New Collaborative Research Projects in Digital Media Arts - an integral component of UCSC's Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program

DANM MFA program application deadline: January 3, 2012

The Digital Arts and New Media (DANM) MFA Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz is initiating new collaborative research projects in the context of the program's ongoing research. Collaborating with faculty and contributing to digital media arts research is a critical component of each student's experience in the DANM MFA program. MFA students entering in Fall 2012 will have the opportunity to collaborate on the following projects:

Mechatronics :: Tangible User Interfaces for Interactive Art, Design and Performance
Faculty: Jennifer Parker
Create tangible user interfaces for interactive art, design and performance through The OpenLab Network. OpenLab facilitates innovative, creative and collaborative research with art, community, design, and science, including the DANM Performative Technologies group and the live Peer Gynt production. Focus on the design and prototyping of tangible user interfaces to create meaningful correlations between ideas, user gestures, the controller interface, and the output of that controller. [more]
 
Participatory Culture :: Sierra Nevada: An Adaption
Faculty: Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison
SIERRA NEVADA: AN ADAPTION is an initial work in the Force Majeure Series, a 50-year collaboration between the Harrison Studio and the Center for Art + Environment at Nevada Museum of Art. The term 'The Force Majeure' refers to the inexorable force of human-based global warming acting in transaction with our vast processes of extraction and CO2 production. Explore and create the methodologies demonstrating how to buffer drought and erratic weather, which will inevitably impact the Central Valley of California as well as the high grounds of the Sierra Nevada. [more]

Participatory Culture :: Art and Globalization
Faculty: Soraya Murray
THE ART AND GLOBALIZATION WORKING GROUP is an ongoing collective of makers and thinkers exploring new media in relation to an era of rapid economic, cultural and political globalization. Undertake projects that exploit the potential of new technologies to convey diverse experiences, address social problems and facilitate broader participation in global culture and politics while working individually and collaboratively in regular critiques, seminars and workshops that foster innovation around art, technology and globalization. [more]
 
Performative Technologies :: Peer Gynt
Faculty: Kimberly Jannarone and others
Peer Gynt, Ibsen's 1867 masterpiece, has waited a century and a half to be staged with 21st-century technology. The proscenium theater of Ibsen's day launched this sprawling verse epic, but it could not accommodate the multidimensional adventure it demands. This production will take over a building with advanced technological capacities, bringing the adventure of Peer Gynt to life in rooms crafted from video, digital animation, human and non-human performers. Become a part of this collaborative and multi-disciplinary process. [video] [more]
 
Playable Media :: Experimental Play
Faculty: 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 opportunities for pervasive, gestural, networked, and potentially deeply responsive computer games, we are changing who plays, how we play, and what play can mean. PLAYABLE FICTIONS invites those who want to invent and explore new play spaces. It seeks participants who will take play-oriented approaches to storytelling, ideology, sociality, performance, and other rich areas of human life. [more]
 
The application for admission deadline is January 3.
 
ABOUT DANM
The Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program at UC Santa Cruz is an interdisciplinary center for the development and study of digital media arts and their social impact. From its base in the new, state-of-the-art Digital Arts Research Center, this intensive two-year MFA program brings together faculty and students from across the academic spectrum to pursue artistic and scholarly research.
 
In addition to conducting collaborative research that results in publications and exhibitions, DANM students take core and elective courses in the theory and practice of digital media arts. Their journey culminates in the development of individual thesis projects, which premier in our annual MFA exhibition. The MFA is the terminal degree in the field of digital media arts, qualifying graduates for a variety of career paths including university-level teaching and research.
 
FINANCIAL ASSISTANCE
DANM makes a strong effort to help its students put together the support they need, including 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.

Digital Arts and New Media MFA Program
University of California, Santa Cruz
[email protected]
+1-831-459-1554
http://danm.ucsc.edu