BIOS
Michael G. Smith is an experimental materials chemist and a poet. He has a Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of California, San Diego, and has held research positions at the University of Texas, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Montana State University. His scientific work has been published in many technical journals including Nature, Physical Review B, The Journal of Solid State Chemistry, and Physica C. His poetry, haiku, haibun, tanka and essays have been published in many literary journals. His books include No Small Things; The Dippers Do Their Part, a collaboration with artist Laura Young of haibun and katagami; and Flip Flop, a collection of haiku co-created with Miriam Sagan. The Oregon Poetry Association awarded first place to his poem Disturbance Theory in their Fall 2017 contest, and second place to his poem Assemblage. The Anthropocene in their Spring 2019 contest in the Theme: Climate category. He has held writing residencies with the Spring Creek Project (Oregon State University) at the NSF-funded HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, an old-growth forest that is part of the Long-Term Ecological Research Network.
In October 2019 Smith did a month-long writing residency at Gullkistan: Center for Creativity in the tiny village of Laugarvatn, Iceland. One of his projects included writing climate change-oriented poems for Vispoems. The village is on the western shores of Laugarvatn Lake. Far away to the east one can see Hekla Volcano. The volcano tends to give only thirty minute warning before erupting every decade or so. Smith would look at it everyday wondering and hoping it would erupt and throw massive quantities of sunlight-reflecting ash into the atmosphere, and thus help slow the planet’s warming. The poem-photo collage “Arks” on this site was created during the residency.
Francesca Samsel, a research scientist at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin, works to balance the fulcrum between art and science. Working in collaboration with scientists, her work merges environmental science, scientific visualization, visual metaphor and poetry in an interactive framework for understanding and reflecting on the pressing environmental issues of our time.
Active in the dialogue between art and science she: is the co-editor of Art on Graphics Department, IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications; presents regularly at ACM CHI – Computer Human Interface, IEEE Vis – Scientific Visualization; EuroVis and IEEE Vis Visual Arts Program. Collaborations with scientific teams include: the Next-Generation Environmental Experiments – The Arctic, LANL, DOE; Climate, Ocean, Sea-Ice Modeling, the Earth and Environmental Sciences group, MPAS – Arctic, LANL; Data Science at Scale, LANL; and the Bradbury Science Museum.
Current NSF funding includes “Sculpting Visualization”, a multifaceted project with the University of Minnesota’s Interactive Visualization Lab investigating intersections of artistic language, scientific data and immersive interaction (www.Sculpting-Vis.org). Samsel holds an M.F.A. from the University of Washington and a B.F.A. from California College of Art.
Greg Foss is a computer animation specialist focusing the last 25 years on visualizing
a wide range of scientific simulation datasets into uniquely aesthetic imagery.
These science-art computer graphics have been exhibited regularly at the annual SC
and XSEDE conferences, included several years at ACM SIGGRAPH’s animation festival,
incorporated in planetarium shows and presented in a variety of publications.
Foss has a BFA in Ceramics and a Masters from Ohio State University’s
Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design, known formerly as the
Computer Graphics Research Group founded in 1971 by pioneer Charles Csuri.
After five years of commercial animation for video and film production
Foss advanced in 1993 to science at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center
at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.
The Texas Advanced Computing Center, University of Texas at Austin, recruited
him in 2012 to make science-art for them instead.
Hannah Simon is an undergraduate student of Environmental Science with a minor in Photojournalism at the University of Texas in Austin. Her biggest passion is for science communication and she believes that visual storytelling can help to establish a connection between an audience and research-related subject matter. She has worked with the Visualization team at the Texas Advanced Computing Center over the last several months on environmental communication projects ranging from data visualization of oceanic currents to illustrating poems through photos. Hannah plans to graduate in Spring 2020 with the aim to continue to pursue a career in science communication.
Telo Hoy is a composer/percussionist and photographer from Santa Fe, New Mexico. His work is influenced by environmental acoustics, sonic ethnography, and human caused environmental change. He explores the relationship between music, place and belonging through acoustic instruments, photography, field recordings, sampling, and live processing.
Annie Barnes
vispoems.com 