Invitation to UC San Diego Faculty, Students for Digitally-Mediated Performances, Presentations

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"Immersive Lab" installation and exhibit in October 2015 was part of the 2015-16 IDEAS season that ends this June.

The Qualcomm Institute at the University of California, San Diego has launched fourth annual invitation to faculty and students to propose the performances and presentations of works and research in visual arts, music, theatre and dance, as well as engineering and sciences. Interdisciplinary proposals will receive special attention and are highly encouraged. The winning events will be staged and/or presented in the institute’s high-tech venues in Atkinson Hall on the UC San Diego campus.

The Call for Events was published online today, with all proposals to be submitted no later than the deadline of noon Pacific time on Monday, February 15, 2016. The competition will result in the selection of works for residencies and performances during the 2016-‘17 season of the Qualcomm Institute (QI) Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (IDEAS). QI is the UC San Diego Division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2).

The IDEAS program was launched in 2013 to encourage all artists, technologists, and scientists to take advantage of the Qualcomm Institute’s advanced audio-visual facilities, services and personnel in developing and staging new or existing works. “In the past three years, the IDEAS program has provided support for the staging of two dozen performances in the institute, many of them original works that took advantage of QI’s unique audio-visual technologies and interactive performance spaces,” said composer Shahrokh Yadegari, a professor of Theatre and Dance who directs the IDEAS program.

“While we expect most of the works to come out of the Music, Visual Arts and Theatre and Dance departments on campus,” Yadegari added, “we are especially encouraging interdisciplinary collaborations, notably with engineering and science faculty or students to explore new perspectives in performing arts, design and engineering using the state-of-the-arts technologies available at Qualcomm Institute.and . ”

In addition to the Call for Events, IDEAS is inviting interested faculty, students and alumni to attend an IDEAS Proposal Workshop from 5-7pm on Thursday, January 28, 2016. During the workshop, potential proposers will be given a tour of the various performance spaces (including the 100-seat Calit2 Theater, 200-seat Calit2 Auditorium, and smaller public spaces designed for cutting-edge interactive video and audio installations, such as the Performative Computing Lab). Artists and engineers will also have the opportunity to watch demonstrations of the advanced equipment available in each space. Visitors will also be able to ask questions and gain further insights into the competitive process for determining which performance proposals will be selected.

“The institute offers spaces and tools such as large-scale video walls, spatialized audio systems and technologies, and immersive 3D virtual-reality environments,” said Qualcomm Institute director Ramesh Rao. “In some cases these facilities do not exist anywhere else on campus or anywhere in San Diego, so we hope to encourage collaborations among artists, designers, engineers, and scientists, to take advantage of these unique facilities to push the boundaries of the performing arts and design.”

The latest Call for Events seeks submissions for in-kind support from the Qualcomm Institute’s IDEAS program for the development and staging of performances involving new or existing works between September 1, 2016 and June 30, 2017. All performances and presentations will be open to the public and free of charge.

Submissions go through a rigorous peer review by faculty on the IDEAS Program Committee. “We want the works to be experimental, interdisciplinary, exploratory, and technological with strong academic merit,” said Yadegari, “so peer review is critical.” Preference will be given to multidisciplinary submissions that take maximum advantage of the Qualcomm Institute’s unique combination of visual and audio technologies, as well as its internal and external spaces for performances. Final decisions on the in-kind rewards will be conveyed to proposers in April 2016.

The in-kind awards will support facility and equipment usage, including lighting, visualization and sound systems, as well as audiovisual technicians and other personnel for event, promotion and communications. Onsite residencies may be awarded from a single day to a full week, depending on project scope.

The 2016-’17 Call for Events and additional information are available on the IDEAS website. All proposals must be submitted online no later than 12PM PT on Monday, February 15, 2016. For questions about the program, contact program manager Trish Stone at tstone@ucsd.edu.

Current Season

The final performances of the 2015-‘16 IDEAS season will take place between now and June 2016. They include:

• March 31: “Head Over Heels”, by Theatre and Dance MFA students Grady Kestler (sound design), Anne Gehman (dance-theatre), and Justin Humphries (set design), 5-7pm, Calit2 Theater
• April 21: “StilHouette”, a work by composer and UC San Diego music-composition Ph.D. student Ryan Welsh, from 5-7pm in the Calit2 Theater.
• June 9: “Past Teton Gap”, by multimedia artist and Music Ph.D. student Kyle Johnson, 5-7pm, Calit2 Auditorium.