“Digital Making” Projects Demonstrate Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Two interdisciplinary projects funded by the College of Arts + Architecture’s Digital Arts (d-Arts) Center will be presented at the end of April. Both projects received d-Arts Faculty Digital Making Grants, designed to actively encourage collaboration among faculty in the CoA+A and the exploration of digital technologies in the arts and design.

Presented by dance professor Rachel Barker and art professor Marek Ranis, The Cafune Project explores “untranslatable words” in six vignettes incorporating dance, film, improvisation, live music, and language. The Cafune Project builds upon research initiated by Ranis in partnership with English psychology scholar Tim Lomas, who has developed a growing inventory of positive words that have no direct translation into English. Named Cafuné for the Brazilian Portuguese term for the act of running a hand through a loved one’s hair, the project seeks to translate nuances of language across cultures. Professional artists from the community, including capoeristas and samba dancers, and UNC Charlotte faculty students will participate in two performances – at 6:00 pm and 8:00 pm – on April 26.

Presented by architecture professor Marc Manack and visiting dance professor Kaustavi Sarkar, Odissi Anima is a conversation between architecture and dance in an interdisciplinary collaboration using digital technology. It explores the architectural and choreographic crafting of movement and space through technological projections and objects. Odissi is an Indian classical dance form that travels globally in high-art concert venues as well as in South Asian diasporic festivals. Anima, meaning soul or life, is reconceived as technological reconfigurations of history in ways that reveal to life the marginalized histories of the Maharis or the temple-dancers. Odissi Anima will be performed at 7:00 pm on April 27.

All performances take place in Robinson Hall 118 and are free and open to the public.

D-Arts Center Co-Directors Christopher Beorkrem (Architecture) and Heather D. Freeman (Art & Art History) have juried and funded projects through the Digital Making Grant funds since Fall 2014. Through these grants, d-Arts supports both individual and collaborative creative projects that employ digital technologies and cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.