engineering ± art ± science

TRUE or FALSE: Everyone is an artist. Everyone is an engineer. Everyone is a scientist. Everyone is creative. Everyone is rational. Everyone believes in a power greater than the individual human being. Everyone likes anchovies and Picasso. Johannes Goebel, Director of the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, will take a tour through motivations and goals of science, art and engineering with excursions to taste and religion. With this lecture, Goebel hopes to create an initializing spark for a continuing discussion of assumed truths, acquired prejudices, and boxes we like to put ourselves and others into. (And most certainly, the lecturer will present boxes of his own design.) With EMPAC, Rensselaer is engaged in establishing the most complex platform for experimental media and performing arts in the USA, spanning the infrastructures of a classical concert hall, a computer controlled theater, broadcast and recording studios, all placed within a prominent engineering and research school and all connected by their shared interests in integrating the “experimental” and “digital” with research, production and presentation. So, the discussion about communalities and differences is then a necessary basis for creating a professional environment for interdisciplinary projects.