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J. Walt to Perform Spontaneous Fantasia Live at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts


Jan. 27, 2009-The Center for Interdisciplinary Arts and Technology (CIDAT) at the University of Utah will bring digital artist and virtual world pioneer J. Walt to perform Spontaneous Fantasia on Jan. 30 at 7 p.m. at the Marcia and John Price Utah Museum of Fine Arts Dumke Auditorium. The event is free and open to the public.

Winner of a Technical Academy Award, J. Walt creates virtual worlds in real-time and guides the audience through them in a combination of computer-generated imagery and music that the Los Angeles Times described as “indescribably delicious.”

Walt will also speak on Software for One: Challenges and questions surrounding the development of a large software project with a user-base of one at the school of computing colloquium on January 30 at 3:40p.m., in the Warnock Engineering Building, room 101. He will present and answer questions on the software he developed and artistic challenges faced in creating Spontaneous Fantasia.

“We cannot express how excited we are to be able to have J. Walt perform at the University of Utah,” says Roger Altizer, Director of CIDAT. “His work is not only a perfect marriage of art and technology, but a glimpse of the direction new media art is headed. Spontaneous Fantasia is a piece that immediately grabs people of all ages with its dazzling use of color, computer generated imagery and music. At the same time it is deep enough to fascinate both technologists and artists who will appreciate the nuances of creating such complex art in real time.”

Spontaneous Fantasia is a collaboration between CIDAT and Students’ Museum Advisory Council (SMAC), along with financial support from the SCI Institute, the school of computing and the entertainment arts and engineering program.
For more information, visit http://cidat.finearts.utah.edu/. To see the event poster, go to: http://cidat.finearts.utah.edu/smacpostereblastsm.pdf. More information about J. Walt and Spontaneous Fantasia may be found at http://www.spontaneousfantasia.com/.