UMBC Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA)

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The Center for Innovation, Research, and Creativity in the Arts (CIRCA) is an interdisciplinary center of the College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at UMBC. Its mission is to inspire and promote inquiry and experimentation in and across the arts. CIRCA supports innovative project-based research in the Arts by faculty, students, and visiting scholars, and promotes the development of interdisciplinary and collaborative projects that advance the Arts in an environment of emerging technologies.

CIRCA is committed to enhancing the local, national, and global reputation of UMBC in the Arts, and will emphasize and augment the role of the Arts in UMBC’s research mission through lectures, performances, exhibitions, internships, symposia, and other types of scholarly engagement and production.

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Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    MARBLEIZED OIL FROM THE GULF OF MEXICO
    MOREN, LISA
    How can we respond to the ever growing, ever multiplying ecological tragedies without sinking into a quagmire of negativity and fear about the present and the future? Lisa Moren performs a brave and important art of inquiry into the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and accomplishes the nearly impossible task of expressing both the despair and the hope. She does not turn away from the devastation, but plunges into its materiality, extracting what she can to make something else out of it. Something else that nourishes our desire for a future — not of denial or even recuperation — but rather one where we might pursue possible ways out of the mire. While art cannot offer us political solutions, it can sustain our sense that there can be another way, and in this Lisa Moren’s work is a great gift, evoking the sense of other possibilities that we need in order not to turn a blind eye, in order to respond, to care about our eco-system.
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    Rembrandt in his Studio: a Cross-Species Installation for the Brids
    Moren, Lisa
    "This public art project is an installation where birds and humans can share in a visual experience unique to a non-human species. Using the idea that birds see in the ultra-violet spectrum, a low-spectrum violet that humans can’t see. A reactive vinyl material adhered to a glass panel appears to be clear to humans but birds perceive it to be deeper than deep violet. When the artist adds a pigment reactive to UV rays, humans can approximate the color birds see all the time, but only when the sun is shining. Rembrandt is a red-tail hawk that visited the exhibition from a local rescue center. He came to share in the art experience with humans. The vinyl is digitally cut using an algorithm to capture natural bird patterns, including flocking patterns. This will hopefully better attract Rembrandt to the art. The more the sun shines, the more humans share color with the birds."