Dr. JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, chief designer of the AlloSphere facility, composer, and media artist with over thirty-five (35) years of experience in media systems engineering, outlines the vision for our research.
Etherial: A Quantum Composition & Installation featured at ISEA, Gwangju, Republic of Korea. Also can be viewed at the California NanoSystems Institute's AlloPortal and AlloSphere.
Our Team is led by Dr. Kuchera-Morin (Director, Inventor, & Lead Researcher) of the Allosphere Research Group. Dr. Andres Cabrera as Media Systems Engineer, Dennis Adderton as Technical Director. And the AlloSphere Team.
The AlloSphere is at the intersection of science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics facilitating exciting new areas for scientific discovery. But more than this, this intersection has given us the potential to have a crucial dialogue about the most important issues that we need to engage and to understand for the future growth of our world community.
The AlloSphere instrument, as well as our research and creative practice can accelerate time to discovery across disciplines by utilizing our immersive/interactive visual/aural data exploration software infrastructure to advance multi-scale complex systems research. This science discovery language enhances and complements data analytics, leading to the capability of creating and testing new theoretical constructs using the computational platform as a real-time interactive instrument.
Our research challenge is to bring human-scale control, understanding, and insight to areas where researchers’ intuitions have been hampered by data size, complexity, and heterogeneity, at both temporal and spatial scale.
At the AlloSphere we aim to create an environment in which new science, currently obscured by data complexity, can be brought into sharp focus. In sharpening that focus we come to a new understanding of the importance of ethical values in the research, creative practice and mentoring that we undertake. The need for an equitable, empathetic, and knowledgeable community to collaborate on the most crucial issues of our day, compassion and understanding, as well as ecological and economic change that empowers everyone to have a free and creative future. This can easily be accomplished when one practices mindfulness in every area of our research and creative practice.
This is an important mission of the AlloSphere Research Facility and Instrument, through using the senses to understand the most complex information intuitively. Seeing, hearing and interacting with this data, can give us a new understanding of the importance of scientific discovery with ethics in mind. Not only asking the question of can we undertake this research but also should we undertake this research when it comes to such areas as ecology, economy, and new technologies that encompass AI and areas of medical research. Through interactive, immersive visualization and sonification of these complex systems we may be able to come to terms with which directions are the most intelligent and wisest to pursue for a healthier and happier united world.
We welcome research partnerships and collaborations of all kinds. Please contact me should you have a research question that we might collectively investigate. The AlloSphere can represent phenomena at scales ranging from the subatomic to the entire universe. As media artists we typically collaborate with scientists and other researchers who supply models, data, and questions; our role is to present their data in a new way that is both insightful and beautiful. Working together, I believe, we can make a real difference in educating our future young minds, inspiring positive change.
