Tess-Celestial

Tess-Celestial is a visualization project that explores the interplay of art, nature, culture, shape, perspective, and math in our everyday lives.

Overview

Tess-Celestial was a collaborative research project between the libraries and Dr. Radmila Sazdanović to produce a large scale immersive visualization, pairing Dr. Sazdanović's research on knot theory and her creative pursuits as an artist. Conducted as a local iteration of the libraries Andrew W. Mellon funded project, Immersive Scholar, this Creative Residency ran from July 1, 2018 to August 15, 2018.

How We Did It

Tess-Celestial team meeting

As a test case in project development, we broke this project down into different workstreams, one focusing on display of the project and the other focusing on developing a grant proposal for extending Dr. Sazdanović's research from this work. We met twice weekly for six weeks, with concurrent check-in points across the entire project team. A major contribution to the project was the insights and expertise of Jasmine Lang, an undergraduate in our College of Design, who helped conceptualize the display and also due to her unique skillset, worked as a Front End Web Developer with our Technical Lead Walt Gurley on the code for the display. We also made a deliberate choice to deliver this visualization from a web responsive framework hosted from github pages so that its accessibility could extend beyond the physical space of Hunt Library.