Mike McMann

I caught a great program last night on my local PBS affiliate. Beyond the Motor City. From the website: “Blueprint America: Beyond the Motor City examines how Detroit, a symbol of America’s diminishing status in the world, may come to represent the future of transportation and progress in America.”

I have recently been awarded University Small Research Grant (USRG) award to assist in covering the costs of travel, lodging, and materials toward a research trip slated for next summer. I am currently investigating growth processes and emergence in the built environment, in particular, the correlation between urban growth and biological processes including Cellular Automata, Lindenmayer systems and Brownian motion. I create digital models of urban environments generated by programming that is based on these systems and from them derive videos, prints, and drawings for national and international exhibition. The research trip outlined below will allow me to collect photographs, video and drawings from the field as well as collect images and texts from archives to be used in the creation of these models and ultimately the artworks themselves. My department is excited about this work, and has thus far contributed funding for materials toward this endeavor.