An IPaT-sponsored project combining art and technology is one of four Georgia Tech projects selected to appear next month at a festival in Washington, D.C. The ACCelerate: ACC Smithsonian Creativity and Innovation Festival, October 13-15 at the National Museum of American History, celebrates creativity and innovation with a focus on science, engineering, art, and design.

The festival features performances, conversational talks, and nearly 50 interactive installations from 15 ACC schools. Georgia Tech will send four projects created by students, faculty, and researchers, including Creative Collisions. The project is a collaboration between Georgia Tech Research Scientists Laura Levy, Clint Zeagler, and Scott Gilliland and Los Angeles-based performance artist Katherine Helen Fisher. Last fall, the group facilitated a series of workshops to discuss how artists and technologists can work together; they also created an interactive garment. “Le Monstre” is a fun, “Fraggle Rock” type of creation that includes sensors and accelerometers and encourages audience participation. Fisher wore the garment in her performance piece Characters last March at the Ferst Center for the Arts.

The team behind Creative Collisions also recently won a design award at the International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC), September 11-15 in Maui, Hawaii. Their paper, Le Monstre: An Interactive Participatory Performance Costume won the Best Design Exhibition Award in the Aesthetics category. ISWC, held in conjunction with the Ubicomp 2017 conference, brings together researchers, fashion designers, product vendors and other related professionals to share information and advances in wearable computing. This year, the conference accepted 11 Georgia Tech papers.

Partners on Creative Collisions include the Georgia Tech Wearable Computing Center, the Interactive Media Technology Center, and the Office of the Arts. The project is funded by IPaT as part of the Research and Engagement Seed Grants Program.

Learn more about Creative Collisions and the team’s participation in ACCelerate at the GVU Center Brown Bag, September 28 at 11:30 a.m. in the Technology Square Research Building.