DX Arts celebrates first graduates with exhibit

The UW program, generally known as DXARTS, was begun as two programs — a doctoral degree and a bachelor of fine arts pre-graduate, research-oriented degree for artists. Graduates of the BFA program study primarily at the 400 and 500 level and are uniquely prepared to go on to graduate studies to investigate fundamental problems in the nature and practice of digital arts and experimental media. Some of the many fields covered by DXARTS include digital cinema, robotics, stereo imaging and holography, virtual reality, computer music composition, 3D modeling and animation, electronic stage and set design and experimental installation art.

The six graduating students whose work will be on exhibit are Peter Brun, Scott Carver, Johnathan Lyon, Matt McDowell, Kevin Olsen and Alan Strathmann.

“It’s quite extraordinary to get to this point and see this group of students graduate,” said Shawn Brixey, associate director and professor in the program and the one who has had substantial contact with the graduating students. “I’ve been teaching for 20 years and have worked with a lot of students, but these are special.”

He called the students “super seniors,” partly, he says, as a term of endearment, but partly because they are “classic polymaths,” the type of students who double and triple major in an attempt to learn as much as possible.

“They just don’t see the traditional boundaries as the academy lays them out,” he says. “They want to drink deeply from a lot of areas — to discover what it means to be human and document that in totally novel, artistic and innovative ways.”

The works the students have created for their exhibit illustrate what Brixey is talking about. Brun, for example, came into the program after studying photography, and has built what Brixey calls one of the more technically complex works in the exhibit. He built dozens of his own custom circuit boards and wrote custom software to create a multivalent imaging system. He plans to go to graduate school to study bio and mechanical engineering “because he has come to understand he has to train to be a good engineer in order to do to achieve the enduring art that he wants to make,” Brixey says.

Strathman came from the Comparative History of Ideas Program. For his piece he built a classically framed mirror with a high resolution LCD screen on the back, on which is playing a series of short (a few seconds each) infrared films of a woman searching for something. After a few minutes of looking in the mirror, Brixey says, viewers will have the sensation of seeing part of themselves wander off with her on the search. Strathman has accepted a scholarship to attend the prestigious art and technology graduate program at the Chicago Art Institute.

McDowell, who is also from the CHID program, has made a stop motion animated film and an ion propulsion anti-gravity sculpture that together are a discursive meditation on the ideas of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. “So instead of reading scholarly interpretation about his ideas on Der Ursprung — the origin of the work of art, you watch characters and the sculpture semiotically engage in dialogue that forms around a search for belief, awe, wonder and finding meaning ,” Brixey says.

Olsen, Brixey says, became interested in metanarrative film experience and wanted to apply that idea to images. “He pursued a novel extension of my own research into phosphenes, the after-images that are left when you press your fingers onto your eyelids. Olsen wrote a software program to create them electronically through video projection onto your closed eyes. In these rhythmic patterns, the autonomic response to the after-image is the of the loci of the art rather than the narrative in the image,” Brixey says.

Carver’s work is even harder to describe. He became interested in the Cubists, who worked to describe objects as unique constellations of space and time simultaneously. Carver wrote his own software so that he could create a video in which every frame was present at every moment in the film. The software allows Carver to carve new time domains out film that have never been fully realized before. “It’s like being able to see around corners, or to more fully understand simultenaeity and the curvature of space and time,” Brixey says. Both Olsen and Carver plan to work in the software field after graduation.

Lyon’s work is possibly more personal than the others. Working in a more classic film medium, he has “reconstructed” a psychological topology or portrait of the liminal mother in his imagination, after losing his real mother early in life. “It’s a beautiful, poetic excavation of his fears and longings,” Brixie says. Lyon plans to study genome sciences in graduate school.

There will be a reception for the artists at 7 p.m. Friday, June 2. The exhibit will remain in place until June 11. There is no admission charge.