Students get techy with multimedia art exhibit

An ambulance's siren wails to life. Screams of horror pierce the air.

The sounds of an accident come to life. The scene is not played out in front of your eyes, but only in the headphones covering your ears.

As you watch a fluorescent red computer screen, the sounds transport you to the scene of a car crash, not through images, but exclusively through sounds as part of one of the most engrossing pieces at the Student Multimedia Exhibit on display at the Vachon Gallery.

The exhibit, featuring various forms of multimedia art created by staff and students over the past two years, has a transportive effect, like the aforementioned dramatic piece, Abdul Hawasli's "Human Hard Drive."

"These works were selected for their high quality, both aesthetically and technically," said digital art and design professor Alexander Mounton, one of the professors who featured class work in the exhibit. "Students whose works were selected were proud to be a part of the show and many have said they were interested in future digital art courses."

The exhibit is displayed entirely on computers and each of the nine computer stations in the gallery house works from many students. Works range from interactive text, animation, music, digital photography, interactive sound and multimedia production. The exhibit features work from various fine arts classes from the past two years, under the auspices of Professors Mouton and Dominic Cody-Kramers, professor of theater, sound design and audio recording.

Each piece centers around a different piece of text, an image or sound. One of the first displays features interactive text, designed to tell a story through a series of seemingly disjointed words and phrases, while another focuses on a narrative told through a series of non-linear images. In Derron Yuhara's "Consciousness," the string of video and sound images together create the narrative of a relationship between two college students and their life in Seattle.

At the two computers dedicated to a display of animated shorts, designed to be "simple, with meaning, cleverness, surprise and beauty," the varied interests of the student creators is clear. In one of the most poignant works, Maylene Ornetas's "Recuerdos (Memories)," two young people play basketball against a stark white backdrop. The piece ends with the phrase "These are my most cherished memories that will always live in my heart" in English and repeated in Spanish.

The animation featured was a standout for Mouton, who lauds the imagination of those that participated.

"I love teaching animation and working with students with sound and interactive art," Mouton said. "I think students grow in thinking about what art is."

Other works focused on music. One in particular featured musical compositions from Seattle U favorites The Brain Cooks, Kithkin and Ramblin Years frontman Sean Clavere. The digital photography station displayed work that "explored the American social landscape to consider yourselves and your gender within a contemporary context." Standouts from this display include works by Sean Baird, who presented a spoken narrative against the backdrop of a candle burning continuously through the day and night. Madelyn Hamilton and Banjarat Chantharothai captured the theme in their works portraying life at Seattle U and in the city itself.

In some of the most sophisticated presentations, students in Art 493 presented multimedia production pieces aimed at showing "meaning through technology." Their pieces told various narratives through a mixture of sound, images and text.

The art displayed at the Vachon Gallery does not follow traditional exhibit methods, focusing on the opportunities presented with computer art. According to Mouton, this type of display allows for versatility.

"This opens a lot of doors for people in how they think about art and affords people the opportunity to collaborate across disciplines in exciting new ways," Mounton said. "The traditional art forms do not stand outside of digital media, but instead can be incorporated into different media at every level, from painting and drawing to printmaking and the book arts and from ceramics to sculpture."

Rather than the typical experience at a gallery, where the viewer passively observes work, the exhibit turns the relationship between art and the viewer on its head by encouraging interaction, making for a fun trip over to the Fine Arts building.

Olivia may be reached at ojohnson@su-spectator.com