By Kate Kellogg
News and Information Services
Faculty, staff and students will join President James J. Duderstadt and six deans Friday (April 8) on North Campus to celebrate groundbreaking for a core facility that will link the disciplines of architecture and urban planning, art, engineering and music, and information resources.
The public groundbreaking ceremony for the Integrated Technology Instruction Center (ITIC) will begin at 2 p.m. in the auditorium of the Chrysler Center for Continuing Engineering Education with an installation/performance by the U-M Digital Music Ensemble, under the direction of Jamy Sheridan, research fellow in the School of Art. The groundbreaking will follow at the construction site, east of the Chrysler Center.
Comprised of excerpts from Sheridan’s four-hour work, “Dark Matter,” the installation/performance illustrates the type of collaborative work ITIC was designed to foster.
ITIC will be a place where students, faculty, staff and the broader community can learn firsthand about the potential uses of advanced information technology and share their knowledge with others inside the building, across the campus and around the world. A model for the electronic university of the 21st Century, ITIC will contain facilities that integrate hard copy with electronic access to information resources.
ITIC also will provide production space, audio/video resources and design visualization/stimulation facilities, in addition to gallery and teleconferencing areas. Other portions of the 300,000- square-foot building will accommodate the integrated library/instructional computing facilities and career counseling.
Sheridan’s contribution to the groundbreaking program combines animated images with live performers in an “attempt to respond in expressive terms to the scale, structure and human implications of the cybernetic world emerging all around us,” he explains. A computer artist, he developed the work collaboratively with Steve Rush and Jessica Fogel, assistant professors of dance, and Digital Music Ensemble members Jason Poss, Elizabeth VanOrnum, Rodrigo Sanchez and Paul Keene.
Joining Duderstadt and other members of the University community in the celebration will be Daniel E. Atkins II, dean of the School of Information and Library Studies; Peter M. Banks, dean of the College of Engineering; Robert M. Beckley, dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Paul C. Boylan; vice provost for the arts and dean of the School of Music; Donald E. Riggs; dean of the University Library; and Allen Samuels, dean of the School of Art.
