied to anything enigmatic as to be synonymous with puzzle or mystery.”



One of the strategies we have been 
trying is “micro-projects” in Cuesta’s terminology- we define them as 
short duration ( weeks), projects which require no money or cash, only 
gift exchange of time and access to facilities, expertise etc ( the gift
 exchange vocabulary comes from James Leach )



In the ArtSciLab we are approached continuously by ‘stem’ professionals who want to collaborate. Interestingly these range from physical sciences and engineering to the brain and Behavioural sciences to business and social sciences…



Often the stem professionals who reach out to us, “they” have antiquated ideas of what making art involves or results in today. Often they view art as less primary in the ‘tree of knowledge” (i.e. in a branch not in the trunk). 



Often they have very different methods , concepts, terminology (we are trying to develop transdisciplinary apprenticeships as part of the approach). Mauricio Mejia at ASU, Alex Topete, colleagues, and I are currently submitting a workshop proposal on applying translation studies methods to transdisciplinary collaborations.



If a micro-project doesn't succeed, its likely that a significant project won't in our experience.



I am delighted that a student research in our ArtSciLab , Diamond Beverly, has proposed: “how do we go about including diverse voices and fostering heterogeneous approaches instead unconsciously excluding people from the conversation and thus creating a continuous conundrum.” which highlights the implicit bias of the artscience community towards people in academia with its ethnic, gender, socio-economic and other implicit social biases.



Maybe the non -academic and younger members of Yasmin should weigh in, just as from Diamond Berverly: I was very intrigued with your post last week when you emphasized educational spaces and work shop methodologies. I would like to know how you define micro-actions. I also find such maker spaces and hackathons a good step into the future of collaborative educational space. A question that persists however is how these spaces find their audience?



And by this I mean how do we go about including diverse voices and fostering heterogeneous approaches instead unconsciously excluding people from the conversation and thus creating a continuous conundrum.



So all Latin students on Yasmin go at it : "One theory of origin of ‘conundrum” suggests that the word was coined as a parody of Latin by students at Oxford University, where it appears to have enjoyed particular popularity in its “word play” or “pun” sense. While the prevalent sense in this century is that of the seemingly unanswerable question or problem, frequently applied to heady dilemmas involving ethics, sociology, or economics, the word is sometimes so loosely applied to anything enigmatic as to be synonymous with puzzle or mystery."



Or maybe living in a continuous conundrum is a desirable state ? Certainly it is a state that drives our ArtScience work and is generative of desired outcomes.



Roger Malina



P.S These are the invited discussants:



Jadwiga
 Charzynska: I am the director of LAZNIA CCA in Gdansk since 2004 and in
 our program, one of the most important points is the Art + Science 
Meeting project, which we organize regularly from 2011. It’s really 
unique program in Poland presented Art / Sci projects. Links: <a href="http://www.laznia.pl/instytucja/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">http://www.laznia.pl/instytucja/</a>



Joao
 Silveira: Brazilian entrepreneur, choreographer and pharmacist. Was a 
Harvard Fellow (Le Laboratoire/ 2017-2019) and currently is a research 
fellow at the ArtSciLab – UT Dallas, and CienciArte Lab – Fiocruz. Jing
 Chen: Associate professor of Arts and associate director of Art and 
Cultural Innovation and Creativity Lab of Nanjing University. Gustavo
 Ariel Schwartz.: Physicist and writer. Scientist of the Spanish 
National Research Council (CSIC) at the Materials Physics Center. 
Founder director of the Mestizajes Program, at the Donostia 
International Physics Center, whose purpose is to explore and cross the 
borders among Art, Science, Literature and Humanities.

art-science

artscience

Micro ArtScience Actions (MASA)

<figure class="wp-block-embed-youtube wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-youtube wp-embed-aspect-4-3 wp-has-aspect-ratio"><div class="wp-block-embed__wrapper">
https://youtu.be/lJlBJ-NagLM
</div></figure>



<a href="https://medium.com/@looplogic/halloween-transmissions-machine-listening-from-the-diary-of-ana%C3%AFs-nin-276f67d71068?sk=336e1b3958336f3ee0952e0bbbb3d4f5">Full article @ Medium.</a>

Halloween Transmissions: Machine Listening from the Diary of Anaïs Nin

Kathryn Evans, Ph.D., is a singer, conductor, director, producer and researcher in arts and science. Dr. Evans was the Associate Dean for the Arts of the School of Arts and Humanities at The University of Texas at Dallas from 1995 to 2010. Dr. Evans holds M. A. degrees in Mathematics and in Music and a Ph.D. in Art and Technology, with an emphasis on arts education in the 21st century. She is a member of the Art-Sci Lab in the School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication, under the direction of Dr. Roger Malina, conducting research in music and science education. Her doctoral dissertation “ Does musical study enhance academic skills in undergraduate non-music majors?” studied skills transfer for music study to academic skills in STEM subjects. Her current project CDASH (Curriculum Development in Arts, Science and Humanities) explores the current state of cross-disciplinary curriculum at the college and high school level. She is currently developing curriculum for a music and science minor at UT Dallas, including her course “Music, Science and Technology” which will serve as the core course for the minor.

Kathryn Evans

Yvan Tina is the Deputy Co-Director of Performative Research of the ArtSciLab and a PhD candidate at the School of Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communication at UT Dallas. Yvan holds a PhD in performance studies from Aix-Marseille University, in France. His dissertation focuses on the notion of theatrically and how it is affected by the use of artificial life in performance art and installation. Additionally, he is in charge of developing the Virtual Africa platform which seek to promote the encounters between the arts and the technosciences in Africa and within the African diaspora.

Yvan Tina

The ArtSciLab has named
 Dr. Kathryn Evans, Associate Professor of Instruction in the School of 
Arts &amp; Humanities of UT Dallas, as Co-Director of Education 
Initiatives, while also promoting Dr. Yvan Tina and Alex Garcia Topete, two of its longest serving ATEC researchers, to the positions of Deputy Co-Directors of the lab. The leadership promotions come as part of a major re-design of the systems and processes of the ArtSciLab
 as it adapts to the challenges of managing research, strategy, 
organizational culture, and operations among a growing group of student 
lab members and external collaborators.&nbsp;



Dr.
 Evans, as Co-Director of Education Initiatives of the lab, will oversee
 the ArtSciLab’s projects that merge diverse disciplines in learning and
 teaching settings, particularly those involving the growing trend of 
turning education from “STEM” to “STEAM” education through the arts. Dr.
 Evans brings to the position not only her years of experience as an 
educator, but also her many talents as an academic researcher, singer, conductor, director, and producer. The ArtSciLab’s current education initiatives include CDASH (Curriculum Development in the Arts, Sciences and Humanities), ToTTS (Tale of Two Thinking Systems), and Arts-Based Learning for Business (ABLB)--all which were originated by Dr. Evans as a lab researcher.&nbsp;



Dr. Tina will now serve as Deputy Co-Director of Performative Research of the lab. Dr.
 Tina's expertise is in performance studies and he will oversee the 
research projects related to new forms of representation and curation of
 the arts, with an emphasis on scenic practices involving artificial 
intelligence and biotechnologies. His role will be to stimulate and 
strengthen the artistic output of the ArtSciLab. As a performative researcher, he is a founding member and manager of the multilingual and international podcast platform Creative Disturbance,
 which requires the coordination of a team composed of UX/UI designers, 
sound designers, and web developers.&nbsp; Dr. Tina is also a member of the Laboratoire d'Études en Sciences des Arts (LESA) of Aix-Marseille University and the artistic director of the Virtual Africa initiative of Leonardo/Olats. He lectures in a number of different venues and conferences and will participate this year to the Next Einstein Forum.&nbsp;



Mr.
 Garcia Topete will function as Deputy Co-Director of Transdisciplinary 
Strategy and Collaboration. His main duties will include overseeing the Experimental Publishing and Curation (ExPuCu)
 efforts of the lab, implementing systems and workflows with the aim of 
fostering creativity, innovation, and collaboration, and designing 
transdisciplinary strategies for teamwork and successful knowledge 
management. His almost two decades of experience in the creative 
industries as an international filmmaker and film festival organizer, as
 well as more than a decade in the entrepreneurial and non-profit world,
 make Mr. Garcia Topete particularly equipped with a multifaceted 
understanding and transnational perspective of knowledge exchange and 
social impact to deal with the current and future challenges of the ArtSciLab.&nbsp;&nbsp;



“As
 the African proverb says: if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want
 to go far, go together; and we’re definitely trying to go far in our 
lab,” said Founding Executive Co-Director Dr. Roger Malina about the reasoning for the lab reorganization. With these new leadership positions and overall redesign, the ArtSciLab
 seeks to improve not only its operations and management, but also 
provide a better learning environment and culture in which its members 
and collaborators share knowledge more effectively, mentor each other in
 their areas of expertise with more ease, and develop further both 
professionally and personally through their lab participation. 
Ultimately, the ArtSciLab continues to pioneer in transdisciplinary issues—this time looking to boost the careers and development of everyone involved.&nbsp;

ArtSciLab Promotes Three Researchers to Leadership Positions

Creative Disturbance is an international and multilingual podcast platform that facilitates collaboration between individuals in art, science, and technology communities. It was created in 2014 by the ArtSciLab of the School of Arts, Technology and Emerging Communication of UT Dallas, with the support of The MIT Press and Leonardo/ISAST. It is primarily run by UT Dallas students, with oversight and assistance from faculty.

Creative Disturbance has been made possible thanks to the success of a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and the generous contribution of donors. On December 8, 2014,133 backers pledged $21,511 to keep Creative Disturbance running. The podcasts are since then recorded and produced by individuals who have an interest in art, science, design, education or technology. As promised during the campaign, the funding generated through this initiative has served to award international grants to students and young professionals across the world (Canada, China, Columbia, Egypt, Kenya, Portugal, South Africa, Sweden, and Turkey so far). In return, the students have created a series of podcasts of their interests.

After four years of activity, Creative Disturbance has covered a wide range of topics such as the advancements of generative art and virtual reality, the ethics and aesthetics of artificial life art, the field of sonification, the meaning of Persian sculpture and mythology, the aesthetics of Chinese contemporary new media art, the dynamics of African diasporas and the Afrofuturist movement, the evolution of digital art in Latin America, the emergence of interactive architecture and synthetic biology, the impact of climate change in environmental art, the story of women engineering, the relationships between gender and economics, technology, race, and sexuality, etc. Today, more than 40 channels have been created by a network of local and international collaborators in the fields of art, science and technology. Creative Disturbance is 480 podcasts published in 16 languages listened in more than 145 countries for a total of 94,408 downloads. We intend to continue this effort by promoting multilinguism, transdisciplinarity and experimentation in the next phases of our development.

Creative Disturbance

This web site is the web companion of the Leonardo e-book Meta-Life: Biotechnologies, Synthetic Biology, ALife and the Arts (MIT Press, 2014). It aims at documenting and promoting the key works and concepts of the arts of artificial life. Each section has been conceived to provide the reader with a maximum resources about the topics discussed in the book. Feel free to propose new material and email Yvan Tina at yvantina@gmail.com.

With biotechnologies, synthetic biology and Artificial Life, artists have opened new avenues in the artworld, going from still to autonomous objects to living creatures, exploring the thin border between animate and inanimate, confronting the grown, the evolved, the born and the built, raising aesthetic but also social, political and ethical issues. In this ground breaking collection, the editors have commission new original essays by key figures in these fields and collected document the ideas and practice of artists involved in these areas as well as theoreticians and historians.

Chapters include: Between Bio, Silico and Synthetic: Of Life and Arts; Artificial Life and the Arts; Bioart; Bio-Fiction, Design, Architecture; DIY Biology-Biohacking (see below for full Table of Contents). An exo-life may not come from outer space hitting the Earth riding a meteorite but very well from the lab, designed by a scientist — unless it is an artist— weaving biology and computing in a petri dish or a bioreactor as a vessel.

Meta Life Web Companion

Ayen Kuol works in the Art Sci Lab as Artist in Residence and coordinator to the Physics department. She holds a bachelor of Science in Physics and Interdisciplinary studies from the Florida International University. Her current interests lie in experimentation of multimodal ways to present scientific knowledge in intimacy to human perception.

Ayen Kuol

Dr. James L. Carter, geoscientist, and associate professor emeritus at the University of Texas at Dallas, passed away on September 21, 2019, in his home at the age of 82. To honor James Carter, ArtSciLab member Ayen Deng has written and performed a spoken word poem in memory of the way he inspired all those who attended his last lecture on September 20, 2019. The slides in this video are from his lecture to accompany the performance. 



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spoken word

A Spoken Word on Life and Death

by Michael Warner



<blockquote class="wp-block-quote">Virtual Menageries puts us back in time amongst the collective elites. Berland forms a cohesive genealogy of the “menagerie” to encourage, challenge, and deconstruct our modern perception of non-human animals and their relationship to human meaning and existence. Virtual Menageries looks through the lens of mediation to draw affective and emotional weight to animals as symbolic messengers in the digital era. From the giraffe, to the beaver, virtual art, digital communications, cats, birds and music Berland maps out how animals have become not only the mediators that bridge worlds together for good, but also as the trafficked subjects of terror: tools made to control, methods for silencing, opportunities to proliferate a message, and catalysts in profiteering. &nbsp; The book begins with a question that led to a series of other questions: “Why are there so many cats on the internet?” (Pg. 1) Which then led to thoughts about the roles of animals as symbols and figures in contexts. “How do animals help manage our perception of the Anthropocene? How do they disrupt our own relationship with digital technologies if they are so abundantly apart of them? If they are mediating in new ways, what content are they mediating, and in what context?” (Pg. 1) These are all questions that threw the book and Berland’s project into fruition.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </blockquote>



To read the full review: 



<div class="wp-block-file"><a href="http://dev.atec.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2020/02/Leonardo_Review_of_Virtual_Menageries.docx">Review_of_Virtual_Menageries</a><a href="http://dev.atec.io/wp-content/uploads/sites/8/2020/02/Leonardo_Review_of_Virtual_Menageries.docx" class="wp-block-file__button" download>Download</a></div>

Halloween Transmissions: Machine Listening from the Diary of Anaïs Nin

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