When Valerie Berney goes to work every day, she's a stone's throw from the Pacific Ocean and a mere glance from the Hollywood hills. She's half a continent away from the academic program that gave her the skills to be there.

Berney is the first graduate of Mississippi State's master of fine arts program in electronic visualization, established in 1994. Today, she works for Side Effects Software (www.SideFX.com), an international company that develops 3-D animation and special effects software used in movies such as "Armageddon," "Fantasia," and "The Matrix." Berney develops, demonstrates, and teaches the highly specialized computer software to entertainment industry professionals.

She's come a long way from the student who entered Mississippi State's then-fledgling program knowing nothing about computers. "Now, the computer is part of almost every aspect of my work and life," she says.

She still maintains a strong connection to traditional artistic media, including drawing and watercolor, and she says that Mississippi State provided her with a broad background in techniques, materials, and the creation of art.

It also provided more. "Those who attended Mississippi State with me are doing well in positions around the country," she noted. "We're equipped with excellent skills in communication, problem solving, leadership, and creation, and this comes from the wide variety of material we covered in the extensive MFA program."

Closer to home, Joe Phoebus, a webmaster of Jackson-based MCI/WorldCom, says Mississippi State prepared him to take on tasks sometimes associated with more technical backgrounds.

"I work in an environment surrounded by people who came from computer science or information system backgrounds," he noted. Classes he took at MSU equipped him to "confidently approach and complete technical tasks," he says.

In his work on web-based projects for MCI/WorldCom's Internet site (www.wcom.com/), he draws on both technical and artistic skills. "I enjoy using the computer as a medium for art," he explains. "A contemporary artist should be competent with contemporary tools."

NEW TOOLS, TRADITIONAL FOUNDATIONS

The art department's three- to four-year master of fine arts program requires that students earn 60 credit hours, with an emphasis in either multimedia or animation. The rigorous schedule includes courses in sequential art, digital imaging, modeling, art history, and theory courses related to digital media. Students undergo periodic reviews by the graduate advisory committee, and each completes a thesis that is a major visual presentation.

It's a tough program that requires students to learn much more than computer proficiencies, said Brent Funderburk, art department head since 1995.

"Our focus is on interactive art and design," he explained. "This is not passive, spectator art. Through this new medium, we're trying to find new ways for human beings to interact, to impart knowledge."

Students studying computer-based art still must learn drawing and other foundation courses, he said. With computers, "the tools are different, but we still focus on content."

To visualize the changes, imagine a class assignment that art professor Guillaume Chartier recently gave his beginning animation students.

Each student was provided a postcard-sized photograph of a turn-of-the-century person. The black and white images showed little about the subjects, other than quaint clothing and facial expressions that gave away little.

Chartier asked each student to create a three-dimensional, animated environment for the person in their photograph. Where did the person live? What was his taste in furnishings? What did he collect around himself?

The assignment required imagination, the ability to draw, and hours to painstakingly render designs that, through the medium of animation software, ultimately tell a story.

One student, given a photo of a man in a bowler hat, created an animation from the perspective of the man entering his home. The viewer sees through the man's eyes as he puts his hat on a rack, scans the room to make sure his teapot is on the stove and steaming, and sits in a rocking chair that begins to move.

"Students encounter the capabilities of the technology," Chartier explained, "but they also learn the need for foundation drawing. Companies are looking for artists-not technicians-and we try to give our students the knowledge and foundation to respond to a rapidly changing industry."

A SCIENTIFIC JUMP START

If you want to know just how unusual Mississippi State's program is, ask an engineer.

Joe Thompson, Giles Distinguished Professor of Aerospace Engineering and the university's chief technology officer, believes the merging of his discipline with fine arts is providing unparalleled opportunities for students.

"Especially at land-grant universities like Mississippi State, computer science and engineering expertise can spin off into partnerships with art. 'Convergence' is a buzzword, but it's a good one to use in this case."

By many descriptions, Mississippi State is a national leader in introducing digital technologies into programs that cross traditional academic boundaries. At MSU, electronic visualization involves students and faculty members in engineering, architecture, and art, as well as facilities and staff at the Engineering Research Center for Computational Field Simulation and at the University Television Center.

"We went from ruling pens and paste-up wax to high-end computers almost overnight," said Funderburk in assessing the artistic sea change.

At Mississippi State, the germ of the electronic visualization program began with engineering faculty members' desire to create visual presentations of designs. In the late 1980s, MSU was pioneering a computational process known as numerical grid generation. As it developed, engineers saw a need to present their models as moving, three-dimensional objects in moving environments. Artists signed on with the ERC, primarily to support the area of scientific visualization.

But soon, Thompson said, other faculty members saw potential applications for the technology. "Others began to experiment with the capabilities of high-end computers," he said, "and we began to use a classroom to teach courses in electronic art."

Funderburk remembers those exciting early days as "a blank canvas.

"The Engineering Research Center called on our strong graphics design area to help create visuals. The ERC had the hardware and software. Soon, the projects became classes in animation."

The art department invited Paul Brown, an internationally recognized expert in the field, to help lay the groundwork for a program in digital media.

With the 1994 establishment of an MFA program in electronic visualization, the art department committed itself to providing students cutting-edge skills in multimedia and computer graphics. Funderburk says a continuing challenge is to keep up with rapidly changing software and hardware.

He credits the university's support, especially that of Academic Affairs, in helping establish a Stafford Hall laboratory with Silicon Graphics equipment provided by the Engineering Research Center.

"We've found that an effective way to access resources and assure that students benefit is to form cooperative agreements with other units on campus," he said. "Our students and our programs are the winners when we share."

Funderburk notes that engineering, art, architecture, and the Television Center share a distance learning/web classroom at the Engineering Research Center, a digital video editing laboratory at the School of Architecture, and the animation laboratory in the art department. In 1999, the art department received a $1.9 million software donation from Alias-Wavefront as part of the company's campus partnership program. It provides students access to industry-standard animation software used in movies, scientific and medical visualizations, and industrial designs.

The on-campus interactions and industry partnerships give Mississippi State students an edge, Funderburk believes. "Our students benefit from sharing classes with someone outside their discipline. They have access to new ideas and to the most sophisticated software available."

As an example, he cites two projects directed by University Television Center director David Hutto, who has regularly taught in the program. "Our students worked on two interactive CDs for national projects that include Passport to Knowledge's 'Live from Antarctica' and 'Live from the Storm,'" he said. "Both were broadcast to locations around the country."

A DIFFERENT PALATTE, A CHANGING WORLD VIEW

Fine arts students-and artists-almost always are pushing the limits of the equipment they're working on, says Anna Chupa, who coordinates the department's electronic visualization program.

Chupa, whose own digital work is influenced by Celtic illuminated manuscripts and devotional sites, says that computers provide a way to create patterns based on her interest in the philosophy of religion.

She frequently incorporates complex interlace patterns and images from altars into her designs. A generative artist, she uses algorithms and other numerically-based systems to generate change in a parent group of images.

"I develop all of my textures manually," she explains. "I do the part that I do well-selection and hand-painting-and let the computer do what it does well." The dynamic between computer and the artist can yield sometimes surprising results, she says, offering completely new insights.

In a similar way, Chupa's colleague Paras Kaul develops complex designs-and sounds-with neural networks. A brainwave interface system that uses low-cost electroencephalogram software connects Kaul by a headband to the computer. The computer receives her brainwave data, which can be used to trigger an audio or multimedia event.

As Kaul achieves a beta state of relaxation, colors and sounds shift. Pinks shade into blues and greens, and sounds slow and change pitch.

"This is a new form of communication," she said. "It's a merging of the visual and audio arts."

Both artists have collaborated with MSU music education professor Mark Applebaum in concerts that combine their work with his "sound sculptures." A Chupa animation was featured in a campus performance titled "Sonic Circuits," while Kaul and Applebaum developed a performance event they titled "That Brainwave Chick."

Their work, which is pushing the boundaries of the understanding of 'art,' translates into a sense of discovery in the classroom. It also is being featured at events both nationally and internationally.

"My research always comes second to my work with students," Kaul says. "I encourage students to test their imaginations and to create something they haven't seen before."

In her multimedia classes, student work ranges from animations with such titles as "Redneck Sushi" to an interactive game that teaches participants something about ecology and history.

"To complete this project, students selected locations and researched them. The game allows players to travel back in time, see environmental problems, and follow strategies to clean up the environment. If you win, you see a better world," she explained.

It's the kind of challenge that lets students expand their abilities and make progress toward meeting a program goal of producing significant creative works, Chupa said.

Graduates say the electronic visualization program also meets another significant goal: preparing them to be strong contenders in the competitive, changing world of digital art.

SOLVING THE PUZZLE

Eric Horton, who works at Venice, Calif.,-based Digital Domain (www.vfxhq.com/houses/d2.html), says that his first project with the company was a nationally airing automobile commercial with computer-generated foliage. He's since progressed to animations on "The Red Planet," a movie with Val Kilmer to be released in June.

His 10-hour-or-longer days ("I have had 90-hour weeks," he confides.) include many screenings of works-in-progress (digital dailies and walkthroughs) and "lots of coffee."

The one constant in his digital domain is change. MSU's graduate program in electronic visualization was a process of "everyone learning how to learn," he said. "This is how a real production environment works."

In addition to providing a technical base, the MFA program gave him the ability to "figure things out," he says.

"Art is a puzzle. Your answer is in there somewhere. It's your job as the artist to figure out how to get there. This is true for painting, sculpture, and the digital arts as well.

"It's the process-the learning how to get there-that is of value."

Brent Funderburk shares this philosophy. "Our program really is asking 'Where are we going?' With this medium, the tools are new, but we're asking questions that artists always have asked."

One of the primary questions, he believes, is "Can we make something that brings order and beauty into our lives? Art still has to deliver those timeless things."