What a great iDEA (lab)

Peter Bill is an Artist, Activist and Educator. He has, since learning photoshop v. 1.5, been interested in connecting under-represented communities with digital tools so their voices may be broadcast. He has been involved with large scale video projections, guerrilla art actions, and community building since the 90s.

Peter Bill's award winning paint and video landscapes have shown in such diverse venues as The Kitchen(NYC), the Henry Art Gallery(Seattle), FILE Festival(São Paulo, Brazil), and other international venues. He continues in his Oil paintings and video work to weave the painterly with the digital, pixels and paint, indigo and 191970 blue. He envisioned and realized the first time-lapse film festival in North America, the Gila Timelapse Film Festival and has curated and directed shows on three continents. "Art must be realized on the streets, as an agent of change and progress."
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Much of my art has been about creating a vessel, a space for meditation. Through my painting and video installations I hope to create a moment of quietude, a contemplation of this world we have built.

In my mural and documentary film work I have balanced a certain transcendentalism in my heart with my didactic scots-yankee bones. In the public sphere arts role is to inspire and provoke. Therefore in my mural projects I have attempted to involve the local community in the conception and realization of my projects. In my animations and short films I have attempted critiques of the bathetic apocalyptic culture we live in, the false utopia of the California landscape, the contested landscape of New Mexico, and tried to get to the situation on the ground in war torn Bosnia, among other subjects. The world is a complicated, granular place. We cannot oversimplify with our stories, but we can in their telling change opinions, and thus change the world for the better.

What a great iDEA (lab)

February 3, 2011

Hidden within the Parotti Building (actually, right inside the front door) exists a room where volcanos erupt and alien monsters duke it out to the death. Toddlers fly over the grand canyon in cardboard boxes and students learn light-saber techniques from the master. Imagination becomes reality in the iDEA Lab, arguably the most happening place at WNMU.

When I mention the Idea Lab, the usual response is-“that sounds like an awesome place…what is it?”. Officially, iDEA is an acronym for Inter-Disciplinary Expressive Arts. However, it is also a word. The definition of idea on my mac app dictionary is “the thought that something is probable or possible” and the def. of laboratory is “is a room equipped for experiments, research, and teaching”.

So take an iDEA class and make your ideas reality: do you want to make a music video? a short documentary film? a New Media installation? The iDEA lab has the tools you need: have state of the art computers and software, fun gadgets, digital cameras, a green screen, fancy lighting and tripods, projectors, a white board, and even a chalkboard :-P. Software available includes Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, AfterEffects, and Flash, Final Cut Pro, Cinema 4D, Dragon Stop Motion, and Soundtrack Pro.Whether you work with image, video, or sound-you can create it and edit it and publish it all in one locale. When you’ve made a project, who knows? You might be featured on this very blog

Classes currently taught in the iDEA Lab are 3d animation and experimental (stop motion) animation.

The iDEA lab was created to meet the needs of the new Interdisciplinary Expressive Art program, part of the Expressive Art department. In this program, students blend the traditional arts of visual arts, music, and theatre with the new arts of graphic design and digital media. Students are encouraged to work with New Media and Mixed Media to create professional and original work, and to push the boundaries of what is possible. For more questions about the iDEA program, contact Prof. Peter Bill billp@wnmu.edu or Ann Marie Elder eldera@wnmu.edu.