How is what we design and engineer guided by what we can imagine? How are our imagination and understanding inspired by our ability to visualize? 

The two-week Salon for Vision: I IMAGINE, I SEE, I MAKE is an experimental platform that engages the campus around those themes and their role at Georgia Tech as the premier 21st century technological university.  The exhibit closes Thursday, May 12 with a panel discussion at 5pm in the College of Architecture Reinisch-Pierce Auditorium.

Hosted in the Hinman Research Building, the physical exhibit showcases work from students and faculty in the Colleges of Liberal Arts, Architecture, Computing, and Engineering.  There are both 3-dimensional and digital works that range from attempts to understand the multiple facets of traffic modeling and management, to exploring the connection between visualization and music; from architectural projects that explore sustainable waste, to virtual game worlds; and from discussions of how innovation is expressed in patents, to discussions of the role of computational models in the making of new forms of ornament.  The salon also offered three discussion panels.

The salon was initiated by Barbara Maria Stafford, visualization scholar and Distinguished Visiting Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture and supported in part by the H. Bruce McEver Program for Engineering and the Liberal Arts.  Stafford views the salon as a point of departure for advancing the horizons of trans-disciplinary education.

“The Salon for Vision is a response to the strategic plan,” Stafford told those gathered for the May 3 opening reception.  “This is an opportunity to think of Georgia Tech as a place for possibilities, of experiment across art, humanities, engineering, and computing.” 

What could/should be the role of the Arts at Tech and of Tech on the Arts? That is the subject for the salon’s closing discussion.  Aaron Bobick, Chair and Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, who will moderate, said that the strategic goal is to “create a culture where art is used to reflect technology” and that Tech Arts are “an interesting way to frame technology and technical problems, a visceral way to connect to them.”  Bobick highlighted that new industries are emerging at the boundaries of art technology and that Tech is already innovating in emerging disciplines such as music technology, computational media, and digital media. Interestingly, just this week, video games like those created in the Digital Media program, crossed the technology/art boundary by becoming recognized as art as defined by new submission guidelines for The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) which are included a new section called "Arts in Media," which includes video games. 

Panelists for the closing program are Joe Bankoff, CEO of Woodruff Arts Center; Ian Bogost, Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Program in Digital Media, School of Literature, Communication, and Culture; Gil Weinberg, Associate Professor of Music Technology, College of Architecture, and Alan Balfour, Dean of the College of Architecture.  

Learn more about the exhibit