Initiative for Digital Exploration of Arts and Sciences (IDEAS)

The initiative aims to encourage interdisciplinary performing, visual, and literary-artists, as well as engineers and scientists, to take advantage of the Qualcomm Institute’s advanced audio-visual facilities, services and personnel in staging performances and presentations of new and experimental works and research. The institute will provide access to its venue and performance spaces, as well as access to a/v, event and communications personnel on an in-kind basis. IDEAS submissions go through a rigorous peer review by the IDEAS Program Committee, chaired by IDEAS Director Shahrokh Yadegari, with members appointed from among QI-affiliated faculty and graduate students from the UC San Diego departments of Music, Visual Arts, Theatre & Dance, or from schools and divisions in the sciences and engineering. Each winning proposal is also awarded an onsite residency lasting from a single day to a full week, depending on project scope (see “Proposals” section below for details). It is anticipated that the longer residencies will feature important new works. “The Qualcomm Institute has become a world-renowned venue for faculty and students to stage performances that could not be staged anywhere else,” says Yadegari, a professor of Music at UC San Diego. “The institute offers spaces and tools – from advanced spatialized 3D audio to large-scale video walls and immersive, virtual-reality environments – that can provide faculty, students, staff, and alumni with a new canvas for their technology-based performances.”