The Interarts salons are always a great time to show work and see what other faculty and students are up too. With Presentations from three students and three faculty, our April salon was particularly good.

WIth presentations by faculty members Jason Geistweidt, Greg Corness, Taylor Hokanson, and interdisciplinary arts students Adrienne Ciskey, Joanna Buese, and Levi Sherman, Our final salon of the semester was stellar.

Levi and Adrienne gave updates on their thesis work, which will be going up in two weeks at the Center for Book and Paper Arts. Joanna discussed a character named leonard she has been developing for over a year, but just recently gave an on-line presence.

Jason Geistweidt discussed his collaboration with The World Opera where he set up a system for large scale telematic performance. As someone personally interested in telematics it was interesting to here how the performers learned to work with the limitations of the technology, specifically latency.

Greg Corness discussed how his work relates to Human Computer Interaction and how he approaches art, specifically theatre, as a laboratory for human experience. One of his pieces that most caught my attention was his installation Nite_Aura which was presented at the NIME (New Interfaces For Musical Expression) conference in 2007. In this piece, visitors are invited to enter a “field of stars” and have their movement affect the sounds and visuals from the installation.

Taylor Hokanson, showed us a number of his interactive projects that include a keyboard that you have to hit with a hammer, a hilarious interactive pillsbury dough boy, and his open source CNC machine project. What I found most interesting was hearing how his decision to keep the CNC machine open source allowed him to collaborate with people around the world on the development of the project.

Once again, the interarts salon rocked. I hope this tradition continues in the program after we’ve gone.