This piece is the first of several in our Studio 300 coverage series.
If you walk through the Mitchell Fine Arts building this week, you might hear a strange sound. Could it be an out-of-tune violin? A music student practicing their scales? Or even the ghost of Lucille Little herself? On Oct. 3 and 4, Transylvania will host Studio 300, a Digital Art and Music Festival that challenges the perceived boundaries between two traditionally separated fields: technological innovation and artistic expression.
Studio 300 spans over two days with multiple chances to catch different performances, exhibits, and even a late night concert at Al’s Bar. The festival will include exhibits and performances from all kinds of mediums including, but not limited to, virtual reality, sculpture, sound art, poetry, and digital imagery. The collaborative effort from various fields of expertise creates a truly transcendent event that celebrates the combined innovative spirit of humans and technology.
The organizers of the event, Dr. Emily Goodman and Dr. Timothy Polashek, are thrilled to welcome the festival to campus. The festival highlights the combination of creativity and virtual modernization that is already being explored on campus every day. Dr. Polashek commented, “All across campus, not just in fine arts, faculty and students are doing incredibly unique things with technology and examining how human expression and society are evolving through pervasive and rapidly evolving technologies in which we are all increasingly immersed.” Dr. Goodman notices the omnipresence of technology in our daily lives, so “limiting work to a specific field would miss out on important ideas and conversations. Technologies are really facilitating a lot of new collaborations and forms of interdisciplinary work/thinking, and so it’s important to be expansive in the categorization of those kinds of works,” she said. Dr. Goodman and Dr. Polashek hope the festival will stimulate conversations about the rapidly changing methods one can express themselves with through technology and what kind of effects that produces. “Both formal and casual conversations are incredibly productive and inspirational!” Dr. Polashek said.
The festival will include 20 stage performances, eight artist lectures, and various installations, both physical and digital. A complete schedule of events and their locations can be found here.
Things that go bump in the night
For the fourth largest city in Kentucky, Owensboro is almost completely quiet. The entire city is asleep by 8:00p.m., it seems, but there’s always background noise. I’m surrounded by so many animals that I’m used to noise. A dog was always barking, a cat was always chewing on something plastic that he shouldn’t be, a chicken was clucking, and a duck was always quacking in the backyard outside my window. (And sometimes, for a period of a month or so,there were 9 baby ducks in a kiddie pool beside my bed. Sometimes, when I close my eyes, I can still hear the peeping.)
Cicadas and crickets were singing. It wasn’t loud, but it wasn’t quiet, either. It was a lullaby you can’t hear anywhere else. There is no lullaby in Lexington, though, because compared to Owensboro, the city never sleeps. Fire trucks and ambulances are constantly roaring down North Broadway. (I lived behind a hospital for 10 years and I didn’t hear half as many ambulances as I do on a daily basis here.) There’s my friends crammed into one dorm room, playing Cards Against Humanity and scream-laughing so long and so loud we can’t breathe. There’s the washing machines whirring down the hall from my room. There’s Japanese anime playing from my roommate’s TV. There’s more men than I’ve ever seen in my entire life gathered out in the grassy patch between the dorms —probably 50 of them—chanting. There’s people thumping up and down the stairwell. My phone, laying on my wooden side table, buzzes. (I would say that it rang, that iconic marima chime, but let’s be honest. I haven’t taken my phone off vibrate since 2012.) I check it and there’s a text—hey can u drive us to Sonic we’ll buy u a milkshake.
Lexington’s music is a lot different than Owensboro’s. Adjusting to the different sounds is a struggle. There are times, many times, that I find myself missing the sounds of home and times when the songs that Lexington traffic sings to me get to be far too much. There are times when the crickets get annoying and the Japanese I don’t understand is comforting, but I love both of them differently and neither is better than the other. The quiet is nice, but there’s something enchanting about the noise.