Category: Publications

I3 was born, representing Interesting Incomplete Ideas. As the lab geared up to celebrate its 10th anniversary in 2023, it provided the perfect opportunity to reconnect with lab alums. The primary goal was to extend invitations for the DecaDance, the milestone celebration, and to explore whether any alumni harbored intriguing ideas left unfinished. In reaching out to several alums, Misal engaged in captivating conversations. He aims to compile and document their I3s so that current and future lab members have a reference point to reach out to for inspiration if they find themselves pursuing ideas along similar lines.

Misal is a graduate student pursuing a Master’s in Finance at The University of Texas at Dallas. He also has a Master’s degree in the field of Physics. Moreover, he has research experience in the field of Atmospheric Science. He is a Financial Coordinator at ArtSciLab, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration across cultures and disciplines. He decided to study physics and finance because his interests lie in these two highly distinct fields: Cosmology and Investments. He believes both areas require a similar approach to analyzing data, identifying patterns, and making informed decisions based on evidence.

A stumble into Text-to-Image Neural Networks

This white paper covers how to get the images you want, how to tell if an image is generated, how to use it in the real world, and ethical and moral issues that arise from this technology.

If you ever wanted to express your ideas really fast, usually you’d make what we call a napkin sketch, something to write down the overall concepts so we can see if the idea is worth pursuing. The technology which he used helps create what he would consider very refined napkin sketches. Here is an AI model called DALL-E 2. It was developed by a company called OpenAI and the model generates images you want from a text or image input. What I have been trying to do is explore the limits as to what the tool can do, and the functionality of this. What are its implications?

One thing he noticed about this is that there are mainly two types of people who generate images. One from the first type would keep his prompts vague and use it to generate new ideas. The second type he call the shopping list prompters. One from this group would have an image in his head and use the AI to create it, listing as much detail as possible.

But how is this useful? He had a friend who he met from this interest get to the New York Times because he submitted one of his generations to an art contest and won. Inspired by this, he teamed up with a friend to make a demo game to show that you could get ideas for game assets with AI-generated art. He also plans on printing out stickers based off of AI generations but as of right now he does not have access to that technology.

Clement Lee likes to make illustrations, design, use artificial intelligence, and type. He is collaborating in the ArtSciLab and is studying in the field of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at UT Dallas.

To the Deceased and Survivors of Domestic Violence

This MFA thesis is about spreading the awareness of domestic violence that has risen since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic. Photo montage videos will exhibit a variety of notecards that will shed light on a glimpse of survivors’ or their confidants’ thoughts after or during a critical predicament. By including graphic design images, I will show statistics on the drastic rise of domestic violence during and after the covid-19 pandemic. Through this creative project, I iterate on my initial participatory installation (2020). My installation creates a connection with survivors, their confidants, and viewers.

Taylor Green is graphic design artist born and raised in Texas. She has done logo designing, branding art, and editorial design while continuing her studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her values within my work are accountability, attention to detail, quality, transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement. The visuals she create present a significant amount of detail and attention. Designing visuals can create an impact on those that come across the illustrations. The impact that she want to have on the community is positive and informative.

A CASE STUDY OF ARTSCILAB RECRUITMENT PROCESS

The “Student Hiring Whitepaper Version 2.0” details the findings of an experiment conducted by student lab participants to direct the recruiting and recruitment process with the extension of version 1 white paper. The lead author presents crucial insights that were learned during the hiring process to solve the questions concerning it and to encourage current and potential members in realizing its intricate nature. It explores the factors that are considered when employing students for the position of Communication Producer.

Rani is working towards her Master’s degree in Business Analytics with a preference for Data Engineering from The University of Texas at Dallas. She has experience in the industry through her work on academic and independent projects, and she hopes to become a Data Engineer or Software Developer. As ArtSciLab Manager, she collaborates closely with Dr.Roger Malina and Dr.Kathryn Evans and is working on several initiatives with ArtSciLab. Rani hopes to employ her analytical and management abilities to the advantage of the lab and the surrounding community.

A case study for Taipei Expo Park of Street Dancer Occupying
Public Space

Occupying public space is a common action and dynamic among people. People can stay in a park occupying a bench for an afternoon or sit in a train station hallway waiting for the train. People could have many different purposes to occupy the public. Dancing in public spaces is an everyday activity in street dance communities. In the case of Taipei Expo Park, there are spots often occupied by street dancers for practicing or rehearsing their dance.

While Taipei Expo Park had met multiple times of transformations by the government for different uses and policies, these public spaces are originally not designed for the activity that street dancers do. This phenomenon shows there is a gap between the design of the space and its usage by people who enter it. Under the paradigm of designing public spaces, “community-building” (社區營造 Shequ Ying Zao) is one of the most popular terms in Taiwanese discourse on the topic of urban planning.

This paper seeks to understand how street dancers complicate the idea of community – building by reappropriating a space when they enter it, and what this means when an urban design plan does not meet the people’s needs, necessitating them to reshape the meaning of urban design. He want to raise street dancers in Taiwan as an example that challenges the meaning of this community-building interaction between the government and the people, and how this phenomenon shows the position of the dancers in the social hierarchy, which embodies the theory of Bourdieu’s cultural capital and symbolic violence

Chi-Peng Tsui was born in Taipei Taiwan. He started breakdancing in 2008. After he completed his associate program, he went to Tamkang University for pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree, majoring in Mass Communications in 2016-2020. From 2016-2017, he entered Red Bull Energy Drink as a Marketing Intern. After he finished his degree in Mass Communications, he entered the Arts, Technology, and Emerging Communications graduate program for pursuing a Master of Arts at The University of Texas at Dallas.

Roger F. Malina is a space scientist and astronomer, with a specialty in extreme and ultraviolet astronomy, space instrumentation and optics. He served as director of the Observatoire Astronomique de Marseille Provence and was NASA Principal Investigator for the Extreme Ultraviolet Satellite project at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also a publisher and editor in the new emerging research fields that connect the sciences and engineering to the arts, design and humanities. Since 1982, he has served as Executive Editor of the Leonardo Publications at MIT Press. He founded, and serves on the board of two nonprofits, ISAST in San Francisco and OLATS in Paris, which advocate and document the work of artists involved in contemporary science and technology. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Art and Technology and Professor of Physics, at the University of Texas at Dallas and Directeur de Recherche for the CNRS in France. He serves as the Associate Director of ATEC, and founded the ArtSciLab in the ATEC program fall 2013.

Carousel by ArtSciLab

The ArtSciLab (A.S.L) Carousel was created by a previous ArtSciLab member, Mahmoud Elkarmalawy. This project is intended to be a multi-modal curation system that showcases works created by members and colleagues of the ArtSciLab. Along with a variety of schools outside of ATEC within the University of Texas at Dallas. Collaborations can range from white papers, artwork, videos, sound, etc. If done well, the lab’s multidisciplinary approach to research projects will be on prominent display. The goal for the carousel is to help collaborators and members of the lab to have a network with others of the same interest.

The ArtSciLab Carousel is a project created by a previous lab member named, Mahmoud Elkarmalawy. The idea for the project is to have art, science, and art/science work rotating within the Edith O’ Donnell building. Eventually, extending out to a variety of areas throughout the campus. There are a group of individuals that organize this project called, The Carousel Collaborators (CACO). Including Taylor Green, Swati Anwesha and Caroline Trotter. Group members will have a chance to create a piece of work in their field of interest, if they would like. After completing their work, an artist’s presentation is allowed to display the completion in the Dean’s lobby. The results of this operation are to exemplify new projects to give onlookers different perspectives on art and science work.

Taylor Green is graphic design artist born and raised in Texas. She has done logo designing, branding art, and editorial design while continuing her studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her values within my work are accountability, attention to detail, quality, transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement. The visuals she create present a significant amount of detail and attention. Designing visuals can create an impact on those that come across the illustrations. The impact that she want to have on the community is positive and informative.

Version 1.0 Theoretical Approach and Initial Methodology

In this paper we begin an attempt to understand and explain the ontological origins,
epistemological structure, and both social and neurological mapping of concepts. Through mapping out
complex networks of concepts, people, and books from small scale local environments to intercontinental links, we attempt to analyze connections in new ways. The aim of this is to gain insight into
how distributed cognitive networks unfold and form, along with finding novel ways of revealing latent or
hidden structure in such networks. In analyzing the network of concepts, people, and books that
constitute the Art-Sci lab at UT Dallas and expanding our scope to an ever-evolving international web of
concepts and people, we seek to reveal any patterns that emerge across levels of analysis within these
distributed cognitive networks.

To explore this in an applied way, the conceptual basis and initial steps
of three different experimental projects will be detailed. Brain of Books (B.o.B.) seeks to find the
conceptual links between books on the shelves in our lab. Further, it aims to find the relevance of these
connections for interlinking people in the lab, authors of titles and those cited within titles. Constellation
Mapper is an online forum for facilitating the formation of a widely distributed network of people and
concepts as a social media platform. Digital Iterative Glossary (D.I.G.) focuses on forming evolving
glossaries of concepts and context-relevant definitions for groups or networks of people (e.g., the ArtSci Lab).

In this paper, we will consider the area of 4E cognitive science as the contextual landscape.
We will lay out this perspective and its relevance and various implications on the current topic and set
of projects. As well, we will detail the reasons for the object of study (books) in the experimental
approach of the B.o.B. project and have a discussion on fractality and spreading activation in
connection to complex networks. Finally, preliminary steps, methods, and results will be detailed, along
with a discussion on the potential steps to come.

A stumble into Text-to-Image Neural Networks

This white paper covers how to get the images you want, how to tell if an image is generated, how to use it in the real world, and ethical and moral issues that arise from this technology.

If you ever wanted to express your ideas really fast, usually you’d make what we call a napkin sketch, something to write down the overall concepts so we can see if the idea is worth pursuing. The technology which he used helps create what he would consider very refined napkin sketches. Here is an AI model called DALL-E 2. It was developed by a company called OpenAI and the model generates images you want from a text or image input. What I have been trying to do is explore the limits as to what the tool can do, and the functionality of this. What are its implications?

One thing he noticed about this is that there are mainly two types of people who generate images. One from the first type would keep his prompts vague and use it to generate new ideas. The second type he call the shopping list prompters. One from this group would have an image in his head and use the AI to create it, listing as much detail as possible.

But how is this useful? He had a friend who he met from this interest get to the New York Times because he submitted one of his generations to an art contest and won. Inspired by this, he teamed up with a friend to make a demo game to show that you could get ideas for game assets with AI-generated art. He also plan on printing out stickers based off of AI generations but as of right now he do not have access to that technology.

Clement Lee likes to make illustrations, design, use artificial intelligence, and type. He is collaborating in the ArtSciLab and is studying in the field of Arts, Humanities, and Technology at UT Dallas.