viz.

"Bug and the Machine" Poster, Stephanie Rosen

If you are interested in science, art, video installations, interdisciplinary work, or maybe if you just like bugs, we'd recommend you stop by the following event at the University of Texas at Austin tomorrow evening.  Read more about the super-computers at the Texas Advanced Computer Center from a past viz. blog post.  Following is the summary description of "Bug in the Machine" by the Vital Arts and Theories Group: "Sixty years ago a small moth flew into a large room on the campus of Harvard University. It fluttered around, disoriented by the artificial light, until it slipped in and got stuck between two of the 700,000 moving parts of the automatic calculating machine MARK II, one of the world's first computers. The moth was removed - debugged - by computer scientist Grace Hopper, only to be stuck between a piece of tape and the page of the lab notes she wrote that day. The one-day exhibition "Bug in the Machine" examines the ways in which organic life gets stuck inside inorganic spaces, codes, technologies and media. Refreshments and hors d'oeuvres served. 

Organized by the Vital Arts and Theories Group and inspired by the first bug to get debugged, the exhibition considers the interaction between living things and the things we build. Video, interactive and 3-D art will be exhibited on all seven state-of-the-art displays at the Texas Advanced Computing Center's ACES Visualization Lab( including the highest-resolution tile display in the world). The show features work by artist-turned-entomologist Gracen Brilmyer; Berlin-based filmmaker and multimedia artist Fons Scheidon; professor of Romantic literature and science at Duke University Robert Mitchell; Austin photographer and new-media artist Ben Aqua; and Radio-Television-Film Ph.D. student Daniel Mauro.