MAT End of Year Show 2025
Dates:
UCSB Elings Hall - June 3rd
SBCAST - June 5th
Develop your technical literacy
and creative design skills
For more information, visit:
UCSB Summer Sessions website
Action-Oriented Workflows for Fabricating Across Humans, Machines and Materials
Abstract
Digital fabrication technologies, such as 3D printers and computer numerical control (CNC) milling machines, have the potential to support manual craft production because they are designed for low-volume manufacturing. However, off-the-shelf digital fabrication workflows primarily focus on automation, repeatability, and simulation. These approaches often result in fully automated processes designed for highly processed materials and material-agnostic machine toolpath generation. They also leave little room for manual intervention and tend to conceal material and machine knowledge within computational abstractions. I propose to reframe interactions with digital fabrication machines to be more like handmade crafts. This perspective is important for the future of digital fabrication because working at the level of material and machine behaviors is necessary for the viability of digitally fabricated products. It can also broaden the expressive possibilities of digital fabrication practices and can support the development of unique, meaningful, and long-lasting products by promoting values of customization inherent to craft. This approach motivates three research questions: (1) How can fabrication workflows integrate manual and computational processes? (2) How can direct control of digital fabrication machine properties support new design spaces? (3) How can a digital fabrication system make material properties discoverable rather than hidden in computational abstractions? In this dissertation, I investigate these questions through the development of three digital fabrication systems. CoilCAM enables craftspeople to define the machine toolpath of a clay 3D printer mathematically. Millipath supports the creation of carved textures with a CNC-milling machine through the design and parametrization of machine movements. WORM is an embodied system that supports human collaboration with a robot arm through manual craft actions. I conclude by discussing the implications of an action-oriented framework for digital fabrication and offer guidelines for system development that address software structure, design capabilities, human engagement with machines and materials, and forms of interdisciplinary approaches for development and evaluation.
Abstract
This colloquium will present a live performance, featuring acoustic instruments driving real-time procedural systems powered by Unreal Engine's MetaSounds, Niagara, Materials, and MetaHuman technologies.
Following the short performance, we will open a broader discussion on the creative potential of game technology in contemporary digital media. The discussion will explore how features originally designed for games can be reimagined to produce expressive instruments, rich interactivity, and dynamic real-time visuals. As game engines become both more comprehensive and more accessible, they offer artists new opportunities for distribution, audience exchange, and interdisciplinary exploration.
This talk invites artists, engineers, and researchers to consider the creative implications of working with game engines beyond their original domain.
Bios
Aaron McLeran is the audio engineering director at Epic Games working with a team developing all the audio tech in Unreal Engine. His team supports the games Epic makes as well as games made by Unreal Engine licensees and the community. His primary goal at Epic is to develop powerful interactive and procedural audio and music creation tools in a mainstream game engine that work both at the scale of independent artists and small teams as well as AAA, large-scale game development. He has a background in sound design, composition, music performance, and physics. He's worked on a variety of games and different game companies, plays jazz trumpet, and used to be a high school teacher. He graduated MAT in 2009.
Patrick Hart is a musician in Los Angeles who explores the intersection of procedural music, interactive art, and games. His music has received press in The Guardian, Billboard, and The Sunday Times. Patrick is currently working on a new music creation game at Aria Labs. In 2024 he received an Epic MegaGrant to build Unreal audio tools, and spoke about procedural music at Unreal Fest and GameSoundCon. Patrick's film, TV, and commercial credits include ESPN, HBO, Microsoft, Nike, and others.
For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to:
seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.
Sketches of Sensorium
Sketches for Sensorium showcases core elements of the late environmental artist Newton Harrison’s (1932 - 2022) long-term project, Sensorium for the World Ocean. It will premiere at the AlloSphere as a satellite to the UC Irvine Beall Center for Art and Technology’s forthcoming exhibition, Future Tense: Art, Complexity, and Uncertainty, produced in partnership with the 2024 Getty PST Art: Art and Science Collide initiative. The installation will incorporate immersive audio and visual scientific climate and ocean health data provided by the Ocean Health Index of the Halpern Lab at the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management.
Sketches for Sensorium is a project of the Center for the Study of the Force Majeure in collaboration with Virtual Planet Technologies, Almost Human Media, and the AlloSphere Research Group. It will premiere with an original spatialized composition and an interactive data world, following Newton’s wish to impart a sense of hope to audiences.
For more information, please visit:
www.independent.com/2024/09/11/sketches-of-sensorium-part-of-getty-pst-art-at-uc-santa-barbara
allosphere.ucsb.edu/research/sketches_of_sensorium/2024.html
As part of the research team, they wrote the software and created the generative and AI content for the study: "Audio-Visual System to Mitigate the Negative Effects on Stress and Depression in Confined Spaces and Extreme Environments."
The research field relates to neuro-architecture and focuses on Media and Design Interventions in Isolated and Extreme Environments (ICEs), utilizing generative design tools and Artificial Intelligence tools to create virtual environments that aim to reduce the negative psychological impacts of long-term isolation.
Leading the Greek expedition, Architect-Engineers Christina Balomenaki and Efharis Gourounti have made history as the first Greek women researchers to set foot in Antarctica. The research conducted during this mission will contribute to the scientific understanding of human adaptation in extreme environments and strengthen Greece's position in international polar research.
The project is jointly led by Professor Konstantinos-Alketas Oungrinis, Vice-Rector for Research and Innovation; Marianthi Liapi, Research Program Director at the Transformable Intelligent Environments Laboratory (TUC TIE Lab); and Professor Michael Zervakis, Rector of the Technical University of Crete and Director of the DISPLAY Lab at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
www.eurecapro.eu/tuc-scientific-expedition-in-antarctica
The title of the NSF award is Dynamic Control Systems for Manual-Computational Fabrication. Professor Jacobs was awarded the NSF Career Award to further her research in integrating skilled manual and material production with computational fabrication.
The CAREER Program offers the NSF's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.
Professor Jacobs thanks all of the amazing members the Expressive Computation Lab whose research contributed the intellectual foundations of this award.
NSF link: Dynamic Control Systems for Manual-Computational Fabrication
George Legrady: Scratching the Surface. Digital Pictures from the 1980s to Present.
RCM Galerie, Paris
Tuesday, December 17 2024 to Sunday February 16, 2025
32 rue de Lille, 75007
Tue-Fri 2pm-7pm & by appointment
whitehotmagazine.com/articles/32-rue-de-lille-paris/6789
Dr. Rincon is a Post Doctoral Research Fellow at the AlloSphere Research Facility at UC Santa Barbara. His interestes include Architectural Design/Engineering, Computational Design and Fabrication, New Media Architectures and Immersive VR Environments.
https://leonardo.info/blog/2025/01/21/recognition-of-leonardos-outstanding-peer-reviewers
α-Forest: An Immersive Sound and Light Journey Through Inner-consciousness Exploration
Production Team: Olifa Hsieh (MAT visiting scholar), Timothy Wood (MAT researcher), and Weihao Qiu (MAT PhD student).
The subconscious is where your intrinsic qualities thrive; where seeds of inspiration reside; and where many impulses, emotions, and thoughts are hidden and never expressed. Sometimes they only appear in dreams.
α-Forest is a participatory immersive theater with healing qualities, created by the following three artists: Olifa Ching-Ying Hsieh, Timothy Wood, and Weihao Qiu. The work integrates electronic sound, interactive design, and AI algorithmic imaging technology to capture the audience’s brainwaves (Electroencephalography, EEG) and collect data on their physical movements, resulting in real-time co-created content. At a residency base offered by the Experimental Forest of National Taiwan University, the artists collected unique forest sounds from a mountainous area in central Taiwan, Nantou. They also visited the region’s indigenous tribe and learned about their culture.
More about the exhibition (PDF)
The National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts
The Computer Music Tutorial, Second Edition (2023) by Curtis Roads
Curtis Roads, professor in Media Arts and Technology and affiliate faculty in Music at UCSB, has announced the publication of an expanded, updated, and fully revised Second Edition of his textbook The Computer Music Tutorial (2023, The MIT Press, 1257 pages).
Essential and state-of-the-art, The Computer Music Tutorial, Second Edition is a singular text that introduces computer and electronic music, explains its motivations, and puts topics into context. Curtis Roads's step-by-step presentation orients musicians, engineers, scientists, and anyone else new to computer and electronic music.
The new edition continues to be the definitive tutorial on all aspects of computer music, including digital audio, signal processing, musical input devices, performance software, editing systems, algorithmic composition, MIDI, and psychoacoustics, but the second edition also reflects the enormous growth of the field since the book's original publication in 1996. New chapters cover up-to-date topics like virtual analog, pulsar synthesis, concatenative synthesis, spectrum analysis by atomic decomposition, Open Sound Control, spectrum editors, and instrument and patch editors. Exhaustively referenced and cross-referenced, the second edition adds hundreds of new figures and references to the original charts, diagrams, screen images, and photographs in order to explain basic concepts and terms.
Features include:
New chapters on virtual analog, pulsar synthesis, concatenative synthesis, spectrum analysis by atomic decomposition, Open Sound Control, spectrum editors, instrument and patch editors, and an appendix on machine learning.
Two thousand references support the book's descriptions and point readers to further study.
Mathematical notation and program code examples used only when necessary.
Twenty-five years of classroom, seminar, and workshop use inform the pace and level of the material.
As Prof. Roads states: "I finished writing the first edition in 1993. It finally came out in 1996, the year I joined the UCSB Music faculty as a Visiting Associate Professor. Writing the Second Edition required going through the research literature in the field since 1993. It often felt overwhelming but I just had to keep going. In 2017 I devoted all my creative time to the project. I promised myself I would finish it in 2020, and at 10 PM on 31 December 2020 I finished writing. Time for Champagne! The production process took all of 2021 and most of 2022. In a way it was a perfect project for the pandemic lockdown, as it gave me a daily purpose in a time of isolation. The textbook has been the core of my teaching at UCSB."
An article about the release of the 2nd edition was published in the UCSB Current:
The book can be found at MIT Press:
mitpress.mit.edu/9780262044912/the-computer-music-tutorial
Professor Roads's previous books include Microsound (2001, The MIT Press) and Composing Electronic Music: A New Aesthetic (2015, Oxford University Press).
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Media Arts and Technology (MAT) at UCSB is a transdisciplinary graduate program that fuses emergent media, computer science, engineering, electronic music and digital art research, practice, production, and theory. Created by faculty in both the College of Engineering and the College of Letters and Science, MAT offers an unparalleled opportunity for working at the frontiers of art, science, and technology, where new art forms are born and new expressive media are invented.
In MAT, we seek to define and to create the future of media art and media technology. Our research explores the limits of what is possible in technologically sophisticated art and media, both from an artistic and an engineering viewpoint. Combining art, science, engineering, and theory, MAT graduate studies provide students with a combination of critical and technical tools that prepare them for leadership roles in artistic, engineering, production/direction, educational, and research contexts.
The program offers Master of Science and Ph.D. degrees in Media Arts and Technology. MAT students may focus on an area of emphasis (multimedia engineering, electronic music and sound design, or visual and spatial arts), but all students should strive to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries and work with other students and faculty in collaborative, multidisciplinary research projects and courses.
MAT Seminar Series: Game Engines and Art. Speakers: Aaron McLeran and Patrick Hart. Monday April 28, at 1PM PST via Zoom.
Sketches of Sensorium, an immersive audio visual event in UCSB's AlloSphere, will continue with shows in February, March and April. Reservations can be made below ↓
In a historic milestone for Greek polar research, MAT PhD students and architects Iason Paterakis and Nefeli Manoudaki are participating in the Technical University of Crete's TIE Lab's research project in Antarctica.
MAT Professor Jennifer Jacobs has been awarded the NSF CAREER Award to conduct research in Dynamic Control Systems for Manual-Computational Fabrication.
Professor George Legrady’s exhibit “Scratching the Surface” at the RCM Galerie in Paris, France, receives a great review by Jospeph Nechvatal in White Hot Magazine, February 2025.
Leonardo, one of the leading international journals of contemporary science and technology in the arts, has recognized Gustavo Rincon PhD for his outstanding contributions to the publication for his work as a peer reviewer. MAT congratulates Dr. Rincon for his tireless contributions to the field of media arts.
α-Forest: An Immersive Sound and Light Journey Through Inner-consciousness Exploration, is on exhibit at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts from January 18 - March 30, 2025.
The Second Edition (2023) of a book by Professor Curtis Roads, "The Computer Music Tutorial" has been released.
