Historically, the ACM Multimedia Conference is split into a "technical" program and an "arts" program. These programs sometimes seem completely separate from one another, victims of a "semantic gap" between disciplines. The goal of this panel is to create a space in which scientists learn from artists, and arts from science. We need to discover new connections between modalities of research. In order to create the most exciting and powerful future forms of interactive multimedia systems, the ones that will create the most beneficial broader impact on humanity, we need to foster new collaborations between artists and scientists. This panel seeks to bridge the great divide of language and communities that has fragmented us, creating a new space for developing connections between the arts and sciences of multimedia research, as embodied through the artists and scientists of ACM Multimedia. The goal is to make this conference a premier site for catalyzing emergent connections.

The Emotion Organ is a synaesthetic simulacrum machine for exploring the sensational interplay of feeling, seeing, hearing, smelling and motion. It is also a time machine - a restored, re-engineered parlor organ from 1895 that builds upon a trajectory of several centuries-worth of ideas about synaesthetic phenomena, combining both antiquated and emerging technology to achieve a media-archaeological synthesis.