Design, Art, Technology Fourth annual Triad symposium, on the UNCG campus, will focus on innovation and collaboration in a changing world

GREENSBORO -- The Piedmont Triad has been nationally recognized for 50 years as a supportive environment for art. Much more recently it has also begun to build a national reputation for innovation in the related but more commercially driven fields of design, marketing, advertising and related technologies, according to Peter Marsh.

Marsh is the vice president of Workplace Strategies, an industrial-design and strategic-planning firm in Winston-Salem. He's also a member of the coordinating committee for this year's Design, Art and Technology Symposium, set to run from Thursday through Saturday on the campus of UNC at Greensboro.

Intended in part to highlight the region's strengths in these interrelated fields, it will be the fourth symposium in an annual series whose first three installments were held in Winston-Salem. Marsh has helped coordinate these events from their outset. He said that the first one, in 2005, attracted 90 people, mostly from Winston-Salem, but the 2008 installment is expected to draw about 500 people from across the Southeast and beyond. Unlike the previous symposiums, admission to this one is free.

This year's symposium is titled "Between the Lines: Innovation in Art, Architecture, and Design," and its principal coordinator is Amy Lixl-Purcell, an associate professor of art at UNCG. She said that the symposium will focus on cross-disciplinary and innovative approaches to design and technology, and will feature keynote presentations by internationally known architects, cutting-edge motion-graphic designers, entrepreneurial creative designers and high-tech graffiti artists.

Featured presenters include Predock Frane Architects (Santa Monica, Calif.); the Ebeling Group, an international production and design company; Graffiti Research Lab, which specializes in experimental graffiti-writing technologies; MK12, a design and filmmaking collective (Kansas City, Mo.); Greensboro native Mackey McDonald, the CEO of VF Corp., and several artists, including a duo called Lead Pencil Studio, which has an exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Museum on view through April 13.

Lixl-Purcell said that the organizers have tailored the symposium to be relevant not only to professionals in the fields of art, architecture and design but also to the larger business and cultural communities. She said she expects the audience to consist of professional designers, other members of the Triad's business community, governmental representatives and academic specialists in related disciplines from each of the Triad's universities and colleges.

The idea, Lixl-Purcell said, is to promote networking, mutual inspiration, creative partnerships and other forms of collaboration among audience members and other participants, as well as to encourage internships and other training opportunities for art and design students. She said that the growth of interest in design among UNCG's students is reflected in the fact that half of the school's 450 current art majors have chosen to specialize in design instead of painting or sculpture, adding that this statistic reflects national trends.

The concept for an annual design symposium in the Triad originated with the Thomas S. Kenan Institute for the Arts, an affiliate of the N.C. School of the Arts. The institute's mission is to build arts-related partnerships and support creative projects, according to its director, Margaret Mertz. In keeping with that mission, Mertz said, the institute organized and paid for the first symposium, held in 2005 at the arts school, and provided decreasing proportions of the financing for the symposiums in 2006 and 2007.

The event -- originally known as the Digital Design Symposium -- has now taken on a life of its own, and Mertz said that this year the institute contributed only a relatively small amount toward marketing costs. Other sponsors of this year's symposium, in addition to various departments of UNCG, include the Weatherspoon Art Museum, the Design Group and Calloway Johnson Moore & West. This year's symposium will cost $50,000 to $60,000 to produce, according to Lixl-Purcell.

"We made an initial three-year investment in a project that the community has embraced," Mertz said. "What's so exciting about this is that it has really caught fire and taken off."

Among local artists planning to participate in the symposium is Scott Betz, an art professor at Winston-Salem State University. Betz is among the exhibitors in the symposium's Design Expo, to be held in UNCG's Elliott Center. He said that his exhibit will focus on a project that he did in collaboration with an architect and a computer-code writer to create a multimedia "intelligent space" for the interior of the new Wachovia Building, which is under construction in Charlotte. He said that some of his students from WSSU will also be exhibiting in the Design Expo.

In summarizing the symposium's relevance for fine artists, Betz said, "All technical innovations and their byproducts are part of the visual landscape. Artists use these and appropriate them for their own work."

■ The Design, Art and Technology Symposium is set to run from Thursday through Saturday on the campus of UNC Greensboro. To register or get more information, call 336 334-5248, 336-256-1096 or visit the symposium's Web site, http://dats

.uncg.edu.