Our vision is to make all of human knowledge and culture available to all, to eliminate temporal, spatial, and cultural barriers to communication, and to unleash and enhance the creativity and creative experience of individuals and groups.

Creativity is the shared foundation of art, science, the humanities, and technology. The Cultural Computing Program at the Siebel Center, under the direction of Roy Campbell and Guy Garnett, will explore and develop technology to foster creative activities and opportunities making a positive impact on our life and culture. The program seeks to increase the quality of life, and further communication and understanding within and between diverse communities. It will develop cultural context as well as creative content for technological achievement.

The CCP seeks large-scale impact on the nascent field of cultural computing. Building on the existing strengths in CS, and collaborating with cultural practitioners and scholars in the fine arts and humanities, the Siebel Center can contribute and develop new technologies to cultural computing that can be widely disseminated and form the basis for new art and scholarship in the 21st Century.

Major research goals for the Siebel Cultural Computing Program, in partnership with the new media program in Art and Design, the School of Music, Dept of Dance, Dept of Theater, Krannert Center, Krannert Art Museum, as well as with partners in the sciences and NCSA and Beckman, are as follows:

• innovation using the emerging synergy between technology and creativity in the Arts, Music, Theatre, Dance, and Computer Science,
• collaboration between computer scientists and artists by creating interdisciplinary teams of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty to work on research and educational projects,
• new research and education specializations: computer gaming; digital theatre; digital dance; innovative art installations; ubiquitous computing, sensor and tracking technologies, user interfaces, visualization and sonification; interdisciplinary curricula.

From photography to online gaming, from digital libraries and cultural repositories, to networked dissemination tools, new technology has always inspired new and previously unconceivable art forms and revitalized scholarship and the humanities. Starting with the current leading edge of these artforms and scholarship, we seek to challenge artists and scholars to new creative endeavors by enabling new and diverse capabilities.

First and foremost, the Program embraces true collaboration. Such collaboration will drive innovation better than models wherein either computer science serves the humanities and arts, or humanists and artists must become computer scientists. It will have as much impact on the sciences and technologies--through opening their domain to new ideas, through humanistic study of their domain, as well as through posing new questions--as the sciences and technologies will impact the arts and humanities.