Off

B2 Reimagined: New B2 director Steven Frost shares the opportunities and difficulties of opening ATLAS Institute’s B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance during the pandemic and his vision for B2’s future.

Two years later, the center is back online with updated equipment, new leadership, a new name and a new graphic identity. The mission of the B2 Center for Media, Arts and Performance is to support interdisciplinary experimentation and radical creativity that blends art, technology, media, science and performance. In more normal times, B2, as it is casually called, supports a series of artists through the year, who take advantage of the space and equipment to push the boundaries of performance art, performing for small audiences at the end of two-week residencies. 

This fall B2’s reduced schedule features two artists, but the team is planning for a more normal program in the spring, albeit with no live performances. These artists will be the first to make use of some of the new equipment, which includes. fifth-order ambisonic speakers, wave field synthesis, 360-video projection, motion capture technology and a Network Device Interface that enables almost instantaneous video transmission over wifi. 

In May 2020, ATLAS also named a new faculty director for B2, interdisciplinary artist and media studies instructor Steven Frost, who is supported by a new executive director, Ondine Geary. Geary doubles as the outreach coordinator for the Department of Theatre and Dance. In the interview that follows, Frost discusses his vision for the center and how they are navigating the challenges posed by the pandemic.

As a textile artist, why were you interested in B2’s faculty director position?

I have a master’s degree in fiber and material studies, and I work with textiles, but much of my work is interdisciplinary. In my practice I work with people who do digital fabrication in various makerspaces, and I know how essential collaboration with electrical engineers and other creatives is for artists. Really my art practice is about building community and creating crossovers between technology and traditional art mediums—exactly the kind of collaborations for which ATLAS is known.  

What distinguishes B2 from other studios?

B2 provides an opportunity for artists to picture possibilities that they had not previously imagined for their practices by working with our skilled and patient team of technicians and a center with a wealth of connections. Not only do we have many artists inside ATLAS, but the institute is connected to an engineering college, we share a wall with the art museum, film studies shares our building, and the Theatre and Dance Department is just down the street. Our physical location and relationships provide amazing opportunities, and it’s extremely exciting to see that cross-pollination across disciplines and ideas. 

What is your vision for the future of the B2 space?

My vision is for writers, dancers and scientists to come into B2 and learn what they can achieve within the space. I’m also interested in bringing people to B2 who are not as comfortable working in technologically advanced spaces, so we can show them the facilities and possibilities and support experimentation. Historically, the development of music and art was led by people willing to experiment with new technologies that fall outside their typical fields, playing with experimental media and finding a new vibe or a new approach. I am really excited to make that opportunity more available to the CU Boulder campus. I also want students to be able to take classes inside B2 that are taught by instructors from across the university, again to encourage interdisciplinary thinking and introduce new ideas to the performing arts.

As an artist, what are you thinking about these days?

When you are trying to create a creative space, subtlety is important, and I often talk about this in my media studies class. With emails, texts and even video, the subtext is difficult to convey. The idea of subtext has become so much harder in this digital world where people kind of say what they mean and you are left wondering where authenticity lives. 

How are things going for B2 during the COVID-19 pandemic?

It's been an interesting time for B2 to relaunch. The space is quite active. There aren’t immediate plans for live audiences, but instead we are focusing on student and faculty research inside the space. Ten resident artists will come here this year, including some from the dance and media studies departments. The projects that most of these artists envisioned were pre-COVID, so they have made adjustments and will share their work in other ways, including livestreaming via social media. 

Due to the remote format, students have had more time to experiment during the pandemic. The normal two-week residency has not been enough time for some students to complete a live show in. Now, they can make the most of the facilities and create work for digital broadcast or their portfolios using a longer production time frame. 

Will the ATLAS Black Box be offering livestream events during the pandemic? 

We are finishing our renovations on a three-camera broadcast studio, one of the best facilities to do a livestream, and we will definitely broadcast some events. We’re also interested in exploring live media in the Zoom world; we have the technical ability and the staff expertise for it to look great. 

Do you see any lasting benefits of the COVID-related restrictions to B2?

In the creative world, digital media art has been questioned because of its lack of analog tangibility. However, in COVID times it’s taken on more significance and relevance to art instructors in particular. When we come out of COVID, my hope is that digital art will have a more prominent place in creative spaces and that B2 will be in a position to house, nurture and promote it.

Photo by Elliot Whitehead

Off

A new show by Laura Ann Samuelson opening in the ATLAS Black Box on Friday, Jan. 24, will be the first performance in the space since it was flooded by a ruptured pipe in September 2018. With a set made of plywood and steel that, aptly, resembles a construction site, Samuelson describes the performance as exploring "the gap between the laws of physics and the mechanics of a psyche." In their solo performance, Samuelson navigates through and around the set, creating holes that cave in as fast as they are opened. Disoriented and destabilized by the environment, a kind of existential crisis ensues, and the bid to reconcile to this uncomfortable reality becomes central to Samuelson's innovative work.

About the Artist
Laura Ann Samuelson is a choreographer and visual artist whose work follows the transmission of feeling across objects, sites and bodies, searching for new strategies to help us bear impermanence, attachments to living and to one another. A performer in Michelle Ellsworth’s Post Verbal Social Network and an MFA student in the Department of Theatre & Dance at CU Boulder, they were named one of Colorado’s most creative minds in Susan Froyd’s 2014 “100 Colorado Creatives,” published by Denver’s Westword. They have collaborated with groups such as Joanna and the Agitators, square product theatre, Buntport Theater Company and Screw Tooth Theater Company, and their own work has been performed in a wide variety of venues, including swimming pools, warehouses, art galleries and loading docks. Samuelson was an artist-in-residence at the Denver Art Museum, Dance Initiative (Carbondale, Colorado), Colorado Conservatory of Dance and SKOGEN (Gothenburg, Sweden).

About ATLAS Center for Media, Art and Performance
This performance is presented by the ATLAS Institute’s Center for Media, Arts and Performance (CMAP), an incubator for experimental art-making methodologies, communities and outcomes.

Learn more about Laura Ann Samuelson in this 2017 Denver Art Museum interview:

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDu5xfQNoOw&feature=emb_logo]

Off

“The body and dance is actually a really potent platform to discuss technology in society and current geopolitical situations,” she said.

Off

Michael’s 4-channel sound installation, “New Atlantis,” also premiered on Governor's Island in New York City, May 25 to Aug 13. The piece was inspired by Francis Bacon's 1626 work of speculative fiction of the same title.

His silent video work, “Why Time,” was exhibited from July 6 to 31 at CU Boulder’s TECHNE Lab’s group show at Made in NY, in Dumbo, Brooklyn, a collaborative workspace and community.

Off

Emily Daub is fascinated by human interactions: How people change while in or out of relationships; how they value themselves in the context of their relationship status; how changes in relationships affect us; and how each relationship differs from another. 

On May 4, Daub brings her fascination to life in an ambitious dance performance that features a wide spectrum of dance styles and handmade costumes equipped with embedded computational and wireless communications technologies. 

Titled “The Show,” the performance is billed as a variety dance performance that “tells the story of how we shape and mold others (and vice versa),” writes Daub, who graduates in May with a bachelor’s degree from the ATLAS Institute’s Technology, Arts and Media (TAM) program, along with a minor in theatre and dance. 

Masterminding both the art and engineering is a comfortable role for Daub, which strikes some as unusual. “I've almost always been an outlier,” Daub says. “TAM fosters that spirit, allowing it to become an asset rather than a handicap.”

Daub entered CU Boulder as a chemistry major with plans to attend medical school, but soon decided it wasn’t the right path for her. A member of the Fashion Design Student Association (FDSA), she found her way to the TAM program via the Makers Collective, another student group. “Someone from the Makers Collective reached out with a project that involved inserting lights in clothing,” says Daub. “That caught my interest.” 

She worked on a swing dance skirt, inserting an accelerometer and 70 LEDs in the hem and coding them so the LEDs would light when the wearer spun. Soon after, she became the president of the Makers Collective, and because club activities happened in the ATLAS Blow Things Up (BTU) Lab, she learned about the TAM program. Since then, she’s created more than 20 pieces of wearable technology of varying levels of complexity, “The Show” being her most ambitious project to date. 

Daub says she couldn’t have reached this point without support, including funding from an Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) grant which covered all the materials. And working under the mentorship of Ben Shapiro as a member of the ATLAS research group, The Laboratory for Playful Computation, meant she was surrounded by a group of supportive graduate students. “Annie Kelly was so, so helpful,” says Daub, referring to a PhD student in the lab.

“The Show” has kept Daub busy since January, designing and sewing costumes, embedding microprocessors, sensors and NeoPixel LEDs, and programming each with unique light patterns that respond to movement and the wearer’s proximity to other dancers over time. 

In addition, she’s encoded a matrix of affinities between dancers, so that when characters with mutual attraction dance together, light patterns in their costumes reflect the personal chemistry and gradually converge. At the same time, analogous changes take place in the pair's dance styles, Daub says.

While the technical side of her work tends to draw the most attention, Daub prefers to be known for her artistry in a more holistic sense. She’s choreographed “The Show,” and will perform alongside six other dancers, and she’s proud of her costumes and how the embedded technology looks and works. “How finished products look is very important to me,” she says. “I've gotten to this point mostly because the things I make are beautiful and functional, not because they are technically complex,” says Daub. 

It’s the same way she’s always approached her projects, forming one coherent vision and then solving problems in order to realize it. “I’m motivated to achieve a specific outcome, not to just push my skills,” she says.

UROP Video

Off

A multimedia artist, Theodore’s presentation, "The (Art) Machines are Coming," is an overview of how he uses computer code for music compositions, object fabrication and creating immersive sound and light installations.

“What’s fun about composing with code is that instead of writing note by note, you can direct streams and flows of information and see where they lead,” says Theodore, who also spoke at CU Boulder Next in Los Angeles in February.

The interactive afternoon of learning, hosted by the Office of the Chancellor, showcases CU Boulder’s people, programs and research, with a focus on how CU Boulder impacts society by leading innovation and developing leaders of tomorrow.

Theodore’s work, including interactive kinetic installations, moving images and musical compositions, have been presented across the United States and in 10 different countries around the world. He has also created large-scale sound/art installations with roboticist Nikolaus Correll and touring pieces with performance artist Michelle Ellsworth.

See .
See 
An engineer’s guide to CU Boulder Next
 

Off

That’s what Michael Skirpan explores in Quantified Self, which piloted in the ATLAS Black Box, April 28 to May 1. 

Skirpan describes Quantified Self as “an art project with civic responsibilities.” The goal is to create a personalized experience through performance and interactive art that shows audience members the extent of the information they’ve shared online. “Personally, I don’t think the regular user realizes what they’re consenting to,” says Skirpan. 

A mix of interactive narratives, exhibits and experiences, Quantified Self is an immersive theatrical exploration of data and online privacy. To gain admission to the show, attendees complete an online form, granting the organizers access to their social media streams. When they arrive, they receive a digital bracelet that is used to check into the various installations and exhibits. 

In addition to presenting guests with sometimes edgy mashups of their social media streams through the various interactive installations, attendees rub shoulders with actors and become part of the theatrical performance that plays out over a 90-minute period.

The story features Amelia Bloom, an employee at tech giant DesignCraft, who becomes suspicious that her company is misusing the information they have about her. By joining forces with audience members, she attempts to bring the massive corporation down. Skirpan says, “We’re doing it in the sci-fi realm because we think it’s a neutral space.” At the end of the show, participants are invited to discuss the event and ask questions before seeing their personal data removed from the system.

Skirpan says the project is not just a discussion of privacy. “We aim to show people the possibilities around product development, research, artificial intelligence and human inference given the amounts of data owned by third-parties.” It is an open source work, so that others can build on the idea, and bring data transparency and understanding to everyone. The hope is not to scare people away from the World Wide Web, but instead “to close the gap between technologists and users to improve dialogue around ethics… to help move toward a more moral and transparent society.”

As a  computer science PhD student at CU-Boulder, and a graduate intern at New York’s Fast Forward Labs, Skirpan is focused on the ethics of information and human-centered design.

William Lewis, the show’s director, is a PhD student with the Department of Theatre and Dance, where many of the 30-member cast and crew were recruited. In addition, a significant contingent of ATLAS students were involved, including PhD candidate Jackie Cameron, one of the show’s three producers, and set designer Danny Rankin, a graduate student enrolled in Creative Technologies and Design. 

Jill Dupré, associate director of ATLAS, says “ATLAS explores technology policy and online privacy in a variety of ways, so we were thrilled to support this novel and innovative production. It was by far the most ambitious student-led project we’ve seen this year in the Black Box, and they pulled it off in style: technically complex, nuanced and the set was beautiful. I had a blast!” 

In addition to support from ATLAS and the University of Colorado’s Engineering Excellence Fund, the show received $35,000 from The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation’s Knight News Challenge, which “accelerates media innovation by funding breakthrough ideas in news and information.” Stay tuned for more: If Quantified Self is granted ongoing support from the Knight Foundation, a national tour will begin in the fall.  

Off

Off