Thursday Club presents Sheldon Brown: The Art and Technology of Better Virtual Worlds :: June 25, 2009; 5:00 - 6:00 pm :: Seminar Rooms, Ben Pimlott Building, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London.

Brown will describe his work to make better virtual worlds — addressing both their computational challenges as well as their expressive affordances. This comes out of work that Brown has been doing for over a decade in creating art installations that utilize virtual reality notions and technologies to pursue conceptually complex interests with a deliberate aesthetic. As the use of virtual worlds and muti-user online gaming environments has moved historically from experiment to speculation to novel experience, technological progress has allowed the field to move from the narrowly experienced to the broadly based, creating a primed culture for meaningful virtual worlds. Their creation requires more expressive and more complex approaches then are currently employed. Solutions to this will come from more imaginative applications of emerging technologies and more imaginative approaches to virtual world semantics. Brown will present his approaches to both of these areas as addressed in the development of his Scalable City project.

Sheldon Brown is an artist and computer science researcher who works in new forms of culture that arise out of the developments of computing technology. He is Director of the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA) at the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) where he is a Professor of Visual Arts. He is a Co-PI of Calit2 (California Institute of Information Technologies and Telecommunications) where he founded the New Media Arts layer and is currently the Artist-in-Residence at Calit2. He is also the founding director of the new Center for Next Generation Digital Media and The Experimental Game Lab.

His artwork emerges from computer science and cultural research. His projects extend and intersect the fields of computer gaming and scientific visualization. Areas such as multicore computing and computer cloud systems design provide the technological frameworks to support new types of experiences arising from the emergence of multi-user virtual worlds and increasingly complex computer gaming environments.

His large scale virtual reality artworks have been exhibited around the world, including: The Museum of Contemporary Art in Shanghai, The Exploratorium in San Francisco, Ars Electronica in Linz Austria, The Kitchen in NYC, Oi Futura Museum in Rio De Janeiro, Zacheta Gallery in Warsaw, Centro Nacional in Mexico City, FILE in Sao Paulo, The National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC, the Barnsdall Gallery in Los Angeles, and the Beall Center for Arts and Technology in Irvine, and others. His work has been featured at Supercomputing 2007 and 2008, along with numerous SIGGRAPH exhibitions. He lectures extensively around the world on his artwork and research and has been commissioned for public artworks in Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego and Mexico City, with grants from AT&T New Experiments in Art and Technology, the NEA, the NSF, the Rockefeller Foundation, IBM, Intel, Sun, Vicon and others.

Location: Lecture Hall, Ground floor, Ben Pimlott Building. Contact Frederic Fol Leymarie.
Website: crca.ucsd.edu/sheldon/
Department: Computing
Time: 25 June 2009, 17:00 - 18:00