DANM collaborative research groups | | Mechatronics | Monuments and Entropy Faculty: Elliot Anderson, Jennifer Parker The Mechatronics research group partners with the Performative Technologies group to create a collaborative research cohort that will develop interactive art and design projects as part of the “Monuments and Entropy” project. Fabricate functional experimental art devices that combine principles of sculpture, kinetics, electronics, motion control, sensors, actuators, motors, and other control devices. | | | Performative Technologies | Monuments and Entropy Faculty: Elliot Anderson, Jim Bierman, Michael Chemers The Performative Technologies research group joins the Mechatronics group to generate a collaborative project that explores themes of entropy, the “monumental,” and the “tour” in the creation of a performative work including sound, animation, interactivity, and theater. Dig into larger socio-political issues such as climate change, and the destruction of landscapes and environments. | | | Participatory Culture | The Public Record: Expanded Documentary, Activism as Affectivism Faculty: Sharon Daniel The interactive, web-based, database-driven, new media documentary, or “iDoc” is, perhaps, one of the most rapidly emerging new media forms. Explore the aesthetic, political and ethical dimensions of such new and expanded forms of documentary practice — experimenting with new methodologies and technologies to generate new kinds of politically and socially productive documents of our situated realities. | | | Playable Media | Experimental Play Faculty: Robin Hunicke, Michael Mateas, Susana Ruiz, Noah Wardrip-Fruin From the rise of the New Games movement and the emergence of the role-playing game (in the 1970s) to the current moment’s rise of independent games, art games, documentary games, political games, and more — we are changing who plays, how we play, and what play can mean. Join others who want to invent and explore new play spaces in storytelling, ideology, sociality, performance, and other rich areas of human life. | | |
The DANM MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz is an interdisciplinary center for the development and study of digital media arts and their social impact. This two-year program brings together faculty and students from across the academic spectrum to pursue interdisciplinary artistic and scholarly research. The diverse curriculum includes the collaborative research groups, and core and elective courses in the theory and practice of digital media arts in support of individual thesis papers and projects. View videos of 2015 graduate thesis projects. | | DANM makes a strong effort to support its students, including providing teaching assistantships for the first year. Additional support may be available in the form of grants and fellowships, graduate student researchships or additional teaching assistantships; some are awarded based on need, others on academic merit. Graduate students are encouraged to apply for both. | | danm@ucsc.edu +1-831-459-1554 | | |