The Arts go High-Tech

A New Media Center brings the arts into the digital age.

KOI ANUNTA/YH

Behind the glass doors of 149 York St., lies an exciting new development for Yale's art departments. Though entering the building is a bit disconcerting, with confusing signs and doors leading to different areas, one can eventually find a group of rooms that holds Yale's new Digital Media Center for the Arts (DMCA). This set of high-tech design labs and classrooms provides a place where artists and musicians can use state-of-the-art equipment for video/audio editing, computer aided design, and most importantly, collaborative projects where all the arts fuse together with new technology.

A high-tech project two years in the works, the DCMA involves the collective efforts of the Art, Architecture, Music and Drama schools, the History of Art and Film Studies undergraduate departments, the Yale University Art Gallery, the British Art Center, the Art & Architecture Library, and Information Technology Services (ITS). Extensive grants from the Intel Corporation, as well as $1 million from Presidents Richard Levin's office fund the project. Though the DMCA has not had any sort of grand opening, the temporary site at 149 York street will house the center indefinitely while all the art schools undergo major renovations. The DMCA may be moved later to a complex adjoining the Art and Architecture Library.

However, the DMCA is still very much unfinished. Furniture needs to be purchased, staff hired, equipment tested and configured. When fully furnished and complete, the new center will put Yale on par with other universities with superior technological resources for artists. For now, the major groundwork has been laid for the fusion of high technology and high art.

The (Impressive) Specs

Carol Scully, director of the committee in charge of the project, described the new project as "a facility to explore and experiment with new digital technologies." The group is a subcommittee of the Arts Area Advisory Committee, which coordinates efforts between the various art schools. "It will be a place where art, architecture, music and drama can get out of their separate spheres and work together on interdisciplinary projects," she said.

At the temporary facility, the hardware for the "interdisciplinary projects" includes dozens of high-end machines. One room consists of 21 Windows NT workstations running on dual 400 MHz Pentium II processors, and come with large hard drives and removable storage. This classroom will be initially used with theater-set-design students and Computer Aided Design (CAD) classes in the architecture department.

In another section of the center, four different editing suites are available: one for high-end audio and the other three for video editing. The editing bays will have the capacity for multi-camera editing and adding digital video to a filmed segment. Fiber optics will also transmit the edited video across networks at high speeds. The last section has six 333 MHz PowerPC G3s for high frame-rate video capture and editing.

Separately, Reprographic and Imaging Services (RIS) will create an office in the building capable of taking high-quality digitally-submitted files and outputting the data to laser, color-laser, and inkjet printers. Color Xerox machines and a drum scanner will also be available.

The numerous possibilities

Although Scully will be able to use the equipment immediately for a digital video editing class, (previously taught with just one antiquated station from 1995) usage by other classes cannot be predicted. As soon as requests start coming in, there will be training sessions and workshops, and scheduling for equipment usage will be arranged.

In addition, the DMCA project hopes to put all of the collections from the participating entities into digital form which may eventually serve as a basis for multimedia CD-ROMs and websites. However, this project may be difficult for participants who have not even put their artwork onto transparencies or slides.

In the meantime, Carol Scully looks forward introducing the numerous pieces of art that Yale holds. She hopes that the project will be able to "to make the collections accessible [to] a world-wide audience."

"I feel privileged to be the person who's coordinating these kinds of things," Scully said. She added that, "the capabilities of the new technologies are really captivating everyone's imagination and interest. There really hasn't been a way to get the message out from all these different schools [in the past]."

Jack Vees, Operations Director of the Center for Studies in Music Technology (CSMT) in the School of Music and DMCA committee member, shares Scully's enthusiasm for the project. He currently works on the third floor of Woolsey Hall, where CSMT's extensive facilities are housed. Though the CSMT already has many synthesizers, amplifiers, computers and other equipment, its current resources are vastly inferior compared to the potential of the DMCA.

"We've been wanting to do this thing for years," Vees said. He added that, though CSMT can, with its current equipment, "can take a person's work up a certain point, it's not the same as having a place which brings everything together."

Why did it take so long?

Vees, who went to the California School for the Arts, where the digital art facilities were initially founded with an interdisciplinary intent, has experience with cross-departmental work. He sees the DMCA as providing "that sort of channel," for such work, likening it to a "big, complex organism." Pointing out that practically every professional artist now works with the computer, he perceives the facility as fulfilling a need.

Scully also feels that the center is an important development. "It's just a bump to the next step," Scully said. She acknowledges that many colleges do have better facilities for the collaborative and digital work that the DMCA will provide. She cites a variety of reasons for the delay in this long-needed innovation, including the fact that "[all] of the schools have really taken care of their own needs and have been limited by their own budgets."

Vees shares similar sentiments. He felt that there were other priorities that took precedence over the initiation of the DMCA. "We've been wanting to do this thing for years," Vees said. "There's a certain amount of inertia you have to overcome. A lot of it is acting as a curator to what's been set up, and that is not bad, but it is a big project in itself. The economics of the thing also played a role. For a while, things were tight around here. Finally there was enough breathing room."

At other schools...

Although Yale took a long time to get started, it certainly is introducing a far better facility than other purported "digital media centers" at universities across the country. Sometimes, the name is far more exciting than the structure itself. At the University of Hawaii, a DMC consists simply of some computers with multimedia tools.

Elsewhere, DMCs are focused on using digital information in traditional education. At the University of Virginia, images are being digitized for classroom use. Meanwhile, the University of Minnesota, to aid the use of technology in the classroom, provides training and assistance in developing courseware.

On the other hand, some schools have been providing high-tech tools to artists for years. At the California Institute of Technology, there are six high-powered machines available for advanced multimedia and design work, each focused on a different area of multimedia. Staff help students and faculty learn new technology that they can implement elsewhere. Various special projects have been produced, including video and animations.

Carolyn Patterson of the Caltech DMC has seen technology become more integral to education and research. "We find more and more people are using media as part of their presentations and analysis, so they need better and more refined tools for image acquisition and analysis, including turning things out for the web and print, such as web movies and pictures," she said.

At the San Francisco Art Institute, a web page advertises the Center for Digital Media, which "in addition to providing technical resources for all disciplines, concentrates on developing project-oriented work with an emphasis on content and substance."

The San Francisco Art Institute's DMC Coordinator Paul Klein points out that their goal is to have students work in mediums other than the standards they are accustomed to. "Unlike other institutions that focus on technique, the Center for Digital Media at the San Francisco Art Institute, in addition to providing technical resources for all disciplines, concentrates on project-oriented that emphasizes research, ideas, and concept," he said.

Middle Tennessee State University has a DMC along the lines of what Yale hopes to create. "At MTSU's DMC, we support a variety of instructional technology applications ranging from creating original digital art to digitizing video or audio to developing course webpages," Information Technology staff member Sylvia Brance said. "Currently about half of our faculty have taught in a technology-based classroom using either applications they developed or commercial software."

Yale's new DMCA, when fully completed, will rival, and even exceed the DMCs of other schools. For students and professors, it will be a highly useful and much-needed improvement to Yale's art scene. For anyone that wants to begin blending all of the high arts into a piece supported by high technology, the Digital Media Center for the Arts will be an invaluable resource.

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