3 Rivers 2nd Nature

This project addressed the meaning, form and function of the three river systems and 53 streams of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania in partnership with the 3 Rivers Wet Weather Demonstration Program. A team of artists, historians, botanists, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) specialists, landscape architects, scientists, engineers and water policy experts developed an historic database, and a contemporary baseline of water quality, river edge plant life, bank conditions and the history of public access and private use. The team also conducted a policy and value analysis of stormwater alternatives, stream restoration and stream daylighting. The goals of Project Director Tim Collins and Artistic/Education Director Reiko Goto were to conduct an analysis of the green infrastructure that provides social, aesthetic, ecological and economic benefit to the Three Rivers Region. A series of River Dialogues introduced the issues to the public through expert-led tours, presentations and discussions. 
 

A Question of Perception
Media artist Regi Allen uses video and photography to explore the community's perception of black culture. While in residence, he received a grant to document Pittsburgh Urban League's trip to Africa and negotiated a landmark agreement with public television station WQED to utilize state-of-the-art editing equipment for community projects. In addition, he offered video workshops with children at the Andy Warhol Museum and the Homewood Montessori school.

Art History Learning Environment
Former School of Art faculty member and administrator, Mary Schmidt, utilized multimedia and web technologies to create a robust learning environment on the subject of art history. She worked in partnership with the TELab (Technology Enhanced Learning Laboratory) at Carnegie Mellon and was supported by a university courseware development grant and Carnegie Mellon On-Line.


Acid Mine Drainage and Art Project
A community enhancement initiative in Western Pennsylvania to bring broad public participation to the construction of treatment systems to clean up Acid Mine Drainage (metals-laden water which seeps out of abandoned coal mines and coats stream beds with orange sediment)--and to create enjoyable, educational, park-like community landscapes in which to be at the same time. A sequential, three-site project will blend community history, innovative science, responsive landscape design and active community participation.


Atlanta Center for Creative Inquiry
This program was initiated in 2004 by Oscar Harris, CEO of Turner Associates/Architects & Planners, Inc., one of Atlanta's leading architectural firms, and a Carnegie Mellon alumnus and trustee, in partnership with Georgia Institute of Technology and Benjamin E. Mays High School. Envisioned as a demonstration project to introduce minority high school students to architecture and design, it was modeled after the Sustainable Landscape and Architecture Project, hosted in the STUDIO in 2000-2003 and created by SK Woodall. The Atlanta program began with 15 students in a six week program that included presentations by architects and faculty and graduate students from Georgia Tech. The curriculum introduced students to college architectural course work. The program has progressed and attracted sponsors and new students. The Atlanta public school system provides transportation so that students can travel to field trips that include tours of architecture firms led by African American principals, and construction sites. The teaching is focused on drawing on students' creative and conceptual thinking, and presentation of ideas in architecture. They draw, design and make models and are challenged to imagine a design for their community. The program and its director are committed to increasing public awareness of architecture as a profession and to expanding pathways to the field for minority youth.


Building Electronic Communities
Pittsburgh artist Carolyn P. Speranza investigates the implications of the Internet as a public space for discourse and telecommunity building. In its application, this research led to the creation of Community Forums Online,featured in The Andy Warhol Museum's exhibition The Architecture of Reassurance: Designing the Disney Theme Parks. Speranza worked with a team of museum staff members to define, envision and recontextualize the museum's relationship to Internet technology. Speranza's residency was co-sponsored by The Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh Filmmakers and Carnegie Mellon's Center for Arts Management and Technology where Speranza trained artists and arts organizations in the use of information technologies and web site development.


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. echo::system-The Desert was performed in Pittsburgh at Helen Wayne Rauh Studio Theatre (as a preview laboratory performance) in September 2005 (flyer) and at the New Hazlett Theater in September 2007 (ad).
 

End of the Line: Building Bridges with Pittsburgh's Busways
A community-based artistic collaboration examining historic and contemporary issues in Pittsburgh's neighborhoods which resulted in the creation of five digital collages displayed on 20 Port Authority buses. These collages were designed to cross boundaries between neighborhoods symbolically in their unifying cultural themes and literally in their method of display on buses and placement on the World Wide Web. These themes were developed through artist-led workshops at Carnegie Branch libraries where participants contributed oral histories and photographs were taught how to make collages.

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, adapted 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 was 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 of fellows Carl DiSalvo, Jeff Maki and Nathan Martin was to collect information about people, places, events, and notes, and help document unseen narratives and histories in public or private theme-based hubs. MapHub researched 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 worked with Bike Pgh to design a system that would help promote safe bicycling in the city of Pittsburgh. This work continues at DeepLocal, a startup company founded by the MapHub project co-directors.

Nine Mile Run Greenway Project

This project connected the expertise and concerns of artists, scientists, engineers, historians, ecologists and planners in a broad-ranging interdisciplinary effort to address the challenges and opportunities faced in transforming an urban, industrial waste site in Pittsburgh into a sustainable environment of private housing and public greenspace. These efforts are continued today by the Nine Mille Run Watershed Association, which grew out of this project.
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Ohio River LifeBoat Project
The Ohio River LifeBoat Project was a 3 and 1/2 month journey exploring and documenting contemporary life on the Ohio River on a customized boat. This mobile art project was made public through a series of gatherings, recorded interviews, and regular updates to the project website. Video documentation and audio podcasts are anticipated to debut in 2008. The river, a public gathering place with many stakeholders, was the site and subject; the interaction was the artwork. The boat was both a mode of transportation and a means to fully integrate into river life and culture. The eco-customized, collaboratively built, pontoon houseboat carried artist Carolyn Lambert and her rotating one-person crew down the river and functioned as a sleeping, cooking and storage space. A solar panel, a water filtration system (to make river water potable), a grey water catchment system, and a small herb garden made the LifeBoat an example of sustainable river living, all within a compact 172 square feet. The LifeBoat hosted potluck dinners to discuss the intersections of recreation and commerce, culture and ecology of the Ohio River. Lambert swapped stories with towboat captains, swimmers, casino boat pilots, commercial fishermen, power plant chemists, environmental activists, small business owners, historians, museum docents, and lots of folks who could bend your ear with hours of river tales. Drawing on their personal stories and memories, the project initiated discussions of the river as a shared space.

Persephone/Art Gardens Project
This project connected 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 ultimate goal was 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 was developed at Frank Curto Park, a green space owned by the City of Pittsburgh along Bigelow Boulevard. Magic Penny Gardens were the community component of the project. They are gardens created by artists using plants contributed from the perennial gardens of neighborhood residents. Gardeners also responded to a "Call for Gardens" issued earlier, by sharing snap shots and comments about their gardens.

Pittsburgh: A City Seen
This digital work extended "Pittsburgh Revealed," the highly successful exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art which showed historical and contemporary photographs of Pittsburgh. Project Director Charlee Brodsky, a documentary photographer, was one of the curators of the original exhibit. Supported by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, this project was carried out in partnership with the Carnegie Museum of Art.


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
An afterschool, pre-college program for high school students developed by S.K. Woodall, this project offered students the chance to discover architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning and design as a career. Students analyzed, planned and designed a specific site in the targeted community (often an inner-city neighborhood) and worked 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.


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 debuted in Pittsburgh in 2002 before traveling to other planetaria worldwide, the project's goals included development of curriculum materials for use in classrooms, and an outreach program that targets 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. 
 

Tracking the Human Brain
A team of artists, scientists and educators has created an interactive, multimedia planetarium presentation about the human brain. This show, Gray Matters: The Brain Movie, is a collaborative production of the STUDIO, the joint University of Pittsburgh/Carnegie Mellon Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, and Carnegie Science Center and was funded primarily by the National Science Foundation. The show's content is based on the latest brain research and linked to National Science Education Standards. Planetarium viewers are taken to a new dimension of "inner space" exploration and discovery, where they move and change images on screen.