Alex McDowell, an internationally acclaimed production designer known for integrating digital technology and traditional craft in such Hollywood blockbusters as “Fight Club,” Tim Burton’s “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” and Steven Spielberg's “Minority Report,” will deliver the keynote address at the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s 10th Annual Faculty Research Symposium.
The daylong event is slated for Monday, Oct. 27 at the Langford Architecture Center on the Texas A&M University campus.
McDowell said his keynote address, “Design in Flux,” will use illustrations from his recent work to provide insight into the future of the creative process of blending technology and narrative.
“Our definition of narrative media is changing rapidly as traditional storytelling disciplines expand and merge,” said McDowell. “A new strain of designer is emerging who can traverse the newly permeable membrane surrounding all forms of immersive storytelling, between media and across culture.
“Immersive design is a philosophy and practice for narrative media that exploits a new blend of art and technology to create worlds both as workspace and experience, whether passive or interactive, virtual or real,” he continued. “It describes simultaneously the practice and the outcome — defining a new control over the immersive experience by imagining environments as containers of narrative, and indeed characters in their own right.”
McDowell’s immersive process in production design allows for unprecedented control over the look of the final work. Other films bearing McDowell’s signature touch include the stop-motion feature “The Corpse Bride,” “Breaking and Entering,” “The Crow,” and “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.”
He recently completed design on the much-anticipated “Watchmen,” a film adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 1986 comic book limited series, and is currently designing a fully digital 3-D animated feature at DreamWorks.
In 2006, McDowell was named a Royal Designer for Industry in the United Kingdom and he was appointed Visiting Artist at MIT’s Media Lab.
At MIT, he served as artistic director for the innovative robotic opera “Death and the Powers.” The production utilized the Media Lab to fuse electronic music, computer science, robotics, lighting, emergent media and design into the operatic narrative penned by former poet laureate Robert Pinsky.
McDowell is also co-founder of the entertainment media design conference, “5D: The Future of Immersive Design,” to be held Oct. 4-5 at the Carpenter Performing Arts Center at California State University, Long Beach. This groundbreaking international conference will explore the profound impact of rapidly changing technologies in design for narrative media — film and television, game design, animation, interactive media, architecture and environment — for artists, designers, scholars, educators, and students.
McDowell’s keynote address will be presented after lunch in the Preston Geren Auditorium, located in Building B of the Langford Architecture Center’s Building B on the Texas A&M campus.
