“Tony Samangy stands inside the entrance of the newest exhibition in the Emily Davis Gallery. Located in Myer School of Art in Folk hall, it doesn’t look like a typical art exhibition. Upon entrance, there are no paintings on the walls and no sculptures to be seen.”
“

Tony Samangy stands inside the entrance of the newest exhibition in the Emily Davis Gallery. Located in Myer School of Art in Folk hall, it doesn’t look like a typical art exhibition.

Upon entrance, there are no paintings on the walls and no sculptures to be seen.

Instead, Collider: Interactivity and New Media explores the realm of new media.

New media is a broad term and in the art and design field it has many different meanings, Samangy explained.

What we’re trying to show is how we can use technology for art and design.

Samangy is an assistant professor of graphic design at the University of Akron and is co-curator of Collider: Interactivity and New Media.

An interaction between human and technology, the exhibition’s Web site describes it as exploring the results of collisions between humans and machines, biology and computations, art and technology and thought and process.

There are many different viewpoints coming together because it is collaborative, Samangy said, who is also a featured artist in the exhibition.

You may be really good at coding as a science student, we might have an art student who’s really good at three-dimensional sculptures and a design student who’s really good at typography and illustration.

He said that they then ask themselves how they can work together to create something unique.

The main idea is for this all to be very interactive, he added.

Most galleries have the information of a piece of artwork, such as the name of the piece and the artist, posted on the wall. However, the information of many of the pieces in Collider: Interactivity and New Media is on a computer screen, or kiosk, that is hanging from the ceiling.

This gallery takes interactivity a step further by including people in the gallery who aren’t even there.

Besides displaying the information of a piece, some of these kiosks also display comments from past visitors. Anyone can post comments on the kiosk from the gallery’s Web site that will be visible to those in the gallery.

People can interact with the gallery even while they’re at home through the Web site, Samangy said.

They can interact with the gallery through Web sites such as Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, along with the gallery’s main Web site.

In this gallery we affect the Web site and the people on the Web site affect the gallery, he explained.

You can change what other people encounter when they come into the gallery.

One exhibit includes computer screens that respond to what people are doing online. They can choose things such as what colors and shapes appear on the screen along with their comments.

Another exhibit features a projection screen where visitors can create their own design. They choose from things such as color, shape and speed on a card with a hole puncher. When they insert it into a slot, the machine interprets it onto the projection screen.

It reads the card and creates a visualization, Samangy explained.

Visitors can also insert past cards from previous visitors to see what their visualization looked like.

Samangy and his colleagues began working on the gallery in the fall of 2008.

I’m in graphic design and it interests me to use technology to help communicate messages. This is an art exploration of that same philosophy, he said.

Samangy pointed out that many of the artists are venturing into areas that don’t really exist yet.

Collider: Interactivity and New Media will run through October 31 and admission is free for students and the general public.

The Emily Davis Gallery is open Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday it is open 10 a.m. to 9 p.m.

“