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The SIUE Graduate School’s Visualizing Research Impacts (VRI) competition offers SIUE faculty, staff and students the opportunity to share the results and impact of their research and creative activities through imagery.

Faculty and students submitted a wide array of entries that depicted a wonderfully rich diversity of creative activities and disciplines from across the institution.

Most Creative Representation of Research Impact “Atmosphere” Abbey Hepner, Assistant Professor, Head of Photography and Digital Arts, Department of Art and Design

“Atmosphere” is a part of the series “Optogenetic Cybernetic Translations,” in which Hepner investigates the artist and scientist as translators of data that illuminate the connections existing in the broader world.

Hepner’s collaborator is scientist Mike Avery, PhD, who researches optogenetics, a technique that involves the use of light to manipulate brain neurons. Using images from Avery’s lab, Hepner explored how a computer interprets brain scans, creating metaphors for what the future may hold as technology continues to infiltrate the fields of art and science. The results of this interpretation included an aurora, fireflies, bioluminescence and military light vision. By pairing each brain scan with its corresponding computer translation, Hepner found interesting metaphors between cognition and a world full of beautiful phenomena. Best Representation of Research Impact “Lemniscate” John Savoie, PhD, Professor, Department of English Language and Literature

As a teacher of imaginative literature, a significant part of Savoie’s research and creative activities comprises poetry writing. In “Lemniscate,” he has taken the idea of synergizing visuals into his own designs to craft the back cover of Sehnsucht, his upcoming book manuscript.

“Connoisseurs of calculus will relish the paradoxical Gabriel’s Horn, or Torricelli’s Trumpet, at the mysterious intersection of the finite and infinite, of time and eternity,” said Savoie. “However, any intelligent reader will easily engage the other expressions and appreciate how the composition as a whole magnifies the graceful integral sign: the curl of mask and beads in the upper right, the slender descent of words down the middle, and the balancing cluster of ‘math’ in the lower left.”

By displacing the customary back cover blurbs, Savoie’s 3D visual poem comes to life beyond the flat page, inviting the reader to enter and explore the pages within.