Margot E. Fassler, Director of SMND, will give the presidential address at the Medieval Academy of America meeting in Atlanta (March 2-4). The title of the presentation is “Women and Sequences,” and in this work Fassler tells the story of the genre in women’s institutions from the twelfth century, beginning with Heloise and Hildegard, through to the Dominicans of Soest in the fourteenth century, and ending with reformed houses of Dominicans and Franciscans in the fifteenth century.
Also in Atlanta, Act 1 of Creation and Cosmos, a digital model of the twelfth-century universe as envisioned by Hildegard of Bingen and recreated in a full dome model by digital artist Christian Jara, will be screened in the Fernbank Science Center. The presentation (“Creation and Cosmos”) is a 25 minute, full dome imagestream (~45,000, 2048 x 2048 png files), combined with a 5.1 surround audio track, featuring singers from the Program in Sacred Music at Notre Dame.
The presentation is designed for a flat full dome planetarium, meaning the projected horizon is not tilted with respect to the audience seating plane, and provides a 360˚ field of view with the apex of the dome directly overhead.
We have shown various stages of opening of the first half at several venues, including the Boston Science Museum, and the Moorhead Science Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We have developed the presentation at the Digital Visualization Theater, at the Jordan Hall of Science at Notre Dame. We are working now on finishing the second act, which is a spectacular end of time, and will hope to have the entire work finished for showing in the Peter Harrison Planetarium in London in early August, 2018.