This presentation highlights a number of innovate research projects and new directions being explored by faculty and students from the DXARTS program at the University of Washington. Focusing primarily on the emerging fields of emulation and telematics, the discussion seeks to expand the current interpretation of telematics from strictly electronic interaction between people over distance, to a broader, less anthropocentric interpretation that involves networked collaboration between humans and other complex systems.
DXARTS is a research center and Ph.D program at the University of Washington in Seattle. Designed around a revolutionary new model of creative practice, scientific research and discovery at the frontier of arts and sciences, the programs expanded research praxis focuses on the creation and study of radically new genres of digital and experimental arts and culture. Degree concentrations in DXARTS range from visual and aural synthesis, computational simulation, computer modeling and animation, spatial imaging and VR, database and interface, algorithmic processes, computer music composition, sensing and control systems, HCI, embedded performance systems, telematics, robotics, and mechatronics.

Shawn Brixey is currently the Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Chair in Arts and Sciences, Co-founder and former Director of the Center in Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS) at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the former founder and Director of the Digital Media Program at UC Berkeley, and has been the architect of five major digital media programs across the U.S. in the past fifteen years. His graduate degree is from MIT in media arts and science, where he studied at the Media Lab. He has exhibited commissioned art and technology works widely in Europe and the U.S. including Documenta, the Deutscher Kunstlerbunde, Cranbrook, the MIT Museum, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Winter Olympics in Nagano Japan. He has received numerous grants, awards and fellowships for creative work in this field including, Leica, Hughes Aircraft, IBM, Intel, Apple, The National Institute of Health, The National Endowment for the Arts, and a 2003 Rockefeller Fellowship. Rockefeller Alumni include Bill Viola, Gary Hill and Kynn Hershman. In 2004 he was selected winner of the Editors Choice Award, in Popular Science Magazine's "World Design Challenge”. In 2009 he served as the Chair of the Virtual and New Media Directorate for the “Canadian Foundation for Innovation”. The Canadian research foundation awards more than $400M annually for national research in science and technology. His works have been reviewed and showcased in diverse media and print sources including the New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Kunst Forum, NPR, PBS Television, and Wolkenkratser, Germany.