CyberArts Showcase features artistic exploration of CAVE technology, live web cast

Experience a 21st-century exploration of the place where art and science/technology meet, where reality and cyber worlds collide. The CyberArts Showcase, an innovative, virtual art museum of student works that uses technology to create inventive, interactive worlds of digital art, will be held from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Friday, April 15, at Torgersen Hall on Virginia Tech's campus. Roberto Bocci, multimedia artist and professor of digital art at Georgetown University will open the event.

Part of ArtsFusion 2005, the second-annual weeklong celebration of the arts, the CyberArts Showcase features work produced by undergraduate students from the Collaborative for Creative Technologies in the Arts and Design (CCTAD), a year-long, multidisciplinary student collaboration. Students were organized into cross-disciplinary teams to create large works of art. The CCTAD teams have created an exhibition that is “beyond the screen” and beyond the students’ abilities to produce individually without the expertise of their fellow team members.

For those unable to make the journey in person, the CyberArts Showcase will be broadcast live via a web cast at beginning at 5 p.m. Friday, April 15.

This multi-sensory, highly entertaining, and electrifying showcase includes:

--A multi-screen sculptural installation with eight computer screens and a surround-sound element incorporating the individual genres of painting, animation and film, woven into one genre. (1100 Torgersen Hall).

--Digital Videos, or avant garde films, that question the notion of narrative, using ADDY award winning animation. (1100 Torgersen Hall).

--Digital prints and websites created by digital arts students. (1120 Torgersen Hall).

--An interactive, virtual environment which creatively employs Virginia Tech CAVE™ technology. Students explore the concept of walking on water, while challenging the boundaries of perception, reality and illusion. (In room 3050 of Torgersen Hall).

The CAVE™ was developed as a “virtual reality theater,” with its design motivation rooted in being a useful tool for scientific visualization. Virtual reality may best be defined as the wide-field presentation of computer-generated, multi-sensory information that tracks a user in real time. The CAVE™ is a multi-person, room-sized, high-resolution, 3D video and audio environment. Graphics are rear projected in stereo onto three walls and the floor and viewed with stereo glasses. As a viewer wearing an electromagnetic sensor, images move within the display boundaries, the correct perspective and stereo projections of the environment are updated by a computer, and the images move with and surround the viewer. Hence, stereo projections create 3D images that appear to have a presence both inside and outside this projection-room continuously. To the viewer with stereo glasses, the projection screens become transparent and the 3D image space appears to extend to infinity.

CCTAD brings together creative research and scholarship in the digital arts across the university. The collaboration includes faculty and students from: the Department of Art and Art History in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, the Department of Music and the Department of Communication both in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences, and the Department of Computer Science in the College of Engineering.

CCTAD provides a platform for interdisciplinary research and practice in digital arts. It offers the necessary training to understand and translate existing media into digital form and potentially creates and manipulates new media forms and genres. The collaborative focus is on the integrated, parallel development of digital media technologies and digital media content.

Throughout the yearlong collaboration, students were encouraged to find their own interpretation of a project theme. The theme for the 2004-2005 CCTAD class is “river.” The theme is appropriate, given our location in the New River Valley. The New River, despite its name is one of the oldest rivers in the world with only the Nile being more ancient. A river can be thought of as an actual physical, geographic feature but also as a metaphor. It is larger than a stream (streaming images, streaming video, bit streams, stream of consciousness) but has many of the same properties as well.

The Art and Art History Department at Virginia Tech, part of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, offers undergraduate four-year degree programs; BA in art history, BFA in graphic design/visual communication design (print, multimedia, web design, advertising, 3D packaging, visual branding) and BFA in studio arts (painting, sculpture, drawing, ceramics). Visit for more information.