Tagged with "worldcanvass"

Although some environmental activists view fracking negatively, experts have re-evaluated the pros and cons of the method.

If you are looking for your point of tolerance on the subject of fracking, please attend the University of Iowa WorldCanvass program’s season-opening show, “Fracking and the Iowa Divide,” from 7:30 to 9 p.m. September 13, in the Recital Hall of the brand new Voxman Music Building. The event is free and open to the public, with a pre-show reception starting at 6:30 p.m.

International Programs presented WorldCanvass alongside the exhibition "Abstract Expressionism" at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, England, on Saturday, October 29, 2016. Host Joan Kjaer and her guests, UI President Bruce Harreld, Co-Curator of "Abstract Expressionism" Dr. David Anfam, Director of the UI's International Writing Program Christopher Merrill, and Director of the UI Museum of Art Sean O'Harrow, discussed the long history of artistic accomplishment and innovation at the University of Iowa, as well as the seminal importance to abstract expressionism of the UI's Jackson Pollock work "Mural."

New time, new location! Season eight of the television, radio, and internet program WorldCanvass will begin on Tuesday, September 13, at 7:30 p.m., in the newly-opened Voxman Music Building in downtown Iowa City. WorldCanvass guests will join host Joan Kjaer to discuss the controversial method of energy production known as fracking and its impact on the environment, social dynamics, and the economy. We’ll also explore through music, photography, and literature ways in which artists have documented transitions and grappled with the drumbeat of change. The public is invited to attend and no tickets are required.

On its final program of the 2015-2016 season, ​WorldCanvass tackled informatics—also known as big data. As a highlighted event of the UI's first Informatics Week, guests from the diverse fields of computer science, medicine, sociology, public health, and geographical and sustainability sciences discussed the proliferation of big data and their attempts to both understand and utilize this massive and, in many ways, untamed digital resource.

We live in a world where digital data is almost as pervasive and unnoticed as the air we breathe. We have become an integral part of the Internet of Things; our personal smart items that we carry with us are sensing the world around us and sharing it with other smart things in our environment including our TV, refrigerator, thermostat, car, bridges — the list is ever growing. The amount of data that is being gathered and exchanged is staggering and growing fast. A billion tweets every 72 hours is one example. Collectively, the amount of data in our digital universe — approximately 5 trillion gigabytes — is doubling every two years.

The UI’s Obermann Center for Advanced Studies has long been the home of interdisciplinary collaboration, where thinking outside the box isn’t just the result, but the operating principle. On March 1, 2016, Joan Kjaer and her WorldCanvass guests discussed “Taking It to the Streets: Engagement and the Academy” just before the ten year anniversary of the center's week-long institute.

On the morning of Jan. 11, I woke early, poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down to reflect. It was an important day, one that had the potential to significantly impact my scholarship and teaching. I wanted to get it right. I was about to join the ranks of nearly 200 other graduate students who, over the last ten years, had participated in the Obermann Graduate Institute on Engagement and the Academy. Their engagement work — which ranges from collaborating with incarcerated Iowans to creating public art to coordinating disaster relief — both excited and intimidated me as I thought about my own project.

We live in an age of new technology, expecting any day to wake up to yet another jaw-dropping device or a discovery that simply changes everything about the way we live and work. The rate of innovation in the modern age can be breathtaking, but technological advances have jolted humans into new and unfamiliar territory since the dawn of humankind. On February 9, Joan Kjaer and her WorldCanvass guests contemplated the larger implications of the adoption of new technologies—how they change the ways in which individuals interact, the sharing of information, the movement of people and ideas from place to place, and what all of this means to the shape and form of a culture. Below is a ReCap of the event with access to see and hear the full program.