Acting Chair Joseph Cancellaro composed the music score for the film Night River directed by Irving Gamboa, which was accepted into the short category at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Cancellaro also composed the score for the film documentary Lowlands released in 2009 and directed and written by Columbia faculty Peter Thompson. Lowlands received its East Coast premiere in October of 2011 and was also screened at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago during the same month.

Department Chair Annette Barbier was a featured (invited) artist at the International Digital Media and Arts Association conference in October, as well as having two works (in collaboration with Drew Browning) in the IDEAS art exhibit (at the same conference): Puff, an interactive installation in which blowing on a wind sensor allows the participant to see delightful responses in his/her self-image, and video clips. It was created in PD/GEM real-time data flow language and uses an Arduino micro-controller and Modern Devices’ wind sensor. Also exhibited Winds of Change, a video that addresses the housing boom and bust as seen through a metaphorical window in a formerly modest neighborhood.

Barbier, as a member of the collaborative unreal-estates, with V1b3 (Video in the Built Environment) and rootoftwo, received a Propeller Fund grant for their planned work: Expose, Intervene, Occupy: Re-interpreting Public Space, an augmented reality application for internet enabled mobile devices that will interrogate the meaning of public space using models, images, text and movies overlaid on locations in Chicago’s loop.

Annette Barbier and faculty member Niki Nolin with collaborator Nancy Gaziano exhibited Brood in July 2011, in the Interactive Arts and Media Project Room. Brood featured birds as the central theme with multimedia works presenting real and metaphorical applications of birds, eggs, nests and cages as well as other installations.

Niki Nolin and Nancy Gaziano’s work, titled Volatile Memories, is a series of fictional spaces or devices that represented the various connections between the tactile and ethereal natures of poetry and art. Works explored the use of combined disciplines—poetry and media arts—and incorporated reclaimed materials with other bird references including glass, hair, wood, lens, feathers, nests, bones, eggs, and salt.

Niki Nolin, Suzanne Cohan-Lange and Sherry Antonini also exhibited the collaborative work, Little Black Dress, at Frederick Meijer Garden and Sculpture Park, Grand Rapids, Michigan as part of Sculpture Today: New Forces, New Forms, which runs to December 31, 2011 as part of ArtPrize, September 21 – October 9, 2011.

Adjunct faculty Sal Barry was very active in 2011. During the spring semester, he taught web design skills to 7th grade students at Gray Elementary School in Chicago’s Portage Park neighborhood. He curated the Interactive Arts and Media exhibit “Art of Play 4” in February, and an interview with Sal about the exhibit was broadcasted on Video Game Television (VGTVnow.com). At a July seminar entitled “Convergence Learning: Using Technology & Media to Engage & Activate Students,” he gave a lecture on interactivity to a group of Chicago Public School teachers. Sal is a weekly guest on the XM Radio talk show “The War Room,” discussing hockey in Chicago and hockey-related memorabilia, and is now a freelance writer for “The Hockey News.” In addition to teaching at Columbia and Gray Elementary, Sal also teaches at ORT Technical Institute and DePaul University.

Adjunct faculty Jenny Magnus and Stefan Brün, both instructors of Story Development for Interactive Media, spent 2010 to 2011 in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Art, developing “Still In Play (a performance of getting ready).” Their work is an original performance written by Jenny Magnus and directed by Stefan Brün, using video (employing the Isadora Software) by Jeffrey Bivens; music by The Crooked Mouth (who released a CD of the same name); with set by Adam Rust and lights by Richard Norwood and featuring fifteen performers from the Curious Theatre Branch, a 25 year old Chicago theater company. After a year of development at the museum and a performance in the museum theater in September 2011, Magnus and Brün are now preparing a scaled down touring version, which will premiere at Links Hall in Chicago December 9th, 10th and 11th before a possible national tour.

Adjunct faculty member Joe Laiacona under the pen name Jack Rinella, published his first novel, The Dionysian Alliance.

Adjunct faculty Andrew Oleksiuk premiered Magic Mushrooms, a 3D virtual world performance piece, in February 2011 for Fluxfest Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). In June 2011, he was part of the Discards show curated by Janell Baxter. In September 2011, he presented a paper on network art at the Smithsonian Postal History Symposium. In October 2011, Magic Mushrooms traveled to Lithuania as part of the Kaunas Biennale.