Professor Schedel Brings Virtual Reality to the Library of Congress
“Glass Menagerie” by Meg Schedel on display at the Library of Congress (photo by arts.codes)
From Happenings November 15, 2018
Composer and cellist Margaret Schedel, an associate professor in the Department of Music at Stony Brook University who specializes in ferociously interactive media, had two
of her virtual reality (VR) pieces with sculptural components shown at the Library
of Congress in Washington, DC, as part of the playtest event — discussion and demos by practitioners whose work has relevance to the application
of VR/AR and emerging media to humanities research, education and engagement.
The piece shown here, “Glass Menagerie” is a collection of 3D prints of nano structures and representations of measurements. The VR experience, which was commissioned by the Center for Functional Nanomaterials at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), shrinks people down and allows them to walk around the sculpture in VR and understand how the measurements are made. All sounds in the VR come from sonifications of measurements of nano materials.
Schedel is also co-director of Stony Brook’s computer music program and an affiliate faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science. She also experiments with data sonification at BNL.
Schedel’s art at the Library of Congress was put on display through the artist collective arts.codes, which she co-founded with artist Melissa F. Clarke, a former lecturer at Stony Brook. arts.codes is a platform focusing on multiple forms of art with computational and algorithmic underpinnings. It is a journal inclusive of the many digital/emerging media applications of today while also indexing historical works that are neither digital or electronic, but employ more traditional mediums or applications built with mathematical systems. arts.codes serves as a bimonthly digital journal and an annual printed publication presenting interviews with artists of all stripes, and reviews of exhibitions, performances and compositions. It is also a platform for open source distribution and creative sharing — where artists, designers and engineers share frameworks, techniques, code and methodologies with step-by-step explanatory articles.
