Over 100 visitors to the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center took a journey back in time to Fairbanks in the early twentieth century Friday night, returning to 2007 only to hop into another world for art, and zoom off on a tour of Mars. Their hour-long experience was capped off with a demonstration of how music and art can be integrated.

Miho Aoki took viewers to another realm. Hers was art-centric, a world of computer generated blue and white clouds and small figures floating through it on various colored geometric shapes.

“I started incorporating flying figures after I moved to Alaska,” she said. “I live near the airport. I love watching planes come and go.”

Aoki’s exhibition included 17 sculptures in a 3-D realm, based upon 5 figures that won an award as 2-D art.

“I really love the form of everyday objects, pots and drinking glasses,” Aoki said. “I combine those shapes with my imagination and my every day life.”

One sculpture was a figurine in a MRI-esque machine, while two others sat on a bench and waited. Aoki said that it was based upon her recent experience having an MRI on her knee.

Another was of a figurine watching TV.

“When I’m making a model, I’m usually watching the small window. A news program, or something,” she said.

But not all of her work is so closely grounded in her everyday life.

Some of it is “what’s not possible in the real world,” she said.

Two-elephant like wine glasses reflected fruit onto their planes. The emerald-green glass reflected an apple, while the bright yellow one reflected a lemon. They were filled with red and white wine, respectively.

The hues from a neon sign on Cushman Street color the reflections of three flower-like figures with a set of halos around them.

The 3-D glasses were used even when Aoki wasn’t presenting.

Chao Peng, a graduate student in Computer Art, took professors, students, and community members on a tour of Fairbanks from 1912-1916—a black and white, true to life, 3-D rendition of downtown. The model was something like walking through the towns of The Oregon Trail game the younger half of the room grew up playing. Compared to 2007, Fairbanks was barren.

“This is real old Fairbanks, based on real maps,” Peng said.

The streets of Fairbanks included a drug store, bookstore, post office, power station, hotel and the many buildings connected to a large company. As he pointed out the buildings, Peng noted that the Key Bank parking lot now sits where many of the other buildings once stood. The Nenana bridge, he said, was wooden then. Peng also pointed out the riverfront street he thinks is the oldest in Fairbanks, and the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, which is still in the same location today.

Peng’s time-travel wasn’t the evening’s only 3-D voyage.

“I’ll just give you a virtual tour of Mars, since we can’t really go there yet,” Kevin Galloway said.

Galloway’s tour included Olympus Mons, a volcano that he said is the highest point in the universe. He also flew visitors through trenches star-wars style. Mars has the deepest trench in the solar system, he said, at more than 5 Grand Canyons deep and the entire United States wide.

The audience also ventured to the white-capped poles at either end of the planet. In the southern hemisphere, he said, the white is frozen carbon monoxide. However, he added, the Northern end, although covered more widely, is warmer.

According to Galloway, the data used to create the virtual mars was available from two different expeditions. For the elevation, they used the MOLA data set, while the color information came from the Viking data. Because the two different data sets were different resolutions, it was difficult to layer them together just right, he said.

A collaboration between Dave Krnavek and Mary Haley brought together music and dance in the final exhibition.

Krnavek, a computer science graduate student, wrote a program that takes data from cameras and alters a sound sample depending on the changing dimensions of the box drawn around the user.

Haley and another member of Cold Fusion Tribal Dance put together a combo that they then performed in front of the audience, and Dave’s cameras, which sent input to a nearby computer.

The sample elongated as their movements shifted; sped up as their arms moved faster.

Following each show, the scientists and artists fielded questions about their work, a sort of bridge between the visual and the technical.

Krnavek was asked about the changes in sound.

“That was the sin wave being modulated, and the modulation depended on the width and height of the bounding box,” he said.