CURATING IMMERSIVE WORLDS: AI VISIONS, SPATIAL NARRATIVE, AND SPECULATIVE MEDIA ARCHITECTURES
A rethinking of the New Media Architectures (NMA) conceptual framework emerges as media arts research and technology continue to evolve through a series of curatorial investigations situated at the intersection of art, design, education, and immersive virtual environments (IVE) research. This presentation explores a journey through the language of experimental media design practices and speculative spatial systems that examine the future of artistic production, technological and sensory culture, and interdisciplinary research.
The presentation frames an Art, Architecture, and Media Arts & Sciences research practice grounded in immersive design-engineered environments, computational worldmaking practices, and augmented media curatorial experiments. A range of creative research collaborations will be discussed, from investigations developed through the AlloSphere Research Facility to exhibition and community engagement initiatives presented through ACM SIGGRAPH conferences. The presentation will also reflect on a continuing series of online dialogues initiated at the beginning of the pandemic that explored AI, architecture, emerging media cultures, and science, organized in collaboration with Digital Futures.
Gustavo Alfonso Rincon, Ph.D., is educated as an architect, artist, curator, and media arts & design-engineering research scholar. He is an advocate for education and research as a human right. His academic and creative work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, while his professional practice has served clients across the globe.
His dissertation, Shaping Space as Information: A Conceptual Framework for New Media Architectures, investigates the limits and possibilities of immersive virtual environments (IVEs) for real-time arts–science research and creative practice. As a curator, educator, and research practitioner, Rincon continues to develop experimental media exhibitions with the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community (DAC), alongside online programming initiatives supporting Digital Futures International.
Rincon is affiliated with the Media Arts and Technology Program, where he contributes to curatorial and research initiatives in collaboration with Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, the inventor of the AlloSphere Research Facility, which is housed inside the CNSI at UCSB.
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JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, PhD, Director and Chief Scientist of the AlloSphere Research Facility and Distinguished Professor of Media Arts and Technology and Music (Composition), in the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). Also is the Founding Director of the Center for Research in Electronic Art Technology at UCSB.
Kuchera-Morin’s research focuses on composition,creative computational systems, content, and facilities design. Her 35 years of experience in digital media research led to the creation of a multi-million dollar sponsored research program for the University of California—the Digital Media Innovation Program. She was Chief Scientist of the Program from 1998 to 2003. The culmination of her creativity and research is the AlloSphere, a 30-foot diameter, 3-story high metal cylinder inside an echo-free cube, designed for immersive/interactive scientific/artistic investigation of multi-dimensional data sets.
Kon Hyong Kim, PhD, is a researcher and media artist specializing in immersive virtual environments and projection-based virtual reality systems. His work focuses on developing and optimizing highly immersive VR experiences, blending cutting-edge technology with interactive design to push the boundaries of how humans engage with digital environments.
His research contributed to a range of topics such as large-scale immersive displays, real-time interactive systems, and neurological spatial perception. His scholarly work reflects a deep engagement with both the technical and experiential aspects of virtual reality. He helped engineer the AlloSphere, one of the most prominent VR facilities in the world, and developed various multimedia software systems such as allolib.
Joshua Dickinson is a programmer and computational artist interested in blurring the boundary between humans and machines. He received a BA in music composition from Columbia University in 2010 and an MS in Multimedia Engineering from the Media Art and Technology department at UC Santa Barbara in 2013. His research centers around human-computer interaction, cultural analytics, computer vision, and the exploration of large or otherwise unique datasets. He enjoys trying to digitally quantify and simulate things we normally consider very “organic,” hopefully as a way of getting closer to what actually makes us human.
In 2012 he founded Unfiltered Audio, a company that has released dozens of instruments and effects used throughout the music industry. In 2023 he founded SoundLabs.ai, dedicated to pushing the boundaries of human creativity through novel generative AI algorithms. SoundLabs has formed a research-partnership with Universal Music, with which they created a Spanish language AI recreation of “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” by Brenda Lee, a first in the industry and featured in Rolling Stone Magazine.
