Media Arts and Technology, UC Santa Barbara

Events

MAT Seminar Series: Onchain Generative Art: The World Computer vs The Casino. Speaker: Sterling Crispin. Monday, March 3rd, 2025 at 1pm PST via Zoom.

Abstract

The emergence of blockchains as an artistic medium has provided new possibilities for artists working with code. Ethereum and other smart contract blockchains allow artists to publish Turing-complete, self-executing code that permanently stores and processes data on the network. This represents the "World Computer" thesis of crypto—an open, decentralized computational layer—contrasted with the speculative "Casino" that has dominated headlines.

Beyond its reputation as a marketplace driven by hype and speculation, blockchain technology enables autonomous, trustless, and censorship-resistant software, creating a fertile ground for generative and code-based art to thrive onchain. These unique properties offer artists both new creative opportunities and an alternative to traditional gatekeepers, allowing for permanent, self-sustaining artworks that exist independently of any centralized authority.

This talk will explore blockchain as both an economic instrument and a creative medium. We’ll discuss how artists can engage with crypto meaningfully beyond speculation and imagine what the future of onchain generative art might look like as the world accelerates.

Bio

Sterling Crispin (born 1985) is a conceptual artist and software engineer who creates smart contracts, generative art, machine intelligence, and techno-sculpture. Crispin’s artwork oscillates between the computational beauty of nature, and our conflicting cultural narratives about the apocalypse.

Crispin’s artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide, including ZKM Karlsruhe, The Mexican National Center for the Arts, The Seoul Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, The Deutsches Hygiene Museum Dresden, and the Venice Biennale. As well as published in The New York Times, Frieze, Wired, MIT Press, BOMB, Rhizome, ARTNews and Art in America.

His corporate career as a software engineer and designer has been focused in the AR and VR industry since 2014 at companies like Apple, and Snap as well as several startups.

sterlingcrispin.com

For more information about the MAT Seminar Series, go to:
seminar.mat.ucsb.edu.

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 ↓

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:

news.ucsb.edu/2024/021608/immersive-ocean-health-project-premieres-ucsbs-allosphere-part-getty-pst-art

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

Past Events

News

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.

George Legrady: Scratching the Surface. Digital Pictures from the 1980s to Present.

RCM Galerie, Paris

www.rcmgalerie.com

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

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.

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, is on exhibit at the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts from January 18 - March 30, 2025.

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 Second Edition (2023) of a book by Professor Curtis Roads, "The Computer Music Tutorial" has been released.

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:

news.ucsb.edu/2023/021272/core-textbook-computer-music-distills-vast-information-space-definitive-tutorial

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).

A team of MAT students led by MAT Chair and transLAB Director Professor Marcos Novak designed and installed an immersive and interactive exhibit called the "Synaptic Time Tunnel" for the 2023 SIGGRAPH Conference at the Los Angeles Convention Center.

Synaptic Time Tunnel, SIGGRAPH 2023.

Sponsored by Autodesk, the Synaptic Time Tunnel was a tribute to 50 years of innovation and achievement in the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques that have been presented at the SIGGRAPH conferences.

An international audience of more than 14,275 attendees from 78 countries enjoyed the conference and its Mobile and Virtual Access component.

Contributors:

Marcos Novak - MAT Chair and transLAB Director, UCSB
Graham Wakefield - York University, UCSB
Haru Ji - York University, UCSB
Nefeli Manoudaki - transLAB, MAT/UCSB
Iason Paterakis - transLAB, MAT/UCSB
Diarmid Flatley - transLAB, MAT/UCSB
Ryan Millet - transLAB, MAT/UCSB
Kon Hyong Kim - AlloSphere Research Group, MAT/UCSB
Gustavo Rincon - AlloSphere Research Group, MAT/UCSB
Weihao Qiu - Experimental Visualization Lab, MAT/UCSB
Pau Rosello Diaz - transLAB, MAT/UCSB
Alan Macy - BIOPAC Systems Inc.
JoAnn Kuchera-Morin - AlloSphere Research Group, MAT/UCSB
Devon Frost - MAT/UCSB
Alysia James - Department of Theater and Dance/UCSB

More information about the Synaptic Time Tunnel can be found in the following news articles:

Forbes.com: SIGGRAPH, Autodesk Take Time Tunnel Through Computer Graphics History on 50th Anniversary

Forbes.com: SIGGRAPH 2023 Highlights

PR Newswire: SIGGRAPH 2023 Conference Commemorates 50 Years of Innovations With Growth in Contributed Works and In-person Attendees

s2023.siggraph.org

translab.mat.ucsb.edu/S50_SynapticTimeTunnel

translab.mat.ucsb.edu

Past News

Alumni Testimonials

"With a deep interest in exploring sound, not only creatively, but technically and scientifically, I began my studies at MAT at UCSB. It was here, through academic discipline and perseverance, alongside professors and colleagues, that I was able to hone my skills and begin my successful career.

Years later, I am leading development of game audio and augmented reality technology at Apple.

The strong academic foundations that I gained in spatial audio, sound synthesis, and audio engine architecture have allowed me to achieve even greater success in my career. I will always be grateful to those who helped me take those first steps to success!"

David Thall
Lead Audio Programmer
Game and Augmented Reality Technology
Apple
"As a UCSB MAT Master's student (2002-2004), I benefited greatly from the required and elective courses taught by professional leaders with broad perspectives, both technical and humanistic. This helped me to improve my research skills, and to refine my academic vision, which culminated in a PhD (2009) from UCSB Electrical and Computer Engineering specializing in Digital Signal Processing. Since that time I have been employed at several academic institutions around Europe, where my broad technical and humanistic perspective has been unique and advantageous."

Bob L. Sturm, Associate Professor
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science
Royal Institute of Technology KTH
Stockholm, Sweden
"As one of the first graduates of the Media Arts and Technology PhD program, I have found the experiences provided by the MAT community invaluable to both my professional development and personal enjoyment of creating technology-based experiences, throughout life. I have been employed for more than 10 years now in the department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University Copenhagen, where I teach both interaction design and real-time signal processing for audio and music performance. As Associate Professor, I guide students to create their own software and hardware tools, concepts, and practices for creating new sonic and embodied interactions, as well as running the Augmented Performance Lab. Together with my colleagues, I helped start the Sound and Music Computing masters program in 2014, and co-chaired the international New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME) conference in 2017."

Dan Overholt
Associate Professor
Aalborg Univeristy, Copenhagen
Denmark
"MAT is a rare graduate program in that it operates more like an creative ecosystem -- your work as a researcher is significant and connects to others. People care a lot about what you are doing, and invest thought into your own thinking. Throughout my eight years of study, from 2007 to 2015, and as a postdoctoral student afterwards, this supportive environment provided the technological, financial, and intellectual resources necessary for me to take risks in my work. As a result, I was able to dive deep into subjects I thought were off limits to my cognitive function, and achieve the great satisfaction of learning how to learn better. It is a testament to the culture fostered there that an experimental filmmaker such as myself entering the program with very basic programming skills can now make regular contributions to mathematics journals, work as a real-time computer graphics programmer in the DTLA arts district, be asked to consult on science fiction television dramas, and innovate novel geometrical algorithms of use in architecture. I think the MAT program at UCSB is a hidden gem -- you enter it with one direction in mind, and come out brilliantly refracted into a spectrum of possibilities."

Pablo Colapinto
Oblong Industries Inc & Independent Artist
Los Angeles
"The education and mentorship I received as an MAT student gave me the skills to discuss my work critically and in the context of the rich history of media arts; and has been pivotal in having my work accepted in exhibitions around the world, including Dubai, Montreal, Tehran, Hong Kong, New York and cities throughout the US. Further, my PhD in MAT was instrumental in securing my position as Curator of Interactive Media for MOXI, the Wolf Museum of Exploration and Innovation. In that capacity, almost half of the artists I have curated into MOXI have been MAT alumni, MAT faculty, MAT students, and distinguished media artists who I met as part of my work in the MAT program. My collaborations with MAT students and alumni are ongoing, and I continue to be grateful for the education, mentorship and community of the UCSB MAT program."

Marco Pinter
Computational Artist
Curator of Interactive Media, MOXI (The Wolf Museum of Exploration + Innovation)
Director of Software Innovation, InTouch Health

Autonomous Robots	Lavin	Melange
Hive	Kinetic	Allotope Krotona