An Audience-Interactive Multimedia Production on the Brain

A multimedia planetarium show, "Gray Matters: The Brain Movie," was created to teach fundamental scientific concepts about the human brain. During the show, the planetarium dome represents a giant brain enclosing the audience. Audience members play the role of neurons in various simulations and representations of brain function. This leads to new ways of thinking about audience interactivity in theaters, with many applications to art and entertainment. The collaborators will also discusses some of the problems of large art/science collaborations.
http://occipita.cfa.cmu.edu/brain/public/

Rob Fisher-
is an internationally recognized artist who has received many commissions for monumental sculptures in Japan, Saudi Arabia and the US. His computer-assisted artwork has been the subject of numerous articles including the Wall Street Journal and Leonardo and has been featured on CNN and the USIA Worldnet. He has lectured and exhibited internationally. His work is included in numerous museum collections and was commissioned for the 1996 Olympics. Fisher serves on the Executive Board of Directors of the International Sculpture Center. Fisher was recently awarded a major public art commission for the Philadelphia International Airport Arrivals Hall to be completed in 2002. Fisher's work will be the subject of a retrospective travelling exhibit in 2002 at Southern Alleghenies Museum of Art.

Fisher received a B.Sc. Degree in Humanities, Engineering and Visual Design from MIT in 1961 and a M.Sc. in Industrial Design from Syracuse in 1965. He was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to Norway in 1961 and studied in Rome in 1962. From 1997-2001 he was a Senior Research Artist at Carnegie Mellon University. He is a Fellow of the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at CMU where he directed several audience interactive planetarium shows funded by the National Science Foundation.

Rob Fisher
228 North Allegheny Street
Bellefonte, PA 16823
TEL: 814 355 1458
FAX: 814 353 9060
EMAIL: glenunion@aol.com
URLs: http://www.sculpture.org/portfolio/
http://www-art.cfa.cmu.edu/fisher/

John Archie Pollock-
is an Associate Professor of Biology having received his PhD. in Biophysics at Syracuse University1984. Additional postdoctoral training in neurobiology and molecular genetics was carried out at California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, CA. Dr. Pollock served as a science advisor on the first interactive planetarium show, "Journey into the Living Cell;" a project funded by the National Science Foundation. Pollock also served as science advisor and co-director on "Gray Matters: The Brain Movie," our second National Science Foundation funded project. Pollock is currently the Producer/Director for a third Planetarium project on Tissue Engineering, which is funded by the National Institutes of Health..

Dr. Pollock has been an educator for college and graduate school as well as junior high and high school. He has lectured on topics including neurobiology, developmental biology, light and electron microscopy, physics, calculus, astronomy, and philosophy. For over 15 years, he has carried out basic science research on brain development supported by the March of Dimes, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. He has published over 30 scholarly papers and has given numerous presentations and lectures. He has also created and directed six films, animation shorts and videos.

John A. Pollock
Biological Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213
Phone: 412-855-4043
Fax: 412-268-7129
EMAIL: john.pollock@andrew.cmu.edu
URLs: http://info.bio.cmu.edu/Research/Faculty/Pollock.html
"The Tissue Engineering Show"
http://www.ptei.org/educational_programs/planetarium_project.html


Roger B. Dannenberg-
is a Senior Research Computer Scientist and Artist at Carnegie Mellon University where he received a Ph.D. in Computer Science in1982. He is internationally known for his research in the field of computer music. His current work includes research on computer accompaniment of live musicians, content-based music retrieval, interactive media, and high-level languages for sound synthesis. Products based on his computer accompaniment research are used by music students around the world. His Just-In-Time Lecture Project produces a system for instruction and training using digital media.

Dr. Dannenberg sometimes poses as a trumpet player and composer, and he has performed in concert halls ranging from the historic Apollo Theater in Harlem to the modern Espace de Projection at IRCAM in Paris. His most recent musical efforts involve real-time computer graphics and computer music systems that interact with live musicians. Dannenberg also performs regularly with the Roger Humphries Big Band in Pittsburgh.

Roger B. Dannenberg
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA 15213

Phone: 412-268-3827
Fax: 412-268-5576
EMAIL: rbd@cs.cmu.edu
URL: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rbd

NEXT

page last modified 09/30/01