Arts, Humanities and Computing
In this romanticized illustration by the award-winning artist, Paul Cox, we depict three of the affinity group members who represent the intersection of computing + arts and humanities: Marientina Gotsis (left, assisting with VR headset); Alexis Wellwood (center, seated at computer); and Alexander Robinson (far right, leaning over water table).
The focus of this group is the scholarly and creative activity at the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities and the arts. Meet some of the faculty active in this group below.
Professor of Cinematic Practice at Interactive Media & Games and Media Arts + Practice (USC School of Cinematic Arts)
“Computing research generates essential tools and methods for creating, imagining, storing, distributing, viewing, listening, feeling, thinking, sharing, archiving, processing, analyzing and collaborating to help us dissolve borders between disciplines and geographies. While I am a fine artist by training, my advanced computing skills are what enable me to cross sectors.”
Gotsis, who runs the USC Creative Media & Behavioral Health Center, uses off-the-shelf technologies, such as game engines, VR headsets and body sensors, but also experiments with emerging technologies, such as generative AI, neuro-technologies and wearables.
She and her interdisciplinary collaborators have done pioneering research in mobile health games with the USC Wellness Partners study — one of the first socially networked “gamification” exercise interventions — before the proliferation of social media and smartphones and several “exergames” for sensorimotor rehabilitation for patients, including “Skyfarer” for spinal cord injury and “Wordplay” for Parkinson’s. Both exercise games have been evaluated by physical therapists and patients, who found them to be motivating and helpful. The CMBHC-affiliated teams also used stereoscopy and extended reality technologies to develop educational experiences for children and families, teaching about vision health (“Enchanted Garden”) and nutrition (“Virtual Spouts”).
Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture Program and Urbanism Program (USC School of Architecture)
“In my work on nature-based landscape infrastructure, computing is a fundamental tool for understanding, communicating and ultimately designing these complex landscapes. I employ it extensively for community outreach, field studies and hydraulic modeling on the Los Angeles River.”
Robinson’s research currently focuses on the Los Angeles River, which he has studied since working on the award-winning Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan. At the Inclusive Infrastructure Design Lab, he collaborates with faculty in USC Viterbi School of Engineering (Mitul Luhar and Gale Lucas), USC Cinematic Arts (Andreas Kratky) and USC Dornsife Public Exchange, as well as the City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering and the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Recently, they presented a 60-foot-long model of the river’s flow that demonstrated different scenarios of potential flooding and how these floods would affect the L.A. environment, including people experiencing homelessness.
Furthermore, they are using computing to conduct frequent analytical field studies, largely with drones. With a closer understanding of the rapidly evolving urban environment, they open the door to more nature-based solutions. Finally, they also employ USC-developed real-time, numerical modeling to accelerate the design process.
Professor of Philosophy, Linguistics, and Psychology
“With the incredible advances in linguistic ability demonstrated by generative AIs, foundational research into the nature of human language is more important than ever. To what degree are human beings similar to computers, and in what ways are we different? I study human language as a cognitive capacity through the lens of formal semantics, a discipline with roots in philosophical logic and the foundations of computer science. Computational concepts like abstraction and the composition of functions are utterly critical to properly characterizing linguistic states and processes. In the Dornsife Meaning Lab which I direct, we conduct online experiments with children and adults using state of the art computational methods to analyze and model the data.”
How natural languages "package" meaning can look very different across languages, but Wellwood’s research has provided strong, convergent evidence that this variation masks significant and fundamental similarities. She has shown that the same highly specific patterning in adult understanding of the word "more" and its cognates across languages, like "más" in Spanish or "plus" in French, is already grasped by children just entering preschool. This work, geared towards helping us formalize the properties of distinctively human thought, is receiving increasing interdisciplinary recognition across philosophy, linguistics, and cognitive psychology.