The Projective Eye Gallery at UNC Charlotte Center City presents Digital Dialogues, two multimedia installations that incorporate full-scale digital fabrication with a touch of the hand and a topographic perspective. Newly formed collaborative teams of College of Arts + Architecture professors and students have expanded the creative process, removing the control of the solely autonomous artist.
Funded with Research Through Making grants by the College of Arts + Architecture’s Digital Arts Center, the projects realize the center’s mission to inspire digital making across the disciplines of the College, each pairing a professor in the School of Architecture with a professor in the Department of Art & Art History. Their collaborative, interdisciplinary installations include video and two-dimensional works as well as elements created with the use of the College’s latest digital devices, including the KUKA robotic arm and CNC router and laser cutter. The exhibition opens June 10 and closes July 28.
“Public Time,” by Associate Professor of Architecture Thomas Forget and Associate Professor of Art Janet Williams, with student research assistants Anna Schmitter, Lewis Mackey, and Dean Crouch, is rooted in an analysis of Charlotte’s transportation infrastructure. It explores how data may be visualized and materialized with an aim to illuminate the social impact and potential of the region’s circulatory systems. Vibrational data collected from rail tracks, for example, has been transformed into 2D visualizations and then realized in sculptural forms. Through mapping, moviemaking, and experimentation in various media (porcelain, cement, Plexiglas, casting resin, etc.), “Public Time” strives to reframe the urban image of Charlotte from a car-based infrastructure to alternative modes of mobility.
“Hybrid Skins,” by Associate Professor of Architecture Jefferson Ellinger and Assistant Professor of Art Thomas Schmidt, with graduate student Paul Stockhoff, explores the aesthetic and conceptual implications of merging ancient analog and contemporary digital methods – low-tech and high-tech – in the production of porcelain and polymer architectural skins. The magnificent wall-sized installation is comprised of fiberglass-backed ceramic tiles, fired in the traditional way, but cast from variegated molds digitally designed and created with the KUKA robotic arm. Cracks in the porcelain, produced during and after firing, form a spectacular surface pattern that is illuminated from behind. In a time when experience is becoming increasingly virtual, “Hybrid Skins” integrates the digital and the tactile, reconciling the incongruities between old and new material processes to offer a sensory experience in the physical here and now.
The UNC Charlotte Center City front window will showcase works by students awarded Research Through Making grants by the Digital Arts Center: Hannah Barnhardt, Dean Crouch, and Hamilton Ward.