RIVERSIDE: Arts and sciences come alive

October 09, 2015

Zombies and insects and robots, oh, my. The arts and sciences came alive Thursday during the 2015 Long Night of Arts & Innovation, complete with an exotic stick-and-leaf bug, zombie CPR dummies and even a Formula race car.

BY SUZANNE HURT / STAFF WRITER

Zombies were out in force in downtown Riverside on Thursday.

But on the 2015 Long Night of Arts & Innovation, so were exotic insects, robotic arms, jazz musicians and Edgar Allan Poe.

They were all part of a giant science and art fair brought together on the Main Street pedestrian mall by the city, community organizations, businesses, and teachers and students from universities, colleges and schools.

Riverside City College’s Jazz Ensemble played big band music on Ninth Street, while nearby, students from the school’s Film, Television and Video Department applied zombie and Day of the Dead makeup to visitors.

Assistant Film and Television professor Scott Hernandez described the event as amazing because it’s a gathering of minds, spirits and endeavors normally spread throughout the city.

“Everything kind of comes together in downtown Riverside on this night,” he said.

More than 200 presentations stretched over five blocks were offered in the heart of downtown from 5 p.m. to midnight.

The night got off to a slow start, but before long people were streaming through the event on a balmy evening.

Outside state Sen. Richard Roth's office, zombified UCR Medical School students Mayra Hernandez and Rita Lis, with bloodied faces and bloodied scrubs or lab coats, coaxed passers-by to practice CPR on a pair of zombie dummy heads and torsos.

City resident Scott Anderson gave repeated chest compressions to one dummy. But when invited by Hernandez and Lis to give it a try, 9-year-old Alyza Wettling and her brother Cayden, 7, just stared at the dummies and shook their heads no.

Kids crowded around the UCR Entomology Department’s tables with stick and leaf insects and a nearby table with long rows of white ceramic dental casts.

The casts are used to teach Norco College forensics students about dental aging, said Alexis Gray, a professor there and a forensic anthropologist for the San Bernardino County Coroner's Office.

“If you’ve got a skull and that’s all you’ve got, the teeth are probably your best bet for making an age determination and an identification,” she said.

On another block, Edgar Allan Poe, aka actor Travis Rhett Wilson, performed his Annabel Lee poem to promote the Riverside Dickens Festival.

Kids and Doug Mayer, visiting from Miami, sat in formula race cars with 600cc Suzuki motorcycle engines designed and built by students from UCR’s Bourns College of Engineering.

The cars are a good way to demonstrate what people can do with math and science skills, said UCR engineering student Ben Schleuniger, treasurer for the Society of Automotive Engineers at UCR.

Mayer said he was impressed with the nightlong event.

“It’s a very cool idea,” he said.