Echo: system
In this project, Grisha Coleman explores, through the medium of live art, the process by which large living organisms, such as ecosystems, receive and adapt to information from the world around them, a world that now includes increased and rapid advances in science and technology. She envisions the project as a series of site-specific live performance installations that will create and explore site-specific "virtual" ecosystems, such as a layer of the ocean floor or the top of a mountain range. By attempting to apply one process - that of live performance - to illuminate another - that of science and its methods - the goal is to create a new awareness for collaborators and audiences alike of the meaning of creativity and the resonance between art and science. Live art as well as scientific lab and fieldwork are dynamic systems of discovering our world, or parts thereof, in a controlled environment with improvisational elements. By creating a multi-disciplinary work of live art predicated on scientific precepts and concepts, Coleman seeks to infuse both collaborators and audiences with a vigorous interest in the adaptive powers and elastic boundaries of art and science.
 

EventScope
A 3D, Networked Robotic Learning Environment designed to allow students to virtually explore remote places like Mars and other planets from their computers. EventScope uses data from NASA exploration missions to involve students in the exploration of these locations, assuming the role of space scientist from their own classrooms. To do this, the project team, led by Peter Coppin, is adapting NASA's virtual world data sets to internet-friendly protocols so students can "virtually visit" the sites of real science missions through activities that explore each mission within a science and interdisciplinary curriculum designed to meet national education standards. An interactive, modularized curriculum is being designed to let teachers adapt the EventScope learning tool to the realities of their individual classrooms.
 

MapHub
MapHub is a web-based, multi-user, group managed information storage system and map. The goal is to collect information about people, places, events, and notes, and help document unseen narratives and histories in public or private theme-based hubs. MapHub researches the introduction of a geographic and historical data sharing application in an urban landscape. MapHub is a peoples' map - a map of an urban geography determined not by traditional methodology but instead by the members who participate and contribute everyday in the experience of urban life. MapHub is both a tool and a platform that gives users pen and paper to record their unique and situated perspectives and then deliver that documentation to others. The web-based software facilitates individual spatial and temporal narratives managed and distributed through a simple social network. Based on a Geographic Information System (GIS) backend built on open source packages, MapHub manages data as visual symbolic objects specific to hubs organized thematically. Aside from having a personal hub based on immediate to distant social or participant networks, alternative hubs based on themes such as health code violations, past job experiences, etc. For example, the project team has been working with Bike Pgh to design a system that would help promote safe bicycling in the city of Pittsburgh.
 

Persephone/Art Gardens Project
This project connects the public to art and to the environment by promoting gardening as a contemporary art medium and by recognizing gardeners as artists. Project Director Stephanie Flom is working to establish the ArtGardens of Pittsburgh--a first-of-its-kind, large-scale outdoor installation gallery where the medium of the art is growing plants. Phase One of the ArtGardens is being developed at Frank Curto Park, a green space owned by the City of Pittsburgh along Bigelow Boulevard. Magic Penny Gardens are the community component of the project. They are gardens created by artists using plants contributed from the perennial gardens of neighborhood residents. Gardeners have also responded to a "Call for Gardens" issued earlier, by sharing snap shots and comments about their gardens. 
 

Rhythm Tutor
An exploration of rhythm as the common unifying link within the arts and beyond through colloquia with presenters from art, music, architecture, drama and design and a pilot project in which students research the concept of rhythm as a potential tool for interdisciplinary exchange and discussion. Project Director Annabelle Joseph's research has led to the development a College of Fine Arts interdisciplinary course entitled, Rhythm: An Interdisciplinary Link Among the Arts,with participation by faculty from each of the Fine Arts disciplines.
 

Sex and Gender in the Biotech Century
A series of performances, publications and web sites from the cyberfeminist art collective subRosa. This work addresses the need for non-specialists to know how sexuality, reproduction, body politics and medical treatments are being profoundly altered and affected by new bio and medical technologies, genetic engineering and research, and global cultural diffusion of these technologies. By researching the particular physical, economic, social, political, and emotional effects of these new technologies on different (groups of) women's lives and bodies; and by disseminating this research through cross-disciplinary, entertaining, interactive and pedagogical workshops and performances, subRosa attempts to transmit critical information and education, as well as encouraging women to initiate and take full part in public forums and discussions about these vitally important contemporary issues.
 

Sustainable Landscape Architecture Project
Currently after school, pre-college program for high school students developed by S.K. Woodall, which offers students the chance to discover architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design as a career. Students analyze, plan and design a specific site in the targeted community (often an inner-city neighborhood) and work with university faculty, community leaders, peers and professionals to learn ways to recycle urban brownfield sites, vacant lots and abandoned buildings into environmentally friendly, healthy canvasses for productive art-based projects. The goal of the project is to expand the current 10 session program for two dozen students to a yearlong effort that reaches more students and impacts the entire Pittsburgh community.
 

Tissue Engineering for Life
A planetarium show focusing on tissue engineering and its applications with the goal of delivering the scientific content through an interactive, multimedia planetarium presentation that brings together technology and the arts. In addition to the planetarium show, which will debut in Pittsburgh in 2002 before traveling to other planetaria worldwide, the project's five-year timeline includes development of curriculum materials for use in classrooms, and an outreach program that will target K-12 youth in under-represented and under-served rural and inner city communities. A Science Education Partnership Award from the National Institutes of Health's National Center for Research Resources has allowed the Pittsburgh Tissue Engineering Initiative to partner with the Carnegie Science Center, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center and the University of Pittsburgh Medical System.