DUKE PRESIDENT TOURS EAST DUKE AND SMITH WAREHOUSE
Duke University President Richard H. Brodhead
President Richard H. Brodhead toured the reconfigured and new facilities in East Duke Building and the Smith Warehouse on February 19. Accompanying him were Hans van Miegroet, Chair of Art, Art History & Visual Studies, and Gregson Davis, Dean of Humanities. Brodhead began his tour in East Duke Building, where he viewed the new digital video projection by William Noland, Occulted, and the new plasma screen digital installation by William Seaman, Architecture of Association, in the main corridor. New faculty and student works will be regularly presented on the digital video and plasma screen projection equipment.
L: Bill Seaman, Architecture of Association; R: William Noland, Occulted
From there he walked through the Visual Resources Center’s newly created Architecture/Design Lab, where student Charles Sparkman’s senior distinction thesis, Black Mountain Bauhaus, was on display, printed on the recently acquired Canon iPF8100 12-ink plotter printer.
Senior visual studies major Charles Sparkman’s works in the new Architecture/Design Lab of the Visual Resources Center.
Architecture/Design Lab, Visual Resources Center
Architecture/Design Lab, Visual Resources Center
From East Duke, the group traveled to the Smith Warehouse, where the newly constructed studios and offices for the Visual Studies Initiative in Bay 11 were explored. These facilities include offices, studios, and communal work spaces for students, faculty, staff, and research groups from Art, Art History & Visual Studies; Computer Science; Documentary Studies; English; Information Science + Information Studies; Kimberly J. Jenkins Chair for New Technologies and Society; Program in Literature; Visualization Technology Group, Pratt School of Engineering; and the Duke Visual Studies Initiative (see http://visualstudies.duke.edu/).
Left to right: Hans van Miegroet (Chair, Art, Art History & Visual Studies), Gregson Davis (Dean of Humanities), Marion Monson (Program Coordinator, Visual Studies Initiative), and Richard H. Brodhead (President, Duke University) review student graphics projects during a tour of the Smith Warehouse’s new Visual Studies Initiative facilities.
Mini-LINK Wall, Bay 11, Smith Warehouse
Gaming Lab, “Virtual Peace” displayed, Bay 11, Smith Warehouse
(see http://news.duke.edu/2008/11/virtualpeace.html)
Faculty Studio, Bay 11, Smith Warehouse
Gaming Lab, “Virtual Peace” displayed, Bay 11, Smith Warehouse
(see http://news.duke.edu/2008/11/virtualpeace.html)
Green Screen Wall, Bay 11, Smith Warehouse
Duke University received a $2.5 million grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create the Visual Studies Initiative, a broad-based effort to improve how visual images are understood and to foster research and teaching in this area. “Visual studies” was identified as an institutional priority in “Making a Difference,” Duke’s current strategic plan, and ties into the university’s focus on the arts and humanities. Part of the grant allows Duke to hire new faculty members; create new undergraduate and graduate courses and a major in visual studies; provide funding for undergraduates to pursue summer research projects; fund collaborative projects; and enhance the library’s digital resources. The grant also pays for a series of short-term visits by scholars who hold public lectures and events. In addition, funds have been used to establish graduate fellowship endowments and been matched by funds from Financial Aid Initiative Challenge, part of Duke’s $300 million Financial Aid Initiative.
The Visual Studies Initiative at Duke encompasses the disciplines of art, art history, and film studies as traditionally pursued, as well as the humanities and social sciences more broadly. It also includes both scholars who study the visual and the artists and other practitioners who create it. A distinctive feature of the initiative is its inclusion of engineering and the computational sciences as part of exploring and understanding the visual in a variety of disciplines.
Photography for this section: Jack Edinger
FACULTY EXHIBITION AT CORNELL
Merrill Shatzman, Improvisations #4, woodcut construction, 2008. Collection of Shirley Drechsel and Wayne Vaughn.
Prints by Merrill Shatzman opens at the Cornel University Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art on April 4, 2009 and runs through July 5. Shatzman, associate professor of the practice of visual arts, “creates large luminous black-and-white woodcuts that accentuate language and landscape.” Shatzman’s intricate compositions are influenced by Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, and Meso-American writing systems.
BOOK ON ELECTRONIC MEDIA BY ALUMNUS
Phaidon Press has just published Art and Electronic Media by Edward Shanken (Ph.D., 2001). Phaidon describes the text as "the first comprehensive international survey of art in the myriad forms of electronic media, including light, robotics, networks, virtual reality and the Web." The book includes works by over 150 artists, some familiar—Jenny Holzer, Bruce Nauman, James Turrell, and Mario Merz—plus emerging and recent pioneers-Robert Lazzarini, Blast Theory, Granular Synthesis, Simon Penny, Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca, and Mikami Seiko. Art and Electronic Media "outlines the importance of figures previously neglected by art history, including engineers, technicians, and collaborators. It provides a lucid, accessible, and authoritative evaluation of continually developing media. As part of the Themes and Movements series, it combines a substantial survey essay, many color illustrations with informative captions, and a wide-ranging anthology of original documents."
Shanken is Universitair Docent, New Media, Department of Media Studies, University of Amsterdam.
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