Photos: At Sundance, where art, science and film collide

The screening rooms at the Sundance Film Festival--kicking off in Park City, Utah, this week--aren't the only places showcasing film innovation. In fact, a totally different type of venue--New Frontier on Main--is charged with pushing cinematic conventions to new limits and its 15 installations this year appear to do just that.

What was once merely the film festival's media center, for the past three years (including 2009) has been transformed into a social space in which visitors interact with the works of people innovating at the crossroads of the art, technology, and film worlds, said curator Shari Frilot.

"We put artists, filmmakers and media scientists in one room and sort of see what happens with imagination and exposure to each others ideas and each other's work," she said.

One feature of this year's New Frontier on Main collection, Frilot said, is the addition of scientists on the roster for the first time. One is actually a pair of programmers, Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, whose works We Feel Fine (shown here) and Universe "use computational mathematics to tell stories by manipulating really big data bases," Frilot added.

Every few minutes in We Feel Fine, the installation takes sentences from recently published blogs from around the world that include the words "I feel" or "I am feeling" and visualizes them in six different movements. It's meant to explore "human emotion on a global scale" to create "an ever-changing and expanding work of art that is authored by everyone," according to Sundance materials.

Frilot is also a senior programming for the Sundance's New Frontier feature film category, which is completely separate from the New Frontier on Main art venue, although there's much thematic overlap.