UCSC Students tackle human waster with public space with "Slugs to Sludge" waste water project
 

Underneath the city, snaking unseen through a system of pipes, is a stinky, sticky sludge nobody wants to talk about: human waste. Read more 


UCSC receives NEA grant for art/science project on ocean ecology

  

April 23, 2014 By Scott Rappaport

UC Santa Cruz has been awarded a $45,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to support Blue Trail: Imagination and Innovation for Ocean Sustainability--a series of interactive visual and sonic art installations that will be spread out across the San Francisco waterfront.

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Under the Microscope: In Museums, schools, and research facilities scientists and artists are swapping methods to illuminate natural phenomena and solve global problems

by Suzanne Muchnic

When the Massachusetts Institute of Technology celebrated its 150th birthday two years ago, a group of professors organized a Festival of Art, Science & Technology. The bonanza of installations, concerts, kinetic illuminations, and new-media explorations "turned the campus upside down", says Evan Ziporyn, a composer and clarinetist who has been on the faculty for 20 years. Read more....


Tinkering in the Model Shop: Designing to Make the Abstract Tangible

by Hunter Whitney

"As a child, I loved building and playing with scale models of all kinds: planes, trains, and automobiles. These replicas taught me about aspects of their real counterparts and sparked many questions about their design—providing a great way to fully understand objects or processes by building them up and breaking them down.

The same basic idea can apply to designing scientific visualizations, and even physical representations, of everything from the chemical processes inside living cells to the gravitational dances of stars and galaxies." Read more....


5 Creative Ways To Get People To Pay Attention To The Ocean

For all the education about how much our human impact is destroying the ocean, not much is changing our behavior. Could some of these crazier projects do the trick?http://www.fastcoexist.com/1680896/5-creative-ways-to-get-people-to-pay-attention-to-the-ocean. Read more....

 

Art: Multimedia,SonicPLACE @ Intersection for the Arts

 Joshua Wyatt, Flavorpill

“All the world is full of invisible information. What are you walking through that can't be sensed? What is the threshold of our perception? Approaching these questions both scientifically and artistically, SonicPLACE embarks on a three-month residency at Intersection for the Arts. SonicPLACE gathers information from the light, movement, and sounds of people around it, and then expresses it back in a way that enunciates the previously insensible. As part of Soundwave's fifth biannual San Francisco summer residency, SonicPLACE is the perfect way to whet your senses for this year's sonic cuisine.” Read more..


Tina Baine, DIY: The joy of sharing what you make

Santa Cruz Sentinel News, Posted:   05/13/2012 01:30:53 AM PDT

There are a lot of good reasons to attend this year's Maker Faire, May 19-20, in San Mateo. For parents, it may be to expose their kids to inventive minds and encourage an interest in technology or engineering. For the crafty, it may be to learn a new skill, like knitting, coffee roasting or soldering. For inventors, it may be to satisfy a need to share an innovative idea or brainstorm with other makers. But possibly the best reason to attend Maker Faire, is to witness the warm handshake of art and science as they begin to rekindle an old friendship. Read More...

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ArtHERE: A Matchmaking Service For Urban Spaces And Art

Fast Company, by Ariel Schwartz

For every urban space covered in beautiful art, there are dozens of buildings--potential canvasas--lying bare. The Summer of Smart hackathon, a series of three hackathons this past summer in San Francisco that brought together artists, community activists, developers, and urban planners to work on urban problems, may have yielded a solution. Read More...


STEM into STEAM at UCSC by Eloise Shim
Monterey Tutoring Examiner, Science and the Arts, April 29, 2012

STEM which stands for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is adding a new dimension with the "A" for the arts, thus the newest scientific discipline STEAM. You might think that an organic flower's stem will evaporate into steam with other new discoveries in global warming and greenhouse gases that are constantly being studied at the university, but ...Read More


UCSC's OpenLab program blends disciplines for new approaches to solving problems

Review Magazine, by John C. Cannon,April 25, 2012

Last summer, visitors at the Tech Museum in San Jose had the chance to step off our planet and hurl a star into the cosmos.

On a screen in front of them lay a black hole waiting to yank in an errant star that visitors attempted to throw toward it at just the right angle and speed. A star isn’t sucked in and gobbled up by a black hole very often—in real life, Read More...


Kepler Explorer App Puts Distant Planets at Fingertips

SpaceRef Posted Wednesday, April 4, 2012

Armchair explorers of the cosmos can now have at their fingertips the nearly 2,000 distant planetary systems discovered by NASA's Kepler Mission. Kepler Explorer, an innovative app for iPads and iPhones developed by a team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, provides interactive displays of newly discovered planetary systems based on Kepler data. Read More...


OpenLab Kepler Explorer app puts distant planets at your fingertips

April 03, 2012, By Tim Stephens

Armchair explorers of the cosmos can now have at their fingertips the nearly 2,000 distant planetary systems discovered by NASA’s Kepler Mission. Kepler Explorer, an innovative app for iPads and iPhones developed by a team at the University of California, Santa Cruz, provides interactive displays of newly discovered planetary systems based on Kepler data. Read More….


Report on our new Kepler Explorer OpenLab app!!!

The app, called Kepler Explorer, provides interactive displays of the 2,300 alien planet candidates that NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope  has detected thus far. It’s available for free at the iTunes App Store and runs on Apple’s iPhone and iPad. It was developed by astronomers, artists and designers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Read More…


Jennifer Parker - Artist, Techie, Entrepreneur, Artist Founds OpenLab with Astrophysics colleague
Tuesday, October 25, 2011
By Christina Waters

Artists deal in making ideas visible. Science works with conceptual data, with ideas often inaccessible to non-scientists. Why couldn't art and science collaborate more creatively in order to uncover each other's mysteries?  At least that's what electronic sculptor Jennifer Parker wondered a year ago. And the result was OpenLab, a laboratory housed in the former foundry at Baskin Arts, where students and faculty from across the campus can come to engage in creative play. Read more...


KZSC Radio: Artist on Art Interview with OpenLab co-founder Amy Boewer
October 10, 2011

Local installation artist, Amy Boewer was the guest on Gamers on Game for October 10, 2011. Amy is Research Assistant and one of the student Founders of OpenLab at UCSC, and the Resident Artist in the UCSC AstroPhysics Department. She recently graduated from UCSC in the Art and History of Art and Visual Culture Programs. Read more…


OpenLab Astronomer Jonathan Forntey contributes to confirm first planet orbiting two stars

A world with multiple suns is a common trope in science fiction, as in the iconic double sunset in Star Wars. Scientific reality has now caught up, with a report from NASA’s Kepler mission of the first unambiguous detection of a planet orbiting two stars. Read More…


OpenLab Scientist, Erik Asphaug on NPR Morning Edition

feature on the origin of the lunar farside (Jutzi and Asphaug, Nature, Aug 4, 2011).

This made the front page of LA Times, Denver Post, many other papers worldwide. Read More…