Bill Gorcica is a professor of Art at St. Cloud State University where he teaches in the Integrated Media and Graphic Design areas. He has a Bachelor’s degree in biology from Virginia Tech and a Master of Fine Arts degree in visual art from Rutgers University. Over the course of his career Bill received a number of honors including a Fulbright scholarship to work in printmaking in Poland, and a Bush Foundation artist fellowship in 3D art. He created an interactive work collaboratively with other faculty and students from St. Cloud State University for the Twin Cities Northern Spark festival in June 2015. For Northern Spark 2016, Bill worked with colleagues in science and engineering to create simRVR, a VR movie that was juried and showcased at the Sundance Film Festival New Frontiers program and at the Walker Art Center. The artist also creates underwater simulations for educational 3D software projects SimRiver and MushiRiver with Dr. Shigeki Mayama in Tokyo, Japan that addresses water quality issues by studying populations of microbes and aquatic invertebrates. In 2019 Bill received an Innovation Funding Grant entitled “Making the Digital Physical” from MN State to set up a small Maker Space in the Art Department at SCSU .Throughout his career, he has worked across disciplines and has often made art about how we as humans engage with the natural world. Currently he is exploring the possibilities of mixing the ancient techniques of encaustic wax painting on wood reliefs designed on an iPad and carved with a CNC router machine.
Check out the resources mentioned in this episode:
Making the Digital Physical with Bill Gorcica Transcript
Current Art: Painted and Carved Wood Reliefs